"Fire!" roared Vorski. "Shoot, can't you, you idiots? Fire!"
"Fire! Fire!" repeated the Druid. "Bang! Bang! A bull's eye!… Two!… Three bull's eyes!… Your shot, Conrad: bang!… Yours, Otto: bang!"
The shots rattled and echoed through the great resounding hall. The bewildered and furious accomplices were gesticulating before their target, while the invulnerable old man danced and kicked, now almost squatting on his heels, now leaping up with astounding agility:
"Lord, what fun one can have in a cave! And what a fool you are, Vorski, my own! You blooming old prophet!… What a mug! But, I say, however could you take it all in? The Bengal lights! The crackers! And the trouser-button! And your old mother's ring!… You silly juggins! What a spoof!"
Vorski stopped. He realized that the three revolvers had been made harmless, but how? By what unprecedented marvel? What was at the bottom of all this fantastic adventure? Who was that demon standing in front of him?
He flung away his useless weapon and looked at the old man. Was he thinking of seizing him in his arms and crushing the life out of him? He also looked at the woman and seemed ready to fall upon her. But he obviously no longer felt equal to facing those two strange creatures, who appeared to him[Pg 282] to be remote from the world and from actuality.
Then, quickly, he turned on his heel and, calling to his accomplices, made for the crypts, followed by the ancient Druid's jeers:
"Look at that now! He's slinging his hook! And the God-Stone, what about it? What do you want me to do with it?… I say, isn't he showing a clean pair of heels!… Hi! Are your trousers on fire? Yoicks, tally-ho, tally-ho! Proph-et Proph-et!…"
[Pg 283]
CHAPTER XV
Vorski had never known fear and he was perhaps not yielding to an actual sense of fear in taking to flight now. But he no longer knew what he was doing. His bewildered brain was filled with a whirl of contradictory and incoherent ideas in which the intuition of an irretrievable and to some extent supernatural defeat held the first place.
Believing as he did in witchcraft and wonders, he had an impression that Vorski, the man of destiny, had fallen from his mission and been replaced by another chosen favourite of destiny. There were two miraculous forces opposed to each other, one emanating from him, Vorski, the other from the ancient Druid; and the second was absorbing the first. Veronique's resurrection, the ancient Druid's personality, the speeches, the jokes, the leaps and bounds, the actions, the invulnerability of that spring-heeled individual, all this seemed to him magical and fabulous; and it created, in these caves of the barbaric ages, a peculiar atmosphere which stifled and demoralized him.
He was eager to return to the surface of the earth. He wanted to breathe and see. And what he wanted above all to see was the tree stripped of its branches to which he had tied Veronique and on which Veronique had expired.
[Pg 284]"For she is dead," he snarled, as he crawled through the narrow passage which communicated with the third and largest of the crypts. "She is dead. I know what death means. I have often held it in my hands and I make no mistakes. Then how did that demon manage to bring her to life again?"
He stopped abruptly near the block on which he had picked up the sceptre:
"Unless…" he said.
Conrad, following him, cried:
"Hurry up, instead of chattering."
Vorski allowed himself to be pulled along; but, as he went, he continued:
"Shall I tell you what I think, Conrad? Well, the woman he showed us, the one asleep, wasn't that one at all. Was she even alive? Oh, the old wizard is capable of anything! He'll have modelled a figure, a wax doll, and given it her likeness."
"You're mad. Get on!"
"I'm not mad. That woman was not alive. The one who died on the tree is properly dead. And you'll find her again up there, I warrant you. Miracles, yes, but not such a miracle as that!"
Having left their lantern behind them, the three accomplices kept bumping against the wall and the upright stones. Their footsteps echoed from vault to vault. Conrad never ceased grumbling:
"I warned you… We ought to have broken his head."
Otto, out of breath with walking, said nothing.
Thus, groping their way, they reached the lobby which preceded the entrance-crypt; and they were not a little surprised to find that this first hall was[Pg 285] dark, though the passage which they had dug in the upper part, under the roots of the dead oak, ought to have given a certain amount of light.
"That's funny," said Conrad.
"Pooh!" said Otto. "We've only got to find the ladder hooked to the wall. Here, I have it… here's a step… and the next…"
He climbed the rungs, but was pulled up almost at once:
"Can't get any farther… It's as if there had been a fall of earth."
"Impossible!" Vorski protested. "However, wait a bit, I was forgetting: I have my pocket-lighter."
He struck a light; and the same cry of anger escaped all three of them: the whole of the top of the staircase and half the room was buried under a heap of stones and sand, with the trunk of the dead oak fallen in the middle. Not a chance of escape remained.
Vorski gave way to a fit of despair and collapsed on the stairs:
"We're tricked. It's that old brute who has played us this trick… which shows that he's not alone."
He bewailed his fate, raving, lacking the strength to continue the unequal struggle. But Conrad grew angry:
"I say, Vorski, this isn't like you, you know."
"There's nothing to be done against that fellow."
"Nothing to be done! In the first place, there's this, as I've told you twenty times: wring his neck. Oh, why did I restrain myself?"
[Pg 286]"You couldn't even have laid a hand on him. Did any of our bullets touch him?"
"Our bullets… our bullets," muttered Conrad. "All this strikes me as mighty queer. Hand me your lighter. I have another revolver, which comes from the Priory: and I loaded it myself yesterday morning. I'll soon see."
He examined the weapon and was not long in discovering that the seven cartridges which he had put in the cylinder had been replaced by seven cartridges from which the bullets had been extracted and which could therefore fire nothing except blank shots.
"That explains it," he said, "and your ancient Druid is no more of a wizard than I am. If our revolvers had been really loaded, we'd have shot him down like a dog."
But the explanation only increased Vorski's alarm:
"And how did he unload them? At what moment did he manage to take our revolvers from our pockets and put them back after drawing the charges? I did not leave go of mine for an instant."
"No more did I," Conrad admitted.
"And I defy any one to touch it without my knowing. So what then? Doesn't it prove that that demon has a special power? After all, we must look at things as they are. He's a man who possesses secrets of his own… and who has means at his disposal, means which…"
Conrad shrugged his shoulders:
"Vorski, this business has shattered you. You were within reach of the goal and yet you let go at[Pg 287] the first obstacle. You're turned into a dish-cloth. Well, I don't bow my head like you. Tricked? Why so? If he comes after us, there are three of us."
"He won't come. He'll leave us here shut up in a burrow with no way out of it."
"Then, if he doesn't come, I'll go back there, I will! I've got my knife; that's enough for me."
"You're wrong, Conrad."
"How am I wrong? I'm a match for any man, especially for that old blighter; and he's only got a sleeping woman to help him."