The trail of the serpent
rather than of a man of the world.
“My good Blurosset,” says Raymond, “I have brought a lady to see you,
to whom I have been speaking very highly of your talents.”
“With the pasteboard or the crucible?” asks the impassible mouth.
“Both, my dear fellow; we shall want both your talents. Sit down,
madame; I must do the honours of the apartment, for my friend Laurent
Blurosset is too much a man of science to be a man of gallantry. Sit
down, madame; place yourself at this table--there, opposite Monsieur
Blurosset, and then to business.”
This Raymond Marolles, of whom she knows absolutely nothing, has a
strange influence over Valerie; an influence against which she no
longer struggles. She obeys him passively, and seats herself before the
little green baize-covered table.
The blue spectacles of Monsieur Laurent Blurosset look at her
attentively for two or three minutes. As for the eyes behind the
spectacles, she cannot even guess what might be revealed in their
light. The man seems to have a strange advantage in looking at every
one as from behind a screen. His own face, with hidden eyes and
inflexible mouth, is like a blank wall.
“Now then, Blurosset, we will begin with the pasteboard. Madame
would like to have her fortune told. She knows of course that this
fortune-telling is mere charlatanism, but she wishes to see one of the
cleverest charlatans.”
“Charlatanism! Charlatan! Well, it doesn’t matter. _I_ believe in
what I read here, because I find it true. The first time I find a false
meaning in these bits of pasteboard I shall throw them into that fire,
and never touch a card again. They’ve been the hobby of twenty years,
but you know I could do it, Englishman!”
“Englishman!” exclaimed Valerie, looking up with astonishment.
“Yes,” answered Raymond, laughing; “a surname which Monsieur Blurosset
has bestowed upon me, in ridicule of my politics, which happened once
to resemble those of our honest neighbour, John Bull.”
Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent to Raymond’s assertion, as he takes
the cards in his thin yellow-white hands and begins shuffling them. He
does this with a skill peculiar to himself, and you could almost guess
in watching him that these little pieces of pasteboard have been his
companions for twenty years. Presently he arranges them in groups of
threes, fives, sevens, and nines, on the green baize, reserving a few
cards in his hand; then the blue spectacles are lifted and contemplate
Valerie for two or three seconds.
“Your friend is the queen of spades,” he says, turning to Raymond.
“Decidedly,” replies Monsieur Marolles. “How the insipid diamond
beauties fade beside this gorgeous loveliness of the south!”
Valerie does not hear the compliment, which at another time she would
have resented as an insult. She is absorbed in watching the groups of
cards over which the blue spectacles are so intently bent.
Monsieur Blurosset seems to be working some abstruse calculations
with these groups of cards, assisted by those he has in his hand. The
spectacles wander from the threes to the nines; from the sevens to
the fives; back again; across again; from five to nine, from three to
seven; from five to three, from seven to nine. Presently he says--
“The king of spades is everywhere here.” He does not look up as he
speaks--never raising the spectacles from the cards. His manner of
speaking is so passionless and mechanical, that he might almost be some
calculating automaton.
“The king of spades,” says Raymond, “is a dark and handsome young man.”
“Yes,” says Blurosset, “he’s everywhere beside the queen of spades.”
Valerie in spite of herself is absorbed by this man’s words. She never
takes her eyes from the spectacles and the thin pale lips of the
fortune-teller.
“I do not like his influence. It is bad. This king of spades is
dragging the queen down, down into the very mire.” Valerie’s cheek can
scarcely grow whiter than it has been ever since the revelation of the
Bois de Boulogne, but she cannot repress a shudder at these words.
“There is a falsehood,” continues Monsieur Blurosset; “and there is a
fair woman here.”
“A fair woman! That girl we saw to-night is fair,” whispers Raymond.
“No doubt Monsieur Don Giovanni admires blondes, having himself the
southern beauty.”
“The fair woman is always with the king of spades,” says the
fortune-teller. “There is here no falsehood--nothing but devotion. The
king of spades can be true; he is true to this diamond woman; but for
the queen of spades he has nothing but treachery.”
“Is there anything more on the cards?” asks Raymond.
“Yes! A priest--a marriage--money. Ah! this king of spades imagines
that he is within reach of a great fortune.”
“Does he deceive himself?”
“Yes! Now the treachery changes sides. The queen of spades is in it
now----But stay--the traitor, the real traitor is here; this fair
man--the knave of diamonds----”
Raymond Marolles lays his white hand suddenly upon the card to which
Blurosset is pointing, and says, hurriedly,--
“Bah! You have told us all about yesterday; now tell us of to-morrow.”
And then he adds, in a whisper, in the ear of Monsieur Blurosset,--
“Fool! have you forgotten your lesson?”
“_They_ will speak the truth,” mutters the fortune-teller. “I was
carried away by them. I will be more careful.”
This whispered dialogue is unheard by Valerie, who sits immovable,
awaiting the sentence of the oracle, as if the monotonous voice of
Monsieur Blurosset were the voice of Nemesis.
“Now then for the future,” says Raymond. “It is possible to tell what
_has_ happened. We wish to pass the confines of the possible: tell
us, then, what is _going_ to happen.”
Monsieur Blurosset collects the cards, shuffles them, and rearranges
them in groups, as before. Again the blue spectacles wander. From three
to nine; from nine to seven; from seven to five; Valerie following them
with bright and hollow eyes. Presently the fortune-teller says, in his
old mechanical way,--
“The queen of spades is very proud.”
“Yes,” mutters Raymond in Valerie’s car. “Heaven help the king who
injures such a queen!”
She does not take her eyes from the blue spectacles of Monsieur
Blurosset; but there is a tightening of her determined mouth which
seems like an assent to this remark.
“She can hate as well as love. The king of spades is in danger,” says
the fortune-teller.
There is, for a few minutes, dead silence, while the blue spectacles
shift from group to group of cards; Valerie intently watching them,
Raymond intently watching her.
This time there seems to be something difficult in the calculation of
the numbers. The spectacles shift hither and thither, and the thin
white lips move silently and rapidly, from seven to nine, and back
again to seven.
“There is something on the cards that puzzles you,” says Raymond,
breaking the deathly silence. “What is it?”
“A death!” answers the passionless voice of Monsieur Blurosset. “A
violent death, which bears no outward sign of violence. I said, did I
not, that the king of spades was in danger?”
“You did.”
From three to five, from five to nine, from nine to seven, from seven
to nine: the groups of cards form a circle: three times round the
circle, as the sun goes; back again, and three times round the circle
in a contrary direction: across the circle from three to seven, from
seven to five, from five to nine, and the blue spectacles come to a
dead stop at nine.
“Before twelve o’clock to-morrow night the king of spades will be
dead!” says the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset. The voices of
the clocks of Paris seem to take up Monsieur Blurosset’s voice as they
strike the hour of midnight.
Twenty-four hours for the king of spades!
Monsieur Blurosset gathers up his cards and drops them into his pocket.
Malicious people say that he sleeps with them under his pillow; that
he plays _écarté_ by himself in his sleep; and that he has played
_piquet_ with a very tall dark gentleman, whom the porter never
let either in or out, and who left a sulphureous and suffocating
atmosphere behind him in Monsieur Blurosset’s little apartment.
“Good!” says Monsieur Raymond Marolles. “So much for the pasteboard.
Now for the crucible.”
For the first time since the discovery of the treachery of her husband
Valerie de Lancy smiles. She has a beautiful smile, which curves the
delicate lips without distorting them, and which brightens in her large
dark eyes with a glorious fire of the sunny south. But for all that,
Heaven save the man who has injured her from the light of such a smile
as hers of to-night.
“You want my assistance in some matters of chemistry?” asks Blurosset.
“Yes! I forgot to tell you, madame, that, my friend Laurent
Blurosset--though he chooses to hide himself in one of the most
obscure streets of Paris--is perhaps one of the greatest men in this
mighty city. He is a chemist who will one day work a revolution in
the chemical science; but he is a fanatic, madame, or, let me rather
say, he is a lover, and his crucible is his mistress. This blind
devotion to a science is surely only another form of the world’s great
madness--love! Who knows what bright eyes a problem in Euclid may have
replaced? Who can tell what fair hair may not have been forgotten in
the search after a Greek root?”
Valerie shivers. Heaven help that shattered heart! Every word that
touches on the master-passion of her life is a wound that pierces it to
the core.
“You do not smoke, Blurosset. Foolish man you do not know how to live.
Pardon, madame.” He lights his cigar at the green-shaded gas-lamp,
seats himself close to the stove, and smokes for a few minutes in
silence.
Valerie, still seated before the little table, watches him with fixed
eyes, waiting for him to speak.
In the utter shipwreck of her every hope this adventurer is the only
anchor to which she can cling. Presently he says, in his most easy and
indifferent manner,--
“It was the fashion at the close of the fifteenth and throughout
the sixteenth century for the ladies of Italy to acquire a certain
knowledge of some of the principles of chemistry. Of course, at the
head of these ladies we must place Lucretia Borgia.”
Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent. Valerie looks from Raymond to the
blue spectacles; but the face of the chemist testifies no shade of
surprise at the singularity of Raymond’s observation.
“Then,” continued Monsieur Marolles, “if a lady was deeply injured
or cruelly insulted by the man she loved; if her pride was trampled
in the dust, or her name and her weakness held up to ridicule and
contempt--then she knew how to avenge herself and to defy the world. A
tender pressure of the traitor’s hand; a flower or a ribbon given as a
pledge of love; the leaves of a book hastily turned over with the tips
of moistened fingers--people had such vulgar habits in those days--and
behold the gentleman died, and no one was any the wiser but the worms,
with whose constitutions _Aqua Tofana_ at second-hand may possibly
have disagreed.”
“Vultures have died from the effects of poisoned carrion,” muttered
Monsieur Blurosset.
“But in this degenerate age,” continued Raymond, “what can our Parisian
ladies do when they have reason to be revenged on a traitor? The poor
blunderers can only give him half a pint of laudanum, or an ounce or so
of arsenic, and run the risk of detection half an hour after his death!
I think that time is a circle, and that we retreat as we advance, in
spite of our talk of progress.”
His horrible words, thrice horrible when contrasted with the coolness
of his easy manner, freeze Valerie to the very heart; but she does not
make one effort to interrupt him.
“Now, my good Blurosset,” he resumes, “what I want of you is this.