He relapsed once more into silence. The river was running grey now. The dusk deepened into night. The red and green lights on the great pillars of the Place des Quinconces by the quay glowed into significance. Under the limes the lamps of Ricardo’s motorcar shone bright. Once or twice Hanaud looked towards them. Almost he had made up his mind to wait no longer. But each time he caught himself back. “I must be right,” he said in a low voice; and now not only his hands, but his voice shook to keep them company. Ricardo had never seen him torn by so much doubt or plunged in a distress so deep. A dreadful responsibility weighed upon him and set him now to shuffling his feet upon the floor, now to beating upon the table with his fist. “I said at the beginning that I shrank from this affair,” he muttered, and then with an exclamation of relief he pushed back his chair and ran out on to the pavement. A man was running towards him, a short, stocky, broad man, Moreau.
“At last!” said Mr. Ricardo. He waved his hand to his chauffeur, who climbed down from his seat and opened the door of the limousine. He took down his hat. “Now we shall go,” he said, and he hurried to the car. But he looked back, and to his amazement the two men, the chief and his assistant, with their heads close together, were slowly pacing the dark avenue. The door of the car was open, the engine running, night had come, the Château Mirandol was fifty kilometres away—and there they were palavering. Ricardo could have screamed with indignation.
“Wonderful!” he cried, bitterly appealing to the world with outspread arms. “Miraculous! Do they think that I have no nerves—?”
His invocation was cut short. Hanaud turned and ran towards him, with Moreau at his heels.
“Quick!” he said in a whisper, and there was a thrill of excitement in his voice.
He bundled Ricardo unceremoniously into the car, and jumped in after him. Moreau took the seat beside the chauffeur, and the car glided out from beneath the trees. At the top of the square it turned to the left. At once Mr. Ricardo was in a state of extreme agitation.
“He is wrong. He should turn to the right for the Rue de Médoc,” and he leaned across Hanaud to seize the speaking-tube. But Hanaud already held it.
“He is right. He should turn to the left for the Rue Grégoire,” said Hanaud.
The car glided without noise or effort down the long, straight street, left the great clustered lights behind it, and came into a cool gloom of narrower ways and shuttered houses. It turned to the right and again to the left. A wide space opened out. On one side of it the mass of a great church loomed immense and black. In the middle a great tower shot upwards like a giant’s spear, and the top of it was lost in darkness. By the side of that tower the car stopped.
“The tower of St. Michel,” Mr. Ricardo whispered.
“Quick!” said Hanaud. “We have not a moment to lose.”
At the very spot where Ricardo had stood when he had hesitated at the entrance to the Cave of the Mummies, ages and ages ago, it seemed, this party of pursuit descended.
“Keep close to me,” Hanaud breathed, “and not a word.”
He crossed the square to the mouth of a little street. A gendarme stood near a lamp, the light shining upon his accoutrements. He did not shift from his position. Hanaud and his company were engulfed in the street. It was short and straight. At the far end the lights of the quay were visible. But here the houses, squalid and forbidding and black, rose to so high a level that they seemed to be walking in a cavern. Suddenly two men seemed to spring from the stones of a wall and closed in behind them.
“Not a sound,” whispered Hanaud.
Halfway down the street two other men emerged from the archway of a great porte-cochère.
“It is here,” said one of them.
“The door,” whispered Hanaud. For the great double doors were closed.
“We opened it when we saw the lights of your car,” said the man, and at his touch the door swung open. One by one they slipped in, and behind them the door was gently closed again and gently locked. They stood in a vault of darkness. Once in the days of the greatness of Bordeaux, when a king held his court there and Monsieur de Tourny was summoning the great artists of Europe to rebuild it in beauty, this house in the Rue Grégoire sheltered some wealthy merchant. Now fallen upon an evil day, the far end of its archway built up with bricks, in a street grown infamous, it stood noisome and decrepit, its grimy walls running with moisture.
Mr. Ricardo stood in the blackness of the pit, his heart hammering within his breast. He had clamoured for thrills and excitements; he was shaking with them like a leaf. He heard the tiniest clink as though one key touched another, and a whispered “Hush!” from Hanaud. For the fraction of a second, the pencil-light of an electric torch showed him the keyhole of a house door and one of the men bending down in front of it, and then the door opening.
“There is one step,” said Hanaud, but in a breath so low that Ricardo’s neighbour could not have heard it. Ricardo felt his arm grasped firmly and lifted when he reached the step. The air, hot and close and stifling, warned him he was within the vestibule. Once more Hanaud’s voice breathed in his ear:
“The house of the widow Chicholle!”
XIX
A Home Truth for the Widow Chicholle
For a few moments they stood in silence, their ears alert, holding their breath. But no voice was lifted anywhere, no foot knocked upon a floor.
