The Teeth of the Tiger Maurice Leblanc (best novels of all time .txt) 📖

bottom latch and seized the handle of the carriage door. At the same moment he lost his balance and was pulled off by the furious ticket collector and by Mazeroux, who bellowed:

“Why, you’re mad, Chief! you’ll kill yourself!”

“Let go, you ass!” roared Don Luis. “It’s they! Let me be, can’t you!”

The carriages filed past. He tried to jump on to another footboard. But the two men were clinging to him, some railway porters came to their assistance, the stationmaster ran up. The train moved out of the station.

“Idiots!” he shouted. “Boobies! Pack of asses that you are, couldn’t you leave me alone? Oh, I swear to Heaven⁠—!”

With a blow of his left fist he knocked the ticket collector down; with a blow of his right he sent Mazeroux spinning; and shaking off the porters and the stationmaster, he rushed along the platform to the luggage-room, where he took flying leaps over several batches of trunks, packing-cases, and portmanteaux.

“Oh, the perfect fool!” he mumbled, on seeing that Mazeroux had let the power down in the car. “Trust him, if there’s any blunder going!”

Don Luis had driven his car at a fine rate during the day; but that night the pace became vertiginous. A very meteor flashed through the suburbs of Le Mans and hurled itself along the highroad. Perenna had but one thought in his head: to reach the next station, which was Chartres, before the two accomplices, and to fly at Sauverand’s throat. He saw nothing but that: the savage grip of his two hands that would set Florence Levasseur’s lover gasping in his agony.

“Her lover! Her lover!” he muttered, gnashing his teeth. “Why, of course, that explains everything! They have combined against their accomplice, Marie Fauville; and it is she alone, poor devil, who will pay for the horrible series of crimes!”

“Is she their accomplice even?” he wondered. “Who knows? Who knows if that pair of demons are not capable, after killing Hippolyte and his son, of having plotted the ruin of Marie Fauville, the last obstacle that stood between them and the Mornington inheritance? Doesn’t everything point to that conclusion? Didn’t I find the list of dates in a book belonging to Florence? Don’t the facts prove that the letters were communicated by Florence?⁠ ⁠…

“Those letters accuse Gaston Sauverand as well. But how does that affect things? He no longer loves Marie, but Florence. And Florence loves him. She is his accomplice, his counsellor, the woman who will live by his side and benefit by his fortune.⁠ ⁠… True, she sometimes pretends to be defending Marie Fauville. Playacting! Or perhaps remorse, fright at the thought of all that she has done against her rival, and of the fate that awaits the unhappy woman!

“But she is in love with Sauverand. And she continues to carry on the struggle without pity and without respite. And that is why she wanted to kill me, the interloper whose insight she dreaded. And she hates me and loathes me⁠—”

To the hum of the engine and the sighing of the trees, which bent down at the approach, he murmured incoherent words. The recollection of the two lovers clasped in each other’s arms made him cry aloud with jealousy. He wanted to be revenged. For the first time in his life, the longing, the feverish craving to kill set his brain boiling.

“Hang it all!” he growled suddenly. “The engine’s misfiring! Mazeroux! Mazeroux!”

“What, Chief! Did you know that I was here?” exclaimed Mazeroux, emerging from the shadow in which he sat hidden.

“You jackass! Do you think that the first idiot who comes along can hang on to the footboard of my car without my knowing it? You must be feeling comfortable down there!”

“I’m suffering agonies, and I’m shivering with cold.”

“That’s right, it’ll teach you. Tell me, where did you buy your petrol?”

“At the grocer’s.”

“At a thief’s, you mean. It’s muck. The plugs are getting sooted up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can’t you hear the misfiring, you fool?”

The motor, indeed, at moments seemed to hesitate. Then everything became normal again. Don Luis forced the pace. Going downhill they appeared to be hurling themselves into space. One of the lamps went out. The other was not as bright as usual. But nothing diminished Don Luis’s ardour.

There was more misfiring, fresh hesitations, followed by efforts, as though the engine was pluckily striving to do its duty. And then suddenly came the final failure, a dead stop at the side of the road, a stupid breakdown.

“Confound it!” roared Don Luis. “We’re stuck! Oh, this is the last straw!”

“Come, Chief, we’ll put it right. And we’ll pick up Sauverand at Paris instead of Chartres, that’s all.”

“You infernal ass! The repairs will take an hour! And then she’ll break down again. It’s not petrol, it’s filth they’ve foisted on you.”

The country stretched around them to endless distances, with no other lights than the stars that riddled the darkness of the sky.

Don Luis was stamping with fury. He would have liked to kick the motor to pieces. He would have liked⁠—

It was Mazeroux who “caught it,” in the hapless sergeant’s own words. Don Luis took him by the shoulders, shook him, loaded him with insults and abuse and, finally, pushing him against the roadside bank and holding him there, said, in a broken voice of mingled hatred and sorrow.

“It’s she, do you hear, Mazeroux? it’s Sauverand’s companion who has done everything. I’m telling you now, because I’m afraid of relenting. Yes, I am a weak coward. She has such a grave face, with the eyes of a child. But it’s she, Mazeroux. She lives in my house. Remember her name: Florence Levasseur. You’ll arrest her, won’t you? I might not be able to. My courage fails me when I look at her. The fact is that I have never loved before.

“There have been other women⁠—but no, those were fleeting fancies⁠—not even that: I don’t even remember the past! Whereas Florence⁠—! You must arrest her, Mazeroux. You must deliver me from her eyes. They burn into me like poison.