And two bursts of fire at once shot up from the two boats, followed by two whirls of smoke.
The explosions re-echoed. For a moment, nothing of what happened amid that black cloud was visible. Then the curtain parted, blown aside by the wind, and Véronique and Honorine saw the two boats swiftly sinking, while their occupants jumped into the sea.
The sight, the infernal sight, did not last long. They saw, standing on one of the buoys that marked the channel, a woman holding a child in her arms, without moving: then some motionless bodies, no doubt killed by the explosion; then two men fighting, mad perhaps. And all this went down with the boats.
A few eddies, some black specks floating on the surface; and that was all.
Honorine and Véronique, struck dumb with terror, had not uttered a single word. The thing surpassed the worst that their anguished minds could have conceived.
When it was all over, Honorine put her hand to her head and, in a hollow voice which Véronique was never to forget, said:
"My head's bursting. Oh, the poor people of Sarek! They were my friends, the friends of my childhood; and I shall never see them again.. The sea never gives up its dead at Sarek: it keeps them. It has its coffins all ready: thousands and thousands of hidden coffins.. Oh, my head is bursting!.. I shall go mad.. mad like François, my poor François!"
Véronique did not answer. She was grey in the face. With clutching fingers she clung to the balcony, gazing downwards as one gazes into an abyss into which one is about to fling oneself. What would her son do? Would he save those people, whose shouts of distress now reached her ears, would he save them without delay? One may have fits of madness; but the attacks pass away at the sight of certain things.
The motor-boat had backed at first to avoid the eddies. François and Stéphane, whose red cap and white cap were still visible, were standing in the same positions at the bow and the stern; and they held in their hands.. what? The two women could not see clearly, because of the distance, what they held in their hands. It looked like two rather long sticks.
"Poles, to help them," suggested Véronique.
"Or guns," said Honorine.
The black specks were still floating. There were nine of them, the nine heads of the survivors, whose arms also the two women saw moving from time to time and whose cries for help they heard.
Some were hurriedly moving away from the motor-boat, but four were swimming towards it; and, of those four, two could not fail to reach it.
Suddenly François and Stéphane made the same movement, the movement of marksmen taking aim.
There were two flashes, followed by the sound of a single report.
The heads of the two swimmers disappeared.
"Oh, the monsters!" stammered Véronique, almost swooning and falling on her knees.
Honorine, beside her, began screaming:
"François! François!"
Her voice did not carry, first because it was too weak and then the wind was in her face. But she continued:
"François! François!"
She next stumbled across the room and into the corridor, in search of something, and returned to the window, still shouting:
"François! François!"
She had ended by finding the shell which she used as a signal. But, on lifting it to her mouth, she found that she could produce only dull and indistinct sounds from it:
"Oh, curse the thing!" she cried, flinging the shell away. "I have no strength left.. François! François!"
She was terrible to look at, with her hair all in disorder and her face covered with the sweat of fever. Véronique implored her:
"Please, Honorine, please!"
"But look at them, look at them!"
The motor-boat was drifting forward down below, with the two marksmen at their posts, holding their guns ready for murder.
The survivors fled. Two of them hung back in the rear.
These two were aimed at. Their heads disappeared from view.
"But look at them!" Honorine said, explosively, in a hoarse voice. "They're hunting them down! They're killing them like game!.. Oh, the poor people of Sarek!."
Another shot. Another black speck vanished.
Véronique was writhing in despair. She shook the rails of the balcony, as she might have shaken the bars of a cage in which she was imprisoned.
"Vorski! Vorski!" she groaned, stricken by the recollection of her husband. "He's Vorski's son!"
Suddenly she felt herself seized by the throat and saw, close to her own face, the distorted face of the Breton woman.
"He's your son!" spluttered Honorine. "Curse you! You are the monster's mother and you shall be punished for it!"
And she burst out laughing and stamping her feet, in an overpowering fit of hilarity.
"The cross, yes, the cross! You shall be crucified, with nails through your hands!.. What a punishment, nails through your hands!"
She was mad.
Véronique released herself and tried to hold the other motionless: but Honorine, filled with malicious rage, threw her off, making her lose balance, and began to climb into the balcony.
She remained standing outside the window, lifting up her arms and once more shouting:
"François! François!"
The first floor was not so high on this side of the house, owing to the slope of the ground. Honorine jumped into the path below, crossed it, pushed her way through the shrubs that lined it and ran to the ridge of rocks which formed the cliff and overhung the sea.
She stopped for a moment, thrice called out the name of the child whom she had reared and flung herself headlong into the deep.
In the distance, the man-hunt drew to a finish.
The heads sank one by one. The massacre was completed.
Then the motor-boat with François and Stéphane on board fled towards the coast of Brittany, towards the beaches of Beg-Meil and Concarneau.
Véronique was left alone on Coffin Island.
CHAPTER V
"FOUR WOMEN CRUCIFIED"
Véronique was left alone on Coffin Island. Until the sun sank among the clouds that seemed, on the horizon, to rest upon the sea, she did not move, but sat huddled against the window, with her head buried in her two arms resting on the sill.
The dread reality passed through the darkness of her mind like pictures which she strove not to see, but which at times became so clearly defined that she imagined herself to be living through those atrocious scenes again.
Still she sought no explanation of all this and formed no theories as to all the motives which might have thrown a light upon the tragedy. She admitted the madness of François and of Stéphane Maroux, being unable to suppose any other reasons for such actions as theirs. And, believing the two murderers to be mad, she did not even try to attribute to them any projects or definite wishes.
Moreover, Honorine's madness, of which she had, so to speak, observed the outbreak, impelled her to look upon all that had happened as provoked by a sort of mental upset to which all the people of Sarek had fallen victims. She herself at moments felt that her brain was reeling, that her ideas were fading away in a mist, that invisible ghosts were hovering around her.
She dozed off into a sleep which was haunted by these images and in which she felt so wretched that she began to sob. Also it seemed to her that she could hear a slight noise which, in her benumbed wits, assumed a hostile significance. Enemies were approaching. She opened her eyes.
A couple of yards in front of her, sitting upon its haunches, was a queer animal, covered with long mud-coloured hair and holding its fore-paws folded like a pair