CLOWNS AND CRIMINALS - Complete Series (Thriller Classics). E. Phillips Oppenheim

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СКАЧАТЬ He rang the bell.

      “Where is your mistress, Jane?” he asked the parlor-maid.

      The girl had no idea. Mrs. Ruff had left for the village several hours before; since then she had not been seen. Peter Ruff ate his luncheon alone, and understood. The afternoon wore on, and at night he traveled up to London. He knew better than to waste time by purposeless inquiries. Instead he took the nine o’clock train the next morning to Paris.

      It was a chamber of death into which he was ushered, dismal—yet, of its sort, unique, marvelous. The room itself might have been the sleeping apartment of an empress—lofty, with white paneled walls, adorned simply with gilded lines; with high windows, closely curtained now, so that neither sound nor the light of day might penetrate into the room. In the middle of the apartment upon a canopy bedside, which had once adorned a king’s palace, lay Madame de Maupassim. Her face was already touched with the finger of death, yet her eyes were undimmed and her lips unquivering. Her hands, covered with rings, lay out before her upon the lace coverlid. Supported by many pillows, she was issuing her last instructions with the cold precision of the man of affairs who makes the necessary arrangements for a few days, absence from his business.

      Peter Ruff, who had not even been allowed sufficient time to change his traveling clothes, was brought without hesitation to her bedside. She looked at him in silence for a moment, with a cold glitter in her eyes.

      “You are four days late, Monsieur Peter Ruff,” she remarked. “Why did you not obey your first summons?

      “Madame,” he answered, “I thought there must be a misunderstanding. Four years ago, I gave notice to the council that I had married and retired into private life. A country farmer is of no further use to the world.”

      The woman’s thin lip curled.

      “From death and the Double Four,” she said, “there is no resignation which counts. You are as much our creature to-day, as I am the creature of the disease which is carrying me across the threshold of death.”

      Peter Ruff remained silent. The woman’s words seemed full of dread significance. Besides, how was it possible to contradict the dying?

      “It is upon the unwilling of the world,” she continued, speaking slowly, yet with extraordinary distinctness, “that its greatest honors are often conferred. The name of my successor has been balloted for, secretly. It is you, Peter Ruff, who have been chosen.”

      This time he was silent because he was literally bereft of words. This woman was dying and fancying strange things! He looked from one to the other of the stern, pale faces of those who were gathered around her bedside. Seven of them there were—the same seven. At that moment their eyes were all focused upon him. Peter Ruff shrank back.

      “Madame,” he murmured, “this cannot be.”

      Her lips twitched as though she would have smiled. “What we have decided,” she said, “we have decided. Nothing can alter that, not even the will of Mr. Peter Ruff.”

      “I have been out of the world for four years,” Peter Ruff protested. “I have no longer ambitions, no longer any desire—”

      “You lie!” the woman interrupted. “You lie or you do yourself an injustice. We gave you four years, and looking into your face, I think that it has been enough. I think that the weariness is there already. In any case, the charge which I lay upon you in these my last moments, is one which you can escape by death only.”

      A low murmur of voices from those others repeated her words.

      “By death only!”

      Peter Ruff opened his lips, but closed them again without speech. A wave of emotion seemed passing through the room. Something strange was happening. It was Death itself, which had come among them.

      A morning journalist wrote of the death of Madame eloquently, and with feeling. She had been a broad-minded aristocrat, a woman of brilliant intellect and great friendships, a woman of whose inner life during the last ten or fifteen years little was known, yet who, in happier times, might well have played a great part in the history of her country.

      Peter Ruff drove back from the cemetery with the Marquis de Sogrange, and, for the first time since the death of Madame, serious subjects were spoken of.

      “I have waited here patiently,” he declared, “but there are limits. I want my wife.”

      Sogrange took him by the arm and led him into the library of the house in the Rue de St. Quintaine. The six men who were already there waiting rose to their feet.

      “Gentlemen,” the Marquis said, “is it your will that I should be spokesman?”

      There was a murmur of assent. Then Sogrange turned toward his companion, and something new seemed to have crept into his manner—a solemn, almost a threatening note.

      “Peter Ruff,” he continued, “you have trifled with the one organization in this world which has never allowed liberties to be taken with it. Men who have done greater service than you have died, for the disobedience of a day. You have been treated leniently, according to the will of Madame. According to her will, and in deference to the position which you must now take up among us, we will treat you as no other has ever been treated by us. The Double-Four admits your leadership and claims you for its own.”

      “I am not prepared to discuss anything of the sort,” Peter Ruff declared, doggedly, “until my wife is restored to me.”

      The Marquis smiled.

      “The traditions of your race, Mr. Ruff,” he said, “are easily manifest in you. Now hear our decision. Your wife shall be restored to you on the day when you take up this position to which you have become entitled. Sit down and listen.”

      Peter Ruff was a rebel at heart, but he felt the grip of iron.

      “During these four years when you, my friend, have been growing turnips and shooting your game, events in the great world have marched, new powers have come into being, a new page of history has been opened. As everything which has good at the heart evolves toward the good, so we of the Double-Four have lifted our great enterprise onto a higher plane. The world of criminals is still at our beck and call, we still claim the right to draw the line between moral theft and immoral honesty, but to-day the Double-Four is concerned with greater things. Within the four walls of this room, within the hearing of these my brothers, whose fidelity is as sure as the stones of Paris, I tell you a great secret. The government of our country has craved for our aid and the aid of our organization. It is no longer the wealth of the world alone, which we may control, but the actual destinies of nations.”

      “What I suppose you mean to say is,” Peter Ruff remarked, “that you’ve been going in for politics?”

      “You put it crudely, my English bull-dog,” Sogrange answered, “but you are right. We are occupied now by affairs of international importance. More than once, during the last few month, ours has been the hand which has changed the policy of an empire.”

      “Most interesting,” Peter Ruff declared, “but so far as I, personally, am concerned—”

      “Listen,” interrupted the Marquis. “Not a hundred yards from the French Embassy, in London, there is waiting for you a house and servants no less magnificent than the Embassy itself. You will become the СКАЧАТЬ