“My darling,” says Véronique, “aren’t you afraid of boring Don Luis?”
“No, madame,” replies Don Luis, rising, going up to Véronique and speaking in such a way that the boy cannot hear, “no, François is not boring me; and in fact I like answering his questions. But I confess that he perplexes me a little and that I am afraid of saying something awkward. Tell me, how much exactly does he know of the whole story?”
“As much as I know myself, except Vorski’s name, of course.”
“But does he know the part which Vorski played?”
“Yes, but with certain differences. He thinks that Vorski is an escaped prisoner who picked up the legend of Sarek and, in order to get hold of the God-Stone, proceeded to carry out the prophecy touching it. I have kept some of the lines of the prophecy from François.”
“And the part played by Elfride? Her hatred for you? The threats she made you?”
“Madwoman’s talk, I told François, of which I myself did not understand the meaning.”
Don Luis smiled:
“The explanation is a little arbitrary; and I have a notion that François quite well understands that certain parts of the tragedy remain and must remain obscure to him. The great thing, don’t you think, is that he should not know that Vorski was his father?”
“He does not know and he never will.”
“And then — and this is what I was coming to — what name will he bear himself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Whose son will he believe himself to be? For you know as well as I do that the legal reality is this, that François Vorski died fifteen years ago, drowned in a shipwreck, and his grandfather with him. And Vorski died last year, stabbed by a fellow-prisoner. Neither of them is alive in the eyes of the law. So . . .”
Véronique nodded her head and smiled:
“So I don’t know. The position seems to me, as you say, incapable of explanation. But everything will come out all right.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re here to do it.”
It was his turn to smile:
“I can no longer take credit for the actions which I perform or the steps which I take. Everything is arranging itself a priori. Then why worry?”
“Am I not right to?”
“Yes,” he said, gravely. “The woman who has suffered all that you have must not be subjected to the least additional annoyance. And nothing shall happen to her after this, I swear. So what I suggest to you is this: long ago, you married against your father’s wish a very distant cousin, who died after leaving you a son, François. This son your father, to be revenged upon you, kidnapped and brought to Sarek. At your father’s death, the name of d’Hergemont became extinct and there is nothing to recall the events of your marriage.”
“But my name remains. Legally, in the official records, I am Véronique d’Hergemont.”
“Your maiden name disappears under your married name.”
“You mean under that of Vorski.”
“No, because you did not marry that fellow Vorski, but one of your cousins called . . .”
“Called what?”
“Jean Maroux. Here is a stamped certificate of your marriage to Jean Maroux, a marriage mentioned in your official records, as this other document shows.”
Véronique looked at Don Luis in amazement:
“But why? Why that name?”
“Why? So that your son may be neither d’Hergemont, which would have recalled past events, nor Vorski, which would have recalled the name of a traitor. Here is his birth-certificate, as François Maroux.”
She repeated, all blushing and confused:
“But why did you choose just that name?”
“It seemed easy for François. It’s the name of Stéphane, with whom François will go on living for some time. We can say that Stéphane was a relation of your husband’s; and this will explain the intimacy generally. That is my plan. It presents, believe me, no possible danger. When one is confronted by an inexplicable and painful position like yours, one must needs employ special means and resort to drastic and, I admit, very illegal measures. I did so without scruple, because I have the good fortune to dispose of resources which are not within everybody’s reach. Do you approve of what I have done?”
Véronique bent her head:
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
He half-rose from his seat:
“Besides,” he added, “if there should be any drawbacks, the future will no doubt take upon itself the burden of removing them. It would be enough, for instance — there is no indiscretion, is there, in alluding to the feelings which Stéphane entertains for François’ mother? — it would be enough if, one day or another, for reasons of common-sense, or reasons of gratitude, François’ mother were moved to accept the homage of those feelings. How much simpler everything will be if François already bears the name of Maroux! How much more easily the past will be abolished, both for the outside world and for François, who will no longer be able to pry into the secret of bygone events which there will be nothing to recall to memory. It seemed to me that these were rather weighty arguments. I am glad to see that you share my opinion.”
Don Luis bowed to Véronique and, without insisting any further, without appearing to notice her confusion, turned to François and explained:
“I’m at your orders now, young man. And, since you don’t want to leave anything unexplained, let’s go back to the God-Stone and the scoundrel who coveted its possession. Yes, the scoundrel,” repeated Don Luis, seeing no reason not to speak of Vorski with absolute frankness, “and the most terrible scoundrel that I have ever met with, because he believed in his mission; in short, a sick-brained man, a lunatic . . .”
“Well, first of all,” François observed, “what I don’t understand is that you waited all night to capture him, when he and his accomplices were sleeping under the Fairies’ Dolmen.”
“Well done, youngster,” said Don Luis, laughing, “you have put your finger on a weak point! If I had acted as you suggest, the tragedy would have been finished twelve or fifteen hours earlier. But think, would you have been released? Would the scoundrel have spoken and revealed your hiding-place? I don’t think so. To loosen his tongue I had to keep him simmering. I had to make him dizzy, to drive him mad with apprehension and anguish and to convince him by means of a mass of proofs, that he was irretrievably defeated. Otherwise he would have held his tongue and we might perhaps not have found you. . . . . Besides, at that time, my plan was not very clear, I did not quite know how to wind up; and it was not until much later that I thought not of submitting him to violent torture — I am incapable of that — but of tying him to that tree on which he wanted to let your mother die. So that, in my perplexity and hesitation, I simply yielded, in the end, to the wish — the rather puerile wish, I blush to confess — to carry out the prophecy to the end, to see how the missionary would behave in the presence of the ancient Druid, in short to amuse myself. After all, the adventure was so dark and gloomy that a little fun seemed to me essential. And I laughed like blazes. That was wrong. I admit it and I apologize.”
The boy was laughing too. Don Luis, who was holding him between his knees, kissed him and asked:
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes, on condition that you answer two more questions. The first is not important.”
“Ask away.”
“It’s about the ring. Where did you get that ring which you put first on mother’s finger and afterwards on Elfride’s?”
“I made it that same night, in a few minutes, out of an old wedding-ring and some coloured stones.”
“But the scoundrel recognized it as having belonged to his mother.”
“He thought he recognized it; and he thought it because the ring was like the other.”
“But how did you know that? And how did you learn the story?”
“From himself.”
“You don’t mean that?”
“Certainly I do!
From words that escaped him while he was sleeping under the Fairies’ Dolmen. A drunkard’s nightmare. Bit by bit he told the whole story of his mother. Elfride knew a good part of it besides. You see how simple it is and how my luck stood by me!”
“But the riddle of the God-Stone is not simple,” François cried, “and you deciphered it! People have been trying for centuries and you took a few hours!”
“No, a few minutes, François. It was enough for me to read the letter which your grandfather wrote about it to Captain Belval. I sent your grandfather by post all the explanations as to the position and the marvellous nature of the God-Stone.”
“Well,” cried the boy, “it’s those explanations that I’m asking of you, Don Luis. This is my last question, I promise you. What made people believe in the power of the God-Stone? And what did that so-called power consist of exactly?”
Stéphane and Patrice drew up their chairs. Véronique sat up and listened. They all understood that Don Luis had waited until they were together before rending the veil of the mystery before their eyes.
He began to laugh:
“You mustn’t hope for anything sensational,” he said. “A mystery is worth just as much as the darkness in which it is shrouded; and, as we have begun by dispelling the darkness, nothing remains but the fact itself in its naked reality. Nevertheless the facts in this case are strange and the reality is not denuded of a certain grandeur.”
“It must needs be so,” said Patrice Belval, “seeing that the reality left so miraculous a legend in the isle of Sarek and even all over Brittany.”
“Yes,” said Don Luis, “and a legend so persistent that it influences us to this day and that not one of you has escaped the obsession of the miraculous.”
“What do you mean?” protested Patrice. “I don’t believe in miracles.”
“No more do I,” said the boy.
“Yes, you do, you believe in them, you accept miracles as possible. If not, you would long ago have seen the whole truth.”
“Why?”
Don Luis picked a magnificent rose from a tree by his side and asked François:
“Is it possible for me to transform this rose, whose proportions, as it is, are larger than those a rose often attains, into a flower double the size and this rose-tree into a shrub twice as tall?”
“Certainly not,” said François.
“Then why did you admit, why did you all admit that Maguennoc could achieve that result, merely by digging up earth in certain parts of the island, at certain fixed hours? That was a miracle; and you accepted it without hesitation, unconsciously.”
Stéphane objected:
“We accept what we saw with our eyes.”
“But you accepted it as a miracle, that is to say, as a phenomenon which Maguennoc produced by special and, truth to tell, by supernatural means. Whereas I, when I read this detail in M. d’Hergemont’s letter, at once — what shall I say? — caught on. I at once established the connection between those monstrous blossoms and the name borne by the Calvary of the flowers. And my conviction was immediate: ‘No, Maguennoc is not a wizard. He simply cleared a piece of uncultivated land around the Calvary; and all he had to do, to produce abnormal flowers, was to bring along a layer of mould. So the God-Stone is underneath; the God-Stone which, in the middle-ages, produced the same abnormal flowers; the God-Stone, which, in the days of the Druids, healed the sick and strengthened children.’”
“Therefore,” said Patrice, “there is a miracle.”
“There is a miracle if we accept the supernatural explanation. There is a natural phenomenon if we look for it and if we find the physical cause capable of giving rise to the apparent miracle.”
“But those physical causes don’t exist! They are not present.”
“They exist, because you have seen monstrous flowers.”
“Then there is a stone,” asked Patrice, almost chaffingly, “which can naturally give health and strength? And that stone is the God-Stone?”
“There is not a particular, individual stone. But there are stones, blocks of stone, rocks, hills and mountains of rock, which contain mineral veins formed of various metals, oxides of uranium, silver, lead, copper, nickel, cobalt and so on. And among these metals are some which emit a special radiation, endowed with peculiar properties known as radioactivity. These veins are veins of pitchblende which are found hardly anywhere in Europe except in the north of Bohemia and which are worked near the little town of Joachimsthal. And those radioactive bodies are uranium, thorium, helium and chiefly, in the case which we are considering . . .”
“Radium,” François interrupted.
“You’ve said it, my boy: radium. Phenomena of radioactivity occur more or less everywhere; and we may say that they are manifested throughout nature, as in the healing action of thermal springs. But plainly radioactive bodies like radium possess more definite properties. For instance, there is no doubt that the rays and the emanation of radium exercise a power over the life of plants, a power similar to that caused by the passage of an electric current. In both cases, the stimulation of the nutritive centres makes the elements required by the plant more easy to assimilate and promotes its growth. In the same way, there is no doubt that the radium rays are capable of exercising a physiological action on living tissues, by producing more or less profound modifications, destroying certain cells and contributing to develop other cells and even to control their evolution. Radiotherapy claims to have healed or improved numerous cases of rheumatism of the joints, nervous troubles, ulceration, eczema, tumours and adhesive cicatrices. In short radium is a really effective therapeutic agent.”
“So,” said Stéphane, “you regard the God-Stone . . .”
“I regard the God-Stone as a block of radiferous pitchblende originating from the Joachimsthal lodes. I have long known the Bohemian legend which speaks of a miraculous stone that was once removed from the side of a hill; and, when I was travelling in Bohemia, I saw the hole left by the stone. It corresponds pretty accurately with the dimensions of the God-Stone.”
“But,” Stéphane objected, “radium is contained in rocks only in the form of infinitesimal particles. Remember that, after a mass of fourteen hundred tons of rock have been duly mined and washed and treated, there remains at the end of it all only a filtrate of some fifteen grains of radium. And you attribute a miraculous power to the God-Stone, which weighs two tons at most!”
“But it evidently contains radium in appreciable quantities. Nature has not pledged herself to be always niggardly and invariably to dilute the radium. She was pleased to accumulate in the God-Stone a generous supply which enabled it to produce the apparently extraordinary phenomena which we know of . . . not forgetting that we have to allow for popular exaggeration.”
Stéphane seemed to be yielding to conviction. Nevertheless he said:
“One last point. Apart from the God-Stone, there was the little chip of stone which Maguennoc found in the leaden sceptre, the prolonged touch of which burnt his hand. According to you, this was a particle of radium?”
“Undoubtedly. And it is this perhaps that most clearly reveals the presence and the power of radium in all this adventure. When Henri Becquerel, the great physicist, kept a tube containing a salt of radium in his waistcoat-pocket, his skin became covered in a few days with suppurating ulcers. Curie repeated the experiment, with the same result. Maguennoc’s case was more serious, because he held the particle of radium in his hand. A wound formed which had a cancerous appearance. Scared by all that he knew and all that he himself had said about the miraculous stone which burns like hell-fire and ‘gives life or death,’ he chopped off his hand.”
“Very well,” said Stéphane, “but where did that particle of pure radium come from? It can’t have been a chip of the God-Stone, because, once again, however rich a mineral may be, radium is incorporated in it, not in isolated grains, but in a soluble form, which has to be dissolved and afterwards collected, by a series of mechanical operations, into a solut
ion rich enough to enable successive crystallizations and concentrations to isolate the active product which the solution contains. All this and a number of other later operations demand an enormous plant, with workshops, laboratories, expert chemists, in short, a very different state of civilization, you must admit, from the state of barbarism in which our ancestors the Celts were immersed.”
Don Luis smiled and tapped the young man on the shoulder:
“Hear, hear, Stéphane! I am glad to see that François’ friend and tutor has a far-seeing and logical mind. The objection is perfectly valid and suggested itself to me at once. I might reply by putting forward some quite legitimate theory, I might presume a natural means of isolating radium and imagine that, in a geological fault occurring in the granite, at the bottom of a big pocket containing radiferous ore, a fissure has opened through which the waters of the river slowly trickle, carrying with them infinitesimal quantities of radium; that the waters so charged flow for a long time in a narrow channel, combine again, become concentrated and, after centuries upon centuries, filter through in little drops, which evaporate at once, and form at the point of emergence a tiny stalactite, exceedingly rich in radium, the tip of which is broken off one day by some Gallic warrior. But is there any need to seek so far and to have recourse to hypotheses? Cannot we rely on the unaided genius and the inexhaustible resources of nature? Does it call for a more wonderful effort on her part to evolve by her own methods a particle of pure radium than to make a cherry ripen or to make this rose bloom . . . or to give life to our delightful All’s Well? What do you say, young François? Do we agree?”
“We always agree,” replied the boy.
“So you don’t unduly regret the miracle of the God-Stone?”
“Why, the miracle still exists!”
“You’re right, François, it still exists and a hundred times more beautiful and dazzling than before. Science does not kill miracles: it purifies them and ennobles them. What was that crafty, capricious, wicked, incomprehensible little power attached to the tip of a magic wand and acting at random, according to the ignorant fancy of a barbarian chief or Druid, what was it, I ask you, beside the beneficent, logical, reliable and quite as miraculous power which we behold to-day in a pinch of radium?”
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 243
