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

through which he saw a procession of hills and spires of village churches.

He found himself in quite another room, a small room, in which he had lived before, with his clothes and his books about him.

A stepladder rose at one side of it. Why did he not go up it since he had the strength? It merely needed an effort of will. He made the effort and mounted it. His head rose into the open air. A river flowed on his left and right. He murmured:

“The deck of the Nonchalante.⁠ ⁠… The Seine⁠ ⁠… the Deux-Amants country.”

He walked aft. Josine was there, sitting in a wicker work chair. There was really no transition between the combative rancor and revolt he had felt and the access of passion and desire which shook him at the sight of her. Had he, indeed, really felt any rancor and revulsion? Everything was drowned in an immense need to clasp her in his arms.

Enemy? Thief? Criminal if you like. But, after all, only a woman⁠—above all, woman. And what a woman!

Dressed, as usual, in a simple frock, she was wearing that delicate veil which softened the luster of her hair and gave her so close a resemblance to the Virgin of Bernardino Luini. Her neck, of a warm creaminess, was bare. Her slender hands lay clasped in her lap. She was gazing at the abrupt slope of the Deux-Amants. And nothing could appear sweeter and more innocent than that face on which rested that perpetual, profound, and mysterious, smile.

Ralph was almost touching her at the moment at which she perceived him. She flushed slightly and lowered her eyelids, and she seemed not to dare to let her eyes rest on him through her long brown eyelashes. Never did a young girl display greater shyness and ingenuous timidity, less affectation and coquetry.

He was deeply touched by it. She feared this first meeting with him. Was he not going to abuse her, to throw himself on her, strike her, and heap abominable epithets on her? Or was he going to leave her with that scorn which is the worst of all things?

Ralph was trembling like a child. At the actual moment nothing counted with him but that which counts eternally with lovers⁠—the kiss, the hands that clasp, the frenzy of glances that fail and of lips that faint with pleasure.

He fell on his knees before her.

X The Mutilated Hand

The penalty of such loves is the silence to which they are condemned. Even when the mouths are speaking, the noise of the words they exchange does not break the heavy silence of the inner, solitary thoughts. Each follows his, or her, course of thought without ever penetrating into the very life of the other. A dispiriting intercourse from which Ralph, always so ready to expand, suffered more and more.

Josephine too must have been suffering from it, to judge from certain moments of extreme lassitude in which she seemed on the verge of those confidences that draw lovers closer than do embraces. Once she began to weep in Ralph’s arms so bitterly that he looked for an access of surrender. But she recovered almost at once, and he felt her further away from him than ever.

“She cannot trust,” he told himself. “She is one of those beings who dwell apart from their fellows in a solitude that has no bounds. She is a prisoner of the image she has formed of herself, has forced herself to form of herself; indeed, a prisoner of the enigma she has elaborated and which holds her in its invisible meshes. As the daughter of Cagliostro she has acquired the habit of the darkness, of the intricate, of plots, intrigues, and subterranean operations. To tell anyone the story of one of these machinations is to give him the thread which will guide him through the labyrinth. She is afraid and withdraws into herself.”

By way of counter-stroke he kept silence himself and refrained from making any allusion to the adventure on which they had embarked, or to the problem of which they were seeking the solution. Had she obtained possession of the casket? Did she know the key-word? Had she plunged her hand into the hollow in that legendary block and emptied it of those thousands and thousands of precious stones?

On that matter, on every matter, silence.

Moreover, after they had passed Rouen, their intimacy slackened. Leonard, avoiding Ralph, reappeared again. The secret meetings began once more. The carriage and the untiring little horses every day carried Josine away. Whither? On what enterprizes? Ralph observed that three of the abbeys, Saint-Georges, Jumièges, and Saint-Wandrille, were close to the river. But then, if she were searching in this quarter, it must be that no solution had yet been found, and that she had simply failed.

This notion drove him abruptly to action. He sent to the inn near La Haie d’Etigues for his bicycle, and rode across the country to the outskirts of Lillebonne, in which Bridget Rousselin’s mother was living. There he learned that a fortnight before⁠—which was about the time that Josine had taken the train from Paris⁠—the Widow Rousselin had shut her house and gone, so they said, to join her daughter in Paris. The evening before a lady had come to see her.

It was ten o’clock at night before Ralph got back to the barge which was moored to the southwest of the first curve beyond Rouen. A little while before reaching it he passed Josine’s carriage, which the little horses, utterly exhausted, could scarcely drag along. When it came to the bank of the river Leonard jumped down from the box, opened the door, bent down, stood up with the inert body of the fainting Josine in his arms, and carried her to the barge. Ralph lent a hand, and the two of them carried her down to her cabin. The woman of the barge came to tend her.

“Look after her,” said Leonard roughly. “She has only fainted.