“Are you sure?”
“Well enough, in any case, to wait an hour. In an hour the Superhun will have spoken. He won’t hold out any longer. Hanging loosens the tongue.”
“And suppose he doesn’t hold out at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose he himself expires, from too violent an effort, heart-failure, a clot of blood to the head?”
“Well?”
“Well, his death would destroy the only hope we have of learning where François is hidden, his death would be François’ undoing!”
But Don Luis was inflexible:
“He won’t die!” he cried. “Vorski’s sort doesn’t die of a stroke! No, no, he’ll talk, he’ll talk within an hour. Just time enough to deliver my lecture.”
Patrice Belval began to laugh in spite of himself:
“Have you a lecture to deliver?”
“Rather! And such a lecture!” exclaimed Don Luis. “The whole adventure of the God-Stone! An historical treatise, a comprehensive view extending from prehistoric times to the thirty murders committed by the Superhun! By Jove, it’s not every day that one has the opportunity of reading a paper like that; and I wouldn’t miss it for a kingdom! Mount the platform, Don Luis, and fire away with your speech!”
He took his stand opposite Vorski:
“You lucky dog, you! You’re in the front seats and you won’t lose a word. I expect you’re glad, eh, to have a little light thrown upon your darkness? We’ve been floundering about so long that it’s time we had a definite lead. I assure you I’m beginning not to know where I am. Just think, a riddle which has lasted for centuries and centuries and which you’ve merely muddled still further.”
“Thief! Robber!” snarled Vorski.
“Insults? Why? If you’re not comfortable, let’s talk about François.”
“Never! He shall die.”
“Not at all, you’ll talk. I give you leave to interrupt me. When you want me to stop, all you’ve got to do is to whistle a tune: ‘En r’venant de la r’vue,’ or Tipperary. I’ll at once send to see; and, if you’ve told the truth, we’ll leave you here quietly, Otto will untie you and you can be off in François’ boat. Is it agreed?”
He turned to Stéphane and Patrice Belval:
“Sit down, my friends,” he said, “for it will take rather long. But, if I am to be eloquent, I need an audience . . . and an audience who will also act as judges.”
“We’re only two,” said Patrice.
“You’re three.”
“With whom?”
“Here’s your third.”
It was All’s Well. He came trotting along, without hurrying more than usual. He frisked round Stéphane, wagged his tail to Don Luis, as though to say, “I know you: you and I are pals,” and squatted on his hind-quarters, with the air of one who does not wish to disturb people.
“That’s right, All’s Well!” cried Don Luis. “You also want to hear all about the adventure. Your curiosity does you honour; and I won’t disappoint you.”
Don Luis appeared to be delighted. He had an audience, a full bench of judges. Vorski was writhing on his tree. It was an exquisite moment.
He cut a sort of caper which must have reminded Vorski of the ancient Druid’s pirouettes and, drawing himself up, bowed, imitated a lecturer taking a sip of water from a tumbler, rested his hands on an imaginary table and at last began, in a deliberate voice:
“Ladies and Gentlemen:
“On the twenty-fifth of July, in the year seven hundred and thirty-two B. C. . . .”
CHAPTER XVI. THE HALL OF THE KINGS OF BOHEMIA
DON LUIS INTERRUPTED himself after delivering his opening sentence and stood enjoying the effect produced. Captain Belval, who knew his friend, was laughing heartily. Stéphane continued to look anxious. All’s Well had not budged.
Don Luis continued:
“Let me begin by confessing, ladies and gentlemen, that my object in fixing my date so precisely was to some extent to stagger you. In reality I could not tell you within a few centuries the exact date of the scene which I shall have the honour of describing to you. But what I can guarantee is that it is laid in that country of Europe which to-day we call Bohemia and at the spot where the little industrial town of Joachimsthal now stands. That, I hope, is fairly circumstantial. Well, on the morning of the day when my story begins, there was great excitement among one of those Celtic tribes which had settled a century or two earlier between the banks of the Danube and the sources of the Elbe, amidst the Hyrcanian forests. The warriors, assisted by their wives, were striking their tents, collecting the sacred axes, the bows and arrows, gathering up the pottery, the bronze and tin implements, loading the horses and the oxen.
“The chiefs were here, there and everywhere, attending to the smallest details. There was neither tumult nor disorder. They started early in the direction of a tributary of the Elbe, the Eger, which they reached towards the end of the day. Here boats were waiting, guarded by a hundred of the picked warriors who had been sent ahead. One of these boats was conspicuous for its size and the richness of its decoration. A long yellow cloth was stretched from side to side. The chief of chiefs, the King, if you prefer, climbed on the stern thwart and made a speech which I will spare you, because I do not wish to shorten my own, but which may be summed up as follows: the tribe was emigrating to escape the cupidity of the neighbouring populations. It is always sad to leave the places where one has dwelt. But it made no difference to the men of the tribe, because they were carrying with them their most valuable possession, the sacred inheritance of their ancestors, the divinity that protected them and made them formidable and great among the greatest, in short, the stone that covered the tomb of their kings.
“And the chief of chiefs, with a solemn gesture, drew the yellow cloth and revealed a block of granite in the shape of a slab about two yards by one, granular in appearance and dark in colour, with a few glittering scales gleaming in its substance.
“There was a single shout raised by the crowd of men and women; and all, with outstretched arms, fell flat on their faces in the dust.
“Then the chief of chiefs took up a metal sceptre with a jewelled handle, which lay on the block of granite, brandished it on high and spoke:
“‘The all-powerful staff shall not leave my hand until the miraculous stone is in a place of safety. The all-powerful staff is born of the miraculous stone. It also contains the fire of heaven, which gives life or death. While the miraculous stone was the tomb of my forefathers, the all-powerful staff never left their hands on days of disaster or of victory. May the fire of heaven lead us! May the Sun-god light our way!’
“He spoke: and the whole tribe set out upon its journey.”
Don Luis struck an attitude and repeated, in a self-satisfied tone:
“He spoke: and the whole tribe set out upon its journey.”
Patrice Belval was greatly amused; and Stéphane, infected by his hilarity, began to feel more cheerful. But Don Luis now addressed his remarks to them:
“There’s nothing to laugh at! All this is very serious. It’s not a story for children who believe in conjuring tricks and sleight of hand, but a real history, all the details of which will, as you shall see, give rise to precise, natural and, in a sense, scientific explanations. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, scientific: I am not afraid of the word. We are here on scientific ground; and Vorski himself will regret his cynical merriment.”
Don Luis took a second sip of water and continued:
“For weeks and months the tribe followed the course of the Elbe; and one evening, on the stroke of half-past nine, reached the sea-board, in the country which afterwards became the country of the Frisians. It remained there for weeks and months, without finding the requisite security. It therefore determined upon a fresh exodus.
“This time it was a naval exodus. Thirty boats put out to sea — observe this number thirty, which was that of the families composing the tribe — and for weeks and months they wan
dered from shore to shore, settling first in Scandinavia, next among the Saxons, driven off, putting to sea again and continuing their voyage. And I assure you it was really a strange, moving, impressive sight to see this vagrant tribe dragging in its wake the tombstone of its kings and seeking a safe, inaccessible and final refuge in which to conceal its idol, protect it from the attack of its enemies, celebrate its worship and employ it to consolidate the tribal power.
“The last stage was Ireland; and it was here that, one day, after they had dwelt in the green isle for half a century or perhaps a century, after their manners had acquired a certain softening by contact with nations which were already less barbarous, the grandson or great-grandson of the great chief, himself a great chief, received one of the emissaries whom he maintained in the neighbouring countries. This one came from the continent. He had discovered the miraculous refuge. It was an almost unapproachable island, protected by thirty rocks and having thirty granite monuments to guard it.
“Thirty! The fateful number! It was an obvious summons and command from the mysterious deities. The thirty galleys were launched once more and the expedition set forth.
“It succeeded. They took the island by assault. The natives they simply exterminated. The tribe settled down; and the tombstone of the Kings of Bohemia was installed . . . in the very place which it occupies to-day and which I showed to our friend Vorski. Here I must interpolate a few historical data of the greatest significance. I will be brief.”
Adopting a professorial tone, Don Luis explained:
“The island of Sarek, like all France and all the western part of Europe, had been inhabited for thousands of years by a race known as the Liguri, the direct descendants of the cave-dwellers part of whose manners and customs they had retained. They were mighty builders, those Liguri, who, in the neolithic period, perhaps under the influence of the great civilizations of the east, had erected their huge blocks of granite and built their colossal funeral chambers.
“It was here that our tribe found and made great use of a system of caves and natural crypts adapted by the patient hand of man and of a cluster of enormous monuments which struck the mystic and superstitious imagination of the Celts.
“We find therefore that, after the first or wandering phase, there begins for the God-Stone a period of rest and worship which we will call the Druidical period. It lasted for a thousand or fifteen hundred years. The tribe became mingled with the neighbouring tribes and probably lived under the protection of some Breton king. But, little by little, the ascendancy had passed from the chiefs to the priests; and these priests, that is to say, the Druids, assumed an authority which increased in the course of the generations that followed.
“They owed this authority, beyond all doubt, to the miraculous stone. True, they were the priests of a religion accepted by all and also the instructors of Gallic childhood (it seems certain, incidentally, that the cells under the Black Heath were those of a Druid convent, or rather a sort of university); true, in obedience to the practices of the time, they presided over human sacrifices and ordained the gathering of the mistletoe, the vervain and all the magic herbs; but, before all, in the island of Sarek, they were the guardians and the possessors of the stone which gave life or death. Placed above the hall of the underground sacrifices, it was at that time undoubtedly visible in the open air; and I have every reason to believe that the Fairies’ Dolmen, which we now see here, then stood in the place known as the Calvary of the Flowers and sheltered the God-Stone. It was there that ailing and crippled persons and sickly children were laid to recover their health and strength. It was on the sacred slab that barren women became fruitful, on the sacred slab that old men felt their energies revive.
“In my eyes it dominates the whole of the legendary and fabled past of Brittany. It is the radiating centre of all the superstitions, all the beliefs, all the fears and hopes of the country. By virtue of the stone or of the magic sceptre which the archdruid wielded and with which he burnt men’s flesh or healed their sores at will, we see the beautiful tales of romance springing spontaneously into being, tales of the knights of the Round Table, tales of Merlin the wizard. The stone is at the bottom of every mystery, at the heart of every symbol. It is darkness and light in one, the great riddle and the great explanation.”
Don Luis uttered these last words with a certain exaltation. He smiled:
“Don’t let yourself be carried away, Vorski. We’ll keep our enthusiasm for the narrative of your crimes. For the moment, we are at the climax of the Druidical period, a period which lasted far beyond the Druids through long centuries during which, after the Druids had gone, the miraculous stone was exploited by the sorcerers and soothsayers. And thus we come gradually to the third period, the religious period, that is to say, actually to the progressive decline of all that constituted the glory of Sarek: pilgrimages, commemorative festivals and so forth.
“The Church in fact was unable to put up with that crude fetish-worship. As soon as she was strong enough, she was bound to fight against the block of granite which attracted so many believers and perpetuated so hateful a religion. The fight was an unequal one; and the past succumbed. The dolmen was moved to where we stand, the slab of the kings of Bohemia was buried under a layer of earth and a Calvary rose at the very spot where the sacrilegious miracles were once wrought.
“And, over and above that, there was the great oblivion!
“Let me explain. The practices were forgotten. The rites were forgotten and all that constituted the history of a vanished cult. But the God-Stone was not forgotten. Men no longer knew where it was. In time they even no longer knew what it was. But they never ceased to speak of and believe in the existence of something which they called the God-Stone. From mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, they handed down on to one another fabulous and terrible stories, which became farther and farther removed from reality, which formed a more and more vague and, for that matter, a more and more frightful legend, but which kept alive in their imaginations the recollection of the God-Stone and, above all, its name.
“This persistence of an idea in men’s memories, this survival of a fact in the annals of a country had the logical result that, from time to time, some enquiring person would try to reconstruct the prodigious truth. Two of these enquiring persons, Brother Thomas, a member of the Benedictine Order, who lived in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the man Maguennoc, in our own time, played an important part. Brother Thomas was a poet and an illuminator about whom we possess not many details, a very bad poet, to judge by his verses, but as an illuminator ingenuous and not devoid of talent. He left a sort of missal in which he related his life at Sarek Abbey and drew the thirty dolmens of the island, the whole accompanied by instances, religious quotations and predictions after the manner of Nostradamus. It was this missal, discovered by Maguennoc aforesaid, that contained the famous page with the crucified women and the prophecy relating to Sarek; it was this missal that I myself found and consulted last night in Maguennoc’s bedroom.
“He was an odd person, this Maguennoc, a belated descendant of the sorcerers of old; and I strongly suspect him of playing the ghost on more than one occasion. You may be sure that the white-robed, white-bearded Druid whom people declared that they had seen on the sixth day of the moon, gathering the mistletoe, was none other than Maguennoc. He too knew all about the good old recipes, the healing herbs, the way to work up the soil so as to make it yield enormous flowers. One thing is certain, that he explored the mortuary crypts and the hall of the sacrifices, that it was he who purloined the magic stone contained in the knob of the sceptre and that he used to enter these crypts by the opening through which we have just come, in the middle of the Postern path, of which he was obliged each time to replace the screen of stones and pebbles. It was he also who gave M. d’Hergemont the page from the missal. Whether he confided the result of his last explorations to him and how much exactly M. d’Hergemont knew does not matter now. Another figure looms into sight, one
who is henceforth the embodiment of the whole affair and claims all our attention, an emissary dispatched by fate to solve the riddle of the centuries, to carry out the orders of the mysterious powers and to pocket the God-Stone. I am speaking of Vorski.”
Don Luis swallowed his third glass of water and, beckoning to the accomplice, said:
“Otto, you had better give him a drink, if he’s thirsty. Are you thirsty, Vorski?”
Vorski on his tree seemed exhausted, incapable of further effort or resistance. Stéphane and Patrice once more intervened on his behalf, fearing an immediate consummation.
“Not at all, not at all!” cried Don Luis. “He’s all right and he’ll hold out until I’ve finished my speech, if it were only because he wants to know. You’re tremendously interested, aren’t you, Vorski?”
“Robber! Murderer!” spluttered the wretched man.
“Splendid! So you still refuse to tell us where François is hidden?”
“Murderer! Highwayman!”
“Then stay where you are, old chap. As you please. There’s nothing better for the health than a little suffering. Besides, you have caused so much suffering to others, you dirty scum!”
Don Luis uttered these words harshly and in accents of anger which one would hardly have expected from a man who had already beheld so many crimes and battled with so many criminals. But then this last one was out of all proportion.
Don Luis continued:
“About thirty-five years ago, a very beautiful woman, who came from Bohemia but who was of Hungarian descent, visited the watering-places that swarm around the Bavarian lakes and soon achieved a great reputation as a fortune-teller palmist, seer and medium. She attracted the attention of King Louis II, Wagner’s friend, the man who built Bayreuth, the crowned mad-man famed for his extravagant fancies. The intimacy between the king and the clairvoyant lasted for some years. It was a violent, restless intimacy, interrupted by the frequent whims of the king; and it ended tragically on the mysterious evening when Louis of Bavaria threw himself out of his boat into the Starnbergersee. Was it really, as the official version stated, suicide following on a fit of madness? Or was it a case of murder, as some have held? Why suicide? Why murder? These are questions that have never been answered. But one fact remains: the Bohemian woman was in the boat with Louis II and next day was escorted to the frontier and expelled from the country after her money and jewellery had been taken from her.
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 239