The Perfume of the Lady In Black by Gaston LeRoux

Author:Gaston LeRoux
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907650291
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

The attack in the Square Tower

I sprang forward and threw my arms around him, fearing the consequences of his madness. There was such despair in his cry of ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ It was so full of longing or, rather, so full of a seemingly superhuman promise to help, that I was terrified lest he forgot that he was merely a man, and therefore unable to fly like a bird from his window directly to the tower, to shoot like an arrow across the black space that lay between us and the scene of the crime! Suddenly, he turned, pushed me out of the way and fled, ran, tumbled, sprang down stairs, across rooms and corridors, over everything that stood between him and the accursed tower in which the death-cry had just rung out.

As for me, I stayed by the window, petrified by the horror of that cry. I was still there when the door of the Square Tower opened, and I saw the figure of the Lady in Black framed in the light which shone from within. She stood straight and lithe and very much alive, notwithstanding the death-cry, but her pale and ghostly face bore an expression of indescribable terror. She held her arms out towards the night and from its shadows sprang Rouletabille. She clasped him to her breast, and I heard her sigh and moan, and again and again I could hear the words: ‘Mother! Mother!’

I ran down into the courtyard, my heart frozen, my head throbbing. What I had seen in the doorway of the Square Tower had not reassured me in the least. I tried in vain to reason with myself. Just as we thought that everything was lost, had not, on the contrary, everything been saved? Had not the son found his mother? Had not the mother at last found her child? Then why that death-cry if she was alive? What was the cause of that agonised call before she appeared on the steps of the door to the tower?

Curiously enough, there was not a soul in the courtyard of Charles the Bold as I crossed it. Had no one else heard the shot? Had no one heard the cry? Where was M. Darzac? Where was Old Bob? Could he still be at work in the Round Tower? I thought it probable, for I could see a slender line of light beneath the door of his study.

And Mattoni? Was it possible that he had heard nothing? Was it possible that Mattoni, who was on guard at the gardener’s gatehouse, could have noticed nothing? And Bernier and his wife, what of them? I could not see them anywhere. The door of the Square Tower had remained open. Ah, the sweet murmur that issued forth from there! ‘Mother, mother, mother!’ I could hear her answering through her sobs: ‘My darling, my darling, my darling!’ They had not even thought to close Old Bob’s sitting room door behind them, for it was there that she had led him.

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