The Secret of the Night, Gaston Leroux [best book recommendations .TXT] 📗
- Author: Gaston Leroux
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But Natacha’s glance passed the reporter coldly over. Ah, that mysterious, cold mask, the mouth with its bitter, impudent smile, an atrocious smile which seemed to say to the reporter: “If it is not I who poured the poison, then it is you!”
It was the visage common enough to the daughters whom Koupriane had spoken of a little while before, “the young girls who read” and, their reading done, set themselves to accomplish some terrible thing, some thing because of which, from time to time, they place stiff ropes around the necks of these young females.
Finally, Koupriane’s frenzy wore itself out and he made a sign. The men filed out in dismal silence. Two of them remained to guard Natacha. From outside came the sounds of a carriage from Sestroriesk ready to convey the girl to the Dungeons of Sts. Peter and Paul. A final gesture from the Prefect of Police and the rough bands of the two guards seized the prisoner’s frail wrists. They hustled her along, thrust her outside, jamming her against the doorway, venting thus their anger at the reproaches of their chief. A few seconds later the carriage departed, not to stop until the fortress was reached with the trickling tombs under the bed of the river where young girls about to die are confined—who have read too much, without entirely understanding, as Monsieur Kropotkine says.
Koupriane prepared to leave in turn. Rouletabille stopped him.
“Excellency, I wish you to tell me why you have shown such anger to your men just now.”
“They are brute beasts,” cried the Chief of Police, quite beside himself again. “They have made me miss the biggest catch of my life. They threw themselves on the group two minutes too early. Some of them fired a gun that they took for the signal and that served to warn the Nihilists. But I will let them all rot in prison until I learn which one fired that shot.”
“You needn’t look far for that,” said Rouletabille. “I did it.”
“You! Then you must have gone outside the touba?”
“Yes, in order to warn them. But still I was a little late, since you did take Natacha.”
Koupriane’s eyes blazed.
“You are their accomplice in all this,” he hurled at the reporter, “and I am going to the Tsar for permission to arrest you.”
“Hurry, then, Excellency,” replied the reporter coldly, “because the Nihilists, who also think they have a little account to settle with me, may reach me before you.”
And he saluted.
XV. “I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU”
At the hotel a note from Gounsovski: “Don’t forget this time to come to-morrow to have luncheon with me. Warmest regards from Madame Gounsovski.” Then a horrible, sleepless night, shaken with echoes of explosions and the clamor of the wounded; and the solemn shade of Pere Alexis, stretching out toward Rouletabille a phial of poison and saying, “Either Natacha or you!” Then, rising among the shades the bloody form of Michael Nikolaievitch the Innocent!
In the morning a note from the Marshal of the Court.
Monsieur le Marechal had no particular good news, evidently, for in terms quite without enthusiasm he invited the young man to luncheon for that same day, rather early, at midday, as he wished to see him once more before he left for France. “I see,” said Rouletabille to himself; “Monsieur le Marechal pronounces my expulsion from the country”—and he forgot once more the Gounsovski luncheon. The meeting-place named was the great restaurant called the Bear. Rouletabille entered it promptly at noon. He asked the schwitzar if the Grand Marshal of the Court had arrived, and was told no one had seen him yet. They conducted him to the huge main hall, where, however, there was only one person. This man, standing before the table spread with zakouskis, was stuffing himself. At the sound of Rouletabille’s step on the floor this sole famished patron turned and lifted his hands to heaven as he recognized the reporter. The latter would have given all the roubles in his pocket to have avoided the recognition. But he was already face to face with the advocate so celebrated for his table-feats, the amiable Athanase Georgevitch, his head swathed in bandages and dressings from the midst of which one could perceive distinctly only the eyes and, above all, the mouth.
“How goes it, little friend?”
“How are you?”
“Oh, I! There is nothing the matter. In a week we shall have forgotten it.”
“What a terrible affair,” said the reporter, “I certainly believed we were all dead men.”
“No, no. It was nothing. Nitchevo!”
“And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff with his two poor legs broken!”
“Eh! Nitchevo! He has plenty of good solid splints that will make him two good legs again. Nitchevo! Don’t you think anything more about that! It is nothing. You have come here to dine? A very celebrated house this. Caracho!” He busied himself to do the honors. One would have said the restaurant belonged to him. He boasted of its architecture and the cuisine “a la Francaise.”
“Do you know,” he inquired confidently, “a finer restaurant room anywhere in the world?”
In fact, it seemed to Rouletabille as he looked up into the high glass arch that he was in a railway station decorated for some illustrious traveler, for there were flowers and plants everywhere. But the visitor whom the ball awaited was the Russian eater, the ogre who never failed to come to eat at The Bear. Pointing out the lines of tables shining with their white cloths and bright silver, Athanase Georgevitch, with his mouth full, said:
“Ah, my dear little French monsieur, you should see it at supper-time, with the women, and the jewels, and the music. There is nothing in France that can give you any idea of it, nothing! The gayety—the champagne—and the jewels, monsieur, worth millions and millions of roubles! Our women wear them all—everything they have. They are decked like sacred
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