Balaoo/1/8
CHAPTER VIII: "MONSIEUR NOËL, IF YOU PLEASE"
The diligence stopped almost at once. Patrice was saved. But the heavy little portmanteau with the two hundred thousand francs was gone. There was nothing left in the coach but Patrice, half-swooning, on the top and, inside, the contractors' agent, who, when M. de Meyrentin's detectives at last joined the phantom diligence, had just enough strength left to tell them how he had been robbed in the simplest fashion by a gentleman in a black mask who had sprung upon him and calmly placed the muzzle of a revolver to his forehead. The agent had not had the pluck to resist him. Besides, the man had already flung the portmanteau on the road and jumped out after it.
The clerk had hardly finished his short and distressful tale, when old Switch came running up. The driver was safe and sound. He related, with great excitement, how he had suddenly felt himself lifted from his box by an irresistible force. And, before he could say a word, he was up in the trees, in the arms of a masked gentleman, who had let him down without ceremony, but very carefully, in the road and, taking off his hat, had wished him a good journey, whereupon Switch had hurried to take a cross-road and catch the diligence at the top of the hill. As for the detectives, they were in dismay. They declared that they would never dare return to duty nor even go back to the prefecture. They were condemned to, public ridicule for all time.
The reader will not be surprised to hear that, on learning of the failure of his expedition, M. de Meyrentin was so much upset that he was promptly laid up with jaundice. And it was while he was keeping his room that, by the irony of fate, the Three Brothers were arrested!
The thing happened in the stupidest fashion. The most monstrous and also the most mysterious tyranny that a small district was ever doomed to undergo seemed — I say, "seemed" — to have come to an end because two gendarmes happened to pass along the road at the moment when the Messieurs Vautrin were sending the dirty soul of Bazin the process-server to the great hereafter. . . . Say what you will, there was nothing ill-natured about the Three Brothers; and, as long as you did not resist them, they did you no harm! But you mustn't resist them! That fool of a process-server would have been living to this day if he had handed over his money-bag nicely and quietly. A blow is so soon given. They had not measured the consequences. And Bazin the process-server died of the blow.
It was very unlucky for him that the Three Brothers were not carrying their guns that day when he met them. He would have given them anything without protest and would still be serving his writs. It was unlucky for the Vautrins too, who had to yield before the threat of the gendarmes' revolvers without making the least show of a fight.
The Three Brothers were sent to Riom for trial; and the proceedings were hastened. Now that they were no longer feared, everybody rose up against them and they were charged with all the crimes committed in the department during the past ten years, all the crimes that had not been brought home to their authors. The murders of Lombard, Camus and Blondel were ascribed to them, of course. And it was partly their own, doing, for they defended themselves slackly, not feeling at all sure that one of them was not the culprit and refusing at any cost to accuse one another.
For the rest, they adopted an heroic and cynical attitude, boasting of the misdemeanours which they had committed beyond a doubt and parading their contempt for humanity in general and the government in particular. They could not forgive the government for not finding some quibble to save them from the assizes; and they loudly proclaimed that, if ever they recovered their liberty, they would not be such fools again and would vote for the King. And so they were closely watched.
The question of an accomplice was raised at the trial. The public prosecutor would not hear of it, the presiding judge neither, both of these luminaries considering that the case was quite clear without an accomplice and both agreeing with the prisoners, who themselves swore that they had never had an accomplice.
But M. de Meyrentin urged the other point of view. And he spoke of a certain Bilbao.
Patrice also, who of course was called as a witness, timidly mentioned the name of Bilbao, without, however, insisting when the prosecuting counsel strongly suggested that he must have dreamt it or made some mistake.
Zoé was called and, like her brothers, replied that she had never heard the name in her life. She would have been implicated in the charge but for the mayor, who repeatedly declared that she was employed at his house on the nights when the crimes were committed. She was left at liberty out of pity for old Barbe.
And the Three Brothers were sentenced to death without further ado. . . .
But they were not yet executed. . . .
M. de Meyrentin remained persuaded of Bilbao's existence; and the reader who is curious to know all that he was thinking will accompany the worthy magistrate to Saint-Martin-des-Bois, to a little road-labourer's cottage standing on the bank of the road that runs at the back of Coriolis' property.
He has been there since last night, in hiding, simply waiting for M. Noël to return home. . . .
The reason why M. de Meyrentin did not take upon himself to contradict the public prosecutor too openly on the question of the accomplice was that, to his mind, the question was still too far from being solved.
To-day, it is solved; at least, so he thinks.
It is solved, thanks to his patience, thanks to a number of nights spent in the little labourer's cottage, with one eye on the Vautrins' cabin and the other on Coriolis' manorhouse, while the magistrate kept repeating to himself, " 'Tain't yellow, it's red!" which is pure slang for "It's not gold, it's copper!" a phrase which corresponded curiously with something at the back of M. de Meyrentin's mind when Patrice came and reported it to him. Had the magistrate not been robbed of a watch which was not entirely free from alloy?
How easy it now was to understand Zoé's flight with the sock in which she had hidden the watch! Well, this watch could only have been given to her by "the man who walked with his head down," by the mysterious accomplice.
Zoé, therefore, was the friend of the accomplice, so much his friend that she mended his socks. It was Zoé therefore that he must keep his eye on. And he kept his eye on her, while his heart beat at the thought of what he was about to discover. . . .
M. de Meyrentin was inclined, for a time, to believe that the extraordinary accomplice was neither more nor less than some animal trained by the Three Brothers, hidden by them in the forest and serving them blindly in their comic or tragic enterprises. This, moreover, seemed to correspond pretty closely with what people ventured, from time to time, to reveal to him about the mysteries of the Black Woods.
Throughout the district, the legend of destructive and bloodthirsty animals, werewolves, monsters that devoured children and cattle, had never entirely died out. At the time of the wholesale hanging of the dogs, all the peasants had agreed in contending that it was a trick of the "Pierrefeu Beast," which did not want to have the dogs barking at it when it came walking into the village to perpetrate same villainy. M. de Meyrentin, on the other hand, at once, an learning the facts, imagined that it was a trick of the Three Brothers, who had thus rid their animal of the scent and barking of the dogs.
But what manner of animal was it? It could barely be built simply on the lines of the famous Gévaudan Beast? [1]
M. de Meyrentin had scarcely dared reply to his own question, after a great deal of hesitation:
"It must be a monkey!"
For at least four hands were needed by the individual who, hanging to the roof, found means, by clinging to the top of an open door or cupbaard, to make his way into Lombard's or Camus' or Roubion's premises. He would need four hands to hold on to iron supports or rails or lyre-shaped gas-brackets, with his head dawn, while strangling his unfortunate victims who were too much terrified to utter a cry!
Lastly, it was on the top of the furniture where Patrice had discovered him that M. de Meyrentin thought he had traced the whole course taken by the murderer along the ceiling. Springing with absolute precision on his fore-hands, the marks of which had remained in the dust on the furniture, he had flung his hind-hands on the ceiling to obtain a fresh impetus; and those hind-hands were clad in socks which, in their turn, left their prints on the ceiling, the footprints of the man who walked upside down!
The man who walked upside down was therefore a monkey!
But Patrice had said:
"He speaks!"
And the whole theory had fallen to the ground, all the more so as M. de Meyrentin could not conceal from himself the difficulty of having his monkey version accepted, short of producing the monkey in a cage in the public prosecutor's office at Belle Étable!
He looked upon all these inferences as admirable in principle, but so exceptional in practice that he dared not state them plainly to a soul. And he himself put them on one side, to hunt about nearer at hand, among mankind, for the exceptional sort of acrobat who could take the place of the monkey in his mind.
Meanwhile, to keep a watch on Zoé, he hit upon devices worthy of a Red Indian. But Zoé went hardly anywhere, except to Coriolis', and home again. She was seen now and then with M. Noël, Coriolis' man-servant, a tall, quiet fellow who ran his master's errands, without loitering to talk to the village-gossips, and who took off his hat politely to the people in the street. This M. Noël was also the only person who sometimes crossed the Vautrins' threshold, no doubt out of charity for old Barbe, now that her sons were sentenced to death.
Well, one day M. Noël appeared to have been in the forest, for, on the skirt of it, he met Zoé leaving Coriolis' place; and M. de Meyrentin, who was in his little cottage, clearly heard Zoé say to M. Noël:
"Madeleine's been asking for you, Balaoo!"
Balaoo! . . . Bilbao! . . .
A great light, a first-class illumination blazed up in the examining-magistrate's heated brain! . . . He reflected that Noël had been brought from the Far East: what nimbler, more active, more acrobatic person could you hope to find than a Chinese or Japanese? . . .
One day, the magistrate was lucky enough to discover some prints left by M. Noël's shoes and corresponding exactly with the prints of soles which he had found on Lombard's roof, near the chimney, in the soot — on the lot where the murderer, no doubt, had gone to put on his shoes after the crime — and corresponding also, as far as possible, with the footprints on the ceiling. . . .
There was no doubt left. . . .
Ah, Noël, with his sly, melancholy airs: what an impostor! Coriolis must be as ignorant of M. Noël's crimes as Patrice himself. And Patrice, on his side, could know nothingof the hatred with which he had inspired M. Noël.
Well, M. de Meyrentin would deliver all those people from a danger. He would make a scoop which would very much annoy Mr. Public Prosecutor, but which would cover him, M. de Meyrentin, with glory: he would arrest the accomplice of the Three Brothers. . . .
He remained two days at Belle-Etable, to make all his preparations, without a word to a soul, and returned to Saint-Martin, accompanied by two gendarmes who were to await his orders, at the corner of the forest and the Riom Road.
And he went off to ensconce himself, for the last time, in his labourer's cottage, waiting until he was sure that M. Noël was at Coriolus' before performing his duty as a magistrate.
Now M. Noël did not give a sign of life. And it was beginning to grow dark.
Perhaps Noël had not left the manor-house.
M. de Meyrentin walked out of his cottage and deliberately went and rang the bell of the little door that opened on the woods.
Coriolis came and opened the door himself.
"M. Noël, if you please," said the magistrate, raising his hat.
"Come in, M. de Meyrentin," said Coriolus, crimson in the face.
And he closed the door.
- ↑ The so-called bête du Gévaudan was a ferocious animal, probably a very large wolf, which appeared in the dense forests of Gévaudan, in Languedoc, about the year 1765, and whose devastations occupied the attention of France for some considerable time. — TRANSLATOR NOTE.