The Secret of Sarek Part 27

He did not answer. He had flung a quick glance at the floor; and Veronique for a moment examined its curious structure.

All around, following the circ.u.mference of the walls, was the granite itself, rugged and uneven. But outlined in the granite was a large square. They could see, on each of the four sides, the deep crevice that divided it from the rest. The timbers of which it consisted were worn and grooved, full of cracks and gashes, but nevertheless ma.s.sive and powerful. The fourth side almost skirted the edge of the precipice, from which it was divided by eight inches at most.

"A trap-door?" she asked, with a shudder.

"No, not that," he said. "It would be too heavy."

"Then what?"

"I don't know. Very likely it is nothing but a remnant of some past contrivance which no longer works. Still . . ."

"Still what?"

"Last night . . . or rather this morning there was a creaking sound down below there. It seemed to suggest attempts, but they stopped at once . . . it's such a long time since! . . . No, the thing no longer works and they can't make use of it."

"Who's _they_?"

Without waiting for his answer, she continued:

"Listen, Stephane, we have a few minutes before us, perhaps fewer than we think. Francois will be free at any moment now and will come to our rescue. Let us make the most of the interval and tell each other the things which both of us ought to know. Let us discuss matters quietly.

We are threatened with no immediate danger; and the time will be well employed."

Veronique was pretending a sense of security which she did not feel.

That Francois would make his escape she refused to doubt; but who could tell that the boy would go to the window and notice the hook of the hanging ladder? On failing to see his mother, would he not rather think of following the underground tunnel and running to the Priory?

However, she mastered herself, feeling the need of the explanation for which she had asked, and, sitting down on a granite projection which formed a sort of bench, she at once began to tell Stephane the events which she had witnessed and in which she had played a leading part, from the moment when her investigations led her to the deserted cabin containing Maguennoc's dead body.

Stephane listened to the terrifying narrative without attempting to interrupt her but with an alarm marked by his gestures of abhorrence and the despairing expression of his face. M. d'Hergemont's death in particular seemed to crush him, as did Honorine's. He had been greatly attached to both of them.

"There, Stephane," said Veronique, when she had described the anguish which she suffered after the execution of the sisters Archignat, the discovery of the underground pa.s.sage and her interview with Francois.

"That is all that I need absolutely tell you. I thought that you ought to know what I have kept from Francois, so that we may fight our enemies together."

He shook his head:

"Which enemies?" he said. "I, too, in spite of your explanations, am asking the very question which you asked me. I have a feeling that we are flung into the midst of a great tragedy which has continued for years, for centuries, and in which we have begun to play our parts only at the moment of the crisis, at the moment of the terrific cataclysm prepared by generations of men. I may be wrong. Perhaps there is nothing more than a disconnected series of sinister, weird and horrible coincidences amid which we are tossed from side to side, without being able to appeal to any other reasons than the whim of chance. In reality I know no more than you do. I am surrounded by the same obscurity, stricken by the same sorrows and the same losses. It's all just insanity, extravagant convulsions, unprecedent shocks, the crimes of savages, the fury of the barbaric ages."

Veronique agreed:

"Yes, of the barbaric ages; and that is what baffles me most and impresses me so much! What is the connection between the present and the past, between our persecutors of to-day and the men who lived in these caves in days of old and whose actions are prolonged into our own time, in a manner so impossible to understand? To what do they all refer, those legends of which I know nothing except from Honorine's delirium and the distress of the sisters Archignat?"

They spoke low, with their ears always on the alert. Stephane listened for sounds in the corridor, Veronique concentrated her attention on the cliff, in the hope of hearing Francois' signal.

"They are very complicated legends," said Stephane, "very obscure traditions in which we must abandon any attempt to distinguish between what is superst.i.tion and what might be truth. Out of this jumble of old wives' tales, the very most that we can disentangle is two sets of ideas, those referring to the prophecy of the thirty coffins and those relating to the existence of a treasure, or rather of a miraculous stone."

"Then they take as a prophecy," said Veronique, "the words which I read on Maguennoc's drawing and again on the Fairies' Dolmen?"

"Yes, a prophecy which dates back to an indeterminate period and which for centuries has governed the whole history and the whole life of Sarek. The belief has always prevailed that a day would come when, within a s.p.a.ce of twelve months, the thirty princ.i.p.al reefs which surround the island and which are called the thirty coffins would receive their thirty victims, who were to die a violent death, and that those thirty victims would include four women who were to die crucified.

It is an established and undisputed tradition, handed down from father to son: and everybody believes in it. It is expressed in the line and part of a line inscribed on the Fairies' Dolmen: 'Four women crucified,'

and 'For thirty coffins victims thirty times!'"

"Very well; but people have gone on living all the same, normally and peaceably. Why did the outburst of terror suddenly take place this year?"

"Maguennoc was largely responsible. Maguennoc was a fantastic and rather mysterious person, a mixture of the wizard and the bone-setter, the healer and the charlatan, who had studied the stars in their courses and whom people liked to consult about the most remote events of the past as well as the future. Now Maguennoc announced not long ago that 1917 would be the fateful year."

"Why?"

"Intuition perhaps, presentiment, divination, or subconscious knowledge: you can choose any explanation that you please. As for Maguennoc, who did not despise the practices of the most antiquated magic, _he_ would tell you that he knew it from the flight of a bird or the entrails of a fowl. However, his prophecy was based on something more serious. He pretended, quoting evidence collected in his childhood among the old people of Sarek, that, at the beginning of the last century, the first line of the inscription on the Fairies' Dolmen was not yet obliterated and that it formed this, which would rhyme with 'Four women shall be crucified on tree:' 'In Sarek's isle, in year fourteen and three.' The year fourteen and three is the year seventeen; and the prediction became more impressive for Maguennoc and his friends of late years, because the total number was divided into two numbers and the war broke out in 1914.

From that day, Maguennoc grew more and more important and more and more sure of the truth of his previsions. For that matter, he also grew more and more anxious; and he even announced that his death, followed by the death of M. d'Hergemont, would give the signal for the catastrophe. Then the year 1917 arrived and produced a genuine terror in the island. The events were close at hand."

"And still," said Veronique, "and still it was all absurd."

"Absurd, yes; but it all acquired a curiously disturbing significance on the day when Maguennoc was able to compare the sc.r.a.ps of prophecy engraved on the dolmen with the complete prophecy."

"Then he succeeded in doing so?"

"Yes. He discovered under the abbey ruins, in a heap of stones which had formed a sort of protecting chamber round it, an old worn and tattered missal, which had a few of its pages in good condition, however, and one in particular, the one which you saw, or rather of which you saw a copy in the deserted cabin."

"A copy made by my father?"

"By your father, as were all those in the cupboard in his study. M.

d'Hergemont, you must remember, was fond of drawing, of painting water-colours. He copied the illuminated page, but of the prophecy that accompanied the drawing he reproduced only the words inscribed on the Fairies' Dolmen."

"How do you account for the resemblance between the crucified woman and myself?"

"I never saw the original, which Maguennoc gave to M. d'Hergemont and which your father kept jealously in his room. But M. d'Hergemont maintained that the resemblance was there. In any case, he accentuated it in his drawing, in spite of himself, remembering all that you had suffered . . . and through his fault, he said."

"Perhaps," murmured Veronique, "he was also thinking of the other prophecy that was once made to Vorski: 'You will perish by the hand of a friend and your wife will be crucified.' So I suppose the strange coincidence struck him . . . and even made him write the initials of my maiden name, 'V. d'H.', at the top." And she added, "And all this happened in accordance with the wording of the inscription . . . ."

They were both silent. How could they do other than think of that inscription, of the words written ages ago on the pages of the missal and on the stone of the dolmen? If destiny had as yet provided only twenty-seven victims for the thirty coffins of Sarek, were the last three not there, ready to complete the sacrifice, all three imprisoned, all three captive and in the power of the sacrificial murderers? And if, at the top of the knoll, near the Grand Oak, there were as yet but three crosses, would the fourth not soon be prepared, to receive a fourth victim?

"Francois is a very long time," said Veronique, presently.

She went to the edge and looked over. The ladder had not moved and was still out of reach.

"The others will soon be coming to my door," said Stephane. "I am surprised that they haven't been yet."

But they did not wish to confess their mutual anxiety; and Veronique put a further question, in a calm voice:

"And the treasure? The G.o.d-Stone?"

"That riddle is hardly less obscure," said Stephane, "and also depends entirely on the last line of the inscription: 'The G.o.d-Stone which gives life or death.' What is this G.o.d-Stone? Tradition says that it is a miraculous stone; and, according to M. d'Hergemont, this belief dates back to the remotest periods. People at Sarek have always had faith in the existence of a stone capable of working wonders. In the middle ages they used to bring puny and deformed children and lay them on the stone for days and nights together, after which the children got up strong and healthy. Barren women resorted to this remedy with good results, as did old men, wounded men and all sorts of degenerates. Only it came about that the place of pilgrimage underwent changes, the stone, still according to tradition, having been moved and even, according to some, having disappeared. In the eighteenth century, people venerated the Fairies' Dolmen and used still sometimes to expose scrofulous children there."

"But," said Veronique, "the stone also had harmful properties, for it gave death as well as life?"

"Yes, if you touched it without the knowledge of those whose business it was to guard it and keep it sacred. But in this respect the mystery becomes still more complicated, for there is the question also of a precious stone, a sort of fantastic gem which shoots out flames, burns those who wear it and makes them suffer the tortures of the d.a.m.ned."

"That's what happened to Maguennoc, by Honorine's account," said Veronique.