“You will save us, I’m sure of it,” she murmured.
“Presently,” he said airily. “You trust me?”
“Yes: I trust you. You told me one day—do you remember? When you were reading the lines on my hand—that I was to beware of danger from water? Your prediction is being accomplished; and yet, I am not at all afraid, for you can do anything. You work miracles.”
“Miracles?” said Ralph, still maintaining his efforts to reassure her by speaking lightly. “No: not miracles. I merely reason, and then act as the occasion demands. Because I never questioned you about your childish memories, and nevertheless brought you here to the very scene you saw so long ago, you think me a kind of sorcerer. You’re wrong. It was all a matter of reasoning and thought. Yet I had no more precise information than the rest of them. Jodot and his confederates knew the bottle as well as I did, and like me read the formula inscribed under the name of Eau de [[279]]Jouvence. What information did they get from it? None. But I made inquiries, and I saw that nearly the whole of the formula was a reproduction, with the exception of one line of the analysis of the springs of Royat, one of the principal hot bath establishments of Auvergne. I looked at the map of Auvergne and on it I find the village and lake of Juvains—Juvains, an obvious contraction of the Latin word Juventia, which means Jouvence. I knew where I was. After an hour’s gossip at Juvains I learned that old M. de Talencay, the Marquess of Carabas of this part of the world, must be at the very heart of the business, and approached him as your envoy. When he told me that you had formerly come here on the Sunday and Monday of the Assumption, that is to say the fourteenth and fifteenth of August, I fixed our visit for the same day. As it happens, the wind was blowing from the north-east, as on your earlier visit. So we had the escort of the bells. And that’s all the miracle there was about it, young lady with the green eyes.”
But words were not enough to distract her attention any longer.
A moment later she murmured: “The water is rising—it’s rising. It’s covered the two stones and is wetting your shoes.”
He stepped down into the water, raised one of the stones, and set it on the other. Thus elevated, he rested his elbow against the rope of the hammock, and [[280]]with untroubled mien began to talk again, for he feared the effect of silence on the girl.
But all the while he was talking about their safety, his underthought had been busy with other trains of reasoning and other reflections about the implacable reality, the growing menace of which he was watching with a growing fear. What was taking place? How was he to handle the situation? Owing to the action of Jodot and William, the surface of the water was rising. So be it. But the two ruffians were evidently taking advantage of a state of things already existing and which had existed for centuries. Must he not then suppose that those who made possible this raising of the surface for reasons now hidden from him—but certainly not for the purpose of blockading and drowning people in the grotto—must have made it equally possible to let the surface sink back to its normal level? The closing of the flood-gates implied the existence of invisible machinery which would, when the lake was too full, let the water out. But where was he to look for this machinery?
Ralph was not one of those who await death with idle hands. He considered carefully the plans of getting to grips with his enemies, or of swimming to the flood-gates. But if a bullet hit him, or if the icy coldness of the water gave him cramp, what would become of Aurelie?
Careful as he was to hide his anxiety from Aurelie, she could not longer fail to understand certain inflections [[281]]of his voice and pauses in his task when he was tongue-tied by the fear which was torturing her.