The Secret of the Night by Gaston Leroux (best free ebook reader .txt) 📖

up, took them one after the other. In the first he stopped at the first step. He didn’t take more than two steps in the second. In the third, which cut obliquely toward the right and seemed to run to the bank nearest Krestowsky Ostrow, she saw him advance slowly at first, then more quickly among the small trees and hedges. Once only he stopped and looked closely at the trunk of a tree against which he seemed to pick out something invisible, and then he continued to the bank. There he sat down on a stone and appeared to reflect, and then suddenly he cast off his jacket and trousers, picked out a certain place on the bank across from him, finished undressing and plunged into the stream. She saw at once that he swam like a porpoise, keeping beneath and showing his head from time to time, breathing, then diving below the surface again. He reached Krestowsky Ostrow in a clump of reeds. Then he disappeared. Below him, surrounded by trees, could be seen the red tiles of the villa which sheltered Boris and Michael. From that villa a person could see the window of the sitting-room in General Trebassof’s residence, but not what might occur along the bank of the river just below its walls. An isvotchick drove along the distant route of Krestowsky, conveying in his carriage a company of young officers and young women who had been feasting and who sang as they rode; then deep silence ensued. Matrena’s eyes searched for Rouletabille, but could not find him. How long was he going to stay hidden like that? She pressed her face against the chill window. What was she waiting for? She waited perhaps for someone to make a move on this side, for the door near her to open and the traitorous figure of The Other to appear.

A hand touched her carefully. She turned.

Rouletabille was there, his face all scarred by red scratches, without collar or neck-tie, having hastily resumed his clothes. He appeared furious as he surprised her in his disarray. She let him lead her as though she were a child. He drew her to his room and closed the door.

“Madame,” he commenced, “it is impossible to work with you. Why in the world have you wept not two feet from your step-daughter’s door? You and your Koupriane, you commence to make me regret the Faubourg Poissoniere, you know. Your step-daughter has certainly heard you. It is lucky that she attaches no importance at all to your nocturnal phantasmagorias, and that she has been used to them a long time. She has more sense than you, Mademoiselle Natacha has. She sleeps, or at least she pretends to sleep, which leaves everybody in peace. What reply will you give her if it happens that she asks you the reason to-day for your marching and counter-marching up and down the sitting-room and complains that you kept her from sleeping?”

Matrena only shook her old, old head.

“No, no, she has not heard me. I was there like a shadow, like a shadow of myself. She will never hear me. No one hears a shadow.”

Rouletabille felt returning pity for her and spoke more gently.

“In any case, it is necessary, you must understand, that she should attach no more importance to what you have done to-night than to the things she knows of your doing other nights. It is not the first time, is it, that you have wandered in the sitting-room? You understand me? And to-morrow, madame, embrace her as you always have.”

“No, not that,” she moaned. “Never that. I could not.”

“Why not?”

Matrena did not reply. She wept. He took her in his arms like a child consoling its mother.

“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. All is not lost. Someone did leave the villa this morning.”

“Oh, little domovoi! How is that? How is that? How did you find that out?”

“Since we didn’t find anything inside, it was certainly necessary to find something outside.”

“And you have found it?”

“Certainly.”

“The Virgin protect you!”

“SHE is with us. She will not desert us. I will even say that I believe she has a special guardianship over the Isles. She watches over them from evening to morning.”

“What are you saying?”

“Certainly. You don’t know what we call in France ‘the watchers of the Virgin’?”

“Oh, yes, they are the webs that the dear little beasts of the good God spin between the trees and that...”

“Exactly. You understand me and you will understand further when you know that in the garden the first thing that struck me across the face as I went into it was these watchers of the Virgin spun by the dear little spiders of the good God. At first when I felt them on my face I said to myself, ‘Hold on, no one has passed this way,’ and so I went to search other places. The webs stopped me everywhere in the garden. But, outside the garden, they kept out of the way and let me pass undisturbed down a pathway which led to the Neva. So then I said to myself, ‘Now, has the Virgin by accident overlooked her work in this pathway? Surely not. Someone has ruined it.’ I found the shreds of them hanging to the bushes, and so I reached the river.”

“And you threw yourself into the river, my dear angel. You swim like a little god.”

“And I landed where the other landed. Yes, there were the reeds all freshly broken. And I slipped in among the bushes.”

“Where to?”

“Up to the Villa Krestowsky, madame—where they both live.”

“Ah, it was from there someone came?”

There was a silence between them.

She questioned:

“Boris?”

“Someone who came from the villa and who returned there. Boris or Michael, or another. They went and returned through the reeds. But in coming they used a boat; they returned by swimming.”

Her customary agitation reasserted itself.

She demanded ardently:

“And you are sure that he came here and that he left here?”

“Yes, I am sure of it.”

“How?”

“By the sitting-room window.”

“It is impossible, for we found it locked.”

“It is possible, if someone closed it behind him.”

“Ah!”

She commenced to tremble again, and, falling back into her nightmarish horror, she no longer wasted fond expletives on her domovoi as on a dear little angel who had just rendered a service ten times more precious to her than life. While he listened patiently, she said brutally:

“Why did you keep me from throwing