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

by Maurice Leblanc

  “Unless,” muttered Patrice, “unless the quality of the air can be impaired and therefore . . .”

  He stopped. Then he went on:

  “Yes, that’s it. I remember.”

  He told Coralie what he suspected, or rather what conformed so well with the reality as to leave no room for doubt. He had seen in old Siméon’s cupboard not only the rope-ladder which the madman had brought with him, but also a coil of lead pipes. And now Siméon’s behavior from the moment when they were locked in, his movements to and fro around the lodge, the care with which he had stopped up every crevice, his labors along the wall and on the roof: all this was explained in the most definite fashion. Old Siméon had simply fitted to a gas-meter, probably in the kitchen, the pipe which he had next laid along the wall and on the roof. This therefore was the way in which they were about to die, as their parents had died before them, stifled by ordinary gas.

  Panic-stricken, they began to run aimlessly about the room, holding hands, while their disordered brains, bereft of thought or will, seemed like tiny things shaken by the fiercest gale. Coralie uttered incoherent words. Patrice, while imploring her to keep calm, was himself carried away by the storm and powerless to resist the terrible agony of the darkness wherein death lay waiting. At such times a man tries to flee, to escape the icy breath that is already chilling his marrow. He must flee, but where? Which way? The walls are insurmountable and the darkness is even harder than the walls.

  They stopped, exhausted. A low hiss was heard somewhere in the room, the faint hiss that issues from a badly-closed gas-jet. They listened and perceived that it came from above. The torture was beginning.

  “It will last half an hour, or an hour at most,” Patrice whispered.

  Coralie had recovered her self-consciousness:

  “We shall be brave,” she said.

  “Oh, if I were alone! But you, you, my poor Coralie!”

  “It is painless,” she murmured.

  “You are bound to suffer, you, so weak!”

  “One suffers less, the weaker one is. Besides, I know that we sha’n’t suffer, Patrice.”

  She suddenly appeared so placid that he on his side was filled with a great peace. Seated on a sofa, their fingers still entwined, they silently steeped themselves in the mighty calm which comes when we think that events have run their course. This calm is resignation, submission to superior forces. Natures such as theirs cease to rebel when destiny has manifested its orders and when nothing remains but acquiescence and prayer.

  She put her arm round Patrice’s neck:

  “I am your bride in the eyes of God,” she said. “May He receive us as He would receive a husband and wife.”

  Her gentle resignation brought tears to his eyes. She dried them with her kisses, and, of her own seeking, offered him her lips.

  They sat wrapped in an infinite silence. They perceived the first smell of gas descending around them, but they felt no fear.

  “Everything will happen as it did before, Coralie,” whispered Patrice, “down to the very last second. Your mother and my father, who loved each other as we do, also died in each other’s arms, with their lips joined together. They had decided to unite us and they have united us.”

  “Our grave will be near theirs,” she murmured.

  Little by little their ideas became confused and they began to think much as a man sees through a rising mist. They had had nothing to eat; and hunger now added its discomfort to the vertigo in which their minds were imperceptibly sinking. As it increased, their uneasiness and anxiety left them, to be followed by a sense of ecstasy, then lassitude, extinction, repose. The dread of the coming annihilation faded out of their thoughts.

  Coralie, the first to be affected, began to utter delirious words which astonished Patrice at first:

  “Dearest, there are flowers falling, roses all around us. How delightful!”

  Presently he himself grew conscious of the same blissful exaltation, expressing itself in tenderness and joyful emotion. With no sort of dismay he felt her gradually yielding in his arms and abandoning herself; and he had the impression that he was following her down a measureless abyss, all bathed with light, where they floated, he and she, descending slowly and without effort towards a happy valley.

  Minutes or perhaps hours passed. They were still descending, he supporting her by the waist, she with her head thrown back a little way, her eyes closed and a smile upon her lips. He remembered pictures showing gods thus gliding through the blue of heaven; and, drunk with pure, radiant light and air, he continued to circle above the happy valley.

  But, as he approached it, he felt himself grow weary. Coralie weighed heavily on his bent arm. The descent increased in speed. The waves of light turned to darkness. A thick cloud came, followed by others that formed a whirl of gloom.

  And suddenly, worn out, his forehead bathed in sweat and his body shaking with fever, he pitched forward into a great black pit. . . .

  CHAPTER XIV. A STRANGE CHARACTER

  IT WAS NOT yet exactly death. In his present condition of agony, what lingered of Patrice’s consciousness mingled, as in a nightmare, the life which he knew with the imaginary world in which he now found himself, the world which was that of death.

  In this world Coralie no longer existed; and her loss distracted him with grief. But he seemed to hear and see somebody whose presence was revealed by a shadow passing before his closed eyelids. This somebody he pictured to himself, though without reason, under the aspect of Siméon, who came to verify the death of his victims, began by carrying Coralie away, then came back to Patrice and carried him away also and laid him down somewhere. And all this was so well-defined that Patrice wondered whether he had not woke up.

  Next hours passed . . . or seconds. In the end Patrice had a feeling that he was falling asleep, but as a man sleeps in hell, suffering the moral and physical tortures of the damned. He was back at the bottom of the black pit, which he was making desperate efforts to leave, like a man who has fallen into the sea and is trying to reach the surface. In this way, with the greatest difficulty, he passed through one waste of water after another, the weight of which stifled him. He had to scale them, gripping with his hands and feet to things that slipped, to rope-ladders which, possessing no points of support, gave way beneath him.

  Meanwhile the darkness became less intense. A little muffled daylight mingled with it. Patrice felt less greatly oppressed. He half-opened his eyes, drew a breath or two and, looking round, beheld a sight that surprised him, the embrasure of an open door, near which he was lying in the air, on a sofa. Beside him he saw Coralie, on another sofa. She moved restlessly and seemed to be in great discomfort.

  “She is climbing out of the black pit,” he thought to himself. “Like me, she is struggling. My poor Coralie!”

  There was a small table between them, with two glasses of water on it. Parched with thirst, he took one of them in his hand. But he dared not drink.

  At that moment some one came through the open door, which Patrice perceived to be the door of the lodge; and he observed that it was not old Siméon, as he had thought, but a stranger whom he had never seen before.

  “I am not asleep,” he said to himself. “I am sure that I am not asleep and that this stranger is a friend.”

  And he tried to say it aloud, to make certainty doubly sure. But he had not the strength.

  The stranger, however, came up to him and, in a gentle voice, said:

  “Don’t tire yourself, captain. You’re all right now. Allow me. Have some water.”

  The stranger handed him one of the two glasses; Patrice emptied it at a draught, without any feeling of distrust, and was glad to see Coralie also drinking.

  “Yes, I’m all right now,” he said. “Heavens, how good it is to be alive! Coralie is really alive, isn’t she?”

  He did not hear the answer and dropped into a welcome sleep.

  When he woke up, the crisis was over, though he still felt a buzzing in his head and a dif
ficulty in drawing a deep breath. He stood up, however, and realized that all these sensations were not fanciful, that he was really outside the door of the lodge and that Coralie had drunk the glass of water and was peacefully sleeping.

  “How good it is to be alive!” he repeated.

  He now felt a need for action, but dared not go into the lodge, notwithstanding the open door. He moved away from it, skirting the cloisters containing the graves, and then, with no exact object, for he did not yet grasp the reason of his own actions, did not understand what had happened to him and was simply walking at random, he came back towards the lodge, on the other front, the one overlooking the garden.

  Suddenly he stopped. A few yards from the house, at the foot of a tree standing beside the slanting path, a man lay back in a wicker long-chair, with his face in the shade and his legs in the sun. He was sleeping, with his head fallen forward and an open book upon his knees.

  Then and not till then did Patrice clearly understand that he and Coralie had escaped being killed, that they were both really alive and that they owed their safety to this man whose sleep suggested a state of absolute security and satisfied conscience.

  Patrice studied the stranger’s appearance. He was slim of figure, but broad-shouldered, with a sallow complexion, a slight mustache on his lips and hair beginning to turn gray at the temples. His age was probably fifty at most. The cut of his clothes pointed to dandyism. Patrice leant forward and read the title of the book: The Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin. He also read the initials inside a hat lying on the grass: “L. P.”

  “It was he who saved me,” said Patrice to himself, “I recognize him. He carried us both out of the studio and looked after us. But how was the miracle brought about? Who sent him?”

  He tapped him on the shoulder. The man was on his feet at once, his face lit up with a smile:

  “Pardon me, captain, but my life is so much taken up that, when I have a few minutes to myself, I use them for sleeping, wherever I may be . . . like Napoleon, eh? Well, I don’t object to the comparison. . . . But enough about myself. How are you feeling now? And madame— ‘Little Mother Coralie’ — is she better? I saw no use in waking you, after I had opened the doors and taken you outside. I had done what was necessary and felt quite easy. You were both breathing. So I left the rest to the good pure air.”

  He broke off, at the sight of Patrice’s disconcerted attitude; and his smile made way for a merry laugh:

  “Oh, I was forgetting: you don’t know me! Of course, it’s true, the letter I sent you was intercepted. Let me introduce myself. Don Luis Perenna, a member of an old Spanish family, genuine patent of nobility, papers all in order. . . . But I can see that all this tells you nothing,” he went on, laughing still more gaily. “No doubt Ya-Bon described me differently when he wrote my name on that street-wall, one evening a fortnight ago. Aha, you’re beginning to understand! . . . Yes, I’m the man you sent for to help you. Shall I mention the name, just bluntly? Well, here goes, captain! . . . Arsène Lupin, at your service.”

  The Teeth of the Tiger. By Maurice Leblanc. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. “Luis Perenna” is one of several anagrams of “Arsène Lupin.”

  Patrice was stupefied. He had utterly forgotten Ya-Bon’s proposal and the unthinking permission which he had given him to call in the famous adventurer. And here was Arsène Lupin standing in front of him, Arsène Lupin, who, by a sheer effort of will that resembled an incredible miracle, had dragged him and Coralie out of their hermetically-sealed coffin.

  He held out his hand and said:

  “Thank you!”

  “Tut!” said Don Luis, playfully. “No thanks! Just a good hand-shake, that’s all. And I’m a man you can shake hands with, captain, believe me. I may have a few peccadilloes on my conscience, but on the other hand I have committed a certain number of good actions which should win me the esteem of decent folk . . . beginning with my own. And so . . .”

  He interrupted himself again, seemed to reflect and, taking Patrice by a button of his jacket, said:

  “Don’t move. We are being watched.”

  “By whom?”

  “Some one on the quay, right at the end of the garden. The wall is not high. There’s a grating on the top of it. They’re looking through the bars and trying to see us.”

  “How do you know? You have your back turned to the quay; and then there are the trees.”

  “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything out of the way.”

  “Yes, the sound of an engine . . . the engine of a stopping car. Now what would a car want to stop here for, on the quay, opposite a wall with no house near it?”

  “Then who do you think it is?”

  “Why, old Siméon, of course!”

  “Old Siméon!”

  “Certainly. He’s looking to see whether I’ve really saved the two of you.”

  “Then he’s not mad?”

  “Mad? No more mad than you or I!”

  “And yet . . .”

  “What you mean is that Siméon used to protect you; that his object was to bring you two together; that he sent you the key of the garden-door; and so on and so on.”

  “Do you know all that?”

  “Well, of course! If not, how could I have rescued you?”

  “But,” said Patrice, anxiously, “suppose the scoundrel returns to the attack. Ought we not to take some precautions? Let’s go back to the lodge: Coralie is all alone.”

  “There’s no danger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m here.”

  Patrice was more astounded than ever:

  “Then Siméon knows you?” he asked. “He knows that you are here?”

  “Yes, thanks to a letter which I wrote you under cover to Ya-Bon and which he intercepted. I told you that I was coming; and he hurried to get to work. Only, as my habit is on these occasions, I hastened on my arrival by a few hours, so that I caught him in the act.”

  “At that moment you did not know he was the enemy; you knew nothing?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Was it this morning?”

  “No, this afternoon, at a quarter to two.”

  Patrice took out his watch:

  “And it’s now four. So in two hours . . .”

  “Not that. I’ve been here an hour.”

  “Did you find out from Ya-Bon?”

  “Do you think I’ve no better use for my time? Ya-Bon simply told me that you were not there, which was enough to astonish me.”

  “After that?”

  “I looked to see where you were.”

  “How?”

  “I first searched your room and, doing so in my own thorough fashion, ended by discovering that there was a crack at the back of your roll-top desk and that this crack faced a hole in the wall of the next room. I was able therefore to pull out the book in which you kept your diary and acquaint myself with what was going on. This, moreover, was how Siméon became aware of your least intentions. This was how he knew of your plan to come here, on a pilgrimage, on the fourteenth of April. This was how, last night, seeing you write, he preferred, before attacking you, to know what you were writing. Knowing it and learning, from your own words, that you were on your guard, he refrained. You see how simple it all is. If M. Masseron had grown uneasy at your absence, he would have been just as successful. Only he would have been successful to-morrow.”

  “That is to say, too late.”

  “Yes, too late. This really isn’t his business, however, nor that of the police. So I would rather that they didn’t meddle with it. I asked your wounded soldiers to keep silent about anything that may strike them as queer. Therefore, if M. Masseron comes to-day, he will think that everything is in order. Well, having satisfied my mind in this respect and possessing the necessary information from your diary, I took Ya-Bon with me and walked across the lane and into the garden.”

  “Was the door open?”

  “No, but Siméon happened to be coming
out at that moment. Bad luck for him, wasn’t it? I took advantage of it boldly. I put my hand on the latch and we went in, without his daring to protest. He certainly knew who I was.”

  “But you didn’t know at that time that he was the enemy?”

  “I didn’t know? And what about your diary?”

  “I had no notion . . .”

  “But, captain, every page is an indictment of the man. There’s not an incident in which he did not take part, not a crime which he did not prepare.”

  “In that case you should have collared him.”

  “And if I had? What good would it have done me? Should I have compelled him to speak? No, I shall hold him tightest by leaving him his liberty. That will give him rope, you know. You see already he’s prowling round the house instead of clearing out. Besides, I had something better to do: I had first to rescue you two . . . if there was still time. Ya-Bon and I therefore rushed to the door of the lodge. It was open; but the other, the door of the studio, was locked and bolted. I drew the bolts; and to force the lock was, for me, child’s play. Then the smell of gas was enough to tell me what had happened, Siméon must have fitted an old meter to some outside pipe, probably the one which supplied the lamps on the lane, and he was suffocating you. All that remained for us to do was to fetch the two of you out and give you the usual treatment: rubbing, artificial respiration and so on. You were saved.”

  “I suppose he removed all his murderous appliances?” asked Patrice.

  “No, he evidently contemplated coming back and putting everything to rights, so that his share in the business could not be proved, so too that people might believe in your suicide, a mysterious suicide, death without apparent cause; in short, the same tragedy that happened with your father and Little Mother Coralie’s mother.”

  “Then you know? . . .”

  “Why, haven’t I eyes to read with? What about the inscription on the wall, your father’s revelations? I know as much as you do, captain . . . and perhaps a bit more.”