The Golden Triangle Part 23

It was a beautiful old garden and had once formed part of the wide-stretching estate where people were in the habit, at the end of the eighteenth century, of going to drink the Pa.s.sy waters. With a two-hundred-yard frontage, it ran from the Rue Raynouard to the quay of the river-side and led, by four successive terraces, to an expanse of lawn as old as the rest of the garden, fringed with thickets of evergreens and shaded by groups of tall trees.

But the beauty of the garden lay chiefly in its four terraces and in the view which they afforded of the river, the low ground on the left bank and the distant hills. They were united by twenty sets of steps; and twenty paths climbed from the one to the other, paths cut between the b.u.t.tressing walls and sometimes hidden in the floods of ivy that dashed from top to bottom.

Here and there a statue stood out, a broken column, or the fragments of a capital. The stone balcony that edged the upper terrace was still adorned with all its old terra-cotta vases. On this terrace also were the ruins of two little round temples where, in the old days, the springs bubbled to the surface. In front of the library windows was a circular basin, with in the center the figure of a child shooting a slender thread of water through the funnel of a sh.e.l.l. It was the overflow from this basin, forming a little stream, that trickled over the rocks against which Patrice had stumbled on the first evening.

"Ten acres to explore before we've done," said M. Ma.s.seron to himself.

He employed upon this work, in addition to Belval's cripples, a dozen of his own detectives. It was not a difficult business and was bound to lead to some definite result. As M. Ma.s.seron never ceased saying, eighteen hundred bags cannot remain invisible. An excavation leaves traces. You want a hole to go in and out by. But neither the gra.s.s of the lawns nor the sand of the paths showed any signs of earth recently disturbed. The ivy? The b.u.t.tressing-walls? The terraces? Everything was inspected, but in vain. Here and there, in cutting up the ground, old conduit pipes were found, running towards the Seine, and remains of aqueducts that had once served to carry off the Pa.s.sy waters. But there was no such thing as a cave, an underground chamber, a brick arch or anything that looked like a hiding-place.

Patrice and Coralie watched the progress of the search. And yet, though they fully realized its importance and though, on the other hand, they were still feeling the strain of the recent dramatic hours, in reality they were engrossed only in the inexplicable problem of their fate; and their conversation nearly always turned upon the mystery of the past.

Coralie's mother was the daughter of a French consul at Salonica, where she married a very rich man of a certain age, called Count Odolavitch, the head of an ancient Servian family. He died a year after Coralie was born. The widow and child were at that time in France, at this same house in the Rue Raynouard, which Count Odolavitch had purchased through a young Egyptian called Essares, his secretary and factotum.

Coralie here spent three years of her childhood. Then she suddenly lost her mother and was left alone in the world. Essares took her to Salonica, to a surviving sister of her grandfather the consul, a woman many years younger than her brother. This lady took charge of Coralie.

Unfortunately, she fell under Essares' influence, signed papers and made her little grand-niece sign papers, until the child's whole fortune, administered by the Egyptian, gradually disappeared.

At last, when she was about seventeen, Coralie became the victim of an adventure which left the most hideous memory in her mind and which had a fatal effect on her life. She was kidnaped one morning by a band of Turks on the plains of Salonica and spent a fortnight in the palace of the governor of the province, exposed to his desires. Essares released her. But the release was brought about in so fantastic a fashion that Coralie must have often wondered afterwards whether the Turk and the Egyptian were not in collusion.

At any rate, sick in body and depressed in spirits, fearing a fresh a.s.sault upon her liberty and yielding to her aunt's wishes, a month later she married this Essares, who had already been paying her his addresses and who now definitely a.s.sumed in her eyes the figure of a deliverer. It was a hopeless union, the horror of which became manifest to her on the very day on which it was cemented. Coralie was the wife of a man whom she hated and whose love only grew with the hatred and contempt which she showed for it.

Before the end of the year they came and took up their residence at the house in the Rue Raynouard. Essares, who had long ago established and was at that time managing the Salonica branch of the Franco-Oriental Bank, bought up almost all the shares of the bank itself, acquired the building in the Rue Lafayette for the head office, became one of the financial magnates of Paris and received the t.i.tle of bey in Egypt.

This was the story which Coralie told Patrice one day in the beautiful garden at Pa.s.sy; and, in this unhappy past which they explored together and compared with Patrice Belval's own, neither he nor Coralie was able to discover a single point that was common to both. The two of them had lived in different parts of the world. Not one name evoked the same recollection in their minds. There was not a detail that enabled them to understand why each should possess a piece of the same amethyst bead nor why their joint images should be contained in the same medallion-pendant or stuck in the pages of the same alb.u.m.

"Failing everything else," said Patrice, "we can explain that the pendant found in the hand of Essares Bey was s.n.a.t.c.hed by him from the unknown friend who was watching over us and whom he murdered. But what about the alb.u.m, which he wore in a pocket sewn inside his vest?"

Neither attempted to answer the question. Then Patrice asked:

"Tell me about Simeon."

"Simeon has always lived here."

"Even in your mother's time?"

"No, it was one or two years after my mother's death and after I went to Salonica that Essares put him to look after this property and keep it in good condition."

"Was he Essares' secretary?"

"I never knew what his exact functions were. But he was not Essares'

secretary, nor his confidant either. They never talked together intimately. He came to see us two or three times at Salonica. I remember one of his visits. I was quite a child and I heard him speaking to Essares in a very angry tone, apparently threatening him."

"With what?"

"I don't know. I know nothing at all about Simeon. He kept himself very much to himself and was nearly always in the garden, smoking his pipe, dreaming, tending the trees and flowers, sometimes with the a.s.sistance of two or three gardeners whom he would send for."

"How did he behave to you?"

"Here again I can't give any definite impression. We never talked; and his occupations very seldom brought him into contact with me.

Nevertheless I sometimes thought that his eyes used to seek me, through their yellow spectacles, with a certain persistency and perhaps even a certain interest. Moreover, lately, he liked going with me to the hospital; and he would then, either there or on the way, show himself more attentive, more eager to please . . . so much so that I have been wondering this last day or two . . ."

She hesitated for a moment, undecided whether to speak, and then continued:

"Yes, it's a very vague notion . . . but, all the same . . . Look here, there's one thing I forgot to tell you. Do you know why I joined the hospital in the Champs-elysees, the hospital where you were lying wounded and ill? It was because Simeon took me there. He knew that I wanted to become a nurse and he suggested this hospital. . . . And then, if you think, later on, the photograph in the pendant, the one showing you in uniform and me as a nurse, can only have been taken at the hospital. Well, of the people here, in this house, no one except Simeon ever went there. . . . You will also remember that he used to come to Salonica, where he saw me as a child and afterwards as a girl, and that there also he may have taken the snapshots in the alb.u.m. So that, if we allow that he had some correspondent who on his side followed your footsteps in life, it would not be impossible to believe that the unknown friend whom you a.s.sume to have intervened between us, the one who sent you the key of the garden . . ."

"Was old Simeon?" Patrice interrupted. "The theory won't hold water."

"Why not?"

"Because this friend is dead. The man who, as you say, sought to intervene between us, who sent me the key of the garden, who called me to the telephone to tell me the truth, that man was murdered. There is not the least doubt about it. I heard the cries of a man who is being killed, dying cries, the cries which a man utters when at the moment of death."

"You can never be sure."

"I am, absolutely. There is no shadow of doubt in my mind. The man whom I call our unknown friend died before finishing his work; he died murdered, whereas Simeon is alive. Besides," continued Patrice, "this man had a different voice from Simeon, a voice which I had never heard before and which I shall never hear again."

Coralie was convinced and did not insist.

They were seated on one of the benches in the garden, enjoying the bright April sunshine. The buds of the chestnut-trees shone at the tips of the branches. The heavy scent of the wall-flowers rose from the borders; and their brown and yellow blossoms, like a cl.u.s.ter of bees and wasps pressed close together, swayed to the light breeze.

Suddenly Patrice felt a thrill. Coralie had placed her hand on his, with engaging friendliness; and, when he turned to look at her, he saw that she was in tears.

"What's the matter, Little Mother Coralie?"

Coralie's head bent down and her cheek touched the officer's shoulder.

He dared not move. She was treating him as a protecting elder brother; and he shrank from showing any warmth of affection that might annoy her.

"What is it, dear?" he repeated. "What's the matter?"

"Oh, it is so strange!" she murmured. "Look, Patrice, look at those flowers."

They were on the third terrace, commanding a view of the fourth; and this, the lowest of the terraces, was adorned not with borders of wall-flowers but with beds in which were mingled all manner of spring flowers; tulips, silvery alyssums, hyacinths, with a great round plot of pansies in the middle.

"Look over there," she said, pointing to this plot with her outstretched arm. "Do you see? . . . Letters. . . ."

Patrice looked and gradually perceived that the clumps of pansies were so arranged as to form on the ground some letters that stood out among the other flowers. It did not appear at the first glance. It took a certain time to see; but, once seen, the letters grouped themselves of their own accord, forming three words set down in a single line:

_Patrice and Coralie_

"Ah," he said, in a low voice, "I understand what you mean!"

It gave them a thrill of inexpressible excitement to read their two names, which a friendly hand had, so to speak, sown; their two names united in pansy-flowers. It was inexpressibly exciting too that he and she should always find themselves thus linked together, linked together by events, linked together by their portraits, linked together by an unseen force of will, linked together now by the struggling effort of little flowers that spring up, waken into life and blossom in predetermined order.

Coralie, sitting up, said:

"It's Simeon who attends to the garden."

"Yes," he said, wavering slightly. "But surely that does not affect my opinion. Our unknown friend is dead, but Simeon may have known him.

Simeon perhaps was acting with him in certain matters and must know a good deal. Oh, if he could only put us on the right road!"

An hour later, as the sun was sinking on the horizon, they climbed the terraces. On reaching the top they saw M. Ma.s.seron beckoning to them.