He stooped over her. “Courage, mademoiselle!” he said chidingly; and Joyce Whipple from the floor laughed weakly and said:
“It is all very well to say ‘Courage, mademoiselle.’ But what is mademoiselle to do, monsieur, my friend, if mademoiselle’s legs give way under her? She can only sit on the floor, poor girl, and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” and her voice trailed away into silence and her shoulders bowed as she crouched upon the floor. She covered her face suddenly with her hands, and in a moment she was shaking from head to foot with great sobs like a child, and the tears were running out between her fingers.
Hanaud had been left completely at a loss by Joyce Whipple’s words, but her distress he did understand. He called for water in a peremptory voice, and when the glass was brought he knelt down by her side and put his great arm about her shoulders, raised her head and held the glass to her lips.
“Oh!” she sighed as she drank, and fearing that he was for handing back the glass before she had finished, she caught his wrist and held it fast with both her hands.
“More?” he asked when she had finished.
“Oh, ever so much more,” she cried in a stronger voice, and now she laughed without hysteria and Hanaud laughed in sympathy. Moreau was holding a jug of water in his hands and he filled the glass again. Hanaud stood up in front of her as she drank it, and with a movement of his hand commanded the removal of the prisoners. They were hustled out whilst she was drinking, but not so quickly but that she uttered a cry and, rising up on her knees, pressed herself against the wall.
“You are safe, mademoiselle,” said Hanaud, but she didn’t hear. Her eyes were fixed on the door through which the women had been taken and the dark cellar beyond. She knelt straight up, bruising her shoulder against the wall by the violence of her pressure. She shivered. She was once more upon the edge of panic.
“No, no, mademoiselle,” said Hanaud. It was an order that he gave her. “There is nothing to fear. It must not be!” and to Moreau he added: “See that they lock those women up in one of the rooms until we go, and send someone into the square to fetch Mr. Ricardo’s car.” He turned again to Joyce Whipple.
“I tell you what we shall do. We shall take you in Mr. Ricardo’s fine car to Mr. Ricardo’s fine hotel, where a friend is waiting for you—”
“A friend?” Joyce asked with a frown of perplexity; then with a cry of alarm: “Not from—”
“No, no, no, not from the Château Suvlac at all. Will you please to listen to me?” Hanaud interrupted with an accent of the utmost testiness. “I dispose of you tonight. I am your goat.”
“Your nanny, he means, Joyce,” Mr. Ricardo explained, and they all fell to laughing foolishly and yet wisely. Joyce Whipple from an instinct that she must grapple herself fast to the light and trifling things if she were ever to repair the hurt and horror of this day; Hanaud because laughter would be the saving of her if it was kept on this side of hysteria. He was not very sure indeed of the occasion for laughter. Nothing that he had said could have provoked it. At an appropriate moment he had used an admirable idiom—that was all. But he was very content to laugh, with an ear alert to catch the first waverings of hysteria; and he kept the broad bulwark of his shoulders solidly between the girl upon the floor in the tattered masquerade and the horrid apparatus of her death. The noose with its short foot of rope promising slow torture and dreadful disfigurement dangled from the hook. But they laughed beneath it so that the walls of that deep-sunk, sinister chamber rang with a joyous sound which they could hardly have heard before. To Mr. Ricardo it seemed that their laughter was laying the ghosts of many crimes and exorcising the cellar of its horrors.
“Come,” said Hanaud to the girl. “I carry you since the legs won’t walk.”
He lifted her up on to her feet and thence into his arms with no more effort than if she had been in very truth a baby. There were only the three of them now in the cellar. “You will take the lantern, yes?—and you will leave this cellar just as it is for Monsieur le Commissaire, and you will light me very carefully so that I do not bump this young lady’s head too often against the wall.”
Mr. Ricardo went forward with the lamp into the outer cellar. He saw clearly now the hole on the edge of which he had tottered. Some boards had been removed, a shallow trench had been dug in the clay—a grave. And the thought that if Hanaud had yielded to his appeals in the restaurant of the Golden Pheasant; or if he had yielded to his own doubts; or if Moreau had been late in coming to summon them; or if that shrill cry of death by terror had not risen up from beneath their feet, the grave would already hold its occupant, set his heart sinking in his breast and filled him with an unforgettable dismay. He would himself have had his share in that crime. Remorse would have stalked him for the rest of his days and his soul went out in gratitude towards his friend. Even now, he noticed with a smile, Hanaud so held Joyce Whipple in his arms that her back was towards that open trench. She never saw
