Collected Works of Gaston Leroux

by Gaston Leroux

  “The reprieve is granted.”

  I rose from my seat and found strength for flight. But I was overwhelmed by the charitable insistence of Sir Archibald, who happened to be near me and who accompanied me to the sidewalk, offering to take me home in his car. I thanked him, and stammered some unintelligible phrases. At length he gave me his card, and begged me to call on him that evening at the Cambridge Hotel, where he was stopping.

  “And if you would do us the pleasure of dining with us, I should be delighted. I would like to talk with you about Durin.”

  Feeling that my presence would be highly embarrassing to Lady Helena, I accepted his invitation.

  At this moment Helena emerged from the courthouse, chatting with a group of friends. Sir Archibald introduced me. I bowed before Lady Helena with a haughtiness that was ridiculous. But she did not trouble to smile at it; she was absorbed by her conversation, and acknowledged my introduction with an absent-minded nod. Never in my life have I felt my insignificance as at the moment. And from the bottom of my outraged pride of a young lawyer I hated this wealthy and beautiful woman.

  When I presented myself, at eight o’clock, at the Cambridge Hotel, I was led at once to Sir Archibald’s apartment. There I was received by Durin, who was already at his old post.

  “Sir Archibald begs to be excused for a few minutes. Meanwhile I should like to take advantage of this opportunity to thank you....”

  “That’ll do, Durin!”

  And I showed him the door.

  “It’ll do better still,” he answered, “when I have given you your fee... on behalf of Sir Archibald.”

  He handed me an envelope which I slipped into my pocket. God knows, I had earned it.

  “Thank you, nevertheless,” he added.

  When he had gone out, I opened the envelope: five thousand.

  Good and bad are always bound together. This little sum gave me pleasure, for it arrived at an opportune time. I had need of it. I had just time to put it away before Sir Archibald entered.

  “I hope you will excuse Lady Skarlett,” he said as he offered his hand. “She is not feeling well this evening. The scene in the court this afternoon has tired her out. If you are willing, we will go out somewhere for dinner. Would you like to walk a bit?”

  As we left the hotel, I caught a glimpse of Lady Helena, in evening dress, stepping into a limousine where a friend was already seated. A flutter of silver laughter reached my ears....

  Sir Archibald gave no sign of having noticed. I spent two hours with him, and at the end of that time was no longer ignorant of what the Puritan soul could be. He talked incessantly of Durin, of the necessity of saving a soul that was not essentially evil, and of the responsibilities of a master towards his servants. As I listened without interrupting him, my conversation pleased him. He invited me to go grouse-hunting with him on his estate in Scotland.

  I responded vaguely to his courtesies, and left him to return to my room, rich in memories and five thousand francs, but cursing Lady Helena in my heart.

  At the corner of the Boulevard Saint Germain a limousine stood motionless. At the sound of my steps, a feminine figure leaned out of the door:

  “Ruddy!”

  I leaped on the running-board. I was in Lady Helena’s arms. At the sound of her voice, all my former infatuation had swept over me like an attack of dizziness. I forgot that she had betrayed me; I forgot Nathalie, who would be waiting to hear my report of what had happened in court.

  “I cannot stay more than a minute,” she whispered, “and we are leaving Paris tomorrow. Sir Archibald has invited you to go grouse-hunting. In a few weeks you will get a letter. Come, Ruddy, come, I beg you! Don’t desert me!”

  This was the only explanation we had. The following month I took the boat at Boulogne, and crossed the channel one night during a storm. I was ill on the way over; but more so later.

  CHAPTER XII

  ENGLAND ACCORDED ME a gracious welcome. Up to the border of Scotland I traveled through green fields, the color of hope. It was a fine autumn day, an opal sky pierced by the spires of cathedrals. The Gothic architecture of red bricks and gable roofs, dressed in ivy, suggested modern comfort more than the mysteries of the Middle Ages. I was on my way towards Helena.

  So the adventure was to continue, was it? Well, so much the better! My blood was stirred now and I was eager to match my wits against those of Durin. Perhaps, after all, he had been as useful to me as I had been to him.

  Helena had addressed her appeal to me: “Do not desert me!”

  Enough of this lyric mood! From now on I must be calm and prudent. Helena had set the example for me: had she not been prudence itself after Sir Archibald had returned to Deauville? She had not recognized me, she had not written to me. She did not shrink from the torture she had inflicted on me: a temporary grief which had been necessary to save us both, for the time had come for me to fulfill my duties as lawyer. Between two such men as Sir Archibald and Durin, no precaution was too great.

  Poor Helena! What a cruel life she was condemned to! I understood now her determination to risk everything to escape. I should help her, if it was the last thing I did: I had acquired a taste for risk now myself. I was no longer the naïve young law clerk. Durin had educated me to his own loss.

  With nightfall I reached Scotland, and put up at the Two Crowns Hotel, at Stirling. But I could not sleep. The Skarletts were to come for me by automobile the next morning. At seven o’clock I was ready. Three hours to kill! I sent for a guide who offered to show me the points of interest. I followed him about while he told me stories I did not listen to and showed me things I did not see.

  Occasionally a few of his words penetrated to my consciousness: Kings of Scotland... impregnable position... Thirteenth Century castle. Once he broke through my indifference by repeating, “Heading Hill — Heading Hill!” and pointing towards a steep cliff. There, in 1421, James I had had his uncle, the Duke of Albany, his brother-in-law, the Count of Lenox, his two sons, Walter and Alexander Stuart, beheaded.... But what did they matter to me?

  Hello! A little Greek temple in the gardens of the Douglas castle. It was in this charming setting that James II planted his royal dagger in Douglas’ heart. Douglas was one of the league of nobles who were dissatisfied with James’ reign. “If you will not break up this league,” said the King, “here is something that will.” And he drove the dagger home. Moral: Never be dissatisfied.

  I looked at my watch. Was it only an hour I had been listening to this old bore? In the center of a lawn stood a large stone, covered with half-effaced carvings of a coat of arms. I sat down on it. The guide rushed towards me breathlessly:

  “Don’t touch that! It’ll bring you bad luck!”

  Too late, old man! I filled my pipe tranquilly and lighted it, scratching a match on the opposite side of the stone from the arms of “Douglas of the bleeding heart.”

  Eventually we made our way back to the hotel, the guide despatching a few last murders along the way.

  Helena had come without her husband, but accompanied by the same young Oriental dancer I had met at Deauville and seen later on the beach at Lion-by-the-Sea. I hardly recognized Helena in this somber beauty: she was wrapped in long veils, the glowing bronze of her southern ardor extinguished. Even more than the veils, her pallor concealed her from me. Her welcome was grave; but her hand held mine for a long moment and I felt her grateful tenderness.

  “Thank you, Ruddy, for coming. Shall we start back at once? Sir Archibald is very ill.”

  I sat on the little seat, facing the two women, and completely bewildered. What had happened? Helena detested her husband, I knew. Yet she was apparently not acting; she had confided too fully in me for that.

  Then why this air of depression, when release for her was near?

  “Sir Archibald was unusually well until three days ago, and then he suddenly began to suffer atrocious pains. The doctors have diagnosed it as a heart attack. He is a little better now, but very weak.... He wro
te all our friends not to come, except you.”

  All except me! But she did not say why this exception had been made for me....

  “Now that you are here, Ruddy, that will give me confidence.”

  “Are they afraid he may...?”

  “We have to be prepared for anything.”

  We drove for some distance in silence, a silence that hinted at many unspoken meanings. Unobtrusively I studied the little Annamite dancer, before whom Helena called me “Ruddy” so tenderly. But Mina did not count; she was a little statuette from the East, with eyes of glass, which turned their unmoved gaze on Helena from time to time as though she was waiting for a word, or an order. I felt that Mina had endured many whims of Helena’s; yet she was perhaps happy, even when Helena made her suffer. But her eyes would never tell you.

  “I am afraid your visit to Black Rooks will be anything but gay, my dear Ruddy,” said Helena. “It is selfish of us to want you here at such a moment.”

  “I am your friend, Helena. If I can help, I shall be glad.”

  She rested her hand on mine and left it there: her touch was infinitely gentle and paid me in advance for the drama that I foresaw ahead of me. I was ready to plunge into it without a glance behind me. That strange wave of magnetism that emanated from this exotic woman stole into my blood through the touch of her hand. I drank in her veiled Egyptian beauty: once more I believed that she loved me and that I loved her. What name can one give to this love that is more like the witchery of opium than an emotion? That allays all distrust in the heart and awakens a deeper distrust at the same moment in the soul? That reveals the dangers in its path, and yet sends one unafraid, unmindful of the cost, to encounter them? This was certainly not the comfortable love that buys a bungalow in the suburbs and prepares the evening meal; it was perilously close to that intoxication of which the poets have sung, that lifts men among the gods or hurls them down into madness. Which way had I taken?

  While these thoughts were going on in me, we exchanged a few casual remarks. We were coming into the country of Rob Roy, I was told. Then the lakes; but my mind was not on the landscape.

  Massive towers against the sky; broken arches that held up their ragged arms as if in memory of long-past tragedies! crumbling castles on the edges of precipices.... We passed through a dark forest of oaks and beeches, and came out on a lonely, rocky heath.

  Suddenly, in the midst of this chaos of mountains and ruins, leaning over the dead surfaces of gray water, I felt myself invaded by a deep, wordless anguish. Helena’s hand on mine, her brow leaning towards me, were like the two poles of her being through which the current of her thoughts and feelings passed into me. I was surprised to feel the same shudder that ran through her body at the sight of certain half-demolished walls, slowly being recaptured by the devouring force of nature. Those martyred queens, those noble ladies, who had spent years in reeking dungeons in these hills, had not been more tranquil, more submissive to an inevitable fate, than Lady Skarlett at that moment.

  She was like one of those marble statues by a tomb, on the edge of a cemetery or in the gloom of a vault, where Fear has been turned to stone. She did not need to speak. She looked out through the windows of the car, and under my eyes the rocky Scotch glens were peopled as of old. With her I saw the lairds in chain armor stepping down from the ruins, to gather their clans. Blood trickled down each of the dry beds of mountain streams. The massacres of the Reformation, the vengeances that were passed on from generation to generation — all of this I evoked the more vividly because of my ignorance of the fact that these smouldering hatreds were not yet extinguished. Though there might be palaces at Edinburgh and factories at Glasgow, one had only to penetrate a little distance into the Highlands to find untouched the customs of past years, and feuds that stopped at nothing to gain their satisfaction.

  We could not have been far from Black Rooks when Helena said abruptly:

  “You know the Skarletts are related to the Montrose family, and by his mother Sir Archibald is also descended from MacGregor, who is famous in the history of Scotland — under the name of Rob Roy. It is probably because of this double heritage that he scorns to use his titles, except the most modest and is called merely “His Lordship” by those whom he still thinks of as his vassals. You must not smile at his old-time ways, Ruddy.”

  I assured her I would not. What difference did the genealogy of the Skarletts make to me?

  But as Helena fixed her eyes on me insistently, I made an effort to dig up my schoolboy memories of Walter Scott, and from my reading of Old Mortality recalled the fact that Rob Roy’s real name had been MacGregor, and that he had only become a bandit after his quarrel with the Duke of Montrose....

  “Then everything is happily settled,” I said, “since the blood of the two hostile families is united in Sir Archibald.”

  Without replying to my remark, Lady Helena continued:

  “Rob Roy left five sons, and the MacGregors, as they continued to be known, had kept up the feud against the descendants of the Duke of Montrose for more than two hundred years, when Elizabeth MacGregor fell in love with Sir Archibald’s father and married him against the will of her family. For Sir Archibald’s father, Sir Edward Skarlett, the match promised to be very advantageous: for Sir Edward was on the verge of bankruptcy. Elizabeth was reputed to be very rich; her father owned large amounts of stock in one of the biggest shipbuilding firms of the Clyde, as well as vast estates in the Highlands, and the castle of Black Rooks, which at one time had been captured by Rob Roy. But he refused to give any dowry to his daughter, and forbade his heir, little David (his only other child), ever to share his fortune with his sister or to help her in any way.

  “But Elizabeth’s father died suddenly, shortly afterwards, and there was some suspicion that he had been poisoned. David inherited the fortune, but at the age of fifteen he also died, one night in midwinter, when he had got lost during a hunt. His body was found the next morning, half eaten by wolves. Thus Sir Archibald’s father came into the inheritance.

  “Today Sir Archibald, the eldest son of Sir Edward, has gathered the whole fortune of the MacGregors into his own hands and lives at Black Rooks.

  “The MacGregors were beloved in this country, and the Skarletts are detested. Sir Archibald has inherited all the hatred accumulated by his father. That was why he sought a career in India, which kept him away from home for many years. He returned in hopes that the old feeling had been forgotten; and, to tell the truth, we have had little to complain of since we came back. But the people of the countryside watch us go by with an indifference under which we can feel their hostility ready to flame out. I am telling you all of this, Ruddy, so that you will understand the situation and not make any remarks.”

  She had told me this story with none of her frequent exclamations in Oriental languages, which she used when she was in a gay mood; and from that I understood that these facts were important in her eyes — and might become so for me as well. She had not brought me all the way from Paris to the Highlands for amusement.

  “Thank you, Helena. I understand better now why you are so sad, living in this atmosphere...”

  “Yes, Ruddy....”

  The road was climbing now in wide loops, and the sky grew murky. A fog was coming up on our left, hiding the long valley where Loch Catherine lay in a lugubrious slumber. Low clouds, driven by the west wind, passed over our heads, pierced by the lonely cawing of crows; and when the car plunged into a deep forest, which we were not to leave until we arrived at the foot of Black Rooks, we were surrounded by a semiobscurity more gloomy than the night itself.

  At a crossroads in the forest the chauffeur stopped suddenly. We thought for a moment that something was wrong with the car; but he remained in his seat, listening. Then he turned towards us, and through the glass we could see his pale face and startled eyes.

  Helena lowered the glass.

  “What is it, Oliver?”

  “Didn’t your ladyship hear it?” he stammered. �
�A cry!”

  “Well, what of it?”

  “It was the cry of death, your ladyship.... It was the banshee....”

  “Nonsense, Oliver! Drive on.”

  She ran the glass up again, and Oliver set off at full speed.

  In spite of her words, it was obvious that Helena had not received the chauffeur’s confidence unmoved. Her hand, which I had once more taken into mine, quivered.

  “Who is the banshee?” I asked.

  “Nobody! It is a superstition in the country. Each old family is supposed to have its banshee. It is the ghost of a woman, whose cries give warning of the death of a chief. Our banshee is called Jenny — Jenny the Weaver. The last time she appeared at Black Rooks was just before the death of Sir Edward Skarlett.... All of this is preposterous, Ruddy, and yet when you live day and night among such tales, they have an effect on you. These people are sapping my health; they live with the dead.”

  To drive away the banshee, I could think of nothing better than to place a kiss on Helena’s wrist, above her glove. The flesh was cold to my touch.

  “Thank God, Ruddy, you have come!” she murmured. “You are my only consolation here.”

  Then she withdrew her hand, for we were arriving at Black Rooks. It was less a château than a fortress; and no modern architecture, at least on the exterior, had softened any of its ancient roughness and warlike severity. A somber dwelling, paved with cold stones and smoked rather than heated by huge fireplaces. Narrow windows dating from the days when the frames were removed during the absence of the owner, for glass was a rare and costly luxury. For long periods at a time wind and ghosts were the only masters of those halls. The moat encircling the coarse granite was filled with a yellowish water. Above the walls, and dominating the countryside, rose the bleak and threatening silhouette of a great tower, whose foundations housed an ancient dungeon.

  I could not repress a sigh: “Helena...”