第42章

"That's it," he said."Above the ground were three stories, which have been razed, and below the ground, dug out of the rock, two stories, one of which was blocked up by the rubbish, while the other...There, that's where our friend Daubrecq lies.The name is significant: the torture-chamber...Poor, dear friend!...Between the staircase and the torture-chamber, two doors.Between those two doors, a recess in which the three brothers obviously sit, gun in hand.""So it is impossible for you to get in that way without being seen.""Impossible...unless I come from above, by the story that has fallen in, and look for a means of entrance through the ceiling...But that is very risky..."He continued to turn the pages of the book.Clarisse asked:

"Is there no window to the room?"

"Yes," he said."From below, from the river - I have just been there - you can see a little opening, which is also marked on the plan.But it is fifty yards up, sheer; and even then the rock overhangs the water.

So that again is out of the question."

He glanced through a few pages of the book.The title of one chapter struck him: The Lovers' Towers He read the opening lines:

"In the old days, the donjon was known to the people of the neighbourhood as the Lovers' Tower, in memory of a fatal tragedy that marked it in the Middle Ages.The Comte de Mortepierre, having received proofs of his wife's faithlessness, imprisoned her in the torture-chamber, where she spent twenty years.One night, her lover, the Sire de Tancarville, with reckless courage, set up a ladder in the river and then clambered up the face of the cliff till he came to the window of the room.After filing the bars, he succeeded in releasing the woman he loved and bringing her down with him by means of a rope.They both reached the top of the ladder, which was watched by his friends, when a shot was fired from the patrol-path and hit the man in the shoulder.The two lovers were hurled into space...."There was a pause, after he had read this, a long pause during which each of them drew a mental picture of the tragic escape.So, three or four centuries earlier, a man, risking his life, had attempted that surprising feat and would have succeeded but for the vigilance of some sentry who heard the noise.A man had ventured! A man had dared! Aman done it!

Lupin raised his eyes to Clarisse.She was looking at him...with such a desperate, such a beseeching look! The look of a mother who demanded the impossible and who would have sacrificed anything to save her son.

"Masher," he said, "get a strong rope, but very slender, so that I can roll it round my waist, and very long: fifty or sixty yards.You, Growler, go and look for three or four ladders and fasten them end to end.""Why, what are you thinking of, governor?" cried the two accomplices.

"What, you mean to...But it's madness!""Madness? Why? What another has done I can do.""But it's a hundred chances to one that you break your neck.""Well, you see, Masher, there's one chance that I don't.""But, governor..."

"That's enough, my friends.Meet me in an hour on the river-bank."The preparations took long in the making.It was difficult to find the material for a fifty-foot ladder that would reach the first ledge of the cliff; and it required an endless effort and care to join the different sections.

At last, a little after nine o'clock, it was set up in the middle of the river and held in position by a boat, the bows of which were wedged between two of the rungs, while the stern was rammed into the bank.

The road through the river-valley was little used, and nobody came to interrupt the work.The night was dark, the sky heavy with moveless clouds.

Lupin gave the Masher and the Growler their final instructions and said, with a laugh: