ON THE IRON WIRE
The door behind which Dorothy was hiding herself shut badly. Having
pushed it to gently, she not only saw but heard everything that took
place, except that the face of Juliet Assire remained hidden from her.
The ruffian's threat did not trouble her much, for she knew that he
would not put it into execution. In fact d'Estreicher counted up to
twenty without the old woman having uttered a word. But her resistance
infuriated him to such a degree that, dropping the mass of iron, he
seized the hand of Juliet Assire and twisted it violently. Juliet
Assire yelled with pain.
"Ah, you're beginning to understand, are you?" he said. "Perhaps you'll
answer.... Where is the medal?"
She was silent.
He gave her hand another twist.
The old woman fell on her knees and begged for mercy incoherently.
"Speak!" he cried. "Speak! I'll go on twisting till you speak!"
She stammered several syllables.
"What's that you say? Speak more distinctly, will you? Do you want me
to give it another twist?"
"No ... no," she implored. "It's there ... at the Manor ... in the
river."
"In the river? What nonsense! You threw it into the river? You're
laughing at me!"
He held her down with one knee on her chest, their hands clenched
round one another. From her post of observation Dorothy watched them,
horror-stricken, powerless against these two men, but nevertheless
unable to resign herself to inaction.
"Then I'll twist it, what?" growled the ruffian. "You prefer it to
speaking?"
He made a quick movement which drew a cry from Juliet Assire. And all
at once she raised herself, showed her face convulsed with terror,
moved her lips, and succeeded in stuttering:
"The c--c--cupboard ... the cupboard ... the flagstones."
The sentence was never finished, though the mouth continued to move,
but a strange thing happened: her frightful face little by little grew
calm, assumed an ineffable serenity, became happy, smiling; and of a
sudden Juliet Assire burst out laughing. She no longer felt the torture
of her twisted wrist and she laughed gently, not jerkily, with an
expression of beatitude.
She was mad.
"You've no luck," said his confederate in a mocking tone. "Directly
you try to make people speak, they collapse--the Baron, cracked; his
sweetheart, mad as a hatter. You're doing well."
The exasperated d'Estreicher thrust away the old woman who stumbled
and turning fell down behind an arm-chair quite close to Dorothy, and
cried furiously.
"You're right, my luck's out. But this time perhaps we've found a lode.
Before her brain gave she spoke of a cupboard and flagstones. Which?
This one or that? They're both paved with flags?"
He pointed first to the kind of closet in which Dorothy was hiding and
then to a cupboard on the other side of the fireplace.
"I'll begin with this cupboard. You start on that one," he said. "Or
rather, no--come and help me; we'll go through this one thoroughly
first."
He knelt down near the fireplace, opened the cupboard door, and with
the poker got to work on one of the cracks between the flags of its
floor which his accomplice tried to raise.
Dorothy lost no time. She knew that they were coming to the closet
and that she was lost if she did not fly. The old woman, stretched
out close to her, was laughing gently and then grew silent as the men
worked on.
Hidden by the arm-chair, Dorothy slipped noiselessly out of the
cupboard, took off the lace cap which covered the hair of Juliet Assire
and put it on her own head. Then she took her spectacles, then her
shawl, put it round her shoulders, and succeeded in hiding her figure
with a big table-cloth of black serge. At that moment Juliet fell
silent. On the instant Dorothy took up her even, joyous laughter. She
rose, and stooping like an old woman, ambled across the room.
D'Estreicher growled: "What's the old lunatic up to? Mind she doesn't
get away."
"How _can_ she get away?" asked his confederate. "You've got the key in
your pocket."
"The window."
"Much too high. Besides she doesn't want to leave the cottage."
Dorothy slipped in front of the window, the sill of which, uncommonly
high up, was on a level with her eyes. The shutters were not closed.
With a slow movement she succeeded in turning the catch. Then she
paused. She knew that directly it was opened the window would let in
the fresh air and the noises outside, and give the ruffians warning. In
a few seconds she calculated and analyzed the movements she would need
to make. Sure of herself and relying on her extraordinary agility, she
took a look at her enemies; then swiftly, without a single mistake or a
second's hesitation, she threw the window wide, jumped on to the sill,
and from it into the garden.
There came two shouts together, then a hubbub of cries. But it took
the two men time to understand, to stumble upon the body of the real
Juliet and discover it was she, to unlock the door. Dorothy made use
of it. Too clever to escape down the garden and through the gate, she
ran round the cottage, jumped down a slope, scratched herself among the
thorns of a hedge, and came out into the fields.
As she did so pistol-shots rang out. D'Estreicher and his confederate
were firing at the shadows.
* * * * *
When Dorothy had rejoined Raoul and the children, who, alarmed by her
absence, were waiting for her at the door of the caravan, and had told
them briefly about her expedition, she ended:
"And now we're going to make an end of it. The final hand will be
played in exactly a week from to-day."
These few days were very sweet to the two young people. While still
remaining shy, Raoul grew bolder in his talks with her and let her
see more clearly the depths of his nature, at once serious and
impassioned. Dorothy abandoned herself with a certain joy to this love,
of the sincerity of which she was fully conscious. Deeply disturbed,
Saint-Quentin and his comrades grew uncommonly gloomy.
The captain tossed his head and said:
"Dorothy, I think I like this one less than the nasty gentleman, and if
you'd listen to me...."
"What should we do, my lamb?"
"We'd harness One-eye' Magpie and go away."
"And the treasure? You know we're hunting for treasure."
"You're the treasure, mummy. And I'm afraid that they'll take you away
from us."
"Don't you worry, my child. My four children will always come first."
But the four children did worry. The sense of danger weighed on them.
In this confined space, between the walls of Hillocks Manor they
breathed a heavy atmosphere which troubled them. Raoul was the chief
danger: but another danger was little by little taking form in their
minds: twice they saw the outline of a man moving stealthily among the
thickets of the hillocks in the dusk.
On the 30th of June, Dorothy begged Raoul to give all his staff a
holiday next day. It was the day of the great religious fête at
Clisson. Three of the stoutest of the servants, armed with guns, were
ordered to come back surreptitiously at four in the afternoon and wait
near a little inn, Masson Inn, a quarter of a mile from the Manor.
Next day Dorothy seemed in higher spirits than ever. She danced jigs in
the court-yard and sang English songs. She sang others in the boat, in
which she had asked Raoul to row her, and then behaved so wildly, that
several times they just missed capsizing. In this way it came about
that in juggling with three coral bracelets she let one of them fall
into the water. She wanted to recover it, dipped her bare arm in the
water as high as the shoulder, and remained motionless, her head bent
over the lake, as if she was considering carefully something she saw on
its bottom.
"What are you looking at like that?" said Raoul.
"There has been no rain for a long while, the lake is low, and one can
see more distinctly the stones and pebbles on the bottom. Now I've
already noticed that some of the stones are arranged in a certain
pattern. Look."
"Undoubtedly," he said. "And they've hewn stones, shaped. One might
fancy that they formed huge letters. Have you noticed it?"
"Yes. And one can guess the words that those letters form: '_In robore
fortuna._' At the mayor's office I've studied an old map of the
neighborhood. Here, where we are, was formerly the principal lawn of a
sunken garden, and on this very lawn one of your ancestors had this
device inscribed in blocks of stone. Since then some one has let in the
water of the Maine over the sunken garden. The pool has taken the place
of the lawn. The device is hidden."
And she added between her teeth:
"And so are the few words and the figures below the device, which I
have not yet been able to see. And it's that which interests me. Do you
see them?"
"Yes. But indistinctly."
"That's just it. We're too near them. We need to look at them from a
height."
"Let's climb up on the hillocks."
"No use. The slope--the water would blur the image."
"Then," said he, laughing, "we must mount above them in an aëroplane."
At lunch-time they parted. After the meal, Raoul superintended the
departure of the _char-à-bancs_, which were taking all the staff of
the Manor to Clisson, then he took his way to the pool where he saw
Dorothy's little troupe hard at work on the bank. The captain, always
the man of affairs, was running to and fro somewhat in the manner of a
Gugusse. The others were carrying out exactly Dorothy's instructions.
When it was all over, a sufficiently thick iron wire was stretched
above the lake at a height of ten or twelve feet, fastened at one end
to the gable of a barn, at the other to a ring affixed to a rock among
the hillocks.
"Hang it all!" he said. "It looks to me as if you'd made preparations
for one of your circus turns."
"You're right," she replied gayly. "Having no aëroplane I fall back on
my aërial rope-walking."
"What? Is that what you intend to do?" he exclaimed in anxious accents.
"But you're bound to fall."
"I can swim."
"No, no. I refuse to allow it."
"By what right?"
"You haven't even a balancing-pole."
"A balancing-pole?" she said, running off. "And what next? A net? A
safety-rope?"
She climbed up the ladder inside the barn and appeared on the edge
of the roof. She was laughing, as was her custom when she began her
performance before a crowd. She was dressed in a silk frock, with broad
white and red stripes, a scarlet silk handkerchief was crossed over her
chest.
Raoul was in a state of feverish excitement.
The captain went to him.
"Do you want to help mummy, Dorothy?" he said in a confidential tone.
"Certainly I do."
"Well, go away, monsieur."
Dorothy stretched out her leg. Her foot, which was bare in a cloth
sandal divided at the big toe, tried the wire, as a bather's foot tries
the coldness of the water. And then she quickly stepped on to it, made
several steps, sliding, and stopped.
She saluted right and left, pretending to believe herself in the
presence of a large audience, and came sliding forward again with a
regular, rhythmic movement of her legs and a swaying of her bust and
arms which balanced her like the beating of the wings of a bird. So she
arrived above the pool. The wire, slackened, bent under her weight and
jerked upwards. A second time she stopped, when she was over the middle
of the pool.
This was the hardest part of her undertaking. She was no longer able to
hook, so to speak, her gaze on a fixed point among the hillocks, and
lend her balance the support of something stable. She had to lower her
eyes and try to read, in the moving and glittering water, repelling
the fascination of the sun's reflection, the words and the figures.
A terribly dangerous task! She had to essay it several times and to
rise upright the very moment she found herself bending over the void.
A minute or two passed, minutes of veritable anguish. She brought them
to an end by a salute with both arms, stretching them out with even
gracefulness, and a cry of victory; then she at once walked on again.
Raoul had crossed the bridge which spans the end of the pool and he was
already on a kind of platform among the hillocks, at which the wire
ended. She was struck by his paleness and touched by his anxiety on her
account.
"Goodness," she said, gripping his hand. "Were you as frightened as
that on my account?... If I'd only known!... And yet, no": she went on.
"Even if I had known, I should have made the experiment, so certain was
I of the result."
"Well?" he said.
"Well, I read the device distinctly, and the date under it, which we
couldn't make out--the 12th of July, 1921. We know now that the 12th
of July of this year is the great day foretold so many years ago. But
there's something better, I fancy."
She called Saint-Quentin to her and said some words to him in a low
voice. Saint-Quentin ran to the caravan and a few minutes came out of
it in his acrobat's tights. He stepped into the boat with Dorothy, who
rowed it to the middle of the pool. He slipped quickly into the water
and dived. Twice he came up to receive more exact instructions from
Dorothy. At last, the third time he came up, he cried:
"Here it is, mummy!"
He tossed into the boat a somewhat heavy object. Dorothy snatched it
up, examined it, and when they reached the bank, handed it to Raoul. It
was a metal disc, of rusted iron or copper, of the size of a saucer,
and convex--like an enormous watch. It must have been formed of two
plates joined together, but the edges of these plates had been soldered
together so that one could not open it.
Dorothy rubbed one of its faces and pointed out to Raoul with her
finger the deeply engraved word: "Fortuna."
"I was not mistaken," she said, "and poor old Juliet Assire was
speaking the truth, in speaking first of the river. During one of their
last meetings the Baron must have thrown in here the gold medal in its
metal case."
"But why?"
"Didn't you write to him from Roborey, after I left, to be on his
guard?"
"Yes."
"In that case what better hiding-place could he find for the medal till
the day came for him to use it than the bottom of the pool? The first
boy who came along could fish it out for him."
Joyously she tossed the disc in the air and juggled with it and three
pebbles. Then she caught hold of the shivering Saint-Quentin, very
scraggy in his wet tights, and with the other three boys danced round
the platform, singing the lay of "The Recovered Medal."
At the end of his breath the captain made the observation that there
was a fête at Clisson and that they might very well go there to
celebrate their success.
"Let's harness One-eye' Magpie."
Dorothy approved of it.
"Excellent! But One-eyed Magpie's too slow. What about your car, Raoul?"
They hurried back to the Manor. Saint-Quentin went to change his
costume. Raoul set his engine going and brought the car out of the
garage. While the three boys were getting into it, he went to Dorothy,
who had sat down at a little table on the terrace which ran the length
of the building.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
She said:
"But I never had any intention of going with you. To-day you're going
to be nursemaid."
He was not greatly surprised. Since early morning he had had an odd
feeling that everything that happened was not quite natural. The
incidents followed one another in such perfect sequence and with a
logic and exactness foreign to actuality. One might have said that
they were scenes in a too-well-made play, of which it would have been
easy, with a little experience of the playwright's art, to analyze the
construction and the tricks. Certainly, without knowing Dorothy's game,
he guessed the dénouement she proposed to bring about--the capture of
d'Estreicher. But by means of what stratagem?
"Don't question me," she said. "We are watched. So no heroics, no
remonstrances. Listen."
She was amusing herself by spinning the disk on the table and quite
calmly she outlined her plan and her maneuvers.
"It's like this. A day or two ago I wrote, in your name, to the Public
Prosecutor, advising him that our friend d'Estreicher, for whom the
police are hunting, guilty of attempts to murder Baron Davernoie and
Madame Juliet Assire, would be at Hillocks Manor to-day. I asked him to
send two detectives who would find you at Masson Inn at four o'clock.
It's now a quarter to four. Your three servants will be there too. So
off you go."
"What am I to do?"
"Come back quickly with the two detectives and your three servants, not
by the main road, but by the paths Saint-Quentin and the three boys
will point out to you. At the end of them you will find ladders ready.
You will set them up against the wall. D'Estreicher and his confederate
will be there. You will cover them with your guns while the detectives
arrest them."
"Are you sure that d'Estreicher will come out of the hillocks--if it's
the fact that the hillocks are his hiding-place?"
"Quite sure. Here is the medal. He knows that it is in my hands. How
can he help seizing the opportunity of taking it now that we are on the
eve of the great event."
She expressed herself with a disconcerting calmness. For all that
she was exposing herself alone to all the menace of a combat which
promised to be formidable, she had not the faintest air of being in
danger. Indeed, such was her indifference to the risk she was running
that, when the old Baron went past them and into the Manor, followed
by his faithful Goliath, she imparted to Raoul some results of her
observations.
"Have you noticed that for the last day or two that your grandfather
has been ill at ease? He too is instinctively aware that the great
event is at hand, and he wants to act. He is pulling himself together
and struggling against the disease which paralyzes him in the very hour
of action."
In spite of everything, Raoul hesitated. The idea of leaving her to
face d'Estreicher alone was infinitely painful to him.
"One question," he said.
"Only one then, for you've no time to lose."
"You made all your preparations for to-day. The police are informed,
the servants warned, the rendezvous fixed. Good. But nevertheless you
couldn't know that the discovery of this disc would take place just an
hour before that rendezvous."
"Excellent, Raoul; I congratulate you. You've put your finger on the
weak point in my explanation. But I can't tell you anything more at the
moment."
"Nevertheless----"
"Do as I ask you, Raoul. You know that I don't act at random."
Dorothy's confidence, her boldness, the simplicity of her plan, her
quiet smile, all inspired him with such trust in her judgment that he
raised no more objections.
"Very well," he said. "I'll go."
"That's right," she said, laughing. "You have faith. In that case make
haste and come back quickly, for d'Estreicher will come here not only
to get hold of the medal but also for something on which perhaps he is
equally keen."
"What's that?"
"Me."
This was a suggestion which hastened the young man's decision. The car
started and crossed the orchard. Saint-Quentin opened the big gate and
shut it again as soon as the car had gone through it.
Dorothy was alone; and she was to remain alone and defenceless for
as long she reckoned, if her calculations were correct, as twelve to
fifteen minutes.
* * * * *
Keeping her back turned to the hillocks, she did not stir from her
chair. She appeared to be very busy with the disc, testing the
soldering, like one who seeks to discover the secret or the weak point
of a piece of mechanism. But with her ears, all her nerves on edge, she
tried to catch every sound or rustle that the breeze might bring her.
By turns she was sustained by an unshakable certainty, or attacked by
discouraging doubts. Yes: d'Estreicher was bound to come. She could not
admit to herself that he might not come. The medal would draw him to
her with an irresistible enticement.
"And yet, no," she said to herself. "He will be on his guard. My little
maneuver is really too puerile. This case, this medal which we find at
the fateful moment, this departure of Raoul and the children, and then
my staying alone in the empty farm, when my one care on the contrary
would be to protect my find against the enemy--all this is really too
far-fetched. An old fox like d'Estreicher will shun the trap."
And then the other side of the problem presented itself:
"He _will_ come. Perhaps he has already left his lair. Manifestly the
danger will be clear to him, but afterwards, when it is too late. At
the actual moment he is not free to act or not to act. He obeys."
So once more Dorothy was guided by her keen insight into the trend
of events, in spite of what her reason might tell her. The facts
grouped themselves before her intelligence in a logical sequence and
with strict method, she saw their accomplishment while they were yet
in process of becoming. The motives which actuated other people were
always perfectly clear to her. Her intuition revealed them; her quick
intelligence instantly fitted them to the circumstances.
Besides, as she had said, d'Estreicher was drawn by a double
temptation. If he succeeded in resisting the temptation to try to seize
the medal, how could he help succumbing to the temptation to seize
that marvelous prize, right within his reach, Dorothy herself?
She sat upright with a smile. The sound of footsteps had fallen on her
ears. It must come from the wooden bridge which spanned the end of the
pool.
The enemy was coming!
* * * * *
But almost at the same moment she heard another sound on her right and
then another on her left. D'Estreicher had _two_ confederates. She was
hemmed in!
The hands of her watch pointed to five minutes to four.