Mathias Sandorf

Toronthal lost his fear as soon as he was seated at the trente-et-quarante table. There was no timidity now about his play; he staked his money like a man in a fury. And Sarcany watched his every movement, deeply interested in this supreme crisis, deeply interested in the issue.

For the first hour the alternations between loss and gain almost balanced each other, the advantage being on Toronthal’s side. Sarcany and he imagined they were sure of success. They grew excited and staked higher and higher until they staked only the maximum. But soon the luck returned to the imperturbable bank, which by this maximum protects its interests in no inconsiderable measure, and which knows no transports of folly.

Then came blow after blow. The winnings during the afternoon went heap by heap. Toronthal was an awful spectacle; his face became congested, his eyes grew haggard, he clung to the table, to his chair, to the rolls of notes, and the rouleaux of gold that his hand would hardly yield over, with the twitchings and convulsions of a drowning man! And no one was there to stop him on the brink of the chasm! Not a hand was stretched out to help him! Not an effort from Sarcany to tear him from the place before he was lost, before he finally sunk beneath the wave of ruin!

At ten o’clock Toronthal had risked his last stake, his last maximum. He won! Then he staked again—and again—and lost. And when he rose, dazed and scared, and fiercely wishing that the very walls would crumble and crush the crowd around him, he had nothing left—nothing of all the millions that had been left in the bank when the millions of Count Sandorf had poured in to its aid.

Toronthal, accompanied by Sarcany, who acted as his jailer, left the gaming-room, crossed the hall, and hurried out of the Casino. Then they fled across the square to the footpaths leading to La Turbie.

Point Pescade was already on their tracks, and as he passed had shaken up Cape Matifou as he lay half asleep on his bench with a shout of—

“Wake up! Eyes and legs!”

And Cape Matifou had come along with him on a trail it would not do to lose.

Sarcany and Toronthal continued to hurry on side by side, and gradually mounted the paths which twist and wind on the flank of the mountain among the olive and orange gardens. The capricious zigzags allowed Pescade and Matifou to keep them in view, although they could not get near enough to hear them.

“Come back to the hotel, Silas!” Sarcany continued to repeat in an imperious tone. “Come back, and be cool again!”

“No! we are ruined! Let us part! I do not want to see you again. I do not want—”

“Part? and why? You will follow me, Silas. To-morrow we will leave Monaco. We have enough to take us to Tetuan, and there we will finish our work.”

“No, no! Leave me, Sarcany, leave me!” said Toronthal.

And he pushed him violently aside as he tried to catch hold. Then be darted off at such speed that Sarcany had some trouble in keeping up. Unconscious of his acts, Toronthal at every step risked falling into the steep ravines above which the winding footpaths lay unrolled. Only one idea possessed him—to escape from Monte Carlo, where he had consummated his ruin, to escape from Sarcany, whose counsels had led him to misery, to escape without caring where he went or what became of him.

Sarcany felt that his accomplice was at last beyond him, that he was going to escape him! Ah! if the banker had not known those secrets which might ruin him, or at least irretrievably compromise the third game he wished to play, how little anxiety he would have felt for the man he had dragged to the brink of destruction! But, before he fell, Toronthal might give a last cry, and that cry he must stifle at all hazards!

Then from the thought of the crime on which he had resolved to its immediate execution was only a step, and this step Sarcany did not hesitate to take. That which he had intended to do on the road to Tetuan in the solitudes of Morocco might be done here this very night, on this very spot which would soon be deserted.

But just at present between Monte Carlo and La Turbie a few belated wayfarers were along the slopes. A cry from Silas might bring them to his help, and the murderer intended the murder to be committed in such a way that it would never be suspected. And so he had to wait. Higher up, beyond La Turbie and the frontier of Monaco, along the Corniche clinging to the lower buttresses of the Alps, two thousand feet above the sea, Sarcany could strike a far surer blow. Who could then come to his victim’s help? How at the foot of such precipices as border that road could Toronthal’s corpse be found?

But, for the last time, Sarcany tried to stop his accomplice, and tempt him back to Monte Carlo.

“Come, Silas, come,” said he, seizing him by the arm. “To-morrow we will begin again! I have some money left.”

“No! Leave me! Leave me!” exclaimed Toronthal with an angry gesture.

And if he had been strong enough to struggle with Sarcany, if he had been armed, he might not even have hesitated to take vengeance on his old Tripolitan broker for all the evil he had done him.

With a hand that anger made the stronger, Toronthal thrust him aside, then he rushed toward the last turn of the path and ran up a few steps roughly cut in the rock between the little gardens. Soon he reached the main road of La Turbie, along the narrow neck which divides the Dog’s Head from Mont Agel, the old frontier line between Italy and France.

“Go, then, Silas!” exclaimed Sarcany. “Go! but you. will not go far.”

Then, turning off to the right, he scrambled over a stone hedge, scaled a garden-wall, and ran on in front so as to precede Toronthal along the road.

Pescade and Matifou, although they had not heard what had passed, had seen the banker thrust Sarcany away, and Sarcany disappear in the shade.

“Eh!” exclaimed Pescade. “Perhaps the best of them has gone. Anyhow, Toronthal is worth something. And we have no choice. Come on, Cape; forward, away!”

And in a few rapid strides they were close to Toronthal who was hurrying up the road. Leaving to the left the little knoll with the tower of Augustus, he passed at a run the houses, then closed for the night, and at length came out on the Corniche.

Point Pescade and Cape Matifou followed him, less than fifty yards behind.

But of Sarcany they thought no more. He had either taken the crest of the slope to the right or abandoned his accomplice to return to Monte Carlo.

The Corniche is an old Roman road. When it leaves La Turbie it drops toward Nice, running in mid-mountain by magnificent rocks, isolated cones, and profound precipices that cleave their ravines down to the railway line along the shore. Beyond, on this starry night by the light of the moon, then rising in the east, there showed forth confusedly the six gulfs, the Isle of Sainte Hospice, the mouth of the Var, the peninsula of Garoupe, the Cape of Antibes, the Juan Gulf, the Lerius Islands, the Gulf of Napoule and the Gulf of Cannes, with the mountains of Esterel in the background. Here shone the harbor lights of Beaulieu at the base of the escarpments of Petite-Afrique, then of Ville franche in front of Mont Leuza, and yonder the lamps of the fishing-boats were reflected on the calm waters of the open sea.

It was just after midnight. Toronthal, as soon as he got out of La Turbie, left the Corniche, dashed down a little road leading directly to Eza, a sort of eagle’s nest with a half savage population, boldly placed on a rock above a mass of pines and carob-trees.

The road was quite deserted. The madman kept on for some time without slackening his pace or turning his head; suddenly he threw himself off to the left, down a narrow footpath running close to the high cliff along the shore, under which the railway and carriage roads pass by the tunnel.

Point Pescade and Cape Matifou hurried after him. A hundred paces further on Toronthal stopped. He had jumped on to a rock which overhung a precipice whose base, hundreds of feet below, dropped deep into the sea.

“What was he going to do? Had the idea of suicide entered his brain? Would he then end his miserable existence by hurling himself into the waves?”

“A thousand devils!” exclaimed Pescade; “we must have him alive! Catch him, Cape Matifou, and hold him tight!”

But they had not gone twenty yards before they saw a man appear to the right of the path, glide along the slope among the myrtles and lentisks, and clamber up so as to reach the rock upon which Toronthal stood.

It was Sarcany.

“Hallo!” exclaimed Point Pescade. “He is going to give his friend something to send him from this world into the next! Hurry up, Matifou. You take one—I’ll take the other!”

But Sarcany stopped. He risked being recognized. A curse escaped his lips. Then springing off to the right before Pescade could reach him, he vanished among the bushes.

An instant afterward as Toronthal had gathered himself together to jump from the rock, he was seized by Cape Matifou and pulled back on to the road.

“Let me go! Let me go!”

“Let you make a mistake, Mr. Toronthal? Oh dear no!” answered Point Pescade.

He was quite prepared for this incident, which his instructions had not foreseen. But although Sarcany had escaped, Toronthal was captured, and all that could now be done was to take him to Antekirtta, where he would be received with all the honor that was his due

“Will you forward the gentleman—at a reduced rate?” asked Point Pescade.

“With pleasure,” said Matifou.

Toronthal, hardly knowing what had happened, made but very slight resistance. Pescade found a rough footpath leading to the beach, and down it he was followed by Cape Matifou, who sometimes carried and sometimes dragged his inert prisoner.

The descent was extremely difficult, and without Pescade’s extraordinary activity and his friend’s extraordinary strength they would certainly have had a fatal fall. However, after risking their lives a score of times, they gained the rocks on the beach. There the shore is formed of a succession of small creeks, capriciously cut back into the sandstone, shut in by high reddish walls and bordered by ferruginous reefs tinting the waves a bright blood color as they curl over them.

Day had begun to break when Point Pescade found a shelter at the back of a deep ravine that had been cut down into the cliff in geologic ages. Here he left Toronthal in charge of Cape Matifou.

“You will stop here!” he said.

“As long as you like.”

“Twelve hours even, if I am twelve hours away?”

“Twelve hours.”

“And without eating?”

“If I do not breakfast this morning I shall dine this evening—and for both of us!”

“And if you do not have dinner for two you shall have supper for four!”

And then Cape Matifou sat down on a rock so as not to lose sight of his prisoner; and Point Pescade made his way along the shore from creek to creek toward Monaco. He was not away as long as he expected. In less than two hours he came upon the “Electric” moored in one of the deserted creeks. And an hour later that swift vessel had arrived off the ravine in which Cape Matifou, seen from the sea, looked like a mythological Proteus herding the sheep of Neptune.

A minute or two afterward he and his prisoner were on board, and without having been noticed by the coastguard or the fishermen the “Electric” was off, under full power, for Antekirtta.

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