The Complete Short Stories of Wilkie Collins. Уилки Коллинз

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ out a glass of the liquor, which he drank by sips, slowly.

      “I wonder whether other men get softer-hearted as they grow older!” he said. “I seem to do so, at any rate. Courage! courage! what must be, must. If I risked my head to do it, I couldn’t stop this arrest. Not a man in the office but would be ready to execute it, if I wasn’t.”

      Here the rumble of carriage-wheels sounded outside.

      “There’s the coach!” exclaimed Lomaque, locking up the brandy-bottle, and taking his hat. “After all, as this arrest is to be made, it’s as well for them that I should make it.”

      Consoling himself as he best could with this reflection, Chief Police Agent Lomaque blew out the candles, and quitted the room.

Chapter II

       Table of Contents

      Ignorant of the change in her husband’s plans, which was to bring him back to Paris a day before the time that had been fixed for his return, Sister Rose had left her solitary home to spend the evening with her brother. They had sat talking together long after sunset, and had let the darkness steal on them insensibly, as people will who are only occupied with quiet, familiar conversation. Thus it happened, by a curious coincidence, that just as Lomaque was blowing out his candles at the office Rose was lighting the reading-lamp at her brother’s lodgings.

      Five years of disappointment and sorrow had sadly changed her to outward view. Her face looked thinner and longer; the once delicate red and white of her complexion was gone; her figure had wasted under the influence of some weakness, which had already made her stoop a little when she walked. Her manner had lost its maiden shyness, only to become unnaturally quiet and subdued. Of all the charms which had so fatally, yet so innocently, allured her heartless husband, but one remained — the winning gentleness of her voice. It might be touched now and then with a note of sadness, but the soft attraction of its even, natural tone still remained. In the marring of all other harmonies, this one harmony had been preserved unchanged. Her brother, though his face was careworn, and his manner sadder than of old, looked less altered from his former self. It is the most fragile material which soonest shows the flaw. The world’s idol, Beauty, holds its frailest tenure of existence in the one Temple where we most love to worship it.

      “And so you think, Louis, that our perilous undertaking has really ended well by this time?” said Rose, anxiously, as she lighted the lamp and placed the glass shade over it. “What a relief it is only to hear you say you think we have succeeded at last!”

      “I said I hope, Rose,” replied her brother.

      “Well, even hoped is a great word from you, Louis — a great word from any one in this fearful city, and in these days of Terror.”

      She stopped suddenly, seeing her brother raise his hand in warning. They looked at each other in silence and listened. The sound of footsteps going slowly past the house — ceasing for a moment just beyond it — then going on again — came through the open window. There was nothing else, out-of-doors or in, to disturb the silence of the night — the deadly silence of Terror which, for months past, had hung over Paris. It was a significant sign of the times, that even a passing footstep, sounding a little strangely at night, was subject for suspicion, both to brother and sister — so common a subject, that they suspended their conversation as a matter of course, without exchanging a word of explanation, until the tramp of the strange footsteps had died away.

      “Louis,” continued Rose, dropping her voice to a whisper, after nothing more was audible, “when may I trust our secret to my husband?”

      “Not yet!” rejoined Trudaine, earnestly. “Not a word, not a hint of it, till I give you leave. Remember, Rose, you promised silence from the first. Everything depends on your holding that promise sacred till I release you from it.”

      “I will hold it sacred; I will indeed, at all hazards, under all provocations,” she answered.

      “That is quite enough to reassure me — and now, love, let us change the subject. Even these walls may have ears, and the closed door yonder may be no protection.” He looked toward it uneasily while he spoke. “By-the-by, I have come round to your way of thinking, Rose, about that new servant of mine — there is something false in his face. I wish I had been as quick to detect it as you were.”

      Rose glanced at him affrightedly. “Has he done anything suspicious? Have you caught him watching you? Tell me the worst, Louis.”

      “Hush! hush! my dear, not so loud. Don’t alarm yourself; he has done nothing suspicious.”

      “Turn him off — pray, pray turn him off, before it is too late!”

      “And be denounced by him, in revenge, the first night he goes to his Section. You forget that servants and masters are equal now. I am not supposed to keep a servant at all. I have a citizen living with me who lays me under domestic obligations, for which I make a pecuniary acknowledgment. No! no! if I do anything, I must try if I can’t entrap him into giving me warning. But we have got to another unpleasant subject already — suppose I change the topic again? You will find a little book on that table there, in the corner — tell me what you think of it.”

      The book was a copy of Corneille’s “Cid,” prettily bound in blue morocco. Rose was enthusiastic in her praises. “I found it in a bookseller’s shop, yesterday,” said her brother, “and bought it as a present for you. Corneille is not an author to compromise any one, even in these times. Don’t you remember saying the other day that you felt ashamed of knowing but little of our greatest dramatist?” Rose remembered well, and smiled almost as happily as in the old times over her present. “There are some good engravings at the beginning of each act,” continued Trudaine, directing her attention rather earnestly to the illustrations, and then suddenly leaving her side when he saw that she became interested in looking at them.

      He went to the window — listened — then drew aside the curtain, and looked up and down the street. No living soul was in sight. “I must have been mistaken,” he thought, returning hastily to his sister; “but I certainly fancied I was followed in my walk to-day by a spy.”

      “I wonder,” asked Rose, still busy over her book, “I wonder, Louis, whether my husband would let me go with you to see ‘Le Cid’ the next time it is acted.”

      “No!” cried a voice at the door; “not if you went on your knees to ask him.”

      Rose turned round with a scream. There stood her husband on the threshold, scowling at her, with his hat on, and his hands thrust doggedly into his pockets. Trudaine’s servant announced him, with an insolent smile, during the pause that followed the discovery. “Citizen Superintendent Danville, to visit the citoyenne, his wife,” said the fellow, making a mock bow to his master.

      Rose looked at her brother, then advanced a few paces toward the door. “This is a surprise,” she said, faintly; “has anything happened? We — we didn’t expect you.” Her voice failed her as she saw her husband advancing, pale to his very lips with suppressed anger.

      “How dare you come here, after what I told you?” he asked, in quick, low tones.

      She shrank at his voice almost as if he had struck her. The blood flew into her brother’s face as he noticed the action; but he controlled himself, and, taking her hand, led her in silence to a chair.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ