He was no longer laughing. For a minute or two perhaps, not more, his face was set in an expression of gravity, and his eyes, seemingly fixed on the void, showed an immense effort of meditation. He perceived, however, that Josine was regarding him with a look of admiration and boundless confidence, and he smiled on her with an absent-minded air without breaking the thread of his ideas.
Motionless in his bonds, his face haggard with anxiety, Beaumagnan listened. Was it really a fact that the tremendous secret was about to be divulged?
Two or three more minutes passed in a dead silence.
Then Josephine murmured: “What’s the matter with you, Ralph? You look quite wrought up.”
“Yes; I am,” he said. “All this story of all this treasure hidden in a block of stone, in full view of everyone who comes near it, is in all conscience strange enough. But it’s nothing, Josine, nothing at all compared with the idea which dominates the story. You cannot imagine how strange it is—and how beautiful! What poetry and what simplicity!”
He was silent for a moment; then he declared sententiously: “Josine, the monks of the middle ages were duffers.” He looked round on the three of them and added: “Goodness, yes; pious personages, but, I repeat it at the risk of shaking your faith, duffers! Just consider: if a great financier took it into his head to protect his strong-box by writing on it, ‘You are forbidden to open it,’ you would reckon him a duffer, wouldn’t you? Well, the method that these monks chose to protect their treasure is very nearly as ingenuous.”
“No—no—it is incredible!” she murmured. “You have guessed wrong! You’re making a mistake!”
“Duffers too, all those who have sought for it and found nothing. Blind souls! Narrow minds! What? You, Leonard, Godfrey d’Etigues, Beaumagnan, their friends, the whole of the Society of Jesus, the Archbishop of Rouen, you had these five words under your eyes; and it was not enough! Why, hang it all, a board-school child solves problems as difficult as this!”
She raised the objection: “But, before everything, it was a matter of one word and not of five.”
“But it’s there; the word’s there, confound it! When I told you a little while ago that the possession of the casket must have revealed the indispensable word to the Baron and Beaumagnan, I just wanted to frighten you and make you loose your hold on Clarice, for these gentlemen were simply puzzled. But the indispensable word is there, all right. It’s there, mixed with the five Latin words. Instead of blanching as you all did in the face of this vague formula you ought, quite naïvely, to have read it, to have put the first five letters together, and to have studied the word composed of those five initials.”