“Reflection? What for?”
“To get the solution,” he said coolly.
“What? You don’t know it?”
“The key-word to the enigma? Of course I don’t.”
“Then you lied!”
“Don’t let’s get theatrical, Josephine,” he said again in a tone of mockery.
“You lied, because you swore—”
“By the tomb of my poor mother,” he said, smiling. “And I stick to it. But you must not get things mixed up. I did not swear that I knew the truth, I swore that I would tell you the truth.”
“To tell it, you must know it.”
“To know one must reflect, and you don’t give me any time! Let’s have a little silence, please! And first of all, let Leonard loose the butt of his revolver. It puts me off.”
Even more than his jokes, the tone of insolent mockery in which he uttered them set Josephine’s teeth on edge. She felt herself surpassed, and realizing the danger to her vanity she said:
“Take your time about it. I know you. You will keep your promise.”
“Ah! You’re going to try kindness on me! I never could resist kindness. … Boy, writing materials! Fine handmade paper, a pen made out of a hummingbird’s quill, the blood of a full-grown negress, and a piece of candied peel, as the poet says.”
He drew the pencil from his pocketbook and a visiting-card on which some words were already written in a particular order. He drew some lines to join these words to one another, then on the reverse he wrote the Latin formula:
“Ad lapidem currebat olim regina.”
“Dog-Latin of the worst,” he murmured. “I fancy that if I had been in the place of those good monks, I should have found better Latin and got quite as good a result. Nevertheless we must take it as we find it. So the queen rode at a gallop towards the block. … The queen rode … Look at your watch, Josephine.”
He was no longer laughing. For a minute or two perhaps, not more, his face was set in an expression of gravity, and his eyes, seemingly fixed on the void, showed an immense effort of meditation. He perceived, however, that Josine was regarding him with a look of admiration and boundless confidence, and he smiled on her with an absentminded air without breaking the thread of his ideas.
Motionless in his bonds, his face haggard with anxiety, Beaumagnan listened. Was it really a fact that the tremendous secret was about to be divulged?
Two or three more minutes passed in a dead silence. Then Josephine murmured: “What’s the matter with you, Ralph? You look quite wrought up.”
“Yes; I am,” he said. “All this story of all this treasure hidden in a block of stone, in full view of everyone who comes near it, is in all conscience strange enough. But it’s nothing, Josine, nothing at all compared with the idea which dominates the story. You cannot imagine how strange it is—and how beautiful! What poetry and what simplicity!”
He was silent for a moment; then he declared sententiously: “Josine, the monks of the middle ages were duffers.” He looked round on the three of them and added: “Goodness, yes; pious personages, but, I repeat it at the risk of shaking your faith, duffers! Just consider: if a great financier took it into his head to protect his strongbox by writing on it, ‘You are forbidden to open it,’ you would reckon him a duffer, wouldn’t you? Well, the method that these monks chose to protect their treasure is very nearly as ingenuous.”
“No—no—it is incredible!” she murmured. “You have guessed wrong! You’re making a mistake!”
“Duffers too, all those who have sought for it and found nothing. Blind souls! Narrow minds! What? You, Leonard, Godfrey d’Etigues, Beaumagnan, their friends, the whole of the Society of Jesus, the Archbishop of Rouen, you had these five words under your eyes; and it was not enough! Why, hang it all, a board-school child solves problems as difficult as this!”
She raised the objection: “But, before everything, it was a matter of one word and not of five.”
“But it’s there; the word’s there, confound it! When I told you a little while ago that the possession of the casket must have revealed the indispensable word to the Baron and Beaumagnan, I just wanted to frighten you and make you loose your hold on Clarice, for these gentlemen were simply puzzled. But the indispensable word is there, all right. It’s there, mixed with the five Latin words. Instead of blanching as you all did in the face of this vague formula you ought, quite naively, to have read it, to have put the first five letters together, and to have studied the word composed of those five initials.”
“But we thought of that,” she said quickly. “It’s the word ALCOR, isn’t it?”
“Yes: the word ALCOR.”
“Well, what about it?”
“What about it? But it contains everything, that word does! Do you know what it means?” he said impatiently.
“It’s an Arabian word which means a ‘test.’ ”
“And which the Arabs and all other people use to designate what?”
“A star.”
“What star?”
“One of the stars in the constellation of the Great Bear. But that’s of no importance. What relation could there be—”
Ralph’s lips were wreathed with a smile of pity; and he said patiently: “Of course it’s quite evident that the name of the star could not have any relation with the situation of a block of stone in the open country. One clings to this silly conclusion; and on that side all effort comes to an end. But it is exactly that which struck me when I got the word ALCOR from the five initials of the Latin inscription. Master of the magic word, the talismanic word, and having besides observed that the whole affair turned round the number seven—seven abbeys, seven monks, seven branches of the candlestick, seven stones of seven colors set in seven rings—at once, d’you hear? at once by a kind of reflex action of my mind I knew that the star ALCOR was part of the constellation of the
