Page:The Teeth of the Tiger - Leblanc - 1914.djvu/469

 Though he had so carefully prepared the catastrophe, and brought it about with such determination, its results seemed suddenly to stagger him. He hunted for the girl with terrified eyes. He stooped down and crawled round the chaos shrouded in clouds of dust. He looked through the interstices. He saw nothing.

Florence was buried under the ruins, dead, invisible, as he had anticipated.

"Dead!" he said, with staring eyes and a look of stupor on his face. "Dead! Florence is dead!"

Once again he lapsed into a state of absolute prostration, which gradually slackened his legs, brought him to the ground and paralyzed him. His two efforts, following so close upon each other and ending in disasters of which he had been the immediate witness, seemed to have robbed him of all his remaining energy.

With no hatred in him, since Arsène Lupin no longer lived, with no love, since Florence was no more, he looked like a man who has lost his last motive for existence.

Twice his lips uttered the name of Florence. Was he regretting his friend? Having reached the last of that appalling series of crimes, was he imagining the several stages, each marked with a corpse? Was something like a conscience making itself felt deep down in that brute? Or was it not rather the sort of physical torpor that numbs the sated beast of prey, glutted with flesh, drunk with blood, a torpor that is almost voluptuousness?

Nevertheless, he once more repeated Florence's name, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

He lay long in this condition, gloomy and motionless; and when, after again taking a few sips of his medicine, he went back to his work, he did so mechanically, with