The Confessions of Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc [top 10 novels of all time txt] 📗

her brother. There was not a doubt possible: it was the identical person. And, without believing for a moment that Gabriel had concealed himself in a woman’s clothes, Lupin, on the contrary, received the distinct impression that it was a woman standing beside him and that the stripling who had pursued him with his hatred and struck him with the dagger was in very deed a woman. In order to follow their trade with greater ease, the Dugrival pair had accustomed her to disguise herself as a boy.

“You⁠ ⁠… you⁠ ⁠… !” he repeated. “Who would have suspected⁠ ⁠… ?”

She emptied the contents of a phial into the cup:

“Drink this cordial,” she said.

He hesitated, thinking of poison.

She added:

“It was I who saved you.”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “It was you who removed the bullets from the revolver?”

“Yes.”

“And you who hid the knife?”

“Here it is, in my pocket.”

“And you who smashed the windowpane while your aunt was throttling me?”

“Yes, it was I, with the paperweight on the table: I threw it into the street.”

“But why? Why?” he asked, in utter amazement.

“Drink the cordial.”

“Didn’t you want me to die? But then why did you stab me to begin with?”

“Drink the cordial.”

He emptied the cup at a draught, without quite knowing the reason of his sudden confidence.

“Dress yourself⁠ ⁠… quickly,” she commanded, retiring to the window.

He obeyed and she came back to him, for he had dropped into a chair, exhausted.

“We must go now, we must, we have only just time.⁠ ⁠… Collect your strength.”

She bent forward a little, so that he might lean on her shoulder, and turned toward the door and the staircase.

And Lupin walked as one walks in a dream, one of those queer dreams in which the most inconsequent things occur, a dream that was the happy sequel of the terrible nightmare in which he had lived for the past fortnight.

A thought struck him, however. He began to laugh:

“Poor Ganimard! Upon my word, the fellow has no luck, I would give twopence to see him coming to arrest me.”

After descending the staircase with the aid of his companion, who supported him with incredible vigour, he found himself in the street, opposite a motorcar into which she helped him to mount.

“Right away,” she said to the driver.

Lupin, dazed by the open air and the speed at which they were travelling, hardly took stock of the drive and of the incidents on the road. He recovered all his consciousness when he found himself at home in one of the flats which he occupied, looked after by his servant, to whom the girl gave a few rapid instructions.

“You can go,” he said to the man.

But, when the girl turned to go as well, he held her back by a fold of her dress.

“No⁠ ⁠… no⁠ ⁠… you must first explain.⁠ ⁠… Why did you save me? Did you return unknown to your aunt? But why did you save me? Was it from pity?”

She did not answer. With her figure drawn up and her head flung back a little, she retained her hard and impenetrable air. Nevertheless, he thought he noticed that the lines of her mouth showed not so much cruelty as bitterness. Her eyes, her beautiful dark eyes, revealed melancholy. And Lupin, without as yet understanding, received a vague intuition of what was passing within her. He seized her hand. She pushed him away, with a start of revolt in which he felt hatred, almost repulsion. And, when he insisted, she cried:

“Let me be, will you?⁠ ⁠… Let me be!⁠ ⁠… Can’t you see that I detest you?”

They looked at each other for a moment, Lupin disconcerted, she quivering and full of uneasiness, her pale face all flushed with unwonted colour.

He said to her, gently:

“If you detested me, you should have let me die.⁠ ⁠… It was simple enough.⁠ ⁠… Why didn’t you?”

“Why?⁠ ⁠… Why?⁠ ⁠… How do I know?⁠ ⁠…”

Her face contracted. With a sudden movement, she hid it in her two hands; and he saw tears trickle between her fingers.

Greatly touched, he thought of addressing her in fond words, such as one would use to a little girl whom one wished to console, and of giving her good advice and saving her, in his turn, and snatching her from the bad life which she was leading, perhaps against her better nature.

But such words would have sounded ridiculous, coming from his lips, and he did not know what to say, now that he understood the whole story and was able to picture the young woman sitting beside his sickbed, nursing the man whom she had wounded, admiring his pluck and gaiety, becoming attached to him, falling in love with him and thrice over, probably in spite of herself, under a sort of instinctive impulse, amid fits of spite and rage, saving him from death.

And all this was so strange, so unforeseen; Lupin was so much unmanned by his astonishment, that, this time, he did not try to retain her when she made for the door, backward, without taking her eyes from him.

She lowered her head, smiled for an instant and disappeared.

He rang the bell, quickly:

“Follow that woman,” he said to his man. “Or no, stay where you are.⁠ ⁠… After all, it is better so.⁠ ⁠…”

He sat brooding for a while, possessed by the girl’s image. Then he revolved in his mind all that curious, stirring and tragic adventure, in which he had been so very near succumbing; and, taking a hand-glass from the table, he gazed for a long time and with a certain self-complacency at his features, which illness and pain had not succeeded in impairing to any great extent:

“Good looks count for something, after all!” he muttered.

V The Red Silk Scarf

On leaving his house one morning, at his usual early hour for going to the Law Courts, Chief-inspector Ganimard noticed the curious behaviour of an individual who was walking along the Rue Pergolèse in front of him. Shabbily dressed and wearing a straw hat, though the day was the first of December, the man stooped at every thirty or