"Would that be any business of yours?" I said, sharp and short, and looking at him in a way he couldn't mistake.
"Certainly it would be," says he. "A cousin of mine knew a Sir Nicolas Steele in Dublin three years ago, and I was wondering if it was the same."
"Then you should have asked my guv'nor," says I, while my heart began to jump so that I could hardly hold my hand still.
"Oh, no offence!" cries he, and with that he slipped a five-franc piece into my hand.
"You've been in Paris long?" he asks.
"A month or more," says I, thinking where I could have him.
"Are you going back to England soon?"
"We are going back at the end of November. Sir Nicolas has engagements in London that month."
"Oh! then you are going back."
"Why, what would we be doing all the winter here in Paris?"
He seemed to think a while over this, taking a drink of the hock and rolling his bleary eyes as though he was looking for some one in the garden. Presently he said;
"Do you like the situation you're in?"
"Oh!" said I, "it's much the same as other situations. Here to-day and gone to-morrow."
"Then you travel a good deal?"
"That's so—but travel or no travel, it's all the same to me."
"Your master seems a pleasant sort of gentleman?"
"I should call him that."
"He's a baronet or something, isn't he?"
"Exactly; he's Sir Nicolas Steele of Castle Rath, County Kerry."
"A generous man, I should say."
I looked at him straight, for I'd read him up by this time.
"It's a cold morning for talking in the open air, sir," says I, and with that I turned on my heel and left him.
Now, though I had taken it coolly enough, a duller head than mine could have seen through the man's talk.
"What's in the wind is this," said I to myself when I got back to the hotel, "you've heard some gossip, my fine gentleman, and you want to get to the bottom of it. If it's true that a cousin of yours knew Sir Nicolas Steele in Dublin three years ago, then you'll write to him, and what you'll learn won't keep your sister at the Hôtel de Lille. Maybe that cousin is in Europe; more probably he's in America, which gives us a month. Any way, it's you that we've got to play, and the sooner we begin the better."
This was my thought, and yet, simple as it seemed, there was something happened later in the day which gave a new turn altogether to it. I'd been bothering my head with the matter all afternoon, making nothing new of it outside the fact that the danger signal had been rung, so to speak, when what would happen but that, just before seven o'clock, I met the man again, face to face, in the corridor of the hotel, and the sight of him fairly took my breath away. I shouldn't have called him a healthy person any time, but now his eyes were sunken away something dreadful to see—while his cheeks were hollow like the cheeks of one just got up from a fever bed. White as his face had been in the morning, the color of it in the afternoon was like a bit of plaster of Paris. And what was more than this was the way he walked, feeling his road with his hands, like a blind man, and staring before him as though he was frightened that every step he took might land him on nothing.
Never have I seen the muscles of a man's mouth twitch so much, or a man's fingers look so like claws. If he had been stark raving mad he could not have given me a greater shock; and I stood there, feeling like a child that has seen something horrible on the stairs and does not know whether to go forward or to go back.
There was a minute when, seeing him clutch hold of the banister and fix his dreadful eyes on me, I thought he was going to strike me. He half raised his right arm, but let it drop quickly again and began to mumble something that I could not hear. His speech was thick like that of a drunken man, and vet I could have sworn that drink was not the matter with him. Quite otherwise, he appeared to be in great pain; and when he got his words out at last, they came with gasps like the words of a man suffering.
"Where's your shoddy baronet?" he asked.
"What's that?" said I.
"Your Nicolas Steele, card-sharper and thief?" he went on, and this took me more aback than if he'd hit me.
"Look here," said I, "you're a bold man, but if you don't want to be horsewhipped out of this hotel, don't say that twice."
"Then you mean to say that he isn't?"
"A hundred times! A more honorable gentleman doesn't breathe in Paris, and if it wasn't for the state you are in, young man, I'd let you know it too."
This silenced him a bit. He stood rocking on his heels for a minute or more, and then, muttering something between his teeth which I could not make out, he continued his march up the stairs. A quarter of an hour later, Sir Nicolas himself drove up with the young American, and he hadn't been in the hotel two minutes before I'd told him what had passed and what I'd seen. Strange to say, he took it as calm as a man hearing of the weather.
"The fellow's a lunatic—that's what he is," he cried, while he began to dress for the opera; "she's told me his history, coming home. He's a drug- drinker, and what he remembers to-day he'll know nothing of to-morrow, or perhaps for a month or more. Ye needn't mind him no more than a toy-pistol. I have her word for it, and that's good enough for me."
"Then his cousin wasn't in Dublin three years ago?" asked I.
"Indeed and he was, and that's the humor of it. He left before my affair, d'ye see, and if they write him, it's a pretty tale of me he'll be telling. Bedad! I couldn't have wished it better if me own hands had the planning of it."
"I'm glad to hear that, sir," said I, "so long as the young lady doesn't listen."
"Listen! Not she. 'Tis easy for the ears to be shut when the heart is open. Sure, won't I be marrying her within the month? She's American, you must remember, and tied to nobody's apron-strings. Oh, it was a famous day that kept us at the Hôtel de Lille!"
He said this quite unconcerned, and not a bit ready to argue the point out with me. It was all very well for him to glide over it in that easy way, but what I wanted to know was, where had Michel Grey first heard talk about us? That the gossip was new to him was evident from the fact that he played billiards with my master the very first night he came to Paris. What chatter he had heard was heard between supper that evening and breakfast two days after. And this was what troubled me, even in the face of Sir Nicolas' tale about him taking drugs and forget- ting. "There's danger moving," I thought, "and if you're married within the month, Nicky, I'm a Chinaman."
This is how the thing looked to me, then and for days after. While, on the one hand, Michel Grey talked no more, either to me or to Sir Nicolas, of his suspicions, on the other hand, I could see that he would have no truck with us, and was doing his best to make his sister think as he did. That he did not succeed in this is to be set down to many things, but above all to the fact that for days together he would hang about the hotel like a man without a mind; and was, as all the world could see, tottering fast to his grave. What drug he drank, or where he learned the habit, no man could say, but a more pitiable spectacle than he made, looking for all the world like a blind thing come out of a coffin, I hope never to see. Luckily for us, there was no affection lost between him and Miss Dora. Talk as he might, the day was rare when she did not plan some excursion with my master. They spent hours together out at Fontainebleau or Versailles—were half their leisure time at the picture-galleries, the other half at the cafés and theatres. I saw them walking arm-in-arm in the gardens, I saw him kiss her when she went to her painting in the morning, I saw him kiss her when she came home again to déjeúner, and I began to think that after all he was right and I was wrong. Then, all of a sudden, the trouble came, and we woke up from our dream.
Michel Grey had disappeared.