Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951
- Автор: Кристи Агата, Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Год: 1951
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mercury Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951». Краткое содержание книги:
“Sue pardon from this mountebank! I?”
“On your knees, Monsieur.”
“Why, you fool,” stormed Monsieur de Guémenée, lost in his rage to reason and decency alike, “do you know what he is? Do you know, for example, that in England he was gaoled for swindling and for debt? I have proofs of it, and...”
“I care not what you have, Monsieur. You will leave my house at once. I do not permit myself to be addressed in such terms as those which you have employed. You have gone too far. You have forgotten the respect due, not only to my person, but to my office. In all my life this has never happened to me before. You say that this man has been gaoled for debt. Whether it is true or not, that fate is one that is very likely to overtake you in the near future; for from this moment you cease to interest me; you may wrestle with your own difficulties, and yourself satisfy the creditors you have abused, as you have abused my patience and my good nature. Not another penny of mine shall stand between you and the fate you have invited.”
“My God!” cried Monsieur de Guémenée. But even now there was more anger than dismay in his soul.
“With that knowledge take your departure, sir, and do not venture to return. You are an ingrate whom I never wish to see again.”
Trembling with fury, Monsieur de Guémenée steadied himself with a hand upon the writing-table. He controlled himself to ask in a voice that was steady, dangerously steady, considering his condition: “Is that your last word, Monseigneur.”
With a great dignity the Cardinal replied: “My last word, Monsieur.”
“Then your last word it shall be,” said his frenzied nephew, and, snatching up the silver battle-axe, he hurled it straight and true at his uncle’s august head. He saw it strike him full upon the brow before His Eminence could so much as put up a hand to avert the unexpected missile; he saw the blood gush forth; saw the tall scarlet figure sway an instant where it stood, the fine hands clawing the air as if seeking a support; then, with a sound as of a rush of wings, the Cardinal-Prince sank together, crumpled and fell, to lie inert.
Terror-stricken by his deed, his blind rage driven forth by panic, Monsieur de Guémenée leaned forward over the table, clawing its sides with nerveless hands. “Monseigneur! Monseigneur!” he cried, in a choking wail, then sprang past the table and went to kneel beside the fallen man. Horror came up like a great tide about him at sight of the gaping vertical wound in the brow, where the axe, hard-driven at close quarters, had split the skull. His Eminence was quite dead.
Then, as he knelt there, paralysed in body and in spirit, he heard the door open softly behind him. He looked up and round, to behold Cagliostro, stern and grim, upon the threshold.
“Wretched man, what have you done?” asked the vibrant voice.
The Prince leapt to his feet. There was blood on his hands and on the ruffles at his wrists. “It is your act,” he raved. “Yours. It is you who are responsible for this.”
Cagliostro preserved a terrible calm. “Tell that to your judges if you think it will save you from being broken on the wheel, from being disembowelled alive for this hideous parricide. Ah, you quail! But that is the least of the punishment in store for you. You will have earned the execration of all upright men for this horrible murder of your uncle and benefactor. Your name will hereafter become a byword.”
“Cease! In God’s name, cease!” cried Monsieur de Guémenée. “Do you think I do not realize it?” And then his tone changed to a piteous whine. “Sir, sir, you are reported to possess more than human powers. Of your pity, help me in this my dreadful need.”
“Ah! You believe in me now. It is true that I possess more than ordinary human powers; but the power to raise the dead is not within them.”
“Is it not? Is it not?” Monsieur de Guémenée reverted abruptly to his earlier frenzy. He was leering now with wicked cunning. “So much the worse for you. Since yours is the blame, you shall bear the punishments I will rouse the house, and declare that it was you who did this thing. What then, my friend? What then? Will your word weigh against mine, do you suppose?”
Cagliostro smiled. “Ingenious. Unfortunately there is a witness. Look behind you, Monsieur.”
Startled, Monsieur de Guémenée looked round. Dimly in the shadows of a farther doorway, a doorway of whose existence he had been in ignorance, he discerned the figure of a man. Looking more closely his straining eyes recognized the Baron de Planta. “How long have you been there, Monsieur?” he asked.
Cold and stern the Baron answered him: “From the moment that you threw the axe.”
The courage went out of Monsieur de Guémenée, taking all fury with it. He raised his blood-stained hands in a gesture of impotence. “What shall I do? Mon Dieu, what shall I do?”
“What are you prepared to do if I can save you?” asked Cagliostro.
Monsieur de Guémenée faced him; advanced towards him.
“Save me, do you say? Do you mock my distress? What help can you, what help can any, give? You have said that you cannot raise the dead.”
“True. But I can undo what is done. Even that is possible to such as I, for I am He Who Is. Listen, my prince, and seek to understand. This deed of yours is something done in time. Time, sir, is not a reality, not one of the fundamental verities. It is an illusion, a human convention for the measuring of actions concerned with our little moment of existence, this heartbeat in eternity which we call life. To such as I who stand untrammelled by the bonds of time, the past and the future are as they are in eternity; that is to say they are not at all; for in eternity there is always and only the present. If I were to turn time back for you, Monsieur de Guémenée; if I were to turn it back to the moment at which you rose to go in quest of your uncle, so that all that now lies in the past would lie once more in the future and would be inevitable — if I were to do this, what would you do for me?”
“For you?” Monsieur de Guémenée could only stare and stare. Nevertheless, he answered the fantastic question, passionately sobbing, “God knows there is nothing that I would not do.”
Cagliostro approached him, smiling gently. “I ask a little thing of you in return for so much. You have procured from England evidence that I was in prison there. You have been at great pains to do this simply so that you might destroy my credit with your uncle, and raise a barrier to my accompanying him to Paris. I am not the first great prophet who has suffered imprisonment. Some have even been put to death by the vicious ignorance of men. For myself I fear nothing from that revelation. But others whom I am concerned to help and serve must suffer if, yielding to prejudice, they should turn from me.
“What I offer you now is this: if you will swear to me on your honour as a gentleman to destroy this evidence which you have wasted such pains in obtaining and never to mention this matter to a living soul, I on my side will so put back the clock for you, that what has been will be still to come and may therefore be avoided. Do you swear, Monsieur?”
There was such firm authority in the voice that even the Sadducean mind of Monsieur de Guémenée was more than half conquered by it. Feebly the other half still battled with reason.
“What you are proposing is impossible.”
“Will you make the experiment? Will you swear as I require? It is your only hope.”
Desperately came the answer: “I swear! I swear!” and in pursuit of it the oath was circumstantially given in the terms Cagliostro dictated.
As Monsieur de Guémenée uttered the last formidable word of it, his senses swam. He had a moment of faintness, which even as it overtook him he attributed to the strain of what he had endured. Then his senses cleared, and as sight, momentarily occluded, was restored to him, he found himself in the library, seated once more in the tall red chair, his legs composedly crossed.