The earth sped beneath them. The trees and houses glided by like shadows.

And then Alencon.

It was hardly more than a quarter to two when they landed in a meadow between the town and Damigni. Don Luis made inquiries. A number of motor cars had pa.s.sed along the road to Damigni, including a small limousine driven by a gentleman who had turned down a crossroad. And this crossroad led to the woods at the back of Langernault's estate, the Old Castle.

Don Luis's conviction was so firm that, after taking leave of Davanne, he helped him to start on his homeward flight. He had no further need of him. He needed n.o.body. The final duel was at hand.

He ran along, guided by the tracks of the tires in the dust, and followed the crossroad. To his great surprise this road went nowhere near the wall behind the barn from which he had jumped a few weeks before. After clearing the woods, Don Luis came out into a large untilled s.p.a.ce where the road turned back toward the estate and ended at an old two-winged gate protected with iron sheets and bars.

The limousine had gone in that way.

"And I must get in this way, too," thought Don Luis. "I must get in at all costs and immediately, without wasting time in looking for an opening or a handy tree."

Now the wall was thirteen feet high at this spot. Don Luis got in. How he managed it, by what superhuman effort, he himself could not have said after he had done it.

Somehow or other, by hanging on to invisible projections, by digging a knife which he had borrowed from Davanne into the interstices between the stones, he managed it.

And when he was on the other side he discovered the tracks of the tires running to the left, toward a part of the grounds which he did not know, more undulating than the other and broken up with little hills and ruined buildings covered with thick curtains of ivy.

Deserted though the rest of the park was, this portion seemed much more uncivilized, in spite of the ragged remains of box and laurel hedges that stood here and there amidst the nettles and brambles, and the luxuriant swarm of tall wild-flowers, valerian, mullein, hemlock, foxglove, and angelica.

Suddenly, on turning the corner of an old hedge of clipped yews, Don Luis saw the limousine, which had been left, or, rather, hidden there in a hollow. The door was open. The disorder of the inside of the car, the rug hanging over the footboard, a broken window, a cushion on the floor, all bore witness to a struggle. The scoundrel had no doubt taken advantage of the fact that Florence was asleep to tie her up; and on arriving, when he tried to take her out of the car, Florence must have clutched at everything that offered.

Don Luis at once verified the correctness of his theory. As he went along the very narrow, gra.s.s-grown path that led up the slope, he saw that the gra.s.s was uniformly pressed down.

"Oh, the villain!" he thought. "The villain! He doesn't carry his victim, he drags her!"

If he had listened only to his instinct, he would have rushed to Florence's rescue. But his profound sense of what to do and what to avoid saved him from committing any such imprudence. At the first alarm, at the least sound, the tiger would have throttled his prey. To escape this hideous catastrophe, Don Luis must take him by surprise and then and there deprive him of his power of action. He controlled himself, therefore, and slowly and cautiously mounted the incline.

The path ran upward between heaps of stones and fallen buildings, and among clumps of shrubs overtopped by beeches and oaks. The place was evidently the site of the old feudal castle which had given the estate its name; and it was here, near the top, that the scoundrel had selected one of his retreats.

The trail continued over the trampled herbage. And Don Luis even caught sight of something shining on the ground, in a tuft of gra.s.s. It was a ring, a tiny and very simple ring, consisting of a gold circlet and two small pearls, which he had often noticed on Florence's finger. And the fact that caught his attention was that a blade of gra.s.s pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed and pa.s.sed a third time through the inside of the ring, like a ribbon that had been rolled round it deliberately.

"It's a clear signal," said Perenna to himself. "The villain probably stopped here to rest; and Florence, bound up; but with her fingers free, was able to leave this evidence of her pa.s.sage."

So the girl still hoped. She expected a.s.sistance. And Don Luis reflected with emotion that it was perhaps to him that this last desperate appeal was addressed.

Fifty steps farther--and this detail pointed to the rather curious fatigue experienced by the scoundrel--there was a second halt and a second clue, a flower, a field-sage, which the poor little hand had picked and plucked of its petals. Next came the print of the five fingers dug into the ground, and next a cross drawn with a pebble. And in this way he was able to follow, minute by minute, all the successive stages of the horrible journey.

The last stopping-place was near. The climb became steeper and rougher.

The fallen stones occasioned more frequent obstacles. On the right the Gothic arches, the remains of a chapel, stood out against the blue sky.

On the left was a strip of wall with a mantelpiece still clinging to it.

Twenty steps farther Don Luis stopped. He seemed to hear something.

He listened. He was not mistaken. The sound was repeated, and it was the sound of laughter. But such an awful laugh! A strident laugh, evil as the laughter of a devil, and so shrill! It was more like the laugh of a woman, of a madwoman.

Again silence. Then another noise, the noise of an implement striking the ground, then silence again.

And this was happening at a distance which Don Luis estimated at a hundred yards.

The path ended in three steps cut in the earth. At the top was a fairly large plateau, also enc.u.mbered with rubbish and ruins. In the centre, opposite Don Luis, stood a screen of immense laurels planted in a semicircle. The marks of trodden gra.s.s led up to it.

Don Luis was a little surprised, for the screen presented an impenetrable outline. He walked on and found that there had once been a cutting, and that the branches had ended by meeting again. They were easy to push aside; and it was through here that the scoundrel must have pa.s.sed. To all appearances he was there now, at the end of his journey, not far away, occupied in some sinister task.

Indeed the air was rent by a chuckle, so close by that Don Luis gave a start and felt as if the scoundrel were laughing beforehand at his intervention. He remembered the letter with the words written in red ink:

There's still time, Lupin. Retire from the contest. If not, it means your death, too. When you think that your object is attained, when your hand is raised against me and you utter words of triumph, at the same moment the ground will open beneath your feet. The place of your death is chosen. The snare is laid. Beware, Lupin!

The whole letter pa.s.sed through his brain, with its formidable threat.

And he felt a shiver of fear. But no fear could stay the man that he was.

He had already taken hold of the branches with his hands and was clearing a way for himself.

He stopped. A last bulwark of leaves hid him from sight. He pulled some of them aside at the level of his eyes.

And he saw ...

First of all, he saw Florence, alone at this moment, lying on the ground, bound, at thirty yards in front of him; and he at once perceived, to his intense delight, from certain movements of her head that she was still alive. He had come in time. Florence was not dead.

She would not die. That was a certainty against which nothing could prevail. Florence would not die.

Then he examined the things around. To the right and left of where he stood the screen of laurels curved and embraced a sort of arena in which, among yews that had once been clipped into cones, lay capitals, columns, broken pieces of arches and vaults, obviously placed there to adorn the formal garden that had been laid out on the ruins of the ancient donjon-keep.

In the middle was a small circular s.p.a.ce reached by two narrow paths, one of which presented the same traces of trodden gra.s.s and was a continuation of that by which Don Luis had come, while the other intersected the first at right angles and joined the two ends of the screen of shrubs.

Opposite was a confused heap of broken stones and natural rocks, cemented with clay, bound together by the roots of gnarled trees, the whole forming at the back of the picture a small, shallow grotto, full of crevices that admitted the light. The floor, which Don Luis could easily distinguish, consisted of three or four flagstones.

Florence Leva.s.seur lay inside this grotto, bound hand and foot, looking like the victim of some mysterious sacrifice about to be performed on the altar of the grotto, in the amphitheatre of this old garden closed by the wall of tall laurels and overlooked by a pile of ancestral ruins.

In spite of the distance, Don Luis was able to make out every detail of her pale face. Though convulsed with anguish, it still retained a certain serenity, an expression of waiting and even of expectancy, as if Florence, believing, until the last moment, in the possibility of a miracle, had not yet relinquished all hope of life.

Nevertheless, though she was not gagged, she did not call for help.

Perhaps she thought that it was useless, and that the road which she had strewn with the marks of her pa.s.sing was more likely to bring a.s.sistance to her side than cries, which the villain would soon have stifled.

Strange to say, it seemed to Don Luis as if the girl's eyes were obstinately fixed on the very spot where he was hiding. Possibly she suspected his presence. Possibly she foresaw his help.

Suddenly Don Luis clutched one of his revolvers and half raised his arm, ready to take aim. The sacrificer, the butcher, had just appeared, not far from the altar on which the victim lay.

He came from between two rocks, of which a bush marked the intervening s.p.a.ce, which apparently afforded but a very low outlet, for he still walked as though bent double, with his head bowed and his long arms swinging so low as to touch the ground.

He went to the grotto and gave his horrible chuckle:

"You're still there, I see," he said. "No sign of the rescuer? Perseus is a little late, I fear. He'd better hurry!"

The tone of his voice was so shrill that Don Luis heard every word, and so odd, so unhuman, that it gave him a feeling of physical discomfort.

He gripped his revolver tightly, prepared to shoot at the first suspicious movement.

"He'd better hurry!" repeated the scoundrel, with a laugh. "If not, all will be over in five minutes. You see that I'm a man of method, eh, Florence, my darling?"

He picked up something from the ground. It was a stick shaped like a crutch. He put it under his left arm and, still bent in two, began to walk like a man who has not the strength to stand erect. Then suddenly and with no apparent cause to explain his change of att.i.tude, he drew himself up and used his crutch as he would a cane. He then walked round the outside of the grotto, making a careful inspection, the meaning of which escaped Don Luis for the time.