The architectural floor plan labeled The Plan of the Inhabited Floor of the Square Tower is depicted with the layout of various rooms within the structure, with each labeled accordingly.The Plan of the Inhabited Floor of the Square Tower.
The Plan of the Inhabited Floor of the Square Tower.
The Plan of the Inhabited Floor of the Square Tower.
He did so now, as I stood there. When we at length passed into the sleeping room of Mme. Darzac, we were absolutely certain that we had left nothing behind us of which we did not know. As soon as we entered the room, Bernier, who had followed us, had taken care, as he always did, to draw the bolt which closed from the inside the only door by which the apartment communicated with the corridor.
Mme. Darzac’s room was smaller than that of her husband. But it was bright and well lighted from the way that the windows were placed. As soon as we set foot over the threshold, I saw Rouletabille turn pale and he turned to me and said:
“Sainclair, do you perceive the perfume of the Lady in Black?”
I did not. I perceived nothing at all. The window, barred, like all the others which looked out on the sea, was wide open and a light breeze rustled the hangings which had been drawn in front of a set of hooks for gowns which had been placed in one corner. The other corner was occupied by the bed. The hooks were placed so high that the gowns and peignoir which they held were covered by the hangings in front scarcely more than half way down, so that it would have been entirely out of the question for any person to conceal himself there without leaving his legs exposed to view from the knees to the feet. Nor would anyonehave been able to hide in the corner where the portmanteaux and trunks were placed, although, nevertheless, Rouletabille examined it with the greatest care. There was no panel in this room. Toilet table, bureau, an easy chair, two other chairs, and the four walls between which there was no one but ourselves, as we could have sworn by all that we held most sacred.
Rouletabille, after having looked under the bed, gave the signal for departure and motioned us from the room. He lingered for a moment, but no longer. Bernier locked the door with the tiny key which he put in his inside pocket and tightly buttoned his coat over it. We made the tour of the corridors and also that of Old Bob’s apartment which consisted of a bedroom and sitting room as easy to examine and as incapable of hiding anyone as those of the Darzacs. No one was in the suite, which was furnished rather carelessly, the chief article noticeable being an almost empty book case with the doors standing open. When we left the room Mere Bernier brought up her chair and placed it on the threshold where she could see clearly and still go on with her work, which seemed to be always that of paring potatoes.
We entered the rooms occupied by the Berniers and found them like all the others. The other stories were inhabited and communicated with the ground floor by a little inner stairway which began at the angle O′ and ascended to the summit of the tower. A trap door in the ceiling of the Berniers’ room closed this stairway. Rouletabille asked for a hammer and nails and nailed up the trap door, thus making the stairway unusable.
One might say, in short and in fact, that nothing escaped Rouletabilleand that when we had made the rounds of the Square Tower we had left no one behind us save M. and Mme. Bernier. One would have said, too, that there could have been no human being in the apartment of the Darzacs before Bernier, a few minutes later, opened the door to M. Darzac himself as I am now about to relate.
* * * * *
It was about five minutes before five o’clock when, leaving Bernier in his corridor in front of the door of the Darzacs’ room, Rouletabille and myself found ourselves again in the Court of the Bold.
At that moment we climbed to the platform of the ancient tower at B″. We seated ourselves upon the parapet, our eyes looking down to the ground, attracted by the echoes of the Rochers Rouges. At that moment, we noticed upon the edge of the Barma Grande which opened its mysterious mouth in the flaming face of Baousse-Raousse, the disturbed and wrathful countenance of Old Bob. His shadow was the only dark thing about. The red cliffs rose from the waters with such a vivid radiance that one might have readily believed that they were still glowing with the same fires which are found in the interior of the earth. By what a prodigious anachronism it was that this modern scholar with his coat and hat in the height of fashion should be moving about, grotesque and ghoulish, in front of this cavern three hundred thousand years old formed by the ardent lava to serve as the first roof for the first family in the first days of the world! Why this sinister gravedigger in this beautiful corner of the earth? We could see him brandishing his skull as he had done at the table and we could hearhim laugh—laugh—laugh! Ah, his laughter made us ill even to think of it! It tore our ears and our hearts.
From Old Bob our attention was drawn to M. Darzac, who was coming through the postern of the gardener and crossing the Court of the Bold. He did not see us. Ah, he was not laughing! Rouletabille felt the deepest pity for him for he saw that he was at the end of his endurance. In the afternoon he had said to my friend, who now repeated the words to me: “Eight days is too much! I do not believe that I can bear this torment for eight days!”
“And where would you go?” Rouletabille had asked him.
“To Rome,” he had replied. Evidently Professor Stangerson’s daughter would accompany him nowhere else and Rouletabille believed that it was the idea that the Pope could arrange the affair which was driving him wild with grief that had put the journey to Rome into the mind of poor M. Darzac. Poor, poor M. Darzac! No, in truth, his face wore no smile.
We followed him with our eyes to the door of the Square Tower. We could see from his looks that he could endure no more. His head was moodily bent toward the ground; his hands were in his pockets. He had the air of a man fatigued and disgusted with the whole world. Yes, with his hands buried in his pockets, he looked out of humor with everything. But, patience! he will take his hands out of his pockets and one will not smile at him always. I confess that I smiled. Well, M. Darzac a little after this gave me cause to experience the most frightful thrill of terror which could freeze human bones! And I did not smile then.
M. Darzac went straight to the Square Tower, where, of course, he found Bernier, who opened the door for him. As Bernier had been keeping constant guard before the door of the room, as he had kept the key in his pocket and as we had proven by our investigation that the place was empty when we had left it, we had established the fact thatwhen M. Darzac entered his room, there could be no one else there. And this is the truth.
Everything that I have said could have been sworn to “after” by each one of us. If I tell it to you “before,” it is that I am haunted by the mystery which lurks in the shadow and makes ready to reveal itself.
At the moment that we saw M. Darzac go to his room, we heard a clock strike five.
(4)What Happened from Five O’clock that Night Until the Moment When the Attack on the Square Tower Began.
Rouletabille and I remained chatting, or, rather, trying to reason things out, upon the platform of the Tower B for another hour. Suddenly, my friend struck me a little tap on the shoulder and exclaimed, “For my part, I think—” and then, without completing the sentence, he started for the Square Tower. I followed him.
I was a thousand miles from guessing what he thought. He thought of Mere Bernier’s bag of potatoes which he emptied out on the white floor of the room to the great amazement of the good woman; then, satisfied with this act which evidently corresponded to the state of his mind, he returned with me to the Court of the Bold, while, behind us, we couldhear Pere Bernier laughing as he picked up the potatoes.
As we reached the court we saw the face of Mme. Darzac appearing for a moment at the window of the room occupied by her father on the first story of “la Louve.”
The heat had become insupportable. We were threatened with a violent storm and we believed that it would begin to lighten immediately.
Ah, how much the storm would relieve us, we thought. The sea had a thick and heavy quietude as though it had been saturated with oil. The sea was heavy and the air was heavy and our hearts were heavy. No one or nothing on the earth or in the heavens was lighter than Old Bob, whose form had appeared again at the edge of the Barma Grande and who was still moving around agitatedly. One would have said that he was dancing. No, he was making a speech! To whom? We leaned over the railing to see. There was apparently some one upon the strand to whom Old Bob was addressing some long-winded scientific discourse. But the palm leaves hid his auditor from us. Finally, the listener moved and advanced, and approached the “black professor,” as Rouletabille called him. And we saw that Old Bob’s congregation was composed of two persons. One was Mme. Edith—we could easily recognize her with her languishing graces, clinging like a vine to her husband’s arm. To her husband’s arm! But this was not her husband? Who, then, was the young man upon whom Mme. Edith was playing off so many pretty airs?
Rouletabille turned around, looking for someone of whom to make inquiries—either Mattoni or Bernier. We saw Bernier upon thethreshold of the door of the Square Tower and Rouletabille beckoned him. Bernier approached and his eye followed the direction indicated by Rouletabille’s finger.
“Who is that with Mme. Rance?” asked the young reporter.
“The young man?” responded Bernier without hesitation. “That is Prince Galitch.”
Rouletabille and I looked at each other. It is true that we had never seen Prince Galitch walking at a distance, but I would not have imagined that his manner of walking would be like this, and he had not seemed to me to be so tall. Rouletabille understood my thoughts, I knew. He shrugged his shoulders.
“All right,” he said to Bernier. “Thanks.”
And we continued to gaze at Mme. Edith and her Prince.
“I can only say one thing,” said Bernier as he turned to leave us. “And that is that I don’t care for this prince at all. He is too soft spoken and too blonde and his eyes are too blue. They say that he is a Russian. That may be, but there are some who leave the country because they have to. But he comes and goes in a strange fashion and takes no leave beforehand. The time before the last that he was invited here to luncheon Madame and Monsieur waited and waited for him and dared not begin without him. Well, after an hour or two they received a wire, begging them to excuse him because he had missed the train. The dispatch was sent from Moscow.”
And Bernier, chuckling, returned to his vantage post.
Our eyes remained fixed upon the beach. Mme. Edith and her prince continued their stroll toward the grotto of Romeo and Juliet; Old Bobsuddenly ceased to gesticulate, descended from the Barma Grande and came toward the château, entered the gate, crossed the outer court, and we saw, even from the height of the platform of the tower, that he had ceased to smile. Old Bob’s face had become sadness itself. He was silent. He passed beneath the arch of the postern. We called him, he did not seem to hear us. He carried before him in the crook of his arm his “oldest skull in the world,” and all at once we saw him fly into the fiercest of passions. He addressed the worst of insults to the skull. He descended into the Round Tower and we heard the mutterings of his wrath for moments after he was out of sight. Then heavy blows resounded. One would have said that he was hurling himself against the wall.
At this moment six strokes resounded from the old clock of the New Castle. And at almost the same instant a clap of thunder echoed over the sea. And the line of the horizon grew black.
Then a groom of the stables, Walter, a brave, stupid fellow who was incapable of a single idea, but who had shown for years past the blind devotion of a brute toward his master, Old Bob, passed under the postern of the gardener, entered into the Court of Charles the Bold, and came to us. He held in his hand a letter which he gave to Rouletabille. He handed me another and continued on his way toward the Square Tower.
Rouletabille, calling after him, inquired what errand was taking him to the Square Tower. He answered that he was taking the mail for M. and Mme. Darzac to Pere Bernier. He spoke in English for Walter understood no other language; but we spoke it well enough to understand him andmake him understand. Walter was charged with distributing the mail because Pere Jacques had no right to leave his lodge on any account. Rouletabille took the letters from the man’s hands and said to him that he would take it in himself.
A few drops of water had begun to fall.
We turned to the door of M. Darzac’s room. Bernier was smoking his pipe in the corridor, sitting astride a chair.
“Is M. Darzac still there?” asked Rouletabille.
“He hasn’t stirred since he went in,” Bernier replied.
We knocked. We heard the heavy bolt drawn from the inside. (These bolts can only be used by the person within the room.)
M. Darzac was writing letters when we entered. He had been seated beside the little reading table facing the door R.
Now mark well all our movements. Rouletabille complained that the letter which he held in his hand confirmed the telegram which he had received in the morning and pressed him to return to Paris. His paper insisted upon his proceeding at once to Russia.
M. Darzac read indifferently the two or three letters which we had brought him and put them in his pocket. I held out to Rouletabille the letter which I had received. It was from my friend in Paris who, after having given me some important details regarding the departure of Brignolles, informed me that the laboratory assistant had left his address for mail to be forwarded to Sospel, the Hotel des Alps. This was extremely interesting and M. Darzac and Rouletabille were greatly excited over it. We decided to go to Sospel as soon as it could be arranged and, after talking of the matter for a few minutes, we wentout of the room. The door of Mme. Darzac’s sleeping room was not closed. Here is what we noticed as we passed out:
I have mentioned that Mme. Darzac was not in her own room. As soon as we made our exit, Pere Bernier immediately—immediately, I say, for I saw him—turned the key in the lock and then took it out and put it in his pocket—in the little inside pocket of his waistcoat. Ah, I can still see him putting the key into his inside pocket—I swear it!—and he buttoned his coat over it!
Then the three of us went out of the Square Tower, leaving Pere Bernier in his corridor like the good watch dog that he never ceased to be until the last day of his life. One may be a poacher and a good watch dog into the bargain, you know. Even watch dogs poach sometimes. And I bear witness here and now, among all the events which followed, Pere Bernier always did his duty and never told lies. And his wife, Mere Bernier, was an excellent servant, faithful, intelligent and not too talkative. Since she has been a widow, I have had her in my service. She will be glad to read here the tribute which I pay to her and to her husband. They both deserved it.
* * * * *
It was about half past six o’clock when, in emerging from the Square Tower, we went to pay a visit to Old Bob in the Round Tower, Rouletabille, M. Darzac and I. As soon as we entered the low basement M. Darzac uttered an exclamation of surprise and indignation at seeing the destruction which had been wrought upon a wash drawing upon which he had been working ever since the evening before in the endeavor todistract his mind, and which represented the plan for a great scaling ladder for the Fort of Hercules of the kind which had existed in the Fifteenth Century and of which Arthur Rance had shown us the pictures. This drawing had been gashed with a knife and paint had been smeared over it. He endeavored in vain to obtain some explanation from Old Bob, who was kneeling beside a box containing a skeleton and was so wrapped up in a shoulder blade that he did not even answer us.
* * * * *
I desire here, by way of parenthesis, to ask the pardon of the reader for the mathematical precision with which for the last few pages, I have enumerated our every act and movement, but I will assure him, once and for all, that even the smallest circumstances have in reality a considerable importance, for everything which we did at this time was done, though alas, we did not guess it, on the brink of a precipice.
As Old Bob seemed to be in a churlish humor, we left him—that is, Rouletabille and myself did. M. Darzac remained gazing at his spoiled drawing, but thinking, doubtless, of altogether different things.
As we went out of the Round Tower, Rouletabille and I raised our eyes to the sky which was rapidly becoming covered with great, black clouds. The tempest was near at hand. In the meantime, the air seemed to grow more and more stifling.
“I am going to lie down in my room,” I said. “I can’t stand any more of this. Perhaps it may be cooler there with all the windows open.”
Rouletabille followed me into the New Castle. Suddenly, as we reachedthe first landing of our winding staircase, he stopped me:
“Ah,” he said in a low voice; “sheis there!”
“Who?”
“The Lady in Black. Can’t you smell the perfume?”
And he hid himself behind a door, motioning me to continue without waiting for him. I obeyed.
What was my amazement in opening the door of my room to find myself face to face with Mathilde!
She uttered a low cry and disappeared in the shadow, gliding away like a surprised bird. I rushed to the staircase and leaned over the balustrade. She swept down the steps like a ghost. She soon gained the ground floor and I saw below me the face of Rouletabille, who, leaning over the rail of the first landing, looked at her, too.
He mounted the steps to my side.
“Oh, my God!” he cried. “What did I tell you! Poor, poor soul!”
He seemed to be in the greatest agitation.
“I asked M. Darzac for eight days!” he went on. “But this thing must be ended in twenty-four hours or I shall no longer have strength to act.”
He entered my room and threw himself into a chair as if exhausted. “I am smothering!” he moaned. “I can’t breathe!” He tore his collar away from his throat. “Water!” he entreated. “Water!”
I started to fetch some, but he stopped me.
“No—I want the water from the heavens! I must have it!” and he waved his hands toward the dark skies from which huge drops were slowly beginning to fall.
For ten minutes he remained stretched out in the chair, thinking. What surprised me was that he asked no question or uttered no conjecture asto what the Lady in Black had been seeking in my room. I would not have known how to answer, if he had done so. At length, he rose.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To take the guard at the postern.”
* * * * *
He would not even come in to dinner and sent word to have some soup brought out to him as though he were a soldier. The dinner was served in la Louve at half past eight. Darzac, who came to the table from Old Bob’s workroom, said that the latter refused to dine also. Mme. Edith, fearing that her uncle might be ill, went immediately to the Round Tower. She would not even allow her husband to accompany her—indeed, she seemed to be much out of humor with him.
The Lady in Black came in on the arm of her father. She cast on me a look of sorrowful reproach which disturbed me greatly. Her eyes seemed never to wander from me.
It was a gloomy meal enough. No one ate much. Arthur Rance looked every moment in the direction of the Lady in Black. All the windows were open. The atmosphere was suffocating. A flash of lightning and a heavy clap of thunder came in rapid succession—and then, the deluge! A sigh of relief issued from our overcharged breasts. Mme. Edith reappeared just in time to escape being drenched by the furious rain which beat down like cannon balls upon the peninsula.
The young woman told us in excited tones and with her hands clasped, how she had found Old Bob bending over his desk with his head buried in his hands. He had refused to have anything to say to her. She hadspoken to him affectionately and he had treated her like a bear. Then, as he had obstinately held his hands to his ears, she had pricked one of his fingers with a little pin set with rubies which she used to fasten the lace scarf which she wore in the evening over her shoulders. Her uncle, she said, had turned upon her like a madman, had snatched the little pin from her and thrown it upon the desk. And then he had spoken to her—“brutally, rudely as he had never done before in his life!” she ejaculated. “Get out of here and leave me alone!” was what he had said to her. Mme. Edith had been so much pained that she went out without saying a word, promising herself, however, that she would not soon set foot again in the Round Tower. But she had turned her head for a last look at her old uncle and had been almost struck dumb by what she saw.
The “oldest skull in the history of the human race” was upon the desk, and Old Bob, a handkerchief stained with blood in his hand, was spitting in the skull. He had always treated it with the most severe respect and had insisted that others should do the same. Edith had hurried away, almost frightened.
Robert Darzac reassured her by telling her that what she had taken for blood was only paint and that Old Bob’s skull had been spattered by the paints which had been used in the wash drawing.
I left the table to hurry out to Rouletabille and also to escape from Mathilde’s glances. What had the Lady in Black been doing in my bedroom? I was not to wait long to know!
* * * * *
When I started out the thunder was pealing loudly and the rain falling with redoubled force. It took me only one bound to reach the postern. No Rouletabille was there! I found him on the terrace B″, watching the entrance to the Square Tower and receiving the full strength of the storm at his back.
I entreated him to take shelter under the arch.
“Leave me alone!” he said impatiently. “Leave me alone. This is the deluge. Ah, how good it is! how good—all this anger of the heavens! Have you ever had a desire to roar with the thunder? I have—and I am roaring now. Listen, while I cry out—alas! alas! alas! My voice is stronger than the thunder!”
And he plunged into the darkness making the shadows resound with his savage clamors. I believed this time that he had surely gone mad! But in my heart I knew that the unhappy lad was breathing forth in these indistinct articulations of frightful anguish the misery that burned him, and which he was constantly trying to hinder from burning up the heart and the soul in his body—the misery of being the son of Larsan.
I turned helplessly and as I did so, I felt a hand seize my wrist and a dark form cried out to me above the tempest:
“Where is he?”
It was Mme. Darzac who was also seeking Rouletabille. A new peal of thunder burst and we heard the boy in his mad delirium hurling wild shouts of defiance to the heavens. She heard him. She saw him. We were drenched with water from the rain and the breaking of the sea on the terrace. Mme. Darzac’s clothing clung around her like a rag and her skirt dripped as she walked. I took the wretched woman’s arm and heldher up, for I saw that she was about to fall, and at that moment, in the midst of that terrible unchaining of the elements, in that mad tempest, under this terrible downpour on the breast of the raging sea, I all at once breathed the perfume—the odor so sweet and penetrating and haunting that its fragrance has remained with me ever since—the Perfume of the Lady in Black. Ah, I understood now how Rouletabille had remembered it all these years.
Yes, it was a fragrance full of sadness—something like the perfume of an isolated flower which has been condemned to be seen by no one but to blossom for itself all alone. It was a fragrance which set such ideas as these running through my brain, although I did not analyze them at the time—a sweet, soft and yet insistent perfume which seemed to steal away my senses in the midst of this battle of the elements, as soon as I perceived it. A strange perfume! Surely it was that, for I had seen the Lady in Black hundreds of times without noticing it, and now that I had done so, it was everywhere and above all things and I knew that the memory of it would abide with me while life should last. I understood how when one had—I will not say smelled but seized (for I do not think that everyone would have been able to catch the subtle fragrance of the perfume of the Lady in Black, any more than I myself had done before this night in which my senses seemed to have become sharpened to the keenest point)—yes, when one had seized this adorable and captivating odor, it was for life. And the heart would be perfumed by it, whether it was the heart of a son, like Rouletabille; or the heart of a lover, like M. Darzac; or the heart of a villain, like Larsan. No, no—theknowledge of it could never pass. And now, by some sudden insight, I seemed to understand Rouletabille and Darzac and Larsan and all the misfortunes which had attended the daughter of Professor Stangerson.
* * * * *
There in the night and the tempest, the Lady in Black called aloud to Rouletabille and he fled from us and rushed further into the night, shrieking aloud, “The perfume of the Lady in Black! The perfume of the Lady in Black!”
The unhappy woman sobbed. She drew me toward the tower. She struck with desperate hands at the door which Bernier opened to us and her weeping would have melted the heart of a stone.
I could only utter the veriest commonplaces, begging her to calm herself, although I would have given everything I had in the world to find words which, without betraying anyone, might perhaps have made her understand my own part in the sorrowful drama which was being played out between the mother and the child.
Suddenly she seemed to recover herself in some degree and she motioned me to enter the little parlor at the right which was just outside the bed chamber of Old Bob. The door stood open but there we were as much alone as we could have been in her own room, for we knew that Old Bob worked late in the Tower of Charles the Bold.
I can assure you that in my memories of that horrible night the thought of the moments which I spent in the company of the Lady in Black are not the least sorrowful. I was put to a proof which I had notexpected, and it was like a blow full in the face when, without even taking time to speak of the way in which we had been treated by the elements, Mme. Darzac looked me full in the eyes and demanded: “How long is it, M. Sainclair, that you were at Trepot?”
I was struck dumb—overpowered more completely than I had been by the fury of the storm. And I felt that, at the moment when nature, wearied out, was beginning to grow more quiet, I was to suffer a more dangerous assault than that of thunderbolts or lightning flashes. I must, by my expression, have betrayed the agitation which was aroused in my mind by this unexpected remark, for I could see by her eyes as she looked at me that she was aware how deeply I was moved.
At first I made no answer: then I stammered out some disconnected words of which I remember nothing, save that they were ridiculous. It is years now since that night, but as I write I am living over the scene as if I were a spectator instead of the actor which I actually was, and as if it were even now going on in front of my eyes.
There are people who may be drenched to the skin and yet not look in the least ridiculous. The Lady in Black was one of them. Although, like myself, she had experienced the full fury of the storm, she was majestic and beautiful with her dishevelled locks, her bare neck and magnificent shoulders which, through the thin silk which clothed them seemed to have merely a light veil thrown across the flesh. She seemed to be a sublime statue, carved by Phidias from the immortal clay to which his chisel has given form and beauty. I am well aware that, even after all the years which have elapsed, my description soundstoo glowing and I will not linger on the subject. But those who have known Professor Stangerson’s daughter will understand me, I think, and I desire, here, with Rouletabille near me, to affirm the sentiments of respectful admiration which filled my heart at the sight of this mother, so divinely beautiful, who, in the state of disorder to which the fearful tempest had brought her, and with her whole heart filled with agony, was endeavoring to make me break the oath that I had sworn to the lad who was my friend.
She took both my hands in hers and said in a voice which I shall never forget:
“You are his friend. Tell him, then, that he is not the only one who has suffered.” And she added with a sob which shook her whole frame:
“Why will he insist on not telling me the truth!”
I had not a word to say. What could I have answered? This woman had always seemed so cold and formal to the world in general and (as I had thought) to me in particular that it was as if I had not existed for her, and now she was laying bare her heart before me as though I were an old friend. And I had breathed the perfume of the Lady in Black.
Yes, she treated me as an old friend. She told me everything that I already knew in a few sentences as piteous and as simple as a mother’s love itself—and she told me other things which Rouletabille had kept a secret from me. Evidently the game of hide and seek could not have lasted long. The relationship between them had been guessed by the one as surely as by the other. Led by a sure instinct Mme. Darzac had resolved to take means to learn who was this Rouletabille whohad saved her from death and who was of the age of her own son—and who resembled the lad whom she had mourned as dead. And since her arrival at Mentone, a letter had reached her containing the proof that Rouletabille had lied to her in regard to his early life and had never set foot in any school at Bordeaux. Immediately, she had sought the youth and had asked for an explanation, but he had hurried away without replying. But he had seemed disturbed when she spoke to him of Trepot and of the school at Eu, and the trip which we had made there before coming to Mentone.
“How did you know?” I exclaimed, betraying my secret without realizing that I was doing so.
She showed no sign of triumph at my involuntary confession, and in a few words went on to reveal to me her stratagem. That evening when I had taken her by surprise, it was not the first time that she had been in my room. My luggage bore the labels of the hotels at which we had stopped on our recent journey.
“Why did he not throw himself into my arms when I opened them to him?” she moaned. “Ah, my God! If he refuses to be Larsan’s son, will he never consent to be mine!”
As she told me her story, it seemed to me that Rouletabille had conducted himself in an atrocious fashion toward this poor woman who had believed him dead, who had mourned for him in despair, and who, in the midst of her terrible dread and mortal anguish, experienced a thrill of the keenest joy in realizing that her son was still alive. Ah, the poor mother! The evening before, he had mocked at her when she had cried out to him with all her soul that she had a son and that that son was he! He had mocked her, even while the tears had streamed downhis cheeks. I could never have believed that Rouletabille could have been so cruel or so heartless—or, even, so ill-bred!
A dramatic scene set in a ruined area with crumbling stone walls and debris on the ground is depicted, where a man, dressed in dark clothing, is running forward with his arms raised, his face showing desperation or fear.We could see his figure borne along as on the wind, and could hear the voice calling, “Mother! Mother!”
We could see his figure borne along as on the wind, and could hear the voice calling, “Mother! Mother!”
We could see his figure borne along as on the wind, and could hear the voice calling, “Mother! Mother!”
Certainly he behaved in an abominable fashion! He had told her with a sardonic smile that “he was nobody’s son—not even the son of a thief.” It was these words that had sent her flying to her room in the Square Tower and had made her long to die. But she had not found her son only to give him up so easily and she would—she must have him acknowledge her!
I was almost beside myself. I kissed her hands and entreated pardon for Rouletabille. Here was the result of my friend’s schemes to save her pain. Under the pretext of saving her from Larsan, he had plunged a knife into her heart. I felt as though I had no wish to know any more of the story. I knew too much already and I longed to run away. I hastened out of the room and called Bernier, who opened the door for me. I went out of the Square Tower, cursing Rouletabille roundly. I went to the Court of the Bold to look for him, but found it deserted.
At the postern gate Mattoni had come to take the ten o’clock watch. I saw a light in Rouletabille’s room and I hastened up the rickety stairway of the New Castle and quickly found myself outside his door. I opened it without knocking. Rouletabille looked up.
“What do you want, Sainclair?”
I told him all that I had heard and my opinion of him for his actions which had so deeply wounded Mme. Darzac.
“She didn’t tell you everything, my friend,” he replied, coldly. “She did not tell you that she forbade me to touch that man.”
“That is true!” I cried. “I heard her.”
“Well, what have you come here to tell me then?” he went on, roughly. “Do you know what she said to me yesterday? She ordered me to go away. She would rather die than see me take issueagainst my father.”
And he laughed—laughed. Such laughter, I hope not to hear again.
“Against my father! She thinks, I suppose, that he is stronger than I!”
His face was not a pleasant sight to see as he uttered the words.
But suddenly it seemed to be transformed and to glow with unearthly beauty.
“She is afraid for me!” he said, softly. “And I—I am afraid for her—only for her. And I do not know my father. And, God help me! I do not know my mother!”
At that moment the sound of a shot rang out on the night, followed by a cry of mortal agony! Ah, it was again the cry that I had heard two years ago in the “inexplicable gallery.” My hair rose on my scalp and Rouletabille tottered as though the bullet had struck himself.
And then he bounded toward the open window, filling the fortress with a despairing burst of anguish:
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”