The Golden Triangle Part 28

Patrice climbed the stairs, feeling a good deal calmer. But, when he came to the first floor, he was astonished to find that the electric light was not on. He turned on the switch. Then he saw, at the end of the pa.s.sage, Ya-Bon on his knees outside Coralie's room, with his head leaning against the wall. The door was open.

"What are you doing there?" he shouted, running up.

Ya-Bon made no reply. Patrice saw that there was blood on the shoulder of his jacket. At that moment the Senegalese sank to the floor.

"d.a.m.n it! He's wounded! Dead perhaps."

He leapt over the body and rushed into the room, switching on the light at once.

Coralie was lying at full length on a sofa. Round her neck was the terrible little red-silk cord. And yet Patrice did not experience that awful, numbing despair which we feel in the presence of irretrievable misfortunes. It seemed to him that Coralie's face had not the pallor of death.

He found that she was in fact breathing:

"She's not dead. She's not dead," said Patrice to himself. "And she's not going to die, I'm sure of it . . . nor Ya-Bon either. . . . They've failed this time."

He loosened the cords. In a few seconds Coralie heaved a deep breath and recovered consciousness. A smile lit up her eyes at the sight of him.

But, suddenly remembering, she threw her arms, still so weak, around him:

"Oh, Patrice," she said, in a trembling voice, "I'm frightened . . .

frightened for you!"

"What are you frightened of, Coralie? Who is the scoundrel?"

"I didn't see him. . . . He put out the light, caught me by the throat and whispered, 'You first. . . . To-night it will be your lover's turn!'

. . . Oh, Patrice, I'm frightened for you! . . ."

CHAPTER XI

ON THE BRINK

Patrice at once made up his mind what to do. He lifted Coralie to her bed and asked her not to move or call out. Then he made sure that Ya-Bon was not seriously wounded. Lastly, he rang violently, sounding all the bells that communicated with the posts which he had placed in different parts of the house.

The men came hurrying up.

"You're a pack of nincomp.o.o.ps," he said. "Some one's been here. Little Mother Coralie and Ya-Bon have had a narrow escape from being killed."

They began to protest loudly.

"Silence!" he commanded. "You deserve a good hiding, every one of you.

I'll forgive you on one condition, which is that, all this evening and all to-night, you speak of Little Mother Coralie as though she were dead."

"But whom are we to speak to, sir?" one of them objected. "There's n.o.body here."

"Yes, there is, you silly fool, since Little Mother Coralie and Ya-Bon have been attacked. Unless it was yourselves who did it! . . . It wasn't? Very well then. . . . And let me have no more nonsense. It's not a question of speaking to others, but of talking among yourselves . . .

and of thinking, even, without speaking. There are people listening to you, spying on you, people who hear what you say and who guess what you don't say. So, until to-morrow, Little Mother Coralie will not leave her room. You shall keep watch over her by turns. Those who are not watching will go to bed immediately after dinner. No moving about the house, do you understand? Absolute silence and quiet."

"And old Simeon, sir?"

"Lock him up in his room. He's dangerous because he's mad. They may have taken advantage of his madness to make him open the door to them. Lock him up!"

Patrice's plan was a simple one. As the enemy, believing Coralie to be on the point of death, had revealed to her his intention, which was to kill Patrice as well, it was necessary that he should think himself free to act, with n.o.body to suspect his schemes or to be on his guard against him. He would enter upon the struggle and would then be caught in a trap.

Pending this struggle, for which he longed with all his might, Patrice saw to Ya-Bon's wound, which proved to be only slight, and questioned him and Coralie. Their answers tallied at all points. Coralie, feeling a little tired, was lying down reading. Ya-Bon remained in the pa.s.sage, outside the open door, squatting on the floor, Arab-fashion. Neither of them heard anything suspicious. And suddenly Ya-Bon saw a shadow between himself and the light in the pa.s.sage. This light, which came from an electric lamp, was put out at just about the same time as the light in the bed-room. Ya-Bon, already half-erect, felt a violent blow in the back of the neck and lost consciousness. Coralie tried to escape by the door of her boudoir, was unable to open it, began to cry out and was at once seized and thrown down. All this had happened within the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds.

The only hint that Patrice succeeded in obtaining was that the man came not from the staircase but from the servants' wing. This had a smaller staircase of its own, communicating with the kitchen through a pantry by which the tradesmen entered from the Rue Raynouard. The door leading to the street was locked. But some one might easily possess a key.

After dinner Patrice went in to see Coralie for a moment and then, at nine o'clock, retired to his bedroom, which was situated a little lower down, on the same side. It had been used, in Essares Bey's lifetime, as a smoking-room.

As the attack from which he expected such good results was not likely to take place before the middle of the night, Patrice sat down at a roll-top desk standing against the wall and took out the diary in which he had begun his detailed record of recent events. He wrote on for half an hour or forty minutes and was about to close the book when he seemed to hear a vague rustle, which he would certainly not have noticed if his nerves had not been stretched to their utmost state of tension. And he remembered the day when he and Coralie had once before been shot at.

This time, however, the window was not open nor even ajar.

He therefore went on writing without turning his head or doing anything to suggest that his attention had been aroused; and he set down, almost unconsciously, the actual phases of his anxiety:

"He is here. He is watching me. I wonder what he means to do. I doubt if he will smash a pane of gla.s.s and fire a bullet at me. He has tried that method before and found it uncertain and a failure. No, his plan is thought out, I expect, in a different and more intelligent fashion. He is more likely to wait for me to go to bed, when he can watch me sleeping and effect his entrance by some means which I can't guess.

"Meanwhile, it's extraordinarily exhilarating to know that his eyes are upon me. He hates me; and his hatred is coming nearer and nearer to mine, like one sword feeling its way towards another before clashing. He is watching me as a wild animal, lurking in the dark, watches its prey and selects the spot on which to fasten its fangs. But no, I am certain that it's he who is the prey, doomed beforehand to defeat and destruction. He is preparing his knife or his red-silk cord. And it's these two hands of mine that will finish the battle. They are strong and powerful and are already enjoying their victory. They will be victorious."

Patrice shut down the desk, lit a cigarette and smoked it quietly, as his habit was before going to bed. Then he undressed, folded his clothes carefully over the back of a chair, wound up his watch, got into bed and switched off the light.

"At last," he said to himself, "I shall know the truth. I shall know who this man is. Some friend of Essares', continuing his work? But why this hatred of Coralie? Is he in love with her, as he is trying to finish me off too? I shall know . . . I shall soon know. . . ."

An hour pa.s.sed, however, and another hour, during which nothing happened on the side of the window. A single creaking came from somewhere beside the desk. But this no doubt was one of those sounds of creaking furniture which we often hear in the silence of the night.

Patrice began to lose the buoyant hope that had sustained him so far. He perceived that his elaborate sham regarding Coralie's death was a poor thing after all and that a man of his enemy's stamp might well refuse to be taken in by it. Feeling rather put out, he was on the point of going to sleep, when he heard the same creaking sound at the same spot.

The need to do something made him jump out of bed. He turned on the light. Everything seemed to be as he had left it. There was no trace of a strange presence.

"Well," said Patrice, "one thing's certain: I'm no good. The enemy must have smelt a rat and guessed the trap I laid for him. Let's go to sleep.

There will be nothing happening to-night."

There was in fact no alarm.

Next morning, on examining the window, he observed that a stone ledge ran above the ground-floor all along the garden front of the house, wide enough for a man to walk upon by holding on to the balconies and rain-pipes. He inspected all the rooms to which the ledge gave access.

None of them was old Simeon's room.

"He hasn't stirred out, I suppose?" he asked the two soldiers posted on guard.

"Don't think so, sir. In any case, we haven't unlocked the door."

Patrice went in and, paying no attention to the old fellow, who was still sucking at his cold pipe, he searched the room, having it at the back of his mind that the enemy might take refuge there. He found n.o.body. But what he did discover, in a press in the wall, was a number of things which he had not seen on the occasion of his investigations in M. Ma.s.seron's company. These consisted of a rope-ladder, a coil of lead pipes, apparently gas-pipes, and a small soldering-lamp.

"This all seems devilish odd," he said to himself. "How did the things get in here? Did Simeon collect them without any definite object, mechanically? Or am I to a.s.sume that Simeon is merely an instrument of the enemy's? He used to know the enemy before he lost his reason; and he may be under his influence at present."

Simeon was sitting at the window, with his back to the room. Patrice went up to him and gave a start. In his hands the old man held a funeral-wreath made of black and white beads. It bore a date, "14 April, 1915," and made the twentieth, the one which Simeon was preparing to lay on the grave of his dead friends.