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

“That’s right,” said Dario; and he continued his translation: “The diamonds are⁠ ⁠… in robore.⁠ ⁠…”

“In the firm heart,” said Errington, laughing.

“In vigor, in force,” added Webster.

“And for you three that’s all that the word robore, the ablative of the Latin word robur means?”

“Goodness, yes!” they answered. “Robur⁠ ⁠… force⁠ ⁠… firmness⁠ ⁠… energy.”

She shrugged her shoulders disdainfully:

“Ah, well, I, who know just about as much Latin as you do, but have the very great advantage over you of being a country girl⁠—to me, when I walk in the country and see that variety of oak which is called the rouvre, it nearly always occurs that the old French word rouvre is derived from the Latin word robur, which means force, and also means oak. And that’s what led me, when on the 12th of July I passed, along with you, near the oak, which stands out so prominently in the middle of the clearing, at the beginning of the avenue of oaks⁠—that’s what led me to make the connection between that tree and the hiding-place, and so to translate the information which our ancestor untiringly repeated to us: ‘I have hidden my fortune in the hollow of a rouvre oak.’ There you are. As you perceive⁠—it’s as simple as winking.”

Having made her explanation with a charming gayety, she was silent. The three young men gazed at her in wonder and amazement. Her charming eyes were full of her simple satisfaction at having astonished her friends by this uncommon quality, this inexplicable faculty with which she was gifted.

“You are different,” said Webster. “You belong to a race⁠ ⁠… a race⁠—”

“A race of sound Frenchmen, who have plenty of good sense, like all the French.”

“No, no,” said he, incapable of formulating the thoughts which oppressed all three of them. “No, no. It’s something else.”

He bent down before her and brushed her hand with his lips. Errington and Dario also bent down in the same respectful act, while, to hide her emotion she mechanically translated:

“Fortuna, fortune.⁠ ⁠… In robore, in the oak.”

And she added:

“In the deepest depths of the oak, in the heart of the oak, one might say. There was about six feet from the ground one of those ring-shaped swellings, that scar which wounds in the trunks of trees leave. And I had an intuition that that was the place in which I must search, and that there the Marquis de Beaugreval had buried the diamonds he was keeping for his second existence. There was nothing else to do but make the test. That’s what I did, during the first few nights while my three cousins were sleeping. Saint-Quentin and I got to work at our exploring with our gimlets and saws and center-bits. And one evening I suddenly came across something too hard to bore. I had not been mistaken. The opening was enlarged and one by one I drew out of it four balls of the size of a hazelnut. All I had to do was to clear off a regular matrix of dirt to bring to light four diamonds. Here are three of them. The fourth is in pawn with Maître Delarue, who very kindly agreed, after a good deal of hesitation, and a minute expert examination by his jeweler, to lend me the necessary money till tomorrow.”

She gave the three diamonds to her three friends, magnificent stones, of the same size, quite extraordinary size, and cut in the old-fashioned way with opposing facets. Errington, Webster, and Dario found it disturbing merely to look at them and handle them. Two centuries before, the Marquis de Beaugreval, that strange visionary, dead of his splendid dream of a resurrection, had entrusted them to the very tree under which doubtless he used to go and lie and read. For two hundred years Nature had continued her slow and uninterrupted work of building walls, ever and ever thicker walls, round the little prison chosen with such a subtle intelligence. For two hundred years generation after generation had passed near this fabulous treasure searching for it perhaps by reason of a confused legend, and now the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the good man, having discovered the undiscoverable secret, and penetrated to the most mysterious and obscure of caskets, offered them the precious stones which their ancestor had brought back from the Indies.

“Keep them,” she said. “Three families sprung from the three sons of the Marquis have lived outside France. The French descendants of the fourth son will share the fourth diamond.”

“What do you mean?” asked Count Octave in a tone of surprise.

“I say that we are three French heirs, you, Raoul, and I, that each diamond, according to the jeweler’s valuation is worth several millions, and that our rights, the rights of all three of us, are equal.”

“My right is null,” said Count Octave.

“Why?” she said. “We are partners. A compact, a promise to share the treasure made you a partner with my father and Raoul’s father.”

“A lapsed compact!” cried Raoul Davernoie in his turn. “For my part I accept nothing. The will leaves no room for discussion. Four medals, four diamonds. Your three cousins and you, Dorothy; you only have the right to inherit the riches of the Marquis!”

She protested warmly:

“And you too, Raoul! You too! We fought together! Your grandfather was a direct descendant of the Marquis! He possessed the token of the medal!”

“That medal was of no value.”

“How do you know? You’ve never had it in your hands.”

“I have.”

“Impossible. There was nothing in the disc I fished up under your eyes. It was simply a bait to catch d’Estreicher. Then?”

“When my grandfather came back from his journey to Roche-Périac, where you met him with Juliet Assire, one day I found him weeping in the orchard. He was looking at a gold medal, which he let me take from him and look at. On it were all the indications you have described. But the two faces were canceled by