“Oh, do be quiet, do be quiet! He’ll come!”
“Capital!” said Lupin. “The good woman is an accomplice of these as well. By Jingo, what a pluralist!”
He rushed across to her and, taking her by the scruff of the neck, hissed:
“Go and tell them I’ve got the child.... They can come and fetch it at my place, Rue Chateaubriand.”
A little way off, in the avenue, stood a taxi which Lupin presumed to be engaged by the gang. Speaking authoritatively, as though he were one of the accomplices, he stepped into the cab and told the man to drive him home.
“Well,” he said to the child, “that wasn’t much of a shake-up, was it?... What do you say to going to bye-bye on the gentleman’s bed?”
As his servant, Achille, was asleep, Lupin made the little chap comfortable and stroked his hair for him. The child seemed numbed. His poor face was as though petrified into a stiff expression made up, at one and the same time, of fear and the wish not to show fear, of the longing to scream and a pitiful effort not to scream.
“Cry, my pet, cry,” said Lupin. “It’ll do you good to cry.”
The child did not cry, but the voice was so gentle and so kind that he relaxed his tense muscles; and, now that his eyes were calmer and his mouth less contorted, Lupin, who was examining him closely, found something that he recognized, an undoubted resemblance.
This again confirmed certain facts which he suspected and which he had for some time been linking in his mind. Indeed, unless he was mistaken, the position was becoming very different and he would soon assume the direction of events. After that....