The Secret Tomb by Maurice Leblanc (i like reading .txt) 📕

“The finger⁠—the finger!” murmured Dorothy.

The fourth finger of the left hand was missing, cut exactly level with the palm as the will had stated.

The man was dressed in a coat of chestnut-colored cloth, a black silk waistcoat, embroidered in green, and breeches. His stockings were of fine wool. He wore no shoes.

“He must be dead,” said one of the young men in a low voice.

To make sure, it would have been necessary to bend down and apply one’s ear to the breast above the heart. But they had an odd feeling that, at the slightest touch, this shape of a man would crumble to dust and so vanish like a phantom.

Besides, to make such an experiment, would it not be to commit sacrilege? To suspect death and question a corpse: none of them dared.

Dorothy shivered, her womanly nerves strained to excess. Maître Delarue besought her:

“Let’s get away.⁠ ⁠… It’s got nothing to do with us.⁠ ⁠… It’s a devilish business.”

But George Errington had an idea. He took a small mirror from his pocket and held it close to the man’s lips. After the lapse of some seconds there was a film on it.

“Oh! I b-b-believe he’s alive!” he stammered.

“He’s alive! He’s alive!” muttered the young people, keeping with difficulty their excitement within bounds.

Maître Delarue’s legs were so shaky that he had to sit down on the foot of the bed. He murmured again and again:

“A devilish business! We’ve no right⁠—”

They kept looking at one another with troubled faces. The idea that this dead man was alive⁠—for he was dead, undeniably dead⁠—the idea that this dead man was alive shocked them as something monstrous.

And yet was not the evidence that he was alive quite as strong as the evidence that he was dead? They believed in his death because it was impossible that he should be alive. But could they deny the evidence of their own eyes because that evidence was against all reason?

Dorothy said:

“Look: his chest rises and falls⁠—you can see it⁠—ever so slowly and ever so little. But it does. Then he is not dead.”

They protested.

“No.⁠ ⁠… It’s out of the question. Such a phenomenon would be inexplicable.”

“I’m not so sure⁠ ⁠… I’m not so sure. It might be a kind of lethargy⁠ ⁠… a kind of hypnotic trance,” she murmured.

“A trance which lasted two hundred years?”

“I don’t know.⁠ ⁠… I don’t understand it.”

“Well?”

“Well, we must act.”

“But how?”

“As the will tells us to act. The instructions are quite definite. Our duty is to execute them blindly and without question.”

“How?”

“We must try to awaken him with the elixir of which the will speaks.”

“Here it is,” said Marco Dario, picking up from the stool a small object wrapped in linen. He unfolded the wrapping and displayed a phial, of antique shape, heavy, of crystal, with a round bottom and long neck which terminated in a large wax cork.

He handed it to Dorothy, who broke off the top of the neck with a sharp tap against the edge of the stool.

“Has any of you a knife?” she asked. “Thank you, Archibald. Open the blade and introduce the point between the teeth as the will directs.”

They acted as might a doctor confronted by a patient whom he does not know exactly how to handle, but whom he nevertheless treats, without the slightest hesitation, according to the formal prescription in use in similar cases. They would see what happened. The essential thing was to carry out the instructions.

Archibald Webster did not find it easy to perform his task. The lips were tightly closed, the upper teeth, for the most part black and decayed, were so firmly wedged against the lower that the knife-point could not force its way between them. He had to introduce it sideways, and then raise the handle to force the jaws apart.

“Don’t move,” said Dorothy.

She bent down. Her right hand, holding the phial, tilted it gently. A few drops of a liquid of the color and odor of green Chartreuse fell between the lips; then an even trickle flowed from the phial, which was soon empty.

“That’s done,” she said, straightening herself.

Looking at her companions, she tried to smile. All of them were staring at the dead man.

She murmured: “We’ve got to wait. It doesn’t work straightaway.”

And as she uttered the words she thought:

“And then what? I am ready to admit that it will have an effect and that this man will awake from sleep! Or rather from death.⁠ ⁠… For such a sleep is nothing but death. No: really we are the victims of a collective hallucination.⁠ ⁠… No: there was no film on the mirror. No: the chest does not rise and fall. No⁠—a thousand times no! One does not come to life again!”

“Three minutes gone,” said Marco Dario.

And watch in hand, he counted, minute by minute, five more minutes⁠—then five more.

The waiting of these six persons would have been incomprehensible, had its explanation not been found in the fact that all the events foretold by the Marquis de Beaugreval had followed one another with mathematical precision. There had been a series of facts which was very like a series of miracles, which compelled the witnesses of those facts to be patient⁠—at least till the moment fixed for the supreme miracle.

“Fifteen minutes,” said the Italian.

A few more seconds passed. Of a sudden they quivered. A hushed exclamation burst from the lips of each. The man’s eyelids had moved.

In a moment the phenomenon was repeated, and so clearly and distinctly that further doubt was impossible. It was the twitching of two eyes that tried to open. At the same time the arms stirred. The hands quivered.

“Oh!” stuttered the distracted notary. “He’s alive! He’s alive!”

Dorothy gazed; her eyes missed no slightest movement. Like her, the young men remained motionless, with drawn faces. The Italian, however, just sketched the sign of the cross.

“He’s alive!” broke in Maître Delarue. “Look; he’s looking at us.”

A strange gaze. It did not shift; it did not try to see. The gaze of the