Memoirs of Arsène Lupin - Maurice Leblanc (books like beach read TXT) 📗

The Nonchalante was a barge in no way distinguished from any other barge. It was fairly old; its paint had faded; but it was well polished and kept very clean by a bargeman of the name Delâtre and his wife. From the outside there was very little to see of the Nonchalante’s cargo, a few cases, some old baskets, and three or four casks. But if you had slipped down the ladder into the hold, you would have seen at a glance that she carried absolutely nothing whatever. The whole of the inside had been divided into three rooms of moderate size, uncommonly comfortable and exceedingly well-kept⁠—two staterooms opening into a saloon.

There Ralph and Josephine lived for a month. Monsieur and Madame Delâtre seemed to be morose; and they were certainly silent. Several times Ralph tried in vain to get into conversation with them. They acted as cook and butler. From time to time a small tug came to tow the Nonchalante up a reach of the Seine.

The whole course of the charming river in this way unrolled itself before their eyes in delightful landscapes through which they wandered, Ralph’s arm round Josephine’s waist⁠ ⁠… the Brotonne Forest, the ruins of Jumièges, Saint George’s Abbey, the hills of Bouille, Rouen, Pont-de-l’Arche.

They were weeks of intense happiness. During those delightful hours Ralph expended a wealth of gaiety and enthusiasm. The wonderful views, the beautiful Gothic churches, the sunsets and the moonlight, everything served him as pretexts for impassioned declarations of his love. Josine, more silent, smiled as in a happy dream. Every day drew her closer to her lover. If at the beginning she had acted from a mere caprice, she now found herself under the yoke of the law of love which quickened her pulses and taught her the danger and the pain of loving too much.

Of the past, of her secret life, never a word. Once however they did exchange a few sentences on this subject. As Ralph was chaffing her about what he called the miracle of her eternal youth, she said:

“A miracle? I don’t understand what people mean by a miracle. For example, the other day we drove sixty miles.⁠ ⁠… You cried out that it was a miracle. But if you’d kept your eyes a little wider open, you would have perceived that that distance was covered not by two horses but by four, for Leonard took the pair which had been drawing it out of the carriage and harnessed another pair in their places in that farmyard at Doudeville, where a relay was waiting for us.”

“You have me there!” exclaimed the young man cheerfully.

“Another example,” she went on: “No one in the world knows that your name is Lupin. But I assure you that that very night you rescued me from death, I knew you as Arsène Lupin and nothing else. A miracle? Not a bit of it. You know that everything that concerns Cagliostro interests me extremely; and when fourteen years ago I heard talk of the disappearance of the Queen’s necklace from the house of the Duchess of Dreux-Soubise, I made the most minute enquiry into the circumstances. That brought me first of all to little Ralph d’Andresy and then to the son of Theophrastus Lupin. Later I found traces of your handiwork in several jobs. I knew where I was.”

Ralph reflected thoughtfully for a good half-minute; then he said very seriously:

“At that date Josine, darling, either you were twelve years old, and it certainly is miraculous that a little girl of that age should have succeeded in an enquiry in which the rest of the world failed, or you were as old as you are today, which is even more miraculous, O daughter of Cagliostro!”

She frowned. His jesting did not seem at all to her taste. She said even more seriously than he:

“We won’t talk about that, Ralph⁠—if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ralph, a little annoyed at having been discovered to be Lupin and desiring to score off her in turn. “Nothing in the world interests me more strongly than the problem of your age and the different exploits you have performed during the last hundred years. I’ve got some ideas of my own on the matter which are really worthy of consideration.”

“Keep them to yourself,” she said sharply.

“Wouldn’t you like me to tell you about them?”

She gazed at him, curious in spite of her reluctance to discuss the matter. He took advantage of her hesitation to continue in a faintly mocking tone:

“My train of reasoning rests on two axioms: the first is, as you have pointed out, there are no miracles; the second is that you are your mother’s daughter.”

She smiled and murmured: “It certainly begins well.”

“You are your mother’s daughter,” Ralph repeated. “That means that there was in the first place a Countess of Cagliostro. At the age of twenty-five or thirty, she dazzled all the Paris of the end of the Second Empire with her beauty and excited the liveliest curiosity at the Court of Napoleon III. With the aid of the young man she called her brother⁠—it doesn’t matter whether he was her brother, her friend, or her lover⁠—she had worked up the story of her relationship to Cagliostro and prepared the forged documents of which the police made use when they gave Napoleon III the information about the daughter of Josephine Beauharnais and that great thaumaturge. Expelled from France, she went to Italy, then to Germany, then disappeared⁠—to come to life again twenty-two years later in the person of her adorable daughter, her exact image, the second Countess of Cagliostro, here present. Do we agree so far?”

Josine did not answer; she gazed at him with in expressive eyes in an impassive face.

He went on: “Between the mother and the daughter the resemblance was perfect⁠—so exact that the affair began, quite naturally, all over again. Why should there be two