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

by Maurice Leblanc

  “Oh, no! A thousand times, no! Whatever be the attraction of the benefit to be derived, one does not mutilate oneself. No, no: your contention falls to the ground. What? You represent this fellow as ready to cut off his finger! This fellow with his dull face, his air of stupidity! But he is incapable of it! He’s weak and a coward...”

  The argument struck Dorothy. It threw light on the most obscure part of the business; and she drew from it exactly the conclusions it warranted.

  “You’re right,” she said. “A man like him is incapable of mutilating himself.”

  “In that case?”

  “In that case, some one else has charged himself with this sinister task.”

  “Some one else has cut off the finger? An accomplice?”

  “More than an accomplice, his chief? The brain which has devised these combinations is not his. He is not the man who has staged the adventure. He is only an instrument, sortie common rogue chosen for his fleshless aspect. The man who holds the threads remains invisible; and he is formidable.” The notary shivered.

  “One would say you knew him.”

  After a pause she answered slowly:

  “It is possible that I do know him. If my instinct does not deceive me, the master criminal is the man who I handed over to justice, this d’Estreicher of whom I spoke just now. While he is in prison his accomplices — for there are several of them — have taken up the work he began and are trying to carry it through.... Yes, yes,” she added, “one can well believe that it is d’Estreicher who has arranged the whole business. He has been engaged in the affair for years; and such a machination is entirely in accord with his cunning and wily spirit. We must be on our guard against him. Even in prison he is a dangerous adversary.”

  “Dangerous... dangerous...” said the notary, trying to reassure himself. “I don’t see what threatens us. Besides, the affair draws to its end. As regards the precious stones, open the codicil. And as far as I am concerned, my task is performed.”

  “It isn’t a matter of knowing whether your task is performed, Maître Delarue,” Dorothy answered in the same thoughtful tone. “It’s a matter of escaping a danger which is not quite clear to me but which permits me to expect anything, which I foresee more and more clearly. Where will it come from? I don’t know. But it exists.”

  “It’s terrible,” groaned Maître Delarue. “How are we to defend ourselves? What are we to do?”

  “What are we to do?”

  She turned towards the little room which served as alcove. The man no longer stirred, his head and face buried in the shadow.

  “Question him. You quite understand that this super did not come here alone. They have intrusted him with this post, but the others are on the watch, the agents of d’Estreicher. They are waiting in the wings for the result of the comedy. They are spying on us. Perhaps they hear us. Question him. He is going to tell us the measures to be taken against us in case of a check.”

  “He will not speak.”

  “But he will — he will. He is in our hands; and it is entirely to his interest to win our forgiveness for the part he has played. He is one of those people who are always on the side of the stronger.... Look at him.”

  The man remained motionless. Not a gesture. However his attitude did not look natural. Sitting as he was, half bent over, he should have lost his balance.

  “Errington... Webster... light him up,” Dorothy ordered.

  Simultaneously the rays from the two electric lamps fell on him.

  Some seconds passed.

  “Ah!” sighed Dorothy, who was the first to grasp the terrible fact; and she started back.

  All six of them were shocked by the same sight, at first inexplicable. The bust and the head which they believed to be motionless, were bending a little forward, with a movement which was hardly perceptible, but which did not cease. At the bottom of the orbits rose the eyes, quite round, eyes full of terror, which gleamed, like carbuncles, in the concentric fires of the two lamps. His mouth moved convulsively as if to utter a cry which did not issue from it. Then the head settled down on to the chest, dragging the bust with it. They saw for some seconds the ebony hilt of a dagger, the blade of which half buried in the right shoulder, at the junction with the neck, was streaming with blood. And finally the whole body huddled on to itself. Slowly, like a wounded beast, the man sank to his knees on the stone floor, and suddenly fell in a heap.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE FOURTH MEDAL

  VIOLENT THOUGH THIS sensational turn was, it provoked from those who witnessed it neither outcries nor disorder. Something mastered their terror, smothered their words, and restrained their gestures: the impossibility of conceiving how this murder had been committed. The impossible resurrection of the Marquis was transformed into a miracle of death quite as impossible; but they could not deny this miracle since it had taken place before their eyes. In truth, they had the impression, since no living being had entered, that death itself had stepped over the threshold, crossed the room to the man, struck him in their presence with its invisible hand, and then gone away, leaving the murderous weapon in the corpse. None but a phantom could have passed. None but a phantom could have killed.

  “Errington,” said Dorothy, who had recovered her coolness more quickly than her companions, “there’s no one on the staircase, is there? Dario, surely the window is too small for any one to slip through? Webster and Kourobelef look to the walls of the alcove.”

  She stooped and took the dagger from the wound. No convulsion stirred the victim’s body. It was indeed a corpse. An examination of the dagger and the clothes gave no clue.

  Errington and Dario rendered an account of their mission. The staircase? Empty. The window? Too narrow.

  They joined the Russian and the American, as did Dorothy also; and all five of them examined and sounded the walls of the alcove with such minuteness that Dorothy expressed the absolute conviction of all of them when she declared in a tone of finality:

  “No entrance. It is impossible to admit that any one passed that way.”’

  “Then?” stuttered the notary, who was sitting on the stool and had not moved for the excellent reason that his legs refused to be of the slightest use to him. “Then?”

  He asked the question with a kind of humility as if he regretted not having admitted without opposition all Dorothy’s explanations, and promised to accept all she should consent to give him. Dorothy, who had so clearly announced the peril which threatened them, and so clearly elucidated all the problems of this obscure affair, suddenly appeared to him to-be a woman who makes no mistake, who cannot make any mistake. And owing to that fact he saw in her a powerful protection against the attacks which were about to ensue.

  Dorothy for her part felt confusedly that the truth was prowling round her, that she was on the point of perceiving with perfect clearness that which had no form, and that it was a thing which most moreover astonish her infinitely. Why could she not guess what was hidden in the shadow? It appeared almost as if she was afraid to guess it and that she was deliberately turning away from a danger which her intelligence would have pointed out to her at once, if her womanly instincts had not suffered her to blind herself for several minutes.

  Indeed, those several minutes, she lost them. Like one whom dangers surround and who does not know against which he must first defend himself, she shuffled about on one spot. She wasted time on futile phrases, keeping herself simply to the actual facts of the situation, in the hope perhaps that one of her words might strike the enlightening spark out of its flint.

  “Maître Delarue, there’s a death and a crime. We must therefore inform the police. However... however I think we could put it off for a day or two.”

  “Put it off?” he protested. “That’s a step I won’t take. That is a formality which admits of no delay.”

  “You will never get back to Périac.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the band which had been able to get rid under our very eyes o
f a confederate who was in its way, must have taken precautions, and the road which leads to Périac must be guarded.”

  “You believe that?... You believe that?” stuttered Maître Delarue.

  “I believe it.”

  She answered in a hesitating fashion. At the moment she was suffering bitterly, being one of those creatures to whom uncertainty is torture. She had a profound impression that an essential element of the truth was lacking. Protected as she was in that tower, with four resolute men beside her, it was not she who directed events. She was under the constraint of the law of the enemy who was oppressing and in a way directing her as his fancy took him.

  “But it’s terrible,” lamented Maître Delarue. “I cannot stay here forever.... My practice demands my attention.... I have a wife... children.”

  “Go, Maître Delarue. But first of all hand over to us the envelope of the codicil that I gave back to you. We will open it in your presence.”

  “Have you the right?”

  “Why not? The letter of the Marquis is explicit: ‘In the event of Destiny having betrayed me and your finding no trace of me, you will yourselves open the envelope, and learning their hiding-place, take possession of the diamonds.’ That’s clear, isn’t it? And since we know that the Marquis is dead and quite dead, we have the right to take possession of the four diamonds of which we are the proprietors — all five of us... all five.”

  She stopped short. She had uttered words which, as the saying goes, clashed curiously. The contradiction of the terms she had used — four diamonds, five proprietors — was so flagrant that the young men were struck by them, and that Maître Delarue himself, absorbed as he was in other matters, received a considerable shock.

  “As a matter of fact that’s true: you are five. How was it we didn’t notice that detail? You are five and there are only four diamonds.”

  Dario explained.

  “Doubtless that arises from the fact that there are four men and that we have only paid attention to this number four, four strangers in contrast with you, mademoiselle, who are French.”

  “But you can’t get away from the fact that you are five,” said Maître Delarue.

  “And what about it?” said Webster.

  “Well, you’re five; and the Marquis, according to his letter, had only four sons to whom he left four gold medals. You understand, four gold medals?” Webster made the objection:

  “He could have bequeathed four... and left five.”

  He looked at Dorothy. She was silent. Was she going to find in this unexpected incident the solution of the enigma which escaped him? She said thoughtfully:

  “Always supposing that a fifth medal has not been fabricated since on the model of the others and then transmitted to us by a process of fraud.”

  “How are we to know it?”

  “Let us compare our medals,” she said “An examination of them will enlighten us perhaps.” Webster was the first to present his medal:

  It showed no peculiarity which gave them to believe that it was not one of the four original pieces struck by the instructions of the Marquis and controlled by him. An examination of the medals of Dario, Kourobelef, and Errington showed the same. Maître Delarue who had taken all four of them and was examining them minutely, held out his hand for Dorothy’s medal.

  She had taken out the little leather purse which she had slipped into her bodice. She untied the strings and stood amazed. The purse was empty. She shook it, turned it inside out. Nothing.

  “It’s gone.... It’s gone,” she said in a hushed voice.

  An astonished silence followed her declaration. Then the notary asked:

  “You haven’t lost it by any chance?”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t have lost it If I had, I should have lost the little bag at the same time.”

  “But how do you explain it?” said the notary. Dario intervened a trifle dryly:

  “Mademoiselle has no need to explain. For you don’t pretend...”

  “Of course none of us supposes that modemoiseile has come here without having the right,” said the notary. “In the place of four medals there are five, that’s all I meant to say.”

  Dorothy said again in the most positive tones: ““I have not lost it. From the moment it was missing — —”

  She was on the point of saying:

  “From the moment it was missing from this purse it had been stolen from me.”

  She did not finish that sentence. Her heart was wrung by a sudden anguish, as she suddenly grasped the full meaning of such an accusation; and the problem presented itself to her in all its simplicity and with its only possible and exact solution: “The four pieces of gold are there. One of them has been stolen from me. Then one of these four men is a thief.”

  And this undeniable fact brought her abruptly to such a vision of the facts, to a certainty so unforeseen and so formidable that she needed almost superhuman energy to restrain herself. It was needful that no one should be on their guard against her, before she had considered the matter and fully taken in the tragic aspect of the situation. She accepted therefore the notary’s hypothesis and murmured:

  “After all... yes... that’s it. You must be right, Maître Delarue, I’ve lost that medal.... But how? I can’t think in what way I could have lost it... at what moment.”

  She spoke in a very low voice, an absent-minded voice. The parted curls showed her forehead furrowed by anxiety. Maître Delarue and the four strangers were exchanging futile phrases; not one of them seemed worth her consideration. Then they were silent. The silence lengthened. The lamps were switched off. The light from the little window was concentrated on Dorothy. She was very pale, so pale that she was aware of it and hid her face in her hands in order to prevent them from perceiving the effects of the emotions which were racking her.

  Violent emotions, which proceeded from that truth that she had had such difficulty in attaining and which was disengaging itself from the shadows. It was not by scraps that she was gathering up the revealing clues but in a mass so to speak. The clouds had been swept away. In front of her, before her closed eyes, she saw... she saw.... Oh! What a terrifying fact!

  However she stubbornly kept herself silent and motionless, while to her mind there presented themselves in quick succession during the course of a few seconds all the questions and all the answers, all the arguments and all the proofs.

  She recalled the fact that the night before at the village of Périac the caravan had nearly been destroyed by fire. Who had started that fire? And with what motive? Might she not suppose that one of those unhoped-for helpers, who had appeared so suddenly in the very nick of time, had taken advantage of the confusion to slip into the caravan, ransack her sleeping birth, and open the little leather purse hanging from a nail.

  Possessor of the medal, the chief of the gang returned in haste to the ruins of Roche-Périac and disposed his men in that peninsula, the innermost recesses of which must be known to him, and in which he had everything arranged in view of the fateful day, the 12th of July, 1921. Doubtless he had had a dress rehearsal with his confederate cast for the part of the sleeping Marquis. Final instructions. Promises of reward in the event of success. Menaces in the event of failure. And at noon he arrived quietly in front of the clock, like the other strangers, presented the medal, the only certificate of identity required, and was present at the reading of the will. Then came the ascent of the tower and the resurrection of the Marquis. In another instant she would have handed over the codicil to him; and he reached his goal. The great plot which d’Estreicher had been so long weaving attained its end. And how could she fail to observe that up to the very last minute, there had been in the working out of that plan, in the performance of unforeseen actions, necessitated by the chances, the same boldness, the same vigor, the same methodical decision? There are battles which are only won when the chief is on the battlefield.

  He is here, she thought, distracted. He has escaped from prison and he is here. His confederate was g
oing to betray him and join us; he killed him. He is here. Rid of his beard and spectacles, his skull shaved, his arm in a sling, disguised as a Russian soldier, not speaking a word, changing his bearing, he was unrecognizable. But it is certainly d’Estreicher. Now he has his eyes fixed on me. He is hesitating. He is asking himself have I penetrated his disguise.... Whether he can go on with the comedy... or whether he should unmask and compel us, revolver in hand, to hand over the codicil, that is to say the diamonds.

  Dorothy did not know what to do. In her place a man of her character and temper would have settled the question by throwing himself on the enemy. But a woman?... Already her legs were failing her; she was in the grip of terror — of terror also for the three young men whom d’Estreicher could lay low with three shots.

  She withdrew her hands from her face. Without turning she was aware that they were waiting, all four of them. D’Estreicher was one of the group, his eyes fixed on her... yes, fixed on her.... She felt the savage glare which followed her slightest movement and sought to discover her intentions.

  She slid a step towards the door. Her plan was to gain that door, bar the enemy’s way, face him, and throw herself between him and the three young men. Blockaded against the walls of the room, with escape impossible, there were plenty of chances that he would be forced to yield to the will of three strong and resolute men.

  She moved yet another step, imperceptibly... then another. Ten feet separated her from the door. She saw on her right its heavy mass, studded with nails.

  She said, as if the disappearance of the medal still filled her mind:

  “I must have lost it... a day or two ago.... I had it on my knee.... I must have forgotten to put it back—”

  Suddenly she made her spring.

  Too late. At the very moment that she drew herself together, d’Estreicher, foreseeing it, leapt in front of the door, a revolver in either outstretched hand.

  This sudden act was masked by no single word. There was no need of words indeed for the three young men to grasp the fact that the murderer of the false Marquis stood before them. Instinctively they recoiled from the menace; then on the instant pulled themselves together, and ready for the; counterstroke, they advanced.