CHAPTER XX

A SIGHT OF THE ABYSS

When Didier was in his own home again he saw that Françoise was in a state of great uneasiness.

"Why did you leave the house so early without letting me know?"

"You were asleep and I didn't want to disturb you."

"How pale you are! You are still suffering. You are concealing something from me, Didier. You have received bad news."

"No, dearest, I assure you----"

The servant came into the room with a letter addressed to him. He took it from her, and went and shut himself in the study, stating that he must get rid of his correspondence which was in arrears. Obviously he wanted to be alone. Françoise realized it, and was greatly distressed.

As soon as he was in the study, he placed his head in his hands and endeavored to think. His mind was a blank. The shock had been too much for him. He was stunned by it.

He stared at the letter on the table before him without opening it. It bore the Nice postmark. Suddenly he caught hold of it and feverishly, with shaking hands, tore it open. It was not until he had made several attempts that he could read it:

_My Dear Captain_,

_I am of opinion that it is absolutely necessary for us to have an interview. You need not be uneasy, for I do not bear you any ill-will on account of our recent meeting. As soon as you recognized me you did the proper thing. I might have entered into conversation with you there and then, but a discussion in the street, even at ten o'clock at night, is never very safe, and it is desirable that what we have to say to you should, as far as possible, be said among ourselves. My friends are here. I do not hide from you that they also will be delighted to see you again. It is at the shop of one of them, Monsieur Toulouse, secondhand clothes dealer, at the corner of the Rue Basse, in the old town, that I make an appointment with you for five o'clock to-day. We shall wait for you until six o'clock, and if you do not put in an appearance, we shall be entitled to presume that our letter has gone astray, and we shall write to Madame d'Haumont, taking the necessary precautions to insure, this time, that our letter reaches its destination._

The letter was signed "The Parisian."

Strange to say the letter came as a relief to Didier. He would meet the danger face to face. He would know exactly what to fear and what to hope; whether he was to live and for how long.

He gave no thought of the danger to which he might be exposed by keeping the appointment. Either his enemies and himself would "come to an understanding," or they would murder him, and in any event they would be rendering him a service.

When he had mapped out his plan of campaign, he felt sufficiently himself for the time being to deceive Françoise by word and manner and look.

He went to her and told her that he felt much better: he had been suffering since the previous night from an attack of malarial fever which he thought he had long since shaken off. He first caught it during one of his visits, many years before, to a marshy district in the tropics. His words in no way allayed his wife's misgivings.

In the afternoon she stole through the passage to the room which Didier used as a study. It possessed a glazed door, the curtain of which was not properly drawn. And she saw Didier with his eyes fixed on an envelope which she recognized, by the seal on it, as one which she had seen in his hands on the night before his duel with Count de Gorbio. His head was slightly turned towards her, and there was a look of infinite sadness on his face such as she had never seen before.

It was not for his own fate that the unhappy man was moved to pity, but for her fate--the fate which he had brought on her in a moment of lover's cowardice. He called himself a villain and held himself in horror. He would have to die. He would have to rescue her from the shame of her marriage with him. Yes, he would keep the appointment.

At that moment he raised his head, and he seemed to hear a mysterious voice which said in a low whisper: "Don't go!"

The window which looked out on to the grounds was open. He thought he saw a dark form holding on to the window. He half rose to his feet, his heart beating like the clapper of a bell.

"Chéri-Bibi!"

Was it a dream? He found the strength to stand up; and he moved closer to the window with arms outstretched to the dark form. And he heard once more:

"Don't go!" And the dark form leaped into the room.

Françoise, hidden behind the curtain, watched, affrighted, the incomprehensible spectacle of that hideous human monstrosity, the sight of which alone would have made little children fly in terror, clasped in her husband's arms.

What was the meaning of that embrace? By what unfathomable mystery did Didier, her husband, her hero, hold to his heart this formidable brute who came to visit him by the path peculiar to robbers and murderers?

A last flicker of light caused the bandit's face to loom into sight so dramatically that Françoise opened her mouth to cry aloud in horror, but her very horror stifled the cry, and she fell her length on the floor.

She did not lose consciousness. In the next room a muffled whisper bore witness that the conversation was continuing between the two friends. But she could not hear what was said. In her ears rang a buzzing sound, which seemed to be a messenger of madness.

She managed to drag herself to her room and to stretch herself on the bed.

Chéri-Bibi, in the study, cut short Didier's desire for an explanation of how he came to be there. It was not a question of explaining his presence, but of knowing what the Nut was going to do in view of the danger which threatened him. Here the bandit found himself up against a rock.

Nothing that he could say to dissuade the Nut from keeping the appointment which the Parisian had made in so barefaced a manner altered his resolution. He would not swerve from his opinion that he must try a policy of conciliation, and the prospect which was guilelessly opened up to him by Chéri-Bibi, who proposed to get rid at the earliest moment--that very evening if necessary--of the miscreants who were threatening him, was not one likely to make him change his mind. Notwithstanding his ten years in a penal settlement, it was difficult for him to treat seriously an idea, put forward so definitely, for the suppression of these human obstacles. Thus he was not content to implore his old comrade from the inferno to refrain from any intervention in the formidable business, he put it to him as a peremptory command.

At the outset he had welcomed the almost natural appearance of Chéri-Bibi as an unexpected help which Providence had vouchsafed him in the hour of adversity, but after a few minutes' talk the artlessness of his friend's project struck him with dismay, and led him almost to regret that, in circumstances in which all might yet perhaps be saved by the display of tact and resource, he should meet again a protector of such savage zeal that human life seemed to mean little or nothing to him.

Seeing him in such a pitiful frame of mind, Chéri-Bibi expressed his shame of what he called his lack of pluck, and, somewhat vexed, no longer concealed from him that he had already taken it upon himself to remove the commonest of his enemies from his path.

"Whom do you mean?" asked Didier in a voice strained with anxiety.

"The Caid. The man whose dead body was found at Mont Boron. It made quite a stir. I did it," returned Chéri-Bibi frankly.

Didier shuddered, refusing, however, to believe his own ears.

"But my wife and I were at Mont Boron that evening, and not far from the very spot."

"Exactly. His presence prevented you from kissing each other."

"And you killed him!"

"Don't take on like that. You had nothing to do with it. It was his own fault. Pull yourself together. He had no right to creep over the parapet. He was already mangled and disfigured, I assure you, when I finished him off to prevent him from molesting you."

"It's awful!"

"Not a bit of it. There's no need to exaggerate. And then, you know, he wasn't there for any good purpose."

"Oh, Chéri-Bibi! . . . Chéri-Bibi, your friendship is a fearful thing."

"Is it really! . . . Yes, my friendship is a fearful thing, but not for you, I hope. You will never know all that I have done to make your life a success, and for your happiness."

"Yes, I do know. I owe everything to you."

"I won't deny it. That's why, since I am responsible for your happiness, I won't allow anyone to lay hands upon it."

Then, in language which bore witness to a certain acquaintance with the polite world, the convict spoke to him with an almost lyrical sensibility of the wedding ceremony, at which he had been present, at a distance so as not to be recognized, but sufficiently near to keep an eye on those miscreants and thwart their schemes.

When Didier learned from Chéri-Bibi that he had again escaped from prison on the heels of the Parisian and his gang, and hastened after them to Europe solely to keep them under observation and prevent them from meeting him; when he learned that Chéri-Bibi had brought with him Yoyo transformed into a dental-surgeon; when he was told of the part played by M. Hilaire, to whom he already owed a great deal, in mounting guard during many days over him and his honeymoon; and when he learned that the fisherman who one evening took him and his wife for a row in his boat was no other than Chéri-Bibi--Chéri-Bibi, his guardian angel, his tutelary saint, who was always on the alert, now acting secretly and now crushing everything before him--Didier was at a loss to express his surprise and gratitude as well as his consternation at the evidence of so many dangers from which he had escaped at a time when he believed that they had been dispelled for ever.

He clasped the bandit's hand in his own trembling hand, and his emotion arose as much from a feeling of gratitude as from the discovery that when he believed that his bark had put off for Cythera he had been sailing over the abyss.

"You would never have known anything about all this if those swine had given me another couple of days," ended Chéri-Bibi with a profound sigh.

Captain d'Haumont grasped the significance of those words. He quivered all over. A nice conversation! And such a meeting!

To have on the one hand Françoise, who lived but for his love, and on the other Chéri-Bibi, who had escaped from the devil!

But the latter had not come to receive the Nut's thanks and speeches. The moment that he was certain that he would never manage to convince him, he quickly disappeared. He departed as he came, by the window, over the roofs, and through the great, heavy, sweeping clouds in which his huge form seemed to swell.