“I should be obliged, Monsieur Hanaud, if you could find it possible to be more explicit about that suitcase.”
“But certainly,” he replied cordially. “Amongst us three there is no need for concealments. The suitcase contains some clothes for Mademoiselle Joyce Whipple.”
From the darkness of the car Tidon asked quietly:
“That young lady has been found then?”
“Happily, yes,” Hanaud returned. “One of those strokes of chance by which it is my business to profit, led me to the house of the widow Chicholle in the Rue Grégoire. I was just in time.”
“She is alive then?”
“Yes. She has been roughly treated. But she is young. She has found, I think, tonight some compensations, so that tomorrow we shall know all that happened two nights ago at the Château Mirandol.”
“That is the best of news,” said the magistrate. “I had hardly dared to hope for it.”
“You can understand, therefore, my relief,” Hanaud continued, dwelling upon this matter of the suitcase with what seemed to Mr. Ricardo a needless particularity, “that it was secured without the knowledge of the household. Were it known there that Joyce Whipple was safe and that the whole truth must be known no later than tomorrow—why, as I say, the Law’s work of punishment might be taken out of the Law’s hands—”
In other words, there would be a suicide—perhaps two—perhaps even three, reflected Mr. Ricardo. For who knew how many of the household of Suvlac were implicated in the mystery?
“I understand you very well,” said the magistrate, and again he relapsed into silence.
But as the loom of light began to show in the sky above Bordeaux, he said:
“I shall smoke,” and he felt in his pocket for his cigarette case.
Hanaud laughed with a very evident note of relief.
“I have been longing to hear you say that,” and a rustle of paper informed Mr. Ricardo that the bright blue packet of Maryland cigarettes was in Hanaud’s fingers.
“I have a match here. You will allow me,” he said. A scratching, a spurt of fire, for a few seconds a tiny creeping blue light and then the yellow flame; and the dark interior of the limousine became a place of wavering shadows with two faces brightly lit. Hanaud held the light to Tidon’s cigarette, then he lighted his own; and for a few moments the two men looked at each other with a steady gaze.
“I thank you,” said the magistrate quietly.
The match burnt out and once more darkness fell. The two men smoked in silence, the glow of their cigarettes waxing and waning; and then Tidon’s cigarette fell to the floor, and as Hanaud stamped upon it a smell as of bitter almonds filled the car. Hanaud let down the windows.
“Your mouth to the air, my friend,” he cried, and Ricardo obeyed, squeezing himself away from the thing which now, shaking and swaying with every jolt of the car, lay behind him in the corner of the carriage. Already, however, they were traversing the city. A few minutes and the car stopped at the hotel in the Cours de l’Intendance. It was half-past two in the morning, and not a light was in any window, not a wayfarer in the street.
“Moreau shall ring for the night porter,” said Hanaud. “You will say nothing of this. I am a servant of the law. I will not have it shamed more than need be.”
“You executed him!” said Mr. Ricardo with a shiver of horror.
“Better I than the man with the guillotine,” Hanaud answered sombrely. He helped Mr. Ricardo out of the car and steadied him across the pavement. He placed him in a chair in the hall and bade the porter fetch a tumbler full of brandy, and stood by whilst Ricardo drank it.
“Shall I help you to your room?” he asked solicitously, but Mr. Ricardo shook his head. Holding by the balustrade he walked, his legs trembling beneath him, up the stairs. Hanaud returned to the car, and a minute later the street was empty again.
XXIII
Mr. Ricardo Lunches
Julius Ricardo had spent a wearing day which would have taxed even a younger and more adventurous person; and such a shock had befallen him at the end that his sensibilities were quite stunned. It was not to be wondered at, then, that he slept like a log. Tidon the magistrate, the Vicomte de Mirandol, Evelyn Devenish, Robin Webster, Hanaud, the old, throned captious lady of Suvlac, the Abbé with the furtive walk, Diana Tasborough, even Joyce Whipple, who occupied the tenderest corner of his heart, thinned to the texture of gossamer. Away they went, carrying their questions and perplexities with them. Not one ghost haunted his pillow, not a question plagued him with dreams. He slept as boys sleep after a football match. Neither the brightness of the morning nor all the clocks of Bordeaux could awaken him. The hour of noon had struck before he passed in a fraction of a second through one of those excruciating nightmares which at times precede the actual awakening. Excruciating, because he could neither cry out nor move, but must lie like another Merlin under a perpetual spell. He dreamed that he lay in an inferno of acrid smoke, and that while Tidon the magistrate held his hand and pointed and said: “There! That is the place,” old Mrs. Tasborough, delicately and without effort, severed his arm at the wrist with a fruit-knife. He sat up with a cry upon his lips and his heart racing. Hanaud was sitting by his bedside, with a black cigarette between his lips and his fingers on Mr. Ricardo’s pulse.
Mr. Ricardo, aware as he swam upwards into consciousness that he had cried out in alarm, eyed his visitor with disfavour.
“I may be old-fashioned,” he said, flapping a hand up and down in the air like the fin of a fish, “but I cannot endure any but the mildest of Turkish tobacco in my bedroom.”
“Good!” Hanaud answered cordially, without, however,
