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

“So⁠—so⁠—the candidate for the priesthood!”

The rope which encircled his neck had been run through a ring in the opposite wall just above one of the windows. Beaumagnan who was acting with jerky movements and apparently half mad, opened that window and half opened the shutter that opened out wards. Then, using the ring as a pulley-block, he pulled the rope and compelled Ralph to walk across the room. Ralph saw through the half-opened shutters the empty space, which, from the top of the steep slope on which the lighthouse had been built, fell among sloping boulders and great trunks of trees whose leafy tops shut out the horizon.

Beaumagnan twisted him round, set his back against the shutters, and tied him to them by the wrists and ankles. Ralph was now in this predicament: in the case of his trying to move forward, the rope round his neck, tightening through the slipknot would strangle him; if on the other hand the whim took Beaumagnan to get rid of his victim, he had only to give him a sharp push, the shutters would give way and Ralph, dangling over the abyss, would find himself being hanged.

“An excellent position for a serious conversation,” he sneered.

Moreover his mind was made up. If it was Beaumagnan’s intention to give him the choice between death and divulging the steps that he, Ralph, had been able to make towards a solution of the problem, he would speak without the slightest hesitation.

“I’m at your orders,” he said. “Ask away.”

“Be quiet!” snapped Beaumagnan, in raging accents. He stuck a pad of cotton wool over Ralph’s mouth and fastened it in place by a handerchief tied round his head.

“A single sound⁠—a single movement⁠—and with one blow of my fist I’ll knock you into the abyss!” he snarled.

He looked at him for a moment as if he were asking himself whether he had not better do it at once and be done with it.

But of a sudden he left him, crossed the room on tiptoe and stretching himself at full length on the threshold, looked through the door which was a little way open.

“Things are going badly,” thought Ralph, uncommonly anxious. “They are going all the more badly because I don’t understand at all what is really happening. How comes he to be here? Am I to suppose that he is the benefactor of the Widow Rousselin, that benefactor whom she did not wish to compromise?”

That hypothesis did not satisfy him.

“No: that isn’t it. I have fallen into a trap not because it was set for me but because I was foolishly careless. It’s plain that a beggar like Beaumagnan knows the whole Rousselin business, that he has learned of these meetings and the hour of these meetings; and then, knowing that the widow has been abducted, he watches and makes other people watch the neighborhood of Lillebonne and Tancarville. So it came about that they have discovered that I was on the spot and my goings and comings⁠—and then the trap⁠—and then⁠—”

This time Ralph’s conviction was profound, the conqueror of Beaumagnan at Paris, he had just lost the second engagement. Victorious in his turn, Beaumagnan had spread him out on a shutter like a bat nailed to a wall and was now looking out for the other person in order to seize him and tear the secret from him.

One point however remained obscure. Why this attitude of a wild beast ready to spring upon its prey? That was quite out of keeping with the probably quite peaceful meeting which was to take place between him and that unknown person. Beaumagnan had only to go out and wait for him outside and say:

“Madam Rousselin is ill and has sent me in her place. She would like to know the inscription engraved on the lid of the casket.”

“Always supposing,” thought Ralph, “that Beaumagnan hasn’t reason to expect some other person to come⁠—and that he does not distrust that person⁠ ⁠… and that he is not preparing for another attack.”

It was sufficient for such a question to present itself to Ralph for him to perceive at once the exact solution. To suppose that Beaumagnan had laid a trap for him, Ralph, was only half the truth. The ambush was a double one. Who then could Beaumagnan be looking for in this fever of exasperation if not for Josephine Balsamo?

“That’s it! That’s it!” said Ralph to himself, the facts of the matter at last clear to him. “He has guessed that she is alive. Yes, the other day in Paris when we had that tussle he must have guessed this amazing fact. And that’s another blunder I’ve made⁠ ⁠… for lack of experience. Should I have spoken like that and acted like that if Josephine Balsamo were not alive? What? I told this man I had read between the lines of his letter to Baron Godfrey, that I was present at the famous gathering at La Haie d’Etigues, and yet failed to understand what he really had in store for the Countess of Cagliostro! And was it likely that a young fellow like me, so thoroughly alive, would abandon that charming woman? Come then: if I was at the trial I was certainly at the priest’s staircase. I was certainly present at the embarkation. I certainly rescued Josephine. And we loved one another not with a love which dated from last winter, as I pretended, but with a love posterior to Josephine’s supposed death!⁠ ⁠… That is what Beaumagnan said to himself.”

Proof piled on proof. Events linked themselves together like the links of a chain. Entangled in the Rousselin affair and consequently sought for by Beaumagnan, Josephine had not failed to search the neighborhood of the lighthouse. Informed of this at once, Beaumagnan formed his ambuscade. Ralph had fallen into it; it was now the turn of Josephine!

One would have said that Fate wished to confirm immediately the ideas which had been running