The two men followed Moreau down the stairs and into the street.
XXI
The Secret House
It was a dark, clear night, the air very still and warm, and the sky bright with innumerable stars. The small company penetrated into the town by the backways and narrow alleys. Daunay going on ahead, Patinot the last by some thirty yards, and Moreau keeping upon the opposite side of the street. Once they had left behind them the lights of the station square, they walked amongst closed doors and the blind faces of unlit houses. Frobisher’s heart raced within his bosom. He strained his eyes and ears for some evidence of spies upon their heels. But no one was concealed in any porch, and not the stealthiest sound of a pursuit was borne to their hearing.
“On a night like this,” he said in tones which, strive as he might to steady them, were still a little tremulous, “one could hear a footstep on the stones a quarter of a mile away, and we hear nothing. Yet, if there is a gang, it can hardly be that we are unwatched.”
Hanaud disagreed. “This is a night for alibis,” he returned, lowering his voice; “good, sound, incontestable alibis. All but those engaged will be publicly with their friends, and those engaged do not know how near we are to their secrets.”
They turned into a narrow street and kept on its left-hand side.
“Do you know where we are?” Hanaud asked. “No? Yet we are near to the Maison Grenelle. On the other side of these houses to our left runs the street of Charles-Robert.”
Jim Frobisher stopped dead.
“It was here, then, that you came last night after I left you at the Prefecture,” he exclaimed.
“Ah, you recognised me, then!” Hanaud returned imperturbably. “I wondered whether you did when you turned at the gates of your house.”
On the opposite side of the street the houses were broken by a high wall, in which two great wooden doors were set. Behind the wall, at the end of a courtyard, the upper storey and the roof of a considerable house rose in a steep ridge against the stars.
Hanaud pointed towards it.
“Look at that house, Monsieur! There Madame Raviart came to live whilst she waited to be set free. It belongs to the Maison Grenelle. After she married Simon Harlowe, they would never let it, they kept it just as it was, the shrine of their passion—that strange romantic couple. But there was more romance in that, to be sure. It has been unoccupied ever since.”
Jim Frobisher felt a chill close about his heart. Was that house the goal to which Hanaud was leading him with so confident a step? He looked at the gates and the house. Even in the night it had a look of long neglect and decay, the paint peeling from the doors and not a light in any window.
Someone in the street, however, was awake, for just above their heads, a window was raised with the utmost caution and a whisper floated down to them.
“No one has appeared.”
Hanaud took no open notice of the whisper. He did not pause in his walk, but he said to Frobisher:
“And, as you hear, it is still unoccupied.”
At the end of the street Daunay melted away altogether. Hanaud and Frobisher crossed the road and, with Moreau just ahead, turned down a passage between the houses to the right.
Beyond the passage they turned again to the right into a narrow lane between high walls; and when they had covered thirty yards or so, Frobisher saw the branches of leafy trees over the wall upon his right. It was so dark here under the shade of the boughs that Frobisher could not even see his companions; and he knocked against Moreau before he understood that they had come to the end of their journey. They were behind the garden of the house in which Madame Raviart had lived and loved.
Hanaud’s hand tightened upon Jim Frobisher’s arm, constraining him to absolute immobility. Patinot had vanished as completely and noiselessly as Daunay. The three men left stood in the darkness and listened. A sentence which Ann Upcott had spoken in the garden of the Maison Grenelle, when she had been describing the terror with which she had felt the face bending over her in the darkness, came back to him. He had thought it false then. He took back his criticism now. For he too imagined that the beating of his heart must wake all Dijon.
They stood there motionless for the space of a minute, and then, at a touch from Hanaud, Nicolas Moreau stooped. Frobisher heard the palm of his hand sliding over wood and immediately after the tiniest little click as a key was fitted into a lock and turned. A door in the wall swung silently open and let a glimmer of light into the lane. The three men passed into a garden of weeds and rank grass and overgrown bushes. Moreau closed and locked the door behind them. As he locked the door the clocks of the city struck the half hour.
Hanaud whispered in Frobisher’s ear:
“They have not yet reached the Val Terzon. Come!”
They crept over the mat of grass and weeds to the back of the house. A short flight of stone steps, patched with mould, descended from a terrace; at the back of the terrace were shuttered windows. But in the corner of the house, on a level with the garden, there was a door. Once more Moreau stooped, and once more a door swung inwards without a sound. But whereas the
