The Secret of the Night
“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 believe, such an attitude was simply incomprehensible. And the
girl could not but be aware she would increase Koupriane’s suspicions.
The reporter had a vital reason for seeing her immediately, a vital
reason for all concerned, above all in this moment when the Nihilists
were culminating their plans, a vital reason for her and for him,
equally menaced with death, to talk with her and to renew the
propositions he had made a few minutes before the poisoning and which
she had not wished to hear him talk about, in fearful pity for him or in
defiance of him. Where was Natacha? He thought maybe she was trying
to rejoin Annouchka, and there were reasons for that, both if she were
innocent and if she were guilty. But where was Annouchka? Who could say!
Gounsovski perhaps. Rouletabille jumped into an isvo, returning from the
Point empty, and gave Gounsovski’s address. He deigned then to recall
that he had been invited that same day to dine with the Gounsovskis.
They would no longer be expecting him. He blamed himself.
They received him, but they had long since finished dinner.
Monsieur and Madame Gounsovski were playing a game of draughts under
the lamp. Rouletabille as he entered the drawing-room recognized the
shining, fattish bald head of the terrible man. Gounsovski came to him,
bowing, obsequious, his fat hands held out. He was presented to Madame
Gounsovski, who was besprinkled with jewels over her black silk gown.
She had a muddy skin and magnificent eyes. She also was tentatively
effusive. “We waited for you, monsieur,” she said, smirking timidly,
with the careful charm of a woman a little along in years who relies
still on infantine graces. As the recreant young man offered his
apologies, “Oh, we know you are much occupied, Monsieur Rouletabille.
My husband said that to me only a moment ago. But he knew you would come
finally. In the end one always accepts my husband’s invitation.” She
said this with a fat smile of importance.
Rouletabille turned cold at this last phrase. He felt actual fear in
the presence of these two figures, so atrociously commonplace, in their
horrible, decent little drawing-room.
Madame continued:
“But you have had rather a bad dinner already, through that dreadful
affair at General Trebassof’s. Come into the dining-room.” “Ah, so
someone has told you?” said Rouletabille. “No, no, thanks; I don’t need
anything more. You know what has happened?”
“If you had come to dinner, perhaps nothing would have happened at all,
you know,” said Gounsovski tranquilly, seating himself again on the
cushions and considering his game of draughts through his glasses.
“Anyway, congratulations to Koupriane for being away from there through
his fear.”
For Gounsovski there was only Koupriane! The life or death of Trebassof
did not occupy his mind. Only the acts and movements of the Prefect of
Police had power to move him. He ordered a waiting-maid who glided into
the apartment without making more noise than a shadow to bring a small
stand loaded with zakouskis and bottles of champagne close to the
game-table, and he moved one of his pawns, saying, “You will permit me?
This move is mine. I don’t wish to lose it.”
Rouletabille ventured to lay his hand on the oily, hairy fist which
extended from a dubious cuff.
“What is this you tell me? How could you have foreseen it?”
“It was easy to foresee everything,” replied Gounsovski, offering
cigars, “to foresee everything from the moment Matiew’s place was filled
by Priemkof.”
“Well?” questioned Rouletabille, recalling with some inquietude the
sight of the whipping in the guards’ chapel.
“Well, this Priemkof, between ourselves,” (and he bent close to the
reporter’s ear) “is no better, as a police-guard for Koupriane than
Matiew himself. Very dangerous. So when I learned that he took Matiew’s
place at the datcha des Iles, I thought there was sure to be some
unfortunate happening. But it was no affair of mine, was it? Koupriane
would have been able to say to me, ‘Mind your own business.’ I had gone
far enough in warning him of the ‘living bombs.’ They had been denounced
to us by the same agency that enabled us to seize the two living bombs
(women, if you please!) who were going to the military tribunal at
Cronstadt after the rebellion in the fleet. Let him recall that. That
ought to make him reflect. I am a brave man. I know he speaks ill of me;
but I don’t wish him any harm. The interests of the Empire before all
else between us! I wouldn’t talk to you as I do if I didn’t know the
Tsar honors you with his favor. Then I invited you to dinner. As one
dines one talks. But you did not come. And, while you were dining down
there and while Priemkof was on guard at the datcha, that annoying
affair Madame Gounsovski has spoken about happened.”
Rouletabille had not sat down, in spite of Madame Gounsovski’s
insistences. He took the box of cigars brusquely out of the hand of the
Chief of the Secret Service, who had continued tendering them, for this
detail of hospitality only annoyed his mood, which had been dark enough
for hours and was now deepened by what the other had just said. He