"M. Poizat," she cried, and she held out her hand to him.

M. Poizat, however, did not take it.

"You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name."

M. Poizat shook his head.

"Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?"

"Of course."

"You are very kind."

Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old, small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added, the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.

"Why am I very kind to receive you?" Cynthia asked gently.

M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.

"Then you do not know what has happened to me?"

"No! Sit down and tell me."

But M. Poizat remained standing.

"I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I have no longer a wife. All is gone."

"I don't understand."

"Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris--the Jobert case."

"Of course."

"But you have not followed it in detail."

"No."

The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case could not be opened since a fict.i.tious action by claimants, whom Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested and prosecuted.

"You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money?

How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was examined upon these questions by the juge d'instruction week after week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:

"'It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial; but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France from the Mediterranean to the Channel.' That is what she said. No one believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh.

Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her crime.

"'La Grande Clothilde,' they named her. What _blague_ would she have ready for the Cour d'a.s.sizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie of hers ruined me."

"Ruined you?" cried Cynthia.

"Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a woman in the dock s.n.a.t.c.hing at any defence or delay; she tells a story so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head in a foreign country for thirty years."

"Yes, but if the story is a lie?" cried Cynthia.

"Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fict.i.tious fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true," said M.

Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled att.i.tude, with his knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be hit at. "I am amazed," he said. "It seems that one has never quite finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody else. We take in the _Pet.i.t Parisien_. I read the trial in the evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal.

Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years, looks upon me as a stranger."

Cynthia's face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.

"Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly after all these years, and has s.n.a.t.c.hed you back," she said slowly, as if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken.

"Quick! Tell me!"

She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear growing in them more and more visibly.

"You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey.

You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who claimed to know me."

"Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner," cried Cynthia, with a rising excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection.

Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster which had overtaken her little visitor.

"He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long corridor, in Metz, in '71."

M. Poizat nodded.

"The corridor of the a.r.s.enal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went to see the Marshal Bazaine."

"Yes," replied Cynthia. "And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the Germans for the betrayal of Metz."

"That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true."

"For instance?" asked Cynthia.

"That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the Germans and Bazaine."

"That was true?"

"Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is of Lorraine. Her father was of those st.u.r.dy ones who would not live under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no longer any house."

He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably.

She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.

"I think you had better come back at five," she said, "and tell my husband your story."

"But of course he knows it already," cried M. Poizat.

Cynthia shook her head.

"He would have spoken of it to me if he had."