He glanced through the paper, which was still clutched in Clarisse’ hand, and read the following lines:
“The strictest measures have been taken to keep order at the execution of Gilbert and Vaucheray, lest Arsène Lupin should make an attempt to rescue his accomplices from the last penalty. At twelve o’clock to-night a cordon of troops will be drawn across all the approaches to the Santé Prison. As already stated, the execution will take place outside the prison-walls, in the square formed by the Boulevard Arago and the Rue de la Santé.
“We have succeeded in obtaining some details of the attitude of the two condemned men. Vaucheray observes a stolid sullenness and is awaiting the fatal event with no little courage:
“‘Crikey,’ he says, ‘I can’t say I’m delighted; but I’ve got to go through it and I shall keep my end up.’ And he adds, ‘Death I don’t care a hang about! What worries me is the thought that they’re going to cut my head off. Ah, if the governor could only hit on some trick to send me straight off to the next world before I had time to say knife! A drop of Prussic acid, governor, if you please!’
“Gilbert’s calmness is even more impressive, especially when we remember how he broke down at the trial. He retains an unshaken confidence in the omnipotence of Arsène Lupin:
“‘The governor shouted to me before everybody not to be afraid, that he was there, that he answered for everything. Well, I’m not afraid. I shall rely on him until the last day, until the last minute, at the very foot of the scaffold. I know the governor! There’s no danger with him. He has promised and he will keep his word. If my head were off, he’d come and clap it on my shoulders and firmly! Arsène Lupin allow his chum Gilbert to die? Not he! Excuse my humour!’
“There is a certain touching frankness in all this enthusiasm which is not without a dignity of its own. We shall see if Arsène Lupin deserves the confidence so blindly placed in him.”
Lupin was hardly able to finish reading the article for the tears that dimmed his eyes: tears of affection, tears of pity, tears of distress.
No, he did not deserve the confidence of his chum Gilbert. Certainly, he had performed impossibilities; but there are circumstances in which we must perform more than impossibilities, in which we must show ourselves stronger than fate; and, this time, fate had been stronger than he. Ever since the first day and throughout this lamentable adventure, events had gone contrary to his anticipations, contrary to logic itself. Clarisse and he, though pursuing an identical aim, had wasted weeks in fighting each other. Then, at the moment when they were uniting their efforts, a series of ghastly disasters had come one after the other: the kidnapping of little Jacques, Daubrecq’s disappearance, his imprisonment in the Lovers’ Tower, Lupin’s wound, his enforced inactivity, followed by the cunning manoeuvres that dragged Clarisse—and Lupin after her—to the south, to Italy. And then, as a crowning catastrophe, when, after prodigies of will-power, after miracles of perseverance, they were entitled to think that the Golden Fleece was won, it all came to nothing. The list of the Twenty-seven had no more value than the most insignificant scrap of paper.
“The game’s up!” said Lupin. “It’s an absolute defeat. What if I do revenge myself on Daubrecq, ruin him and destroy him? He is the real victor, once Gilbert is going to die.”