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

by Maurice Leblanc

  But what a meaning we read into this gloomy spectacle! What a frightful tragedy was enacted before our eyes! The beating of our hearts wrung with love and distress was the very beating of that Sacred Heart. Those weary eyes looked down upon the same things that we beheld, the same dry soil, the same savage faces of the soldiers, the same countenances of the grief-stricken women.

  When a last vision showed us His rigid and emaciated body and His sweet ravaged head in which the dilated eyes seemed to us abnormally large, the whole crowd rose to its feet, men and women fell upon their knees and, in a profound silence that quivered with prayer, all arms were despairingly outstretched towards the dying God.

  Such scenes cannot be understood by those who did not witness them. You will no more find their living presentment in the pages in which I describe them than I can find it in the newspapers of the time. The latter pile up adjectives, exclamations and apostrophes which give no idea of what the vivid reality was. On the other hand, all the articles lay stress upon the essential truth which emerges from the two films of that day and, very rightly, declare that the second explains and completes the first. Yonder also, among our distant brethren, a God was delivered to the horrors of martyrdom; and, by connecting the two events, they intended to convey to us that, like ourselves, they possessed a religious belief and ideal aspirations. In the same way, they had shown us by the death of one of their rulers and the death of one of our kings that they had known the same political upheavals. In the same way, they had shown us by visions of lovers that, like us, they yielded to the power of love. Therefore, the same stages of civilizations, the same efforts of belief, the same instincts, the same sentiments existed in both worlds.

  How could messages so positive, so stimulating have failed to increase our longing to know more about it all and to communicate more closely? How could we do other than think of the questions which it was possible to put and of the problems which would be elucidated, problems of the future and the past, problems of civilization, problems of destiny?

  But the same uncertainty lingered in us, keener than the day before. What would become of Noël Dorgeroux’s secret? The position was this: Massignac accepted the ten millions which he was offered, but on condition that he was paid the money immediately after the performance and that he received a safe-conduct for America. Now, although the enquiries instituted at Toulouse confirmed the accusations brought against him by the maid-of-all-work, it was stated that the compact was on the point of being concluded, so greatly did the importance of Noël Dorgeroux’s secret outweigh all ordinary consideration of justice and punishment. Finding itself confronted with a state of things which could not be prolonged, the government was yielding, though constraining Massignac to sell the secret under penalty of immediate arrest and posting all around him men who were instructed to lay him by the heels at the first sign of any trickery. When the iron curtain fell, twelve policemen took the place of the usual attendants.

  And then began an exhibition to which special circumstances imparted so great a gravity and which was in itself so poignant and so implacable.

  As on the other occasions, we did not at first grasp the significance which the scenes projected on the screen were intended to convey. These scenes passed before our eyes as swiftly as the love-scenes displayed two days before.

  There was not the initial vision of the Three Eyes. We plunged straight into reality. In the middle of a garden sat a woman, young still and beautiful, dressed in the fashion of 1830. She was working at a tapestry stretched on a frame and from time to time raised her eyes to cast a fond look at a little girl playing by her side. The mother and child smiled at each other. The child left her sand-pies and came and kissed her mother.

  For a few minutes there was merely this placid picture of human life.

  Then, a dozen paces behind the mother, a tall, close-trimmed screen of foliage is gently thrust aside and, with a series of imperceptible movements, a man comes out of the shadow, a man, like the woman, young and well-dressed.

  His face is hard, his jaws are set. He has a knife in his hand.

  He takes three or four steps forward. The woman does not hear him, the little girl cannot see him. He comes still farther forward, with infinite precautions, so that the gravel may not creak under his feet nor any branch touch him.

  He stands over the woman. His face displays a terrible cruelty and an inflexible will. The woman’s face is still smiling and happy.

  Slowly his arm is raised above that smile, above that happiness. Then it descends, with equal slowness; and suddenly, beneath the left shoulder, it strikes a sharp blow at the heart.

  There is not a sound; that is certain. At most, a sigh, like the one sigh emitted, in the awful silence, by the crowd in the Yard.

  The man has withdrawn his weapon. He listens for a moment, bends over the lifeless body that has huddled into the chair, feels the hand and then steals back with measured steps to the screen of foliage, which closes behind him.

  The child has not ceased playing. She continues to laugh and talk.

  The picture fades away.

  The next shows us two men walking along a deserted path, beside which flows a narrow river. They are talking without animation; they might be discussing the weather.

  When they turn round and retrace their steps, we see that one of the two men, the one who hitherto had been hidden behind his companion, carries a revolver.

  They both stop and continue to talk quietly. But the face of the armed man becomes distorted and assumes the same criminal expression which we beheld in the first murderer. And suddenly he makes a movement of attack and fires; the other falls; and the first flings himself upon him and snatches a pocket-book from him.

  There were four more murders, none of which had as its perpetrator or its victim any one who was known to us. They were so many sensational incidents, very short, restricted to the essential factors; the peaceful representation of a scene in daily life and the sudden explosion of crime in all its bestial horror.

  The sight was dreadful, especially because of the expression of confidence and serenity maintained by the victim, while we, in the audience, saw the phantom of death rise over him. The waiting for the blow which we were unable to avert left us breathless and terrified.

  And one last picture of a man appeared to us. A stifled exclamation rose from the crowd. It was Noël Dorgeroux.

  CHAPTER XVIII. THE CHTEAU DE PRÉ-BONY

  THE EXCLAMATION OF the crowd proved to me that, at the sight of the great old man, who was known to all by his portraits and by the posters exhibited at the doors of the Yard, the same thought had instantaneously struck us all. We understood from the first. After the series of criminal pictures, we knew the meaning of Noël Dorgeroux’s appearance on the screen and knew the inexorable climax of the story which we were being told. There had been six victims. My uncle would be the seventh. We were going to witness his death and to see the face of the murderer.

  All this was planned with the most disconcerting skill and with a logic whose implacable rigour wrung our very souls. We were as though imprisoned in a horribly painful track which we were bound to follow to the end, notwithstanding the unspeakable violence of our sensations. I sometimes ask myself, in all sincerity, whether the series of miraculous visions could have been continued much longer, so far did the nervous tension which they demanded exceed our human strength.

  A succession of pictures showed us several episodes of which the first dated back to a period when Noël Dorgeroux certainly had not discovered the great secret, for his son was still alive. It was the time of the war. Dominique, in uniform, was embracing the old fellow, who was weeping and trying to hold him back; and, when Dominique went, Noël Dorgeroux watched him go with all the distress of a father who is not to see his son again.

  Next we have him again, once more in the Yard, which is encumbered with its sheds and workshops, as it used to be. Bérangère, quite a child, is running to and fro. She is thirteen or fourtee
n at most.

  We now follow their existence in pictures which tell us with what hourly attention my uncle Dorgeroux’s labours were watched from up yonder. He became old and bent. The little one grew up, which did not deter her from playing and running about.

  On the day when we are to see her as I had found her in the previous summer, we see at the same time Noël Dorgeroux standing on a ladder and daubing the wall with a long brush which he keeps dipping into a can. He steps back and looks with a questioning gaze at the wall where the screen is marked out. There is nothing. Nevertheless something vague and confused must already have throbbed in the heart of the substance, because he seems to be waiting and seeking. . . .

  A click; and everything is changed. The amphitheatre arises, unfinished in parts, as it was on the Sunday in March when I discovered my uncle’s dead body. The new wall is there, surrounded by its canopy. My uncle has opened the recess contained in the basement and is arranging his carboys.

  But, now, beyond the amphitheatre, which grows smaller for an instant, we see the trees in the woods and the undulations of the adjoining meadow; and a man comes up on that side and moves towards the path which skirts the fence. I for my part recognize his figure. It is the man with whom I was to struggle, half an hour later, in the wood through which he had just come. It is the murderer. He is wrapped in a rain-coat whose upturned collar touches the lowered brim of his hat. He walks uneasily. He goes up to the lamp-post, looks around him, climbs up slowly and makes his way into the Yard. He follows the road which I myself took that day after him and thrusts forward his head as I did.

  Noël Dorgeroux is standing before the screen. He has closed the recess and jotted down some notes in a book. The victim suspects nothing.

  Then the man throws off his wrap and his hat. He turns his face in our direction. It is Massignac.

  The crowd was so much expecting to find that it was he that there was no demonstration of surprise. Besides, the pictures on this day were of a nature that left no room for alien thoughts or impressions. The consequences which might ensue from the public proof of Massignac’s guilt were not apparent to us. We were not living through the minutes which were elapsing in the past but through those which were elapsing in the present; and until the last moment we thought only of knowing whether Noël Dorgeroux, whom we knew to be dead, was going to be murdered.

  The scene did not last long. In reality my uncle was not conscious for a second of the danger that threatened him; and, contrary to what was elicited at the enquiry, there was no trace of that struggle of which the signs appeared to have been discovered. This struggle occurred afterwards, when my uncle had been struck down and was lying on the ground, motionless. It took place between a murderer seized with insensate fury and the corpse which he seemed bent upon killing anew.

  And in fact it was this act of savage brutality that let loose the rage of the crowd. Held back until then by a sort of unreasoning hope and petrified, in its terror, at the sight of the loathsome act accomplished on the screen, it was stirred with anger and hatred against the living and visible murderer whose existence suddenly provoked it beyond endurance. It experienced a sense of revolt and a need for immediate justice which no considerations were able to stay. It underwent an immediate change of attitude. It withdrew itself abruptly from any sort of memory or evocation of the past, to fling itself into the reality of the present and to play its part in the necessary action. And, obeying an unanimous impulse, pouring helter-skelter down the tiers and flowing like a torrent through every gangway, it rushed to the assault of the iron cage in which Massignac was sheltering.

  I cannot describe exactly the manner in which things took place. Massignac, who attempted to take flight at the first moment of the accusation, found in front of him the twelve policemen, who next turned against the crowd when it came dashing against the rails of the high grille. But what resistance were those twelve men able to offer? The grille fell. The police were borne down in the crush. In a flash I saw Massignac braced against the wall and taking aim with two revolvers held in his outstretched hands. A number of shots rang out. Some of the aggressors dropped. Then Massignac, taking advantage of the hesitation which kept back the others, stooped swiftly towards the electric battery in the foundation. He pressed a button. Right at the top of the wall, the canopy overhanging the two pillars opened like a sluice and sent forth streams of a bluish liquid, which seethed and bubbled in a cascade over the whole surface of the screen.

  I then remembered Massignac’s terrible prophecy:

  “If I die, it means the death of Noël Dorgeroux’s secret. We shall perish together.”

  In the anguish of peril, at the very bottom of the abyss, he had conceived the abominable idea and had the courage to carry out his threat. My uncle’s work was utterly destroyed.

  Nevertheless I darted forward, as though I could still avert the disaster by saving the scoundrel’s life. But the crowd had seized upon its prey and was passing it from hand to hand, like a howling pack worrying and rending the animal which it had hunted down.

  I succeeded in shouldering my way through with the aid of two policemen and then only because Massignac’s body had ended by falling into the hands of a band of less infuriated assailants, who were embarrassed by the sight of the dying man. They formed themselves into a group to protect his death-struggles and one of them even, raising his voice above the din, called to me:

  “Quick, quick!” he said, when I came near. “He is speaking your name.”

  At the first glance at the mass of bleeding flesh that lay on one of the tiers, between two rows of seats, I perceived that there was no hope and that it was a miracle that this corpse was still breathing. Still it was uttering my name. I caught the syllables as I stooped over the face mauled beyond recognition and, speaking slowly and distinctly, I said:

  “It’s I, Massignac, it’s Victorien Beaugrand. What have you to say to me?”

  He managed to lift his eyelids, looked at me with a dim eye which closed again immediately and stammered:

  “A letter . . . a letter . . . sewn in the lining. . . .”

  I felt the rags of cloth which remained of his jacket. Massignac had done well to sew up the letter, for all the other papers had left his pocket. I at once read my name on the envelope.

  “Open it . . . open it,” he said, in a whisper.

  I tore open the envelope. There were only a few lines scribbled in a large hand across the sheet of paper, a few lines of which I took the time to read only the first, which said:

  “Bérangère knows the formula.”

  “Bérangère!” I exclaimed. “But where is she? Do you know?”

  I at once understood the imprudence of which I had been guilty in thus mentioning the girl’s name aloud; and, bending lower down, I put my ear to Massignac’s mouth to catch his last words.

  He repeated the name of Bérangère time after time, in the effort to pronounce the answer which I asked for and which his memory perhaps refused to supply. His lips moved convulsively and he stammered forth some hoarse sounds which were more like a death-rattle but which yet enabled me to distinguish the words:

  “Bérangère. . . . Château . . . Château de Pré-Bony. . . .”

  However great the tension of the mind may be when concentrated on an idea which entirely absorbs it, we remain more or less subject to the thousand sensations that assail us. Thus, at the very moment when I rose and, in a whisper, repeated, “Château de Pré-Bony . . . de Pré-Bony,” the vague impression that another had heard the address which Massignac had given began to take shape and consistency within me. Nay more, I perceived, when it was too late, that this other man, thanks to his position at my side, must have been able to read as I had read, the opening words of Théodore Massignac’s letter. And that other man’s able make-up suddenly dropped away before my eyes to reveal the pallid features of the man Velmot.

  I turned my head. The man had just made his way out of the band of onlookers who stood gathered round us
and was slipping through the shifting masses of the crowd. I called out. I shouted his name. I dragged detectives in his wake. It was too late.

  And so the man Velmot, the implacable enemy who had not hesitated to torture Massignac in order to extract my uncle Dorgeroux’s formula from him, knew that Bérangère was acquainted with the formula! And he had at the same time learnt, what he doubtless did not know before, where Bérangère was concealed.

  The Château de Pré-Bony! Where was this country-house? In what corner of France had Bérangère taken refuge after the murder of her god-father? It could not be very far from Paris, seeing that she had once asked for my assistance and that, two days ago, she had come to the Yard. But, whatever the distance, how was I to find it? There were a thousand country-houses within a radius of twenty-five miles from Paris.

  “And yet,” I said to myself, “the solution of the tragedy lies there, in that country-house. All is not lost and all may still be saved, but I have to get there. Though, the miraculous screen is destroyed, Massignac has given me the means of reconstructing it, but I have to get there. And I have to get there by day break, or Velmot will have Bérangère at his mercy.”

  I spent the whole evening in enquiries. I consulted maps, gazetteers, directories. I asked everywhere; I telephoned. No one was able to supply the least hint as to the whereabouts of the Château de Pré-Bony.

  It was not until the morning, after an agitated night, that a more methodical scrutiny of recent events gave me the idea of beginning my investigations in the actual district where I knew that Bérangère had stayed. I hired a motor-car and had myself driven towards Bougival. I had no great hope. But my fear lest Velmot should discover Bérangère’s retreat before I did caused me such intense suffering that I never ceased repeating to myself: