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

by Maurice Leblanc

  “That’s it. . . . I’m on the right track. . . . I’m certain to find Bérangère; and the villain shall not touch a hair of her head.”

  My love for the girl suddenly became purged of all the doubts and suspicions that had poisoned it. For the rest, I did not trouble about these details and troubled myself neither to explain her conduct nor to establish the least proof for or against her. Even if her kiss had not already wiped out every disagreeable recollection, the danger which she was incurring was enough to restore all my faith in her and all my affection.

  My first enquiries at Ville d’Avray, Marnes and Vaucresson told me nothing. The Château de Pré-Bony was unknown. At La Cello-Saint-Cloud I encountered a fresh check. But here, in an inn, I seemed to recover, thanks to the accident of a casual question, the traces of the man Velmot: a tall, white-faced gentleman, I was told, who often motored along the Bougival road and who had been seen prowling outside the village that very morning.

  I questioned my informant more closely. It really was Velmot. He had four hours’ start of me. And he knew where to go! And he was in love with Bérangère! Four hours’ start, for that clever and daring scoundrel, who was staking his all on this last throw of the die! Who could stop him? What scruples had he? To seize upon Bérangère, to hold her in his power, to compel her to speak: all this was now mere child’s play. And he was in love with Bérangère!

  I remember striking the inn-table with my fist and exclaiming, angrily:

  “No, no, it’s not possible! . . . The house in question is bound to be somewhere near here! . . . They must show me the way!”

  Thenceforward I did not experience a moment’s hesitation. On the one hand, I was not mistaken in coming to this district. On the other hand, I knew that Velmot, having heard what Massignac said and knowing the country by having lived in it, had begun his campaign at dawn.

  There was a crowd of people outside the inn. Feverishly I put the questions which remained unanswered. At last, some one mentioned a cross-roads which was sometimes known by the name of Pré-Bony and which was on the Saint-Cucufa road, some two or three miles away. One of the roads which branched from it led to a new house, of not very imposing appearance, which was inhabited by a young married couple, the Comte and Comtesse de Roncherolles.

  I really had the impression that it was my sheer will-power that had brought about this favourable incident and, so to speak, created, lock, stock and barrel and within my reach, that unknown country-house which it behoved me to visit that very instant.

  I made my way there hurriedly. At the moment when I was walking across the garden, a young man alighted from horseback at the foot of the steps.

  “Is this the Château de Pré-Bony?” I asked.

  He flung the reins of his horse to a groom and replied, with a smile:

  “At least that is what they call it, a little pompously, at Bougival.”

  “Oh,” I murmured, as though taken aback by an unhoped for piece of news, “it’s here . . . and I am in time!”

  The young man introduced himself. It was the Comte de Roncherolles.

  “May I ask to whom I have the honour . . .”

  “Victorien Beaugrand,” I replied.

  And, without further preamble, confiding in the man’s looks, which were frank and friendly, I said:

  “I have come about Bérangère. She’s here, isn’t she? She has found a shelter here?”

  The Comte de Roncherolles flushed slightly and eyed me with a certain attention. I took his hand:

  “If you please, monsieur, the position is very serious. Bérangère is being hunted down by an extremely dangerous man.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Velmot.”

  “Velmot?”

  The count threw off all further disguise as useless and repeated:

  “Velmot! Velmot! The enemy whom she loathes! . . . Yes, she has everything to fear from the man. Fortunately, he does not know where she is.”

  “He does know . . . since yesterday,” I exclaimed.

  “Granted. But he will need time to make his preparations, to plan his move.”

  “He was seen not far from here, yesterday, by people of the village.”

  I began to tell him what I knew. He did not wait for me to finish. Evidently as anxious as myself, he drew me towards a lodge, standing some distance from the house, which Bérangère occupied.

  He knocked. There was no answer. But the door was open. He entered and went upstairs to Bérangère’s room. She was not there.

  He did not seem greatly surprised.

  “She often goes out early,” he said.

  “Perhaps she is at the house?” I suggested.

  “With my wife? No, my wife is not very well and would not be up yet.”

  “What then?”

  “I presume she has gone for her ordinary walk to the ruins of the old castle. She likes the view there, which embraces Bougival and the whole river.”

  “Is it far?”

  “No, just at the end of the park.”

  Nevertheless the park stretched some way back; and it took us four or five minutes’ walk to reach a circular clearing from which we could see a few lengths of broken wall perched on the top of a ridge among some fallen heaps of stone-work.

  “There,” said the count. “Bérangère has been to this bench. She has left the book which she was reading.”

  “And a scarf too,” I said, anxiously. “Look, a rumpled scarf. . . . And the grass round about shows signs of having been trampled on. . . . My God, I hope nothing has happened to the poor child!”

  I had not finished speaking when we heard cries from the direction of the ruins, cries for help or cries of pain, we could not tell which. We at once darted along the narrow path which ran up the hill, cutting across the winding forest-road. When we were half-way up, the cries broke out again; and a woman’s figure came into view among the crumbling stones of the old castle.

  “Bérangère!” I cried, increasing my pace.

  She did not see me. She was running, as though she had some one in pursuit of her, and taking advantage of every bit of shelter that the ruins offered. Presently a man appeared, looking for her and threatening her with a revolver which he carried in his hand.

  “It’s he!” I stammered. “It’s Velmot!”

  One after the other they entered the huddle of ruins, from which we were now separated by forty yards at most. We covered the distance in a few seconds and I rushed ahead towards the place through which Bérangère had slipped.

  As I arrived, a shot rang out, some little way off, and I heard moans. Despite my efforts, I could get no farther forward, because the passage was blocked by brambles and trails of ivy. My companion and I struggled desperately against the branches which were cutting our faces. At length we emerged on a large platform, where at first we saw no one among the tall grass and the moss-grown rocks. Still, there was that shot . . . and those cries of pain quite close to where we stood. . . .

  Suddenly the count, who was searching a short distance in front of me, exclaimed:

  “There she is! . . . Bérangère! Are you hurt?”

  I leapt towards him. Bérangère lay outstretched in a tangle of leaves and herbage.

  She was so pale that I had not a doubt but that she was dead; and I felt very clearly that I should not be able to survive her. I even completed my thought by saying, aloud:

  “I will avenge her first. The murderer shall die by my hand, I swear it.”

  But the count, after a hurried inspection, declared.

  “She’s not dead, she’s breathing.”

  And I saw her open her eyes.

  I fell on my knees besides her and, lifting her fair and sorrow-stricken face in my hands, asked her:

  “Where are you hurt, Bérangère? Tell me, darling.”

  “I’m not hurt,” she whispered. “It’s the exertion, the excitement.”

  “But surely,” I insisted, “he fired at you?”

  “No, no,” she said,
“it was I who fired.”

  “Do you mean that? You fired?”

  “Yes, with his revolver.”

  “But you missed him. He has made his escape.”

  “I did not miss him. I saw him fall . . . quite close to this . . . on the edge of the ravine.”

  This ravine was a deep cut in the ground, on our right. The count went to the spot and called to me. When I was standing beside him, he showed me the body of a man lying head downwards, his face covered with blood. I approached and recognized Velmot. He was dead.

  CHAPTER XIX. THE FORMULA

  VELMOT DEAD, BÉRANGÈRE alive: the joy of it! The sudden sense of security! This time, the evil adventure was over, since the girl whom I loved had nothing more to fear. And my thoughts at once harked back to Noël Dorgeroux: the formula in which the great secret was summed up was saved. With the clues and the means of action which existed elsewhere, mankind was now in a position to continue my uncle’s work.

  Bérangère called me back:

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  I felt intuitively that I ought not to tell her a truth which was too heavy for her to bear and which she was afraid of hearing and I declared:

  “Not at all. . . . We haven’t seen him. . . . He must have got away. . . .”

  My answer seemed to relieve her; and she whispered:

  “In any case, he is wounded. . . . I know I hit him.”

  “Rest, my darling,” I said, “and don’t worry any more about anything.”

  She did as she was told; and she was so weary that she soon fell asleep.

  Before taking her home, the count and I went back to the body and lowered it down the slope of the ravine, which we followed to the wall that surrounded the estate. As there was a breach at this spot, the count gave it as his opinion that Velmot could not have entered anywhere but here. And in fact a little lower down, at the entrance to a lonely forest-road we discovered his car. We lifted the body into it, placed the revolver on the seat, drove the car to a distance of half a mile and left it at the entrance to a clearing. We met nobody on the road. The death would beyond a doubt be ascribed to suicide.

  An hour later, Bérangère, now back to the lodge and lying on her bed, gave me her hand, which I covered with kisses. We were alone, with no more enemies around us. There was no hideous shape prowling in the dark. No one was any longer able to thwart our rightful happiness.

  “The nightmare has passed,” I said. “There is no obstacle left between you and me. You will no longer try to run away, will you?”

  I watched her with an emotion in which still lingered no small anxiety. Dear little girl, she was still, to me, a creature full of mystery and the unknown; and there were many secrets hidden in the shadowy places of that soul into which I had never entered. I told her as much. She in her turn looked at me for a long time, with her tired and fevered eyes, so different from the careless, laughing eyes which I had loved long ago, and she whispered:

  “Secrets? My secrets? No. There is only one secret in me; and that one secret is the cause of everything.”

  “May I hear it?”

  “I love you.”

  I felt a thrill of joy. Often I had experienced a profound intuition of this love of hers, but it had been spoilt by so much distrust, suspicion and resentment. And now Bérangère was confessing it to me, gravely and frankly.

  “You love me,” I repeated. “You love me. Why did you not tell me earlier? How many misfortunes would have been avoided! Why didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “And you can now, because there is no longer any obstacle between us?”

  “There is the same obstacle as ever.”

  “Which is that?”

  “My father.”

  I said in a lower voice:

  “Yon know that Théodore Massignac is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I am Théodore Massignac’s daughter.”

  I cried eagerly:

  “Bérangère, there is something I want to tell you; and I assure you beforehand . . .”

  She interrupted me:

  “Please don’t say anything more. There’s always that between us. It is a gulf which we cannot hope to fill with words.”

  She seemed so much exhausted that I made a movement to leave her. She stopped me:

  “No,” she said, “don’t go. I am not going to be ill . . . for more than a day or two, at the outside. First of all, I want everything to be quite clear between us; I want you to understand every single thing that I have done. Listen to me. . . .”

  “To-morrow, Bérangère.”

  “No, to-day,” she insisted. “I feel a need to tell you at once what I have to say. Nothing will do more to restore my peace of mind. Listen to me. . . .”

  She did not have to entreat me long. How could I have wearied of looking at her and listening to her? We had been through such trials when separated from each other that I was afraid, after all, of being parted from her now.

  She put her arm round my neck. Her beautiful lips were quivering beneath my eyes. Seeing my gaze fixed upon them, she smiled:

  “You remember, in the Yard . . . the first time. . . . From that day, I hated you . . . and adored you. . . . I was your enemy . . . and your slave. . . . Yes, all my independent and rather wild nature was up in arms at not being able to shake off a recollection which gave me so much pain . . . and so much pleasure! . . . I was mastered. I ran away from you. I kept on coming back to you . . . and I should have come back altogether, if that man — you know whom I mean — had not spoken to me one morning. . . .”

  “Velmot! What did he come for? What did he want?”

  “He came from my father. What he wanted, as I perceived later, was through me to enter into Noël Dorgeroux’s life and rob him of the secret of his invention.”

  “Why did you not warn me?”

  “From the first moment, Velmot asked me to be silent. Later, he commanded it.”

  “You ought not to have obeyed him. . . .”

  “Had I committed the least indiscretion, he would have killed you. I loved you. I was afraid; and I was all the more afraid because Velmot persecuted me with a love which my hatred for him merely stimulated. How could I doubt that his threat was seriously meant? From that time onward, I was caught in the wheels of the machine. What with one lie and another, I became his accomplice . . . or rather their accomplice, for my father joined him in the course of the winter. Oh, the torture of it! That man who loved me . . . and that contemptible father! . . . I lived a life of horror . . . always hoping that they would grow tired because their machinations were leading to nothing.”

  “And what about my letters from Grenoble? And my uncle’s fears?”

  “Yes, I know, my uncle often mentioned them to me; and, without revealing the plot to him, I myself put him on his guard. It was at my request that he sent you that report which was stolen. Only, he never anticipated murder. Theft, yes; and, notwithstanding the watch which I maintained, I could see that I was doing no good, that my father made his way into the Lodge at night, that he had at his disposal methods of which I knew nothing. But between that and murder, assassination! No, no, a daughter cannot believe such things.”

  “So, on the Sunday, when Velmot came to fetch you at the Lodge while Noël Dorgeroux was out . . . ?”

  “That Sunday, he told me that my father had given up his plan and wanted to say good-bye to me and that he was waiting for me by the chapel in the disused cemetery, where the two of them had been experimenting with the fragments removed from the old wall in the Yard. As it happened, Velmot had taken advantage of his call at the Lodge to steal one of the blue phials which my uncle used. I did not notice this before he had already poured part of the liquid on the improvised screen of the chapel. I was able to get hold of the phial and throw it into the well. Just then you called me. Velmot made a rush at me and carried me to his motor-car, where, after stunning me with his fist and bin
ding me, he hid me under a rug. When I recovered from my swoon, I was in the garage at Batignolles. It was in the evening. I was able to push the car under a window which opened on the street, and I jumped out. A gentleman and a lady who were passing picked me up, for I had sprained my ankle as I came to the ground. They took me home with them. Next morning I read in the papers that Noël Dorgeroux had been murdered.”

  Bérangère hid her face in her hands:

  “Oh, how I suffered! Was I not responsible for his death? And I should have given myself up, if M. and Madame de Roncherolles, who were the kindest of friends to me, had not prevented me. To give myself up meant ruining my father and, as a consequence, destroying Noël Dorgeroux’s secret. This last consideration decided me. I had to repair the wrong which I had unwittingly committed and to fight against those whom I had served. As soon as I was well again, I set to work. Knowing of the existence of the written instructions which Noël Dorgeroux had hidden behind the portrait of D’Alembert, I had myself driven to the Lodge on the evening before, or rather on the morning of the inauguration. My intention was to see you and tell you everything. But it so happened that the kitchen-entrance was open and that I was able to go upstairs without attracting anybody’s attention. It was then that you surprised me, in god-father’s bedroom.”

  “But why did you run away, Bérangère?”

  “You had the documents; and that was enough.”

  “No, you ought to have stayed and explained.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have spoken to me of love,” she replied, sadly. “No one can love Massignac’s daughter.”

  “And the result, my poor darling,” I said, with a smile, “was that Massignac, who was in the house, of which he had a key, and who overheard our conversation, took the document and, through your fault, remained the sole possessor of the secret. Not to mention that you left me face to face with a formidable adversary!”

  She shook her head: “You had nothing to fear from my father. Your danger came from Velmot; and him I watched.”

  “How?”

  “I had accepted an invitation to stay at the Château de Pré-Bony, because I knew that my father and Velmot had lived in that neighbourhood during the past winter. Indeed, one day I recognized Velmot’s car coming down the hill at Bougival. After some searching, I discovered the shed in which he kept his car. Well, on the fifteenth of May, I was watching there when he went in, accompanied by two men. From what they said I gathered that they had carried off my father at the end of the performance, that they had taken him to an island in the river where Velmot lay in hiding and that next day Velmot was to resort to every possible method to make him speak. I did not know what to do. To denounce Velmot to the police meant supplying them with convincing evidence against my father. On the other hand, my friends the Roncherolles were not at Pré-Bony. Longing for assistance, I ran to the Blue Lion and telephoned to you making an appointment with you there.”