Be sure we did not linger upon an accident so remarkable. The monks appeared to have no fear of us when we rode by, and the most part of them lay sleeping. We forbore to intrude upon their dreams; and going on at our leisure, we came up with the army at dawn and there recited the details of this amazing adventure.
It remains but to say a word of the bell and the treasure.
I have often discussed it with Léon, and we have come to the conclusion that there must have been monks left in the monastery after the main body had fled, and that they sounded the alarm upon the approach of the hussars. Their situation when we sacked that dismal building must have been parlous indeed, and God alone knew where they hid from us.
As for the treasure, I have since learned that it belonged to a certain Prince Karasin, a Tartar from beyond the Urals. He had been murdered by his servants just as I had supposed, and the woman upon whom he had lavished the treasure must have been a witness of the wickedness. Her subsequent fate I am unable to tell you, but my nephew Léon, with his accustomed gallantry, still swears that she was innocent, and, Valerie St. Antoine excepted, by far the most beautiful thing he ever discovered in that God-forsaken country.
CHAPTER IV
PHANTOM MUSIC
I
I never thought to see Valerie St. Antoine again after we had left Moscow; but here I was quite wrong, as you shall learn presently, and my next encounter with her was as strange an affair as any I remember during the war.
You will remember that we had marched out of Moscow on the 19th day of October, in the year 1812; but it was the 29th of that month when the snow began to fall.