Chapter XVI

M. Ginory, M. Leriche, the chief; Bernardet, and, in fact, all the judiciary, believed that Charles Pradès was guilty of the murder of Rovère. Bernardet, who had been an actor in this drama, had now become a spectator.

Paul Rodier, a good reporter, had learned before his confreres of the arrest of the young man, and, abandoning what he had called his trail of the Woman in Black, he abruptly whirled about and quickly invented a sensational biography of the newcomer. Charles-Henri Pradès, or rather Carlos Pradès, as he called himself, had been a gaucho, a buffalo tamer, a cowboy, using, turn by turn, the American revolver against the Redskins and the Mexican lasso against the Yankees.

The journalist had obtained a signature, picked up by the lodging-house keeper where the guilty man had been hunted down, and published in his paper the autographic characters; he had deduced from them some dramatic observations. Cooper, of former times; Gustave Aymard, of yesterday; Rudyard Kipling or Bret Harte, of to-day, had never met a personage more dreadful, and at the same time more heroic. Carlos Pradès used the navaja (Spanish knife) with the terrible rapidity of a Catalan. He had felt since the days of Buenos Ayres a fierce hate for the ex-Consul, and this crime, which some of his brother reporters, habitually indifferently informed (it was Paul Rodier who spoke), now attributed alone to the avarice of this Cambrioleur from over the sea; he, Rodier, gave this note as the cause of vengeance, and built thereupon a romance which made his readers shiver. Or, rather, he said nothing outright. He permitted one a glimpse into, he outlined, one knows not what, dark history. Soon he made this Carlos Pradès the instrument and the arm of an association of vengeance. He could even believe that there was anarchy in the affair. Then he had the young man mixed in some love affair, a drama of passion, with Argentine Republic for the theatre.

As a result he had succeeded in making interesting the man whom Bernardet had pushed a few nights before into the station house.

And, what was a singular thing, the reporter had divined part of the truth. It was still another episode in his past that Rovère expiated when he found himself one day, in his salon in the Boulevard de Clichy, face to face with the man who was to be his murderer. At Buenos Ayres, the ex-Consul had been associated in a large agricultural enterprise with a man whose hazardous speculations, play and various adventures had completely ruined him, and who had left two children—a young girl whom Rovère thought for a moment of marrying, and a son, younger—poor beings of whom the Consul, paying his partner's debts, seemed the natural protector. Jean Pradès, in committing suicide—he had killed himself, frightened at the magnitude of his debts—had commended his children to Rovère's care.

If Carlotta had lived, without doubt Rovère would have made her his wife. He loved her with a deep and respectful tenderness. The poor girl died very suddenly, and there remained to Rovère only his dream. One of those remembrances of a fireside, one of those spectres which brush the forehead with their wings or the folds of their winding sheets, when in the solitude in which he has voluntarily buried himself the searcher after adventures recalls the past. The past of yesterday. Illusions, disillusions, old loves, miseries!

Rovère gave to this brother of the dead girl the affection which he had felt for her. He remembered, also, the father's request. Pradès's son, passionate, eager to live, tempted in all his appetites, accepted as his due Rovère's truly paternal devotion, worked on the sympathy of this man, who, through pity and duty, too, gave to Charles a little of the affection which he had felt for the sister, almost his fiancee, and for the father, dead by his own hand.

But, little by little, the solicitations, the unreasonable demands of Pradès, who, believing that he had a just claim on his father's old partner, found it very natural that Rovère should devote himself to him—these continual and pressing demands became for the Consul irritating obsessions. Rovère seemed to this young man, who was a spendthrift and a gambler—a gambler possessed with atavistic frenzy—a sort of living savings bank, from which he could draw without counting. His importunities at last seemed fatiguing and excessive, and Pradès was advised one beautiful day that he no longer need count from that moment on the generosity of his benefactor. All this happened at Buenos Ayres, and about the time of the Consul's departure for France. Rovère added to this very curt declaration a last benefit. He gave to the brother of the dead girl, to the son of Pradès, of the firm of Rovère and Pradès, a sum sufficient to enable him to live while waiting for better things, and he told the young man in proper terms that, as he had now no one to depend upon, that he had better take himself elsewhere to be hung. The word could not be, with the appetites and habits of Charles Pradès, taken in a figurative sense, and the young man continued his life of adventures, as tragic in their reality and as improbable as the reporters' melodramatic inventions.

Then, at the end of his resources, after having searched for fortune among miners, weary of tramping about in America, he embarked one morning for Havre, with the idea that the best gold mine was still that living placer which he had exploited in Buenos Ayres, and which was called Pièrre Rovère.

At Paris, where he knew the Consul had retired, Pradès soon found trace of him, and learned where was the retreat of his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law! He pronounced the word with a wicked sneer, as if it had for him a something understood about the sweet and maiden remembrance of the dead girl. There, in gay Paris, with some resources which allowed him to pay for his board and lodging in a third-rate hotel, he searched, asked, discovered, at last, the address of the ex-Consul, and presented himself to Rovère, who felt, at sight of this spectre, his anger return.

The first time that Charles Pradès had asked at the lodge if M. Rovère was at home, the Moniches had permitted him to go upstairs, and perhaps Mme. Moniche would have suspected the man in the sombrero if she had not surprised Jacques Dantin before the open safe and the papers.

Pradès, moreover, had appeared only three times at Rovère's house, and on the day of the murder he had entered at the moment when Mme. Moniche was sweeping the upper floors, and Moniche was working in his shop in the rear of the lodge, and the staircase was empty. He rang, and Rovère, with dragging steps, came to open the door. Rovère was ill and was a little ennuied, and he believed, or instinctively hoped, that it was the woman in black—his daughter!

Everything served Pradès's projects. He had come not to kill, but by some means to gain entrance to Rovère's apartments, and, when once there, to find some resource—a loan, more or less freely given, more or less forced—and he would leave with it.

Rovère, already worn out, weary of his former supplications, felt tempted to shut the door in his face, but Pradès pushed it back, entered, closed it, and said:

"A last interview! You will never see me again! But listen to me!"

Then, Rovère allowed him to enter the salon, and despite the terrible weakness which he experienced wished to make this a final, decisive interview; to disembarrass himself once for all of this everlasting beggar, sometimes whining, sometimes threatening.

"Will you not let me die in peace?" he said. "Have I not paid my debt?"

But Pradès had seated himself in a fauteuil, crossed his legs and hung over his knee his sombrero, on which he drummed a minstrel march.

"My dear Monsieur Rovère, it is a last appeal for funds. I believe that America is better than Paris. And in order to return there or to do what I ought here, I must have what I have not—money!"

"I am tired of giving you money!" Rovère quickly replied.

And between these two men, bound by the remembrance of the dead girl—a bond burdensome to the one, imposed upon by the other—a storm of bitter words and harsh sentiments arose and kindled fierce anger in both.

"I tried to let you remain in peace, my dear Consul. But hunger has driven the wolf out of the woods. I am very hungry. And here I am!"

"I have nothing with which to feed your appetites. You are nothing but a burden to me."

"Oh! Ingratitude!" and Pradès, with his Argentine accent, spoke his sister's name.

"My father died and Carlotta herself entrusted me to your care, my dear brother-in-law!"

It seemed to the sick man, irritated as he was, that this name—which he had buried deep in his heart with chaste tenderness—was a supreme insult.

"I forbid you to evoke that memory! You do not see, then, that the memory of that dear and saintly creature is one of the griefs of my life!"

"And it is one of my heritages! Brother-in-law of a consul, Senor mia, but it is a title, and I hold it!"

Rovère experienced a strong desire to call, to ring, to give an order to have this troublesome visitor put out. But energetic and fearless as he had been but a short time before, now weakened by illness, he trembled before a possible scandal. Then he, unaided, attempted to push the young man out of the salon. Pradès resisted, and, at the first touch, gave a bound, and all that was evil in him suddenly awoke.

A struggle ensued, without a word being pronounced by either; a quick, brutal struggle. Rovère counted on his past strength, taking by the collar this Pradès who threatened him, and Pradès, while clutching the ex-Consul with his left hand, searched in his pocket for a weapon—the one which Bernardet had taken from him.

This was a sinister moment! Pradès pushed Rovère back; he staggered and fell against a piece of furniture, while the young man disengaging himself, stepped back, quickly opened his Spanish knife, then, with a bound, caught Rovère, shook him, and holding the knife uplifted, said:

"Thou hast willed it!"

It was at this instant that Rovère, whose hands were contracted, dug his nails into the assassin's neck—the nails which the Commissary Desbrière and M. Jacquelin Audrays had found still red with blood.

Pradès, who had come there either to supplicate or threaten, now had only one thought, hideous and ferocious—to kill! He did not reason. It was no more than an unchained instinct. The noise of the organs upon the Boulevard, which accompanied with their musical, dragging notes this savage scene, like a tremulo undertone to a melodrama at the theatre, he did not hear. The whole intensity of his life seemed to be concentrated in his fury, in his hand armed with the knife. He threw himself on Rovère; he struck the flesh, opening the throat, as across the water among the Gauchos he had been accustomed to kill sheep or cut the throat of an ox.

Rovère staggered, wavered, freed from the hand which held him, and Pradès stepping back, looked at him.

Livid, the dying man seemed to live only in his eyes. He had cast upon the murderer a last meaning look—now, in a sort of supreme agony, he looked around, his eyes searched for a support, for aid, yes, they called, while from that throat horrible sounds issued.

Pradès saw with a kind of fright, Rovère, with a superhuman tragic effort, step back, staggering like a drunken man, pull with his poor contracted hands from above the chimney piece an object which the murderer had not noticed and upon which, with an ardent, prayerful expression he fixed his eyes, stammering some quick inarticulate words which Pradès could not hear or understand.

It seemed to Pradès that between his victim and himself there was a witness, and whether he thought of the value of the stones imbedded in the frame or whether he wished to take from Rovère this last support in his distress, he went to him and attempted to tear the portrait from his hands. But an extraordinary strength seemed to come to the dying man and Rovère resisted, fastening his eyes upon the portrait, casting upon it a living flame, like the last flare of a dying lamp, and with this last, despairing, agonizing look the ex-Consul breathed his last. He fell. Pradès tore the portrait from the fingers which clutched it. That frame, he could sell it. He picked up here and there some pieces which seemed to him of value, as if on a pillaging tour on the prairies. He was about to enter the library where the safe was, when the noise of the opening of the entrance door awakened his trapper's instinct. Some one was coming. Who it could be was of little importance. To remain was to expose himself, to be at once arrested. The corpse once seen, the person would cry aloud, rush out, close the door and send for the police.

Hesitating between a desire to pillage and the necessity for fright, Pradès did not wait long to decide. Should he hide? Impossible! Then, stepping back to the salon door, he flattened himself as much as possible against the wall and waited until the door should be opened when he would be completely hidden behind it. As Mme. Moniche stepped into the room and cried out as she saw Rovère lying on the floor, Pradès slipped into the ante-chamber, found himself on the landing, closed the door, rapidly descended the stairs and stepped out upon the Boulevard de Clichy among the passers-by, even before Mme. Moniche, terrified, had called for help.