The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      The curtain has fallen upon the first act, when Mr. Peters lays his hand on Richard’s arm and points to a box on the grand tier.

      A gentleman and lady, and a little boy, have just taken their seats. The gentleman, as becomes him, sits with his back to the stage and faces the house. He lifts his opera-glass to take a leisurely survey of the audience. Percy puts his glass into Richard’s hand, and with a hearty “Courage, old boy!” watches him as he looks for the first time at his deadliest enemy.

      And is that calm, aristocratic, and serene face the face of a murderer? The shifting blue eyes and the thin arched lips are not discernible from this distance; but through the glass the general effect of the face is very plainly seen, and there is no fear that Richard will fail to know its owner again, whenever and wherever he may meet him.

      Mr. Cordonner, after a deliberate inspection of the personal attractions of the Count de Marolles, remarks, with less respect than indifference,

      “Well, the beggar is by no means bad-looking, but he looks a determined scoundrel. He’d make a first-rate light-comedy villain for a Porte-St.-Martin drama. I can imagine him in Hessian boots poisoning all his relations, and laughing at the police when they come to arrest him.”

      “Shall you know him again, Percy?” asks Richard.

      “Among an army of soldiers, every one of them dressed in the same uniform,” replies his friend. “There’s something unmistakable about that pale thin face. I’ll go and bring the other fellows in, that they may all be able to swear to him when they see him.”

      In groups of two and three the Cherokees strolled into the pit, and were conducted by Mr. Cordonner—who, to serve a friend, could, on a push, be almost active—to the spot where Richard and the detective stood. One after another they took a long look, through the most powerful glass they could select, at the tranquil features of Victor de Marolles.

      Little did that gentleman dream of this amateur band of police, formed for the special purpose of the detection of the crime he was supposed to have committed.

      One by one the “Cheerfuls” register the Count’s handsome face upon their memories, and with a hearty shake of the hand each man declares his willingness to serve Richard whenever and wherever he may see a chance, however faint or distant, of so doing.

      And all this time the Count is utterly unmoved. Not quite so unmoved though, when, in the second act, he recognizes in the Edgardo—the new tenor, the hero of the night—his old acquaintance of the Parisian Italian Opera, the chorus-singer and mimic, Monsieur Paul Moucée. This skilful workman does not care about meeting with a tool which, once used, were better thrown aside and for ever done away with. But this Signor Paolo Mosquetti is neither more nor less than the slovenly, petit-verre-drinking, domino-playing chorus-singer, at a salary of thirty francs a-week. His genius, which enabled him to sing an aria in perfect imitation of the fashionable tenor of the day, has also enabled him, with a little industry, and a little less wine-drinking and gambling, to become a fashionable tenor himself, and Milan, Naples, Vienna, and Paris testify to his triumphs.

      And all this time Valerie de Marolles looks on a stage such as that on which, years ago, she so often saw the form she loved. That faint resemblance, that likeness in his walk, voice, and manner, which Moucée has to Gaston de Lancy strikes her very forcibly. It is no great likeness, except when the mimic is bent on representing the man he resembles; then, indeed, as we know, it is remarkable. But at any time it is enough to strike a bitter pang to this bereaved and remorseful heart, which in every dream and every shadow is only too apt to recall that unforgotten past.

      The Cherokees meanwhile express their sentiments pretty freely about Monsieur Raymond de Marolles, and discuss divers schemes for the bringing of him to justice. Splitters, whose experiences as a dramatic writer suggested to him every possible kind of mode but a natural one, proposed that Richard should wait upon the Count, when convenient, at the hour of midnight, disguised as his uncle’s ghost, and confound the villain in the stronghold of his crime—meaning Park Lane. This sentence was verbatim from a playbill, as well as the whole very available idea; Mr. Splitters’s notions of justice being entirely confined to the retributive or poetical, in the person of a gentleman with a very long speech and two pistols.

      “The Smasher’s outside,” said Percy Cordonner. “He wants to have a look at our friend as he goes out, that he may reckon him up. You’d better let him go into the Count’s peepers with his left, Dick, and damage his beauty; it’s the best chance you’ll get.”

      “No, no; I tell you, Percy, that man shall stand where I stood. That man shall drink to the dregs the cup I drank, when I stood in the criminal dock at Slopperton and saw every eye turned towards me with execration and horror, and knew that my innocence was of no avail to sustain me in the good opinion of one creature who had known me from my very boyhood.”

      “Except the ‘Cheerfuls,’ ” said Percy. “Don’t forget the ‘Cheerfuls.’ ”

      “When I do, I shall have forgotten all on this side of the grave, you may depend, Percy. No; I have some firm friends on earth, and here is one;” and he laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. Peters, who still stood at his elbow.

      The opera was concluded, and the Count de Marolles and his lovely wife rose to leave their box. Richard, Percy, Splitters, two or three more of the Cherokees, and Mr. Peters left the pit at the same time, and contrived to be at the box-entrance before Raymond’s party came out.

      At last the Count de Marolles’s carriage was called; and as it drew up, Raymond descended the steps with his wife on his arm, her little boy clinging to her left hand.

      “She’s a splendid creature,” said Percy; “but there’s a spice of devilry in those glorious dark eyes. I wouldn’t be her husband for a trifle, if I happened to offend her.”

      As the Count and Countess crossed from the doors of the opera-house to their carriage, a drunken man came reeling past, and before the servants or policemen standing by could interfere, stumbled against Raymond de Marolles, and in so doing knocked his hat off. He picked it up immediately, and, muttering some unintelligible apology, returned it to Raymond, looking, as he did so, very steadily in the face of M. de Marolles. The occurrence did not occupy a moment, and the Count was too finished a gentleman to make any disturbance. This man was the Smasher.

      As the carriage drove off, he joined the group under the colonnade, perfectly sober by this time.

      “I’ve had a jolly good look at him, Mr. Marwood,” he said, “and I’d swear to him after forty rounds in the ring, which is apt sometimes to take a little of the Cupid out of a gent. He’s not a bad-looking cove on the whole, and looks game. He’s rather slight built, but he might make that up in science, and dance a pretty tidy quadrille round the chap he was put up agin, bein’ active and lissom. I see the cut upon his forehead, Mr. Peters, as you told me to take notice of,” he said, addressing the detective. “He didn’t get that in a fair stand-up fight, leastways not from an Englishman. When you cross the water for your antagonist, you don’t know what you may get.”

      “He got it from an Englishwoman, though,” said Richard.

      “Did he, now? Ah, that’s the worst of the softer sect; you see, sir, you never know where they’ll have you. They’re awful deficient in science, to be sure; but, Lord bless you, they make it up with the will,” and the Left-handed one rubbed his nose. He had been married during his early career, and was in the habit of saying that ten rounds inside the ropes was a trifle compared with one round in your own back-parlour, when your missus had got your knowledge-box in chancery against the corner of the mantelpiece, СКАЧАТЬ