The Secret of the Night by Gaston Leroux (books to read for 12 year olds txt) 📕
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- Author: Gaston Leroux
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“Yes, yes; and Mademoiselle Natacha, does she know it is to Orel you have decided to retire?”
“I have no reason for concealing it from her, Monsieur Rouletabille.”
“So far so good. You needn’t feel so desolate, my dear Monsieur Boris. All is not lost. I will say even that I see a future for you full of hope.”
“Ah, if you are able to say that truthfully, I am happy indeed to have met you. I will never forget this rope you have flung me when all the waters seemed closing over my head. ‘What do you advise, then?”
“I advise you to go to Orel, monsieur, and as quickly as possible.”
“Very well. You must have reasons for saying that. I obey you, monsieur, and go.”
As Boris started towards the entrance-arch, Rouletabille slipped into the laboratory. Old Alexis was bent over his retorts. A wretched lamp barely lighted his obscure work. He turned at the noise the reporter made.
“Ah!-you, lad!”
“‘Well?”
“Oh, nothing so quick. Still, I have already analyzed the two napkins, you know.”
“Yes? The stains? Tell me, for the love of God!”
“Well, my boy, it is arsenate of soda again.”
Rouletabille, stricken to the heart, uttered a low cry and everything seemed to dance around him. Pere Alexis in the midst of all the strange laboratory instruments seemed Satan himself, and he repulsed the kindly arms stretched forth to sustain him; in the gloom, where danced here and there the little blue flames from the crucibles, lively as flickering tongues, he believed he saw Michael Nikolaievitch’s ghost come to cry, “The arsenate of soda continues, and I am dead.” He fell against the door, which swung open, and he rolled as far as the counter, and struck his face against it. The shock, that might well have been fatal, brought him out of his intense nightmare and made him instantly himself again. He rose, jumped over the heap of boots and fol-de-rols, and leaped to the court. There Boris grabbed him by his coat. Rouletabille turned, furious:
“What do you want? You haven’t started for the Orel yet?”
“Monsieur, I am going, but I will be very grateful if you will take these things yourself to—to Natacha.” He showed him, still with despairing mien, the two ikons from Mount Athos, and Rouletabille took them from him, thrust them in his pocket, and hurried on, crying, “I understand.”
Outside, Rouletabille tried to get hold of himself, to recover his coolness a little. Was it possible that he had made a mortal error? Alas, alas, how could he doubt it now! The arsenate of soda continued. He made, a superhuman effort to ward off the horror of that, even momentarily—the death of innocent Michael Nikolaievitch—and to think of nothing except the immediate consequences, which must be carefully considered if he wished to avoid some new catastrophe. Ah, the assassin was not discouraged. And that time, what a piece of work he had tried! What a hecatomb if he had succeeded! The general, Matrena Petrovna, Natacha and Rouletabille himself (who almost regretted, so far as he was concerned, that it had not succeeded)—and Koupriane! Koupriane, who should have been there for luncheon. What a bag for the Nihilists! That was it, that was it. Rouletabille understood now why they had not hesitated to poison everybody at once: Koupriane was among them.
Michael Nikolaievitch would have been avenged!
The attempt had failed this time, but what might they not expect now! From the moment he believed Michael Nikolaievitch no longer guilty, as he had imagined, Rouletabille fell into a bottomless abyss.
Where should he go? After a few moments he made the circuit of the Rotunda, which serves as the market for this quarter and is the finest ornament of Aptiekarski-Pereoulok. He made the circuit without knowing it, without stopping for anything, without seeing or understanding anything. As a broken-winded horse makes its way in the treadmill, so he walked around with the thought that he also was lost in a treadmill that led him nowhere. Rouletabille was no longer Rouletabille.
XIII. THE LIVING BOMBS
At random—because now he could only act at random—he returned to the datcha. Great disorder reigned there. The guard had been doubled. The general’s friends, summoned by Trebassof, surrounded the two poisoned sufferers and filled the house with their bustling devotion and their protestations of affection. However, an insignificant doctor from the common quarter of the Vasili-Ostrow, brought by the police, reassured everybody. The police had not found the general’s household physician at home, but promised the immediate arrival of two specialists, whom they had found instead. In the meantime they had picked up on the way this little doctor, who was gay and talkative as a magpie. He had enough to do looking after Matrena Petrovna, who had been so sick that her husband, Feodor Feodorovitch, still trembled, “for the first time in his life,” as the excellent Ivan Petrovitch said.
The reporter was astonished at not finding Natacha either in Matrena’s apartment or Feodor’s. He asked Matrena where her step-daughter was. Matrena turned a frightened face toward him. When they were alone, she said:
“We do not know where she is. Almost as soon as you left she disappeared, and no one has seen her since. The general has asked for her several times. I have had to tell him Koupriane took her with him to learn the details from her of what happened.”
“She is not with Koupriane,” said Rouletabille.
“Where is she? This disappearance is more than strange at the moment we were dying, when her father—O God! Leave me, my child; I am stifling; I am stifling.”
Rouletabille called the temporary doctor and withdrew from the chamber. He had come with the idea of inspecting the house room by room, corner by corner, to make sure whether or not any possibility of entrance existed that he had not noticed before, an entrance would-be poisoners were continuing to use. But now a new fact confronted him and overshadowed everything: the disappearance of Natacha. How he lamented his ignorance of the Russian language—and not one of Koupriane’s men knew French. He might draw something out of Ermolai.
Ermolai said he had seen Natacha just outside the gate for a moment, looking up and down the road. Then he had been called to the general, and so knew nothing further.
That was all the reporter could gather from the gestures rather than the words of the old servant.
An additional difficulty now was that twilight drew on, and it was impossible for the reporter to discern Natacha’s foot-prints. Was it true that the young girl had fled at such a moment, immediately after the poisoning, before she knew whether her father and mother were entirely out of danger? If Natacha were innocent, as Rouletabille still wished to
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