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

by Maurice Leblanc

  It gave them a thrill of inexpressible excitement to read their two names, which a friendly hand had, so to speak, sown; their two names united in pansy-flowers. It was inexpressibly exciting too that he and she should always find themselves thus linked together, linked together by events, linked together by their portraits, linked together by an unseen force of will, linked together now by the struggling effort of little flowers that spring up, waken into life and blossom in predetermined order.

  Coralie, sitting up, said:

  “It’s Siméon who attends to the garden.”

  “Yes,” he said, wavering slightly. “But surely that does not affect my opinion. Our unknown friend is dead, but Siméon may have known him. Siméon perhaps was acting with him in certain matters and must know a good deal. Oh, if he could only put us on the right road!”

  An hour later, as the sun was sinking on the horizon, they climbed the terraces. On reaching the top they saw M. Masseron beckoning to them.

  “I have something curious to show you,” he said, “something I have found which will interest both you, madame, and you, captain, particularly.”

  He led them to the very end of the terrace, outside the occupied part of the house next to the library. Two detectives were standing mattock in hand. In the course of their searching, M. Masseron explained, they had begun by removing the ivy from the low wall adorned with terra-cotta vases. Thereupon M. Masseron’s attention was attracted by the fact that this wall was covered, for a length of some yards, by a layer of plaster which appeared to be more recent in date than the stone.

  “What did it mean?” said M. Masseron. “I had to presuppose some motive. I therefore had this layer of plaster demolished; and underneath it I found a second layer, not so thick as the first and mingled with the rough stone. Come closer . . . or, rather, no, stand back a little way: you can see better like that.”

  The second layer really served only to keep in place some small white pebbles, which constituted a sort of mosaic set in black pebbles and formed a series of large, written letters, spelling three words. And these three words once again were:

  Patrice and Coralie

  “What do you say to that?” asked M. Masseron. “Observe that the inscription goes several years back, at least ten years, when we consider the condition of the ivy clinging to this part of the wall.”

  “At least ten years,” Patrice repeated, when he was once more alone with Coralie. “Ten years ago was when you were not married, when you were still at Salonica and when nobody used to come to this garden . . . nobody except Siméon and such people as he chose to admit. And among these,” he concluded, “was our unknown friend who is now dead. And Siméon knows the truth, Coralie.”

  They saw old Siméon, late that afternoon, as they had seen him constantly since the tragedy, wandering in the garden or along the passages of the house, restless and distraught, with his comforter always wound round his head and his spectacles on his nose, stammering words which no one could understand. At night, his neighbor, one of the maimed soldiers, would often hear him humming to himself.

  Patrice twice tried to make him speak. He shook his head and did not answer, or else laughed like an idiot.

  The problem was becoming complicated; and nothing pointed to a possible solution. Who was it that, since their childhood, had promised them to each other as a pair betrothed long beforehand by an inflexible ordinance? Who was it that arranged the pansy-bed last autumn, when they did not know each other? And who was it that had written their two names, ten years ago, in white pebbles, within the thickness of a wall?

  These were haunting questions for two young people in whom love had awakened quite spontaneously and who suddenly saw stretching behind them a long past common to them both. Each step that they took in the garden seemed to them a pilgrimage amid forgotten memories; and, at every turn in a path, they were prepared to discover some new proof of the bond that linked them together unknown to themselves.

  As a matter of fact, during those few days, they saw their initials interlaced twice on the trunk of a tree, once on the back of a bench. And twice again their names appeared inscribed on old walls and concealed behind a layer of plaster overhung with ivy.

  On these two occasions their names were accompanied by two separate dates:

  Patrice and Coralie, 1904

  Patrice and Coralie, 1907

  “Eleven years ago and eight years ago,” said the officer. “And always our two names: Patrice and Coralie.”

  Their hands met and clasped each other. The great mystery of their past brought them as closely together as did the great love which filled them and of which they refrained from speaking.

  In spite of themselves, however, they sought out solitude; and it was in this way that, a fortnight after the murder of Essarès Bey, as they passed the little door opening on the lane, they decided to go out by it and to stroll down to the river bank. No one saw them, for both the approach to the door and the path leading to it were hidden by a screen of tall bushes; and M. Masseron and his men were exploring the old green-houses, which stood at the other side of the garden, and the old furnace and chimney which had been used for signaling.

  But, when he was outside, Patrice stopped. Almost in front of him, in the opposite wall, was an exactly similar door. He called Coralie’s attention to it, but she said:

  “There is nothing astonishing about that. This wall is the boundary of another garden which at one time belonged to the one we have just left.”

  “But who lives there?”

  “Nobody. The little house which overlooks it and which comes before mine, in the Rue Raynouard, is always shut up.”

  “Same door, same key, perhaps,” Patrice murmured, half to himself.

  He inserted in the lock the rusty key, which had reached him by messenger. The lock responded.

  “Well,” he said, “the series of miracles is continuing. Will this one be in our favor?”

  The vegetation had been allowed to run riot in the narrow strip of ground that faced them. However, in the middle of the exuberant grass, a well-trodden path, which looked as if it were often used, started from the door in the wall and rose obliquely to the single terrace, on which stood a dilapidated lodge with closed shutters. It was built on one floor, but was surmounted by a small lantern-shaped belvedere. It had its own entrance in the Rue Raynouard, from which it was separated by a yard and a very high wall. This entrance seemed to be barricaded with boards and posts nailed together.

  They walked round the house and were surprised by the sight that awaited them on the right-hand side. The foliage had been trained into rectangular cloisters, carefully kept, with regular arcades cut in yew- and box-hedges. A miniature garden was laid out in this space, the very home of silence and tranquillity. Here also were wall-flowers and pansies and hyacinths. And four paths, coming from four corners of the cloisters, met round a central space, where stood the five columns of a small, open temple, rudely constructed of pebbles and unmortared building-stones.

  Under the dome of this little temple was a tombstone and, in front of it, an old wooden praying-chair, from the bars of which hung, on the left, an ivory crucifix and, on the right, a rosary composed of amethyst beads in a gold filigree setting.

  “Coralie, Coralie,” whispered Patrice, in a voice trembling with emotion, “who can be buried here?”

  They went nearer. There were bead wreaths laid in rows on the tombstone. They counted nineteen, each bearing the date of one of the last nineteen years. Pushing them aside, they read the following inscription in gilt letters worn and soiled by the rain:

  HERE LIE

  PATRICE AND CORALIE,

  BOTH OF WHOM WERE MURDERED

  ON THE 14th OF APRIL, 1895.

  REVENGE TO ME: I WILL REPAY.

  CHAPTER X. THE RED CORD

  CORALIE, FEELING HER legs give way beneath her, had flung herself on the prie-dieu and there knelt praying fervently and wildly. She could not tell on whose behalf, for the
repose of what unknown soul her prayers were offered; but her whole being was afire with fever and exaltation and the very action of praying seemed able to assuage her.

  “What was your mother’s name, Coralie?” Patrice whispered.

  “Louise,” she replied.

  “And my father’s name was Armand. It cannot be either of them, therefore; and yet . . .”

  Patrice also was displaying the greatest agitation. Stooping down, he examined the nineteen wreaths, renewed his inspection of the tombstone and said:

  “All the same, Coralie, the coincidence is really too extraordinary. My father died in 1895.”

  “And my mother died in that year too,” she said, “though I do not know the exact date.”

  “We shall find out, Coralie,” he declared. “These things can all be verified. But meanwhile one truth becomes clear. The man who used to interlace the names of Patrice and Coralie was not thinking only of us and was not considering only the future. Perhaps he thought even more of the past, of that Coralie and Patrice whom he knew to have suffered a violent death and whom he had undertaken to avenge. Come away, Coralie. No one must suspect that we have been here.”

  They went down the path and through the two doors on the lane. They were not seen coming in. Patrice at once brought Coralie indoors, urged Ya-Bon and his comrades to increase their vigilance and left the house.

  He came back in the evening only to go out again early the next day; and it was not until the day after, at three o’clock in the afternoon, that he asked to be shown up to Coralie.

  “Have you found out?” she asked him at once.

  “I have found out a great many things which do not dispel the darkness of the present. I am almost tempted to say that they increase it. They do, however, throw a very vivid light on the past.”

  “Do they explain what we saw two days ago?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Listen to me, Coralie.”

  He sat down opposite her and said:

  “I shall not tell you all the steps that I have taken. I will merely sum up the result of those which led to some result. I went, first of all, to the Mayor of Passy’s office and from there to the Servian Legation.”

  “Then you persist in assuming that it was my mother?”

  “Yes. I took a copy of her death-certificate, Coralie. Your mother died on the fourteenth of April, 1895.”

  “Oh!” she said. “That is the date on the tomb!”

  “The very date.”

  “But the name? Coralie? My father used to call her Louise.”

  “Your mother’s name was Louise Coralie Countess Odolavitch.”

  “Oh, my mother!” she murmured. “My poor darling mother! Then it was she who was murdered. It was for her that I was praying over the way?”

  “For her, Coralie, and for my father. I discovered his full name at the mayor’s office in the Rue Drouot. My father was Armand Patrice Belval. He died on the fourteenth of April, 1895.”

  Patrice was right in saying that a singular light had been thrown upon the past. He had now positively established that the inscription on the tombstone related to his father and Coralie’s mother, both of whom were murdered on the same day. But by whom and for what reason, in consequence of what tragedies? This was what Coralie asked him to tell her.

  “I cannot answer your questions yet,” he replied. “But I addressed another to myself, one more easily solved; and that I did solve. This also makes us certain of an essential point. I wanted to know to whom the lodge belonged. The outside, in the Rue Raynouard, affords no clue. You have seen the wall and the door of the yard: they show nothing in particular. But the number of the property was sufficient for my purpose. I went to the local receiver and learnt that the taxes were paid by a notary in the Avenue de l’Opéra. I called on this notary, who told me . . .”

  He stopped for a moment and then said:

  “The lodge was bought twenty-one years ago by my father. Two years later my father died; and the lodge, which of course formed part of his estate, was put up for sale by the present notary’s predecessor and bought by one Siméon Diodokis, a Greek subject.”

  “It’s he!” cried Coralie. “Siméon’s name is Diodokis.”

  “Well, Siméon Diodokis,” Patrice continued, “was a friend of my father’s, because my father appointed him the sole executor of his will and because it was Siméon Diodokis who, through the notary in question and a London solicitor, paid my school-fees and, when I attained my majority, made over to me the sum of two hundred thousand francs, the balance of my inheritance.”

  They maintained a long silence. Many things were becoming manifest, but indistinctly, as yet, and shaded, like things seen in the evening mist. And one thing stood in sharper outline than the rest, for Patrice murmured:

  “Your mother and my father loved each other, Coralie.”

  The thought united them more closely and affected them profoundly. Their love was the counterpart of another love, bruised by trials, like theirs, but still more tragic and ending in bloodshed and death.

  “Your mother and my father loved each other,” he repeated. “I should say they must have belonged to that class of rather enthusiastic lovers whose passion indulges in charming little childish ways, for they had a trick of calling each other, when alone, by names which nobody else used to them; and they selected their second Christian names, which were also yours and mine. One day your mother dropped her amethyst rosary. The largest of the beads broke in two pieces. My father had one of the pieces mounted as a trinket which he hung on his watch-chain. Both were widowed. You were two years old and I was eight. In order to devote himself altogether to the woman he loved, my father sent me to England and bought the lodge in which your mother, who lived in the big house next door, used to go and see him, crossing the lane and using the same key for both doors. It was no doubt in this lodge, or in the garden round it, that they were murdered. We shall find that out, because there must be visible proofs of the murder, proofs which Siméon Diodokis discovered, since he was not afraid to say so in the inscription on the tombstone.”

  “And who was the murderer?” Coralie asked, under her breath.

  “You suspect it, Coralie, as I do. The hated name comes to your mind, even though we have no grounds for speaking with certainty.”

  “Essarès!” she cried, in anguish.

  “Most probably.”

  She hid her face in her hands:

  “No, no, it is impossible. It is impossible that I should have been the wife of the man who killed my mother.”

  “You bore his name, but you were never his wife. You told him so the evening before his death, in my presence. Let us say nothing that we are unable to say positively; but all the same let us remember that he was your evil genius. Remember also that Siméon, my father’s friend and executor, the man who bought the lovers’ lodge, the man who swore upon their tomb to avenge them: remember that Siméon, a few months after your mother’s death, persuaded Essarès to engage him as caretaker of the estate, became his secretary and gradually made his way into Essarès’ life. His only object must have been to carry out a plan of revenge.”

  “There has been no revenge.”

  “What do we know about it? Do we know how Essarès met his death? Certainly it was not Siméon who killed him, as Siméon was at the hospital. But he may have caused him to be killed. And revenge has a thousand ways of manifesting itself. Lastly, Siméon was most likely obeying instructions that came from my father. There is little doubt that he wanted first to achieve an aim which my father and your mother had at heart: the union of our destinies, Coralie. And it was this aim that ruled his life. It was he evidently who placed among the knick-knacks which I collected as a child this amethyst of which the other half formed a bead in your rosary. It was he who collected our photographs. He lastly was our unknown friend and protector, the one who sent me the key, accompanied by a letter which I never received, unfortunately.”

  “Then, Patrice, you no longer believe
that he is dead, this unknown friend, or that you heard his dying cries?”

  “I cannot say. Siméon was not necessarily acting alone. He may have had a confidant, an assistant in the work which he undertook. Perhaps it was this other man who died at nineteen minutes past seven. I cannot say. Everything that happened on that ill-fated morning remains involved in the deepest mystery. The only conviction that we are able to hold is that for twenty years Siméon Diodokis has worked unobtrusively and patiently on our behalf, doing his utmost to defeat the murderer, and that Siméon Diodokis is alive. Alive, but mad!” Patrice added. “So that we can neither thank him nor question him about the grim story which he knows or about the dangers that threaten you.”

  Patrice resolved once more to make the attempt, though he felt sure of a fresh disappointment. Siméon had a bedroom, next to that occupied by two of the wounded soldiers, in the wing which formerly contained the servants’ quarters. Here Patrice found him.

  He was sitting half-asleep in a chair turned towards the garden. His pipe was in his mouth; he had allowed it to go out. The room was small, sparsely furnished, but clean and light. Hidden from view, the best part of the old man’s life was spent here. M. Masseron had often visited the room, in Siméon’s absence, and so had Patrice, each from his own point of view.

  The only discovery worthy of note consisted of a crude diagram in pencil, on the white wall-paper behind a chest of drawers: three lines intersecting to form a large equilateral triangle. In the middle of this geometrical figure were three words clumsily inscribed in adhesive gold-leaf:

  The Golden Triangle

  There was nothing more, not another clue of any kind, to further M. Masseron’s search.

  Patrice walked straight up to the old man and tapped him on the shoulder:

  “Siméon!” he said.

  The other lifted his yellow spectacles to him, and Patrice felt a sudden wish to snatch away this glass obstacle which concealed the old fellow’s eyes and prevented him from looking into his soul and his distant memories. Siméon began to laugh foolishly.