PLANS AND STRATAGEMS
Events had taken a course uncommonly favorable to Marescal. Aurelie’s
confinement to her room meant checkmate to the plan that Ralph had had
in mind; it rendered it impossible to fly; it kept her awaiting
denunciation in a terrible suspense. Marescal took immediate
precautions not to lose these advantages; the nurse they had to put in
charge of her, was one of his creatures and, as Ralph was able to
ascertain, let him have word every day of the condition of the sick
girl. In the event of a sudden improvement, he would have acted.
“Yes,” said Ralph to himself. “But if he has not acted already, it must
be that he has motives which prevent him still from laying information
against her and prefer to await the end of her illness. He is making
his preparations. Let us make our preparations too.”
Though he was opposed to too logical hypotheses which the event always
upsets, Ralph had drawn from the facts of the affair some, so to speak,
involuntary, conclusions. The strange truth of which no one in the
world had dreamt for an instant, but which was so simple, he saw in a
confused fashion, rather owing to the weight of the facts than to any
effort of his intelligence, and he understood that the moment had come
to attack the problem with the utmost determination.
“In an enterprise,” he often said to himself, “the first step is often
the most difficult of all.”
If certain actions were clear enough to him, the motives of them
remained obscure. To him characters in the drama presented the
appearance of people struggling in stress and storm. If he meant to
win, it was no longer enough to go on defending Aurelie day after day,
but he must ransack the past and discover what profound reasons had
moved these people and influenced them in the course of that tragic
night.
“To sum up,” he said to himself, “besides me, there are four leading
actors who circle round Aurelie and who, all four of them, persecute
her: William, Jodot, Marescal and Bregeac. Of these four, some are
drawn to her by love, others by the desire of tearing her secret from
her. The combination of these two elements, love and greed, are the
determining factors in the affair. Now William is, for the time being,
out of action. Bregeac and Jodot do not worry me much, as long as
Aurelie is ill. There remains Marescal. That is the enemy to be
watched.”
There were opposite Bregeac’s house, some empty rooms. Ralph
established himself in them. Moreover, since the nurse was in
Marescal’s pay, he renewed his acquaintance with the maid and bribed
her. Thrice, during the absence of the nurse, this maid took him into
Aurelie’s bedroom.
Aurelie did not appear to recognize him. She was still so enfeebled by
the fever that she could only utter a few incoherent words and close
her eyes again. But he had no doubt that she heard him and that she
knew who it was who spoke to her in that gentle voice which comforted
and soothed her like the passes of an hypnotist.
“It is I, Aurelie,” he said. “You see that I am true to my promise and
that you may have complete confidence in me. I swear to you that your
enemies are not capable of fighting me and that I will set you free.
How should it be otherwise? I think of nothing but you. I reconstitute
your life, and little by little it grows clearer and clearer to me
exactly as it is, simple and honest. I know that you are innocent. I’ve
always known it, even when I accused you. The most irrefutable proof
seemed false to me: the lady with the green eyes could not be a
criminal.”
He did not fear to go further in his avowals and say the tenderest
words to her, to which she was compelled to listen, for he mixed with
his advice:
“You are all my life. I have never found so much grace and charm in a
woman. Trust yourself to me, Aurelie. I only ask one thing of you, you
know, trust. If any one questions you, do not answer. If any one writes
to you, do not reply, if any one wishes to take you away from here
refuse to go. Trust in me to the very last minute of the cruelest hour.
I shall be there. I shall always be there because I live only for you
and by you.”
The girl’s face filled slowly with a restful quietness. She fell
asleep, as if lulled by a happy dream.
Then he slipped into the room reserved for the use of Bregeac and
sought, vainly enough, papers and information which might guide his
actions.
He also made domiciliary visits to the flat which Marescal occupied in
the Rue de Rivoli and searched them with extraordinary minuteness.
Finally he made the most careful inquiries in the offices of the
Minister of the Interior in which the two men worked. Their rivalry and
hatred of one another were known to all. Both of them, supported by
people in high places, were the objects of a struggle both at the
Ministry and at the Prefecture of Police, waged by powerful personages
who battled above their heads. The service suffered from it. Either of
them accused the other openly of serious derelictions from duty. There
was talk of calling on them to resign. Which of them would be
sacrificed?
One day, hidden behind the window curtain, Ralph watched Bregeac at
Aurelie’s bedside. He was a bilious-looking person with a thin and
yellow face. Of rather more than middle height, he carried himself with
something of an air, and at any rate he was a man of greater elegance
and distinction than the vulgar Marescal.
Awaking suddenly, Aurelie caught sight of him bending over her, and
said in harsh enough accents: “Leave me! Go away!”
“How you detest me and how you would love to injure me!” he murmured
sadly.
“I should never injure the man that my mother married,” she said.
He gazed upon her with eyes full of suffering.
“You are very beautiful, my poor child,” he said. “But, alas, why have
you always rejected my affection? Yes, I know that I was in the wrong.
For a very long while I was only drawn to you by that secret you kept
from me for no reason whatever. But if you had not been so stubborn in
that absurd silence, I should never have dreamt of the love which now
tortures me, for you will never love me—it is not possible that you
should ever love me.”
She did not wish to listen to him and turned away her head.
However, he went on: “During your delirium you often spoke of
revelations you wanted to make to me. Were they revelations about the
secret, or about your senseless flight with that fellow William? Where
did that outsider take you? What became of you before you took refuge
in your convent?”
She did not answer—either because she was too exhausted to answer, or
because she disliked him too heartily.
He said no more and went away. When he had gone, Ralph, slipping away
in his turn, saw that she was weeping.
Finally, at the end of a fortnight’s investigation any one but Ralph
would have been discouraged. Speaking generally, apart from certain
tendencies, which he had interpreted in his own way, the chief problems
remained insoluble, or, at any rate, were incapable of any apparent
solution.
“But I am not wasting my time,” he said to himself; “and that is the
essential thing. Action often consists of inactivity. The atmosphere is
less thick. My vision of the characters and events in this affair is
growing stronger and more precise. If the fact which is the key to the
problem is still missing, I am in the very heart of the enemy’s camp.
On the eve of a combat which promises to be so violent, when all these
mortal enemies confront one another, the needs of the fight itself and
of finding effective weapons will certainly give me the unexpected jolt
which will strike out the sparks which will show me the truth.”
One of those sparks was struck out sooner than he expected, a spark
which lighted one quarter of the darkness, a quarter from which he did
not think that anything important would come. One morning he was gazing
out of his window, with his eyes fixed on the windows of Bregeac’s
house, when he saw, still disguised as a rag-picker, the murderer
Jodot. This time Jodot was carrying on his shoulder a canvas bag into
which he dropped his loot. He set it down in front of the house itself,
sat down and began to eat his dejeuner, poking about in the orderly box
which the cook had carried out. The action seemed mechanical, but in a
minute or two Ralph perceived that the man was only hooking out of the
box crumpled envelopes and torn-up letters. He cast a glance over each
scrap and then continued his sorting. There was no doubt that he was
interested in Bregeac’s correspondence.
A quarter of an hour later he hoisted his bag on to his back and went
off. Ralph followed him to Montmartre, to discover that Jodot had a
junk shop there. He came three days in succession and on each occasion
he repeated the same equivocal operation. But on the third day, which
was a Sunday, Ralph surprised Bregeac watching him out of his window.
When Jodot went off, Bregeac, in his turn, followed him with infinite
precaution. Ralph followed both of them at a distance. Was he going to
discover the tie which connected Bregeac and Jodot?
In this order, following one another, they went through the Monceau
district, crossed over the fortifications, and came to the banks of the
Seine at the end of the Boulevard Bineau. A few modest villas stood
between patches of waste land. Jodot set down his bag in front of one
of these villas and sat down on the curb and began to eat.
He remained there four or five hours, watched by Bregeac, who had his
lunch in the arbor of a small restaurant about thirty yards away, and
by Ralph, who, stretched at full length on the river bank, smoked
cigarettes.
When Jodot went away, Bregeac went off in the opposite direction as if
he had lost all interest in the matter. Ralph went into the restaurant
and over a meal, for which he was more than ready, chatted to the
proprietor. He learned that the villa in front of which Jodot had been
sitting, had belonged a few weeks before to the two brothers Loubeaux,
who had been murdered by three ruffians in the Marseilles express. The
police had sealed it up and left it in charge of a neighbor who went
for a walk every Sunday afternoon.
Ralph had started at hearing the name of the brothers Loubeaux. The
maneuvers of Jodot began to assume significance.
He went deeper into the matter and learned that at the time of their
death the brothers Loubeaux lived very little at their villa, which
they only used as an office for their champagne business. They had
separated from their partner and were traveling on their own account.
“Their partner?” said Ralph.
“Yes. You’ll still see his name engraved on the brass plate on the
door, ‘Loubeaux Frères, et Jodot’,” said the proprietor of the
restaurant.
Ralph started again.
“Jodot?” he said in incredulous accents.
“Yes—a big, red-faced man who looks like a strong man at a fair. No one
has seen him about here for more than a year.”
Most important information, as Ralph told himself, when the proprietor
hurried to welcome a regular customer.
So Jodot had formerly been the partner of the two brothers whom he was
to murder later. There was nothing astonishing in the fact that the
police had not gone carefully into this matter, for they had never
suspected that there had been any Jodot concerned in the crime, since
Marescal had made up his mind that Ralph was the third confederate of
the murderers. But why did Jodot return to the very place where his
victims had formerly lived? And why did Bregeac spy upon his coming?
The week passed uneventfully. Jodot did not appear again in front of
Bregeac’s house. But on the Saturday Ralph, convinced that he would
return to the villa on the Sunday, climbed over the wall of its garden
from the piece of waste land which ran along it and made his way into
the villa itself through a window on the first floor.
Two of the rooms on this floor were still furnished; and there were
signs that they had been carefully searched. Who had searched them? The
Police? Bregeac? Jodot? With what object?
Ralph did not search them himself. That which some one else had sought,
was either not to be found there, or was to found there no longer. He
settled down to spend the night in an easy chair. He found a book lying
on the table and began to read it by the light of his electric torch.
It sent him to sleep.
The truth is only revealed to those who compel it to emerge from the
darkness; and it often happens that, when one believes it to be a long
way off, chance comes and sets it in the very place one has prepared
for it. One’s merit consists in the quality of that preparation. On
awaking, Ralph’s eyes fell on the book he had been reading. Its cover
had been again covered with a piece of cloth cut out of one of those
squares of black cloth which photographers use to cover their cameras.
Ralph hunted about. In a corner of a cupboard, devoted apparently to
odds and ends, he found one of those very squares of cloth. Three round
pieces of about the size of a plate had been cut out of it.
“Here we are!” he said to himself in some excitement. “I am in luck!
The three masks of the train-robbers came from this house! Here is the
irrefutable proof of it. It does throw a lot of light on the affair.”
The truth now appeared to him so natural, so exactly in keeping with
the unexpressed intuitions he had had, and to a certain extent so
entertaining in its simplicity, that he laughed aloud in that silent
house.
“Perfect—perfect,” he said to himself. “Fortune itself will supply me
with the missing facts. Henceforward she will enter my service, and all
the details of the affair are going to come at my call and range
themselves in order before me in the full light of day.”
At eight o’clock in the morning the caretaker of the villa made his
Sunday round of the ground floor and satisfied himself that the seals
were unbroken. At nine Ralph went down into the dining-room, and opened
a window, leaving the shutters closed, just above the spot on which
Jodot was accustomed to sit.
Jodot arrived punctually. He came with his sack, which he set against
the wall. Then he sat down and began his meal. Over it he talked to
himself, but in so low a voice that Ralph could not catch his words.
His meal consisted of sausages and cheese washed down by a jug of red
wine; and after it he lit a pipe, the smoke of which rose to Ralph’s
nostrils.
This first pipe was followed by a second, then by a third. So two hours
passed, without Ralph’s being able to understand the reason of this
long stay. Through a hole in the shutter he could see Jodot’s ragged
trouser-legs and his boots down at heel. Beyond them flowed the river.
Passers-by came and went. Bregeac must be on the watch in one of the
arbors of the restaurant.
At last, a few minutes before noon, Jodot uttered these words:
“Hang it all! Nothing fresh? But it’s pretty stiff, dammit!”
He seemed to be speaking not to himself, but to some one close at hand.
But no one had joined him: there was no one near him.
“Hell and blazes!” he growled on. “I tell you the bottle’s there! I’ve
had it in my hand and seen it with my own eyes not once but a hundred
times. Have you done exactly what I told you? The whole of the right
side of the cellar, as you went over the left the other day? Well,
well—you ought to have found it.”
He was silent for a little while; then he went on.
“It might be as well to try somewhere else and move on to the waste
ground at the back of the house, in case they threw the bottle there,
before the coup on the express. It’s an open-air hiding-place, and just
as good as any other. If Bregeac has searched the cellar, he mayn’t
have thought of outside. Go there and look. I’ll wait for you.”
Ralph did not wait to hear any more. He began to understand as soon as
Jodot spoke of the cellar. That cellar must run from the front to the
back of the house, with an air-hole into the street and another at the
back. Access to it through the air-hole at the back would be easy.
Quickly he ran upstairs to the first floor and into a back bedroom from
which he could look down on the waste ground, to find that he had
guessed right. In the middle of the unused building plot, in which
stood a board with “For Sale” on it, among a heap of old iron, empty
barrels, and broken bottles, a small boy of seven or eight, tiny,
incredibly thin in his tightly fitting gray jersey, was searching hard,
darting about with the agility of a squirrel. The circle he was
searching with the object of finding a bottle, was of very small
circumference. If Jodot had been right, the search should not take him
long. It did not. In about ten minutes after moving the broken barrels
and boxes, the small boy rose and, without wasting time, ran towards
the villa, carrying a bottle gray with dust.
Ralph ran down the stairs to the ground floor with the intention of
relieving the small boy of his prize. But he could not get the door at
the head of the stairs to the basement open, and he hurried to his
peep-hole at the dining-room window.
He was just in time to hear Jodot say: “That’s it! You’ve got it!
Splendid! Now I’m ‘armed’. Bregeac’s friend won’t be able to give me
any more trouble. Hurry up! Get out of sight!”
The small boy got out of sight. He squeezed himself through the opening
made by a broken bar in the grating and the air-hole and slipped like a
ferret into the sack.
Jodot at once rose, hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and went off.
Ralph gave him a minute or two’s grace, then drew the bolts of the
front door, opened it, breaking the seals, and started in pursuit.
Jodot was walking briskly along two hundred yards ahead, carrying the
confederate who had first explored for him the basement of Bregeac’s
house, and then the cellar of the villa of the brothers Loubeaux.
Fifty yards behind him Bregeac was winding in and out among the trees
which bordered the road.
Fifty yards behind him an angler was rowing along under the bank of the
Seine in pursuit of Bregeac. It was Marescal. So Jodot was followed by
Bregeac, Bregeac and Jodot by Marescal, and all three of them by Ralph.
And the stake for which all four of them were playing was the
possession of a bottle.
“This is growing exciting,” said Ralph to himself. “Jodot is in
possession of the bottle it is true. But he does not know that other
people are after it. Who will be cleverest of the other three? If there
was no Lupin in it, I should back Marescal. But Lupin is in it.”
Jodot stopped. Bregeac stopped also, so did Marescal in his boat. Ralph
stopped too.
Jodot laid his sack on the ground, stretched out so that the small boy
should be comfortable, and sitting on a bench, he began to examine the
bottle, shaking it and holding it up to the light.
The time had come for Bregeac to act; at any rate that was his opinion;
and he came up very quietly.
He had opened a large parasol and held it before him like a shield
behind which he hid his face. On his boat Marescal disappeared beneath
a very large straw hat.
When Bregeac was three yards from the bench, he shut his parasol,
sprang forward, without bothering about the people strolling along the
path, snatched the bottle, and took to flight along a lane in the
direction of the fortifications.
He did this with uncommon skill and admirable swiftness. Taken aback,
Jodot hesitated, cried out, caught up the sack, set it down again as if
he was afraid of not being able to run quickly enough with such a
burden, lost time and went out of action.
But Marescal, foreseeing the attack, had landed, and at once dashed in
pursuit. Ralph did the same. There were only three competitors left.
Bregeac, like a good runner, gave his mind to nothing but his running
and did not turn round. Marescal gave his mind only to Bregeac, and he
did not turn round either, so that Ralph was able to pursue them quite
openly. Why not?
In ten minutes the first of the three runners reached the Ternes Gate.
Bregeac was so hot that he took off his jacket. Near the Custom House a
street car had stopped and a number of travelers were waiting at the
ticket office to get aboard it and return to Paris.
Bregeac mingled with this crowd. Marescal did the same.
The conductor called out the numbers of the tickets. But the jostling
was so violent that Marescal had scarcely any difficulty in pulling the
bottle out of Bregeac’s pocket without Bregeac’s being any the wiser.
At once Marescal slipped through the Custom House and set off at full
speed.
“My good friends eliminate themselves one after the other,” chuckled
Ralph. “And each of them is working for me.”
When, in his turn, Ralph went through the Custom House, he saw Bregeac
making desperate efforts to get out of the car through the crowd which
blockaded his way, in order to pursue the man who had robbed him.
Marescal plunged into the streets which run parallel to the Avenue des
Ternes. They are narrow and winding. He ran like a madman. When he came
to a stop at the Avenue Wagram, he was out of breath. His face was
shining with sweat, his eyes were bloodshot, his veins were swollen. He
mopped his face and forehead, utterly done.
He bought a newspaper and, after having taken a look at it, wrapped the
bottle up in it. Then he stuck it under his arm and went tottering on
like a man who only keeps upright by a miracle. In fact, the handsome
Marescal could not hold himself upright. His collar was as limp and
crumpled as if it had been dipped in water; his beard ended in two
points from which dripped drops of sweat.
It was just before he reached the Place de L’Etoile that a gentleman in
large dark spectacles, coming from the opposite direction with a
lighted cigarette in his mouth, appeared in front of him. This
gentleman barred his way, and since his cigarette was already burning,
did not ask him for a light, but, without a word puffed a cloud of
smoke into his face, and smiled a smile that bared his teeth, nearly
all of them pointed like canines.
The Commissary’s eyes started out of their sockets; he stammered: “Who
are you? What do you want?”
What was the use of asking? He knew quite well that the man who always
mystified him stood before him, the man whom he called the third
confederate, Aurelie’s lover, and his, Marescal’s, eternal enemy.
And this man, who appeared to him the devil in person, pointed a finger
at the bottle and said in affectionately genial accents:
“Come, hand it over—be nice to the kind gentleman—hand it over. A
Commissary of your rank can’t go dancing along the streets with a
bottle. Come, Rudolph—hand it over.”
Marescal gave way at once. Cry out, call for help, set passers-by on
this murderer—he could not do it. He was under a spell. This infernal
creature robbed him of all his vigor, and, stupidly, without dreaming
for a moment of resisting, like a thief who finds it quite natural to
restore the thing he has stolen, he allowed the bottle to be taken from
under the arm which could not longer hold it.
At that moment Bregeac came up, also breathless, also powerless to
spring on the third thief, or to question Marescal. Both of them stood,
stunned, on the edge of the gutter and watched the gentleman in dark
spectacles hail a taxi, get into it, and wave his hat in farewell out
of the window.
As soon as he reached his lodgings Ralph unwrapped the bottle. It was a
quart bottle such as is used for mineral water, an old quart bottle of
thick black glass. On the dusty, dirty label, which all the same must
have been protected against the damp, an inscription in large printed
letters could be easily read:
EAU DE JOUVENCE.
Below were several lines hard to decipher which evidently gave the
formula of this Eau de Jouvence.
Bi-carbonate de soude 1349 grammes
— de potasse 6439 —
— de chaux 1000 —
........................................
....mille cures.........................
........................................
etc.......................
But the bottle was not empty. In the inside something moved, something
light, which rustled like paper. He turned the bottle upside down and
shook it; nothing came out. Then he let down into the bottle a piece of
string ending in a big knot and by means of it, after the exercise of a
good deal of patience, drew out a small sheet of paper, rolled up into
a cylinder and tied with red thread. Having unrolled it, he saw that it
was rather less than a half of an ordinary sheet of paper and that the
lower part of it had been cut, or rather torn, irregularly. Some words
were written on it in ink, of which many were missing, but which were
sufficient for him to form several sentences:
“The accusation is true. This is my formal confession. I alone am
responsible for the crime that has been committed and neither Jodot
nor the Loubeaux are to be blamed for it. Bregeac.”
At the first glance Ralph had recognized Bregeac’s handwriting, but
written in an ink faded by time, which permitted him, along with the
state of the paper, to reckon the document to be fifteen or twenty
years old.
What was this crime, and against whom had it been committed?
He reflected for some time before he arrived at this conclusion. Then
he said to himself: “All the obscurity of this affair comes from the
fact that it is not one affair but two; two enterprises are mingled in
it, two dramas of which the first dominates the second. First the drama
of the express in which the characters are the two Loubeaux, William
Jodot, and Aurelie. The second is a drama which took place years ago
and of which to-day the two actors, Jodot and Bregeac, are at
loggerheads.
“The situation which grows more and more complicated for any one who
does not know the key-word, is becoming clearer and clearer to me. The
hour of battle draws near, and the stake is Aurelie, or rather the
secret which flutters in the depths of her beautiful green eyes.
Whoever shall be for a few minutes, by force, by trickery, or by love,
master of her thoughts, will be master of that secret, for which so
many victims have already died.
“And to this whirlwind of hate and vengeance and greed, Marescal with
his passion, his ambition, and his rancor, brings that terrible
instrument of war, Justice.
“Opposing him, myself.”
He made his preparations with the most minute care and with all the
more vigor because each of his adversaries was redoubling his
precautions. Bregeac, without any definite proof against the nurse who
gave information to Marescal or against the maid whom Ralph had bribed,
discharged them both. The shutters of the windows in the front of his
house were shut. On the other hand, the agents of Marescal began to
show themselves in the street. Jodot only no longer showed himself.
Disarmed doubtless by the loss of the document in which Bregeac had
written his confession, he must have buried himself in some safe
retreat.
This period lasted for a fortnight. Ralph obtained an introduction,
under a false name, to the wife of the Minister who openly protected
Marescal, and succeeded in becoming uncommonly intimate with this
rather mature lady, who was exceedingly jealous, and from whom her
husband kept nothing secret. She was transported with joy by Ralph’s
attentions. Without being aware of the part she was playing and
ignorant moreover of Marescal’s passion for Aurelie, from hour to hour
she kept Ralph informed of the Commissary’s intentions, of his plans
with regard to Aurelie, and of the method by which he sought, with the
Minister’s help, to smash Bregeac and those who supported him.
Ralph was frightened: the attack was so well planned that he asked
himself if he ought not to anticipate it, to carry off Aurelie, and so
bring it to nothing before it was put into execution.
“And what then?” he said to himself. “What should we gain by flight?
The conflict would remain the same and everything would begin all over
again.”
He was able to resist the temptation.
Returning home one evening, he found a note awaiting him. The
Minister’s wife informed him that the final decisions had been made,
among others that the arrest of Aurelie had been fixed for the next
day, July the 12th, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
“Poor little girl with the green eyes,” thought Ralph. “Will she have
confidence in me in everything and in spite of everything, as I asked
her? Will there not again be tears and anguish for her?”
He slept peacefully, like a great commander on the eve of battle. He
rose at eight o’clock. The decisive day had begun.
Then, towards noon, as his maid, his old nurse Victoire, returned by
the servants’ entrance with her basket of provisions, six men posted on
the staircase, forced their way into the kitchen.
“Is your master here?” said one of them roughly. “Come, hurry up!
There’s no point in lying. I am the Commissary Marescal and I have a
warrant for his arrest.”
Pale and trembling she muttered: “He’s in his study.”
“Take us to it!”
He set his hand over her mouth, that she might not warn her master, and
made her walk along the passage at the end of which she pointed to a
door.
Their adversary had not time to throw himself on guard. He was seized
and tied up and dispatched almost as if he had been a trunk.
Marescal said simply: “You are the chief of the robbers of the express.
Your name is Ralph de Limézy.” Turning to his men he added: “Take him
to the police station. Here’s the warrant. And keep your mouths shut,
do you hear? Not a word about the personality of our ‘client’. You’re
responsible for him, Tony. You, too, Labonce. Take him off, And at
three o’clock meet me in front of Bregeac’s house. It will be the young
lady’s turn then and the smashing up of her step-father.”
Four men took away the prisoner. Marescal kept the fifth, Sauvinoux,
with him.
Forthwith he searched the study and took possession of some papers and
other unimportant things. But neither he, nor Sauvinoux, found what
they were looking for, the bottle on the label of which he had had time
to read, when he came to a stop in the Avenue Wagram: “Eau de
Jouvence.”
They went away to lunch in a neighboring restaurant. They came back and
Marescal searched furiously.
At last, at a quarter past two, Sauvinoux discovered the famous bottle
behind the marble slab under the mantelpiece. It was corked and
carefully sealed with red sealing-wax.
Marescal shook it and held it up against the light of an electric light
bulb. It contained a roll of paper.
He hesitated—should he read that paper?
“No, no! Not yet!—Later in the presence of Bregeac! Bravo, Sauvinoux!
You’ve worked splendidly, my lad!”
His joy was overflowing. He went away, murmuring:
“This time I am near my goal. I hold Bregeac in my hands and I’ve only
to tighten my grip. As for the girl, there is no longer any one to
defend her. Her lover is in prison. There are just you and I, darling!”