He had just left his bath, and assumed a dressing-gown, when Otto handed him a letter from the duchess. He hastily opened the envelope and read: “You are safe. You know everything. I am dying. Farewell. I loved you.”
With two bounds he reached his wife’s apartments. The outer door was locked: he burst it open; but he came to late. Blanche was dead—poisoned, like Marie-Anne; but she had procured a drug having an instantaneous effect, and extended on her couch, clad in her wonted apparel, her hands folded over her breast, she seemed only asleep. A tear glistened in Martial’s eye. “Poor, unhappy woman!” he murmured; “may God forgive you as I forgive you—you whose crime has been so frightfully expiated here below!”
EPILOGUE.
Safe, in his own princely mansion, and surrounded by an army of retainers, the Duke de Sairmeuse had triumphantly exclaimed: “We have outwitted Lecoq!”
In this he was right; for the young detective was certainly nonplussed for the time being; but when his grace fancied himself for ever beyond this wily, keen-witted, aspiring agent’s reach, he was most decidedly wrong. Lecoq was not the man to sit down with folded hands and brood over the humiliation of defeat. Before he went to old Tabaret, he was beginning to recover from his despondency; and when he left that experienced detective’s presence, he had regained his courage, energy, and command over his faculties. “Well, my worthy friend,” he remarked to Father Absinthe, who was trotting along by his side, “you heard what the great Monsieur Tabaret said, didn’t you? So you see I was right.”
But his companion evinced no enthusiasm. “Yes, you were right,” he responded, in woe-begone tones.
“Do you think we are ruined by two or three mistakes? Nonsense! I will soon turn to-day’s defeat into a glorious victory.”
“Ah! you might do so perhaps, if—they don’t dismiss us from the force.”
This doleful remark recalled Lecoq to a sense of his present position. He and Absinthe had allowed a prisoner to slip through their fingers. That was vexatious, it is true; but, on the other hand, they had captured a most notorious criminal—Joseph Couturier. Surely there was some comfort in that. Still, of course, they both might be dismissed—and yet Lecoq could have borne the prospect, dismal as it was, if it had not been for the thought that dismissal would for ever prevent him from following up the Poivriere affair. What would his superiors say when he told them that May and the Duke de Sairmeuse were one and the same person. They would, no doubt, shrug their shoulders and turn up their noses. “Still, M. Segmuller will believe me,” he thought. “But will he dare to take any action in the matter without patent evidence before him?”
This was very unlikely, as Lecoq fully realized, and for a moment he asked himself if he and his fellows could not make a descent on the Hotel de Sairmeuse, and, on some pretext or other, compel the duke to show himself. It would then be easy to identify him as the prisoner May. However, after a little thought he dismissed the idea. “It would be a stupid expedient!” he exclaimed. “Two such men as the duke and his accomplice are not likely to be caught napping. They are prepared for such a visit, and we should only have our labour for our pains.”