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

by Maurice Leblanc

  He is to-day living in the village of Saint-Maclou, among those charming valleys which run down to the Oise. Who does not know his modest little pink-washed house, with its green shutters and its garden filled with bright flowers? People make up parties to go there from Paris on Sundays, in the hope of catching a sight, through the elder hedges, of the man who was Arsène Lupin, or of meeting him in the village square.

  He is there, with his hair just touched with gray, his still youthful features, and a young man’s bearing; and Florence is there, too, with her pretty figure and the halo of fair hair around her happy face, unclouded by even the shadow of an unpleasant recollection.

  Very often visitors come and knock at the little wooden gate. They are unfortunate people imploring the master’s aid, victims of oppression, weaklings who have gone under in the struggle, reckless persons who have been ruined by their passions.

  For all these Don Luis is full of pity. He gives them his full attention, the help of his far-seeing advice, his experience, his strength, and even his time, disappearing for days and weeks to fight the good fight once more.

  And sometimes also it is an emissary from the Prefect’s office or some subordinate of the police who comes to submit a complex case to his judgment. Here again Don Luis applies the whole of his wonderful mind to the business.

  In addition to this, in addition to his old books on ethics and philosophy, to which he has returned with such pleasure, he cultivates his garden. He dotes on his flowers. He is proud of them. He takes prizes at the shows; and the success is still remembered of the treble carnation, streaked red and yellow, which he exhibited as the “Arsène carnation.”

  But he works hardest at certain large flowers that blossom in summer. During July and the first half of August they fill two thirds of his lawn and all the borders of his kitchen-garden. Beautiful, decorative plants, standing erect like flag-staffs, they proudly raise their spiky heads of all colours: blue, violet, mauve, pink, white.

  They are lupins and include every variety: Cruikshank’s lupin, the two-coloured lupin, the scented lupin, and the last to appear, Lupin’s lupin. They are all there, resplendent, in serried ranks like an army of soldiers, each striving to outstrip the others and to hold up the thickest and gaudiest spike to the sun. They are all there; and, at the entrance to the walk that leads to their motley beds, is a streamer with this device, taken from an exquisite sonnet of Jose Maria de Heredia:

  “And in my kitchen-garden lupins grow.”

  You will say that this is a confession. But why not?

  In the evening, when a few privileged neighbours meet at his house — the justice of the peace, the notary, Major Comte d’Astrignac, who has also gone to live at Saint-Maclou — Don Luis is not afraid to speak of Arsène Lupin.

  “I used to see a great deal of him,” he says. “He was not a bad man. I will not go so far as to compare him with the Seven Sages, or even to hold him up as an example to future generations, but still we must judge him with a certain indulgence.

  “He did a vast amount of good and a moderate amount of harm. Those who suffered through him deserved what they got; and fate would have punished them sooner or later if he had not forestalled her. Between a Lupin who selected his victims among the ruck of wicked rich men and some big company promoter who deliberately ruins numbers of poor people, would you hesitate for a moment? Does not Lupin come out best?

  “And, on the other hand, what a host of good actions! What countless proofs of disinterested generosity! A burglar? I admit it. A swindler? I don’t deny it. He was all that. But he was something more than that. And, while he amused the gallery with his skill and ingenuity, he roused the general enthusiasm in other ways.

  “People laughed at his practical jokes, but they loved his pluck, his courage, his adventurous spirit, his contempt for danger, his shrewd insight, his unfailing good humour, his reckless energy: all qualities that stood out at a period when the most active virtues of our race had reached their zenith, the period of the motor car and the aeroplane….

  “One day,” he said, as a joke, “I should like my epitaph to read, ‘Here lies Arsène Lupin, adventurer.’” That was quite correct. He was a master of adventure.

  “And, if the spirit of adventure led him too often to put his hand in other people’s pockets, it also led him to battlefields where it gives those who are worthy opportunity to fight and win titles of distinction which are not within reach of all. It was there that he gained his. It is there that you should see him at work, spending his strength braving death, and defying destiny. And it is because of this that you must forgive him, even if he did sometimes get the better of a commissary of police or steal the watch of an examining magistrate. Let us show some indulgence to our professors of energy.”

  And, nodding his head, Don Luis concludes:

  “Then, you see, he had another virtue which is not to be despised. It is a virtue for which we should be grateful to him in these gray days of ours: he knew how to smile!”

  THE END

  The Secret Tomb

  Translated by Edgar Jepson

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER I

  THE CHTEAU DE ROBOREY

  UNDER A SKY heavy with stars and faintly brighter for a low-hanging sickle moon, the gipsy caravan slept on the turf by the roadside, its shutters closed, its shafts stretched out like arms. In the shadow of the ditch nearby a stertorous horse was snoring.

  Far away, above the black crest of the hills, a bright streak of sky announced the coming of the dawn. A church clock struck four. Here and there a bird awoke and began to sing. The air was soft and warm.

  Abruptly, from the interior of the caravan, a woman’s voice cried:

  “Saint-Quentin! Saint-Quentin!”

  A head was thrust out of the little window which looked out over the box under the projecting roof.

  “A nice thing this! I thought as much! The rascal has decamped in the night. The little beast! Nice discipline this is!”

  Other voices joined in the grumbling. Two or three minutes passed, then the door in the back of the caravan opened and a shadowy figure descended the five steps of the ladder while two tousled beads appeared at the side window.

  “Dorothy! Where are you going?”

  “To look for Saint-Quentin!” replied the shadowy figure.

  “But he came back with you from your walk last night; and I saw him settle down on the box.”

  “You can see that he isn’t there any longer, Castor.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Patience! I’m going to bring him back to you by the ears.”

  But two small boys in their shirts came tumbling down the steps of the caravan and implored her: “No, no, mummy Dorothy! Don’t you go away by yourself in the night-time. It’s dangerous...”

  “What are you making a fuss about, Pollux? Dangerous? It’s no business of yours!”

  She smacked them and kicked them gently, and brought them quickly back to the caravan into which they climbed. There, sitting on the stool, she took their two heads, pressed them against her face, and kissed them tenderly.

  “No ill feeling, children. Danger? I’ll find Saint-Quentin in half an hour from now.”

  “A nice business!... Saint-Quentin!... A beggar who isn’t sixteen!”

  “While Castor and Pollux are twenty — taken together!” retorted Dorothy.

  “But what does he want to go traipsing about like this at night for? And it isn’t the first time either.... Where is it
he makes these expeditions to?”

  “To snare rabbits,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong in it, you see. But come, there’s been talk enough about it. Go to by-by again, boys. And above all, Castor and Pollux, don’t fight. D’you hear? And no noise. The Captain’s asleep; and he doesn’t like to be disturbed, the Captain doesn’t.”

  She took herself off, jumped over the ditch, crossed a meadow, in which her feet splashed up the water in the puddles, and gained a path which wound through a copse of young trees which only reached her shoulders. Twice already, the evening before, strolling with her comrade Saint-Quentin, she had followed this half-formed path, so that she went briskly forward without hesitating. She crossed two roads, came to a stream, the white pebbly bottom of which gleamed under the quiet water, stepped into it, and walked up it against the current, as if she wished to hide her tracks, and when the first light of day began to invest objects with clear shapes, darted forth afresh through the woods, light, graceful, not very tall, her legs bare below a very short skirt from which streamed behind her a flutter of many-colored ribbons.

  She ran, with effortless ease, surefooted, with never a chance of spraining an ankle, over the dead leaves, among the flowers of early spring, lilies of the valley, violet anemones, or white narcissi.

  Her black hair, not very long, was divided into two heavy masses which flapped like two wings. Her smiling face, parted lips, dilated nostrils, her half-closed eyes proclaimed all her delight in her swift course through the fresh air of the morning. Her neck, long and flexible, rose from a blouse of gray linen, closed by a kerchief of orange silk. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen years old.

  The wood came to an end. A valley lay before her, sunk between two walls of rock and turning off abruptly. Dorothy stopped short. She had reached her goal.

  Facing her, on a pedestal of granite, cleanly cut down, and not more than a hundred feet in diameter, rose the main building of a château, which though it lacked grandeur of style itself, yet drew from its position and the impressive nature of its construction an air of being a seigniorial residence. To the right and left the valley, narrowed to two ravines, appeared to envelop it like an old-time moat. But in front of Dorothy the full breadth of the valley formed a slightly undulating glacis, strewn with boulders and traversed by hedges of briar, which ended at the foot of the almost vertical cliff of the granite pedestal.

  “A quarter to five striking,” murmured the young girl. “Saint-Quentin won’t be long.”

  She crouched down behind the enormous trunk of an uprooted tree and watched with unwinking eyes the line of demarcation between the château itself and its rocky base.

  A narrow shelf of rock lengthened this line, running below the windows of the ground floor; and there was a spot in this exiguous cornice at which there came to an end a slanting fissure in the face of the cliff, very narrow, something of the nature of a crevice in the face of a wall.

  The evening before, during their walk, Saint-Quentin had said, his finger pointing at the fissure:

  “Those people believe themselves to be perfectly secure; and yet nothing could be easier than to haul one’s self up along that crack to one of the windows.

  .. Look; there’s one which is actually half-open... the window of some pantry.”

  Dorothy had no doubt whatever that the idea of climbing the granite pedestal had gripped Saint-Quentin and that that very night he had stolen away to attempt it. What had become of him after the attempt? Had there not been some one in the room he had entered? Knowing nothing of the place he was exploring nor of the dwellers in it, had he not let himself be taken? Or was he merely waiting for the break of day?

  She was greatly troubled. For all that she could see no sign of a path along the ravine, some countryman might come along at the very moment at which Saint-Quentin took the risk of making his descent, a far more difficult business than climbing up.

  Of a sudden she quivered. One might have said that in thinking of this mischance she had brought it on them. She heard the sound of heavy footfalls coming along the ravine and making for its main entrance. She buried herself among the roots of the tree and they hid her. A man came in sight. He was wearing a long blouse; his face was encircled and hidden by a gray muffler; old, furred gloves covered his hands; he carried a gun on his arm, a mattock over his shoulder.

  She thought that he must be a sportsman, or rather a poacher, for he walked with an uneasy air, looking carefully about him, like one who feared to be seen, and who was carefully changing his usual bearing. But he came to a standstill near the wall fifty or sixty yards from the spot at which Saint-Quentin had made the ascent, and studied the ground, turning over some flat stones and bending down over them.

  At last he made up his mind and seizing one of these slabs by its narrower end, he raised it and set it up on end in such a manner that it was balanced after the fashion of a cromlech. So doing he uncovered a hole which had been hollowed out in the center of the deep imprint left by the slab. Then he took his mattock and set about enlarging it, removing the earth very quietly, evidently taking great care to make no noise.

  A few minutes more slipped away. Then the inevitable event which Dorothy had at once desired and feared took place. The window of the chateau, through which Saint-Quentin had climbed the night before, opened; and there appeared a long body dad in a long black coat, its head covered with a high hat, which, even at that distance, were plainly shiny, dirty, and patched.

  Squeezed flat against the wall, Saint-Quentin lowered himself from the window and succeeded in setting his two feet on the rocky shelf. On the instant Dorothy, who was at the back of the man in the blouse, was on the point of rising and making a warning signal to her comrade. The movement was useless. The man had perceived what looked to be a black devil clinging to the face of the cliff, and dropping his mattock, he slipped into the hole.

  For his part, Saint-Quentin, absorbed in his job of getting down, was paying no attention to what was going on below him, and could only have seen it by turning round, which was practically impossible. Uncoiling a rope, which he had, without doubt, picked up in the mansion, he ran it round a pillar of the balcony of the window in such a fashion that the two ends hung down the face of the cliff an equal distance. With the help of this double rope the descent presented no difficulty.

  Without losing a second, Dorothy, uneasy at being no longer able to see the man in a blouse, sprang from her hiding-place and raced to the hole. As she got a view of it, she smothered a cry. At the bottom of the hole, as at the bottom of a trench, the man, resting the barrel of his gun on the rampart of earth he had thrown up, was about to take deliberate aim at the unconscious climber.

  Call out? Warn Saint-Quentin? That was to precipitate the event, to make her presence known and find herself engaged in an unequal struggle with an armed adversary. But do something she must. Up there Saint-Quentin was availing himself of the fissure in the face of the cliff, for all the world as if he were descending the shaft of a chimney. The whole of him stuck out, a black and lean silhouette. His high hat had been crushed down, concertina fashion, right on to his ears.

  The man set the butt of his gun against his shoulder and took aim. Dorothy leapt forward and flung herself at the stone which stood up behind him and with the impetus of her spring and all her weight behind her outstretched hands, shoved it. It was badly balanced, gave at the shock, and toppled over, closing the excavation like a trap-door of stone, crushing the gun, and imprisoning the man in the blouse. The young girl got just a glimpse of his head as it bent and his shoulders as they were thrust down into the hole.

  She thought that the attack was only postponed, that the enemy would lose no time in getting out of his grave, and dashed at full speed to the bottom of the fissure at which she arrived at the same time as Saint-Quentin.

  “Quick... quick!” she cried. “We must bolt!” In a flurry, he dragged down the rope by one of the ends, mumbling as he did so:

  “What’s up? What d’y
ou want? How did you know I was here?”

  She gripped his arm and tugged at it.

  “Bolt, idiot!... They’ve seen you!... They were going to take a shot at you!... Quick! They’ll be after us!”

  “What’s that? Be after us? Who?”

  “A queer-looking beggar disguised as a peasant. He’s in a hole over yonder. He was going to shoot you like a partridge when I tumbled the slab on to the top of him.”

  “But—”

  “Do as I tell you, idiot! And bring the rope with you. You mustn’t leave any traces!”

  She turned and bolted; he followed her. They reached the end of the valley before the slab was raised, and without exchanging a word took cover in the wood.

  Twenty minutes later they entered the stream and did not leave it till they could emerge on to a bank of pebbles on which their feet could leave no print. Saint-Quentin was off again like an arrow; but Dorothy stopped short, suddenly shaken by a spasm of laughter which bent her double.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  She could not answer. She was convulsed, her hands pressed against her ribs, her face scarlet, her teeth, small, regular, whitely-gleaming teeth, bared. At last she managed to stutter:

  “You — you — your high — high hat!... That b-b-black coati... Your b-b-bare feet!... It’s t-t-too funny!... Where did you sneak that disguise from?... Goodness! What a sight you are!”

  Her laughter rang out, young and fresh, on the silence in which the leaves were fluttering. Facing her, Saint-Quentin, an awkward stripling who had outgrown his strength, with his face too pale, his hair too fair, his ears sticking out, but with admirable, very kindly black eyes, gazed, smiling, at the young girl, delighted by this diversion which seemed to be turning aside from him the outburst of wrath he was expecting.