“This lobster Cardinal is delicious,” Mr. Ricardo observed, and very regrettably with his mouth full. He was already taking a rosier anticipation of the night’s adventure.
“It is not so bad,” Hanaud agreed. “There is a caneton à la presse to follow with a salad.”
“Admirable,” said Ricardo.
The proprietor brought tenderly to the table a black bottle in a wicker cradle, and laid it down as though it were a baby and he its loving nurse.
“I thought that it would be appropriate on this night of all nights,” said Hanaud, “if we drank a bottle of old Mirandol. It is a second growth, to be sure, but according to many judges should be classed with the first. You shall tell me!”
Yes, it was Mr. Ricardo’s turn to tell. He was on his own ground. The red wines of the Médoc! Not for nothing had he travelled once a year from Bordeaux to Arcachon! Hanaud tipped a tablespoonful first into his own glass and then filled Mr. Ricardo’s. Mr. Ricardo beamed. Good manners and good wine—could there be a more desirable conjunction? He held the glass up to the light. The wine was ruby-red, ruby-clear. He lowered it to his nostrils and savoured its aroma.
“Exquisite,” he said.
Then religiously he drank of it.
“Adorable!” he cried; and drank again. He swam upwards into rosy clouds. That little affair at Suvlac would be settled in no time. “A wine for two friends to drink in a rapturous silence by the side of an historic square in la belle France.”
It was a pity that he must end his flight of poesy with so dreadful a banality as “la belle France.” But that was his way, and Hanaud took the compliment to himself as though he was la belle France all in one. And that was Hanaud’s way too.
“The cellar here is not so bad,” he remarked.
Ricardo drank again, and after much rolling of the wine upon his tongue, put down the glass with a vigour which threatened to break the stem.
“It is ’93,” he declared; and Hanaud bowed in admiration of the subtle palate of his friend. Oh certainly, Ricardo reflected, stretching out his legs beneath the table, with the great detective of France to begin with, and a friend who could announce right off the year of a ’93 claret to help him, the mystery of Suvlac was as good as solved, the criminals practically in the dock.
“To the widow Chicholle,” he said, leaning forward cunningly and holding up his replenished glass.
“But certainly,” Hanaud returned. “To the widow Chicholle!”
The word, however, brought to him no gaiety. It brought him a black mood. He declined into a vein of self-disparagement very unusual with him.
“I think myself a very fine fellow, of course,” he said, “and so do you.”
“I don’t quite agree that I think myself a very fine fellow,” Mr. Ricardo objected.
“I expressed myself ill,” said Hanaud. “I meant that you think me a very fine fellow.”
“I am not always quite sure about that,” Mr. Ricardo answered upon reflection.
“No? There are times when we all fall below our true selves. But you recover, my friend, very, very quickly. For a minute there may be a doubt and then I do a little thing and at once you say—oh, with such a relief!—‘That Hanaud! What a prodigy!’ But, even so”—and he shrugged his shoulders—“how often when I am in a tangle a little accident sets me on the road. The little accidents—yes—they happen. To know them when you see them, to catch them, to use them—that is half my business. But, of course, you must be always alert for them.”
It was Hanaud’s old doctrine many a time pronounced. Chance was the most willing of goddesses, but the most jealous. She demanded a swift mind and a deadly hand. She showed her face for the fraction of a second, just the time to breathe her message, and the clouds closed again. It was your fault if your ears were not quick to catch the words.
“Here’s Jeanne Corisot, for instance. You know something about these women, of course, a man of the world like you. A few of them marry, a good many of them put their money away in a safe place, but the rest when their youth is over”—and he made a gesture as though he were dropping a stone into a pool. “They have no friends to inquire for them. Some other woman looking round a cabaret at two o’clock in the morning may say carelessly: ‘The little Fifi! I have not seen her for a month. It is curious.’ But that will be all. The little Fifi has gone into outer darkness. She is nobody’s business. She will die in the gutter, possibly is dead already. Granted?”
“Yes,” the man of the world agreed.
“Very well,” Hanaud continued, and because the little history he was relating was in a hurry to get itself related, he dropped his English and used his native tongue. “Jeanne Corisot was saved from a similar oblivion by just one circumstance. Her parents, a couple of old peasants owning a little farm near Fontainebleau, had been living for years upon Jeanne’s presents. Each season, you see, there arrived a little more money to buy a little more land and to stock it afterwards, and every year there was a ceremonial visit of Jeanne and her lover. They came down in their car, took their luncheon in the parlour with the antimacassars, and after the luncheon sat outside in the porch while one by one the family passed them in a procession, each one, you understand, receiving a few kind words and more than a few kind banknotes. Ah, you must not look shocked, my friend! The family Corisot
