The Mystery of Orcival, Émile Gaboriau [fiction novels to read TXT] 📗

it seemed, between dusk and dawn, as a rose blooms on a June night, the pretty child had become a sweet and radiant young girl. She was timid and reserved with all but him⁠—was he not her old friend, the confidant of all her little griefs and her innocent hopes? How frank and pure she was then; what a heavenly ignorance of evil!

Nine o’clock struck; M. Lecoq laid down his paper.

“Let us go,” said he.

M. Plantat followed him with a firmer step, and they soon reached M. Wilson’s house, accompanied by Job and his men.

“You men,” said M. Lecoq, “wait till I call before you go in; I will leave the door ajar.”

He rang; the door swung open; and M. Plantat and the detective went in under the arch. The porter was on the threshold of his lodge.

“Monsieur Wilson?” asked M. Lecoq.

“He is out.”

“I will speak to Madame, then.”

“She is also out.”

“Very well. Only, as I must positively speak with Madame Wilson, I’m going upstairs.”

The porter seemed about to resist him by force; but, as Lecoq now called in his men, he thought better of it and kept quiet.

M. Lecoq posted six of his men in the court, in such a position that they could be easily seen from the windows on the first floor, and instructed the others to place themselves on the opposite sidewalk, telling them to look ostentatiously at the house. These measures taken, he returned to the porter.

“Attend to me, my man. When your master, who has gone out, comes in again, beware that you don’t tell him that we are upstairs; a single word would get you into terribly hot water⁠—”

“I am blind,” he answered, “and deaf.”

“How many servants are there in the house?”

“Three; but they have all gone out.”

The detective then took M. Plantat by the arm, and holding him firmly:

“You see, my dear friend,” said he, “the game is ours. Come along⁠—and in Laurence’s name, have courage!”

XXVII

All M. Lecoq’s anticipations were realized. Laurence was not dead, and her letter to her parents was an odious trick. It was really she who lived in the house as Mme. Wilson. How had the lovely young girl, so much beloved by the old justice, come to such a dreadful extremity? The logic of life, alas, fatally enchains all our determinations to each other. Often an indifferent action, little wrongful in itself, is the beginning of an atrocious crime. Each of our new resolutions depends upon those which have preceded it, and is their logical sequence just as the sum-total is the product of the added figures. Woe to him who, being seized with a dizziness at the brink of the abyss, does not fly as fast as possible, without turning his head; for soon, yielding to an irresistible attraction, he approaches, braves the danger, slips, and is lost. Whatever thereafter he does or attempts he will roll down the faster, until he reaches the very bottom of the gulf.

Trémorel had by no means the implacable character of an assassin; he was only feeble and cowardly; yet he had committed abominable crimes. All his guilt came from the first feeling of envy with which he regarded Sauvresy, and which he had not taken the pains to subdue. Laurence, when, on the day that she became enamoured of Trémorel, she permitted him to press her hand, and kept it from her mother, was lost. The hand-pressure led to the pretence of suicide in order to fly with her lover. It might also lead to infanticide.

Poor Laurence, when she was left alone by Hector’s departure to the Faubourg St. Germain, on receiving M. Lecoq’s letter, began to reflect upon the events of the past year. How unlooked-for and rapidly succeeding they had been! It seemed to her that she had been whirled along in a tempest, without a second to think or act freely. She asked herself if she were not a prey to some hideous nightmare, and if she should not presently awake in her pretty maidenly chamber at Orcival. Was it really she who was there in a strange house, dead to everyone, leaving behind a withered memory, reduced to live under a false name, without family or friends henceforth, or anyone in the world to help her feebleness, at the mercy of a fugitive like herself, who was free to break tomorrow the bonds of caprice which today bound him to her? Was it she, too, who was about to become a mother, and found herself suffering from the excessive misery of blushing for that maternity which is the pride of pure young wives? A thousand memories of her past life flocked through her brain and cruelly revived her despair. Her heart sank as she thought of her old friendships, of her mother, her sister, the pride of her innocence, and the pure joys of the home fireside.

As she half reclined on a divan in Hector’s library, she wept freely. She bewailed her life, broken at twenty, her lost youth, her vanished, once radiant hopes, the world’s esteem, and her own self-respect, which she should never recover.

Of a sudden the door was abruptly opened.

Laurence thought it was Hector returned, and she hastily rose, passing her handkerchief across her face to try to conceal her tears.

A man whom she did not know stood upon the threshold, respectfully bowing. She was afraid, for Trémorel had said to her many times within the past two days, “We are pursued; let us hide well;” and though it seemed to her that she had nothing to fear, she trembled without knowing why.

“Who are you?” she asked, haughtily, “and who has admitted you here? What do you want?”

M. Lecoq left nothing to chance or inspiration; he foresaw everything, and regulated affairs in real life as he would the scenes in a theatre. He expected this very natural indignation and these questions, and was prepared for them. The only reply he made was to step one side, thus revealing M. Plantat behind him.

Laurence was so much overcome on recognizing her