Suddenly he let go the instrument, looked at the wires, perceived that they had been cut, and turned round, showing a face that clearly expressed the thought in his mind.
“That’s done it. I’ve been tricked!”
Perenna was standing a couple of yards behind him, leaning carelessly against the woodwork of the arch, with his left hand passed between his back and the woodwork. He was smiling, smiling pleasantly, kindly, and genially:
“Don’t move!” he said, with a gesture of his right hand.
Weber, more frightened by that smile than he would have been by threats, took good care not to move.
“Don’t move,” repeated Don Luis, in a very queer voice. “And, whatever you do, don’t be alarmed. You shan’t be hurt, I promise you. Just five minutes in a dark cell for a naughty little boy. Are you ready? One two, three! Bang!”
He stood aside and pressed the button that worked the iron curtain. The heavy panel came crashing to the floor. The deputy chief was a prisoner.
“That’s a hundred millions gone to Jericho,” grinned Don Luis. “A pretty trick, but a bit expensive. Good-bye, Mornington inheritance! Good-bye, Don Luis Perenna! And now, my dear Lupin, if you don’t want Weber to take his revenge, beat a retreat and in good order. One, two; left, right; left, right!”
As he spoke, he locked, on the inside, the folding doors between the drawing-room and the first-floor anteroom; then, returning to his study, he locked the door between this room and the drawing-room.
The deputy chief was banging at the iron curtain with all his might and shouting so loud that they were bound to hear him outside through the open window.
“You’re not making half enough noise, deputy!” cried Don Luis. “Let’s see what we can do.”
He took his revolver and fired off three bullets, one of which broke a pane. Then he quickly left his study by a small, massive door, which he carefully closed behind him. He was now in a secret passage which ran round both rooms and ended at another door leading to the anteroom. He opened this door wide and was thus able to hide behind it.
Attracted by the shots and the noise, the detectives were already rushing through the hall and up the staircase. When they reached the first floor and had gone through the anteroom, as the drawing-room doors were locked, the only outlet open to them was the passage, at the end of which they could hear the deputy shouting. They all six darted down it.
When the last of them had vanished round the bend in the passage, Don Luis softly pushed back the door that concealed him and locked it like the rest. The six detectives were as safely imprisoned as the deputy chief.
“Bottled!” muttered Don Luis. “It will take them quite five minutes to realize the situation, to bang at the locked doors, and to break down one of them. In five minutes we shall be far away.”
He met two of his servants running up with scared faces, the chauffeur and the butler. He flung each of them a thousand-franc note and said to the chauffeur:
“Set the engine going, there’s a sportsman, and let no one near the machine to block my way. Two thousand francs more for each of you if I get off in the motor. Don’t stand staring at me like that: I mean what I say. Two thousand francs apiece: it’s for you to earn it. Look sharp!”
He himself went up the second flight without undue haste, remaining master of himself. But, on the last stair, he was seized with such a feeling of elation that he shouted:
“Victory! The road is clear!”
The boudoir door was opposite. He opened it and repeated:
“Victory! But there’s not a second to lose. Follow me.”
He entered. A stifled oath escaped his lips.
The room was empty.
“What!” he stammered. “What does this mean? They’re gone…. Florence—”
Certainly, unlikely though it seemed, he had hitherto supposed that Sauverand possessed a false key to the lock. But how could they both have escaped, in the midst of the detectives? He looked around him. And then he understood.
In the recess containing the window, the lower part of the wall, which formed a very wide box underneath the casement, had the top of its woodwork raised and resting against the panes, exactly like the lid of a chest. And inside the open chest he saw the upper rungs of a narrow descending ladder.
In a second, Don Luis conjured up the whole story of the past: Count Malonyi’s ancestress hiding in the old family mansion, escaping the search of the perquisitors, and in this way living throughout the revolutionary troubles. Everything was explained. A passage contrived in the thickness of the wall led to some distant outlet. And this was how Florence used to come and go through the house; this was how Gaston went in and out in all security; and this also was how both of them were able to enter his room and surprise his secrets.
“Why not have told me?” he wondered. “A lingering suspicion, I suppose—”
But his eyes were attracted by a sheet of paper on the table. With a feverish hand, Gaston Sauverand had scribbled the following lines in pencil:
“We are trying to escape so as not to compromise you. If we are caught, it can’t be helped. The great thing is that you should be free. All our hopes are centred in you.”
Below were two words written by Florence: “Save Marie.”
“Ah,” he murmured, disconcerted by the turn of events and not knowing what to decide, “why, oh, why did they not obey my instructions? We are separated now—”
Downstairs the detectives were battering at the door of the passage in which they were imprisoned. Perhaps he would still have time to reach his motor before they succeeded in breaking down the door. Nevertheless, he preferred to take the same road as Florence and Sauverand, which gave him the hope of saving them and of rescuing them in case of danger.
He therefore stepped over the side of the chest, placed his foot on the top rung and went down. Some twenty bars brought him to the middle of the first floor. Here, by the light of his electric lantern, he entered a sort of low, vaulted tunnel, dug, as he thought, in the wall, and so narrow that he could only walk along it sideways.
Thirty yards farther there was a bend, at right angles; and next, at the end of another tunnel of the same length, a trapdoor, which stood open, revealing the rungs of a second ladder. He did not doubt that the fugitives had gone this way.
It was quite light at the bottom. Here he found himself in a cupboard which was also open and which, on ordinary occasions, must have been covered by curtains that were now drawn. This cupboard faced a bed that filled almost the whole space of an alcove. On passing through the alcove and reaching a room from which it was separated only by a slender partition, to his great surprise, he recognized Florence’s sitting-room.
This time, he knew where he was. The exit, which was not secret, as it led to the Place du Palais-Bourbon, but nevertheless very safe, was that which Sauverand generally used when Florence admitted him.
Don Luis therefore went through the entrance hall and down the steps and, a little way before the pantry, came upon the cellar stairs. He ran down these and soon recognized the low door that served to admit the wine-casks. The daylight filtered in through a small, grated spy-hole. He groped till he found the lock. Glad to have come to the end of his expedition, he opened the door.
“Hang it all!” he growled, leaping back and clutching at the lock, which he managed to fasten again.
Two policemen in uniform were guarding the exits two policemen who had tried to seize him as he appeared.
Where did those two men come from? Had they prevented the escape of Sauverand and Florence? But in that case Don Luis would have met the two fugitives, as he had come by exactly the same road as they.
“No,” he thought, “they effected their flight before the exit was watched. But, by Jove! it’s my turn to clear out; and that’s not easy. Shall I let myself be caught in my burrow like a rabbit?”
He went up the cellar stairs again, intending to hasten matters, to slip into the courtyard through the outhouses,
to jump into his motor, and to clear a way for himself. But, when he was just reaching the yard, near the coach-house, he saw four detectives, four of those whom he had imprisoned, come up waving their arms and shouting. And he also became aware of a regular uproar near the main gate and the porter’s lodge. A number of men were all talking together, raising their voices in violent discussion.
Perhaps he might profit by this opportunity to steal outside under cover of the disorder. At the risk of being seen, he put out his head. And what he saw astounded him.
Gaston Sauverand stood with his back to the wall of the lodge, surrounded by policemen and detectives who pushed and insulted him. The handcuffs were on his wrists.
Gaston Sauverand a prisoner! What had happened between the two fugitives and the police?
His heart wrung with anguish, he leaned out still farther. But he did not see Florence. The girl had no doubt succeeded in escaping.
Weber’s appearance on the steps and the deputy chief’s first words confirmed his hopes. Weber was mad with rage. His recent captivity and the humiliation of his defeat exasperated him.
“Ah!” he roared, as he saw the prisoner. “There’s one of them, at any rate! Gaston Sauverand! Choice game, that!… Where did you catch him?”
“On the Place du Palais-Bourbon,” said one of the inspectors. “We saw him slinking out through the cellar door.”
“And his accomplice, the Levasseur girl?”
“We missed her, Deputy Chief. She was the first out.”
“And Don Luis? You haven’t let him leave the house, I hope? I gave orders.”
“He tried to get out through the cellar door five minutes after.”
“Who said so?”
“One of the men in uniform posted outside the door.”
“Well?”
“The beggar went back into the cellar.”
Weber gave a shout of delight.
“We’ve got him! And it’s a nasty business for him! Charge of resisting the police!… Complicity … We shall be able to unmask him at last. Tally-ho, my lads, tally-ho! Two men to guard Sauverand, four men on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, revolver in hand. Two men on the roof. The rest stick to me. We’ll begin with the Levasseur girl’s room and we’ll take his room next. Hark, forward, my lads!”
Don Luis did not wait for the enemies’ attack. Knowing their intentions, he beat a retreat, unseen, toward Florence’s rooms. Here, as Weber did not yet know the short cut through the outhouses, he had time to make sure that the trapdoor was in perfect working order, and that there was no reason why they should discover the existence of a secret cupboard at the back of the alcove, behind the curtains of the bed.
Once inside the passage, he went up the first staircase, followed the long corridor contrived in the wall, climbed the ladder leading to the boudoir, and, perceiving that this second trapdoor fitted the woodwork so closely that no one could suspect anything, he closed it over him. A few minutes later he heard the noise of men making a search above his head.
And so, on the twenty-fourth of May, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the position was as follows: Florence Levasseur with a warrant out against her, Gaston Sauverand in prison, Marie Fauville in prison and refusing all food, and Don Luis, who believed in their innocence and who alone could have saved them, Don Luis was being blockaded in his own house and hunted down by a score of detectives.
As for the Mornington inheritance, there could be no more question of that, because the legatee, in his turn, had set himself in open rebellion against society.
“Capital!” said Don Luis, with a grin. “This is life as I understand it. The question is a simple one and may be put in different ways. How can a wretched, unwashed beggar, with not a penny in his pocket, make a fortune in twenty-four hours without setting foot outside his hovel? How can a general, with no soldiers and no ammunition left, win a battle which he has lost? In short, how shall I, Arsène Lupin, manage to be present to-morrow evening at the meeting which will be held on the Boulevard Suchet and to behave in such a way as to save Marie Fauville, Florence Levasseur, Gaston Sauverand, and my excellent friend Don Luis Perenna in the bargain?”
Dull blows came from somewhere. The men must be hunting the roofs and sounding the walls.
Don Luis stretched himself flat on the floor, hid his face in his folded arms and, shutting his eyes, murmured:
“Let’s think.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“HELP!”
WHEN LUPIN AFTERWARD told me this episode of the tragic story, he said, not without a certain self-complacency:
“What astonished me then, and what astonishes me still, as one of the most amazing victories on which I am entitled to pride myself, is that I was able to admit Sauverand and Marie Fauville’s innocence on the spot, as a problem solved once and for all. It was a first-class performance, I swear, and surpassed the most famous deductions of the most famous investigators both in psychological value and in detective merit.
“After all, taking everything into account, there was not the shadow of a fresh fact to enable me to alter the verdict. The charges accumulated against the two prisoners were the same, and were so grave that no examining magistrate would have hesitated for a second to commit them for trial, nor any jury to bring them in guilty. I will not speak of Marie Fauville: you had only to think of the marks of her teeth to be absolutely certain. But Gaston Sauverand, the son of Victor Sauverand and consequently the heir of Cosmo Mornington — Gaston Sauverand, the man with the ebony walking-stick and the murderer of Chief Inspector Ancenis — was he not just as guilty as Marie Fauville, incriminated with her by the mysterious letters, incriminated by the very revelation of the husband whom they had killed?
“And yet why did that sudden change take place in me?” he asked. “Why did I go against the evidence? Why did I credit an incredible fact? Why did I admit the inadmissible? Why? Well, no doubt, because truth has an accent that rings in the ears in a manner all its own. On the one side, every proof, every fact, every reality, every certainty; on the other, a story, a story told by one of the three criminals, and therefore, presumptively, absurd and untrue from start to finish. But a story told in a frank voice, a clear, dispassionate, closely woven story, free from complications or improbabilities, a story which supplied no positive solution, but which, by its very honesty, obliged any impartial mind to reconsider the solution arrived at. I believed the story.”
The explanation which Lupin gave me was not complete. I asked:
“And Florence Levasseur?”
“Florence?”
“Yes, you don’t tell me what you thought. What was your opinion about her? Everything tended to incriminate her not only in your eyes, because, logically speaking, she had taken part in all the attempts to murder you, but also in the eyes of the police. They knew that she used to pay Sauverand clandestine visits at his house on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace. They had found her photograph in Inspector Vérot’s memorandum-book, and then — and then all the rest: your accusations, your certainties. Was all that modified by Sauverand’s story? To your mind, was Florence innocent or guilty?”
He hesitated, seemed on the point of replying directly and frankly to my question, but could not bring himself to do so, and said:
“I wished to have confidence. In order to act, I must have full and entire confidence, whatever doubts might still assail me, whatever darkness might still enshroud this or that part of the adventure. I therefore believed. And, believing, I acted according to my belief.”
Acting, to Don Luis Perenna, during those hours of forced inactivity, consisted solely in perpetually repeating to himself Gaston Sauverand’s account of the events. He tried to reconstitute it in all its details, to remember the very least sentences, the apparently most insignificant phrases. And he examined those sentences, scrutinized those phrases one by one, in order to extract such particle of the truth as they contained.
For the truth was there. Sauverand had said so and Perenna did not doubt
it. The whole sinister affair, all that constituted the case of the Mornington inheritance and the tragedy of the Boulevard Suchet, all that could throw light upon the plot hatched against Marie Fauville, all that could explain the undoing of Sauverand and Florence — all this lay in Sauverand’s story. Don Luis had only to understand, and the truth would appear like the moral which we draw from some obscure fable.
Don Luis did not once deviate from his method. If any objection suggested itself to his mind, he at once replied:
“Very well. It may be that I am wrong and that Sauverand’s story will not enlighten me on any point capable of guiding me. It may be that the truth lies outside it. But am I in a position to get at the truth in any other way? All that I possess as an instrument of research, without attaching undue importance to certain gleams of light which the regular appearance of the mysterious letters has shed upon the case, all that I possess is Gaston Sauverand’s story. Must I not make use of it?”
And, once again, as when one follows a path by another person’s tracks, he began to live through the adventure which Sauverand had been through. He compared it with the picture of it which he had imagined until then. The two were in opposition; but could not the very clash of their opposition be made to produce a spark of light?
“Here is what he said,” he thought, “and there is what I believed. What does the difference mean? Here is the thing that was, and there is the thing that appeared to be. Why did the criminal wish the thing that was to appear under that particular aspect? To remove all suspicion from him? But, in that case, was it necessary that suspicion should fall precisely on those on whom it did?”
The questions came crowding one upon the other. He sometimes answered them at random, mentioning names and uttering words in succession, as though the name mentioned might be just that of the criminal, and the words uttered those which contained the unseen reality.
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 265
