Читать книгу: «Checkmate», страница 31
“In five minutes.”
“Oh, you mean a photograph, or a picture?”
“No, in the solid. Here is the key of the catacombs.” And he took a key that hung from a nail on the wall.
“Bah, ha, yah!” exploded the baron, in a ferocious sneer, rather than a laugh, and shrugging his great shoulders to his ears, he shook them in barbarous glee, crying – “What clever fellow you are, Monsieur Arden! you see so well srough ze millstone! Ich bin klug und weise– you sing zat song. I am intelligent and wise, eh, he! gra-a, ha, ha!”
He seized the candlestick in one hand, and shaking the key in the other by the side of his huge forehead, he nodded once or twice to David Arden.
“Not much life where we are going; but you shall see zem bose.”
“You speak riddles, Baron; but by all means bring me, as you say, face to face with them.”
“Very good, Monsieur; you'll follow me,” said the baron. And he opened a door that admitted to the gallery, and, with the candle and the keys, he led the way, by this corridor, to an iron door that had a singular appearance, being sunk two feet back in a deep wooden frame, that threw it into shadow. This he unlocked, and with an exertion of his weight and strength, swung slowly open.
CHAPTER LXXIX
RESURRECTIONS
David Arden entered this door, and found himself under a vaulted roof of brick. These were the chambers, for there was at least two, which the baron termed his catacombs. Along both walls of the narrow apartment were iron doors, in deep recesses, that looked like the huge ovens of an ogre, sunk deep in the wall, and the baron looked himself not an unworthy proprietor. The baron had the General's faculty of remembering faces and names.
“Monsieur Yelland Mace? Yes, I will show you him; he is among ze dead.”
“Dead?”
“Ay, zis right side is dead– all zese.”
“Do you mean,” says David Arden, “literally that Yelland Mace is no longer living?”
“A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” mutters the baron, slowly pointing his finger along the right wall.
“I beg your pardon, Baron, but I don't think you heard me,” said David Arden.
“Perfectly, excuse me: H, I, J, K, L, M – M. I will show you now, if you desire it, Yelland Mace; you shall see him now, and never behold him more. Do you wish very much?”
“Intensely —most intensely!” said Uncle David earnestly.
The baron turned full upon him, and leaned his shoulders against the iron door of the recess. He had taken from his pocket a bunch of heavy keys, which he dangled from his clenched fingers, and they made a faint jingle in the silence that followed, for a few seconds.
“Permit me to ask,” said the baron, “are your inquiries directed to a legal object?”
“I have no difficulty in saying yes,” answered he; “a legal object, strictly.”
“A legal object, by which you gain considerably?” he asked slowly.
“By which I gain the satisfaction of seeing justice done upon a villain.”
“That is fine, Monsieur. Eternal justice! I have thought and said that very often: Vive la justice eternelle! especially when her sword shears off the head of my enemy, and her scale is laden with napoleons for my purse.”
“Monsieur le Baron mistakes, in my case; I have absolutely nothing to gain by the procedure I propose; it is strictly criminal,” said David Arden drily.
“Not an estate? not a slice of an estate? Come, come! Thorheit! That is foolish talk.”
“I have told you already, nothing,” repeated David Arden.
“Then you don't care, in truth, a single napoleon, whether you win or lose. We have been wasting our time, Sir. I have no time to bestow for nothing; my minutes count by the crown, while I remain in Paris. I shall soon depart, and practise no more; and my time will become my own – still my own, by no means yours. I am candid, Sir, and I think you cannot misunderstand me; I must be paid for my time and opportunities.”
“I never meant anything else,” said Mr. Arden sturdily; “I shall pay you liberally for any service you render me.”
“That, Sir, is equally frank; we understand now the principle on which I assist you. You wish to see Yelland Mace, so you shall.”
He turned about, and struck the key sharply on the iron door.
“There he waits,” said the baron, “and – did you ever see him?”
“No.”
“Bah! what a wise man. Then I may show you whom I please, and you know nothing. Have you heard him described?”
“Accurately.”
“Well, there is some little sense in it, after all. You shall see.”
He unlocked the safe, opened the door, and displayed shelves, laden with rudely-made deal boxes, each of a little more than a foot square. On these were marks and characters in red, some, and some in black, and others in blue.
“Hé! you see,” said the baron, pointing with his key, “my mummies are cased in hieroglyphics. Come! Here is the number, the date, and the man.”
And lifting them carefully one off the other, he took out a deal box that had stood in the lowest stratum. The cover was loose, except for a string tied about it. He laid it upon the floor, and took out a plaster mask, and brushing and blowing off the saw-dust, held it up.
David Arden saw a face with large eyes closed, a very high and thin nose, a good forehead, a delicately chiselled mouth; the upper lip, though well formed after the Greek model, projected a little, and gave to the chin the effect of receding in proportion. This slight defect showed itself in profile; but the face, looked at full front, was on the whole handsome, and in some degree even interesting.
“You are quite sure of the identity of this?” asked Uncle David earnestly.
There was a square bit of parchment, with two or three short lines, in a character which he did not know, glued to the concave reverse of the mask. The baron took it, and holding the light near, read, “Yelland Mace, suspect for his politics, May 2nd, 1844.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Arden, having renewed his examination, “it very exactly tallies with the description; the nose aquiline, but very delicately formed. Is that writing in cypher?”
“Yes, in cypher.”
“And in what language?”
“German.”
David Arden looked at it.
“You will make nothing of it. In these inscriptions, I have employed eight languages – five European, and three Asiatic – I am, you see, something of a linguist – and four distinct cyphers; so having that skill, I gave the benefit of it to my friends; this being secret.”
“Secret? – oh!” said Uncle David.
“Yes, secret; and you will please to say nothing of it to any living creature until the twenty-first of October next, when I retire. You understand commerce, Mr. Arden. My practice is confidential, and I should lose perhaps eighty thousand francs in the short space that intervenes, if I were thought to have played a patient such a trick. It is but twenty days of reserve, and then I go and laugh at them, every one. Piff, puff, paff! ha! ha!”
“Yes, I promise that also,” said Uncle David dryly, and to himself he thought, “What a consummate old scoundrel!”
“Very good, Sir; we shall want this of Yelland Mace again, just now; his face and coffin, ha! ha! can rest there for the present.” He had replaced the mask in its box, and that lay on the floor. The door of the iron press he shut and locked. “Next, I will show you Mr. Longcluse: those are dead.”
He waved his short hand toward the row of iron doors which he had just visited.
“Please, Sir, walk with me into this room. Ay, so. Here are the resurrections. Will you be good enough – L, Longcluse, M, one, two, three, four; three, yes, to hold this candlestick for a moment?”
The baron unlocked this door, and, after some rummaging, he took forth a box similar to that he had taken out before.
“Yes, right, Walter Longcluse. I tell you how you will see it best: there is brilliant moonlight, stand there.”
Through a circular hole in the wall there streamed a beam of moonlight, that fell upon the plaster-wall opposite with the distinctness of the circle of a magic-lantern.
“You see it – you know it! Ha! ha! His pretty face!”
He held the mask up in the moonlight, and the lineaments, sinister enough, of Mr. Longcluse stood, sharply defined in every line and feature, in intense white and black, against the vacant shadow behind. There was the flat nose, the projecting underjaw, the oblique, sarcastic eyebrow, even the line of the slight but long scar, than ran nearly from his eye to his nostril. The same, but younger.
“There is no doubt about that. But when was it taken? Will you read what is written upon it?”
Uncle David had taken out the candle, and he held it beside the mask. The baron turned it round, and read, “Walter Longcluse, 15th October, 1844.”
“The same year in which Mace's was taken?”
“So it is, 1844.”
“But there is a great deal more than you have read, written upon the parchment in this one.”
“It looks more.”
“And is more. Why, count the words, one, two, four, six, eight. There must be thirty, or upwards.”
“Well, suppose there are, Sir: I have read, nevertheless, all I mean to read for the present. Suppose we bring these three masks together. We can talk a little then, and I will perhaps tell you more, and disclose to you some secrets of nature and art, of which perhaps you suspect nothing. Come, come, Monsieur! kindly take the candle.”
The baron shut the iron door with a clang, and locked it, and, taking up the box, marched into the next room, and placing the boxes one on top of the other, carried them in silence out upon the gallery, accompanied by David Arden.
How desolate seemed the silence of the vast house, in all which, by this time, perhaps, there did not burn another light!
They now re-entered the large and strangely-littered chamber in which he had talked with the baron; they stop among the chips and sawdust with which his work has strewn the floor.
“Set the candle on this table,” says he. “I'll light another for a time. See all the trouble and time you cost me!”
He placed the two boxes on the table.
“I am extremely sorry – ”
“Not on my account, you needn't. You'll pay me well for it.”
“So I will, Baron.”
“Sit you down on that, Monsieur.”
He placed a clumsy old chair, with a balloon-back, for his visitor, and, seating himself upon another, he struck his hand on the table, and said, arresting for a moment the restless movement of his eyes, and fixing on him a savage stare —
“You shall see wonders and hear marvels, if only you are willing to pay what they are worth.” The baron laughed when he had said this.
CHAPTER LXXX
ANOTHER
“You shall sit here, Mr. Arden,” said the baron, placing a chair for him. “You shall be comfortable. I grow in confidence with you. I feel inwardly an intuition when I speak wis a man of honour; my demon, as it were, whispers ‘Trust him, honour him, make much of him.’ Will you take a pipe, or a mug of beer?”
This abrupt invitation Mr. Arden civilly declined.
“Well, I shall have my pipe and beer. See, there is ze barrel – not far to go.” He raised the candle, and David Arden saw for the first time the outline of a veritable beer-barrel in the corner, on tressels, such as might have regaled a party of boors in the clear shadow of a Teniers.
“There is the comely beer-cask, not often seen in Paris, in the corner of our boudoir, resting against the only remaining rags of the sky-blue and gold silk – it is rotten now – with which the room was hung, and a gilded cornice – it is black now – over its head; and now, instead of beautiful women and graceful youths, in gold lace and cut velvets and perfumed powder, there are but one rheumatic and crooked old woman, and one old Prussian doctor, in his shirt-sleeves, ha! ha! mutat terra vices! Come, we shall look at these again, and you shall hear more.”
He placed the two masks upon the chimney-piece, leaning against the wall.
“And we will illuminate them,” says he; and he takes, one after the other, half a dozen pieces of wax candle, and dripping the melting wax on the chimney-piece, he sticks each candle in turn in a little pool of its own wax.
“I spare nothing, you see, to make all plain. Those two faces present a marked contrast. Do you, Mr. Arden, know anything, ever so little, of the fate of Yelland Mace?”
“Nothing. Is he living?”
“Suppose he is dead, what then?”
“In that case, of course, I take my leave of the inquiry, and of you, asking you simply one question, whether there was any correspondence between Yelland Mace and Walter Longcluse?”
“A very intimate correspondence,” said the baron.
“Of what nature?”
“Ha! They have been combined in business, in pleasures, in crimes,” said the baron. “Look at them. Can you believe it? So dissimilar! They are opposites in form and character, as if fashioned in expression and in feature each to contradict the other; yet so united!”
“And in crime, you say?”
“Ay, in crime – in all things.”
“Is Yelland Mace still living?” urged David Arden.
“Those features, in life, you will never behold, Sir.”
“He is dead. You said that you took that mask from among the dead. Is he dead?”
“No, Sir; not actually dead, but under a strange condition. Bah; Don't you see I have a secret? Do you prize very highly learning where he is?”
“Very highly, provided he may be secured and brought to trial; and you, Baron, must arrange to give your testimony to prove his identity.”
“Yes; that would be indispensible,” said the baron, whose eyes were sweeping the room from corner to corner, fiercely and swiftly. “Without me you can never lift the veil; without me you can never unearth your stiff and pale Yelland Mace, nor without me identify and hang him.”
“I rely upon your aid, Baron,” said Mr. Arden, who was becoming agitated. “Your trouble shall be recompensed; you may depend upon my honour.”
“I am running a certain risk. I am not a fool, though, like little Lebas. I am not to be made away with like a kitten; and once I move in this matter, I burn my ships behind me, and return to my splendid practice, under no circumstances, ever again.”
The baron's pallid face looked more bloodless, his accent was fiercer, and his countenance more ruffianly as he uttered all this.
“I understood, Baron, that you had quite made up your mind to retire within a very few weeks,” said David Arden.
“Does any man who has lived as long as you or I quite trust his own resolution? No one likes to be nailed to a plan of action an hour before he need be. I find my practice more lucrative every day. I may be tempted to postpone my retirement, and for a while longer to continue to gather the golden harvest that ripens round me. But once I take this step, all is up with that. You see – you understand. Bah! you are no fool; it is plain, all I sacrifice.”
“Of course, Baron, you shall take no trouble, and make no sacrifice, without ample compensation. But are you aware of the nature of the crime committed by that man?”
“I never trouble my head about details; it is enough, the man is a political refugee, and his object concealment.”
“But he was no political refugee; he had nothing to do with politics – he was simply a murderer and a robber.”
“What a little rogue! Will you excuse my smoking a pipe and drinking a little beer? Now, he never hinted that, although I knew him very intimately, for he was my patient for some months; never hinted it, he was so sly.”
“And Mr. Longcluse, was he your patient also?”
“Ha! to be sure he was. You won't drink some beer? No; well, in a moment.”
He drew a little jugful from the cask, and placed it, and a pewter goblet, on the table, and then filled, lighted, and smoked his pipe as he proceeded.
“I will tell you something concerning those gentlemen, Mr. Longcluse and Mr. Mace, which may amuse you. Listen.”
CHAPTER LXXXI
BROKEN
“My hands were very full,” said the baron, displaying his stumpy fingers. “I received patients in this house; I had what you call many irons in ze fire. I was making napoleons then, I don't mind telling you, as fast as a man could run bullets. My minutes counted by the crown. It was in the month of May, 1844, late at night, a man called here, wanting to consult me. He called himself Herr von Konigsmark. I went down and saw him in my audience room. He knew I was to be depended upon. Such people tell one another who may be trusted. He told me he was an Austrian proscribed: very good. He proposed to place himself in my hands: very well. I looked him in the face – you have there exactly what I saw.”
He extended his hand toward the mask of Yelland Mace.
“‘You are an Austrian,’ I said, ‘a native subject of the empire?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Italian?’
“‘No.’
“‘Hungarian?’
“‘No.’
“‘Well, you are not German– ha, ha! – I can swear to that.’
“He was speaking to me in German.
“‘Your accent is foreign. Come, confidence. You must be no impostor. I must make no mistake, and blunder into a national type of features, all wrong; if I make your mask, it must do us credit. I know many gentlemen's secrets, and as many ladies' secrets. A man of honour! What are you afraid of?’”
“You were not a statuary?” said Uncle David, astonished at his versatility.
“Oh, yes! A statuary, but only in grotesque, you understand. I will show you some of my work by-and-by.”
“And I shall perhaps understand.”
“You shall, perfectly. With some reluctance, then, he admitted that what I positively asserted was true; for I told him I knew from his accent he was an Englishman. Then, with some little pressure, I invited him to tell his name. He did – it was Yelland Mace. That is Yelland Mace.”
He had now finished his pipe: he went over to the chimney-piece, and having knocked out the ashes, and with his pipe pointing to the tip of the long thin plaster nose, he said, “Look well at him. Look till you know all his features by rote. Look till you fix them for the rest of your days well in memory, and then say what in the devil's name you could make of them. Look at that high nose, as thin as a fish-knife. Look at the line of the mouth and chin; see the mild gentlemanlike contour. If you find a fellow with a flat nose, and a pair of upper tusks sticking out an inch, and a squint that turns out one eye like the white of an egg, you pull out the tusks, you raise the skin of the nose, slice a bit out of the cheek, and make a false bridge, as high as you please; heal the cheek with a stitch or two, and operate with the lancet for the squint, and your bust is complete. Bravo! you understand?”
“I confess, Baron, I do not.”
“You shall, however. Here is the case – a political refugee, like Monsieur Yelland Mace – ”
“But he was no such thing.”
“Well, a criminal – any man in such a situation is, for me, a political refugee zat, for reasons, desires to revisit his country, and yet must be so thoroughly disguised zat by no surprise, and by no process, can he be satisfactorily recognised; he comes to me, tells me his case, and says, ‘I desire, Baron, to become your patient,’ and so he places himself in my hands, and so – ha, ha! You begin to perceive?”
“Yes, I do! I think I understand you clearly. But, Lord bless me! what a nefarious trade!” exclaimed Uncle David.
The baron was not offended; he laughed.
“Nevertheless,” said he, “There's no harm in that. Not that I care much about the question of right or wrong in the matter; but there's none. Bah! who's the worse of his going back? or, if he did not, who's the better?”
Uncle David did not care to discuss this point in ethics, but simply said, —
“And Mr. Longcluse was also a patient of yours?”
“Yes, certainly,” said the baron.
“We Londoners know nothing of his history,” said Mr. Arden.
“A political refugee, like Mr. Mace,” said the baron. “Now, look at Herr Yelland Mace. It was a severe operation, but a beautiful one! I opened the skin with a single straight cut from the lachrymal gland to the nostril, and one underneath meeting it, you see” (he was tracing the line of the scalpel with the stem of his pipe), “along the base of the nose from the point. Then I drew back the skin over the bridge, and then I operated on the bone and cartilage, cutting them and the muscle at the extremity down to a level with the line of the face, and drew the flap of skin back, cutting it to meet the line of the skin of the cheek; there, you see, so much for the nose. Now see the curved eyebrow. Instead of that very well marked arch, I resolved it should slant from the radix of the nose in a straight line obliquely upward; to effect which I removed at the upper edge of each eyebrow, at the corner next the temple, a portion of the skin and muscle, which, being reunited and healed, produced the requisite contraction, and thus drew that end of each brow upward. And now, having disposed of the nose and brows, I come to the mouth. Look at the profile of this mask.”
He was holding that of Yelland Mace toward Mr. Arden, and with the bowl of the pipe in his right hand, pointed out the lines and features on which he descanted, with the amber point of the stem.
“Now, if you observe, the chin in this face, by reason of the marked prominence of the nose, has the effect of receding, but it does not. If you continue the perpendicular line of ze forehead, ze chin, you see, meets it. The upper lip, though short and well-formed, projects a good deal. Ze under lip rather retires, and this adds to the receding effect of the chin, you see. My coup-d'œil assured me that it was practicable to give to this feature the character of a projecting under-jaw. The complete depression of the nose more than half accomplished it. The rest is done by cutting away two upper and four under-teeth, and substituting false ones at the desired angle. By that application of dentistry I obtained zis new line.” (He indicated the altered outline of the features, as before, with his pipe). “It was a very pretty operation. The effect you could hardly believe. He was two months recovering, confined to his bed, ha! ha! We can't have an immovable mask of living flesh, blood, and bone for nothing. He was threatened with erysipelas, and there was a rather critical inflammation of the left eye. When he could sit up, and bear the light, and looked in the glass, instead of thanking me, he screamed like a girl, and cried and cursed for an hour, ha, ha, ha! He was glad of it afterward: it was so complete. Look at it” (he held up the mask of Yelland Mace): “a face, on the whole, good-looking, but a little of a parrot-face, you know. I took him into my hands with that face, and” (taking up the mask of Mr. Longcluse, and turning it with a slow oscillation so as to present it in every aspect), he added, “these are the features of Yelland Mace as I sent him into the world with the name of Herr Longcluse!”
“You mean to say that Yelland Mace and Walter Longcluse are the same person?” cried David Arden, starting to his feet.
“I swear that here is Yelland Mace before, and here after the operation, call him what you please. When I was in London, two months ago, I saw Monsieur Longcluse. He is Yelland Mace; and these two masks are both masks of the same Yelland Mace.”
“Then the evidence is complete,” said David Arden, with awe in his face, as he stood for a moment gazing on the masks which the Baron Vanboeren held up side by side before him.
“Ay, the masks and the witness to explain them,” said the baron, sturdily.
“It is a perfect identification,” murmured Mr. Arden, with his eyes still riveted on the plaster faces. “Good God! how wonderful that proof, so complete in all its parts, should remain!”
“Well, I don't love Longcluse, since so he is named; he disobliged me when I was in London,” said the baron. “Let him hang, since so you ordain it. I'm ready to go to London, give my evidence, and produce these plaster casts. But my time and trouble must be considered.”
“Certainly.”
“Yes,” said the baron; “and to avoid tedious arithmetic, and for the sake of convenience, I will agree to visit London, at what time you appoint, to bring with me these two masks, and to give my evidence against Yelland Mace, otherwise Walter Longcluse, my stay in London not to exceed a fortnight, for ten thousand pounds sterling.”
“I don't think, Baron, you can be serious,” said Mr. Arden, as soon as he had recovered breath.
“Donner-wetter! I will show you that I am!” bawled the baron. “Now or never, Sir. Do as you please. I sha'n't abate a franc. Do you like my offer?”
On the event of this bargain are depending issues of which David Arden knows nothing; the dangers, the agonies, the salvation of those who are nearest to him on earth. The villain Longcluse, and the whole fabric of his machinations, may be dashed in pieces by a word.
How, then, did David Arden, who hated a swindle, answer the old extortioner, who asked him, “Do you like my offer?”
“Certainly not, Sir,” said David Arden, sternly.
“Then was scheert's mich! What do I care! No more, no more about it!” yelled the baron in a fury, and dashed the two masks to pieces on the hearth-stone at his feet, and stamped the fragments into dust with his clumsy shoes.
With a cry, old Uncle David rushed forward to arrest the demolition, but too late. The baron, who was liable to such accesses of rage, was grinding his teeth, and rolling his eyes, and stamping in fury.
The masks, those priceless records, were gone, past all hope of restoration. Uncle David felt for a moment so transported with anger, that I think he was on the point of striking him. How it would have fared with him, if he had, I can't tell.
“Now!” howled the baron, “ten times ten thousand pounds would not place you where you were, Sir. You fancied, perhaps, I would stand haggling with you all night, and yield at last to your obstinacy. What is my answer? The floor strewn with the fragments of your calculation. Where will you turn – what will you do now?”
“Suppose I do this,” said Uncle David fiercely – “report to the police what I have seen – your masks and all the rest, and accomplish, besides, all I require, by my own evidence as to what I myself saw?”
“And I will confront you, as a witness,” said the baron, with a cold sneer, “and deny it all – swear it is a dream, and aid your poor relatives in proving you unfit to manage your own money matters.”
Uncle David paused for a moment. The baron had no idea how near he was, at that moment, to a trial of strength with his English visitor. Uncle David thinks better of it, and he contents himself with saying, “I shall have advice, and you shall most certainly hear from me again.”
Forth from the room strides David Arden in high wrath. Fearing to lose his way, he bawls over the banister, and through the corridors, “Is any one there?” and after a time the old woman, who is awaiting him in the hall, replies, and he is once more in the open street.
