第58章

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 littie 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 isjointed 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 ppearing under the aspect of M.Nicole, in the clothes and figure of that wizened, awkward, nervous private tutor.

A sad smile Bickered 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: