The Prisoner in the Mask Read online

  Madame Forain smiled an acceptance, and when they came over he displayed almost pathetic pleasure, making it clear that he had plucked up the courage to ask them only because he knew so few people in Paris and at times felt terribly lonely.

  Over their Benedictine and café filtre they talked for a good hour and a half, mostly of Russia and Madame’s girlhood there. She was a native of St. Petersburg and had become lady’s maid to a Countess, who had brought her to Paris in the middle eighties. Forain had met her, on one of her evenings off, dancing at the Great Hall of Folly, and later persuaded her to marry him. Politics were not mentioned, but this second meeting paid de Quesnoy a good dividend, as before leaving the Forains asked him if he would like to join them for a picnic next Sunday in a boat that they kept out at St. Cloud. As it was contrary to custom for the French bourgeoisie to invite any but most intimate friends to their homes, this was better than anything for which he could normally have hoped, and he accepted with alacrity.

  The Sunday proved fine, and the long hours on the river created just the atmosphere for disclosing confidences; so the fictitious M. Vasili Petrovich gave his reasons for leaving Russia. Having decided that the Forains were far from fanatical types, he made no pretence of being a nihilist, and even deplored the attempts by them to assassinate members of the Imperial family. But he spoke with great bitterness of the way in which the Czar’s autocratic government denied the people a voice in the running of the country and deliberately blocked all progress. It was circulating pamphlets advocating a Socialist World-State that had brought him to grief, but fortunately a friendly police chief had warned him that he had been denounced so this enabled him to escape over the frontier with some part of his small fortune instead of being sent as a prisoner to exile in Siberia.

  The Forains were most sympathetic. It transpired that Madame had a brother who, while demonstrating in the streets, had been ridden down by the Cossacks and crippled for life; and that Monsieur, although only a boy of fifteen at the time, had fought beside the Communists on the barricades in ’71.

  During the following week the Count returned their hospitality by taking them to a local café-concert, and they joined him on another night after dinner at the Rotonde. On the Sunday, he again went with them to St. Cloud but in the afternoon it came on to rain so they returned early. Madame then decided to visit her sister-in-law and nieces, and Forain took de Quesnoy with him to what he termed his ‘wet weather retreat’.

  Entering a small café, they walked through it and upstairs to a room in which there were two billiard tables and a score of men, a number of whom were sitting talking and drinking in its big bay window. Half a dozen of them called cheerful greetings to Forain, and he introduced ‘Monsieur Vasili Petrovich’ all round as a good fellow who had recently been driven from his country by the tyranny of the Czar.

  It was soon obvious to the Count that everyone in the place knew one another and that it was a form of club, although an unofficial one, as there was no formal electing of members; but on his leaving with Forain after spending several hours there, three of the other men with whom he had talked all invited him to come again any time that he liked.

  Most of the men present had given the impression of being middle-class intellectuals and, while the conversation had touched on a wide variety of subjects, whenever politics cropped up the views expressed had been those of the extreme Left; so de Quesnoy judged that many of his new acquaintances were brother Masons of Forain’s. In consequence, while keeping up with the Forains, he now gave more of his time to the billiards saloon and to cultivating its most regular occupants; three men named Héquet, Daguenet and Lazare.

  It was the last who first spoke to him about Freemasonry, and said he thought he would find much in it to interest him. Playing for safety, he showed no great enthusiasm but asked to be told more about it.

  Smiling, Lazare declared that the secrets of Masonry could not be divulged, but that all honest men who hated priests and oppression could be certain that by becoming Masons they would be helping to advance the cause in which they believed.

  No more was said at the time; but three evenings later Héquet tackled him on the same subject, then drew Lazare and also Forain, who happened to be in the room, into the conversation. On the latter, as his original friend, promising to sponsor him, de Quesnoy agreed to have his name put forward.

  A fortnight elapsed, then his friends took him by night to an underground Masonic Temple at the headquarters of the Grand Orient in the Rue Cadet, just off the southern end of the Rue de la Fayette, and there he was initiated into the first degree of the mysteries. Parts of the ritual he thought impressive and other parts childish. The oaths he had to take would have been binding, on account of the awful fate accepted as the penalty for breaking them, had he given them the weight they were expected to carry; but he did not. To him his word of honour meant a very great deal, as also did an oath in which God was invoked, but, as he had decided for himself before seeking initiation, the dictates of chivalry had no bearing on this matter and, since the congregation was composed of atheists, any oath dictated by their representative must logically be meaningless.

  His initiation did not take place until the third week in July; so it had cost him two months’ hard work even to penetrate the Masonic world as a neophyte, but the way was now open for him to become the repository of Masonic secrets if he could induce his seniors in the hierarchy to confide them to him.

  In the meantime, he had been building up a very different personality which he felt might later have its uses should Masonry prove a dead end for him. He had soon learned that the Forains dined at the Rotonde only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and decided that to run into them there one night a week was quite sufficient. He had had to devote five Sundays to them, and had spent four weekends, as well as a number of odd nights, keeping warm his room at the Pension Smirnoff. Lastly, from mid-June, he had had to spend two or more evenings each week up in the billiards room. But it had been easy for him frequently to fit these activities in on the same night; so actually he had spent barely a third of each week in Montparnasse.

  For the other two-thirds he had been living miles away on the north side of the Seine as Jules Dupont, in Van Ryn’s comfortable apartment. A certain amount of his time he gave to seeing bloodstock put through its paces, and making arrangements concerning his nominal master’s small stud. He also stocked Channock’s cellar, engaged a good chef for him and made all the arrangements for his frequent luncheon and dinner parties, leaving Harry Plimsol free to concentrate entirely on the banker’s business affairs.

  Most of Van Ryn’s guests were Americans, either resident in Paris or passing through it, but as his circle of acquaintances grew he also began to entertain the leading French financiers of solid reputation, and on two occasions when de Quesnoy was present he had M. Rouvier, the Minister of Finance in Combes’s government, to dinner.

  Listening to the talk of these men, who largely controlled the economic situation in France, gave the Count a behind-the-scenes insight into the affairs of the country which he felt might in due course prove of considerable value to him in his endeavours to bring down the government. Moreover, this cover of his in the Avenue Victor Hugo enabled him to see General Laveriac, Gabriel Syveton and Guyot de Villeneuve openly, to discuss progress, whenever he wished.

  Early in June he received two letters. The first had been forwarded on to him from America through the Van Ryn office. It was from de Vendôme, in reply to one that he had written to the Prince from New York.

  His ex-pupil first expressed unbounded delight at his escape, then undying gratitude for his sacrifice in having changed places with him in the Cherche-Midi. He went on to say that he was not content to leave matters as they were, with de Quesnoy exposed, should he return to France and be caught, to a charge of murder. He had, therefore, instructed a legal firm in Paris to engage private inquiry agents to make an exhaustive investigation into the fracas at Versailles. His idea was to pay
out of his own pocket considerable sums as compensation to every policeman who had suffered injury in the affair. But before receiving the money they would be asked to write out a detailed eyewitness account of every act they had seen committed during the engagement, and swear to it.

  By these means, de Vendôme reasoned, the malice of Combes and André might be defeated, as the combined statements must show how the three policemen who had died had met their deaths, and that de Quesnoy had had no hand in killing any of them.

  The Count was greatly touched, for he felt that if the plan succeeded it would make a great difference to his future. As long as he was wanted for murder the French Government could, on locating him, demand his extradition from almost any country in the world; so there would be few places in which he could ever have settled down in safety under his own name. But if a dossier of sworn evidence could be compiled against which no murder charge could be sustained, then a prison sentence for assaulting the police was the worst penalty that could be inflicted on him, if he were caught while in France, and he could live in exile anywhere that he liked without fear of extradition.

  The other letter was from Angela. He had not written to her from New York as he had planned to surprise her by turning up in Paris some two months earlier than had been his intention before reaching Valparaiso; so this was a reply to a letter he had sent her only a week after learning from her husband that she was in London.

  In it she said how overjoyed she had been on receiving his cable from Bahia, and spoke of the frustration she had felt at not being able to reply to the letters he had sent her from South American ports on account of her uncertainty of his future movements. She went on to say that in February her father had begun a tour of duty at the Foreign Office; so her parents had taken a house in Great Cumberland Place, and she had gone over at the beginning of May for a long stay with them. At present she was greatly enjoying the gaieties of the London season, and did not mean to return to Paris until at least after Cowes week, as for this she was going to her grandmother, the Dowager Lady Chudleigh, whose home, Herne Court, was in the Isle of Wight.

  De Quesnoy found her letter disappointing. Apart from a description of her relief when she had first learned that he had escaped to South America, and a plea that now he had returned to Paris he should take every possible precaution against being recognised, the tone of her letter was very similar to those which she had written to him while he was in Madagascar and North Africa. It was not that after this last five months of separation he had expected an outpouring of violent passion, but her declaration just before they had parted in the Cherche-Midi, and his own letters to her since, had led him to anticipate a much warmer expression of her feelings.

  However, after some thought he decided that her restraint on paper was probably due to her English upbringing, and that being once again among her own people had re-aroused in her the virtue they made of concealing their emotions. He was, too, by this time launched on his campaign to cultivate the Forains, and felt that he must not allow his mind to dwell too much on Angela until he could make more concrete plans about his own future.

  Nevertheless, now that he was again in Paris so many of its sights and scenes recalled her to him that he thought of her frequently, and towards the end of June he jumped at a chance that arose by which he might see her again earlier than he had expected. It came about through Van Ryn’s announcing one evening that he intended to buy a yacht; so that he could enjoy his favourite pastime of sailing at Deauville, and perhaps for a while, during the coming winter, down in the Mediterranean.

  Realising at once the possibility of combining his friend’s pleasure with his own desires, de Quesnoy said, ‘What a splendid idea; and if in the next few weeks you could find something to suit you we could take her across to Cowes. The meeting there and the Kiel Regatta are the two greatest events of the sailing year; so if business does not interfere it would be a pity for you to miss either.’

  Van Ryn agreed with enthusiasm. Enquiries were set on foot, and after inspecting three craft of about the tonnage he favoured he settled on a handsome cutter named the Juliette that was lying in Dieppe harbour, took over her crew, and left it to de Quesnoy to complete the arrangements for her sailing.

  The Count’s initiation as a Mason had by then been fixed for July 17th, after which discretion demanded that for a while he should not put himself forward too eagerly; so he told his sponsors and Madame Smirnoff that he was taking the last week in July and the first in August as his annual holiday, and meant to spend them at a little place in Normandy. Then he wrote to Angela giving the name of Van Ryn’s yacht and telling her that they were coming to Cowes. She replied by return saying how greatly she looked forward to seeing him, and on July 21st the yacht set sail for England.

  They had a good passage, and when she arrived the following evening Van Ryn found the Solent a sight to gladden his yachtsman’s heart. Hundreds of small and medium-sized boats were practising for the races, and scores of larger ones with towering masts lay at their anchorages—among them King Edward VII’s Britannia, her famous rivals, Reliance and Valkyrie II, and Sir Thomas Lipton’s Atlantic challenger, Shamrock III.

  Their application for an anchorage having been put in very late, the one allotted to them was a considerable distance from Cowes pier, but de Quesnoy got ashore as soon as he could and, having forced his way through the packed hall of the Gloster Hotel, found to his relief that Herne Court was on the telephone. After the initial difficulties connected with the use of this comparatively new instrument had been overcome, he managed to speak to Angela. Between buzzings and cracklings, she asked him to come over with his American friend to lunch next day, and told him that Herne Court lay in the south-east of the island, near the village of Brading.

  On making further inquiries at the office of the hotel, he learned that Brading was a good twelve miles from Cowes by road, so he ordered a carriage for eleven o’clock the following morning; then, darkness having fallen, he spent two grim hours being rowed in and out between a forest of bobbing masts before the three French sailors who had brought him ashore succeeded in locating the Juliette at her moorings.

  His excitement at the prospect of seeing Angela again, un-diminished by his dinnerless and exasperating evening, he hustled Van Ryn ashore next day and, as the weather remained good, they had an enjoyable drive through leafy lanes, which brought them to Herne Court in good time for luncheon. They found it to be a not very large but charming Georgian mansion, and the house-party of some fifteen people, which had been assembled for Cowes week, was seated on the lawn under a great cedar.

  Now that he was again outside France the Count had had no intention of asking Angela to keep his real identity secret; but, even so, he was distinctly embarrassed to find that she had told all her relatives and friends about the part he had played in the de Vendôme conspiracy, and how Van Ryn had rescued him. As a result both of them were given a welcome in which curiosity was only thinly veiled under good breeding, and Angela’s grandmother, the formidable old Dowager Countess, voiced the desire of all her guests, although somewhat inexactly, when she declared that after lunch they must tell the story of how they had murdered all the warders on Devil’s Island.

  When they had enjoyed one of those meals the simplicity but excellence of which seems peculiar to English country houses, they adjourned to the garden and de Quesnoy gave a modest account of the events which had led to his diving overboard from the cruiser. Van Ryn then took up the tale and would obviously have been willing to spend the rest of the afternoon discoursing on his friend’s sufferings and bravery; but the Count did his best to cut him short as he was anxious that the party should break up so that he could get Angela to himself.

  In her light summer frock, a big picture hat and this, the natural setting for her English loveliness, he thought her more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and it made him all the more impatient to talk to her about the future; but in that, for the time being, he was infuriatingly
frustrated. He was just about to ask her to take him round the gardens when a clock in a small belfry over the stables chimed three. The butler appeared behind Lady Chudleigh’s chair and murmured with a bow:

  ‘The carriages are ready, milady.’

  A few of the party excused themselves on the plea of having letters to write, but the old lady lost no time in sweeping the others together and leading them through to the front of the house, where two carriages and pairs, and behind them the victoria which had brought the visitors, were waiting.

  As she was assisted into the leading landau by a tall, grey-haired man, who was spoken to as ‘Jim-jam’, ‘Newcombe’ or ‘Sir Reginald’ according to the age and sex of whoever addressed him, Angela whispered to de Quesnoy:

  ‘To go for a drive every fine afternoon is one of Grandmama’s rituals, and today she is taking us to Carisbrooke Castle. King Charles I was kept a prisoner there by the Roundheads, so she thought you and Mr. Van Ryn would like to go over it.’

  ‘That was most kind.’ murmured the Count, as he and Sir Reginald followed her into the carriage, while Van Ryn and the other members of the party got into those behind. Two minutes later the little cavalcade set off at a spanking trot, and after a drive of an hour through gently rolling well-wooded country reached the mount upon which stood the ivy-covered, half-ruined gate-house of the castle.

  Old Lady Chudleigh said that she meant to remain in her carriage, but she refused to allow Sir Reginald to stay and keep her company, declaring that few people knew the castle better than he did, so he must take the party round it.

  In other circumstances de Quesnoy would have been much interested in the misfortunes of Charles I, but now he silently cursed that monarch, and Sir Reginald for discoursing so loquaciously upon him. However, towards the end of the half-hour’s tour he managed to get Angela a little behind the others, so that he was able to say to her, sotto voce: