The Prisoner in the Mask Read online

  Having despatched his letter he left the War Office and, after lunch, he did not feel like going back there that afternoon. It then occurred to him that it was one of Angela’s Thursdays and, as he had not called on her for a long time, he decided to do so.

  He was not surprised that she greeted him rather coldly and therefore all the more so when, after he had been there for about twenty minutes, she beckoned him over to her and said in a low voice: ‘Armand, I want to talk to you privately. Can you come back about six o’clock?’

  ‘With pleasure,’ he replied at once and left shortly afterwards. At six he was back again and, much puzzled about what she could want with him, was shown up to her boudoir, to which he had never previously been admitted.

  When they had settled down he said with a smile: ‘Now, tell me. In what way can I be of service to you?’

  She shook her head. ‘None. It is yourself that I wish to talk about.’

  ‘Really!’ He raised his devil’s eyebrows. ‘What have I done? Nothing, I hope, to offend you.’

  ‘Nothing to offend but to distress,’ she replied sadly. ‘We have known one another for nearly three years now; so I look on you as an old friend, and I am worried about you. I know you to have so many fine qualities and it pains me to hear of the life you have been leading.’

  ‘Oh, come! It is true that in this past year I have racketed round quite a bit with my Russian friends; but to show them the sights was part of my job.’

  ‘It’s not that. It is the attitude to life that you have adopted which I find so distressing. From all accounts you have become completely cynical and think of nothing but chasing women.’

  He shrugged. ‘What the devil else is there to do as long as I am stationed in Paris? If only they would send me out to fight the Arabs, no one would be more pleased than myself. If only France were like Russia I could now and then hunt wolf and bear. During the two years I was at St. Cyr I read enough military history to last me a lifetime, and I am interested in neither cards nor horses. I am the victim of my circumstances.’

  Again Angela shook her head. ‘That is not true, Armand; or only partly so. I make no criticism of your affair with Madeleine, or of your having become the lover of a woman like Madame Pollit; but of recent months your behaviour has been abominable. There was that episode which led to Claude Trouverier slapping your face’

  De Quesnoy grinned. ‘She said she did, but she was lying.’

  ‘No matter; it is clear that she found your attentions unwelcome. Then there were those poems published by Julie de Beaumont-Arlon’s cousin; and more recently the duel in which you might have killed or wounded that poor young Prince de Lodi.’

  ‘He is not a real Prince, only a Napoleonic one.’

  ‘Armand, please be serious. No matter where he gets his name he is in love with his wife and she with him. For you to attempt to come between them was inexcusable.’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, my dear, I suppose you are right, and I have been behaving like a blackguard. In the circumstances it is sweet of you to be concerned for me; and to tell the truth I have derived little pleasure from these adventures. But I am all at sixes and sevens with myself; so what would you have me do?’

  ‘Why, pull yourself together. Become again the man you really are, then find some nice girl to marry. Or, if you are averse to that, an attractive woman, with complaisant husband, who needs a lover; and be faithful to her.’

  ‘I have no mind to marry yet awhile,’ he declared, then added with a smile. ‘From your last recommendation it seems that you have overcome your old prejudices against adultery?’

  ‘In three years, Armand, one’s sense of values are apt to change,’ she smiled back. ‘I still regard it as a sin; but not such a terrible one as I used to. I have since met many women I respect whose characters have not deteriorated because they have taken lovers. There is, too, much point in the old saying: “When in Rome …” And the special circumstances in which most French marriages are made makes it difficult not to condone it.’

  After a moment he said: ‘If only I could adopt your suggestion it would, I know, mean recapturing the happiness I have lost; but the problem is to find such a woman, and one to whom I should be likely to remain faithful for any length of time. I … well, why should I not say so; I thought that I had found one once.’

  Angela quickly looked away. ‘I know, and I tricked you very badly. I have often regretted it.’

  In an instant de Quesnoy was on his feet. ‘D’you mean that? Angela, tell me! Do you really mean—’

  ‘No! No!’ Quickly she thrust him away from her. ‘I meant only that I regretted the childish, vindictive trick that I played upon you.’

  With a sigh, he sank back in his chair. ‘I was a fool to hope anything else. But, tell me, do you intend never to take a lover?’

  She hesitated, then replied in a low voice. ‘I don’t know. I would no longer have any scruples of conscience about doing so. Gabriel freed me of these some months ago.’

  ‘Indeed How did that come about?’

  ‘Our personal relations have never been happy ones, and for a long time past he has bothered me very little—for which I thank God. I think I would have died if I had had to continue to submit to the sort of demands which I have reason to suppose he makes of his young mistresses.’

  The angry blood came rushing to de Quesnoy’s face; but before he could speak she hurried on: ‘Still, that is beside the point. What I was about to tell you is that during the summer a youngish banker with whom he does a great deal of business began to pay me marked attention. Then one night Gabriel gave me the strongest possible hint that if I liked to take this man as my lover he would be grateful to me, because it would help his financial interests.’

  ‘My God! The swine!’ De Quesnoy exclaimed. ‘I’d like to wring his neck.’

  Angela smiled. ‘You need not be so fierce. Apart from his sadistic tendencies he is not a bad man. Normally he is kind, understanding and very generous. He is, too, a great patriot. He is always neglecting his own affairs to appear at rallies of the Ligue and attend Royalist conferences. As most women have lovers, too, there was nothing so terrible in his suggestion, and he did not press it in the least. I simply said that I did not feel that I could help him in that way, and that was the end of the matter. But I decided that his attitude freed me from any obligation to be faithful to him in the future.’

  ‘Then Angela,’ de Quesnoy leant forward earnestly, ‘will you not take me for your lover? Oh, I beg you to! You, and you alone, have the power to rescue me from this stupid vicious life with which you so rightly reproach me. I have loved you for years, more than any woman I have ever known. And at the bottom of your heart you must still care for me, otherwise you would never have sent for me to talk to as you have this afternoon. Oh, please, my dear. Just think how happy we could be.’

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ she stammered, the blood mounting to her face. ‘Oh, Armand, if I could be really sure that you would keep on loving me I might. The idea of saving you from yourself that way had not occurred to me; but it is one that would appeal to any woman who has been as fond of a man as I have been of you. Don’t press me for an answer now, though. No, please, I’ll have to think about it first.’

  ‘For how long, darling! For how long? How long?’

  Suddenly she laughed. ‘Armand, at heart you are still only a boy, and have all a boy’s impatience. Give me a week. And if I do decide to give you a rendez-vous, this time I promise to keep it.’

  Seizing her hands he kissed them, but she stood up and said firmly: ‘I don’t want to discuss this any more for the moment. I want to be alone; so please, my dear, go now.’

  Regretfully he took his leave. But as he walked downstairs he felt a different man from the one who had come up them only twenty minutes earlier. Totally unexpectedly his whole outlook had been changed and he was in the seventh heaven of delight, for Angela’s parting smile had left him with little doubt that he had only to wait a
week and, after all these years, she would become his at last.

  When he strode down the Rue Saint-Dominique to the War Office the following morning he was still walking on air. As he entered his room, one of his fellow A.D.C.s told him that their General wished to see him; but with his head still full of Angela he had forgotten all about the letter he had written to General Billot until he walked into de Boisdeffre’s spacious sanctum.

  As he approached the desk the General pushed a flimsy paper towards him and said: ‘Read that.’

  It was the faux Henry. Having read the few lines of writing on it, without even a suspicion that they might be forgery, he murmured: ‘I see, Then Dreyfus was guilty after all.’

  De Boisdeffre nodded. ‘Perhaps that will teach you not to form judgments contrary to those of your superiors.’

  ‘Has Colonel Picquart seen this, Sir?’ de Quesnoy inquired.

  ‘No; it has come to hand only since his departure. But what concern is that of yours?’

  ‘Only that from your showing it to me, Sir, I assume you have been told about the letter I wrote yesterday to General Billot. If Picquart has not seen this document it is still true that his dismissal is indefensible.’

  ‘Again, your superiors are the best judge of that, and General Billot takes the strongest possible exception to your insolence in daring to criticise his decisions. He is also determined that no rumours of any kind shall reach Deputies, at all events from you. I recall that you wished to see foreign service. Well, you shall. But I fear you will not find much chance of winning any glory.’

  De Boisdeffre paused for a moment, then delivered the coup de grâce: The Minister for War has charged me to convey to you the following order: You are to leave Paris tonight for Marseilles. At Army Headquarters there they will have been instructed to allot you a passage on the first ship leaving for Madagascar. It is to be hoped that you will have a better understanding of the word discipline after you have done a few years’ garrison duty in the fever-ridden swamps of that most unattractive island.’

  10

  RIP VAN QUESNOY

  It was not until January 1903 that de Quesnoy returned from exile. When one is still in the early twenties six years seems a lifetime, and as he strode down the crowded Cannebière a few hours after landing at Marseilles he felt like Rip van Winkle.

  At twenty-seven he made a more than ever gallant figure, for he wore the sky-blue uniform and flowing scarlet robe of the crack African cavalry corps; on his chest there were ribbons for gallantry, and his kepi carried the four gold rings of a Lieutenant-Colonel. His face was bronzed, his eyes bright and the muscles of his slender, medium-tall body as strong as whipcord.

  As he ate his bouillabaisse at the Mont Ventoux, looking out towards the fishing boats in the Vieux Port, he well remembered the anger and despair with which he had eaten his last meal there. To have disobeyed the orders he had received would have meant court martial, and de Boisdeffre would not grant him even a twenty-four-hour postponement. That afternoon he had called on Angela but, to his fury, he had found Syveton’s old mother with her; so they had had to part without a chance to say what was in their hearts.

  He had seriously considered resigning his commission, as the only way of saving himself from the War Minister’s fear-inspired vindictiveness, but to have done so would have meant losing face with his father. Much as he hated the idea of going to Madagascar, he would not give the Duke the satisfaction of believing that, after three easy years in Paris, he had thrown his hand in when called on to face the discomforts of real soldiering.

  His first few months in Madagascar had been grim; for he had not even the comparative solace of the sort of books he liked, and other small luxuries which his private income enabled him later to have sent out from Europe. The huge island, larger in area than France, was thinly garrisoned and its population hostile. It was only in the preceding year that the famous Colonial soldier, General Galliéni, had succeeded in stamping out widespread rebellion. There was no proper accommodation for the troops, supplies of all kinds, particularly medical stores, were hopelessly inadequate and fever was rampant.

  The French, having made a treaty with the Hová Queen, had expected to be able to administer the island through her officials, in the same way as they were now successfully running Tunisia through those of its Bey. But it transpired that the Hovás controlled only the big plateau of Imèrina; so Galliéni had had to start again from scratch, and set up an organisation which would reconcile the divergent interests of several different races before order could be brought out of chaos. Moreover, the Malagasy population was rapidly falling. It was of such poor spirit that it would not work to improve its condition, and the island had been declared unfit for white settlers. So a more depressing station for a young officer could hardly be imagined.

  The Count had again contemplated sending in his papers, but had put off doing so owing to a friendship he had struck up with an English missionary: a fine, intelligent and broad-minded man with whom he spent many of his evenings converting his textbook English into a fluent command of that language.

  This parson, like many of his kind at that time, was compiling a bulky treatise on the folklore and customs of the natives among whom he worked, and that entailed an examination of their priests’ claim to occult powers. As the island’s people were an admixture of Pacific and African races, its witch doctors had become the repositories of the magic of both, so were among the most advanced occultists in the world. The many strange feats they performed so intrigued de Quesnoy that by the early summer he had embarked on a serious study of the subject.

  White magic was practised as extensively as Black, the only difference between the two being that whereas the latter is for personal ends the former is for purposes of healing or the benefit of others, and after a while de Quesnoy decided to become a neophyte under the direction of the most celebrated White Magician in the island. Henceforth the long empty hours between his dull routine duties were filled with mental exercises, tests of physical endurance and a gradual building up of the will-power which is necessary to all occult operations.

  Originally he had made up his mind that in no circumstances would he spend more than a year in Madagascar, but so fascinated did he become by his penetration into the vast domain of the supernatural that month after month slid by and, even after two and a half years, he hardly knew if he was pleased or sorry when an order at last arrived for his transfer.

  The order was accompanied by a personal letter from General de Galliffet, who had just become Minister of War in a government formed by M. Waldeck-Rousseau. The General wrote that he had long wished to rescue his protégé from exile, but that had not been possible while de Boisdeffre had remained Chief of Staff, and even after his retirement in the preceding November opposition had been met with from other officers in the War Office. Now, however, as War Minister, his desires had to be complied with without argument. He added that on de Quesnoy’s arrival in Europe he might take two months’ leave, but that he was not having him posted to a Metropolitan regiment as he considered that his career would now be better forwarded by his seeing some active service; so when his leave was over he was to place himself at the disposal of the G.O.C. Algeria.

  For his leave the Count had not gone to Paris. Instead, as his father was now resigned to the career he had chosen, he had taken ship from Suez via Constantinople to Odessa and thence travelled up to Jvanets. After a stay of some weeks there he had spent the rest of his leave in Budapest and Vienna, then by way of Trieste recrossed the Mediterannean to the scene of his new activities.

  It was just at this time that the Dreyfus affair boiled up to the greatest of all its crises. In the summer of ’97 the Dreyfus family’s efforts to secure a retrial had begun to bear fruit, the agitation being led by an Alsation Senator named Scheurer-Kestner. Esterhazy was publicly denounced that autumn and the War Office reluctantly compelled to bring him to trial early in ’98. The court martial was held in camera, he was found ‘n
ot guilty’, and the mobs, which had now been whipped up by the Press into an anti-Semitic fervour, screamed with delight at his acquittal.

  Emile Zola had then published his famous letter under the banner headline ‘J’ Accuse’ in the newspaper Aurore. In it he charged the judges at the court martial with having acquitted Esterhazy at the order of the War Office. This public ‘insult to the Army’ resulted in anti-Semitic riots in nearly every town in France, while in Algiers the mobs got completely out of hand and for four days sacked the Jewish quarter.

  Generals Billot and de Boisdeffre retaliated by prosecuting Zola for libel, but they feared that Picquart might prove awkward if he were called as a witness, so they decided that they had better tackle him before the trial came on.

  In the preceding year Picquart had been ordered to a post of great danger on the frontier of Tripoli. The local C.-in-C., General Leclerc, on learning what lay behind the order, indignantly repudiated it, and told him that he was not to go farther south than Gabes. Now he was recalled to Paris, placed under arrest, forbidden to see his friends and brought before a Court of Inquiry. Then, having rejected the overtures of the Generals to save his career at the price of perjuring himself at the Zola trial, he was dismissed the service.

  The trial of Zola lasted a week. He was not a very likeable personality. Having insulted the jury he spent most of the time that he was in the box singing his own praises; but the only way the Generals could get the better of his counsel was to refuse to answer questions on the excuse that to have done so would have given away official secrets. Zola was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and a heavy fine. The acid comment of the Berliner Tageblatt when reporting the case was ‘The French Army has won its first victory since its defeat in 1870-71’.