The Golden Triangle Part 18

"Oh," replied the magistrate, "old Simeon is wandering in his mind! To listen to him, you would think that everything was about to happen all over again, that Mme. Essares is threatened with danger and that she ought to take to flight at once. That is all that I have been able to get out of him. However, he took me to an old disused door that opens out of the garden on a lane running at right angles with the Rue Raynouard; and here he showed me first the watch-dog's dead body and next some footprints between the door and the flight of steps near the library. But you know those foot-prints, do you not? They belong to you and your Senegalese. As for the death of the watch-dog, I can put that down to your Senegalese, can't I?"

Patrice was beginning to understand. The magistrate's reticence, his explanation, his agreement with Coralie: all this was gradually becoming plain. He put the question frankly:

"So there was no murder?"

"No."

"Then there will be no magistrate's examination?"

"No."

"And no talk about the matter; it will all be kept quiet, in short, and forgotten?"

"Just so."

Captain Belval began to walk up and down, as was his habit. He now remembered Essares' prophecy:

"I sha'n't be arrested. . . . If I am, I shall be let go. . . . The matter will be hushed up. . . ."

Essares was right. The hand of justice was arrested; and there was no way for Coralie to escape silent complicity.

Patrice was intensely annoyed by the manner in which the case was being handled. It was certain that a compact had been concluded between Coralie and M. Ma.s.seron. He suspected the magistrate of circ.u.mventing Coralie and inducing her to sacrifice her own interests to other considerations. To effect this, the first thing was to get rid of him, Patrice.

"Ugh!" said Patrice to himself. "I'm fairly sick of this sportsman, with his cool ironical ways. It looks as if he were doing a considerable piece of thimblerigging at my expense."

He restrained himself, however, and, with a pretense of wanting to keep on good terms with the magistrate, came and sat down beside him:

"You must forgive me, sir," he said, "for insisting in what may appear to you an indiscreet fas.h.i.+on. But my conduct is explained not only by such sympathy or feeling as I entertain for Mme. Essares at a moment in her life when she is more lonely than ever, a sympathy and feeling which she seems to repulse even more firmly than she did before. It is also explained by certain mysterious links which unite us to each other and which go back to a period too remote for our eyes to focus. Has Mme.

Essares told you those details? In my opinion, they are most important; and I cannot help a.s.sociating them with the events that interest us."

M. Ma.s.seron glanced at Coralie, who nodded. He answered:

"Yes, Mme. Essares has informed me and even . . ."

He hesitated once more and again consulted Coralie, who flushed and seemed put out of countenance. M. Ma.s.seron, however, waited for a reply which would enable him to proceed. She ended by saying, in a low voice:

"Captain Belval is ent.i.tled to know what we have discovered. The truth belongs as much to him as to me; and I have no right to keep it from him. Pray speak, monsieur."

"I doubt if it is even necessary to speak," said the magistrate. "It will be enough, I think, to show the captain this photograph-alb.u.m which I have found. Here you are, Captain Belval."

And he handed Patrice a very slender alb.u.m, covered in gray canvas and fastened with an india-rubber band.

Patrice took it with a certain anxiety. But what he saw on opening it was so utterly unexpected that he gave an exclamation:

"It's incredible!"

On the first page, held in place by their four corners, were two photographs: one, on the right, representing a small boy in an Eton jacket; the other, on the left, representing a very little girl. There was an inscription under each. On the right: "Patrice, at ten." On the left: "Coralie, at three."

Moved beyond expression, Patrice turned the leaf. On the second page they appeared again, he at the age of fifteen, she at the age of eight.

And he saw himself at nineteen and at twenty-three and at twenty-eight, always accompanied by Coralie, first as a little girl, then as a young girl, next as a woman.

"This is incredible!" he cried. "How is it possible? Here are portraits of myself which I had never seen, amateur photographs obviously, which trace my whole life. Here's one when I was doing my military training.

. . . Here I am on horseback . . . Who can have ordered these photographs? And who can have collected them together with yours, madame?"

He fixed his eyes on Coralie, who evaded their questioning gaze and lowered her head as though the close connection between their two lives, to which those pages bore witness, had shaken her to the very depths of her being.

"Who can have brought them together?" he repeated. "Do you know? And where does the alb.u.m come from?"

M. Ma.s.seron supplied the answer:

"It was the surgeon who found it. M. Essares wore a vest under his s.h.i.+rt; and the alb.u.m was in an inner pocket, a pocket sewn inside the vest. The surgeon felt the boards through it when he was undressing M.

Essares' body."

This time, Patrice's and Coralie's eyes met. The thought that M. Essares had been collecting both their photographs during the past twenty years and that he wore them next to his breast and that he had lived and died with them upon him, this thought amazed them so much that they did not even try to fathom its strange significance.

"Are you sure of what you are saying, sir?" asked Patrice.

"I was there," said M. Ma.s.seron. "I was present at the discovery.

Besides, I myself made another which confirms this one and completes it in a really surprising fas.h.i.+on. I found a pendant, cut out of a solid block of amethyst and held in a setting of filigree-work."

"What's that?" cried Captain Belval. "What's that? A pendant? An amethyst pendant?"

"Look for yourself, sir," suggested the magistrate, after once more consulting Mme. Essares with a glance.

And he handed Captain Belval an amethyst pendant, larger than the ball formed by joining the two halves which Coralie and Patrice possessed, she on her rosary and he on his bunch of seals; and this new ball was encircled with a specimen of gold filigree-work exactly like that on the rosary and on the seal.

The setting served as a clasp.

"Am I to open it?" he asked.

Coralie nodded. He opened the pendant. The inside was divided by a movable gla.s.s disk, which separated two miniature photographs, one of Coralie as a nurse, the other of himself, wounded, in an officer's uniform.

Patrice reflected, with pale cheeks. Presently he asked:

"And where does this pendant come from? Did you find it, sir?"

"Yes, Captain Belval."

"Where?"

The magistrate seemed to hesitate. Coralie's att.i.tude gave Patrice the impression that she was unaware of this detail. M. Ma.s.seron at last said:

"I found it in the dead man's hand."

"In the dead man's hand? In M. Essares' hand?"

Patrice had given a start, as though under an unexpected blow, and was now leaning over the magistrate, greedily awaiting a reply which he wanted to hear for the second time before accepting it as certain.