“I felt the full force of the blow. It was hard lines, though I had been expecting it for some time. I bowed and cleared out. I will not dwell on the terrible time that I went through afterwards. Let it suffice to say that I had no intention of allowing matters to drop.... It was then that I sent Mademoiselle Odette the letter which is in your possession. I was mad enough to think that she would keep the appointment. I waited for her some time and then went back home. Suddenly I heard a noise in the garden. The door was being shaken. I opened it and found myself confronted by a veritable wild animal.
“Monsieur de Lavardens had my letter in his hand,” continued de Lauriac. “He threw it in my face and, foaming with rage, cried: ‘How dare you write in this way to my daughter! What do you take her for?’
“He accompanied the question with the most offensive insults. Seeing the state he was in I did my utmost to keep myself under control.
“‘I made a mistake,’ I replied, ‘in asking her to meet me. But there is some excuse for a fellow who has lost his temper. I adore your daughter and you have broken your word to me.’
“He made answer that I ought to have known from the first that he would never have given me Odette, for I was not good enough for her, being only a groom and so forth. In fact, he went so far in this sort of compliment that I could contain myself no longer, and I laid my hand on him to turn him out of the house. He had a dog-whip with him and tried to thrash me. We at once closed with each other in the most savage manner. It was at this moment that he must have torn a piece out of my tie. At last I got the better of him and bundled him into the garden. with all the more force, since he was hanging on to me in a passion of rage.
“Then I shut the door again. I could hear him shouting curses as he went away. For my part I was overcome, staggered less by the violence of the scene than by a feeling of certainty that I had lost Odette for ever, and I remained some time without stirring a limb. When I came to myself from a sort of lethargy which lasted, perhaps, for some hours, I rushed out of the house like a madman and wandered aimlessly about the country.
“I must have covered a good distance. Where did I go? Which way did I take? It would be impossible for me to tell you. It was not until daybreak that I began to recover my mental balance, and see for myself my pitiable plight; so much so that I hid myself from every person I met in order to avoid entering into any explanation. And this was how I tried to get back home without being seen, to change my clothes and think over such decisions as I should have to make. But then you arrested me, and thus I learnt of Monsieur de Lavardens’ murder and Odette’s abduction.”
When he finished his statement he sat silent and the examining magistrate could not get another word out of him that day. The magistrate sought in vain to point out discrepancies in his evidence, and gave him to understand that, in spite of the cleverness of his story, the facts themselves belied him in the most obvious fashion. For instance, if after this stormy interview Monsieur de Lavardens had simply returned to Viei-Castou-Nou he would not have omitted to shut the park gate behind him, whereas the key was still in the lock, from which it was easy to deduce that Monsieur de Lavardens had received a blow at de Lauriac’s house and was dragging himself to his own place in search of assistance. He succumbed to his injuries on the way, while de Lauriac carried off Mademoiselle de Lavardens, who was doubtless in a fainting condition — in any case, deprived of all power of defending herself.
“And, perhaps, she too is dead,” added the magistrate. “For, after all, since you will not tell us where she is we are compelled to suspect the worst. Did you carry her away alive or dead?”
To the last question, which the magistrate persisted in putting, de Lauriac replied with a shrug of his shoulders, casting a diabolical look upon him.
He was taken to prison that same evening by a circuitous route, for the police desired to escape the populace, which was greatly incensed against him and seething with excitement. De Lauriac left in Camargue a number of enemies who, since his return, had spread the most malevolent rumours about him and the manner in which he had acquired his fortune.
The truth was that nothing was known of him during those four years. He himself spoke vaguely of being engaged in the coasting-trade in the Far East, and changed the conversation if anyone tried to draw him out on the subject. He confined himself to saying that in the early days he had had a hard struggle and greatly suffered.
When he found himself confined in a prison cell, as though it were the end of his untold efforts, he fiercely shook his shoulders as if he longed to rid himself of the weight of his ill-fortune, and his parched throat gave forth the snarl of a hunted animal. He did not touch the food that was brought to him, but drained a jug of water at one gulp. And then he sat down on his stool, his elbows on his knees, holding his head in his hands.
Suddenly his attention was roused by a continuous noise which came from without; a rumbling sound which penetrated the walls which held him prisoner. A word or two in a foreign tongue fell on his ear. He rose and lifted his eyes. Above him, high in the wall, was a dingy square of glass in a narrow window, which transmitted a gleam of the pale light of night. He placed his stool on his mattress and raised himself in this way to the opening, which was protected by iron cross-bars.
The pane of glass was not fastened. He had but to open it and the voices outside grew more distinct. Amid the cracking of whips and the trampling of sandals, odds and ends of sentences which were certainly not Provençal but pure Romany, as spoken in Wallachia, struck his ear. Thus a child’s voice fretted aloud several times, Mec naxim tegalitsia—” I want something to eat” — and her raya, her mother, sent her to beka, that is, to the devil. Then the sound of singing drifted by, in which was a pleasant invocation to debla, the sun; and next voices were raised in abuse, among which recurred an irritable shout, Ushela!—” You dog!” De Lauriac understood every word.
At the same time his eyes fixed themselves in the distance on the road whitened by the moon, dotted with shadows of a procession returning to the North, a procession of slatternly men and women, creaking caravans, and lean but unwearied horses which had worn out their shoes on the great roads of the world. Still nearer, black shadows turned for a last look at Les Saintes Maries, to which they had come impelled by a dream which had, perhaps, been realized. So near were they that de Lauriac could see the dark gleam in their jade-like eyes.... And it seemed to him that not all those faces were unknown to him.
A name repeated with noisy satisfaction threw him back into the gloomy abyss of his prison.
“Sever Turn!”
Then, on the impenetrable screen which he had set up with so much unyielding obstinacy between the past and the future, certain pictures seemed to appear, sulphurous pictures which began to take shape like a vision of disaster, devastation and desolation, in which lingered an unholy figure strangely suggestive of de Lauriac himself. In the depths emerged the falling towers of a doomed city, laid waste by old-time catastrophes — invasions, — pestilence.... Sever Turn!
Sever Turn!
After the destruction of Babylon, the gipsies — for such was their Egyptian name — the most ancient people on earth, flocked from the prehistoric Atlantide to the west, whence they came and sought asylum at Sever Turn. But after the first disaster which in the Mohammedan era, fell upon the city, they fled from it terrified, and were unable to find sanctuary in any country; and other people called them derisively Bohemians, though they had never dwelt in Bohemia.
They were driven out from country to country and knew not where to lay their heads, yet it might also be asked where they buried their dead, for the grave of a gipsy was never seen, and thus a legend sprang up that they changed the direction of the bed of streams and buried their dead therein to save them from desecration by alien hands.
Throughout the centuries, their forefathers maintained that their calamities were a punishment for their cowardice. They ought never to have abandoned the sacred city; in that city alone,
in that city still, lay their salvation. Certain families, moreover, had remained in the shadow of the temple in that country so desolate and pestilential that no thought arose of disputing possession with them. Others, on the strength of prophecies, returned to it, and this was how, at the beginning of the century, the patriarchate of Transylvania was reconstituted, and since it is remote from the great highways of the world and environed by precipitous mountains, it has retained to our own day laws and customs whose antiquity is at least comparable to that of mysterious Albany, the first country of the Pelasgians.
Why was this ungodly figure of de Lauriac lingering in this country, once again devastated by pestilence? He was a pitiable sight, dissimulating a form consumed with fever under the habiliments of a gipsy to escape from a people which in its adversity denounces the stranger. Let us see him as he saw himself two years before, finding sufficient strength to mount a stolen horse and fly this country of the dead. Suddenly an arm is raised on the road — an arm which beckons him. An old man richly clad in the manner of officiating priests in the Russian or Greek Church, stands before him in his death agony, stricken by the scourge. He offers him an object in a leather covering, which he was clasping to his breast. He collects his last breath to whisper:
You are of our people. Come, take this. It is the Book of Ancestors.”
According to an ancient custom an old man was appointed to carry the Book to the neighbouring tribes, and by the fervency of his prayers to battle against the contagion.
Before the old man breathed his last he said to de Lauriac:
“The plague has struck me down. You must take the Book to the chief of the nearest village three miles from here.”
De Lauriac accepted the object that was entrusted to him. When he drew the book from its covering he saw that he was in possession of a veritable gem. All the art with which the monks of Mount Athos could embellish a missal or ikon, all the Byzantine knowledge and wealth handed down by generations of jewellers of Sever Turn, had been brought together to transform this book into a veritable marvel. The binding was inlaid with the most precious stones. Henceforward de Lauriac was a rich man, or rather he possessed the wherewithal to become rich. He hastened, with his treasure, to quit a country which was a sort of open sore in the world.
How came it that he was in the country? He had once heard someone tell his father that the de Lavardens were not formerly so wealthy, and that old de Lavardens travelled a great deal in his younger days before he achieved fortune, the foundation of which lay, according to rumour, in the acquisition of certain petroliferous lands on the borders of Transylvania. One day, indeed, de Lauriac’s father had questioned de Lavardens, who answered vaguely that he had merely passed through the country which was, indeed, one of the richest in oil in the world, but its inaccessibility, the difficulties of transport, and the ill-will of the inhabitants rendered the exploitation of the oil well-nigh impossible.
De Lauriac, who was at the end of his resources and with whom nothing had succeeded, had just entered Hungary. He made a wide detour in order to ascertain for certain what foundation there was for the rumours that the surface of the soil of this wild country was oozing with oil products. But in order to obtain admission to the forbidden zone, he was compelled to live for many long months in the country, to adopt the habits of the primitive Tziganes of the mountains, and to learn their language. And in the end he was forced to abandon his project because of the plague, and, as we have seen, to leave the country. But he brought away with him the Book of Ancestors.
What was the present state of the book shamefully despoiled of its erstwhile magnificence? In the gloom of his prison de Lauriac saw it as when he first received it, luminous as a book of fire! The amethysts, topazes, beryls, chrysoberyls, emeralds, rubies, with which it was encrusted were like so many drops of blood, blazing as though they would scorch him? But that which blinded him most in this phantasmal vision was not the magnificence in which the sacred text was encompassed, but the first few lines which he had read inside its cover:
Whose shall reverence this Book
Preserve it if it be in peril,
Restore it if it be lost,
Shall be given a fitting recompense.
But whose shall steal this Book,
Or mutilate it,
Shall be chastened and suffer the pain of death.
Superstitious, like every self-respecting herdsman, de Lauriac was never able to forget those words. Sometimes, when least he expected it, they rose up before him from the depths of his too tenacious memory. Sometimes a supernatural force seemed to project them outside himself so that he could see them with greater clearness, and they began to dance before his bewildered eyes... and his terror-stricken face - as they were dancing that night, for the name — of the accursed city rang in his ears that night; he beheld once more the people of Sever Turn, beheld their dark faces, their jade-like eyes, their gestures of execration. And was not the prophecy in the very process of being fulfilled that night? Was he not marching along the road which’ led to chastisement and death? —
These people had, in very truth, entered into a compact with the devil, with their debla! All that had befallen him since was anything but natural; was, indeed, supernatural. To begin with, these people had changed the character of “his Odette.” He no longer recognized her. When he left her she was his—” all his.” By what species of witchcraft had it come about that she refused to look at him when he returned? And then the incidents which had ensued! Everything had turned against him in an extraordinary way. Then came that infernal night when, instead of Odette, he had encountered her father... her father who next day was found murdered! By whom? By whom? By himself perhaps. He did not know! He had denied it with all the strength of his being; he had denied it with all his longing to have done no murder; but by no means with the full power of his conviction. He did not know!
He, so clever, so crafty, who by dint of quiet cunning had got the better of more than one person, had suddenly acted like a man possessed. He had seen red; in other words he was incapable of seeing things as they were. Why had he forgotten that the very last thing to do, in spite of all, was to raise his hand against Odette’s father? He had seen red; he had struck him a blow and perhaps killed him. When de Lavardens raised his whip against him he had, perhaps, seized a dagger which lay on his desk ostensibly for the purpose of cutting the pages of his books.... But de Lauriac never read books. This dagger was more or less an absurd ornament, but assuredly, in his hand it might have carried death with it. What had he done with the dagger? He did not know! His memory seemed to have become detached from the struggle. From a certain moment onward his mind had fallen into a dark void and when he recovered at daybreak he found himself wandering about the country like a madman. What had become of that trifling object bought at a bazaar, that insignificant paper-cutter shaped like a dagger? What had he done with it? His mind was a blank.... It was chaos and witchcraft!... Mai chauriko — But listen! Ahvenjanco — Oh for revenge! Orro enjanco — Abominable people!
Thus, in his intense mental confusion, de Lauriac connected his present calamities with the “evil spell” which the People of the Road had at their command to revenge themselves on the “stranger” who had laid violent hands on the Book of Ancestors. In his uncouth mind, reckless and timorous by turns, he entertained the thought that the fatal book, after being the starting point of his good fortune, would turn against him and bring upon him the direst woes. His sufferings at that moment were considerable. Faced by Rouletabille, Jean, and the magistrate he had never flinched, standing up to them like a man who scorns an infamous charge, but to himself and the Book of Ancestors he was like an animal hunted down by a relentless fate. To be charged with murder and not to know whether he had committed it or not, was indeed to suffer the tortures of the damned.
As to Odette... well, the thought that she might never be found again made his heart leap and he gave a savage laugh.
CHAPTER X
BEWARE OF THE OCTOPUS!
THE FIRST QUESTION which Jean asked himself after de Lauriac was removed to prison was: — What was Rouletabille doing? While de Lauriac was at the Viei-Castou-Nou it was impossible for Jean to leave it. He was waiting for some word which would betray his rival, perhaps some confession; in any case, some clue which would put them on the track of Odette. When de Lauriac was gone Jean discovered that Rouletabille had left the château many hours before. After his brief investigation at Lavardens, he had taken the car which brought him and Jean from Avignon, and driven towards Les Saintes Maries. On learning this, Jean stepped into his racing car and started in pursuit on the off-chance of overtaking Rouletabille.
Nevertheless his progress was slow. Every now and then he pulled up to question the peasants and to gaze wonderingly into the great expanse of earth and sky at Camargue. Where was Odette? Where was Odette?
Suppose de Lauriac had not killed her as he had killed her father, where was he hiding her? To what retreat sheltered by the marshlands had he carried the poor child? De Lauriac knew every nook and cranny of Camargue which, beautiful and treacherous alike, seemed to have become the villain’s accomplice. He knew all the whirlpools which lay behind the tall smooth trunks of the trees. He had traversed every section of the Rhone, which was scattered with little islands. In what direction should he search for her?
The country between Arles and the coast had rarely been so lovely as at the close of that day. The waters reflected the softness of the falling evening and enfolded the land in a golden haze. In the distance the bells of Les Saintes Maries floated over the country lulled to rest after the festivities of the day. Nearer still the great sedge-warblers in full flight uttered their joyous notes. Standing in the car, which had pulled up at a cross-road, the question nearest his heart forced itself upon him once more, and Jean stretched out his arms to the horizon with a gesture of despair. “Odette! Odette!” he cried, and fell back in tears.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 106
