Murder Abroad Read Online Free PDF Page A

and frowning air. He gave them a quick look as he passed, exchanged a half-hostile, half-hesitating salute with Eudes and passed on. A girl came to the door of the hotel as if she had been waiting for him. Bobby had not seen her before and wondered if she were one of the staff. She was dressed simply and wore no hat. Without being strikingly handsome, she had pleasant, well-formed, somewhat large features, with eyes of clear grey below a broad, smooth forehead. Her hair caught Bobby’s attention. It was twined in thick masses about her head and was of a rich dark brown that had somehow a reddish tinge to it, so that a stray beam of the setting sun caught in it lay there as if at home. But then Bobby saw that when she spoke to the new-comer, who had quickened his step on seeing her, they both looked at him, and that the young man’s expression grew even more dark and angry than before. The girl laid a hand upon his arm and drew him within. They vanished from sight so, and Bobby said carelessly to his companion:
    â€œTwo good-looking youngsters. Who are they?”
    â€œThe girl is Mademoiselle Simone. Lucille Simone. She has come recently to live with her aunt, Madame Jules Simone. Madame keeps the little shop there.” Eudes pointed down the street. “The young man is Charles Camion, the son of the proprietor of the hotel.”
    The name, Bobby remembered, of the suspected murderer of the unfortunate Miss Polthwaite!
    â€œOh, indeed,” he said indifferently.
    He had seen Monsieur and Madame Camion on his arrival, a smiling, comfortable, pudgy pair, like two well-fed, friendly spaniels. Difficult to believe they could have produced this haughty-looking off-spring with his eyes of an eagle and his step of a leopard.
    â€œHe hasn’t too amiable an air,” Bobby added after a pause. “Doesn’t he like the hotel or is it just guests he disapproves of?”
    â€œAh, no, it is probably something else that has displeased him,” Eudes answered. “He is perhaps too easily displeased but then he is young. He will change all that presently.”
    He shrugged his shoulders and got up to go, saying something as he did so about preparing lessons. Bobby asked if he might accompany him part of the way and Eudes expressed his pleasure at the suggestion and added a compliment about the quality of Bobby’s French. He wished, he said, he could speak English, but not a word did he know of that admirable language, the language of Shakespeare and George Eliot, a collocation of names that slightly staggered Bobby who had not known before how much George Eliot was still admired and remembered in France. They walked together, the schoolmaster with a word to everyone they met, and a little outside the village passed a field where men were still at work, late as it was. Eudes stopped and pointed to one of the workers whom Bobby had already remarked for his different dress and from the fact that even a glance showed he was having some difficulty in keeping up with the others.
    â€œOur curé,” Eudes said, making no effort this time to disguise the contempt and dislike in his voice. “Monsieur, the Curé Georges Granges. He has here a fat living, with his regular salary from the bishop, his fees for the masses fools pay him to say, the christenings, the marriages and the rest of all that flummery. It is well known, too, that he has his little investments, his income in addition. And yet he hires himself out to work in the harvest field where any pair of hands is welcome. A scandal, though the Church takes no notice. Ashamed of it, they admit over there at the diocese headquarters, but they do nothing. Even they understand that a miser who would shave an egg for what he could get from it, does their precious Church little credit.”
    â€œI gather you are no great lover of the Church,” Bobby observed.
    â€œIt is,” said the schoolmaster firmly, “the eternal enemy of