The Black Graves
The Marquis de Lorgères was confined to his bed for four months by his wounds. The thrusts had been masterly; either might have been fatal, and Dupuytren 27 was able to boast for many years afterwards of that particular cure. In the meantime, Prince Jacobyi’s reply arrived in Paris–bearing the address of Chandor Castle–and was favorable.
As one would expect, the Princess, although she trusted the Marquis’s word completely, had not been deterred from obtaining information from her cousins the de Rohans, who were established in Hungary. It was, after all, part of her duty as a mother. The information thus transmitted was, like the Prince’s reply, favorable.
The Prince had bought back his lands. The Prince was, as before, one of the greatest lords of the Austrian Empire.
The marriage of the Marquis de Lorgères to Princess Lenore took place in Szeged, at the beginning of March 1826.
Early in April that same year, a little old man with a pleasant face and an easy-gong manner was trudging along the high road from Pest to Szeged, pulling a hand-cart containing a poor creature who looked like a living corpse and who had, moreover, lost his reason. Not far from Szeged, upstream of Morzau, there is a spring whose water is clear, protected by a little minaret from the dust of the road. The water of that spring was blessed by Saint Miklos, and has the power to cure madness. The little old man was a good father who had come from the region of Ofen, dragging his unfortunate son every step of the way.
Since that era, our French engineers have laid four parallel iron bars all the way from Pest to Belgrade, via Szeged. It only requires a few hours to cross that vast plain. The last time I saw Szeged, that strange town which contains as many bells as the entire district of Beauce 28, it had an old pupil of our Ecole Polytechnique for its king. He was in the process of building a four thousand-feet bridge across the Tisza: a magnificent bridge to carry the railway. Austrian engineers came to study the work, carried out by a human ant-hive in which one could identify twenty races and whose members spoke fifteen languages.
I realized then that the confusion of languages had counted for nothing in preventing the erection of the Tower of Babel. The bridge marched upon the waters, so to speak, supported by great tubular columns, and I saw a daguerreotype machine with the round eye of its black chamber already focused on its arches. This is our future civilization–but on that same voyage I saw accused and condemned men, stretched out entirely naked on the damp earth in the cellars of Turkish forts: forts whose walls, flanked by corpulent towers, looked over that same Parisian bridge. We have, however, already raised the possibility that men might break out of prisons, even those whose stones have been set permanently in place.
In 1826, the high road entered the city via a lake of mud in winter, a sea of dust in summer. The dust of Szeged is famous in Hungary, and the mud too. Ingenious Magyars set planks end to end in order that these precipices may be crossed, but the regulations require carriages to pass alongside them lest they be rendered useless, and the trusting pedestrian who dares to set foot upon them is almost certain to fall off.
The pious father, the hand-cart and the son arrived two hours before sunset at the horribly churned-up plain called the Place Joseph II, in the shadow of the beautiful Byzantine Church of Saint Job. The hand-cart stopped in front of a sort of caravanserail, bearing a sign depicting a saint clad in red, whose interior courtyard, as large as one of our public squares, was bordered by worm-eaten wooden arcades. The little old man asked politely for the least expensive room in the inn, deposited his son there and went out to get his papers stamped by a government official. His passport bore the name Petroz Aszuth, leather-merchant of Kaiserbad.
The servants in Hungarian inns are usually Slavs and, in consequence, almost as garrulous as the staff of French taverns. Before dinner was served, everyone knew the whole story of little Petroz Aszuth, who was taking his idiot son to the spring of Saint Miklos. The poor lumpen boy was certainly in great need of the spring. The innkeeper’s daughter who took him his food was kind enough to strike up a conversation with him to relieve his boredom slightly, but she returned saying: “One might as well talk to Schwartz, the guard-dog!”
The night was already well-advanced when the little old man came back. He did not want any supper and immediately went up to his room. As soon as he was inside, he locked the door and drew the curtains over the window.
The idiot leapt from his bed and put on a blond wig. You would have immediately recognized the long lean figure of Baron von Altenheimer. “Do you know something, Bobby?” he asked, animatedly.
Bobby removed his dirty beard, which was making his rosy cheeks itch, and plunged his face into a basin of fresh water, displaying the pretty face of Monsignor Benedict.
“Well,” he said, “this place hasn’t changed–they still chatter like magpies. I know the story from beginning to end.”
Tall William sat down on the foot of his bed to smoke his porcelain pipe. “Go on,” he said.
“It was the Marquis all right,” Bobby replied, lighting his cigar. “He’s given the missal to old Jacobyi, who’s bought his hovel back...”
“Then they’re thieves like us!” William cried. “The missal only had five hundred thousand florins of his, from Lenore’s ransom, and he’d have needed six times that to buy his estates back!”
Bobby shrugged his shoulders. “If they’d kept the lot,” he replied, “I could almost have forgiven them–after all, it’s every man for himself, isn’t it? But since old Baszin got back his castle, his forests, his lakes and his fields, he’s taken out all his mortgages again and borrowed exactly the same sum as the excess he took from the missal. Even before he celebrated the marriage of his daughter, he had delivered our cash into the hands of the Primate of Hungary, the Archbishop of Graz. The fact has been advertised in Vienna, Venice, Stuttgart, Paris and everywhere else, and all the sheep that we have fleeced have turned up, demanding their wool! Pillaged, all of it! Not a single florin of our little hoard remains–and if there were anything left, the rogues would still be queuing up!”
“Wretches!” William groaned.
“Let me tell you,” Bobby went on, “everyone is talking about us here. Since we’ve done what we came to do, we’d best be on our way. They know everything! The story of our Paris venture has become legendary. The tale of the Archbishop’s collection is all the rage. And the missal itself... but it’s the story of the missal that I want to tell you. The Marquis was running an errand for his mother when he picked up the missal. His intention was to return it to me, but the missal had fallen so unluckily that the secret catch had been sprung. Nothing was broken, but the steel casement could be opened as easily as one might open a book. The Marquis did exactly that, perhaps by chance, and the two fifty-thousand-pound banknotes leapt to his eyes. He understands English, and you had taken care to acquaint him, a few minutes earlier, with the story of the father of Lenore, with whom he was already in love even though he had never spoken to her...”
“I remember!” murmured William. “He had the nerve to ask me for information about rights of repurchase, on the pretext that his brother had property in Debrecen...”
“When he asked you for that information, his plan was conceived,” Bobby went on. “He’s a smart fellow and I won’t regret the bullet that smashes his head.”
William took a flat square bottle from his overcoat, which contained brandy. He took a big gulp. “Ever since that business,” he said, “we’ve been unable to get back on our feet. All our capers have gone wrong, in London, in Berlin, in Vienna–he’s the cause of all our misfortune!” He passed the bottle to Bobby, who drank before repeating: “He’s the cause of all our misfortune!”
“When we’ve bled him dry, he must die!”
“He must die!” Bobby echoed, again. “I have all the necessary information. They talk of little else in Szeged, because of the story of the missal, which has been on everyone’s lips. He’s spending his honeymoon at Chandor. He hunts and he fishes. A big hunt is planned for tomorrow.”
“We’ll be there!” snarled William.
“We’ll be there. We must be up early–let’s get some sleep, Old William.”
The next morning, before daybreak, the little old man from Kaiserbad hitched himself up to his vehicle and carted his maniac son off towards the welcoming spring. The staff of the inn were most impressed by the conduct of the little old man; they pointed him in the right direction and wished him good luck.
The way to the spring was the road to Chandor Castle. After an hour’s march, at the moment when dawn silvered the horizon, the hand-cart reached the vast forests of the Baszin domain.
The old man left the main road and pushed the hand-cart into a dense wood. The invalid son, suddenly recovering the agility appropriate to one of his age, leapt on to the moss and opened the false bottom of the cart, from which he extracted two double-barreled shotguns and two costumes of the kind worn by Czech peasants. The change of clothes was affected in no time, and the cart hidden under a bush.
It was not a moment too soon. In the distance, the sound of horns could already be heard.
That day, the Marquis de Lorgères heard several gunshots fired from cover while he was chasing a wild boar. One shot hissed past his ear, and so that he might be certain that he had not been the victim of an illusion, another bullet lodged itself in the material of his hunting-jacket.
But William and Bobby had said it: fortune was against them.
They were found and recognized, and had to show their pursuers a clean pair of heels. When they came to recover their hand-cart and their disguises, they found that the cache had been looted. The road of retreat was closed to them; they could not resume their roles in Szeged.
They spent the night in the woods, resolved to flee; their enterprise had failed. They knew that by the following day the news of their presence would spread throughout the land with lightning rapidity. As soon as they could, they had to put the Tisza between themselves and the crusade that their old misdeeds would launch against them.
“We’ll come back later!” William said.
“There’ll be a time when Lenore is alone in the castle,” Bobby added.
Arriving at the edge of the forest, they saw shadows moving along the river-bank. They had presumed too much in thinking that they had a night to spare; the crusade had already taken up its arms.
They were two determined and tireless individuals, a small army in their own right. They were both fit and they knew the territory well. They conferred for a few minutes and decided to take on the hunt while darkness could provide cover for their flight. The choice of direction was vital; now that the Tisza crossing was closed to them, they could either retrace their steps towards Szeged, then push on towards Kolocza and the Danube, or go upstream to Czongrad, where there was a pontoon bridge.
They decided on the latter course and dived straight into the forest. The night was very dark, which was in their favor.
At two o’clock in the morning, they arrived at the Czongrad bridge, at the moment when the moon–which was in its last quarter–showed its pale and narrow crescent above the horizon.
While they were crossing the bridge unhindered, already congratulating themselves at this first success, they saw boats coming swiftly up the watercourse; at the same time, they heard the muffled sound of hoofbeats made by horses coming along the bank they had just quit.
Was it the Devil himself who had put their enemies on their track?
The moon illuminated them, and their path was discovered.
“Fire!” cried a voice, which came from the nearest boat. They realized immediately that it was old Baszin in person.
They ducked down just in time to avoid a volley of shots which passed over their heads.
The horses on the bank took to the gallop and their hooves were soon drumming on the planks of the bridge.
William and Bobby, desperately accelerating their pace, had reached the other bank. They threw themselves into the cornfields which covered the whole plain between the Tisza and Turkeve. There, they cowered like two partridges in a furrow, getting their breath back.
The cavalcade was already in the field and the cornstalks rattled, shaken by the passage of the horses. There was one moment when the two fugitives had pursuers to the right and left of them, in front of them and behind–but then the hunt passed by.
The foot of the rearmost horse touched William’s head, but he stifled a gasp and kept silent. Its rider was Chrétien Baszin, Prince Jacobyi, who had disembarked on the bank and rejoined his galloping horsemen. “Form up in fours!” he cried to those who were ahead of him. “The wretches have made two attempts to assassinate my son-in-law! They shall not escape! Close ranks and beat thoroughly!”
The sounds gradually retreated into the northeast, in the direction of Turkeve. William and Bobby recovered and took a new course, this time heading towards Timisoara, whose wild landscape was almost certain to provide them with adequate shelter. But the horsemen were beating the fields in a zigzag fashion and from time to time our fugitives were obliged to turn aside from their path. Day broke when they were crossing a second river at a ford, below the town of Ghila, which was situated on an island. There was no further shelter thereafter but the tall cornfields of the Great Hungarian Plain.
They were tortured by fatigue, and it was necessary for them to cross a large open space, but chance had put some distance between themselves and the hunt for the time being.
“We must make the most of the last few minutes of darkness,” William said. “One last effort!”
They hurled themselves forward, running in a straight line towards the cornfields. On attaining the edge of that ocean of verdure, they looked back in order to scan the ground they had covered. No one was in sight: the hunters had lost their trail. They ran on into the young cornstalks like stags plunging into a forest. After taking a few paces more, they threw themselves on the ground, utterly exhausted, pressing their burning faces to the fresh earth.
“I couldn’t have taken another step to save my life!” said Bobby, in a choked voice.
William consulted his watch. “We’ve been on the run for eleven hours,” he said, “and we’ve covered more than twenty leagues 29.”
“Do we have time to rest?”
“The sun’s coming up. In broad daylight they’ll soon pick up our trail.”
“You’re very calm,” murmured Bobby.
“Because I’m certain that I can still save myself,” William replied.
“How’s that?”
“In ten minutes, we can be back in the graves!”
“The graves!” cried Bobby, leaping triumphantly to his feet, no longer feeling fatigued.
The day brightened and the hunters found their trail again. They followed the fresh tracks which cut across the fields of the Great Hungarian Plain at the gallop. They were certain now of their quarry. For the Chevalier Ténèbre and brother Ange, the vampire, to escape it would be necessary for the earth to open beneath them and swallow them!
The hunters went on and on, guided by their master, Prince Jacobyi. At a certain place, though, the tracks became confused, tangled like a ball of string–and then there was nothing.
The earth had indeed opened up and swallowed them. There was no doubt about it.