“To sit on the floor and tell sad stories of dead kings—that is an English custom, eh?”
“No, my friend, but it is an English quotation, when it is right.”
Hanaud turned in the darkness eagerly.
“Aha! The charming Miss Whipple—she makes a phrase in the cellar, eh? She use an idiom?”
“You may call it so.”
“Good,” said Hanaud with contentment. “I too use him.”
Mr. Ricardo was never able quite to comprehend the professional mind which, having made its careful plan and set it irrevocably in motion, can turn to trifles whilst awaiting the result.
“Do you mean to say,” he cried, “that all this while in the corner of my car you have been considering the preposterous question whether or no you will sometime be able to drag into your conversation an unusual phrase which you have just heard for the first time? You are approaching Mirandol. Dreadful duties lie before you—and you are trifling with an idiom. I don’t wish to be censorious, but levity is levity.”
Hanaud was altogether unmoved by this rebuke.
“A field-marshal, my friend,” he replied, “once he has prepared his battle, and given the order to begin, may go and fish with his little rod for a trout. He can do no more. He cannot alter his strategy that day. So with Hanaud. His scheme is complete. His subordinates are carrying it out. Himself he learns an idiom.”
He had hardly delivered himself of this immodest comparison when a lantern swung to and fro ahead of them, and with all its brakes clamped fast the car came to a stop. The headlights showed a stout wire rope fixed across the road at the level of the bonnet, and three gendarmes in uniform with a local inspector of police dressed in plain clothes. The inspector opened the door of the car and, seeing now who was within it, saluted.
“The Château Mirandol is surrounded. You will only have to blow your whistle and there will be assistance at once,” he said.
“The Vicomte is alone?” asked Hanaud.
“No, the Juge d’Instruction has returned to him. Oh—Monsieur Tidon—he is ambitious. It is known that he aspires to Paris and here is the case to lift him up the ladder. He has not let the Vicomte de Mirandol for long out of his sight today, I can tell you,” the inspector observed with a quiet laugh.
“And what of Suvlac?”
“No one has moved beyond the grounds all day.”
“Good!” Hanaud leaned out of the window and spoke in a whisper. Ricardo heard the inspector answer “Yes,” and again “Yes,” and then Hanaud turned his head towards Moreau on the seat beside the driver. “We will go in by the gate that was painted”; and as the gendarmes removed the barrier from across the road, he turned again to the inspector.
“There is no need for that wire rope any longer. Anyone from the Château Suvlac or Mirandol—yes, you shall stop him. But the travellers—now they can pass without inconvenience.”
The car, purring like a great cat, slid along past the high iron gates of Mirandol on the left hand, and the plantations of Suvlac upon the right. It reached the arch and the house of Suvlac, the pink walls glimmering under the stars and not a light in any window. It turned down the slope by the farm buildings and the garage, crossed the pastureland and ascended the hill. Fifty yards from the gate, Hanaud tapped upon the front glass and the car stopped. From that point the three men proceeded quietly on foot. The hillside fell away upon their right, the hedge of the Mirandol property rose high upon their left, and they walked by the faint gleam of the white road. At a corner they came to a gap in the hedge. Mr. Ricardo stepped forward busily and reached out a hand to the gate. But Hanaud snatched him back violently.
“Don’t touch it!” he whispered.
“A little wet paint—what does that matter?” Mr. Ricardo returned in the same tone.
“There may be more than a little wet paint. Let us take care!”
He drew a glove over his right hand. But noiselessly though the party had moved, he had not touched the latch before a thread of light shot out, flickered over their faces and was gone. A man moved forward from the shrubs within the garden and opened the gate for them.
“That is very good watching,” Hanaud murmured. “I thank you.”
They slid between the high bushes to the lawn in front of the low house. At the edges of the thick dark curtains which were drawn across the library window there was a trickle of light. But nowhere else. In that room there, thought Ricardo, sat the ambitious Juge d’Instruction keeping watch over the rogue whose conviction was to waft him away to Paris. He crept forward across the drive in the hope that at one of those edges where the light shone he might catch a glimpse of the interior of the room. What were those two doing? Chatting over a bottle of wine like two good friends? Not a sign that on one side of the hearth sat a criminal and on the other a judge with a knowledge of the crime? Or did they sit in a dreadful silence, one with eyes shifting from chair to table, from book to ornament, from picture to bright fire-iron—anywhere, so that they did not meet another pair of eyes; the other watching steadily, unblinkingly out of a face of steel? Mr. Ricardo had got to know. He crept close to the window and peered in; and then with a low cry rattling in his throat he leaped suddenly back. Hanaud caught him by the elbow.
“Hush!” he whispered. “What do you see?”
But Ricardo had suffered from an unexpected shock, so strange a thrust of terror that he could not answer. His blood seemed to him to stand still and his belly to turn over.
“Look! Look!” he gasped at length, and pointed to the window. Hanaud, in his
