Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late
for his dinner, and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These were,
however, reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar,
and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table in the
entrance hall—a hall hung with weapons. Valentin’s house was perhaps as
peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house, with high walls and
tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity—and perhaps the
police value of its architecture was this: that there was no ultimate exit at
all except through this front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The
garden was large and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into
the garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world outside; all
round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no
bad garden, perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had
sworn to kill.
As Ivan explained to the guests, their
host had telephoned that he was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth,
making some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though
these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with
precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about their
punishment. Since he had been supreme over French—and largely over
European—policial methods, his great influence had been honourably used for the
mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons. He was one of the
great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is
that they make mercy even colder than justice.
When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black
clothes and the red rosette—an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked
with grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on the
grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had carefully
locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few seconds at the open
door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon was fighting with the flying
rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness
unusual in such scientific natures as his. Perhaps such scientific natures have
some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives. From any
such occult mood, at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and
that his guests had already begun to arrive.
A glance at his drawing-room when he entered it was
enough to make certain that his principal guest was not there, at any rate. He
saw all the other pillars of the little party; he saw Lord Galloway, the
English Ambassador—a choleric old man with a russet face like an apple, wearing
the blue ribbon of the Garter. He saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with
silver hair and a face sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady
Margaret Graham, a pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured
hair. He saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with
her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon, a typical
French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a forehead barred
with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty of superciliousness, since
they come through constantly elevating the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of
Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had recently met in England.
He saw—perhaps with more interest than any of these—a
tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without receiving any very
hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to pay his respects to his
host. This was Commandant O’Brien, of the French Foreign Legion. He was a slim
yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and,
as seemed natural in an officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures
and successful suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was
by birth an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways—especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and now
expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in
uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador’s family, Lord and
Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away.
But for whatever old causes such people might be
interested in each other, their distinguished host was not specially interested
in them. No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening.
Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose
friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs
in the United States. He was expecting Julius K.Brayne, that multi-millionaire
whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned
so much easy support and easier solemnity for the American and English papers.
Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a
Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual
vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for
the American Shakespeare—a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt
Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more “progressive”
than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought “progressive.” He
thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.
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