The Secret Garden

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner, and some of his guests began to arrive before him.  These were, however, reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar, and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table in the entrance hall—­a hall hung with weapons.  Valentin’s house was perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master.  It was an old house, with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity—­and perhaps the police value—­of its architecture was this:  that there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury.  The garden was large and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the garden.  But there was no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned that he was detained for ten minutes.  He was, in truth, making some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with precision.  Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about their punishment.  Since he had been supreme over French—­and largely over European—­policial methods, his great influence had been honourably used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.  He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the red rosette—­an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with grey.  He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on the grounds behind.  The garden door of it was open, and after he had carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden.  A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his.  Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives.  From any such occult mood, at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his guests had already begun to arrive.  A glance at his drawing-room when he entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not there, at any rate.  He saw all the other pillars of the little party; he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador—­a choleric old man with a russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter.  He saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face sensitive