“Have I made you cry?” he asked.
“No,” she said, in a low voice, “it’s all of you who upset me. It’s your cheerfulness, your pride, your way not of submitting to fate, but mastering it. The humblest of you raises himself above his nature without an effort; and I know nothing finer or more touching than that indifference.”
He sat down beside her:
“Then you’re not angry with me for saying . . . what I said?”
“Angry with you?” she replied, pretending to mistake his meaning. “Why, every woman thinks as you do. If women, in bestowing their affection, had to choose among the men returning from the war, the choice I am sure would be in favor of those who have suffered most cruelly.”
He shook his head:
“You see, I am asking for something more than affection and a more definite answer to what I said. Shall I remind you of my words?”
“No.”
“Then your answer . . . ?”
“My answer, dear friend, is that you must not speak those words again.”
He put on a solemn air:
“You forbid me?”
“I do.”
“In that case, I swear to say nothing more until I see you again.”
“You will not see me again,” she murmured.
Captain Belval was greatly amused at this:
“I say, I say! And why sha’n’t I see you again, Little Mother Coralie?”
“Because I don’t wish it.”
“And your reason, please?”
“My reason?”
She turned her eyes to him and said, slowly:
“I am married.”
Belval seemed in no way disconcerted by this news. On the contrary, he said, in the calmest of tones:
“Well, you must marry again! No doubt your husband is an old man and you do not love him. He will therefore understand that, as you have some one in love with you . . .”
“Don’t jest, please.”
He caught hold of her hand, just as she was rising to go:
“You are right, Little Mother Coralie, and I apologize for not adopting a more serious manner to speak to you of very serious things. It’s a question of our two lives. I am profoundly convinced that they are moving towards each other and that you are powerless to restrain them. That is why your answer is beside the point. I ask nothing of you. I expect everything from fate. It is fate that will bring us together.”
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” he declared, “that is how things will happen.”
“It is not. They will not and shall not happen like that. You must give me your word of honor not to try to see me again nor even to learn my name. I might have granted more if you had been content to remain friends. The confession which you have made sets a barrier between us. I want nobody in my life . . . nobody!”
She made this declaration with a certain vehemence and at the same time tried to release her arm from his grasp. Patrice Belval resisted her efforts and said:
“You are wrong. . . . You have no right to expose yourself to danger like this. . . . Please reflect . . .”
She pushed him away. As she did so, she knocked off the mantelpiece a little bag which she had placed there. It fell on the carpet and opened. Two or three things escaped, and she picked them up, while Patrice Belval knelt down on the floor to help her:
“Here,” he said, “you’ve missed this.”
It was a little case in plaited straw, which had also come open; the beads of a rosary protruded from it.
They both stood up in silence. Captain Belval examined the rosary.
“What a curious coincidence!” he muttered. “These amethyst beads! This old-fashioned gold filigree setting! . . . It’s strange to find the same materials and the same workmanship. . . .”
He gave a start, and it was so marked that Coralie asked:
“Why, what’s the matter?”
He was holding in his fingers a bead larger than most of the others, forming a link between the string of tens and the shorter prayer-chain. And this bead was broken half-way across, almost level with the gold setting which held it.
“The coincidence,” he said, “is so inconceivable that I hardly dare . . . And yet the face can be verified at once. But first, one question: who gave you this rosary?”
“Nobody gave it to me. I’ve always had it.”
“But it must have belonged to somebody before?”
“To my mother, I suppose.”
“Your mother?”
“I expect so, in the same way as the different jewels which she left me.”
“Is your mother dead?”
“Yes, she died when I was four years old. I have only the vaguest recollection of her. But what has all this to do with a rosary?”
“It’s because of this,” he said. “Because of this amethyst bead broken in two.”
He undid his jacket and took his watch from his waistcoat-pocket. It had a number of trinkets fastened to it by a little leather and silver strap. One of these trinkets consisted of the half of an amethyst bead, also broken across, also held in a filigree setting. The original size of the two beads seemed to be identical. The two amethysts were of the same color and contained in the same filigree.
Coralie and Belval looked at each other anxiously. She stammered:
“It’s only an accident, nothing else . . .”
“I agree,” he said. “But, supposing these two halves fit each other exactly . . .”
“It’s impossible,” she said, herself frightened at the thought of the simple little act needed for the indisputable proof.
The officer, however, decided upon that act. He brought his right hand, which held the rosary-bead, and his left, which held the trinket, together. The hands hesitated, felt about and stopped. The contact was made.
The projections and indentations of the broken stones corresponded precisely. Each protruding part found a space to fit it. The two half amethysts were the two halves of the same amethyst. When joined, they formed one and the same bead.
There was a long pause, laden with excitement and mystery. Then, speaking in a low voice:
“I do not know either exactly where this trinket comes from,” Captain Belval said. “Ever since I was a child, I used to see it among other things of trifling value which I kept in a cardboard box: watch-keys, old rings, old-fashioned seals. I picked out these trinkets from among them two or three years ago. Where does this one come from? I don’t know. But what I do know . . .”
He had separated the two pieces and, examining them carefully, concluded:
“What I do know, beyond a doubt, is that the largest bead in this rosary came off one day and broke; and that the other, with its setting, went to form the trinket which I now have. You and I therefore possess the two halves of a thing which somebody else possessed twenty years ago.”
He went up to her and, in the same low and rather serious voice, said:
“You protested just now when I declared my faith in destiny and my certainty that events were leading us towards each other. Do you still deny it? For, after all, this is either an accident so extraordinary that we have no right to admit it or an actual fact which proves that our two lives have already touched in the past at some mysterious point and that they will meet again in the future, never to part. And that is why, without waiting for the perhaps distant future, I offer you to-day, when danger hangs over you, the support of my friendship. Observe that I am no longer speaking of love but only of friendship. Do you accept?”
She was nonplussed and so much perturbed by that miracle of the two broken amethysts, fitting each other exactly, that she appeared not to hear Belval’s voice.
“Do you accept?” he repeated.
After a moment she replied:
“No.”
“Then the proof which destiny has given you of its wishes does not satisfy you?” he said, good-humoredly.
“We must not see each other again,” she declared.
“Very well. I will leave it to chance. It will not be for long. Meanwhile, I promise to make no effort to see you.”
“Nor to find out my name?”
“Yes, I promise you.”
“Good-by,” she said, giving him her hand.
“Au revoir,” he answered.
She moved away. When she reached the door, she seemed to hesitate. He was standing motionless by the chimney. Once more she said:
“Good-by.”
“Au revoir, Little Mother Coralie.”
Then she went out.
Only when the street-door had closed behind her did Captain Belval go to one of the windows. He saw Coralie passing through the trees, looking quite small in the surrounding darkness. He felt a pang at his heart. Would he ever see her again?
“Shall I? Rather!” he exclaimed. “Why, to-morrow perhaps. Am I not the favorite of the gods?”
And, taking his stick, he set off, as he said, with his wooden leg foremost.
That evening, after dining at the nearest restaurant, Captain Belval went to Neuilly. The home run in connection with the hospital was a pleasant villa on the Boulevard Maillot, looking out on the Bois de Boulogne. Discipline was not too strictly enforced. The captain could come in at any hour of the night; and the man easily obtained leave from the matron.
“Is Ya-Bon there?” he asked this lady.
“Yes, he’s playing cards with his sweetheart.”
“He has the right to love and be loved,” he said. “Any letters for me?”
“No, only a parcel.”
“From whom?”
“A commissionaire brought it and just said that it was ‘for Captain Belval.’ I put it in your room.”
The officer went up to his bedroom on the top floor and saw the parcel, done up in paper and string, on the table. He opened it and discovered a box. The box contained a key, a large, rusty key, of a shape and manufacture that were obviously old.
What could it all mean? There was no address on the box and no mark. He presumed that there was some mistake which would come to light of itself; and he slipped the key into his pocket.
“Enough riddles for one day,” he thought. “Let’s go to bed.”
But when he went to the window to draw the curtains he saw, across the trees of the Bois, a cascade of sparks which spread to some distance in the dense blackness of the night. And he remembered the conversation which he had overheard in the restaurant and the rain of sparks mentioned by the men who were plotting to kidnap Little Mother Coralie. . . .
CHAPTER III. THE RUSTY KEY
WHEN PATRICE BELVAL was eight years old he was sent from Paris, where he had lived till then, to a French boarding-school in London. Here he remained for ten years. At first he used to hear from his father weekly. Then, one day, the head-master told him that he was an orphan, that provision had been made for the cost of his education and that, on his majority, he would receive through an English solicitor his paternal inheritance, amounting to some eight thousand pounds.
Two hundred thousand francs could never be enough for a young man who soon proved himself to possess expensive tastes and who, when sent to Algeria to perform his military service, found means to run up twenty thousand francs of debts before coming into his money. He therefore started by squandering his patrimony and, having done so, settled down to work. Endowed with an active temperament and an ingenious brain, possessing no special vocation, but capable of anything that calls for initiative and resolution, full of ideas, with both the will and the knowledge to carry out an enterprise, he inspired confidence in others, found capital as he needed it and started one venture after another, including electrical schemes, the purchase of rivers and waterfalls, the organization of motor services in the colonies, of steamship lines and of mining companies. In a few years he had floated a dozen of such enterprises, all of which succeeded.
The war came to him as a wonderful adventure. He flung himself into it with heart and soul. As a sergeant in a colonial regiment, he won his lieutenant’s stripes on the Marne. He was wounded in the calf on the 15th of September and had it amputated the same day. Two months after, by some mysterious wirepulling, cripple though he was, he began to go up as observer in the aeroplane of one of our best pilots. A shrapnel-shell put an end to the exploits of both heroes on the 10th of January. This time, Captain Belval, suffering from a serious wound in the head, was discharged and sent to the hospital in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. About the same period, the lady whom he was to call Little Mother Coralie also entered the hospital as a nurse.
There he was trepanned. The operation was successful, but complications remained. He suffered a good deal of pain, though he never uttered a complaint and, in fact, with his own good-humor kept up the spirits of his companions in misfortune, all of whom were devoted to him. He made them laugh, consoled them and stimulated them with his cheeriness and his constant happy manner of facing the worst positions.
Not one of them is ever likely to forget the way in which he received a manufacturer who called to sell him a mechanical leg:
“Aha, a mechanical leg! And what for, sir? To take in people, I suppose, so that they may not notice that I’ve lost a bit of mine? Then you consider, sir, that it’s a blemish to have your leg amputated, and that I, a French officer, ought to hide it as a disgrace?”
“Not at all, captain. Still . . .”
“And what’s the price of that apparatus of yours?”
“Five hundred francs.”
“Five hundred francs! And you think me capable of spending five hundred francs on a mechanical leg, when there are a hundred thousand poor devils who have been wounded as I have and who will have to go on showing their wooden stumps?”
The men sitting within hearing reveled with delight. Little Mother Coralie herself listened with a smile. And what would Patrice Belval not have given for a smile from Little Mother Coralie?
As he told her, he had fallen in love with her from the first, touched by her appealing beauty, her artless grace, her soft eyes, her gentle soul, which seemed to bend over the patients and to fondle them like a soothing caress. From the very first, the charm of her stole into his being and at the same time compassed it about. Her voice gave him new life. She bewitched him with the glance of her eyes and with her fragrant presence. And yet, while yielding to the empire of this love, he had an immense craving to devote himself to and to place his strength at the service of this delicate little creature, whom he felt to be surrounded with danger.
And now events were proving that he was right, the danger was taking definite shape and he had had the happiness to snatch Coralie from the grasp of her enemies. He rejoiced at the result of the first battle, but could not look upon it as over. The attacks were bound to be repeated. And even now was he not entitled to ask himself if there was not some close connection between the plot prepared against Coralie that morning and the sort of signal given by the shower of sparks? Did the two facts announced by the speakers at the restaurant not form part of the same suspicious machination?
The sparks continued to glitter in the distance. So far as Patrice Belval could judge, they came from the riverside, at some spot between two extreme points which might be the Trocadéro on the left and the Gare de Passy on the right.
“A mile or two at most, as the crow flies,” he said to himself. “Why not go there? We’ll soon see.”
A faint light filtered through the key-hole of a door on the second floor. It was Ya-Bon’s room; and the matron had told him that Ya-Bon was playing cards with his sweetheart. He walked in.
Ya-Bon was no longer playing. He had fallen asleep in an armchair, in front of the outspread cards, and on the pinned-back sleeve hanging from his left shoulder lay the head of a woman, an appallingly common head, with lips as thick as Ya-Bon’s, revealing a set of black teeth, and with a yellow, greasy skin that seemed soaked in oil. It was Angèle, the kitchen-maid, Ya-Bon’s sweetheart. She snored aloud.
Patrice looked at them contentedly.
The sight confirmed the truth of his theories. If Ya-Bon could find some one to care for him, might not the most sadly mutilated heroes aspire likewise to all the joys of love?
He touched the Senegalese on the shoulder. Ya-Bon woke up and smiled, or rather, divining the presence of his captain, smiled even before he woke.
“I want you, Ya-Bon.”
Ya-Bon uttered a grunt of pleasure and gave a push to Angèle, who fell over on the table and went on snoring.
Coming out of the house, Patrice saw no more sparks. They were hidden behind the trees. He walked along the boulevard and, to save time, went by the Ceinture railway to the Avenue Henri-Martin. Here he turned down the Rue de la Tour, which runs to Passy.
On the way he kept talking to Ya-Bon about what he had in his mind, though he well knew that the negro did not understand much of what he said. But this was a habit with him. Ya-Bon, first his comrade-in-arms and then his orderly, was as devoted to him as a dog. He had lost a limb on the same day as his officer and was wounded in the head on the same day; he believed himself destined to undergo the same experiences throughout; and he rejoiced at having been twice wounded just as he would have rejoiced at dying at the same time as Captain Belval. On his side, the captain rewarded this humble, dumb devotion by unbending genially to his companion; he treated him with an ironical and sometimes impatient humor which heightened the negro’s love for him. Ya-Bon played the part of the passive confidant who is consulted without being regarded and who is made to bear the brunt of his interlocutor’s hasty temper.
“What do you think of all this, Master Ya-Bon?” asked the captain, walking arm-in-arm with him. “I have an idea that it’s all part of the same business. Do you think so too?”
Ya-Bon had two grunts, one of which meant yes, the other no. He grunted out:
“Yes.”
“So there’s no doubt about it,” the officer declared, “and we must admit that Little Mother Coralie is threatened with a fresh danger. Is that so?”
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 190
