Memoirs of Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc [librera reader txt] 📗

that up and leave us!” cried Josephine. “You Corbus too. None of that foolishness!”

She had not risen from her chair while all this had been going on, but now she rose among the bushes.

Leonard protested: “It isn’t foolishness! The foolishness would be to let him go⁠—now that we’ve once got him.”

“Be off!” she commanded.

“But that woman⁠—that woman will denounce us!”

“No she won’t. It’s not to Mother Rousselin’s interest to speak. Now be off!” said Josephine.

Leonard and his friends moved away. She came close up to Ralph.

He looked at her at length, with a look which appeared to disquiet her to the point that to break the silence she had to say jestingly: “Each in turn, isn’t it, Ralph? Between you and me success passes from one to the other. Today you have the upper hand. Tomorrow⁠—but what’s the matter with you? You do look funny! And your eyes are positively savage.”

He said curtly: “Goodbye, Josine.”

The color in her cheeks faded a little and she said: “Goodbye? You mean au revoir.”

“No: goodbye.”

“Then⁠—then⁠—you mean that you don’t wish to see me again?”

“I don’t wish to see you again,” he said coldly.

She lowered her eyes. Her eyelids quivered. Her lips were smiling and at the same time infinitely dolorous.

“Why, Ralph?” she murmured.

“Because I’ve seen a thing that I cannot⁠—that I can never forgive you,” he said.

“What?”

“That poor woman’s hand.”

She looked as if she were going to faint and murmured, “Ah, I understand.⁠ ⁠… Leonard hurt her. But I forbade him to do anything of the kind.⁠ ⁠… I thought she had yielded merely to threats.”

“You lie, Josine! You heard the woman’s cries, just as you heard them in Maulevrier Forest. Leonard acts, but the will to evil, the intention to murder is yours, Josine. It was you who sent your accomplice to the little house in Montmartre with instructions to kill Bridget Rousselin if she resisted. It was you who some time ago put the poisonous cachet among those which Beaumagnan would swallow. It was you who, during the years before that, destroyed Beaumagnan’s two friends, Denis Saint-Hébert and George d’Isneauval.”

“No, no! I won’t let you say so!” she broke out. “It isn’t true! And you know it isn’t!”

He shrugged his shoulders and said slowly: “Yes: the legend of the other woman created to meet the necessity of the case⁠ ⁠… another woman who is your exact image and commits the crimes, while you, Josephine Balsamo, content yourself with less brutal adventures. I believe in that legend. I let myself get muddled up in all these stories of identical women, daughter, granddaughter, and great granddaughter of Cagliostro. But it’s all over, Josine. If my eyes deliberately closed themselves formerly in order not to see things, the sight of that mangled hand has definitely opened them to the truth.”

“You are acting on lies, Ralph! On wrong interpretations! I never knew the two men of whom you speak!”

He said wearily: “It may be so. It is not altogether impossible that I am making a mistake. But it is altogether impossible that I should henceforward see you through this fog of mystery in which you’ve hidden yourself. You are no longer mysterious to me, Josine. I see you as you are⁠—that is to say as a criminal.”

He paused and added in a lower voice: “As a sick woman even. If there is a lie anywhere, it’s the lie of your beauty.”

She was silent. In the shadow of her straw hat her face was still sweet. The accusations of her lover did not ruffle her. She was altogether seductive, altogether enchanting.

He was disturbed to the very depths of his being. Never had she appeared to him so beautiful and so desirable; and he asked himself if it were not folly to seize a freedom which he would curse on the morrow.

“My beauty is not a lie, Ralph,” she declared. “And will come back to me because it is for you that I am beautiful.”

“I shall never come back.”

“Yes, you can no longer live without me. The Nonchalante is close by, I shall be waiting for you tomorrow.”

“I shall never come back,” said he, once more ready to bend the knee.

“In that case, why are you trembling? Why are you so pale?” she said stretching out her arms toward him.

He perceived that his salvation depended on his silence, that he must flee without answering, and never turn his head.

He thrust off the two hands which were grasping him, and went.

XI The Old Lighthouse

All that night, Ralph pedaled away, as much to wear himself out with a salutary weariness as to throw the gang off his track. Next morning, utterly worn out he came to a stop at an hotel at Lillebonne.

He forbade them to awake him, locked and bolted his door, and slept for twenty-four hours. When he had dressed and breakfasted, all he thought of was mounting his bicycle and returning to the Nonchalante. The struggle against love had begun.

He was very unhappy, and having never suffered, having always followed his whims, he raged against a despair to which it would have been so easy for him to put an end.

“Why not yield?” he said to himself. “I can get there in two hours. And what is there to prevent me going off again a few days later when I shall have hardened myself against the parting?”

But he could not do so. The vision of that mutilated hand was a veritable obsession and ruled his actions. It obliged him to recall those other barbarous and hateful deeds which enabled him to see this one as their natural sequel.

Josephine had done this; then Josephine had murdered; Josephine did not shrink from murderous acts and found it quite simple and natural to kill and kill again when murder helped her enterprises. From murder Ralph shrank, with a physical repulsion, a revolt of every instinct. The idea that he might be drawn, in some access of madness, to shed blood, filled him with horror. And