The Eight Strokes of the Clock (12 page)

Dalbrèque gave his adversary a long look:

“Who are you?”

“A friend of Rose Andrée’s,” said Rénine.

The other started and, to some extent dropping his mask, retorted:

“What are your conditions?”

“Rose Andrée, whom you have abducted and tormented, is dying in some hole or corner. Where is she?”

A strange thing occurred and impressed Rénine. Dalbrèque’s face, usually so common, was lit up by a smile that made it almost attractive. But this was only a flashing vision: the man immediately resumed his hard and impassive expression.

“And suppose I refuse to speak?” he said.

“So much the worse for you. It means your arrest.”

“I dare say, but it means the death of Rose Andrée. Who will release her?”

“You. You will speak now, or in an hour, or two hours hence at least. You will never have the heart to keep silent and let her die.”

Dalbrèque shrugged his shoulders. Then, raising his hand, he said:

“I swear on my life that, if they arrest me, not a word will leave my lips.”

“What then?”

“Then save me. We will meet this evening at the entrance to the Parc des Landes and say what we have to say.”

“Why not at once?”

“I have spoken.”

“Will you be there?”

“I shall be there.”

Rénine reflected. There was something in all this that he failed to grasp. In any case, the frightful danger that threatened Rose Andrée dominated the whole situation, and Rénine was not the man to despise this threat and to persist out of vanity in a perilous course. Rose Andrée’s life came before everything.

He struck several blows on the wall of the next bedroom and called his chauffeur.

“Adolphe, is the car ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Set her going and pull her up in front of the terrace outside the café, right against the boxes so as to block the exit. As for you,” he continued, addressing Dalbrèque, “you’re to jump on your machine and, instead of making off along the road, cross the yard. At the end of the yard is a passage leading into a lane. There you will be free. But no hesitation and no blundering … else you’ll get yourself nabbed. Good luck to you.”

He waited till the car was drawn up in accordance with his instructions and, when he reached it, he began to question his chauffeur, in order to attract the detectives’ attention.

One of them, however, having cast a glance through the spindle trees, caught sight of Dalbrèque just as he reached the bottom of the staircase. He gave the alarm and darted forward, followed by his comrades, but had to run round the car and bumped into the chauffeur, which gave Dalbrèque time to mount his bicycle and cross the yard unimpeded. He thus had some seconds’ start. Unfortunately for him as he was about to enter the passage at the back, a troop of boys and girls appeared, returning from vespers. On hearing the shouts of the detectives, they spread their arms in front of the fugitive, who gave two or three lurches and ended by falling.

Cries of triumph were raised:

“Lay hold of him! Stop him!” roared the detectives as they rushed forward.

Rénine, seeing that the game was up, ran after the others and called out:

“Stop him!”

He came up with them just as Dalbrèque, after regaining his feet, knocked one of the policemen down and levelled his revolver. Rénine snatched it out of his hands. But the two other detectives, startled, had also produced their weapons. They fired. Dalbrèque, hit in the leg and the chest, pitched forward and fell.

“Thank you, sir,” said the inspector to Rénine, introducing himself. “We owe a lot to you.”

“It seems to me that you’ve done for the fellow,” said Rénine. “Who is he?”

“One Dalbrèque, a scoundrel for whom we were looking.”

Rénine was beside himself. Hortense had joined him by this time, and he growled:

“The silly fools! Now they’ve killed him!”

“Oh, it isn’t possible!”

“We shall see. But, whether he’s dead or alive, it’s death to Rose Andrée. How are we to trace her? And what chance have we of finding the place—some inaccessible retreat—where the poor thing is dying of misery and starvation?”

The detectives and peasants had moved away, bearing Dalbrèque with them on an improvised stretcher. Rénine, who had at first followed them, in order to find out what was going to happen, changed his mind and was now standing with his eyes fixed on the ground. The fall of the bicycle had unfastened the parcel which Dalbrèque had tied to the handlebar; and the newspaper had burst, revealing its contents, a tin saucepan, rusty, dented, battered and useless.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he muttered. “What was the idea? …”

He picked it up examined it. Then he gave a grin and a click of the tongue and chuckled, slowly:

“Don’t move an eyelash, my dear. Let all these people clear off. All this is no business of ours, is it? The troubles of police don’t concern us. We are two motorists travelling for our pleasure and collecting old saucepans if we feel so inclined.”

He called his chauffeur:

“Adolphe, take us to the Parc des Landes by a roundabout road.”

Half an hour later they reached the sunken track and began to scramble down it on foot beside the wooded slopes. The Seine, which was very low at this time of day, was lapping against a little jetty near which lay a worm-eaten, mouldering boat, full of puddles of water.

Rénine stepped into the boat and at once began to bale out the puddles with his saucepan. He then drew the boat alongside of the jetty, helped Hortense in and used the one oar, which he shipped in a gap in the stern, to work her into midstream:

“I believe I’m there!” he said, with a laugh. “The worst that can happen to us is to get our feet wet, for our craft leaks a trifle. But haven’t we a saucepan? Oh, blessings on that useful utensil! Almost as soon as I set eyes upon it, I remembered that people use those articles to bale out the bottoms of leaky boats. Why, there was bound to be a boat in the Landes woods! How was it I never thought of that? But of course Dalbrèque made use of her to cross the Seine! And, as she made water, he brought a saucepan.”

“Then Rose Andrée …?” asked Hortense.

“Is a prisoner on the other bank, on the Jumièges peninsula. You see the famous abbey from here.”

They ran aground on a beach of big pebbles covered with slime.

“And it can’t be very far away,” he added. “Dalbrèque did not spend the whole night running about.”

A towpath followed the deserted bank. Another path led away from it. They chose the second and, passing between orchards enclosed by hedges, came to a landscape that seemed strangely familiar to them. Where had they seen that pool before, with the willows overhanging it? And where had they seen that abandoned hovel?

Suddenly both of them stopped with one accord:

“Oh!” said Hortense. “I can hardly believe my eyes!”

Opposite them was the white gate of a large orchard, at the back of which, among groups of old, gnarled apple trees, appeared a cottage with blue shutters, the cottage of the Happy Princess.

“Of course!” cried Rénine. “And I ought to have known it, considering that the film showed both this cottage and the forest close by. And isn’t everything happening exactly as in
The Happy Princess
? Isn’t Dalbrèque dominated by the memory of it? The house, which is certainly the one in which Rose Andrée spent the summer, was empty. He has shut her up there.”

“But the house, you told me, was in the Seine-inférieure.”

“Well, so are we! To the left of the river, the Eure and the forest of Brotonne; to the right, the Seine-inférieure. But between them is the obstacle of the river, which is why I didn’t connect the two. A hundred and fifty yards of water form a more effective division than dozens of miles.”

The gate was locked. They got through the hedge a little lower down and walked towards the house, which was screened on one side by an old wall shaggy with ivy and roofed with thatch.

“It seems as if there was somebody there,” said Hortense. “Didn’t I hear the sound of a window?”

“Listen.”

Someone struck a few chords on a piano. Then a voice arose, a woman’s voice softly and solemnly singing a ballad that thrilled with restrained passion. The woman’s whole soul seemed to breathe itself into the melodious notes.

They walked on. The wall concealed them from view, but they saw a sitting room furnished with bright wallpaper and a blue Roman carpet. The throbbing voice ceased. The piano ended with a last chord, and the singer rose and appeared framed in the window.

“Rose Andrée!” whispered Hortense.

“Well!” said Rénine, admitting his astonishment. “This is the last thing that I expected! Rose Andrée! Rose Andrée at liberty! And singing Massenet in the sitting room of her cottage!”

“What does it all mean? Do you understand?”

“Yes, but it has taken me long enough! But how could we have guessed …?”

Although they had never seen her except on the screen, they had not the least doubt that this was she. It was really Rose Andrée, or rather, the Happy Princess, whom they had admired a few days before, amidst the furniture of that very sitting room or on the threshold of that very cottage. She was wearing the same dress; her hair was done in the same way; she had on the same bangles and necklaces as in
The Happy Princess
; and her lovely face, with its rosy cheeks and laughing eyes, bore the same look of joy and serenity.

Some sound must have caught her ear, for she leaned over towards a clump of shrubs beside the cottage and whispered into the silent garden:

“Georges … Georges … Is that you, my darling?”

Receiving no reply, she drew herself up and stood smiling at the happy thoughts that seemed to flood her being.

But a door opened at the back of the room and an old peasant woman entered with a tray laden with bread, butter and milk:

“Here, Rose, my pretty one, I’ve brought you your supper. Milk fresh from the cow …”

And, putting down the tray, she continued:

“Aren’t you afraid, Rose, of the chill of the night air? Perhaps you’re expecting your sweetheart?”

“I haven’t a sweetheart, my dear old Catherine.”

“What next!” said the old woman, laughing. “Only this morning there were footprints under the window that didn’t look at all proper!”

“A burglar’s footprints perhaps, Catherine.”

“Well, I don’t say they weren’t, Rose dear, especially as in your calling you have a lot of people round you whom it’s well to be careful of. For instance, your friend Dalbrèque, eh? Nice goings on his are! You saw the paper yesterday. A fellow who has robbed and murdered people and carried off a woman at Le Havre … !”

Hortense and Rénine would have much liked to know what Rose Andrée thought of the revelations, but she had turned her back to them and was sitting at her supper; and the window was now closed, so that they could neither hear her reply nor see the expression of her features.

They waited for a moment. Hortense was listening with an anxious face. But Rénine began to laugh:

“Very funny, really funny! And such an unexpected ending! And we who were hunting for her in some cave or damp cellar, a horrible tomb where the poor thing was dying of hunger! It’s a fact, she knew the terrors of that first night of captivity; and I maintain that, on that first night, she was flung, half-dead, into the cave. Only, there you are: the next morning she was alive! One night was enough to tame the little rogue and to make Dalbrèque as handsome as Prince Charming in her eyes! For see the difference. On the films or in novels, the Happy Princesses resist or commit suicide. But in real life … oh, woman, woman!”

“Yes,” said Hortense, “but the man she loves is almost certainly dead.”

“And a good thing too! It would be the best solution. What would be the outcome of this criminal love for a thief and murderer?”

A few minutes passed. Then, amid the peaceful silence of the waning day, mingled with the first shadows of the twilight, they again heard the grating of the window, which was cautiously opened. Rose Andrée leaned over the garden and waited, with her eyes turned to the wall, as though she saw something there.

Presently, Rénine shook the ivy branches.

“Ah!” she said. “This time I know you’re there! Yes, the ivy’s moving. Georges, Georges darling, why do you keep me waiting? Catherine has gone. I am all alone …”

She had knelt down and was distractedly stretching out her shapely arms covered with bangles, which clashed with a metallic sound:

“Georges! … Georges! …”

Her every movement, the thrill of her voice, her whole being expressed desire and love. Hortense, deeply touched, could not help saying:

“How the poor thing loves him! If she but knew …”

“Ah!” cried the girl. “You’ve spoken. You’re there, and you want me to come to you, don’t you? Here I am, Georges! …”

She climbed over the window ledge and began to run, while Rénine went round the wall and advanced to meet her.

She stopped short in front of him and stood choking at the sight of this man and woman whom she did not know and who were stepping out of the very shadow from which her beloved appeared to her each night.

Rénine bowed, gave his name and introduced his companion:

“Madame Hortense Daniel, a pupil and friend of your mother’s.”

Still motionless with stupefaction, her features drawn, she stammered:

“You know who I am? … And you were there just now? … You heard what I was saying …?”

Rénine, without hesitating or pausing in his speech, said:

“You are Rose Andrée, the Happy Princess. We saw you on the films the other evening, and circumstances led us to set out in search of you … to Le Havre, where you were abducted on the day when you were to have left for America, and to the forest of Brotonne, where you were imprisoned.”

She protested eagerly, with a forced laugh:

“What is all this? I have not been to Le Havre. I came straight here. Abducted? Imprisoned? What nonsense!”

“Yes, imprisoned, in the same cave as the Happy Princess; and you broke off some branches to the right of the cave.”

“But how absurd! Who would have abducted me? I have no enemy.”