Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/188

180 Prévol, and who almost shut the door in our principal's nose. Our firm took the trouble to find out why Mademoiselle objected to the fame which photography can alone bestow upon beauty; and we discovered that there was a lover in the case—a mysterious lover; a man who kept himself curiously dark—"

"Stay!" exclaimed Heathcote. "I will give you a thousand francs for a photograph of that lover."

The shopman shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"A liberal offer, Monsieur, and a very safe one. Except that the man's name was Georges, I know nothing about him. The police would have given me twice as much as you offer, for his photograph, if I could have furnished them with one ten years ago, immediately after the murder of Marie Prévol."

And then the man proceeded to relate the story of the actress's death, and the impression which it made in Paris at the time. Heathcote listened, and affected ignorance: for, even in these recollections, there might be some detail to suggest a clue. There was nothing, however. The man told the story as it had been told in the newspapers, and as it was already known to Heathcote.

He went back to the shop on the following day, and the shopman showed him three different photographs of Marie Prévol.

Two were of the carte de visite size, in costume. They had both grown pale with age, and had an old-fashioned look. They were full-length portraits, showing the perfection of an exquisite figure, as displayed in the scanty drapery of a burlesque costume: a graceful girlish form, delicately fashioned, a perfect face, small refined features, a head crowned with masses of platted hair. But, in these small photographs, the soul was wanting. Beyond the one fact, that the original was exquisitely lovely, they revealed nothing.

The third was of cabinet size, and here the woman herself appeared. Here, in the face of the photograph, Edward Heathcote looked back across ten years, and saw the face of the living woman, the smile on the lips, the light in the eyes. It was a head vignetted, the head only, carelessly draped with a cloud of tulle, which framed the oval of the face and veiled the rich masses of hair. It was an exquisite face, eyes large and dark and dreamy, shadowed by long dark lashes, an expression of pensive tenderness about the perfect lips, the nose small and straight, the chin delicately moulded. It was not the bold bright beauty of an actress, accustomed to challenge the admiration of the vulgar crowd; it was a beauty instinct with tender womanly feeling, and serious thought, an essentially feminine loveliness; and its chief characteristic was purity. It would have been impossible to associate such loveliness with an evil life, a dissolute mind.