"Yes; and I did so again this morning.I expect he put it there last night.""And I expect he'll want to take it from there again," said Lupin.
"Very likely."
"And suppose he finds it gone?"
Victoire looked frightened.
"Answer me," said Lupin."If he finds it gone, he'll accuse you of taking it, won't he?""Certainly."
"Then go and put it back, as fast as you can."Oh dear, oh dear!" she moaned."I hope he won't have had time to find out.Give it to me, quick."Here you are," said Lupin.
He felt in the pocket of his overcoat.
"Well?" said Victoire, holding out her hand.
"Well," he said, after a moment, "it's gone.""What!"
"Yes, upon my word, it's gone...somebody's taken it from me."He burst into a peal of laughter, a laughter which, this time, was free from all bitterness.
Victoire flew out at him:
"Laugh away!...Putting me in such a predicament!...""How can I help laughing? You must confess that it's funny.It's no longer a tragedy that we're acting, but a fairy-tale, as much a fairy-tale as Puss in Boots or Jack the Beanstalk.I must write it when I get a few weeks to myself: The Magic Stopper; or, The Mishaps of Poor Arsene.""Well...who has taken it from you?"
"What are you talking about?...It has flown away...vanished from my pocket: hey presto, begone!"He gave the old servant a gentle push and, in a more serious tone:
"Go home, Victoire, and don't upset yourself.Of course, some one saw you give me the stopper and took advantage of the crowd in the shop to pick my pocket of it.That only shows that we are watched more closely than I thought and by adversaries of the first rank.But, once more, be easy.Honest men always come by their own...Have you anything else to tell me?""Yes.Some one came yesterday evening, while M.Daubrecq was out.Isaw lights reflected upon the trees in the garden.""The portress' bedroom?"
"The portress was up."
"Then it was some of those detective-fellows; they are still hunting.
I'll see you later, Victoire.You must let me in again.""What! You want to..."
"What do I risk? Your room is on the third floor.Daubrecq suspects nothing.""But the others!"
"The others? If it was to their interest to play me a trick, they'd have tried before now.I'm in their way, that's all.They're not afraid of me.So till later, Victoire, at five o'clock exactly."One further surprise awaited Lupin.In the evening his old nurse told him that, having opened the drawer of the bedside table from curiosity, she had found the crystal stopper there again.
Lupin was no longer to be excited by these miraculous incidents.He simply said to himself:
"So it's been brought back.And the person who brought it back and who enters this house by some unexplained means considered, as I did, that the stopper ought not to disappear.And yet Daubrecq, who knows that he is being spied upon to his very bedroom, has once more left the stopper in a drawer, as though he attached no importance to it at all! Now what is one to make of that?
Though Lupin did not make anything of it, nevertheless he could not escape certain arguments, certain associations of ideas that gave him the same vague foretaste of light which one receives on approaching the outlet of a tunnel.
"It is inevitable, as the case stands," he thought, "that there must soon be an encounter between myself and the others.From that moment Ishall be master of the situation."
Five days passed, during which Lupin did not glean the slightest particular.On the sixth day Daubrecq received a visit, in the small hours, from a gentleman, Laybach the deputy, who, like his colleagues, dragged himself at his feet in despair and, when all was done, handed him twenty thousand francs.
Two more days; and then, one night, posted on the landing of the second floor, Lupin heard the creaking of a door, the front-door, as he perceived, which led from the hall into the garden.In the darkness he distinguished, or rather divined, the presence of two persons, who climbed the stairs and stopped on the first floor, outside Daubrecq's bedroom.
What were they doing there? It was not possible to enter the room, because Daubrecq bolted his door every night.Then what were they hoping?
Manifestly, a handiwork of some kind was being performed, as Lupin discovered from the dull sounds of rubbing against the door.Then words, uttered almost beneath a whisper, reached him:
"Is it all right?"
"Yes, quite, but, all the same, we'd better put it off till to-morrow, because..."Lupin did not hear the end of the sentence.The men were already groping their way downstairs.The hall-door was closed, very gently, and then the gate.
"It's curious, say what one likes," thought Lupin."Here is a house in which Daubrecq carefully conceals his rascalities and is on his guard, not without good reason, against spies; and everybody walks in and out as in a booth at a fair.Victoire lets me in, the portress admits the emissaries of the police: that's well and good; but who is playing false in these people's favour? Are we to suppose that they are acting alone?
But what fearlessness! And how well they know their way about!"In the afternoon, during Daubrecq's absence, he examined the door of the first-floor bedroom.And, at the first glance, he understood: one of the lower panels had been skilfully cut out and was only held in place by invisible tacks.The people, therefore, who had done this work were the same who had acted at his two places, in the Rue Matiguon and the Rue Chateaubriand.
He also found that the work dated back to an earlier period and that, as in his case, the opening had been prepared beforehand, in anticipation of favourable circumstances or of some immediate need.
