The Three Eyes - free ebook by Maurice Leblanc

THE THREE EYES

Bérangère stopped. . . . ( The Three Eyes ) Frontispiece...

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The Three Eyes

By MAURICE LEBLANC Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos Author of " The Secret of Sarek ." Frontispiece by G. W. GAGE A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by arrangement with The Macaulay Company Copyright, 1921, by THE MACAULAY COMPANY All rights reserved PRINTED IN U. S. A....

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THE THREE EYES CHAPTER I BERGERONNETTE

For me the strange story dates back to that autumn day when my uncle Dorgeroux appeared, staggering and unhinged, in the doorway of the room which I occupied in his house, Haut-Meudon Lodge. None of us had set eyes on him for a week. A prey to that nervous exasperation into which the final test of any of his inventions invariably threw him, he was living among his furnaces and retorts, keeping every door shut, sleeping on a sofa, eating nothing but fruit and bread. And suddenly he stood before m

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CHAPTER II THE "TRIANGULAR CIRCLES"

What was known at Meudon as Noël Dorgeroux's Yard was a piece of waste-land in which the paths were lost amid the withered grass, nettles and stones, amid stacks of empty barrels, scrap-iron, rabbit-hutches and every kind of disused lumber that rusts and rots or tumbles into dust. Against the walls and outer fences stood the workshops, joined together by driving-belts and shafts, and the laboratories filled with furnaces, pneumatic receivers, innumerable retorts, phials and jars containing the m

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CHAPTER III AN EXECUTION

It must be understood that, notwithstanding the explanations which I must needs offer, the development of all these events took but very little time: exactly eighteen seconds, as I had the opportunity of calculating afterwards. But, during these eighteen seconds—and this again I observed on many an occasion—the spectator received the illusion of watching a complete drama, with its preliminary expositions, its plot and its culmination. And when this obscure, illogical drama was over, you question

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CHAPTER IV NOËL DORGEROUX'S SON

The spectator who has just been watching the most tragic of films finds it easy to escape from the sort of dark prison-house in which he was suffocating and, with the return of the light, recovers his equilibrium and his self-possession. I, on the other hand, remained for a long time numb and speechless, with my eyes riveted to the empty panel, as though I expected something else to emerge from it. Even when it was over, the tragedy terrified me, like a nightmare prolonged after waking, and, eve

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CHAPTER V THE KISS

Bérangère next day resumed her place at meals, looking a little pale and wearing a more serious face than usual. My uncle, who had not troubled about her during the last two days, kissed her absent-mindedly. We lunched without a word. Not until we had nearly ended did Noël Dorgeroux speak to his god-child: "Well, dear, are you none the worse for your fall?" "Not a bit, god-father; and I'm only sorry that I didn't see . . . what you saw up there, yesterday and the day before. Are you going there

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CHAPTER VI ANXIETIES

"You seem very happy, uncle!" said I to Noël Dorgeroux, who walked briskly on the way to the station, whistling one gay tune after another. "Yes," he replied, "I am happy as a man is who has come to a decision." "You've come to a decision, uncle?" "And a very serious one at that. It has cost me a sleepless night; but it's worth it." "May I ask . . . ?" "Certainly. In two words, it's this: I'm going to pull down the sheds in the Yard and build an amphitheatre there." "What for?" "To exploit the t

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CHAPTER VII THE FIERCE-EYED MAN

The staff at the Lodge consisted in its entirety of one old maid-servant, a little deaf and very short-sighted, who combined the functions, as occasion demanded, of parlour-maid, cook and gardener. Notwithstanding these manifold duties, Valentine hardly ever left her kitchen-range, which was situated in an extension built on to the house and opening directly upon the street. This was where I found her. She did not seem surprised at my return—nothing, for that matter, ever surprised or perturbed

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CHAPTER VIII "SOME ONE WILL EMERGE FROM THE DARKNESS"

Notwithstanding Noël Dorgeroux's advanced age, there had been a violent struggle. The murderer, whose footprints I traced along the path which led from the fence to the wall, had flung himself upon his victim and had first tried to strangle him. It was not until later, in the second phase of the contest, that he had seized a pick-axe with which to strike Noël Dorgeroux. Nothing of intrinsic value had been stolen. I found my uncle's watch and note-case untouched. But the waistcoat had been opened

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CHAPTER IX THE MAN WHO EMERGED FROM THE DARKNESS

"When the time comes," they had said, "some one will emerge from the darkness. When the time comes, some one will remove the mask from his face." That face now beamed expansively before me. That some one, who was about to play the game of the two accomplices, was Bérangère's father. And the same question continued to suggest itself, each time more painfully than the last: "What had been Bérangère's part in the horrible tragedy?" There was a long, heavy silence between us. I began to stride acros

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CHAPTER X THE CROWD SEES

Théodore Massignac was installed at the box-office! Théodore Massignac, when a dispute of any kind occurred, left his desk and hastened to settle it! Théodore Massignac walked up and down, examining the tickets, showing people to their places, speaking a pleasant word here, giving a masterful order there and doing all these things with his everlasting smile and his obsequious graciousness. Of embarrassment not the slightest sign. Everybody knew that Théodore Massignac was the fellow with the bro

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CHAPTER XI THE CATHEDRAL

The crowd could not recover from its stupefaction. It sat and waited. It had heard through me of the Three Eyes, of their significance as a message, a preliminary illustration, something like the title or picture-poster of the coming spectacle. It remembered Edith Cavell's eyes, Philippe Dorgeroux's eyes, Bérangère's eyes, all those eyes which I had seen again afterwards ; and it sat as though cramped in obstinate silence, as though it feared lest a word or a movement should scare away the invis

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CHAPTER XII THE "SHAPES"

On the morning of the day following this memorable spectacle, I woke late, after a feverish night during which I twice seemed to hear the sound of a shot. "Nightmare!" I thought, when I got up. "I was haunted by the pictures of the bombardment; and what I heard was the bursting of the shells." The explanation was plausible enough: the powerful emotions of the amphitheatre, coming after my meeting with Bérangère in the course of that other night and my struggle with Théodore Massignac, had thrown

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CHAPTER XIII THE VEIL IS LIFTED

I will not linger over the two films of this second performance and the evident connection between them. At the present moment we are too near the close of this extraordinary story to waste time over minute, tedious, unimportant details. We must remember that, on the following morning, a newspaper printed the first part, and, a few hours later, the second part of the famous Prévotelle report, in which the problem was attacked in so masterly a fashion and solved with so profoundly impressive a di

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CHAPTER XIV MASSIGNAC AND VELMOT

"Clouds were floating. . . . Clouds were floating. . . ." These words of the report, which I repeated mechanically while trying to decipher what followed, were the last that I was able to read. Night was falling rapidly. My eyes, tired by the strain and difficulty of reading, strove in vain against the increasing darkness and suddenly refused to obey any further effort. Besides, Velmot rose soon after and walked to the bank of the river. The time had come for action. What that action was to be I

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CHAPTER XV THE SPLENDID THEORY

It is not only to-day, when I am relating that tragic scene, that it appears to me in the light of a subsidiary episode to my story. I already had that impression at the time when it was being enacted. My reason for laying no greater stress on my alarm and on the horror of certain facts is that all this was to me only an interlude. Massignac's sufferings and his disappearance and Velmot's inexplicable behaviour, in abandoning for some minutes the conduct of a matter to which he had until then ap

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CHAPTER XVI WHERE LIPS UNITE

We have but to read the newspapers of the period, to realize that the excitement caused by the Meudon pictures reached its culminating point as the result of Benjamin Prévotelle's essay. I have four of those newspapers, dated the following day, on my table as I write. Not one of them contains throughout its eight pages a single line that does not refer to what at once became known as the Splendid Theory. For the rest, the chorus of approval and enthusiasm was general, or very nearly so. There we

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CHAPTER XVII SUPREME VISIONS

The exhibition of the following day was preceded by two important pieces of news which appeared in the evening papers. A group of financiers had offered Théodore Massignac the sum of ten million francs in consideration of Noël Dorgeroux's secret and the right to work the amphitheatre. Théodore Massignac was to give them his answer next day. But, at the last moment, a telegram from the south of France announced that the maid-of-all-work who had nursed Massignac in his house at Toulouse, a few wee

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CHAPTER XVIII THE CHÂTEAU DE PRÉ-BONY

The exclamation of the crowd proved to me that, at the sight of the great old man, who was known to all by his portraits and by the posters exhibited at the doors of the Yard, the same thought had instantaneously struck us all. We understood from the first. After the series of criminal pictures, we knew the meaning of Noël Dorgeroux's appearance on the screen and knew the inexorable climax of the story which we were being told. There had been six victims. My uncle would be the seventh. We were g

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CHAPTER XIX THE FORMULA

Velmot dead, Bérangère alive: the joy of it! The sudden sense of security! This time, the evil adventure was over, since the girl whom I loved had nothing more to fear. And my thoughts at once harked back to Noël Dorgeroux: the formula in which the great secret was summed up was saved. With the clues and the means of action which existed elsewhere, mankind was now in a position to continue my uncle's work. Bérangère called me back: "He's dead, isn't he?" I felt intuitively that I ought not to te

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