The Secret of the Night by Gaston Leroux (books to read for 12 year olds txt) 📕

XVII. THE LAST CRAVAT

The gentleman of the Neva said to him: “If you have nothing further to say, we will go into the courtyard.”

Rouletabille understood at last that hanging him in the room where judgment had been pronounced was rendered impossible by the violence of the prisoner just executed. Not only the rope and the ring-bolt had been torn away, but part of the beam had splintered.

“There is nothing more,” replied Rouletabille.

He was mistaken. Something occurred to him, an idea flashed so suddenly that he became white as his shirt, and had to lean on the arm of the gentleman of the Neva in order to accompany him.

The door was open. All the men who had voted his death filed out in gloomy silence. The gentleman of the Neva, who seemed charged with the last offices for the prisoner, pushed him gently out into the court.

It was vast, and surrounded by a high board wall; some small buildings, with closed doors, stood to right and left. A high chimney, partially demolished, rose from one corner. Rouletabille decided the whole place was part of some old abandoned mill. Above his head the sky was pale as a winding sheet. A thunderous, intermittent, rhythmical noise appraised him that he could not be far from the sea.

He had plenty of time to note all these things, for they had stopped the march to execution a moment and had made him sit down in the open courtyard on an old box. A few steps away from him under the shed where he certainly was going to be hanged, a man got upon a stool (the stool that would serve Rouletabille a few moments later) with his arm raised, and drove with a few blows of a mallet a great ring-bolt into a beam above his head.

The reporter’s eyes, which had not lost their habit of taking everything in, rested again on a coarse canvas sack that lay on the ground. The young man felt a slight tremor, for he saw quickly that the sack swathed a human form. He turned his head away, but only to confront another empty sack that was intended for him. Then he closed his eyes. The sound of music came from somewhere outside, notes of the balalaika. He said to himself, “Well, we certainly are in Finland”; for he knew that, if the guzla is Russian the balalaika certainly is Finnish. It is a kind of accordeon that the peasants pick plaintively in the doorways of their toubas. He had seen and heard them the afternoon that he went to Pergalovo, and also a little further away, on the Viborg line. He pictured to himself the ruined structure where he now found himself shut in with the revolutionary tribunal, as it must appear from the outside to passers-by; unsinister, like many others near it, sheltering under its decaying roof a few homes of humble workers, resting now as they played the balalaika at their thresholds, with the day’s labor over.

And suddenly from the ineffable peace of his last evening, while the balalaika mourned and the man overhead tested the solidity of his ring-bolt, a voice outside, the grave, deep voice of Annouchka, sang for the little Frenchman:

“For whom weave we now the crown Of lilac, rose and thyme? When my hand falls lingering down Who then will bring your crown Of lilac, rose and thyme? O that someone among you would hear, And come, and my lonely hand Would press, and shed the friendly tear— For alone at the end I stand. Who now will bring the crown Of lilac, rose and thyme?”

Rouletabille listened to the voice dying away with the last sob of the balalaika. “It is too sad,” he said, rising. “Let us go,” and he wavered a little.

They came to search him. All was ready above. They pushed him gently towards the shed. When he was under the ring-bolt, near the stool, they made him turn round and they read him something in Russian, doubtless less for him than for those there who did not understand French. Rouletabille had hard work to hold himself erect.

The gentleman of the Neva said to him further:

“Monsieur, we now read you the final formula. It asks you to say whether, before you die, you have anything you wish to add to what we know concerning the sentence which has been passed upon you.”

Rouletabille thought that his saliva, which at that moment he had the greatest difficulty in swallowing, would not permit him to utter a word. But disdain of such a weakness, when he recalled the coolness of so many illustrious condemned people in their last moments, brought him the last strength needed to maintain his reputation.

“Why,” said he, “this sentence is not wrongly drawn up. I blame it only for being too short. Why has there been no mention of the crime I committed in contriving the tragic death of poor Michael Korsakoff?”

“Michael Korsakoff was a wretch,” pronounced the vindictive voice of the young man who had presided at the trial and who, at this supreme moment, happened to be face to face with Rouletabille. “Koupriane’s police, by killing that man, ridded us of a traitor.”

Rouletabille uttered a cry, a cry of joy, and while he had some reason for believing that at the point he had reached now of his too-short career only misfortune could befall him, yet here Providence, in his infinite grace, sent him before he died this ineffable consolation: the certainty that he had not been mistaken.

“Pardon, pardon,” he murmured, in an excess of joy which stifled him almost as much as the wretched rope would shortly do that they were getting ready behind him. “Pardon. One second yet, one little second. Then, messieurs, then, we are agreed in that, are we? This Michael, Michael Nikolaievitch was the the last of traitors.”

“The first,” said the heavy voice.

“It is the same thing, my dear monsieur. A traitor, a wretched traitor,” continued Rouletabille.

“A poisoner,” replied the voice.

“A vulgar poisoner! Is that not so? But, tell me how—a vulgar poisoner who, under cover of Nihilism, worked for his own petty ends, worked for himself and betrayed you all!”

Now Rouletabille’s voice rose like a fanfare. Someone said:

“He did not deceive us long; our enemies themselves undertook his punishment.”

“It was I,” cried Rouletabille, radiant again. “It was I who wound up that career. I tell you that was managed right. It was I who rid you of him. Ah, I knew well enough, messieurs, in the bottom of my heart I knew that I could not be mistaken. Two and two make four always, don’t they? And Rouletabille is always Rouletabille. Messieurs, it is all right, after all.”

But it was probable that it was also all wrong, for the gentleman of the Neva came up to him hat in hand and said:

“Monsieur, you know now why the witnesses at your trial did not raise a fact against you that, on the contrary, was entirely in your favor. Now it only remains for us to execute the sentence which is entirely justified on other grounds.”