Castles in the Air eBook

Baroness Emma Orczy
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Castles in the Air.

Castles in the Air eBook

Baroness Emma Orczy
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Castles in the Air.

I went to the Morgue, thinking to find there Theodore’s dead body, and found myself vaguely looking for the mutilated corpse of Carissimo.  Indeed, after a while Theodore and Carissimo became so inextricably mixed up in my mind that I could not have told you if I was seeking for the one or for the other and if Mme. la Comtesse de Nole was now waiting to clasp her pet dog or my man-of-all-work to her exquisite bosom.

She in the meanwhile had received a second, yet more peremptory, missive through the same channel as the previous one.  A grimy deformed man, with ginger-coloured hair, and wearing a black patch over one eye, had been seen by one of the servants lolling down the street where Madame lived, and subsequently the concierge discovered that an exceedingly dirty scrap of paper had been thrust under the door of his lodge.  The writer of the epistle demanded that Mme. la Comtesse should stand in person at six o’clock that same evening at the corner of the Rue Guenegaud, behind the Institut de France.  Two men, each wearing a blue blouse and peaked cap, would meet her there.  She must hand over the money to one of them, whilst the other would have Carissimo in his arms.  The missive closed with the usual threats that if the police were mixed up in the affair, or the money not forthcoming, Carissimo would be destroyed.

Six o’clock was the hour fixed by these abominable thieves for the final doom of Carissimo.  It was now close on five.  In a little more than an hour my last hope of five or ten thousand francs and a smile of gratitude from a pair of lovely lips would have gone, never again to return.  A great access of righteous rage seized upon me.  I determined that those miserable thieves, whoever they were, should suffer for the disappointment which I was now enduring.  If I was to lose five thousand francs, they at least should not be left free to pursue their evil ways.  I would communicate with the police; the police should meet the miscreants at the corner of the Rue Guenegaud.  Carissimo would die; his lovely mistress would be brokenhearted.  I would be left to mourn yet another illusion of a possible fortune, but they would suffer in gaol or in New Caledonia the consequences of all their misdeeds.

Fortified by this resolution, I turned my weary footsteps in the direction of the gendarmerie where I intended to lodge my denunciation of those abominable thieves and blackmailers.  The night was dark, the streets ill-lighted, the air bitterly cold.  A thin drizzle, half rain, half snow, was descending, chilling me to the bone.

I was walking rapidly along the river bank with my coat collar pulled up to my ears, and still instinctively peering up every narrow street which debouches on the quay.  Then suddenly I spied Theodore.  He was coming down the Rue Beaune, slouching along with head bent in his usual way.  He appeared to be carrying something, not exactly heavy, but cumbersome, under his left arm.  Within the next few minutes he would have been face to face with me, for I had come to a halt at the angle of the street, determined to have it out with the rascal then and there in spite of the cold and in spite of my anxiety about Carissimo.

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Castles in the Air from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.