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

through Ralph’s mind. He had scarcely reached this conclusion when there came the sound of a carriage coming up the road which runs along the canal under the cliff. On the instant, Ralph recognized the quick trot of Leonard’s horses.

Beaumagnan, on his part, must have known what was happening, for he sprang up and listened.

The noise of hoofs ceased, then began again slower. The carriage was mounting the rocky lane, which winds up towards the plateau and from which runs the forest path, in which there is no room for a carriage, which ascends the steep slope to the old lighthouse.

In five minutes or less, Josephine would appear.

Every second of every one of those solemn minutes increased the agitation and frenzy of Beaumagnan. He muttered incoherent words. His mask of romantic actor grew uglier and uglier till his face became of a purely bestial hideousness. The instinct, the will to murder contorted his features; and all at once it became clear that this will, this savage instinct were inflamed against Ralph, against Josephine’s lover.

Once more his feet began to pace mechanically the tiled floor. He was walking up and down without knowing it; he was going to kill without knowing it, like a drunken man. His arms outstretched themselves. His clenched fists moved forward like two battering rams that a slow, continuous, and irresistible force would have thrust against the young man’s bosom. A few more steps, and Ralph would be dangling in the abyss. He shut his eyes. However, he was not in the slightest degree resigned and tried hard to retain a vestige of hope.

“The rope will break,” he thought, “and there will be thick grass for me to fall on. Truly it is not the fate of Monsieur Arsène Lupin d’Andresy to be hung. If, at my age, I have no chance of getting out of such a hole as this, it must be that the gods have no intention of taking a real interest in me. In that case there is nothing to regret.”

He thought of his father and of the instruction in gymnastics he had had from Theophrastus Lupin. He murmured the name of Clarice.

However, the blow did not come. Even as he felt him within striking distance, it seemed that his adversary stopped in his spring.

He opened his eyes. Beaumagnan, drawn up to his full height, was towering above him. But he did not move; his arms had fallen; and on his face, on which the thought of murder had impressed the most abominable expression, the decision seemed to be suspended.

Ralph listened and heard nothing. But perhaps Beaumagnan, whose senses had been rendered extraordinarily acute by his emotions, heard Josephine coming. As a matter of fact, he drew back a step or two and then with a rush took up his post in the recess to the right of the door.

Ralph had a good view of his face. It was hideous. He looked for all the world like a sportsman practising bringing his gun to his shoulder in order to get the stiffness out of his arms and bring it up quickly when the time came to shoot. So Beaumagnan’s hands were moving in the gestures necessary to the crime. They kept opening for the strangling, moved to a suitable distance from one another, and closed their curved fingers like talons.

Ralph was panic-stricken. His impotence was terrible; it was a veritable martyrdom.

Though he was well aware that any movement was useless, he struggled to break his bonds. If only he had been able to call out to warn her! But the gag smothered his cries and the bonds cut into his flesh.

Outside the deep silence was broken by the sound of footsteps. The gate grated on its hinges, a petticoat rustled among the tall weeds, a foot crunched the pebbles.

Beaumagnan, flattened against the wall, raised his forearms; his hands, trembling like the hands of a skeleton shaken by the wind, seemed already to be closing round a neck and to be gripping it, all alive and throbbing.

Ralph moaned behind his gag.

And then the door opened and the scene was played.

It was played exactly in the manner in which Beaumagnan had planned and Ralph pictured to himself. The figure of Josephine Balsamo stepped over the threshold and on the instant was crushed down in Beaumagnan’s rush. A feeble moan from her was drowned by a kind of furious baying which poured from the assassin’s throat.

Ralph groaned. Never had he loved Josephine so dearly as at the moment in which he saw her in her death agony. Her faults? Her crimes? What did they matter? She was the most beautiful creature in the world and all that beauty, that adorable smile, that charming body, made for all the caresses, were about to be annihilated. No help was possible. No force could avail against the irresistible strength of this brute.

What saved Josephine was the excess of Beaumagnan’s love which death alone could glut. At the last moment it was unable to complete its sinister task. At the end of his strength, racked by a despair which suddenly assumed the appearance of madness, Beaumagnan rolled on the ground tearing at his hair and banging his head on the tiles.

Ralph breathed again. Though appearances were against it and though Josephine did not move, he was sure she was not dead. As a matter of fact, slowly, coming out of the horrible nightmare, she raised herself, and after several violent fits of shuddering, at last stood upright, her usual well-balanced and calm self. She was dressed in a cloak with a cape to it and was wearing a toque from which hung a veil embroidered with large flowers. She let the cloak fall, revealing her bare shoulders, for her bodice had been torn in the struggle. As for the toque and veil, which had been badly rumpled, she threw them into a corner and her hair, freed from them, fell on each side of her forehead in heavy, even curls