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

to speak to them during this time; that will keep them patient until the general is out of danger. As soon as Matrena has withdrawn into the garden, I will call my men, who will shoot them from a distance.”

“And the house itself? And the general’s friends?”

“Let them try to get away, too, by the servants’ stairway and jump from the window after the general. We must try something. Say that I have them at the muzzle of my revolver.”

“Your plan won’t work,” said Rouletabille, “unless the door of Natacha’s sitting-room that opens on the drawing-room is closed.”

“It is. I can see from here.”

“And unless the door of the little passage-way before that staircase that opens into the drawing-room is closed also, and you cannot see it from here.”

“That door is open,” said Ermolai.

Koupriane swore. But he recovered himself promptly.

“Madame Trebassof will close the door when she speaks to them.”

“It’s impracticable,” said the reporter. “That will arouse their suspicions more than ever. Leave it to me; I have a plan.”

“What?”

“I have time to execute it, but not to tell you about it. They have already waited too long. I shall have to go upstairs, though. Ermolai will need to go with me, as with a friend of the family.”

“I’ll go too.”

“That would give the whole show away, if they saw you, the Prefect of Police.”

“Why, no. If they see me—and they know I ought to be there—as soon as I show myself to them they will conclude I don’t know anything about it.”

“You are wrong.”

“It is my duty. I should be near the general to defend him until the last.”

Rouletabille shrugged his shoulders before this dangerous heroism, but he did not stop to argue. He knew that his plan must succeed at once, or in five minutes at the latest there would be only ruins, the dead and the dying in the datcha des Iles.

Still he remained astonishingly calm. In principle he had admitted that he was going to die. The only hope of being saved which remained to them rested entirely upon their keeping perfectly cool and upon the patience of the living bombs. Would they still have three minutes’ patience?

Ermolai went ahead of Koupriane and Rouletabille. At the moment they reached the foot of the veranda steps the servant said loudly, repeating his lesson:

“Oh, the general is waiting for you, Excellency. He told me to have you come to him at once. He is entirely well and Madame Trebassof also.”

When they were in the veranda, he added:

“She is to see also, at once, these gentlemen, who will be able to tell her there is no more danger.”

And all three passed while Koupriane and Rouletabille vaguely saluted the two conspirators in the drawing-room. It was a decisive moment. Recognizing Koupriane, the two Nihilists might well believe themselves discovered, as the reporter had said, and precipitate the catastrophe. However, Ermolai, Koupriane and Rouletabille climbed the stairs to the bedroom like automatons, not daring to look behind them, and expecting the end each instant. But neither stirred. Ermolai went down again, by Rouletabille’s order, normally, naturally, tranquilly. They went into Matrena Petrovna’s chamber. Everybody was there. It was a gathering of ghosts.

Here was what had happened above. That the “doctors” still remained below, that they had not been received instantly, in brief, that the catastrophe had been delayed up to now was due to Matrena Petrovna, whose watchful love, like a watch-dog, was always ready to scent danger. These two “doctors” whose names she did not know, who arrived so late, and the precipitate departure of the little doctor of Vassili-Ostrow aroused her watchfulness. Before allowing them to come upstairs to the general she resolved to have a look at them herself downstairs. She arose from her bed for that; and now her presentiment was justified. When she saw Ermolai, sober and mysterious, enter with Koupriane’s message, she knew instinctively, before he spoke, that there were bombs in the house. When Ermolai did speak it was a blow for everybody. At first she, Matrena Perovna, had been a frightened, foolish figure in the big flowered dressing-gown belonging to Feodor that she had wrapped about her in her haste. When Ermolai left, the general, who knew she only trembled for him, tried to reassure her, and, in the midst of the frightened silence of all of them, said a few words recalling the failure of all the previous attempts. But she shook her head and trembled, shaking with fear for him, in agony at the thought that she could do nothing there above those living bombs but wait for them to burst. As to the friends, already their limbs were ruined, absolutely ruined, in very truth. For a moment they were quite incapable of moving. The jolly Councilor of Empire, Ivan Petrovitch, had no longer a lively tale to tell, and the abominable prospect of “this horrible mix-up” right at hand rendered him much less gay than in his best hours at Cubat’s place. And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff was whiter than the snow that covers old Lithuania’s fields when the winter’s chase is on. Athanase Georgevitch himself was not brilliant, and his sanguine face had quite changed, as though he had difficulty in digesting his last masterpiece with knife and fork. But, in justice to them, that was the first instantaneous effect. No one could learn like that, all of a sudden, that they were about to die in an indiscriminate slaughter without the heart being stopped for a little. Ermolai’s words had turned these amiable loafers into waxen statues, but, little by little, their hearts commenced to beat again and each suggested some way of preventing the disaster—all of them sufficiently incoherent—while Matrena Petrovna invoked the Virgin and at the same time helped Feodor Feodorovitch adjust his sword and buckle his belt; for the general wished to die in uniform.

Athanase Georgevitch, his eyes sticking out of his head and his body bent as though he feared the Nihlists just below him might perceive his tall form—through the floor, no doubt—proposed that they should throw themselves out of the window, even at the cost of broken legs. The saddened Councilor of Empire declared that project simply idiotic, for as they fell they would be absolutely at the disposal of the Nihilists, who would be attracted by the noise and would make a handful of dust of them with a single gesture through the window. Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff, who couldn’t think of anything at all, blamed Koupriane and the rest of the police for not having devised something. Why hadn’t they already got rid of these Nihilists? After the frightened silence they had kept at first, now they all spoke at once, in low voices, hoarse and rapid, with shortened breath, making wild movements of the arms and head, and walked here and there in the chamber quite without motive, but very softly on tiptoe, going to the windows, returning, listening at the doors, peering through the key-holes, exchanging absurd suggestions, full of the wildest imaginings. “If we should... if... if,”—everybody speaking and everybody making signs for the others to be quiet. “Lower! If they hear us,