He had no wish to allow his fears to be seen before the game was played. He must, from the outset, treat the enemy as impostors, for his one last hope lay in the whole thing being an imposture.
Yes, he determined to believe that they were about to lie to him. And he would show a calm assurance in the presence of such a conspiracy.
Unfortunately his reflection on certain events of the last few days rendered it extremely difficult for him to maintain the necessary self-possession.
He would rather have found himself in the African desert amid the treachery of wild tribes than in that peaceful old house where two persons were waiting for him in the small drawing-room.
He had chosen that room, sometimes used by his mother in the daytime as a room of rest, because it was at the far end of a passage and they would be able to talk in peace without rousing the attention of any inquisitive listener.
Subdamoun opened a drawer, took out a revolver and loaded it. He put it in his pocket, and then began to pace up and down the study. He made an effort to think out some plan of campaign. It was to no purpose.
Suddenly the door opened and he found himself confronted by his mother, seemingly no less agitated than himself.
“What’s the matter, Jacques?” she said. “As I passed the small drawing-room, the door being ajar, I heard a voice say: ‘Is he going to keep us waiting much longer?’ I recognized the voice. It was the Baroness d’Askof speaking.”
Subdamoun, on his guard, managed in part to conceal the excitement which the mention of that name occasioned.
The Baroness d’Askof! So she was the enemy! He thought of the many deeds that the Baron could have done, or caused to be done, in his name while they were conspiring together, and inwardly quailed. In what deep waters was he floundering?
“Why have you not more confidence in me?” went on the Marchioness. “I feel certain that some great danger hangs over you.”
“You are mistaken, mother,” he returned. “I have an appointment with the Baroness d’Askof because we have to settle certain matters connected with the past, but I am in no danger.”
She stood motionless. He made a movement of impatience.
“You ought to get some rest. Besides, I have asked you to allow me to see these people without worrying yourself about them.”
He had never spoken to her in such a tone before. She was more than ever perturbed.
“You are not yourself. During the last few days you have altered beyond recognition. Usually you have such complete control of yourself, but you cannot disguise your uneasiness. Why don’t you trust me? I have always looked upon these d’Askofs as bandits.”
“I, too, have considered them as utterly unscrupulous,” agreed Subdamoun.
“Ah, there you are giving yourself away. Well, refuse to meet these people. They mustn’t be allowed to come to this house again.... We must break with them.”
“It is for that very purpose that I must see them. Besides, you forget that this interview with the Baroness may be useful in assisting the marriage of Frederic Héloni and Maria Thérèse.”
“Don’t say any more. How can you put forward such a pretext! Marie Thérèse will wait if necessary until she is of age, and if it were nothing more than that I would see the Baroness myself. The look on your face frightens me, and I am frightened on your account.”
He clenched his fists, and then at the sight of the grief on his mother’s face he relented.
“Listen, mother. Things being what they are I must have done with them, and I will tell you everything briefly. These people have come here, it seems, to prove to me that in the matter of the coup d’état I was merely the tool of a murderer, and they’re going to tell me that murderer’s name. So you see I must receive them.”
Cecily made no reply. She was at the end of her endurance. All her terrors, all her forebodings, all her suspicions, since it had been brought home to her how assassination had helped her son, the vague but terrible image of the man who had saved her life, the haunting memory of her captivity in the underground cellar where a loathsome slave groveled at her feet; above all, the name, the deadly name, revealed by the photograph in the little temple with its relics of the past, the name that little children in France had learnt to fear like that of an ogre or the wolf-man — all these things rose up before her and enveloped her in a demoniacal whirl that paralyzed her mind, scorched her eyes, deafened her ears — her ears still ringing with the sound of those tragic syllables: “Chéri-Bibi! Chéri-Bibi!”
She put out her arms.
“Don’t go there.... Don’t go there.”
She caught hold of him. He shook her as though she were the obstacle, forgetting that she was his mother, and she gave a gasp without losing her hold.
“Don’t go there.... Don’t go there.”
At the thought that she should try to prevent him from getting at the truth Subdamoun darted forward in a frenzy, dragging her with him, and thus they reached the door of the small drawing-room, which was now closed.
Here he came to a stand and listened. She, too, mastering the delirium that was taking possession of her, drew herself up and listened. They could hear nothing but the loud throbbing of their hearts.
Suddenly he decided to open the door, and they entered the room.
A light softened by the shades over the electric bulbs was diffused over the middle of the room leaving the rest in shadow.
They were amazed. The room was empty.
“Gone!” exclaimed Subdamoun. “Why have they gone?”
And the fact that these people whom he had expected to see were no longer there increased his dismay.
As he approached the middle of the room his foot slipped on the carpet. He stooped forward. His hand touched the carpet, and he looked at his hand in the light.
He uttered a cry — his hand was red.... It was blood!... His hand was red with blood.
He fell on his knees and stared — stared at the pool of blood flowing towards the window.
Here, near the window, he picked up a hat, an ordinary, common battered felt hat, and a little farther away a bag, a wrist bag, an elegant reticule, open and bloodstained.
He stood up, his face pale, his eyes starting from his head.
“Murder has been done here.... Call... Call the servants....”
The Marchioness stood there open-mouthed, her eyes filled with horror, her hands trembling, her cheeks livid.
“He has murdered them.... Again he has done murder.”
Subdamoun was beside himself.... Who was he?
“I want to know.... I want to know.”
He was near the partly open window overlooking the garden. The window creaked slightly as it was blown back by a light breeze.
He thought that the criminal had fled through the window with his victims. With a violent movement he flung the window still wider open and leapt into the garden.
In the moonlight he could see before him a man bending over the air-hole of a cellar and forcing something through the aperture.
At the sound made by Subdamoun in leaping into the garden the man turned round. And Subdamoun recognized his rescuer, the man who had helped him to break out of prison, the man who had killed M. Dimier and so many others. He drew his revolver and ran towards him.
The man saw that he would not have the time to slip into the cellar and he fled with incredible rapidity. He made mad rushes here and there to escape Subdamoun’s revolver....
“Hands up or I’ll fire!” shouted Subdamoun. But the man again silently eluded him and made a dash for the window through which Subdamoun had come. Then he sprang through the window into the house.
The small drawing-room was empty. He tore across it like an arrow, mounted a staircase leading to the first floor, and saw on the landing the Marchioness, who was vainly endeavoring in a lifeless voice to rouse the servants.
At the sight of the frightful apparition she fell on her knees.
“Hide me, Cecily,” said Chéri-Bibi.
>
And he went into her room and closed the door.
“Hide me, Cecily!” The Marchioness uttered a cry. That voice and that intonation when he said “Cecily!” And then that supreme cry for assistance from the man who had been her playmate as a child and who years ago, when she was a young girl, gratified her every caprice — and that way of saying “Cecily!” like the Marquis after his return from a long absence abroad, made her shudder to the very marrow.
When Jacques appeared on the landing in his turn she said in answer to his furious questions:
“No, I have not seen him.”
She went into her room. She could not see him. She did not know where he was hiding.
“Stay where you are!” she cried aloud.
Jacques’s footsteps could be heard coming nearer. He opened the door of his mother’s room. His revolver was still in his hand. He was fuming with rage and discomfiture.
“Where are the servants? Isn’t there a servant in the place? One would think they were all the accomplices of this man.”
His mother made no answer. She was kneeling on a prayer-stool. Subdamoun left the room and continued his frenzied search. He went into Lydia’s room. She was sleeping more soundly than usual from the effects of some narcotic — the result, doubtless, of Chéri-Bibi’s precautions.
While Subdamoun was out of his mother’s room no word passed between the Marchioness and the man in hiding; there was nothing between them but her prayers.
Jacques returned to her.
“That man is a devil and he saved my life.”
“Yes,” she said, rising from her prayer-stool.
“Did you suspect that?”
“Yes,” she answered once more.
“But this is a most horrible catastrophe. We don’t know who this man is.
“Yes, I know him,” she said.
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
He started up. He forced her into a seat. He shook her. She made no resistance.
“Have you known him long?”
“Yes.”
“His name.”
“Chéri-Bibi.”
He gave a start. His brain reeled. But for the tragic look on his mother’s face he could have believed that she was mocking him and had herself gone mad. He was the protégé of Chéri-Bibi, of Chéri-Bibi who had murdered both his grandfathers!... Chéri-Bibi!... Oh, that terrible name! He had heard it all around him when he was a little boy. He had been brought up in a place that rang with the story of his crimes — in a house stained with the blood of his victims. He knew that Chéri-Bibi’s crimes at that period were past counting. When he went near the butcher’s shop in Le Pollet his governess used to stop to tell him the story of the butcher’s boy who first learnt in that shop how to use the knife!
He called to mind how they refrained from talking of him when the servant, dear Jacqueline, afterwards Sister St. Mary of the Angels, was near, because that sainted woman was the monster’s sister.
Suddenly Subdamoun burst into a fit of wild laughter.
“Come, come, surely not.... What does it all mean? Chéri-Bibi has been dead for many a long year.”
“No.”
“But you yourself thought he was dead.”
“Yes.”
“When did you learn that he was alive?”
“When I learnt that the peanut dealer and he were one and the same person.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Only a few days.”
“Why did you not denounce him to the police?”
“He saved your life.”
“Why did he not murder me instead of his other victims?” exclaimed Subdamoun.
“And me, too, alas,” wailed Cecily in a hollow voice. “Yes, you are right, Jacques, a thousand times right. There is no one in the world more wretched than we are through that monster. I have not denounced him to the police, but I execrate him. I would rather have died by his hand than know that we owe our lives to him.”
Subdamoun stared at his mother. She spoke without looking at him, with strange force, despite her physical weakness. He was more than ever at a loss.
“But tell me the why and wherefore of all these murders committed by him round about us? What was the object — why? That is what I should like you to tell me, mother.”
Cecily did not lower her eyes. She spoke like a clairvoyant who divines things that are hidden from ordinary mortals.
“I have had many afflictions in my life, Jacques, but I have just learnt that the greatest of all was to have been loved long ago by that little wretch....”
“You!”
“Oh, he never told me so, but alas, I know it all the same. A Chéri-Bibi dare not speak openly of love to a good woman, but he may love her secretly.”
“And his murders are the tokens of his love for her!”
Subdamoun flung out his brutal retort and then lay prostrate on the sofa. Suddenly he looked up.
“Put in writing all you know of this man. I have but one object in life, and when I have accomplished it we will go away. I intend to find Chéri-Bibi and hand him over to the police.”
Jacques had scarcely finished speaking when a cupboard door opened and the man stepped out.
“Here I am,” he said, folding his arms. “I am ready to go with you. Hand me over to the police.”
Subdamoun still held his revolver and instinctively aimed at him.
“Or shoot me,” added the man.
“That would probably be the best thing to do, but not in front of my mother,” said Subdamoun, thrusting aside the Marchioness, who clung to his arm.
“Wherever you please.”
“Jacques, let this man go,” cried Cecily in a strained voice. “Let us never see him again. Let him disappear as we will disappear ourselves.”
“Oh, this man and I have a few mysteries to unravel,” returned Jacques, opening the door, adding to Chéri-Bibi: “Be good enough to come down to my room.”
The man went out and Subdamoun followed. The Marchioness could scarcely stand. She made no attempt to follow them. She had accomplished a superhuman effort in hiding the monster. Fate must take its course....
The door was no sooner closed than it was opened again and a vague form entered the room. It seemed to her that she was in the throes of some hideous nightmare. She was no longer surprised at anything. She came back to reality on hearing a voice say:
“I beg your pardon, madame, but I must have a word with you here and now.”
She recognized the form. It was that of M. Hilaire of the “Up-to-date Grocery Stores,” who regularly supplied the household with provisions.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHÉRI-BIBI AND SUBDAMOUN
SUBDAMOUN SAT IN his study listening to Chéri-Bibi. At first there was a short, sharp exchange of words between them. Confronted by the incredible audacity of the monster Jacques seemed ineffective.
“Yes, monsieur, I dared to act without asking your permission. What have you to complain of? You are not responsible for anything. You know nothing. And no one will ever be any the wiser if you are sufficiently clever to continue to remain ignorant. Hang it all, you were a combatant in the Great War. Lives are lost in peace as well as in war. For many long years I have worked secretly for you, saving you from every disagreeable necessity, taking upon myself the most hideous tasks. You have had the honor and the fame.... And for a long time I have got rid of all your Dukes d’Enghien! You have had but to march forward in the name of justice, and you have known no other course.... Thereupon you threaten to shoot me. What is that to me so long as I have succeeded?...
“But have I succeeded? That is the crux of the question. Are you going to shoot and then denounce me, that is to say, denounce yourself? Have I worked so hard only to see the country return to a state of anarchy from which I rescued it by placing at its head an honest man against whom no one can breathe a word of reproach? Think it over! You are not a child. Great heavens, you have returned from an army
in the field. The military eagle never begot a tame dove!... You understand me.... You will end by understanding me.”
“I understand that you are a murderer,” said Subdamoun in a harsh voice, wiping with the back of his hand the perspiration that trickled down his forehead.
“A murderer!” repeated Chéri-Bibi. “What do you mean by a murderer? Can you tell me that?... Oh, I know the definition. A murderer is a man who wilfully puts a fellow-being to death.... Suppose I tell you that I have always had the intention to save my fellow-being, and that my intention has most often led me to kill him. I couldn’t help that. Formerly I used to say Fatalitas! Now I hold my tongue and believe in the good God, the good God of my boyhood, who chastizes the wicked by my hand. I am not responsible for that.”
“M. Dimier was an honest man and an upright judge,” said Subdamoun, more and more aghast at the monster’s frightful theories.
“M. Dimier was my friend. I would have given my life to save his life. I took his life to save yours.
You must know that I have never taken life but when there was no alternative. A man is not a murderer when he takes life only if there is no alternative!”
“No man had the right to kill another except in self-defense.”
“Since my earliest boyhood I have been in a state of self-defense against society which has never ceased to attack me.... Another man might have borne malice. I have forgiven society. I have done more than forgive it. I have dreamed of reforming it, of working to make it better and more fit to live in under a leader of my own choice. And whom did I choose? You! And yet you do not seem in the least flattered. You have a look of disgust on your face. You turn round and say to yourself: ‘To think that such a man supported me!’ Why, my dear young sir, if you had not had that man behind you, you would have had no one in front of you to admire you and say: ‘What a fine fellow he is! What a brave man! He’s the man for us. Everything he touches succeeds.’ Everything you touched did succeed. Without my help you would not have been returned at your first election.”
“My opponent was the victim of a motor-car accident,” declared Subdamoun, trembling with anguish though he endeavored to assume a brave front.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 237