The Double Four Part 36

"Stupid!" she cried, stepping out. "I do not recognise you to-night, little one. Even your voice is different. Follow me quickly across the pavement and up the stairs. There is only one flight. The flat I have borrowed is on the second floor. I do not care very much that people should recognise me either, under the circ.u.mstances. There is nothing they love so much," she added, with a toss of the head, "as finding an excuse to have my picture in the paper."

He followed her down the dim hall and up the broad, flat stairs, keeping always some distance behind. On the first landing she drew a key from her pocket and opened a door. It was the door of Monsieur Guillot's sitting-room. A round table in the middle was laid for supper. One light alone, and that heavily shaded, was burning.

"Oh, la, la," she exclaimed. "How I hate this darkness! Wait till I can turn on the lights, dear friend, and then you must embrace me. It is from outside, I believe. No, do not follow. I can find the switch for myself. Remain where you are. I return instantly."

She left him alone in the room, closing the door softly. In the pa.s.sage she reeled for a moment and caught at her side. She was very pale.

Guillot, coming swiftly up the steps, frowned as he saw her.

"He is there?" he demanded harshly.

"He is there," Louise replied; "but, indeed, I am angry with myself.

See, I am faint. It is a terrible thing, this, which I have done. He did me no harm, that young man, except that he was stupid and heavy, and that I never loved him. Who could love him, indeed? But, Guillot----"

He pa.s.sed on, scarcely heeding her words, but she clung to his arm.

"Dear one," she begged, "promise that you will not really hurt him.

Promise me that, or I will shriek out and call the people from the streets here. You will not make an a.s.sa.s.sin of me? Promise!"

Guillot turned suddenly towards her, and there were strange things in his face. He pointed down the stairs.

"Go back, Louise," he ordered, "back to your rooms, for your own sake.

Remember that you left the theatre, too ill to finish your performance.

You have had plenty of time already to get home. Quick! Leave me to deal with this young man. I tell you to go."

She retreated down the stairs, dumb, her knees shaking still as though with fear. Guillot entered the room, closing the door behind him. Even as he bowed to that dark figure standing in the corner, his left hand shot forward the bolt.

"Monsieur," he said.

"What is the meaning of this?" the visitor interrupted haughtily. "I am expecting Mademoiselle Louise. I did not understand that strangers had the right of entry into this room."

Guillot bowed low.

"Monsieur," he said once more, "it is a matter for my eternal regret that I am forced to intrude even for a moment upon an a.s.signation so romantic. But there is a little matter which must first be settled. I have some friends here who have a thing to say to you."

He walked softly, with catlike tread, along by the wall to where the thick curtains shut out the inner apartment. He caught at the thick velvet, dragged it back, and the two rooms were suddenly flooded with light. In the recently discovered one, two stalwart-looking men in plain clothes, but of very unmistakable appearance, were standing waiting.

Guillot staggered back. They were strangers to him. He was like a man who looks upon a nightmare. His eyes protruded. The words which he tried to utter failed him. Then, with a swift, nervous presentiment, he turned quickly around towards the man who had been standing in the shadows.

Here, too, the unexpected had happened. It was Peter, Baron de Grost, who threw his m.u.f.fler and broad-brimmed hat upon the table.

"Five minutes to eleven, I believe, Monsieur Guillot," Peter declared.

"I win by an hour and five minutes."

Guillot said nothing for several seconds. After all, though, he had great gifts. He recovered alike his power of speech and his composure.

"These gentlemen," he said, pointing with his left hand towards the inner room. "I do not understand their presence in my apartments."

Peter shrugged his shoulders.

"They represent, I am afraid, the obvious end of things," he explained.

"You have given me a run for my money, I confess. A Monsieur Guillot who is remarkably like you still occupies your box at the Empire, and Mademoiselle Jeanne Lemere, the accomplished understudy of the lady who has just left us, is sufficiently like the incomparable Louise to escape, perhaps, detection for the first few minutes. But you gave the game away a little, my dear Guillot, when you allowed your quarry to come and gaze even from the shadows of his box at the woman he adored."

"Where is--he?" Guillot faltered.

"He is on his way back to his country home," Peter replied. "I think that he will be cured of his infatuation for Mademoiselle. The a.s.sa.s.sins whom you planted in that room are by this time in Bow Street. The price which others beside you knew, my dear Guillot, was placed upon that unfortunate young man's head will not pa.s.s this time into your pocket.

For the rest----"

"The rest is of no consequence," Guillot interrupted, bowing. "I admit that I am vanquished. As for those gentlemen there," he added, waving his hand towards the two men, who had taken a step forward, "I have a little oath which is sacred to me concerning them. I take the liberty, therefore, to admit myself defeated, Monsieur le Baron, and to take my leave."

No one was quick enough to interfere. They had only a glimpse of him as he stood there with the revolver pressed to his temple, an impression of a sharp report, of Guillot staggering back as the revolver slipped from his fingers on to the floor. Even his death cry was stifled. They carried him away without any fuss, and Peter was just in time, after all, to see the finish of the second act of the ballet. The sham Monsieur Guillot still smirked at the sham Louise, but the box by his side was empty.

"Is it over?" Violet asked breathlessly.

"It is over," Peter answered.

It was, after all, an unrecorded tragedy. In an obscure corner of the morning papers one learned the next day that a Frenchman, who had apparently come to the end of his means, had committed suicide in a furnished flat in Shaftesbury Avenue. Two foreigners were deported without having been brought up for trial, for being suspected persons. A little languid interest was aroused at the inquest when one of the witnesses deposed to the deceased having been a famous French criminal.

Nothing further transpired, however, and the readers of the halfpenny press for once were deprived of their sensation. For the rest, Peter received, with much satisfaction, a remarkably handsome signet ring, bearing some famous arms, and a telegram from Sogrange: "_Well done, Baron! May the successful termination of your enterprise nerve you for the greater undertaking which is close at hand. I leave for London by the night train._--SOGRANGE."

CHAPTER X

THE THIRTEENTH ENCOUNTER

The Marquis de Sogrange arrived in Berkeley Square with the grey dawn of an October morning, showing in his appearance and dress few enough signs of his night journey. Yet he had travelled without stopping from Paris by fast motor car and the mail boat.

"They telephoned me from Charing Cross," Peter said, "that you could not possibly arrive until midday. The clerk a.s.sured me that no train had yet reached Calais."

"They had reason in what they told you," Sogrange remarked, as he leaned back in a chair and sipped the coffee which had been waiting for him in the Baron de Grost's study. "The train itself never got more than a mile away from the Gare du Nord. The engine-driver was shot through the head, and the metals were torn from the way. Paris is within a year now of a second and more terrible revolution."

"You really believe this?" Peter asked gravely.

"It is a certainty," Sogrange replied. "Not I alone, but many others can see this clearly. Everywhere the Socialists have wormed themselves into places of trust. They are to be met with in every rank of life, under every form of disguise. The post-office strike has already shown us what deplorable disasters even a skirmish can bring about. To-day the railway strike has paralysed France. Our country lies to-day absolutely at the mercy of any invader. As it happens, no one is, for the moment, prepared. Who can tell how it may be next time?"

"This is bad news," Peter declared. "If this is really the position of affairs, the matter is much more serious than the newspapers would have us believe."

"The newspapers," Sogrange muttered, "ignore what lies behind. Some of them, I think, are paid to do it. As for the rest, our Press had always an ostrich-like tendency. The Frenchman of the cafe does not buy his journal to be made sad."

"You believe, then," Peter asked, "that these strikes have some definite tendency?"

Sogrange set down his cup and smiled bitterly. In the early sunlight, still a little cold and unloving, Peter could see that there was a change in the man. He was no longer the debonair aristocrat of the racecourses and the boulevards. The shadows under his eyes were deeper, his cheeks more sunken. He had lost something of the sprightliness of his bearing. His att.i.tude, indeed, was almost dejected. He was like a man who sees into the future and finds there strange and gruesome things.

"I do more than believe that," he declared. "I know it. It has fallen to my lot to make a very definite discovery concerning them. Listen, my friend. For more than six months the Government has been trying to discover the source of this stream of vile socialistic literature which has contaminated the French working cla.s.ses. The pamphlets have been distributed with devilish ingenuity amongst all national operatives, the army and the navy. The Government has failed. The Double Four has succeeded."

"You have really discovered their source?" Peter exclaimed.

"Without a doubt," Sogrange a.s.sented. "The Government appealed to us first some months ago when I was in America. For a time we had no success. Then a clue, and the rest was easy. The navy, the army, the post-office employees, the telegraph and telephone operators, and the railway men, have been the chief recipients of this incessant stream of foul literature. To-day one cannot tell how much mischief has been actually done. The strikes which have already occurred are only the mutterings of the coming storm. But mark you, wherever those pamphlets have gone, trouble has followed. What men may do the Government is doing, but all the time the poison is at work, the seed has been sown.

Two millions of money have been spent to corrupt that very cla.s.s which should be the backbone of France. Through the fingers of one man has come this shower of gold, one man alone has stood at the head of the great organisation which has disseminated this loathsome disease. Behind him--well, we know."