The words were hardly out of his mouth, when the two stones, forming one piece, slipped back into the interior of the wall and revealed in the semidarkness the foot of a staircase and some steps.
The Englishman uttered a cry of triumph:
“The worthy gentleman did not lie! There’s the staircase!”
For a moment they remained speechless. Not that there was anything extraordinary in the affair so far; but it was a confirmation of the first part of the Marquis de Beaugreval’s statement; and they asked themselves if the rest of his predictions would not be fulfilled with the same exactness.
“If it turns out that there are a hundred and thirty-two steps, I shall declare myself convinced,” said Errington.
“What?” said Maître Delarue, who also appeared deeply impressed. “Do you mean to assert that the Marquis—”
“That the Marquis is awaiting us like a man who is expecting our visit.”
“You’re raving,” growled the notary. “Isn’t he, mademoiselle?”
The young men hauled themselves on to the landing formed by the stones which had slipped back. Dorothy joined them. Two electric pocket-lamps took the place of the torch suggested by the Marquis de Beaugreval, and they set about mounting the high steps which wound upwards in a very narrow space.
“Fifteen—sixteen—seventeen,” Dario counted.
To hearten himself, Maître Delarue sang the couplets of “da Tour, prende garde.” But at the thirtieth step he began to save his breath.
“It’s a steep climb, isn’t it?” said Dorothy.
“Yes it is. But it’s chiefly the idea of paying a visit to a dead man. It makes my legs a bit shaky.”
At the fiftieth step a hole in the wall let in some light. Dorothy looked out and saw the woods of La Roche-Périac; but a cornice, jutting out, prevented her from seeing the ground at the foot of the keep.
They continued the ascent. Maître Delarue kept singing in a more and more shaky voice, and towards the end it was rather a groaning than a singing.
“A hundred … a hundred and ten … a hundred and twenty.”
At a hundred and thirty-two he made the announcement:
“It is indeed the last. A wall blocks the staircase. About this also our ancestor was telling the truth.”
“And are there three bricks let into the step?”
“There are.”
“And a pickax?”
“It’s here.”
“Come: on getting to the top of the staircase and examining what we find there, every detail agrees with the will, so that we have only to carry out the good man’s final instructions.” She said: “Break down the wall, Webster. It’s only a plaster partition.”
At the first blow in fact the wall crumbled away, disclosing a small, low door.
“Goodness!” muttered the lawyer, who was no longer trying to dissemble his uneasiness. “The program is indeed being carried out item by item.”
“Ah, you’re becoming a trifle less sceptical, Maître Delarue. You’ll be declaring next that the door will open.”
“I do declare it. This old lunatic was a clever mechanician and a scenical producer of the first order.”
“You speak of him as if he were dead,” observed Dorothy.
The notary seized her arm.
“Of course I do! I’m quite willing to admit that he’s behind this door. But alive? No, no! Certainly not!”
She put her foot on one of the bricks. Errington and Dario pressed the two others. The door jerked violently, quivered, and turned on its hinges.
“Holy Virgin!” murmured Dario. “We’re confronted by a genuine miracle. Are we going to see Satan?”
By the light of their lamps they perceived a fair-sized room with an arched ceiling. No ornament relieved the bareness of the stone walls. There was nothing in the way of furniture in it. But one judged that there was a small, low room, which formed an alcove, from the piece of tapestry, roughly nailed to a beam, which ran along the left side of it.
The five men and Dorothy did not stir, silent, motionless. Maître Delarue, extremely pale, seemed very ill at ease indeed.
Was it the fumes of wine, or the distress inspired by mystery?
No one was smiling any longer. Dorothy could not withdraw her eyes from the piece of tapestry. So the adventure did not come to an end with the astonishing meeting of the Marquis’ heirs, nor with the reading of his fantastic will. It went as far as the hollow stairway in the old tower, to which no one had ever penetrated, to the very threshold of the inviolable retreat in which the Marquis had drunk the draft which brings sleep. … Or which kills. What was there behind the tapestry? A bed, of course … some garments which kept perhaps the shape of the body they had covered … and besides, a handful of ashes.
She turned her head to her companions as if to say to them:
“Shall I go first?”
They stood motionless—undecided, ill at ease.
Then she took a step forward—then two. The tapestry was within reach. With a hesitating hand she took hold of the edge of it, while the young men drew nearer.
They turned the light of their lamps into the alcove.
At the back of it was a bed. On that bed lay a man.
This vision was, in spite of everything, so unexpected, that for a few seconds Dorothy’s legs almost failed her, and she let the tapestry fall. It was Archibald Webster who, deeply perturbed, raised it quickly, and walked briskly to this sleeping man, as if he were about to shake him and awake him forthwith. The others tumbled into the alcove after him. Archibald stopped short at the bed, with his arm raised, and dared not make another movement.
One might have judged the man on the bed to be sixty years old.
But in the strange paleness of that wholly colorless skin, beneath which flowed no single drop of blood, there was something that was of no age. A face absolutely hairless. Not an eyelash, no eyebrows. The nose, cartilage and all, transparent like the noses of some consumptives. No flesh. A jaw, bones, cheekbones, large sunken eyelids. That was the face between two sticking-out ears; and above it was an enormous forehead running up
