The Crystal Stopper Part 20

"Yes, I know... and I was of the same opinion. Unfortunately, my poor Gilbert--you know how weak he is!--was under the influence of one of his comrades."

"Vaucheray?"

"Yes, Vaucheray, a saturnine spirit, full of bitterness and envy, an ambitious, unscrupulous, gloomy, crafty man, who had acquired a great empire over my son. Gilbert made the mistake of confiding in him and asking his advice. That was the origin of all the mischief. Vaucheray convinced him and convinced me as well that it would be better if we acted by ourselves. He studied the business, took the lead and finally organized the Enghien expedition and, under your direction, the burglary at the Villa Marie-Therese, which Prasville and his detectives had been unable to search thoroughly, because of the active watch maintained by Leonard the valet. It was a mad scheme. We ought either to have trusted in your experience entirely, or else to have left you out altogether, taking the risk of fatal mistakes and dangerous hesitations. But we could not help ourselves. Vaucheray ruled us. I agreed to meet Daubrecq at the theatre. During this time the thing took place. When I came home, at twelve o'clock at night, I heard the terrible result: Leonard murdered, my son arrested. I at once received an intuition of the future. Daubrecq's appalling prophecy was being realized: it meant trial and sentence. And this through my fault, through the fault of me, the mother, who had driven my son toward the abyss from which nothing could extricate him now."

Clarisse wrung her hands and s.h.i.+vered from head to foot. What suffering can compare with that of a mother trembling for the head of her son?

Stirred with pity, Lupin said:

"We shall save him. Of that there is not the shadow of a doubt. But, it is necessary that I should know all the details. Finish your story, please. How did you know, on the same night, what had happened at Enghien?"

She mastered herself and, with a face wrung with fevered anguish, replied:

"Through two of your accomplices, or rather two accomplices of Vaucheray, to whom they were wholly devoted and who had chosen them to row the boats."

"The two men outside: the Growler and the Masher?"

"Yes. On your return from the villa, when you landed after being pursued on the lake by the commissary of police, you said a few words to them, by way of explanation, as you went to your car. Mad with fright, they rushed to my place, where they had been before, and told me the hideous news. Gilbert was in prison! Oh, what an awful night! What was I to do?

Look for you? Certainly; and implore your a.s.sistance. But where was I to find you?... It was then that the two whom you call the Growler and the Masher, driven into a corner by circ.u.mstances, decided to tell me of the part played by Vaucheray, his ambitions, his plan, which had long been ripening..."

"To get rid of me, I suppose?" said Lupin, with a grin.

"Yes. As Gilbert possessed your complete confidence, Vaucheray watched him and, in this way, got to know all the places which you live at. A few days more and, owning the crystal stopper, holding the list of the Twenty-seven, inheriting all Daubrecq's power, he would have delivered you to the police, without compromising a single member of your gang, which he looked upon as thenceforth his."

"The a.s.s!" muttered Lupin. "A muddler like that!" And he added, "So the panels of the doors..."

"Were cut out by his instructions, in antic.i.p.ation of the contest on which he was embarking against you and against Daubrecq, at whose house he did the same thing. He had under his orders a sort of acrobat, an extraordinarily thin dwarf, who was able to wriggle through those apertures and who thus detected all your correspondence and all your secrets. That is what his two friends revealed to me. I at once conceived the idea of saving my elder son by making use of his brother, my little Jacques, who is himself so slight and so intelligent, so plucky, as you have seen. We set out that night. Acting on the information of my companions, I went to Gilbert's rooms and found the keys of your flat in the Rue Matignon, where it appeared that you were to sleep. Unfortunately, I changed my mind on the way and thought much less of asking for your help than of recovering the crystal stopper, which, if it had been discovered at Enghien, must obviously be at your flat. I was right in my calculations. In a few minutes, my little Jacques, who had slipped into your bedroom, brought it to me. I went away quivering with hope. Mistress in my turn of the talisman, keeping it to myself, without telling Prasville, I had absolute power over Daubrecq. I could make him do all that I wanted; he would become the slave of my will and, instructed by me, would take every step in Gilbert's favour and obtain that he should be given the means of escape or else that he should not be sentenced. It meant my boy's safety."

"Well?"

Clarisse rose from her seat, with a pa.s.sionate movement of her whole being, leant over Lupin and said, in a hollow voice:

"There was nothing in that piece of crystal, nothing, do you understand?

No paper, no hiding-place! The whole expedition to Enghien was futile!

The murder of Leonard was useless! The arrest of my son was useless! All my efforts were useless!"

"But why? Why?"

"Why? Because what you stole from Daubrecq was not the stopper made by his instructions, but the stopper which was sent to John Howard, the Stourbridge gla.s.sworker, to serve as a model."

If Lupin had not been in the presence of so deep a grief, he could not have refrained from one of those satirical outbursts with which the mischievous tricks of fate are wont to inspire him. As it was, he muttered between his teeth:

"How stupid! And still more stupid as Daubrecq had been given the warning."

"No," she said. "I went to Enghien on the same day. In all that business Daubrecq saw and sees nothing but an ordinary burglary, an annexation of his treasures. The fact that you took part in it put him off the scent."

"Still, the disappearance of the stopper..."

"To begin with, the thing can have had but a secondary importance for him, as it is only the model."

"How do you know?"

"There is a scratch at the bottom of the stem; and I have made inquiries in England since."

"Very well; but why did the key of the cupboard from which it was stolen never leave the man-servant's possession? And why, in the second place, was it found afterward in the drawer of a table in Daubrecq's house in Paris?"

"Of course, Daubrecq takes care of it and clings to it in the way in which one clings to the model of any valuable thing. And that is why I replaced the stopper in the cupboard before its absence was noticed. And that also is why, on the second occasion, I made my little Jacques take the stopper from your overcoat-pocket and told the portress to put it back in the drawer."

"Then he suspects nothing?"

"Nothing. He knows that the list is being looked for, but he does not know that Prasville and I are aware of the thing in which he hides it."

Lupin had risen from his seat and was walking up and down the room, thinking. Then he stood still beside Clarisse and asked:

"When all is said, since the Enghien incident, you have not advanced a single step?"

"Not one. I have acted from day to day, led by those two men or leading them, without any definite plan."

"Or, at least," he said, "without any other plan than that of getting the list of the Twenty-seven from Daubrecq."

"Yes, but how? Besides, your tactics made things more difficult for me. It did not take us long to recognize your old servant Victoire in Daubrecq's new cook and to discover, from what the portress told us, that Victoire was putting you up in her room; and I was afraid of your schemes."

"It was you, was it not, who wrote to me to retire from the contest?"

"Yes."

"You also asked me not to go to the theatre on the Vaudeville night?"

"Yes, the portress caught Victoire listening to Daubrecq's conversation with me on the telephone; and the Masher, who was watching the house, saw you go out. I suspected, therefore, that you would follow Daubrecq that evening."

"And the woman who came here, late one afternoon..."

"Was myself. I felt disheartened and wanted to see you."

"And you intercepted Gilbert's letter?"

"Yes, I recognized his writing on the envelope."

"But your little Jacques was not with you?"

"No, he was outside, in a motor-car, with the Masher, who lifted him up to me through the drawing-room window; and he slipped into your bedroom through the opening in the panel."

"What was in the letter?"

"As ill-luck would have it, reproaches. Gilbert accused you of forsaking him, of taking over the business on your own account. In short, it confirmed me in my distrust; and I ran away."

Lupin shrugged his shoulders with irritation:

"What a shocking waste of time! And what a fatality that we were not able to come to an understanding earlier! You and I have been playing at hide-and-seek, laying absurd traps for each other, while the days were pa.s.sing, precious days beyond repair."