The Lerouge Case by Émile Gaboriau (best classic books TXT) 📕

more tipsy than a cork; so much so, that he lost nearly everything he had with him: his overcoat, purse, umbrella, cigar-case⁠—”

Old Tabaret couldn’t sit and listen any longer; he jumped to his feet like a raving madman. “Miserable wretch!” he cried, “infamous scoundrel! It is he; but I have him!”

And he rushed out, leaving Juliette so terrified that she called her maid.

“Child,” said she, “I have just made some awful blunder, have let some secret out. I am sure that something dreadful is going to happen; I feel it. That old rogue was no friend of Noel’s, he came to circumvent me, to lead me by the nose; and he succeeded. Without knowing it I must have spoken against Noel. What can I have said? I have thought carefully, and can remember nothing; but he must be warned though. I will write him a line, while you find a messenger to take it.”

Old Tabaret was soon in his cab and hurrying towards the Prefecture of Police. Noel an assassin! His hate was without bounds, as formerly had been his confiding affection. He had been cruelly deceived, unworthily duped, by the vilest and the most criminal of men. He thirsted for vengeance; he asked himself what punishment would be great enough for the crime.

“For he not only assassinated Claudine,” thought he, “but he so arranged the whole thing as to have an innocent man accused and condemned. And who can say that he did not kill his poor mother?”

He regretted the abolition of torture, the refined cruelty of the middle ages: quartering, the stake, the wheel. The guillotine acts so quickly that the condemned man has scarcely time to feel the cold steel cutting through his muscles; it is nothing more than a fillip on the neck. Through trying so much to mitigate the pain of death, it has now become little more than a joke, and might be abolished altogether. The certainty of confounding Noel, of delivering him up to justice, of taking vengeance upon him, alone kept old Tabaret up.

“It is clear,” he murmured, “that the wretch forgot his things at the railway station, in his haste to rejoin his mistress. Will they still be found there? If he has had the prudence to go boldly, and ask for them under a false name, I can see no further proofs against him. Madame Chaffour’s evidence won’t help me. The hussy, seeing her lover in danger, will deny what she has just told me; she will assert that Noel left her long after ten o’clock. But I cannot think he has dared to go to the railway station again.”

About half way down the Rue Richelieu, M. Tabaret was seized with a sudden giddiness. “I am going to have an attack, I fear,” thought he. “If I die, Noel will escape, and will be my heir. A man should always keep his will constantly with him, to be able to destroy it, if necessary.”

A few steps further on, he saw a doctor’s plate on a door; he stopped the cab, and rushed into the house. He was so excited, so beside himself, his eyes had such a wild expression, that the doctor was almost afraid of his peculiar patient, who said to him hoarsely: “Bleed me!”

The doctor ventured an objection; but already the old fellow had taken off his coat, and drawn up one of his shirtsleeves. “Bleed me!” he repeated. “Do you want me to die?”

The doctor finally obeyed, and old Tabaret came out quieted and relieved.

An hour later, armed with the necessary power, and accompanied by a policeman, he proceeded to the lost property office at the St. Lazare railway station, to make the necessary search. It resulted as he had expected. He learnt that, on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, there had been found in one of the second class carriages, of train No. 45, an overcoat and an umbrella. He was shown the articles; and he at once recognised them as belonging to Noel. In one of the pockets of the overcoat, he found a pair of lavender kid gloves, frayed and soiled, as well as a return ticket from Chatou, which had not been used.

In hurrying on, in pursuit of the truth, old Tabaret knew only too well, what it was. His conviction, unwillingly formed when Clergeot had told him of Noel’s follies, had since been strengthened in a number of other ways. When with Juliette, he had felt positively sure, and yet, at this last moment, when doubt had become impossible, he was, on beholding the evidence arrayed against Noel, absolutely thunderstruck.

“Onwards!” he cried at last. “Now to arrest him.”

And, without losing an instant, he hastened to the Palais de Justice, where he hoped to find the investigating magistrate. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, M. Daburon was still in his office. He was conversing with the Count de Commarin, having related to him the facts revealed by Pierre Lerouge whom the count had believed dead many years before.

Old Tabaret entered like a whirlwind, too distracted to notice the presence of a stranger. “Sir,” he cried, stuttering with suppressed rage, “we have discovered the real assassin! It is he, my adopted son, my heir, Noel!”

“Noel!” repeated M. Daburon, rising. And then in a lower tone, he added, “I suspected it.”

“A warrant is necessary at once,” continued the old fellow. “If we lose a minute, he will slip through our fingers. He will know that he is discovered, if his mistress has time to warn him of my visit. Hasten, sir, hasten!”

M. Daburon opened his lips to ask an explanation; but the old detective continued: “That is not all. An innocent man, Albert, is still in prison.”

“He will not be so an hour longer,” replied the magistrate; “a moment before your arrival, I had made arrangements to have him released. We must now occupy ourselves with the other one.”

Neither old Tabaret nor M. Daburon had noticed the disappearance of the Count de Commarin. On hearing Noel’s name mentioned, he gained the door