The Prisoner in the Opal

turn, approached and saw. And he too was startled. Standing between the curtain and the window, with his face pressed against the glass, and his hands curved about his eyes to shut out any glimmer from the room, the Vicomte de Mirandol stared out into the darkness, motionless like some old Indian idol. He was watching them as some late student, disturbed by the cracking of a twig in a lonely garden, might watch from his curtained study and, discerning robbers, stand rooted to the spot. There had been only the thickness of the pane between Mr. Ricardo and that big white face with the full, mincing lips and the bald forehead; and it had not moved. Ricardo had never seen anything more disturbing, more ghostly. He came to Hanaud’s side reluctantly, uneasily. A foot away from the window the two men stood and stared. Did the Vicomte imagine that he had not been seen? That they were staring at him and overlooking him? No! For he did move, and the movement was even more grotesque and somehow more alarming than his immobility. For his face expanded in a grin which showed both the rows of his teeth and, lifting a fat finger, he beckoned. For a moment the heavy curtain swung aside, and both the men in the garden saw the examining magistrate leaning forward from a chair in the lighted room with the most baffling look of suspense upon his face. The curtain swept down again and hid the room. But the one brief glimpse had given to Mr. Ricardo a new and vague idea of Arthur Tidon, the examining magistrate. The astute judge, sitting over against his victim, playing with him, playing David to his Jonathan until the police arrived? No! There would have been exultation in his aspect if that had been the case. As it was, there was suspense. And fear? he asked himself. No. Calculation, perhaps, but above all suspense with its parted lips and wide staring, expectant eyes.

Mr. Ricardo’s conjectures were cut short by the opening of the door and the great panel of light which stretched of a sudden across the white pebbles of the drive.

“It is Monsieur Hanaud?”

The mincing treble voice floated out softly to the watchers.

“It is.”

“Will you come in? Monsieur Tidon is with me. I was a little alarmed to see so many unexpected visitors in my garden at so late an hour. But you shall tell us all that you have done in Bordeaux.”

“All? I have been very busy, Monsieur le Vicomte,” said Hanaud in a dry, uncompromising voice. “Moreau!”

Moreau stepped out of the darkness, and the three visitors followed the Vicomte de Mirandol into the vestibule. But only two of them crossed the threshold of the library. Moreau remained outside the door.

XXI

Mustard Gas

The examining magistrate was buttoning a glove upon his right hand. He nodded pleasantly to Hanaud and to Mr. Ricardo.

“Alas, my good Hanaud, you disappoint me,” he grumbled ruefully. “I am no nearer to Bordeaux than I was two days ago.”

“On the contrary, sir,” Hanaud retorted, smiling. “You are as good as there already.”

Tidon, the magistrate, was a little taken aback.

“That is excellent,” he said. He seemed upon the point of asking for an explanation, but thought the better of it and contented himself with repeating in an even heartier tone: “Yes, that is excellent! Ah, the Paris police! Nothing is hidden from it for long.”

Hanaud shook his head.

“Monsieur, the longer I practise my profession, the humbler I grow⁠—” and of all the untruths, and the name of them was legion, which Mr. Ricardo had heard Hanaud utter, this most took his breath away and plunged him in a state of admiration. “For more and more clearly do I observe that the chief of our success we owe to chance and the mistakes of the other man.”

“You shall try to persuade me of that tomorrow morning,” said the Juge d’Instruction very politely, and he rose from his chair and with his left hand he reached for his hat.

Hanaud did not respond to that invitation. He had come straight into the room and across it, and now stood with his back to the fireplace, and as far from the door as in that room any man could possibly be. Yet to everyone he seemed to hold the handle.

“You are going, Monsieur le Juge?” he asked quietly, and Tidon stopped, and he had quite the air of a man begging permission to go, as he answered:

“My car has been waiting for me for some while⁠—”

“For the best part of an hour,” Hanaud interrupted.

“You must have passed it in the courtyard of the old château.”

“We came by the gate which Monsieur de Mirandol was so careful to paint yesterday,” said Hanaud; and Mr. Ricardo, realising somehow that the air was heavy with stupendous events, but quite at a loss to guess what events, said to himself: “All this is very singular. Here is the chief, the very powerful Juge d’Instruction, asking permission of his subordinate to go away, and here is a roomful of people turned into pillars of salt by the mere mention by that subordinate that he came in by a newly-painted gate.”

It certainly was extraordinary. There had been an extremely faint, an extremely subtle menace in Hanaud’s speech. He lingered ever so slightly on the words, but he did linger on them, and both the Vicomte and the Judge were disturbed. The Judge was the first to recover his serenity.

“Oh, you came by that longer way,” he said with a smile. “It took you past the Château Suvlac. Yes, I understand that you of all men would wish to see what was going on there.”

“There was not a light in any window,” said Hanaud.

Tidon the Judge leaped at that interruption. He had his cue, and like a good actor, he took it up at once.

“No. We provincials are early in