File No. 113 - Emile Gaboriau (large screen ebook reader TXT) 📗

Prosper, fearing that he was dead or dangerously injured.

“What did you see? Are you hurt?” he whispered.

But Prosper had already risen. Although he had had a violent fall, he was unhurt; he was in a state when mind governs matter so absolutely that the body is insensible to pain.

“I saw,” he answered in a hoarse voice, “I saw Madeleine—do you understand, Madeleine—in that room, alone with Raoul!”

M. Verduret was confounded. Was it possible that he, the infallible expert, had been mistaken in his deductions?

He well knew that M. de Lagors’s visitor was a woman; but his own conjectures, and the note which Mme. Gypsy had sent to him at the tavern, had fully assured him that this woman was Mme. Fauvel.

“You must be mistaken,” he said to Prosper.

“No, monsieur, no. Never could I mistake another for Madeleine. Ah! you who heard what she said to me yesterday, answer me: was I to expect such infamous treason as this? You said to me then, ‘She loves you, she loves you!’ Now do you think she loves me? speak!”

M. Verduret did not answer. He had first been stupefied by his mistake, and was now racking his brain to discover the cause of it, which was soon discerned by his penetrating mind.

“This is the secret discovered by Nina,” continued Prosper. “Madeleine, this pure and noble Madeleine, whom I believed to be as immaculate as an angel, is in love with this thief, who has even stolen the name he bears; and I, trusting fool that I was, made this scoundrel my best friend. I confided to him all my hopes and fears; and he was her lover! Of course they amused themselves by ridiculing my silly devotion and blind confidence!”

He stopped, overcome by his violent emotions. Wounded vanity is the worst of miseries. The certainty of having been so shamefully deceived and betrayed made Prosper almost insane with rage.

“This is the last humiliation I shall submit to,” he fiercely cried. “It shall not be said that I was coward enough to stand by and let an insult like this go unpunished.”

He started toward the house; but M. Verduret seized his arm and said:

“What are you going to do?”

“Have my revenge! I will break down the door; what do I care for the noise and scandal, now that I have nothing to lose? I shall not attempt to creep into the house like a thief, but as a master, as one who has a right to enter; as a man who, having received an insult which can only be washed out with blood, comes to demand satisfaction.”

“You will do nothing of the sort, Prosper.”

“Who will prevent me?”

“I will.”

“You? do not hope that you will be able to deter me. I will appear before them, put them to the blush, kill them both, then put an end to my own wretched existence. That is what I intend to do, and nothing shall stop me!”

If M. Verduret had not held Prosper with a vicelike grip, he would have escaped, and carried out his threat.

“If you make any noise, Prosper, or raise an alarm, all your hopes are ruined.”

“I have no hopes now.”

“Raoul, put on his guard, will escape us, and you will remain dishonored forever.”

“What difference is it to me?”

“It makes a great difference to me. I have sworn to prove your innocence. A man of your age can easily find a wife, but can never restore lustre to a tarnished name. Let nothing interfere with the establishing of your innocence.”

Genuine passion is uninfluenced by surrounding circumstances. M. Verduret and Prosper stood foot-deep in mud, wet to the skin, the rain pouring down on their heads, and yet seemed in no hurry to end their dispute.

“I will be avenged,” repeated Prosper with the persistency of a fixed idea, “I will avenge myself.”

“Well, avenge yourself like a man, and not like a child!” said M. Verduret angrily.

“Monsieur!”

“Yes, I repeat it, like a child. What will you do after you get into the house? Have you any arms? No. You rush upon Raoul, and a struggle ensues; while you two are fighting, Madeleine jumps in her carriage, and drives off. What then? Which is the stronger, you or Raoul?”

Overcome by the sense of his powerlessness, Prosper was silent.

“And arms would be of no use,” continued M. Verduret: “it is fortunate you have none with you, for it would be very foolish to shoot a man whom you can send to the galleys.”

“What must I do?”

“Wait. Vengeance is a delicious fruit, that must ripen in order that we may fully enjoy it.”

Prosper was unsettled in his resolution; M. Verduret seeing this brought forth his last and strongest argument.

“How do we know,” he said, “that Mlle. Madeleine is here on her own account? Did we not come to the conclusion that she was sacrificing herself for the benefit of someone else? That superior will which compelled her to banish you may have constrained this step to-night.”

That which coincides with our secret wishes is always eagerly welcomed. This supposition, apparently improbable, struck Prosper as possibly true.

“That might be the case,” he murmured, “who knows?”

“I would soon know,” said M. Verduret, “if I could see them together in that room.”

“Will you promise me, monsieur, to tell me the exact truth, all that you see and hear, no matter how painful it may be for me?”

“I swear it, upon my word of honor.”

Then, with a strength of which a few minutes before he would not have believed himself possessed, Prosper raised the ladder, placed the last round on his shoulders, and said to M. Verduret:

“Mount!”

M. Verduret rapidly ascended the ladder without even shaking it, and had his head on a level with the window.

Prosper had seen but too well. There was Madeleine at this hour of the night, alone with Raoul de Lagors in his room!

M. Verduret observed that she still wore her shawl and bonnet.

She was standing in the middle of the room, talking with great animation. Her look and gestures betrayed indignant scorn. There was an expression of ill-disguised loathing upon her beautiful face.

Raoul was seated by the fire, stirring up the coals with a pair of tongs. Every now and then, he would shrug his shoulders, like a man resigned to everything he heard, and had no answer, except, “I cannot help it. I can do nothing for you.”

M. Verdure would willingly have given the diamond ring on his finger to be able to hear what was said; but the roaring wind completely drowned their voices.

“They are evidently quarrelling,” he thought; “but it is not a lovers’ quarrel.”

Madeleine continued talking; and it was by closely watching the face of Lagors, clearly revealed by the lamp on the mantel, that M. Verduret hoped to discover the meaning of the scene before him.

At one moment Lagors would start and tremble in spite of his apparent indifference; the next, he would strike at the fire with the tongs, as if giving vent to his rage at some reproach uttered by Madeleine.

Finally Madeleine changed her threats into entreaties, and, clasping her hands, almost fell at his knees.

He turned away his head, and refused to answer save in monosyllables.

Several times she turned to leave the room, but each time returned, as if asking a favor, and unable to make up her mind to leave the house till she had obtained it.

At last she seemed to have uttered something decisive; for Raoul quickly rose and opened a desk near the fireplace, from which he took a bundle of papers, and handed them to her.

“Well,” thought M. Verduret, “this looks bad. Can it be a compromising correspondence which the fair one wants to secure?”

Madeleine took the papers, but was apparently still dissatisfied. She again entreated him to give her something else. Raoul refused; and then she threw the papers on the table.

The papers seemed to puzzle M. Verduret very much, as he gazed at them through the window.

“I am not blind,” he said, “and I certainly am not mistaken; those papers, red, green, and yellow, are pawnbroker’s tickets!”

Madeleine turned over the papers as if looking for some particular ones. She selected three, which she put in her pocket, disdainfully pushing the others aside.

She was evidently preparing to take her departure, for she said a few words to Raoul, who took up the lamp as if to escort her downstairs.

There was nothing more for M. Verduret to see. He carefully descended the ladder, muttering to himself. “Pawnbroker’s tickets! What infamous mystery lies at the bottom of all this?”

The first thing he did was to remove the ladder.

Raoul might take it into his head to look around the garden, when he came to the door with Madeleine, and if he did so the ladder could scarcely fail to attract his attention.

M. Verduret and Prosper hastily laid it on the ground, regardless of the shrubs and vines they destroyed in doing so, and then concealed themselves among the trees, whence they could watch at once the front door and the outer gate.

Madeleine and Raoul appeared in the doorway. Raoul set the lamp on the bottom step, and offered his hand to the girl; but she refused it with haughty contempt, which somewhat soothed Prosper’s lacerated heart.

This scornful behavior did not, however, seem to surprise or hurt Raoul. He simply answered by an ironical gesture which implied, “As you please!”

He followed her to the gate, which he opened and closed after her; then he hurried back to the house, while Madeleine’s carriage drove rapidly away.

“Now, monsieur,” said Prosper, “you must tell me what you saw. You promised me the truth no matter how bitter it might be. Speak; I can bear it, be it what it may!”

“You will only have joy to bear, my friend. Within a month you will bitterly regret your suspicions of to-night. You will blush to think that you ever imagined Mlle. Madeleine to be intimate with a man like Lagors.”

“But, monsieur, appearances–-”

“It is precisely against appearances that we must be on our guard. Always distrust them. A suspicion, false or just, is always based on something. But we must not stay here forever; and, as Raoul has fastened the gate, we shall have to climb back again.”

“But there is the ladder.”

“Let it stay where it is; as we cannot efface our footprints, he will think thieves have been trying to get into the house.”

They scaled the wall, and had not walked fifty steps when they heard the noise of a gate being unlocked. The stood aside and waited; a man soon passed on his way to the station.

“That is Raoul,” said M. Verduret, “and Joseph will report to us that he has gone to tell Clameran what has just taken place. If they are only kind enough to speak French!”

He walked along quietly for some time, trying to connect the broken chain of his deductions.

“How in the deuce,” he abruptly asked, “did this Lagors, who is devoted to gay society, come to choose a lonely country house to live in?”

“I suppose it was because M. Fauvel’s villa is only fifteen minutes’ ride from here, on the Seine.”

“That accounts for his staying here in the summer; but in winter?”

“Oh, in winter he has a room at the Hotel du Louvre, and all the year round keeps an apartment in Paris.”

This did not enlighten M. Verduret much; he hurried his pace.

“I hope our driver has not gone. We cannot take the train which is about to start, because Raoul would see