The Secret Tomb Maurice Leblanc (best love story novels in english .TXT) 📖

her like the beating of the wings of a bird. So she arrived above the pool. The wire, slackened, bent under her weight and jerked upwards. A second time she stopped, when she was over the middle of the pool.

This was the hardest part of her undertaking. She was no longer able to hook, so to speak, her gaze on a fixed point among the hillocks, and lend her balance the support of something stable. She had to lower her eyes and try to read, in the moving and glittering water, repelling the fascination of the sun’s reflection, the words and the figures. A terribly dangerous task! She had to essay it several times and to rise upright the very moment she found herself bending over the void. A minute or two passed, minutes of veritable anguish. She brought them to an end by a salute with both arms, stretching them out with even gracefulness, and a cry of victory; then she at once walked on again.

Raoul had crossed the bridge which spans the end of the pool and he was already on a kind of platform among the hillocks, at which the wire ended. She was struck by his paleness and touched by his anxiety on her account.

“Goodness,” she said, gripping his hand. “Were you as frightened as that on my account?⁠ ⁠… If I’d only known!⁠ ⁠… And yet, no”: she went on. “Even if I had known, I should have made the experiment, so certain was I of the result.”

“Well?” he said.

“Well, I read the device distinctly, and the date under it, which we couldn’t make out⁠—the 12th of July, 1921. We know now that the 12th of July of this year is the great day foretold so many years ago. But there’s something better, I fancy.”

She called Saint-Quentin to her and said some words to him in a low voice. Saint-Quentin ran to the caravan and a few minutes came out of it in his acrobat’s tights. He stepped into the boat with Dorothy, who rowed it to the middle of the pool. He slipped quickly into the water and dived. Twice he came up to receive more exact instructions from Dorothy. At last, the third time he came up, he cried:

“Here it is, mummy!”

He tossed into the boat a somewhat heavy object. Dorothy snatched it up, examined it, and when they reached the bank, handed it to Raoul. It was a metal disc, of rusted iron or copper, of the size of a saucer, and convex⁠—like an enormous watch. It must have been formed of two plates joined together, but the edges of these plates had been soldered together so that one could not open it.

Dorothy rubbed one of its faces and pointed out to Raoul with her finger the deeply engraved word: Fortuna.

“I was not mistaken,” she said, “and poor old Juliet Assire was speaking the truth, in speaking first of the river. During one of their last meetings the Baron must have thrown in here the gold medal in its metal case.”

“But why?”

“Didn’t you write to him from Roborey, after I left, to be on his guard?”

“Yes.”

“In that case what better hiding-place could he find for the medal till the day came for him to use it than the bottom of the pool? The first boy who came along could fish it out for him.”

Joyously she tossed the disc in the air and juggled with it and three pebbles. Then she caught hold of the shivering Saint-Quentin, very scraggy in his wet tights, and with the other three boys danced round the platform, singing the lay of “The Recovered Medal.”

At the end of his breath the captain made the observation that there was a fête at Clisson and that they might very well go there to celebrate their success.

“Let’s harness One-eye’ Magpie.”

Dorothy approved of it.

“Excellent! But One-eyed Magpie’s too slow. What about your car, Raoul?”

They hurried back to the Manor. Saint-Quentin went to change his costume. Raoul set his engine going and brought the car out of the garage. While the three boys were getting into it, he went to Dorothy, who had sat down at a little table on the terrace which ran the length of the building.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She said:

“But I never had any intention of going with you. Today you’re going to be nursemaid.”

He was not greatly surprised. Since early morning he had had an odd feeling that everything that happened was not quite natural. The incidents followed one another in such perfect sequence and with a logic and exactness foreign to actuality. One might have said that they were scenes in a too-well-made play, of which it would have been easy, with a little experience of the playwright’s art, to analyze the construction and the tricks. Certainly, without knowing Dorothy’s game, he guessed the dénouement she proposed to bring about⁠—the capture of d’Estreicher. But by means of what stratagem?

“Don’t question me,” she said. “We are watched. So no heroics, no remonstrances. Listen.”

She was amusing herself by spinning the disk on the table and quite calmly she outlined her plan and her maneuvers.

“It’s like this. A day or two ago I wrote, in your name, to the Public Prosecutor, advising him that our friend d’Estreicher, for whom the police are hunting, guilty of attempts to murder Baron Davernoie and Madame Juliet Assire, would be at Hillocks Manor today. I asked him to send two detectives who would find you at Masson Inn at four o’clock. It’s now a quarter to four. Your three servants will be there too. So off you go.”

“What am I to do?”

“Come back quickly with the two detectives and your three servants, not by the main road, but by the paths Saint-Quentin and the three boys will point out to you. At the end of them you will find ladders ready. You will set them up against the wall. D’Estreicher and his confederate will be there. You will cover them with your guns while