We were approaching Marseilles.
Marseilles!
The farewells were heartrending, although neither Rouletabille nor the Lady in Black uttered a word.
And as the train bore us away we saw her standing on the platform in the station, without a movement or gesture, her arms hanging at her side, looking in her sombre draperies like a statue of mourning and of sorrow.
I saw in front of me Rouletabille’s shoulders shaken with sobs.
* * * * *
Lyons. We could not sleep. We alighted from the train and walked about the station. Both of us recalled the moment when we had been there before—only a few days past—when we were rushing to the rescue of the most unhappy of women. My thoughts plunged once more into the memories of the tragedy and I knew that Rouletabille’s were following the same track. And now Rouletabille spoke—spoke in a voice which he tried to make sound careless and light hearted and which made me understand that he was endeavoring to efface from his mind the thought of the grief which had made him sob like a little child only a short while ago.
“Old man!” he said, with a smile, throwing his arm across my shoulder. “That Brignolles was really a beast!” and he looked at me with such an air of reproach that he almost succeeded in making me believe for a moment that I had ever taken the creature for an honest man.
And then he told me everything—all the marvellous, horrible story which I am compressing here into a few lines. Larsan had had need of some relative of Darzac in order that he might obtain the necessary signature for the incarceration of the Sorbonne professor in a madhouse. And he discovered Brignolles. He could not have fallen upon a better man for his purpose. Everyone knows how simple it is, even to-day, to have a human being, no matter who he may be, locked up in a cell. The desire of a relative and the signature of a medical man is sufficient in France, impossible as the thing appears, for the accomplishment of this task which may be performed with the utmost celerity. The matter of a signature never embarrassed Larsan in his life. He forged one—that of an eminent alienist—and Brignolles, richly reimbursed, charged himself with the rest. When Brignolles came to Paris, he was already a party to the combination. Larsan had formed his plan—to take Darzac’s place before the wedding. The accident to the young professor’s eyes had been, as I had believed from the first, the result of design. Brignolles had been directed to manage in some manner so that Darzac’s eyes might be sufficiently injured that Larsan, when he took his place, might have in his trickery the important adjunct of dark spectacles, or, failing spectacles, which one cannot wear always, the right to sit in the shadow without arousing suspicion.
The departure of Darzac for the Midi must have strangely facilitated the plans of the two villains. It was not until the end of his sojourn at San Remo that Darzac had been, by the efforts of Larsan who had never ceased to spy upon him, actually dragged to the lunatic asylum. He had been assisted materially in this affair by that “special police force” which has nothing to do with police officials and which puts itself at the disposal of families in certain disagreeable cases which demand as much discretion as rapidity in their execution.