Maurice Leblanc - The Secret of Sarek

[Pg 360]"Well done, youngster," said Don Luis, laughing, "you have put your finger on a weak point! If I had acted as you suggest, the tragedy would have been finished twelve or fifteen hours earlier. But think, would you have been released? Would the scoundrel have spoken and revealed your hiding-place? I don't think so. To loosen his tongue I had to keep him simmering. I had to make him dizzy, to drive him mad with apprehension and anguish and to convince him by means of a mass of proofs, that he was irretrievably defeated. Otherwise he would have held his tongue and we might perhaps not have found you…. Besides, at that time, my plan was not very clear, I did not quite know how to wind up; and it was not until much later that I thought not of submitting him to violent torture-I am incapable of that-but of tying him to that tree on which he wanted to let your mother die. So that, in my perplexity and hesitation, I simply yielded, in the end, to the wish-the rather puerile wish, I blush to confess-to carry out the prophecy to the end, to see how the missionary would behave in the presence of the ancient Druid, in short to amuse myself. After all, the adventure was so dark and gloomy that a little fun seemed to me essential. And I laughed like blazes. That was wrong. I admit it and I apologize."

The boy was laughing too. Don Luis, who was holding him between his knees, kissed him and asked:

"Do you forgive me?"

"Yes, on condition that you answer two more questions. The first is not important."

[Pg 361]"Ask away."

"It's about the ring. Where did you get that ring which you put first on mother's finger and afterwards on Elfride's?"

"I made it that same night, in a few minutes, out of an old wedding-ring and some coloured stones."

"But the scoundrel recognized it as having belonged to his mother."

"He thought he recognized it; and he thought it because the ring was like the other."

"But how did you know that? And how did you learn the story?"

"From himself."

"You don't mean that?"

"Certainly I do! From words that escaped him while he was sleeping under the Fairies' Dolmen. A drunkard's nightmare. Bit by bit he told the whole story of his mother. Elfride knew a good part of it besides. You see how simple it is and how my luck stood by me!"

"But the riddle of the God-Stone is not simple," Francois cried, "and you deciphered it! People have been trying for centuries and you took a few hours!"

"No, a few minutes, Francois. It was enough for me to read the letter which your grandfather wrote about it to Captain Belval. I sent your grandfather by post all the explanations as to the position and the marvellous nature of the God-Stone."

"Well," cried the boy, "it's those explanations that I'm asking of you, Don Luis. This is my last[Pg 362] question, I promise you. What made people believe in the power of the God-Stone? And what did that so-called power consist of exactly?"

Stephane and Patrice drew up their chairs. Veronique sat up and listened. They all understood that Don Luis had waited until they were together before rending the veil of the mystery before their eyes.

He began to laugh:

"You mustn't hope for anything sensational," he said. "A mystery is worth just as much as the darkness in which it is shrouded; and, as we have begun by dispelling the darkness, nothing remains but the fact itself in its naked reality. Nevertheless the facts in this case are strange and the reality is not denuded of a certain grandeur."

"It must needs be so," said Patrice Belval, "seeing that the reality left so miraculous a legend in the isle of Sarek and even all over Brittany."

"Yes," said Don Luis, "and a legend so persistent that it influences us to this day and that not one of you has escaped the obsession of the miraculous."

"What do you mean?" protested Patrice. "I don't believe in miracles."

"No more do I," said the boy.

"Yes, you do, you believe in them, you accept miracles as possible. If not, you would long ago have seen the whole truth."

"Why?"

Don Luis picked a magnificent rose from a tree by his side and asked Francois:

"Is it possible for me to transform this rose, whose proportions, as it is, are larger than those a[Pg 363] rose often attains, into a flower double the size and this rose-tree into a shrub twice as tall?"

"Certainly not," said Francois.

"Then why did you admit, why did you all admit that Maguennoc could achieve that result, merely by digging up earth in certain parts of the island, at certain fixed hours? That was a miracle; and you accepted it without hesitation, unconsciously."

Stephane objected:

"We accept what we saw with our eyes."

"But you accepted it as a miracle, that is to say, as a phenomenon which Maguennoc produced by special and, truth to tell, by supernatural means. Whereas I, when I read this detail in M. d'Hergemont's letter, at once-what shall I say?-caught on. I at once established the connection between those monstrous blossoms and the name borne by the Calvary of the flowers. And my conviction was immediate: 'No, Maguennoc is not a wizard. He simply cleared a piece of uncultivated land around the Calvary; and all he had to do, to produce abnormal flowers, was to bring along a layer of mould. So the God-Stone is underneath; the God-Stone which, in the middle-ages, produced the same abnormal flowers; the God-Stone, which, in the days of the Druids, healed the sick and strengthened children.'"

"Therefore," said Patrice, "there is a miracle."

"There is a miracle if we accept the supernatural explanation. There is a natural phenomenon if we look for it and if we find the physical cause capable of giving rise to the apparent miracle."

"But those physical causes don't exist! They are not present."

[Pg 364]"They exist, because you have seen monstrous flowers."

"Then there is a stone," asked Patrice, almost chaffingly, "which can naturally give health and strength? And that stone is the God-Stone?"

"There is not a particular, individual stone. But there are stones, blocks of stone, rocks, hills and mountains of rock, which contain mineral veins formed of various metals, oxides of uranium, silver, lead, copper, nickel, cobalt and so on. And among these metals are some which emit a special radiation, endowed with peculiar properties known as radioactivity. These veins are veins of pitchblende which are found hardly anywhere in Europe except in the north of Bohemia and which are worked near the little town of Joachimsthal. And those radioactive bodies are uranium, thorium, helium and chiefly, in the case which we are considering…"

"Radium," Francois interrupted.

"You've said it, my boy: radium. Phenomena of radioactivity occur more or less everywhere; and we may say that they are manifested throughout nature, as in the healing action of thermal springs. But plainly radioactive bodies like radium possess more definite properties. For instance, there is no doubt that the rays and the emanation of radium exercise a power over the life of plants, a power similar to that caused by the passage of an electric current. In both cases, the stimulation of the nutritive centres makes the elements required by the plant more easy to assimilate and promotes its growth. In the same way, there is no doubt that the radium rays are capable of exercising a physiological action[Pg 365] on living tissues, by producing more or less profound modifications, destroying certain cells and contributing to develop other cells and even to control their evolution. Radiotherapy claims to have healed or improved numerous cases of rheumatism of the joints, nervous troubles, ulceration, eczema, tumours and adhesive cicatrices. In short radium is a really effective therapeutic agent."

"So," said Stephane, "you regard the God-Stone…"