The Secret of Sarek - Maurice Leblanc (easy to read books for adults list TXT) 📗

“There, Stéphane,” said Véronique, when she had described the anguish which she suffered after the execution of the sisters Archignat, the discovery of the underground passage and her interview with François. “That is all that I need absolutely tell you. I thought that you ought to know what I have kept from François, so that we may fight our enemies together.”

He shook his head:

“Which enemies?” he said. “I, too, in spite of your explanations, am asking the very question which you asked me. I have a feeling that we are flung into the midst of a great tragedy which has continued for years, for centuries, and in which we have begun to play our parts only at the moment of the crisis, at the moment of the terrific cataclysm prepared by generations of men. I may be wrong. Perhaps there is nothing more than a disconnected series of sinister, weird and horrible coincidences amid which we are tossed from side to side, without being able to appeal to any other reasons than the whim of chance. In reality I know no more than you do. I am surrounded by the same obscurity, stricken by the same sorrows and the same losses. It’s all just insanity, extravagant convulsions, unprecedent shocks, the crimes of savages, the fury of the barbaric ages.”

Véronique agreed:

“Yes, of the barbaric ages; and that is what baffles me most and impresses me so much! What is the connection between the present and the past, between our persecutors of today and the men who lived in these caves in days of old and whose actions are prolonged into our own time, in a manner so impossible to understand? To what do they all refer, those legends of which I know nothing except from Honorine’s delirium and the distress of the sisters Archignat?”

They spoke low, with their ears always on the alert. Stéphane listened for sounds in the corridor, Véronique concentrated her attention on the cliff, in the hope of hearing François’ signal.

“They are very complicated legends,” said Stéphane, “very obscure traditions in which we must abandon any attempt to distinguish between what is superstition and what might be truth. Out of this jumble of old wives’ tales, the very most that we can disentangle is two sets of ideas, those referring to the prophecy of the thirty coffins and those relating to the existence of a treasure, or rather of a miraculous stone.”

“Then they take as a prophecy,” said Véronique, “the words which I read on Maguennoc’s drawing and again on the Fairies’ Dolmen?”

“Yes, a prophecy which dates back to an indeterminate period and which for centuries has governed the whole history and the whole life of Sarek. The belief has always prevailed that a day would come when, within a space of twelve months, the thirty principal reefs which surround the island and which are called the thirty coffins would receive their thirty victims, who were to die a violent death, and that those thirty victims would include four women who were to die crucified. It is an established and undisputed tradition, handed down from father to son: and everybody believes in it. It is expressed in the line and part of a line inscribed on the Fairies’ Dolmen: ‘Four women crucified,’ and ‘For thirty coffins victims thirty times!’ ”

“Very well; but people have gone on living all the same, normally and peaceably. Why did the outburst of terror suddenly take place this year?”

“Maguennoc was largely responsible. Maguennoc was a fantastic and rather mysterious person, a mixture of the wizard and the bonesetter, the healer and the charlatan, who had studied the stars in their courses and whom people liked to consult about the most remote events of the past as well as the future. Now Maguennoc announced not long ago that 1917 would be the fateful year.”

“Why?”

“Intuition perhaps, presentiment, divination, or subconscious knowledge: you can choose any explanation that you please. As for Maguennoc, who did not despise the practices of the most antiquated magic, he would tell you that he knew it from the flight of a bird or the entrails of a fowl. However, his prophecy was based on something more serious. He pretended, quoting evidence collected in his childhood among the old people of Sarek, that, at the beginning of the last century, the first line of the inscription on the Fairies’ Dolmen was not yet obliterated and that it formed this, which would rhyme with ‘Four women shall be crucified on tree:’ ‘In Sarek’s isle, in year fourteen and three.’ The year fourteen and three is the year seventeen; and the prediction became more impressive for Maguennoc and his friends of late years, because the total number was divided into two numbers and the war broke out in 1914. From that day, Maguennoc grew more and more important and more and more sure of the truth of his previsions. For that matter, he also grew more and more anxious; and he even announced that his death, followed by the death of M. d’Hergemont, would give the signal for the catastrophe. Then the year 1917 arrived and produced a genuine terror in the island. The events were close at hand.”

“And still,” said Véronique, “and still it was all absurd.”

“Absurd, yes; but it all acquired a curiously disturbing significance on the day when Maguennoc was able to compare the scraps of prophecy engraved on the dolmen with the complete prophecy.”

“Then he succeeded in doing so?”

“Yes. He discovered under the abbey ruins, in a heap of stones which had formed a sort of protecting chamber round it, an old worn and tattered missal, which had a few of its pages in good condition, however, and one in particular, the one which you saw, or rather of which you saw a copy in the deserted cabin.”

“A copy made by my father?”

“By your father, as were all those in the cupboard in his study. M. d’Hergemont, you must remember, was fond of drawing,