“Can one anticipate things like that?” he said. “When we parted, my heart bled to think that you, my son, must fall into the hands of justice, and that your feet must tread the path that led to the scaffold or, at least, to the galleys; I wondered how I could save you; then chance, chance, mark you, brought that poor drowned body in my way: I saw the fortunate coincidence of a faint resemblance, and resolved to pass it off for you; I got those woman’s clothes which you exchanged for yours, buried the dead man’s clothes and put yours on the corpse. Do you know, Charles, that I have suffered too? Do you know what agony and torture I, as a man of honour, have endured? Have you not heard the story of my appearance at the Assizes and of my humiliation in court?”
“You did all that!” Charles Rambert murmured. “Strange chance, indeed!” Then his tone changed and he sobbed. “Oh, my poor father, what an awful fatality it all is!” Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “But I committed no crime, papa! I never killed the Marquise de Langrune! Oh, do believe me! Why, you have just this minute said that you know I am not mad!”
Etienne Rambert looked at his son with distress.
“Not mad, my poor boy? Yet perhaps you were mad—then?” Then he stopped abruptly. “Don’t let us go over all that again! I forbid it absolutely.” He leaned back on his writing-table, folded his arms and asked sternly: “Have you come here only to tell me that?”
The curt question seemed to affect the lad strangely. All his former audacity dropped from him. Nervously he stammered:
“I can’t remain a woman any longer!”
“Why not?” snapped Etienne Rambert.
“I can’t.”
The two men looked at each other in silence, as if trying to read one another’s thoughts. Then Etienne Rambert seemed to see the inner meaning of the words his son had just said.
“I see!” he answered slowly. “I understand. … The Royal Palace Hotel, where Mlle. Jeanne held a trusted post, has just been the scene of a daring robbery. Obviously, if anyone could prove that Charles Rambert and the new cashier were one and the same person—”
But the young fellow understood the insinuation and burst out:
“I did not commit that robbery!”
“You did!” Etienne Rambert insisted: “you did. I read the newspaper accounts of the robbery, read them with all the agony that only a father like me with a son like you could feel. The detectives and the magistrates were at a loss to find the key to the mystery, but I saw clearly and at once what the solution of the mystery was. And I knew and understood because I knew it was—you!”
“I did not commit the robbery,” Charles Rambert shouted. “Do you mean to begin all your horrible insinuations again, as you did at Beaulieu?” he demanded in almost threatening tones. “What evil spirit obsesses you? Why will you insist that your unhappy son is a criminal? I had nothing to do with those robberies at the hotel; I swear I had not, father!”
M. Rambert shrugged his shoulders and clasped his hands.
“What have I done,” he muttered, “to have so heavy a cross laid on me?” He turned again to his son. “Your defence is childish. What is the use of mere denials? Words don’t mean anything without proofs to support them.” The lad was silent, seeming to think it useless to attempt to convince a father who appeared so certain of his guilt, and also crushed by the thought of all that had happened at the hotel. His father betrayed some uneasiness at a new thought that had come into his mind. “I told you not to come to me again except as a last resource, when punishment was actually overtaking you, or when you had proved your innocence: why are you here now? Has something happened that I do not know about? What has happened? What else have you done? Speak!”
Charles Rambert answered in a toneless voice, as if hypnotised:
“There has been a detective in the hotel for the last few days. He called himself Henri Verbier, and was disguised, but I knew him, for I had seen him too lately, and in circumstances too deeply impressed upon my mind for me to be able to forget him, although I only saw him then for a few minutes.”
“What do you mean?” said the elder man uneasily.
“I mean that Juve was at the Royal Palace Hotel.”
“Juve?” exclaimed Etienne Rambert. “And then—go on!”
“Juve, disguised as Henri Verbier, subjected me to a kind of examination, and I don’t know what conclusion he came to. Then, this evening, barely two hours ago, he came up to my room and had a long talk, and while he was trying to get some information from me about a matter that I know nothing about—for I swear, papa, that I had nothing whatever to do with the robbery—he came up to me and took hold of me as a man does when he wants to make up to a woman. And I lost my head! I felt that in another minute all would be up with me—that he would establish my identity, which he perhaps suspected already—and I thought of all you had done to save my life by representing that I was dead, and—”
Charles paused for breath. His father’s fists were clenched and his face contracted.
“Go on!” he said, “go on, but speak lower!”
“As Juve came close,” Charles went on, “I dealt him a terrific blow on the forehead, and he fell like a stone. And I got away!”
“Is he dead?” Etienne Rambert whispered.
“I don’t know.”
For ten minutes Charles Rambert remained alone in the study, where his father had left him, thinking deeply. Then the door opened and Etienne
