The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsène Lupin

CHAPTER XI
ON THE BRINK

Patrice at once made up his mind what to do. He lifted Coralie to her bed and asked her not to move or call out. Then he made sure that Ya-Bon was not seriously wounded. Lastly, he rang violently, sounding all the bells that communicated with the posts which he had placed in different parts of the house.

The men came hurrying up.

"You're a pack of nincompoops," he said. "Some one's been here. Little Mother Coralie and Ya-Bon have had a narrow escape from being killed."

They began to protest loudly.

"Silence!" he commanded. "You deserve a good hiding, every one of you. I'll forgive you on one condition, which is that, all this evening and all to-night, you speak of Little Mother Coralie as though she were dead."

"But whom are we to speak to, sir?" one of them objected. "There's nobody here."

"Yes, there is, you silly fool, since Little Mother Coralie and Ya-Bon have been attacked. Unless it was yourselves who did it!.. It wasn't? Very well then… And let me have no more nonsense. It's not a question of speaking to others, but of talking among yourselves.. and of thinking, even, without speaking. There are people listening to you, spying on you, people who hear what you say and who guess what you don't say. So, until to-morrow, Little Mother Coralie will not leave her room. You shall keep watch over her by turns. Those who are not watching will go to bed immediately after dinner. No moving about the house, do you understand? Absolute silence and quiet."

"And old Siméon, sir?"

"Lock him up in his room. He's dangerous because he's mad. They may have taken advantage of his madness to make him open the door to them. Lock him up!"

Patrice's plan was a simple one. As the enemy, believing Coralie to be on the point of death, had revealed to her his intention, which was to kill Patrice as well, it was necessary that he should think himself free to act, with nobody to suspect his schemes or to be on his guard against him. He would enter upon the struggle and would then be caught in a trap.

Pending this struggle, for which he longed with all his might, Patrice saw to Ya-Bon's wound, which proved to be only slight, and questioned him and Coralie. Their answers tallied at all points. Coralie, feeling a little tired, was lying down reading. Ya-Bon remained in the passage, outside the open door, squatting on the floor, Arab-fashion. Neither of them heard anything suspicious. And suddenly Ya-Bon saw a shadow between himself and the light in the passage. This light, which came from an electric lamp, was put out at just about the same time as the light in the bed-room. Ya-Bon, already half-erect, felt a violent blow in the back of the neck and lost consciousness. Coralie tried to escape by the door of her boudoir, was unable to open it, began to cry out and was at once seized and thrown down. All this had happened within the space of a few seconds.

The only hint that Patrice succeeded in obtaining was that the man came not from the staircase but from the servants' wing. This had a smaller staircase of its own, communicating with the kitchen through a pantry by which the tradesmen entered from the Rue Raynouard. The door leading to the street was locked. But some one might easily possess a key.

After dinner Patrice went in to see Coralie for a moment and then, at nine o'clock, retired to his bedroom, which was situated a little lower down, on the same side. It had been used, in Essarès Bey's lifetime, as a smoking-room.

As the attack from which he expected such good results was not likely to take place before the middle of the night, Patrice sat down at a roll-top desk standing against the wall and took out the diary in which he had begun his detailed record of recent events. He wrote on for half an hour or forty minutes and was about to close the book when he seemed to hear a vague rustle, which he would certainly not have noticed if his nerves had not been stretched to their utmost state of tension. And he remembered the day when he and Coralie had once before been shot at. This time, however, the window was not open nor even ajar.

He therefore went on writing without turning his head or doing anything to suggest that his attention had been aroused; and he set down, almost unconsciously, the actual phases of his anxiety:

"He is here. He is watching me. I wonder what he means to do. I doubt if he will smash a pane of glass and fire a bullet at me. He has tried that method before and found it uncertain and a failure. No, his plan is thought out, I expect, in a different and more intelligent fashion. He is more likely to wait for me to go to bed, when he can watch me sleeping and effect his entrance by some means which I can't guess.

"Meanwhile, it's extraordinarily exhilarating to know that his eyes are upon me. He hates me; and his hatred is coming nearer and nearer to mine, like one sword feeling its way towards another before clashing. He is watching me as a wild animal, lurking in the dark, watches its prey and selects the spot on which to fasten its fangs. But no, I am certain that it's he who is the prey, doomed beforehand to defeat and destruction. He is preparing his knife or his red-silk cord. And it's these two hands of mine that will finish the battle. They are strong and powerful and are already enjoying their victory. They will be victorious."

Patrice shut down the desk, lit a cigarette and smoked it quietly, as his habit was before going to bed. Then he undressed, folded his clothes carefully over the back of a chair, wound up his watch, got into bed and switched off the light.

"At last," he said to himself, "I shall know the truth. I shall know who this man is. Some friend of Essarès', continuing his work? But why this hatred of Coralie? Is he in love with her, as he is trying to finish me off too? I shall know.. I shall soon know.."

An hour passed, however, and another hour, during which nothing happened on the side of the window. A single creaking came from somewhere beside the desk. But this no doubt was one of those sounds of creaking furniture which we often hear in the silence of the night.

Patrice began to lose the buoyant hope that had sustained him so far. He perceived that his elaborate sham regarding Coralie's death was a poor thing after all and that a man of his enemy's stamp might well refuse to be taken in by it. Feeling rather put out, he was on the point of going to sleep, when he heard the same creaking sound at the same spot.

The need to do something made him jump out of bed. He turned on the light. Everything seemed to be as he had left it. There was no trace of a strange presence.

"Well," said Patrice, "one thing's certain: I'm no good. The enemy must have smelt a rat and guessed the trap I laid for him. Let's go to sleep. There will be nothing happening to-night."

There was in fact no alarm.

Next morning, on examining the window, he observed that a stone ledge ran above the ground-floor all along the garden front of the house, wide enough for a man to walk upon by holding on to the balconies and rain-pipes. He inspected all the rooms to which the ledge gave access. None of them was old Siméon's room.

"He hasn't stirred out, I suppose?" he asked the two soldiers posted on guard.

"Don't think so, sir. In any case, we haven't unlocked the door."

Patrice went in and, paying no attention to the old fellow, who was still sucking at his cold pipe, he searched the room, having it at the back of his mind that the enemy might take refuge there. He found nobody. But what he did discover, in a press in the wall, was a number of things which he had not seen on the occasion of his investigations in M. Masseron's company. These consisted of a rope-ladder, a coil of lead pipes, apparently gas-pipes, and a small soldering-lamp.

"This all seems devilish odd," he said to himself. "How did the things get in here? Did Siméon collect them without any definite object, mechanically? Or am I to assume that Siméon is merely an instrument of the enemy's? He used to know the enemy before he lost his reason; and he may be under his influence at present."

Siméon was sitting at the window, with his back to the room. Patrice went up to him and gave a start. In his hands the old man held a funeral-wreath made of black and white beads. It bore a date, "14 April, 1915," and made the twentieth, the one which Siméon was preparing to lay on the grave of his dead friends.

"He will lay it there," said Patrice, aloud. "His instinct as an avenging friend, which has guided his steps through life, continues in spite of his insanity. He will lay it on the grave. That's so, Siméon, isn't it: you will take it there to-morrow? For to-morrow is the fourteenth of April, the sacred anniversary.."

He leant over the incomprehensible being who held the key to all the plots and counterplots, to all the treachery and benevolence that constituted the inextricable drama. Siméon thought that Patrice wanted to take the wreath from him and pressed it to his chest with a startled gesture.

"Don't be afraid," said Patrice. "You can keep it. To-morrow, Siméon, to-morrow, Coralie and I will be faithful to the appointment which you gave us. And to-morrow perhaps the memory of the horrible past will unseal your brain."

The day seemed long to Patrice, who was eager for something that would provide a glimmer in the surrounding darkness. And now this glimmer seemed about to be kindled by the arrival of this twentieth anniversary of the fourteenth of April.

At a late hour in the afternoon M. Masseron called at the Rue Raynouard.

"Look what I've just received," he said to Patrice. "It's rather curious: an anonymous letter in a disguised hand. Listen:

"'Sir, be warned. They're going away. Take care. To-morrow evening the 1800 bags will be on their way out of the country.

A Friend of France.'"

"And to-morrow is the fourteenth of April," said Patrice, at once connecting the two trains of thought in his mind.

"Yes. What makes you say that?"

"Nothing… Something that just occurred to me.."

He was nearly telling M. Masseron all the facts associated with the fourteenth of April and all those concerning the strange personality of old Siméon. If he did not speak, it was for obscure reasons, perhaps because he wished to work out this part of the case alone, perhaps also because of a sort of shyness which prevented him from admitting M. Masseron into all the secrets of the past. He said nothing about it, therefore, and asked:

"What do you think of the letter?"

"Upon my word, I don't know what to think. It may be a warning with something to back it, or it may be a trick to make us adopt one course of conduct rather than another. I'll talk about it to Bournef."

"Nothing fresh on his side?"

"No; and I don't expect anything in particular. The alibi which he has submitted is genuine. His friends and he are so many supers. Their parts are played."

The coincidence of dates was all that stuck in Patrice's mind. The two roads which M. Masseron and he were following suddenly met on this day so long since marked out by fate. The past and the present were about to unite. The catastrophe was at hand. The fourteenth of April was the day on which the gold was to disappear for good and also the day on which an unknown voice had summoned Patrice and Coralie to the same tryst which his father and her mother had kept twenty years ago.

And the next day was the fourteenth of April.

At nine o'clock in the morning Patrice asked after old Siméon.

"Gone out, sir. You had countermanded your orders."

Patrice entered the room and looked for the wreath. It was not there. Moreover, the three things in the cupboard, the rope-ladder, the coil of lead and the glazier's lamp, were not there either.

"Did Siméon take anything with him?"

"Yes, sir, a wreath."

"Nothing else?"

"No, sir."

The window was open. Patrice came to the conclusion that the things had gone by this way, thus confirming his theory that the old fellow was an unconscious confederate.

Shortly before ten o'clock Coralie joined him in the garden. Patrice had told her the latest events. She looked pale and anxious.

They went round the lawns and, without being seen, reached the clumps of dwarf shrubs which hid the door on the lane. Patrice opened the door. As he started to open the other his hand hesitated. He felt sorry that he had not told M. Masseron and that he and Coralie were performing by themselves a pilgrimage which certain signs warned him to be dangerous. He shook off the obsession, however. He had two revolvers with him. What had he to fear?

"You're coming in, aren't you, Coralie?"

"Yes," she said.

"I somehow thought you seemed undecided, anxious."

"It's quite true," said Coralie. "I feel a sort of hollowness."

"Why? Are you afraid?"

"No. Or rather yes. I'm not afraid for to-day, but in some way for the past. I think of my poor mother, who went through this door, as I am doing, one April morning. She was perfectly happy, she was going to meet her love… And then I feel as if I wanted to hold her back and cry, 'Don't go on… Death is lying in wait for you… Don't go on..' And it's I who hear those words of terror, they ring in my ears; it's I who hear them and I dare not go on. I'm afraid."

"Let's go back, Coralie."

She only took his arm:

"No," she said, in a firm voice. "We'll walk on. I want to pray. It will do me good."

Boldly she stepped along the little slanting path which her mother had followed and climbed the slope amid the tangled weeds and the straggling branches. They passed the lodge on their left and reached the leafy cloisters where each had a parent lying buried. And at once, at the first glance, they saw that the twentieth wreath was there.

"Siméon has come," said Patrice. "An all-powerful instinct obliged him to come. He must be somewhere near."

While Coralie knelt down beside the tombstone, he hunted around the cloisters and went as far as the middle of the garden. There was nothing left but to go to the lodge, and this was evidently a dread act which they put off performing, if not from fear, at least from the reverent awe which checks a man on entering a place of death and crime.

It was Coralie once again who gave the signal for action:

"Come," she said.

Patrice did not know how they would make their way into the lodge, for all its doors and windows had appeared to them to be shut. But, as they approached, they saw that the back-door opening on the yard was wide open, and they at once thought that Siméon was waiting for them inside.

It was exactly ten o'clock when they crossed the threshold of the lodge. A little hall led to a kitchen on one side and a bedroom on the other. The principal room must be that opposite. The door stood ajar.

"That's where it must have happened.. long ago," said Coralie, in a frightened whisper.

"Yes," said Patrice, "we shall find Siméon there. But, if your courage fails you, Coralie, we had better give it up."

An unquestioning force of will supported her. Nothing now would have induced her to stop. She walked on.

Though large, the room gave an impression of coziness, owing to the way in which it was furnished. The sofas, armchairs, carpet and hangings all tended to add to its comfort; and its appearance might well have remained unchanged since the tragic death of the two who used to occupy it. This appearance was rather that of a studio, because of a skylight which filled the middle of the high ceiling, where the belvedere was. The light came from here. There were two other windows, but these were hidden by curtains.

"Siméon is not here," said Patrice.

Coralie did not reply. She was examining the things around her with an emotion which was reflected in every feature. There were books, all of them going back to the last century. Some of them were signed "Coralie" in pencil on their blue or yellow wrappers. There were pieces of unfinished needlework, an embroidery-frame, a piece of tapestry with a needle hanging to it by a thread of wool. And there were also books signed "Patrice" and a box of cigars and a blotting-pad and an inkstand and penholders. And there were two small framed photographs, those of two children, Patrice and Coralie. And thus the life of long ago went on, not only the life of two lovers who loved each other with a violent and fleeting passion, but of two beings who dwell together in the calm assurance of a long existence spent in common.

"Oh, my darling, darling mother!" Coralie whispered.

Her emotion increased with each new memory. She leant trembling on Patrice's shoulder.

"Let's go," he said.

"Yes, dear, yes, we had better. We will come back again… We will come back to them… We will revive the life of love that was cut short by their death. Let us go for to-day; I have no strength left."

But they had taken only a few steps when they stopped dismayed.

The door was closed.

Their eyes met, filled with uneasiness.

"We didn't close it, did we?" he asked.

"No," she said, "we didn't close it."

He went to open it and perceived that it had neither handle nor lock.

It was a single door, of massive wood that looked hard and substantial. It might well have been made of one piece, taken from the very heart of an oak. There was no paint or varnish on it. Here and there were scratches, as if some one had been rapping at it with a tool. And then.. and then, on the right, were these few words in pencil:

Patrice and Coralie, 14 April, 1895

God will avenge us

Below this was a cross and, below the cross, another date, but in a different and more recent handwriting:

14 April, 1915

"This is terrible, this is terrible," said Patrice. "To-day's date! Who can have written that? It has only just been written. Oh, it's terrible!.. Come, come, after all, we can't."

He rushed to one of the windows, tore back the curtain that veiled it and pulled upon the casement. A cry escaped him. The window was walled up, walled up with building-stones that filled the space between the glass and the shutters.

He ran to the other window and found the same obstacle.

There were two doors, leading probably to the bedroom on the right and to a room next to the kitchen on the left. He opened them quickly. Both doors were walled up.

He ran in every direction, during the first moment of terror, and then hurled himself against the first of the three doors and tried to break it down. It did not move. It might have been an immovable block.

Then, once again, they looked at each other with eyes of fear; and the same terrible thought came over them both. The thing that had happened before was being repeated! The tragedy was being played a second time. After the mother and the father, it was the turn of the daughter and the son. Like the lovers of yesteryear, those of to-day were prisoners. The enemy held them in his powerful grip; and they would doubtless soon know how their parents had died by seeing how they themselves would die… 14 April, 1895… 14 April, 1915..

CHAPTER XII
IN THE ABYSS

"No, no, no!" cried Patrice. "I won't stand this!"

He flung himself against the windows and doors, took up an iron dog from the fender and banged it against the wooden doors and the stone walls. Barren efforts! They were the same which his father had made before him; and they could only result in the same mockery of impotent scratches on the wood and the stone.

"Oh, Coralie, Coralie!" he cried in his despair. "It's I who have brought you to this! What an abyss I've dragged you into! It was madness to try to fight this out by myself! I ought to have called in those who understand, who are accustomed to it!.. No, I was going to be so clever!.. Forgive me, Coralie."

She had sunk into a chair. He, almost on his knees beside her, threw his arms around her, imploring her pardon.

She smiled, to calm him:

"Come, dear," she said, gently, "don't lose courage. Perhaps we are mistaken… After all, there's nothing to show that it is not all an accident."

"The date!" he said. "The date of this year, of this day, written in another hand! It was your mother and my father who wrote the first.. but this one, Coralie, this one proves premeditation, and an implacable determination to do away with us."

She shuddered. Still she persisted in trying to comfort him:

"It may be. But yet it is not so bad as all that. We have enemies, but we have friends also. They will look for us."

"They will look for us, but how can they ever find us, Coralie? We took steps to prevent them from guessing where we were going; and not one of them knows this house."

"Old Siméon does."

"Siméon came and placed his wreath, but some one else came with him, some one who rules him and who has perhaps already got rid of him, now that Siméon has played his part."

"And what then, Patrice?"

He felt that she was overcome and began to be ashamed of his own weakness:

"Well," he said, mastering himself, "we must just wait. After all, the attack may not materialize. The fact of our being locked in does not mean that we are lost. And, even so, we shall make a fight for it, shall we not? You need not think that I am at the end of my strength or my resources. Let us wait, Coralie, and act."

The main thing was to find out whether there was any entrance to the house which could allow of an unforeseen attack. After an hour's search they took up the carpet and found tiles which showed nothing unusual. There was certainly nothing except the door, and, as they could not prevent this from being opened, since it opened outwards, they heaped up most of the furniture in front of it, thus forming a barricade which would protect them against a surprise.

Then Patrice cocked his two revolvers and placed them beside him, in full sight.

"This will make us easy in our minds," he said. "Any enemy who appears is a dead man."

But the memory of the past bore down upon them with all its awful weight. All their words and all their actions others before them had spoken and performed, under similar conditions, with the same thoughts and the same forebodings. Patrice's father must have prepared his weapons. Coralie's mother must have folded her hands and prayed. Together they had barricaded the door and together sounded the walls and taken up the carpet. What an anguish was this, doubled as it was by a like anguish!

To dispel the horror of the idea, they turned the pages of the books, works of fiction and others, which their parents had read. On certain pages, at the end of a chapter or volume, were lines constituting notes which Patrice's father and Coralie's mother used to write each other.

"Darling Patrice,

"I ran in this morning to recreate our life of yesterday and to dream of our life this afternoon. As you will arrive before me, you will read these lines. You will read that I love you.."

And, in another book:

"My own Coralie,

"You have this minute gone; I shall not see you until to-morrow and I do not want to leave this haven where our love has tasted such delights without once more telling you."

They looked through most of the books in this way, finding, however, instead of the clues for which they hoped, nothing but expressions of love and affection. And they spent more than two hours waiting and dreading what might happen.

"There will be nothing," said Patrice. "And perhaps that is the most awful part of it, for, if nothing occurs, it will mean that we are doomed not to leave this room. And, in that case."

Patrice did not finish the sentence. Coralie understood. And together they received a vision of the death by starvation that seemed to threaten them. But Patrice exclaimed:

"No, no, we have not that to fear. No. For people of our age to die of hunger takes several days, three or four days or more. And we shall be rescued before then."

"How?" asked Coralie.

"How? Why, by our soldiers, by Ya-Bon, by M. Masseron! They will be uneasy if we do not come home to-night."

"You yourself said, Patrice, that they cannot know where we are."

"They'll find out. It's quite simple. There is only the lane between the two gardens. Besides, everything we do is set down in my diary, which is in the desk in my room. Ya-Bon knows of its existence. He is bound to speak of it to M. Masseron. And then.. and then there is Siméon. What will have become of him? Surely they will notice his movements? And won't he give a warning of some kind?"

But words were powerless to comfort them. If they were not to die of hunger, then the enemy must have contrived another form of torture. Their inability to do anything kept them on the rack. Patrice began his investigations again. A curious accident turned them in a new direction. On opening one of the books through which they had not yet looked, a book published in 1895, Patrice saw two pages turned down together. He separated them and read a letter addressed to him by his father:

"Patrice, my dear Son,

"If ever chance places this note before your eyes, it will prove that I have met with a violent death which has prevented my destroying it. In that case, Patrice, look for the truth concerning my death on the wall of the studio, between the two windows. I shall perhaps have time to write it down."

The two victims had therefore at that time foreseen the tragic fate in store for them; and Patrice's father and Coralie's mother knew the danger which they ran in coming to the lodge. It remained to be seen whether Patrice's father had been able to carry out his intention.

Between the two windows, as all around the room, was a wainscoting of varnished wood, topped at a height of six feet by a cornice. Above the cornice was the plain plastered wall. Patrice and Coralie had already observed, without paying particular attention to it, that the wainscoting seemed to have been renewed in this part, because the varnish of the boards did not have the same uniform color. Using one of the iron dogs as a chisel, Patrice broke down the cornice and lifted the first board. It broke easily. Under this plank, on the plaster of the wall, were lines of writing.

"It's the same method," he said, "as that which old Siméon has since employed. First write on the walls, then cover it up with wood or plaster."

He broke off the top of the other boards and in this way brought several complete lines into view, hurried lines, written in pencil and slightly worn by time. Patrice deciphered them with the greatest emotion. His father had written them at a moment when death was stalking at hand. A few hours later he had ceased to live. They were the evidence of his death-agony and perhaps too an imprecation against the enemy who was killing him and the woman he loved.

Patrice read, in an undertone:

"I am writing this in order that the scoundrel's plot may not be achieved to the end and in order to ensure his punishment. Coralie and I are no doubt going to perish, but at least we shall not die without revealing the cause of our death.

"A few days ago, he said to Coralie, 'You spurn my love, you load me with your hatred. So be it. But I shall kill you both, your lover and you, in such a manner that I can never be accused of the death, which will look like suicide. Everything is ready. Beware, Coralie.'

"Everything was, in fact, ready. He did not know me, but he must have known that Coralie used to meet somebody here daily; and it was in this lodge that he prepared our tomb.

"What manner of death ours will be we do not know. Lack of food, no doubt. It is four hours since we were imprisoned. The door closed upon us, a heavy door which he must have placed there last night. All the other openings, doors and windows alike, are stopped up with blocks of stone laid and cemented since our last meeting. Escape is impossible. What is to become of us?"

The uncovered portion stopped here. Patrice said:

"You see, Coralie, they went through the same horrors as ourselves. They too dreaded starvation. They too passed through long hours of waiting, when inaction is so painful; and it was more or less to distract their thoughts that they wrote those lines."

He went on, after examining the spot:

"They counted, most likely, on what happened, that the man who was killing them would not read this document. Look, one long curtain was hung over these two windows and the wall between them, one curtain, as is proved by the single rod covering the whole distance. After our parents' death no one thought of drawing it, and the truth remained concealed until the day when Siméon discovered it and, by way of precaution, hid it again under a wooden panel and hung up two curtains in the place of one. In this way everything seemed normal."

Patrice set to work again. A few more lines made their appearance:

"Oh, if I were the only one to suffer, the only one to die! But the horror of it all is that I am dragging my dear Coralie with me. She fainted and is lying down now, prostrate by the fears which she tries so hard to overcome. My poor darling! I seem already to see the pallor of death on her sweet face. Forgive me, dearest, forgive me!"

Patrice and Coralie exchanged glances. Here were the same sentiments which they themselves felt, the same scruples, the same delicacy, the same effacement of self in the presence of the other's grief.

"He loved your mother," Patrice murmured, "as I love you. I also am not afraid of death. I have faced it too often, with a smile! But you, Coralie, you, for whose sake I would undergo any sort of torture.. !"

He began to walk up and down, once more yielding to his anger:

"I shall save you, Coralie, I swear it. And what a delight it will then be to take our revenge! He shall have the same fate which he was devising for us. Do you understand, Coralie? He shall die here, here in this room. Oh, how my hatred will spur me to bring that about!"

He tore down more pieces of boarding, in the hope of learning something that might be useful to him, since the struggle was being renewed under exactly similar conditions. But the sentences that followed, like those which Patrice had just uttered, were oaths of vengeance:

"Coralie, he shall be punished, if not by us, then by the hand of God. No, his infernal scheme will not succeed. No, it will never be believed that we had recourse to suicide to relieve ourselves of an existence that was built up of happiness and joy. No, his crime will be known. Hour by hour I shall here set down the undeniable proofs.."

"Words, words!" cried Patrice, in a tone of exasperation. "Words of vengeance and sorrow, but never a fact to guide us. Father, will you tell us nothing to save your Coralie's daughter? If your Coralie succumbed, let mine escape the disaster, thanks to your aid, father! Help me! Counsel me!"