Véronique moved away.
The window was not much more than three feet from the floor: and the small stones, as she had supposed, were kept in place only by their own weight and the way in which they were arranged. The opening which she thus contrived to make was very wide; and she easily passed the ladder which she had brought with her through and secured it by its iron hooks to the lower ledge.
She was some hundred feet or so above the sea, which lay all white before her, guarded by the thousand reefs of Sarek. But she could not see the foot of the cliff, for there was under the window a slight projection of granite which jutted forward and on which the ladder rested instead of hanging perpendicularly.
“That will help François,” she thought.
Nevertheless, the danger of the undertaking seemed great; and she wondered whether she herself ought not to take the risk, instead of her son, all the more so as François might be mistaken, as Stéphane’s cell was perhaps not there at all and as perhaps there was no means of entering it by a similar opening. If so, what a waste of time! And what a useless danger for the boy to run!
At that moment she felt so great a need of self-devotion, so intense a wish to prove her love for him by direct action, that she formed her resolution without pausing to reflect, even as one performs immediately a duty which there is no question of not performing. Nothing deterred her: neither her inspection of the ladder, whose hooks were not wide enough to grip the whole thickness of the ledge, nor the sight of the precipice, which gave an impression that everything was about to fall away from under her. She had to act; and she acted.
Pinning up her skirt, she stepped across the wall, turned round, supported herself on the ledge, groped with her foot in space and found one of the rungs. Her whole body was trembling. Her heart was beating furiously, like the clapper of a bell. Nevertheless she had the mad courage to catch hold of the two uprights and go down.
It did not take long. She knew that there were twenty rungs in all. She counted them. When she reached the twentieth, she looked to the left and murmured, with unspeakable joy:
“Oh, François . . . my darling!”
She had seen, three feet away at most, a recess, a hollow which appeared to be the entrance to a cavity cut in the rock itself.
“Stéphane . . . Stéphane,” she called, but in so faint a voice that Stéphane Maroux, if he were there, could not hear her.
She hesitated a few seconds, but her legs were giving way and she no longer had the strength either to climb up again or to remain hanging where she was. Taking advantage of a few irregularities in the rock and thus shifting the ladder, at the risk of unhooking it, she succeeded, by a sort of miracle of which she was quite aware, in catching hold of a flint which projected from the granite and setting foot in the cave. Then, with fierce energy, she made one supreme effort and, recovering her balance with a jerk, she entered.
She at once saw some one, fastened with cords, lying on a truss of straw.
The cave was small and not very deep, especially in the upper portion, which pointed towards the sky rather than the sea and which must have looked, from a distance, like a mere fold in the cliff. There was no projection to bound it at the edge. The light entered freely.
Véronique went nearer. The man did not move. He was asleep.
She bent over him; though she did not recognize him for certain, it seemed to her that a memory was emerging from that dim past in which all the faces of our childhood gradually fade away. This one was surely not unknown to her: a gentle visage, with regular features, fair hair flung well back, a broad, white forehead and a slightly feminine countenance, which reminded Véronique of the charming face of a convent friend who had died before the war.
She deftly unfastened the bonds with which the wrists were fastened together.
The man, without waking immediately, stretched his arms, as though submitting himself to a familiar operation, not effected for the first time, which did not necessarily interfere with his sleep. Presumably he was released like this at intervals, perhaps in order to eat and at night, for he ended by muttering:
“So early? . . . But I’m not hungry . . . and it’s still light!”
This last reflection astonished the man himself. He opened his eyes and at once sat up where he lay, so that he might see the person who was standing in front of him, no doubt for the first time in broad daylight.
He was not greatly surprised, for the reason that the reality could not have been manifest to him at once. He probably thought that he was the sport of a dream or an hallucination; and he said, in an undertone:
“Véronique . . . Véronique . . .”
She felt a little embarrassed by his gaze, but finished releasing his bonds; and, when he distinctly felt her hand on his own hands and on his imprisoned limbs, he understood the wonderful event which her presence implied and he said, in a faltering voice:
“You! You! . . . Can it be? . . . Oh, speak just one word, just one! . . . Can it possibly be you?” He continued, almost to himself, “Yes, it is she . . . it is certainly she . . . . She is here!” And, anxiously, aloud, “You . . . at night . . . on the other nights . . . it wasn’t you who came then? It was another woman, wasn’t it? An enemy? . . . Oh, forgive me for asking you! . . . It’s because . . . because I don’t understand . . . . How did you come here?”
“I came this way,” she said, pointing to the sea.
“Oh,” he said, “how wonderful!”
He stared at her with dazed eyes, as he might have stared at some vision descended from Heaven; and the circumstances were so unusual that he did not think of suppressing the eagerness of his gaze.
She repeated, utterly confused:
“Yes, this way . . . . François suggested it.”
“I did not mention him,” he said, “because, with you here, I felt sure that he was free.”
“Not yet,” she said, “but he will be in an hour.”
A long pause ensued. She interrupted it to conceal her agitation:
“He will be free . . . . You shall see him . . . . But we must not frighten him: there are things which he doesn’t know.”
She perceived that he was listening not to the words uttered but to the voice that uttered them and that this voice seemed to plunge him into a sort of ecstasy, for he was silent and smiled. She thereupon smiled too and questioned him, thus obliging him to answer:
“You called me by my name at once. So you knew me? I also seem to . . . Yes, you remind me of a friend of mine who died.”
“Madeleine Ferrand?”
“Yes, Madeleine Ferrand.”
“Perhaps I also remind you of her brother, a shy schoolboy who used often to visit the parlour at the convent and who used to look at you from a distance.”
“Yes, yes,” she declared. “I remember. We even spoke to each other sometimes; you used to blush. Yes, that’s it: your name was Stéphane. But how do you come to be called Maroux?”
“Madeleine and I were not children of the same father.”
“Ah,” she said, “that was what misled me!”
She gave him her hand:
“Well, Stéphane,” she said, “as we are old friends and have renewed our acquaintance, let us put off all our remembrances until later. For the moment, the most urgent matter is to get away. Have you the strength?”
“The strength, yes: I have not had such a very bad time. But how are we to go from here?”
“By the same road by which I came, a ladder communicating with the upper passage of cells.”
He was now standing up:
“You had the courage, the pluck?” he asked, at last realizing what she had dared to do.
“Oh, it was not very difficult!” she declared. “François was so anxious! He maintained that you were both occupying old torture-chambers . . . death-chambers . . . .”
It was as though these words aroused him violently from a dream and made him suddenly see that it was madness to converse in such circumstances.
“Go away!” he cried. “François is right! Oh, if you knew the risk you are running. Please, please go!”
He was beside himself, as though convulsed by the thought of an immediate peril. She tried to calm him, but he entreated her:
“Another second may be your undoing. Don’t stay here . . . . I am condemned to death and to the most terrible death. Look at the ground on which we are standing, this sort of floor . . . . But it’s no use talking about it. Oh, please do go!”
“With you,” she said.
“Yes, with me. But save yourself first.”
She resisted and said, firmly:
“For us both to be saved, Stéphane, we must above all things remain calm. What I did just now we can do again only by calculating all our actions and controlling our excitement. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” he said, overcome by her magnificent confidence.
“Then follow me.”
She stepped to the very edge of the precipice and leant forward:
“Give me your hand,” she said, “to help me keep my balance.”
She turned round, flattened herself against the cliff and felt the surface with her free hand.
Not finding the ladder, she leant outward slightly.
The ladder had become displaced. No doubt, when Véronique, perhaps with too abrupt a movement, had set foot in the cave, the iron hook of the right-hand upright had slipped and the ladder, hanging only by the other hook, had swung like a pendulum.
The bottom rungs were now out of reach.
CHAPTER VIII. ANGUISH
HAD VÉRONIQUE BEEN alone, she would have yielded to one of those moods of despondency which her nature, brave though it was, could not escape in the face of the unrelenting animosity of fate. But in the presence of Stéphane, who she felt to be the weaker and who was certainly exhausted by his captivity, she had the strength to restrain herself and announce, as though mentioning quite an ordinary incident:
“The ladder has swung out of our reach.”
Stéphane looked at her in dismay:
“Then . . . then we are lost!”
“Why should we be lost?” she asked, with a smile.
“There is no longer any hope of getting away.”
“What do you mean? Of course there is. What about François?”
“François?”
“Certainly. In an hour at most, François will have made his escape; and, when he sees the ladder and the way I came, he will call to us. We shall hear him easily. We have only to be patient.”
“To be patient!” he said, in terror. “To wait for an hour! But they are sure to be here in less than that. They keep a constant watch.”
“Well, we will manage somehow.”
He pointed to the wicket in the door:
“Do you see that wicket?” he said. “They open it each time. They will see us through the grating.”
“There’s a shutter to it. Let’s close it.”
“They will come in.”
“Then we won’t close it and we’ll keep up our confidence, Stéphane.”
“I’m frightened for you, not for myself.”
“You mustn’t be frightened either for me or for yourself . . . . If the worst comes to the worst, we are able to defend ourselves,” she added, showing him a revolver which she had taken from her father’s rack of arms and carried on her ever since.
“Ah,” he said, “what I fear is that we shall not even be called upon to defend ourselves! They have other means.”
“What means?”
He did not answer. He had flung a quick glance at the floor; and Véronique for a moment examined its curious structure.
All around, following the circumference of the walls, was the granite itself, rugged and uneven. But outlined in the granite was a large square. They could see, on each of the four sides, the deep crevice that divided it from the rest. The timbers of which it consisted were worn and grooved, full of cracks and gashes, but nevertheless massive and powerful. The fourth side almost skirted the edge of the precipice, from which it was divided by eight inches at most.
“A trap-door?” she asked, with a shudder.
“No, not that,” he said. “It would be too heavy.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Very likely it is nothing but a remnant of some past contrivance which no longer works. Still . . .”
“Still what?”
“Last night . . . or rather this morning there was a creaking sound down below there. It seemed to suggest attempts, but they stopped at once . . . it’s such a long time since! . . . No, the thing no longer works and they can’t make use of it.”
“Who’s they?”
Without waiting for his answer, she continued:
“Listen, Stéphane, we have a few minutes before us, perhaps fewer than we think. François will be free at any moment now and will come to our rescue. Let us make the most of the interval and tell each other the things which both of us ought to know. Let us discuss matters quietly. We are threatened with no immediate danger; and the time will be well employed.”
Véronique was pretending a sense of security which she did not feel. That François would make his escape she refused to doubt; but who could tell that the boy would go to the window and notice the hook of the hanging ladder? On failing to see his mother, would he not rather think of following the underground tunnel and running to the Priory?
However, she mastered herself, feeling the need of the explanation for which she had asked, and, sitting down on a granite projection which formed a sort of bench, she at once began to tell Stéphane the events which she had witnessed and in which she had played a leading part, from the moment when her investigations led her to the deserted cabin containing Maguennoc’s dead body.
Stéphane listened to the terrifying narrative without attempting to interrupt her but with an alarm marked by his gestures of abhorrence and the despairing expression of his face. M. d’Hergemont’s death in particular seemed to crush him, as did Honorine’s. He had been greatly attached to both of them.
“There, Stéphane,” said Véronique, when she had described the anguish which she suffered after the execution of the sisters Archignat, the discovery of the underground passage and her interview with François. “That is all that I need absolutely tell you. I thought that you ought to know what I have kept from François, so that we may fight our enemies together.”
He shook his head:
“Which enemies?” he said. “I, too, in spite of your explanations, am asking the very question which you asked me. I have a feeling that we are flung into the midst of a great tragedy which has continued for years, for centuries, and in which we have begun to play our parts only at the moment of the crisis, at the moment of the terrific cataclysm prepared by generations of men. I may be wrong. Perhaps there is nothing more than a disconnected series of sinister, weird and horrible coincidences amid which we are tossed from side to side, without being able to appeal to any other reasons than the whim of chance. In reality I know no more than you do. I am surrounded by the same obscurity, stricken by the same sorrows and the same losses. It’s all just insanity, extravagant convulsions, unprecedent shocks, the crimes of savages, the fury of the barbaric ages.”
Véronique agreed:
“Yes, of the barbaric ages; and that is what baffles me most and impresses me so much! What is the connection between the present and the past, between our persecutors of to-day and the men who lived in these caves in days of old and whose actions are prolonged into our own time, in a manner so impossible to understand? To what do they all refer, those legends of which I know nothing except from Honorine’s delirium and the distress of the sisters Archignat?”
They spoke low, with their ears always on the alert. Stéphane listened for sounds in the corridor, Véronique concentrated her attention on the cliff, in the hope of hearing François’ signal.
“They are very complicated legends,” said Stéphane, “very obscure traditions in which
we must abandon any attempt to distinguish between what is superstition and what might be truth. Out of this jumble of old wives’ tales, the very most that we can disentangle is two sets of ideas, those referring to the prophecy of the thirty coffins and those relating to the existence of a treasure, or rather of a miraculous stone.”
“Then they take as a prophecy,” said Véronique, “the words which I read on Maguennoc’s drawing and again on the Fairies’ Dolmen?”
“Yes, a prophecy which dates back to an indeterminate period and which for centuries has governed the whole history and the whole life of Sarek. The belief has always prevailed that a day would come when, within a space of twelve months, the thirty principal reefs which surround the island and which are called the thirty coffins would receive their thirty victims, who were to die a violent death, and that those thirty victims would include four women who were to die crucified. It is an established and undisputed tradition, handed down from father to son: and everybody believes in it. It is expressed in the line and part of a line inscribed on the Fairies’ Dolmen: ‘Four women crucified,’ and ‘For thirty coffins victims thirty times!’”
“Very well; but people have gone on living all the same, normally and peaceably. Why did the outburst of terror suddenly take place this year?”
“Maguennoc was largely responsible. Maguennoc was a fantastic and rather mysterious person, a mixture of the wizard and the bone-setter, the healer and the charlatan, who had studied the stars in their courses and whom people liked to consult about the most remote events of the past as well as the future. Now Maguennoc announced not long ago that 1917 would be the fateful year.”
“Why?”
“Intuition perhaps, presentiment, divination, or subconscious knowledge: you can choose any explanation that you please. As for Maguennoc, who did not despise the practices of the most antiquated magic, he would tell you that he knew it from the flight of a bird or the entrails of a fowl. However, his prophecy was based on something more serious. He pretended, quoting evidence collected in his childhood among the old people of Sarek, that, at the beginning of the last century, the first line of the inscription on the Fairies’ Dolmen was not yet obliterated and that it formed this, which would rhyme with ‘Four women shall be crucified on tree:’ ‘In Sarek’s isle, in year fourteen and three.’ The year fourteen and three is the year seventeen; and the prediction became more impressive for Maguennoc and his friends of late years, because the total number was divided into two numbers and the war broke out in 1914. From that day, Maguennoc grew more and more important and more and more sure of the truth of his previsions. For that matter, he also grew more and more anxious; and he even announced that his death, followed by the death of M. d’Hergemont, would give the signal for the catastrophe. Then the year 1917 arrived and produced a genuine terror in the island. The events were close at hand.”
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 226
