MRS3 The Velvet Hand (18 page)

"Turn around and let me look at you," said Mme Storey.

I whispered to myself: I have been taught to carry myself with a certain assurance, but at heart I am a fool; a hysterical fool. I turned around.

"Admirable!" said Mme Storey with a smile. "Hold that look!"

We proceeded down to the entrance together, and she whispered my final instructions to me.

"You have ten thousand dollars in marked bills. Your grand object is to get Guimet to take it from you. You will find an
agent de police
in the dress of a street idler loafing at the entrance to the courtyard of the house. There are other agents in the neighbourhood. Once Guimet has taken the money, you may come out and order his arrest. Should any accident happen, should you be in any sort of danger, you may summon the police by blowing upon the whistle which has been furnished you."

"My greatest difficulty will be to open the conversation with Guimet," I said. "I shall have to find out exactly what Miss Copley was to come to him for."

"Well—let us say that Monsieur possesses the secret of the charm of women," said Mme Storey with a subtle smile. "That is what you are willing to pay ten thousand dollars for."

"So that's it!" I said.

"How could it be anything else?" said Mme Storey. "Consider the style of the talk of the decoy—that is to say Mrs. Dartrey. Consider the actions of Mrs. Ellis, who thought, poor soul, that she had purchased the secret, until her husband turned from her in disgust. Consider what Mrs. Dartrey said to Guimet concerning this last victim."

We had arrived at the door.

"
Au revoir
, and good luck!" said Mme Storey.

My route lay eastward along the unfashionable part of the Rue de Rivoli and its continuation, the Rue St. Antoine, which is like Fourteenth Street, New York. The Rue des Tournelles was the last turning to the left before you reached the Place de la Bastille. Here you plunged at once into the Seventeenth Century. It was the fashionable quarter in those days; now it is somewhat miscellaneous. The houses were so plain and well built they scarcely looked ancient, but only solid and deadly respectable. Each one of the old mansions was entered through an archway leading to a courtyard, in which you caught glimpses of beautiful fountains. My destination, number ——, seemed to be one of the finest houses in the street. The courtyard was still paved with the original cobblestones in which the iron-shod wheels of the old coaches had left deep ruts. I saw my supposed idler lounging outside the archway.

As in all Paris houses, you rang a bell, and the concierge poked her head out of the window in the entry and inquired your business. "Monsieur Guimet," said I. "
Premier étage
," said she, with an inquisitive and comprehensive survey of my person, and pulled a wire which was connected with the latch of the door.

I mounted the noble old stairway with a fast-beating heart. There were several doors opening on the first landing, and I knocked on one at random. It was the wrong one; another door was opened by a very neat old woman who looked like a peasant. She looked me over in no friendly fashion and asked me curtly what I wanted.

"Monsieur Guimet," I said. I could not conceal my breathlessness, but that, of course, was quite in character.

"You can't see him," she said bluntly. "He's busy."

"Can't I wait?" I asked.

"That won't do you any good. He is always busy."

I was dismayed. Could there have been any slip-up in our plans? I wondered. Had he been warned against me? "But—but—" I faltered—"I have come such a long way to see Monsieur. All the way from England."

"He didn't ask you to come, did he?" she said rudely.

It occurred to me that the best way to find out if they suspected me would be to make believe to be discouraged, so I half turned from the door with a crushed air.

The woman immediately said: "Well, I'll take your name to him, but he never sees ladies when he's busy."

I gave her my supposed name, and she left me standing out on the landing. My heart was light again, for I was sure that this blunt reception was merely part of a clever bluff.

The old woman presently returned with a slightly less forbidding expression. "Monsieur says he will see you since you have come so far," she said.

I stepped into a beautiful octagonal foyer panelled with velvety walnut which had never been desecrated by varnish. The little room was quite bare. Crossing it, we entered a noble salon which occupied the whole of that side of the building and looked down into the courtyard. This room had been designed for splendid entertainments, but was now filled from end to end with scientific instruments and chemical apparatus, all very bare and workmanlike. Three or four linen-coated students bent over the tables in deep concentration or manipulated the instruments. The lovely old painted ceiling of Venuses and cupids looked down very strangely on this scene.

My guide, turning to the right, led me through half this room, then, with another turn to the right, through a small library, or a storehouse of scientific books. Finally, with still another half turn, she opened a door and allowed me to pass her into another beautiful little panelled room. Now, my sense of direction is excellent, and I immediately realized that this little room had its own door on the foyer, and I had been led all the way around merely for the purpose of impressing me.

This was the cabinet of the master. My first impression was of a withered little man in a black skullcap. He was seated at a table with a pair of calipers in his hand, tracing a mysterious design on a large sheet of Whatman paper. He did not look up at my entrance, and I had ample opportunity to look about me. The single window in the room looked toward a narrower courtyard in the rear. This room, too, was filled with scientific apparatus whose uses I could only guess at; mere stage settings, I judged, since he already had a fully equipped laboratory outside.

He raised his head, and I saw a handsome, hawklike old face with a pair of dark, still youthful eyes. He burst out at me surprisingly in French; very good French too; good enough to have deceived my ears.

"Madame, I am a serious man, a scientist! I am engaged in deep researches for the good of humanity. Must my work be interrupted by the knocking of light-minded women at my door?"

Behind the assumed anger there was the hint of a twinkle in his eyes, which suggested that he appreciated the joke of the situation. Evidently this man was a rogue out of the sheer love of roguery. It rendered him insidiously attractive. But of course I had to suppress the answering grin that pulled at my lips. A foolish woman like Miss Copley would have been terrified by his outburst. I tried to make myself look senseless with terror.

"I didn't know," I stammered. "Excuse me—I was led to suppose—I thought——"

"Speak English," he said. "I understand it."

The instant he said it, I knew he was my own countryman. There was an overtone that suggested the streets of New York; the merest hint of what used to be called a Bowery accent but is now universal from Coney Island to Clason's Point.

"I am very sorry to have disturbed you," I said, "but——"

"What do you want of me?" he demanded.

I supposed that Miss Copley and the others would have been a good deal confused here. "I understand," I stammered, "that is I have been told by a lady—that you have something—a secret——"

"Please speak out, Madame. My time is valuable."

"The charm of women," I mumbled.

He shrugged magnificently; hands, arms, shoulders, head, eyebrows, all had a part in it. "What folly! There is no panacea for that!" He made believe to return to his work.

I suspected that a stupid woman such as I was portraying would be dogged enough in the pursuit of her own ends, so I sat tight.

"Well, why don't you go?" he said, looking up.

"I am sure there is no mistake," I said. "Mrs. Dartrey told me——"

"I know no such person."

"Oh, I suppose you have forgotten her. But she has been to you. You gave her something——"

"My dear Madame," he said impatiently, "this is unworthy of the attention of a scientific man. What is this charm of women that you set such a store by? Merely a disturbing element in life. It distracts men from their serious work and sets them flying at each other's throats. It is responsible for all the follies and crimes and misfortunes of humanity! Why should I spread that which had much better be wiped out and destroyed?"

Ah, the clever rascal! While he was apparently disparaging what I wanted, he was really rendering it twice as desirable.

I sat on in dumb obstinacy.

"It is useless for you to remain," he said, fussing among the objects on his desk.

"I am prepared to pay well for it," I murmured.

"What, Madame!" he cried, furiously indignant "Do you take me for a marketman? Or a peddler of love philtres? Please leave me!"

Somewhere about this point Miss Copley, I fancied, would have begun to cry. I couldn't actually make the tears come, but I wrinkled up my face as if they were near.

M. Guimet jumped up with a distracted gesture. I saw that he was a short man who had been powerful in youth. "Ah,
mon Dieu
!" he cried. "Am I to be treated to a display of emotion now? You have destroyed my whole day for me! I wish to Heaven there were no such thing as the charm of women!"

This was a subtle admission, you see. I pressed my handkerchief to my eyes and made my shoulders shake. "I wanted it so badly!" I murmured with a piteous catch in my breath. "I have come so far——"

M. Guimet walked to and fro, snorting.

Finally he came to a stand. "Well, since you have ruined my day anyhow, I may as well tell you," he said. "I do possess such a secret, but I am obliged to deny it like an infection of leprosy or I should be swamped,
swamped
by your scatter-brained sex."

I let the sun break through my grief. "And you will give it to me!" I said, clasping my hands.

"Wait a minute!" he said, holding up his hand. "I should have destroyed the recipe long ago and forgotten it were it not that my serious experiments are so frightfully expensive. Of course, I enjoy grants from the government, but it is not enough. And once or twice in the past I have sold my secret to a rich woman in order to enable me to carry on my great work for La France!"

I wish you could have seen the noble attitude he struck for La France—this denizen of the Tenderloin district, or I missed my guess.

"Is the hint sufficient for you, Madame? If you are not a rich woman, go away, for the love of God, and leave me to my work."

"I'm not exactly rich," I said, "but I can pay well. How much will it be?"

He waved his hands violently. "Don't talk to me of money!" he cried with tears in his voice. "I am no chafferer, I am a scientist. If you are rich, give largely to my work. I assure you I won't count it."

This was magnificent but vague. "I have the money with me," I said, raising my handbag.

"I won't take it! I won't take it!" he said. "I am an honest man. I insist that you sample my recipe first. The effect, I may say, is instantaneous. If you are satisfied, you may come back to-morrow for a supply."

He opened a wall cupboard, and I beheld rows of bottles containing diverse coloured liquors and powders with Latin labels. I have no Latin, but if I had, I doubt if I could have made much of those labels. He impressively set out a number of these bottles on his desk and brought a graduated glass and a chemist's scales contained in a glass case, that not even a grain of dust might disturb its delicate balance. Then he sat down and proceeded to measure and weigh with the nicest care; holding up the graduated glass to the light, and squinting at it exactly as you see in the pictures of the old alchemists.

An ounce of this liquid; a few drops of that; a gramme of an odd-coloured red powder. As the various bottles were uncorked, different pungent and delicious perfumes filled the room. Mme Storey, with her marvellous sense of smell, would probably have recognized them all; but I only got a generally alcoholic effect and one particular perfume that I guessed to be nothing but sirop de grenadine. All this he put in a curious antique bottle, holding something less than a pint.

While he mixed, he conversed with the greatest affability. His bearlike reception of me in the beginning had evidently been designed only to show up his present charming manners by force of contrast. It is an old trick. In this he overreached himself a little; for there was more than a trace of oiliness in him now that betrayed the sharper. But, of course, since he designed to deal with fools only, he felt that he did not have to be too particular.

"Do you know whose house this was?" he asked me. "It is quite famous."

"No," said I.

"The marvellous Ninon de l'Enclos lived here during the late Seventeenth Century. These very rooms, in fact, were hers."

"I've heard of her," said I.

"Who has not heard of her? She was not, perhaps, a paragon of virtue" (an expressive shrug here), "but we must not be censorious. A matchless woman! At ninety years old men fell at her feet. In the history of the world there was never another like her. What is still more remarkable, they say she was not beautiful. She had wit; she had learning; above all, she had charm. Think of a woman who had for lovers in succession such men as de Coligny, D'Estrées, La Rochefoucauld, Condé, St. Evremond. They speak of Voltaire too, though he was but a lad when she was old. Anne of Austria, the great queen herself, was no match for Ninon de l'Enclos, and strove to combat her influence in vain. They say that this little room was her own private cabinet. If you close your eyes perhaps you can feel that exquisite presence here still.

"Of course, I did not engage these rooms for that reason, but because the salon outside, with its good light, made such an admirable laboratory, and this little room a quiet study for myself. When I came here, the panelling of this room was somewhat in disrepair, and in examining it with a view to its restoration I discovered a little iron box hidden in the wall. I forced its lock myself, and inside I found a single scrap of parchment, upon which was engrossed in a crabbed Seventeenth Century hand a formula. With my knowledge of chemistry I instantly recognized the purport of this formula. It was thus, Madame, that I stumbled on the secret of the great Ninon de l'Enclos's imperishable charm!"