He laughed once more:

"Yes, you accept, because that will happen in a month's time... and meanwhile you reckon on finding some trick, an a.s.sistance of some kind or another... M. a.r.s.ene Lupin..."

"I swear it on the head of my son."

"The head of your son!... Why, my poor pet, you would sell yourself to the devil to save it from falling!..."

"Oh, yes," she whispered, shuddering. "I would gladly sell my soul!"

He sidled up against her and, in a low voice:

"Clarisse, it's not your soul I ask for... It's something else... For more than twenty years my life has spun around that longing. You are the only woman I have ever loved... Loathe me, hate me--I don't care--but do not spurn me... Am I to wait? To wait another month?... No, Clarisse, I have waited too many years already..."

He ventured to touch her hand. Clarisse shrank back with such disgust that he was seized with fury and cried:

"Oh, I swear to heaven, my beauty, the executioner won't stand on such ceremony when he catches hold of your son!... And you give yourself airs! Why, think, it'll happen in forty hours! Forty hours, no more, and you hesitate... and you have scruples, when your son's life is at stake!

Come, come, no whimpering, no silly sentimentality... Look things in the face. By your own oath, you are my wife, you are my bride from this moment... Clarisse, Clarisse, give me your lips..."

Half-fainting, she had hardly the strength to put out her arm and push him away; and, with a cynicism in which all his abominable nature stood revealed, Daubrecq, mingling words of cruelty and words of pa.s.sion, continued:

"Save your son!... Think of the last morning: the preparations for the scaffold, when they snip away his shirt and cut his hair... Clarisse, Clarisse, I will save him... Be sure of it... All my life shall be yours ... Clarisse..."

She no longer resisted. It was over. The loathsome brute's lips were about to touch hers; and it had to be, and nothing could prevent it.

It was her duty to obey the decree of fate. She had long known it. She understood it; and, closing her eyes, so as not to see the foul face that was slowly raised to hers, she repeated to herself:

"My son... my poor son."

A few seconds pa.s.sed: ten, twenty perhaps. Daubrecq did not move.

Daubrecq did not speak. And she was astounded at that great silence and that sudden quiet. Did the monster, at the last moment, feel a scruple of remorse?

She raised her eyelids.

The sight which she beheld struck her with stupefaction. Instead of the grinning features which she expected to see, she saw a motionless, unrecognizable face, contorted by an expression of unspeakable terror: and the eyes, invisible under the double impediment of the spectacles, seemed to be staring above her head, above the chair in which she lay prostrate.

Clarisse turned her face. Two revolver-barrels, pointed at Daubrecq, showed on the right, a little above the chair. She saw only that: those two huge, formidable revolvers, gripped in two clenched hands. She saw only that and also Daubrecq's face, which fear was discolouring little by little, until it turned livid. And, almost at the same time, some one slipped behind Daubrecq, sprang up fiercely, flung one of his arms round Daubrecq's neck, threw him to the ground with incredible violence and applied a pad of cotton-wool to his face. A sudden smell of chloroform filled the room.

Clarisse had recognized M. Nicole.

"Come along, Growler!" he cried. "Come along, Masher! Drop your shooters: I've got him! He's a limp rag... Tie him up."

Daubrecq, in fact, was bending in two and falling on his knees like a disjointed doll. Under the action of the chloroform, the fearsome brute sank into impotence, became harmless and grotesque.

The Growler and the Masher rolled him in one of the blankets of the bed and tied him up securely.

"That's it! That's it!" shouted Lupin, leaping to his feet.

And, in a sudden reaction of mad delight, he began to dance a wild jig in the middle of the room, a jig mingled with bits of can-can and the contortions of the cakewalk and the whirls of a dancing dervish and the acrobatic movements of a clown and the lurching steps of a drunken man. And he announced, as though they were the numbers in a music-hall performance:

"The prisoner's dance!... The captive's hornpipe!... A fantasia on the corpse of a representative of the people!... The chloroform polka!...

The two-step of the conquered goggles! Olle! Olle! The blackmailer's fandango! Hoot! Hoot! The McDaubrecq's fling!... The turkey trot!...

And the bunny hug!... And the grizzly bear!... The Tyrolean dance: tra-la-liety!... Allons, enfants de la partie!... Zing, boum, boum!

Zing, boum, boum!..."

All his street-arab nature, all his instincts of gaiety, so long suppressed by his constant anxiety and disappointment, came out and betrayed themselves in roars of laughter, bursts of animal spirits and a picturesque need of childlike exuberance and riot.

He gave a last high kick, turned a series of cartwheels round the room and ended by standing with his hands on his hips and one foot on Daubrecq's lifeless body.

"An allegorical tableau!" he announced. "The angel of virtue destroying the hydra of vice!"

And the humour of the scene was twice as great because Lupin was appearing under the aspect of M. Nicole, in the clothes and figure of that wizened, awkward, nervous private tutor.

A sad smile flickered across Mme. Mergy's face, her first smile for many a long month. But, at once returning to the reality of things, she besought him:

"Please, please... think of Gilbert!"

He ran up to her, caught her in his arms and, obeying a spontaneous impulse, so frank that she could but laugh at it, gave her a resounding kiss on either cheek:

"There, lady, that's the kiss of a decent man! Instead of Daubrecq, it's I kissing you... Another word and I'll do it again... and I'll call you darling next... Be angry with me, if you dare. Oh, how happy I am!"

He knelt before her on one knee. And, respectfully:

"I beg your pardon, madame. The fit is over."

And, getting up again, resuming his whimsical manner, he continued, while Clarisse wondered what he was driving at:

"What's the next article, madame? Your son's pardon, perhaps? Certainly!

Madame, I have the honour to grant you the pardon of your son, the commutation of his sentence to penal servitude for life and, to wind up with, his early escape. It's settled, eh, Growler? Settled, Masher, what? You'll both go with the boy to New Caledonia and arrange for everything. Oh, my dear Daubrecq, we owe you a great debt! But I'm not forgetting you, believe me! What would you like? A last pipe? Coming, coming!"

He took one of the pipes from the mantel-piece, stooped over the prisoner, shifted his pad and thrust the amber mouth-piece between his teeth:

"Draw, old chap, draw. Lord, how funny you look, with your plug over your nose and your cutty in your mouth. Come, puff away. By Jove, I forgot to fill your pipe! Where's your tobacco, your favourite Maryland?

... Oh, here we are!..."

He took from the chimney an unopened yellow packet and tore off the government band:

"His lordship's tobacco! Ladies and gentlemen, keep your eyes on me!

This is a great moment. I am about to fill his lordship's pipe: by Jupiter, what an honour! Observe my movements! You see, I have nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves!..."

He turned back his cuffs and stuck out his elbows. Then he opened the packet and inserted his thumb and fore-finger, slowly, gingerly, like a conjurer performing a sleight-of-hand trick before a puzzled audience, and, beaming all over his face, extracted from the tobacco a glittering object which he held out before the spectators.

Clarisse uttered a cry.

It was the crystal stopper.

She rushed at Lupin and s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him:

"That's it; that's the one!" she exclaimed, feverishly. "There's no scratch on the stem! And look at this line running down the middle, where the gilt finishes... That's it; it unscrews!... Oh, dear, my strength's going!..." She trembled so violently that Lupin took back the stopper and unscrewed it himself.