Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17)

by Maurice Leblanc

  “He is here. He is watching me. I wonder what he means to do. I doubt if he will smash a pane of glass and fire a bullet at me. He has tried that method before and found it uncertain and a failure. No, his plan is thought out, I expect, in a different and more intelligent fashion. He is more likely to wait for me to go to bed, when he can watch me sleeping and effect his entrance by some means which I can’t guess.

  “Meanwhile, it’s extraordinarily exhilarating to know that his eyes are upon me. He hates me; and his hatred is coming nearer and nearer to mine, like one sword feeling its way towards another before clashing. He is watching me as a wild animal, lurking in the dark, watches its prey and selects the spot on which to fasten its fangs. But no, I am certain that it’s he who is the prey, doomed beforehand to defeat and destruction. He is preparing his knife or his red-silk cord. And it’s these two hands of mine that will finish the battle. They are strong and powerful and are already enjoying their victory. They will be victorious.”

  Patrice shut down the desk, lit a cigarette and smoked it quietly, as his habit was before going to bed. Then he undressed, folded his clothes carefully over the back of a chair, wound up his watch, got into bed and switched off the light.

  “At last,” he said to himself, “I shall know the truth. I shall know who this man is. Some friend of Essarès’, continuing his work? But why this hatred of Coralie? Is he in love with her, as he is trying to finish me off too? I shall know . . . I shall soon know. . . .”

  An hour passed, however, and another hour, during which nothing happened on the side of the window. A single creaking came from somewhere beside the desk. But this no doubt was one of those sounds of creaking furniture which we often hear in the silence of the night.

  Patrice began to lose the buoyant hope that had sustained him so far. He perceived that his elaborate sham regarding Coralie’s death was a poor thing after all and that a man of his enemy’s stamp might well refuse to be taken in by it. Feeling rather put out, he was on the point of going to sleep, when he heard the same creaking sound at the same spot.

  The need to do something made him jump out of bed. He turned on the light. Everything seemed to be as he had left it. There was no trace of a strange presence.

  “Well,” said Patrice, “one thing’s certain: I’m no good. The enemy must have smelt a rat and guessed the trap I laid for him. Let’s go to sleep. There will be nothing happening to-night.”

  There was in fact no alarm.

  Next morning, on examining the window, he observed that a stone ledge ran above the ground-floor all along the garden front of the house, wide enough for a man to walk upon by holding on to the balconies and rain-pipes. He inspected all the rooms to which the ledge gave access. None of them was old Siméon’s room.

  “He hasn’t stirred out, I suppose?” he asked the two soldiers posted on guard.

  “Don’t think so, sir. In any case, we haven’t unlocked the door.”

  Patrice went in and, paying no attention to the old fellow, who was still sucking at his cold pipe, he searched the room, having it at the back of his mind that the enemy might take refuge there. He found nobody. But what he did discover, in a press in the wall, was a number of things which he had not seen on the occasion of his investigations in M. Masseron’s company. These consisted of a rope-ladder, a coil of lead pipes, apparently gas-pipes, and a small soldering-lamp.

  “This all seems devilish odd,” he said to himself. “How did the things get in here? Did Siméon collect them without any definite object, mechanically? Or am I to assume that Siméon is merely an instrument of the enemy’s? He used to know the enemy before he lost his reason; and he may be under his influence at present.”

  Siméon was sitting at the window, with his back to the room. Patrice went up to him and gave a start. In his hands the old man held a funeral-wreath made of black and white beads. It bore a date, “14 April, 1915,” and made the twentieth, the one which Siméon was preparing to lay on the grave of his dead friends.

  “He will lay it there,” said Patrice, aloud. “His instinct as an avenging friend, which has guided his steps through life, continues in spite of his insanity. He will lay it on the grave. That’s so, Siméon, isn’t it: you will take it there to-morrow? For to-morrow is the fourteenth of April, the sacred anniversary. . . .”

  He leant over the incomprehensible being who held the key to all the plots and counterplots, to all the treachery and benevolence that constituted the inextricable drama. Siméon thought that Patrice wanted to take the wreath from him and pressed it to his chest with a startled gesture.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Patrice. “You can keep it. To-morrow, Siméon, to-morrow, Coralie and I will be faithful to the appointment which you gave us. And to-morrow perhaps the memory of the horrible past will unseal your brain.”

  The day seemed long to Patrice, who was eager for something that would provide a glimmer in the surrounding darkness. And now this glimmer seemed about to be kindled by the arrival of this twentieth anniversary of the fourteenth of April.

  At a late hour in the afternoon M. Masseron called at the Rue Raynouard.

  “Look what I’ve just received,” he said to Patrice. “It’s rather curious: an anonymous letter in a disguised hand. Listen:

  “‘Sir, be warned. They’re going away. Take care. To-morrow evening the 1800 bags will be on their way out of the country.

  A Friend of France.’”

  “And to-morrow is the fourteenth of April,” said Patrice, at once connecting the two trains of thought in his mind.

  “Yes. What makes you say that?”

  “Nothing. . . . Something that just occurred to me. . . .”

  He was nearly telling M. Masseron all the facts associated with the fourteenth of April and all those concerning the strange personality of old Siméon. If he did not speak, it was for obscure reasons, perhaps because he wished to work out this part of the case alone, perhaps also because of a sort of shyness which prevented him from admitting M. Masseron into all the secrets of the past. He said nothing about it, therefore, and asked:

  “What do you think of the letter?”

  “Upon my word, I don’t know what to think. It may be a warning with something to back it, or it may be a trick to make us adopt one course of conduct rather than another. I’ll talk about it to Bournef.”

  “Nothing fresh on his side?”

  “No; and I don’t expect anything in particular. The alibi which he has submitted is genuine. His friends and he are so many supers. Their parts are played.”

  The coincidence of dates was all that stuck in Patrice’s mind. The two roads which M. Masseron and he were following suddenly met on this day so long since marked out by fate. The past and the present were about to unite. The catastrophe was at hand. The fourteenth of April was the day on which the gold was to disappear for good and also the day on which an unknown voice had summoned Patrice and Coralie to the same tryst which his father and her mother had kept twenty years ago.

  And the next day was the fourteenth of April.

  At nine o’clock in the morning Patrice asked after old Siméon.

  “Gone out, sir. You had countermanded your orders.”

  Patrice entered the room and looked for the wreath. It was not there. Moreover, the three things in the cupboard, the rope-ladder, the coil of lead and the glazier’s lamp, were not there either.

  “Did Siméon take anything with him?”

  “Yes, sir, a wreath.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, sir.”

  The window was open. Patrice came to the conclusion that the things had gone by this way, thus confirming his theory that the old fellow was an unconscious confederate.

  Shortly before ten o’clock Coralie joined him in the garden. Patrice had told her the latest events. She looked pale and anxious.

  They went round the lawns and, without being seen, reached the clumps of dwarf shrubs which hid the door on the lane. Patrice opened the door
. As he started to open the other his hand hesitated. He felt sorry that he had not told M. Masseron and that he and Coralie were performing by themselves a pilgrimage which certain signs warned him to be dangerous. He shook off the obsession, however. He had two revolvers with him. What had he to fear?

  “You’re coming in, aren’t you, Coralie?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I somehow thought you seemed undecided, anxious . . .”

  “It’s quite true,” said Coralie. “I feel a sort of hollowness.”

  “Why? Are you afraid?”

  “No. Or rather yes. I’m not afraid for to-day, but in some way for the past. I think of my poor mother, who went through this door, as I am doing, one April morning. She was perfectly happy, she was going to meet her love. . . . And then I feel as if I wanted to hold her back and cry, ‘Don’t go on. . . . Death is lying in wait for you. . . . Don’t go on. . . .’ And it’s I who hear those words of terror, they ring in my ears; it’s I who hear them and I dare not go on. I’m afraid.”

  “Let’s go back, Coralie.”

  She only took his arm:

  “No,” she said, in a firm voice. “We’ll walk on. I want to pray. It will do me good.”

  Boldly she stepped along the little slanting path which her mother had followed and climbed the slope amid the tangled weeds and the straggling branches. They passed the lodge on their left and reached the leafy cloisters where each had a parent lying buried. And at once, at the first glance, they saw that the twentieth wreath was there.

  “Siméon has come,” said Patrice. “An all-powerful instinct obliged him to come. He must be somewhere near.”

  While Coralie knelt down beside the tombstone, he hunted around the cloisters and went as far as the middle of the garden. There was nothing left but to go to the lodge, and this was evidently a dread act which they put off performing, if not from fear, at least from the reverent awe which checks a man on entering a place of death and crime.

  It was Coralie once again who gave the signal for action:

  “Come,” she said.

  Patrice did not know how they would make their way into the lodge, for all its doors and windows had appeared to them to be shut. But, as they approached, they saw that the back-door opening on the yard was wide open, and they at once thought that Siméon was waiting for them inside.

  It was exactly ten o’clock when they crossed the threshold of the lodge. A little hall led to a kitchen on one side and a bedroom on the other. The principal room must be that opposite. The door stood ajar.

  “That’s where it must have happened . . . long ago,” said Coralie, in a frightened whisper.

  “Yes,” said Patrice, “we shall find Siméon there. But, if your courage fails you, Coralie, we had better give it up.”

  An unquestioning force of will supported her. Nothing now would have induced her to stop. She walked on.

  Though large, the room gave an impression of coziness, owing to the way in which it was furnished. The sofas, armchairs, carpet and hangings all tended to add to its comfort; and its appearance might well have remained unchanged since the tragic death of the two who used to occupy it. This appearance was rather that of a studio, because of a skylight which filled the middle of the high ceiling, where the belvedere was. The light came from here. There were two other windows, but these were hidden by curtains.

  “Siméon is not here,” said Patrice.

  Coralie did not reply. She was examining the things around her with an emotion which was reflected in every feature. There were books, all of them going back to the last century. Some of them were signed “Coralie” in pencil on their blue or yellow wrappers. There were pieces of unfinished needlework, an embroidery-frame, a piece of tapestry with a needle hanging to it by a thread of wool. And there were also books signed “Patrice” and a box of cigars and a blotting-pad and an inkstand and penholders. And there were two small framed photographs, those of two children, Patrice and Coralie. And thus the life of long ago went on, not only the life of two lovers who loved each other with a violent and fleeting passion, but of two beings who dwell together in the calm assurance of a long existence spent in common.

  “Oh, my darling, darling mother!” Coralie whispered.

  Her emotion increased with each new memory. She leant trembling on Patrice’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Yes, dear, yes, we had better. We will come back again. . . . We will come back to them. . . . We will revive the life of love that was cut short by their death. Let us go for to-day; I have no strength left.”

  But they had taken only a few steps when they stopped dismayed.

  The door was closed.

  Their eyes met, filled with uneasiness.

  “We didn’t close it, did we?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “we didn’t close it.”

  He went to open it and perceived that it had neither handle nor lock.

  It was a single door, of massive wood that looked hard and substantial. It might well have been made of one piece, taken from the very heart of an oak. There was no paint or varnish on it. Here and there were scratches, as if some one had been rapping at it with a tool. And then . . . and then, on the right, were these few words in pencil:

  Patrice and Coralie, 14 April, 1895

  God will avenge us

  Below this was a cross and, below the cross, another date, but in a different and more recent handwriting:

  14 April, 1915

  “This is terrible, this is terrible,” said Patrice. “To-day’s date! Who can have written that? It has only just been written. Oh, it’s terrible! . . . Come, come, after all, we can’t . . .”

  He rushed to one of the windows, tore back the curtain that veiled it and pulled upon the casement. A cry escaped him. The window was walled up, walled up with building-stones that filled the space between the glass and the shutters.

  He ran to the other window and found the same obstacle.

  There were two doors, leading probably to the bedroom on the right and to a room next to the kitchen on the left. He opened them quickly. Both doors were walled up.

  He ran in every direction, during the first moment of terror, and then hurled himself against the first of the three doors and tried to break it down. It did not move. It might have been an immovable block.

  Then, once again, they looked at each other with eyes of fear; and the same terrible thought came over them both. The thing that had happened before was being repeated! The tragedy was being played a second time. After the mother and the father, it was the turn of the daughter and the son. Like the lovers of yesteryear, those of to-day were prisoners. The enemy held them in his powerful grip; and they would doubtless soon know how their parents had died by seeing how they themselves would die. . . . 14 April, 1895. . . . 14 April, 1915. . . .

  CHAPTER XII. IN THE ABYSS

  “NO, NO, NO!” cried Patrice. “I won’t stand this!”

  He flung himself against the windows and doors, took up an iron dog from the fender and banged it against the wooden doors and the stone walls. Barren efforts! They were the same which his father had made before him; and they could only result in the same mockery of impotent scratches on the wood and the stone.

  “Oh, Coralie, Coralie!” he cried in his despair. “It’s I who have brought you to this! What an abyss I’ve dragged you into! It was madness to try to fight this out by myself! I ought to have called in those who understand, who are accustomed to it! . . . No, I was going to be so clever! . . . Forgive me, Coralie.”

  She had sunk into a chair. He, almost on his knees beside her, threw his arms around her, imploring her pardon.

  She smiled, to calm him:

  “Come, dear,” she said, gently, “don’t lose courage. Perhaps we are mistaken. . . . After all, there’s nothing to show that it is not all an accident.”

  “The date!” he said. “The date of this year, of this day, written in another hand! It was your mother and
my father who wrote the first . . . but this one, Coralie, this one proves premeditation, and an implacable determination to do away with us.”

  She shuddered. Still she persisted in trying to comfort him:

  “It may be. But yet it is not so bad as all that. We have enemies, but we have friends also. They will look for us.”

  “They will look for us, but how can they ever find us, Coralie? We took steps to prevent them from guessing where we were going; and not one of them knows this house.”

  “Old Siméon does.”

  “Siméon came and placed his wreath, but some one else came with him, some one who rules him and who has perhaps already got rid of him, now that Siméon has played his part.”

  “And what then, Patrice?”

  He felt that she was overcome and began to be ashamed of his own weakness:

  “Well,” he said, mastering himself, “we must just wait. After all, the attack may not materialize. The fact of our being locked in does not mean that we are lost. And, even so, we shall make a fight for it, shall we not? You need not think that I am at the end of my strength or my resources. Let us wait, Coralie, and act.”

  The main thing was to find out whether there was any entrance to the house which could allow of an unforeseen attack. After an hour’s search they took up the carpet and found tiles which showed nothing unusual. There was certainly nothing except the door, and, as they could not prevent this from being opened, since it opened outwards, they heaped up most of the furniture in front of it, thus forming a barricade which would protect them against a surprise.

  Then Patrice cocked his two revolvers and placed them beside him, in full sight.

  “This will make us easy in our minds,” he said. “Any enemy who appears is a dead man.”

  But the memory of the past bore down upon them with all its awful weight. All their words and all their actions others before them had spoken and performed, under similar conditions, with the same thoughts and the same forebodings. Patrice’s father must have prepared his weapons. Coralie’s mother must have folded her hands and prayed. Together they had barricaded the door and together sounded the walls and taken up the carpet. What an anguish was this, doubled as it was by a like anguish!