MEMOIRS OF
ARSÈNE LUPIN

By the Same Author

The Woman of Mystery
The Golden Triangle
The Secret of Sarek
Eyes of Innocence
The Three Eyes
The Eight Strokes of the Clock
The Tremendous Event
The Secret Tomb

“Yes,” declared Ralph, “He’s murdered Bridget Rousselin.”

MEMOIRS OF
ARSÈNE LUPIN

BY
MAURICE LE BLANC

Frontispiece by
GEORGE W. GAGE

NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1925,
By THE MACAULAY COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

This is the story of the first adventure of Arsène Lupin, and undoubtedly it would have been published before the stories of the others if he had not so often and so resolutely opposed it.

“No,” he would say, “there are one or two little matters yet to be settled between the Countess of Cagliostro and me. We must wait.”

The waiting lasted longer than he foresaw. More than a quarter of a century passed before the final settlement; and only to-day am I permitted to relate the frightful duel of love and hate which brought a boy of twenty to grips with Cagliostro’s daughter.

CONTENTS

MEMOIRS OF
ARSÈNE LUPIN

MEMOIRS OF ARSÈNE LUPIN

CHAPTER I.
ARSÈNE LUPIN AT TWENTY

Ralph d’Andresy extinguished the lamp, and thrust his bicycle behind a bank. At that moment the clock of Benouville struck three.

In the deep shadow of the night he followed the lane which led to the estate of La Haie d’Etigues and so came to the wall which ran round it. He waited a little—the sound of horses pawing the ground, of wheels which rang on the pavement of the court-yard, the sound of harness bells. Then the two leaves of the big door were thrown open and a carriage passed out. It passed so quickly that Ralph barely caught the sound of men’s voices and perceived the barrel of a gun before the vehicle reached the high road and took the way to Etretat.

“Come,” said he. “Shooting gulls is an attractive sport and the rock where they shoot them is a long way off. At last I’m going to know the meaning of this improvised shooting-party and of all these odd comings and goings.”

He took his way along the boundary wall to the left, turned a corner and then another, and stopped forty yards along the wall. In his hand he held two keys. The first of them opened a small, low door. He went through it up a staircase hollowed out of the wall, half fallen to ruin, which, running along its left wing, had formed one of the old defences of the château. The second key opened for him a secret door in the first floor of the château itself.

He lit a small bull’s-eye lantern and without taking any special precautions, since he knew that the staff of servants lived in the other wing and that Clarice d’Etigues, the only daughter of the Baron, had her rooms on the second floor, went down a passage which brought him to a large study. In that very room some weeks previously he had asked the Baron for his daughter’s hand in marriage. His proposal had been received with an explosion of indignant anger of which he retained a most disagreeable recollection.

A mirror showed him the pale face of a young man, even paler than usual. However, inured to emotion, he remained master of himself and coolly addressed himself to his task.

He was not long about it. In the course of his interview with the Baron he had observed that that gentleman now and then cast a glance at a large mahogany roll-top desk of which the top had not been drawn down. Ralph knew all the places in which it is possible to put a secret drawer and all the mechanical devices that work such secret drawers. In a very short time he discovered in a cranny of the desk a tiny drawer which held a letter written on very thin paper and rolled up into the shape of a cigarette. No signature. No address.

He studied this letter, which at first appeared to him too commonplace for anyone to have taken so much trouble to hide it, and after working on it with the most minute care, giving the most earnest consideration to certain words which seemed significant and ignoring certain phrases evidently intended to fill the gaps between them, he was able to disentangle the following:

I found at Rouen traces of our enemy and I have had published in the local newspapers a story that a peasant in the vicinity of Etretat has dug up in his field an old copper candlestick with seven branches. At once she telegraphed to the livery stable at Etretat to send, at three o’clock in the afternoon on the twelfth, a brougham to meet her at Fécamp station.

On the morning of that day I will see that the livery stable receives another telegram, countermanding this order. Therefore it will be your brougham that she will find at Fécamp station and which will bring her to us, under a sufficient escort, at the very moment at which we are holding our meeting. We shall be able to constitute ourselves a tribunal and pronounce upon her a relentless sentence.

In those days in which the greatness of the end justified the means, the punishment would have been immediate. Dead men tell no tales. Choose what end you please; but remember the conclusions to which we came during our last interview and bear in mind that the success of our enterprises and our very existence itself depends on this infernal creature.

Be prudent. Arrange a shooting-party to divert suspicion. I will arrive by way of le Havre at four o’clock exactly, with two of our friends. Do not destroy this letter. You will give it back to me.

“An excess of precaution is a mistake,” thought Ralph. “If the Baron’s correspondent had not been so distrustful, the Baron would have burnt this letter and I should not have known about this scheme of abduction, this scheme of an illegal tribunal and even, heaven help us! this scheme of assassination.... Hang it! My future father-in-law, devout Catholic though he may be, seems to me to be entangled in combinations that are not Catholic at all.... Will he go as far as murder?... All this is devilishly serious and may very well give me a hold on him.”

He rubbed his hands. The business gave him considerable satisfaction and excited in him no great astonishment, since for several days he had been noticing some queer facts. He resolved then to return to his inn and sleep there and then to come back in good time to learn what the Baron and his guests were plotting and who this “infernal creature” was whom they desired to suppress.

He rerolled the letter, cigarette-wise, carefully, and put it back in the drawer, but, instead of departing, he sat down in front of a small round table on which there was a photograph of Clarice, and drawing it directly in front of him contemplated it with a profound tenderness. Clarice d’Etigues, very little younger than he was himself ... eighteen. Voluptuous lips ... eyes full of dreams ... a clear-skinned, pink, and delicate fair face, crowned by a mass of fair hair such as the hair of those little girls who run about the roads in the neighborhood of Caux ... and such a sweet expression and such charm!

Ralph’s eyes grew fonder and fonder as he gazed. Thus, naturally, the desire came to him to be with the object of his adoration. Why not? Clarice was alone in her isolated suite of rooms above him. Twice already, making use of the keys which she had entrusted to him, he had made his way to them in the afternoon. What was there to hinder him now? No sound they would make could reach the servants. The Baron would not return till the afternoon. Why go away? Compromise her? Why should he compromise her? No one could possibly know that he had been with her.

Besides, it was such a delightful night. The moon, nearly at the full, was shining with all its brightness. On such a night, under an even brighter moon and clearer sky, Romeo had made love to Juliet. He went quickly, but quietly, up the stairs.

Before the closed door of her boudoir he hesitated. Suppose someone should learn that he had been with her? No one could. He knocked with a rather uncertain hand. He waited. He knocked again louder and again waited. There was a sound in the room. The door opened, revealing Clarice, candle in hand, dressed in a lace peignoir, her charming face enframed in the silken mass of fair hair loosely held together by a ribbon.

“Ralph?” she murmured softly. “It seemed impossible. But I knew it was you. But—you oughtn’t to have come.”

“I couldn’t keep away. I wanted so to be with you. It’s quite safe. No one saw me come. No one can know I’m here,” he said in pleasing accents.

She smiled at him adorably and stepped back. He entered and shut the door and turned the key. He took the candle from her, blew it out, and set it on the table. Then, gently, he put his arms around her, drew her to him, and kissed her eyes and her lips with long, lingering kisses.

Then he drew her to a couch in front of the long, low window, and they sank down on to it, his arm round her waist, and her arm round his neck; and in the intervals between their languorous, passionate kisses, they gazed down on the plain and across the sea bathed in the silver radiance of the queen of the night.

They sat, murmuring to one another the lovely thoughts which their nearness in the night evoked in their ardent souls, thrilling and intoxicated, till the moonlight faded in the golden dawn and the sun rose over the seat.

They had loved one another for three months—since the day of their meeting in the south, where Clarice was spending some time at the home of a school-girl friend. Forthwith they felt themselves united by a bond, which was for him the most delightful thing in the world, for her the symbol of slavery which she cherished more and more fondly. From the beginning he appeared to her to be an extraordinarily elusive creature, mysterious, one whom she would never understand. He grieved her by occasional moods of flippancy, of malicious irony, of deep gloom. But in spite of that, what a fascination he had! What a gaiety! What bursts of enthusiasm and youthful exaltation!

All his faults assumed the appearance of qualities in excess; and his vices had the air of virtues ignorant of themselves and about to expand.

After her return to Normandy she was surprised one morning to perceive the slender figure of the young man, perched on a wall in front of her windows. He had chosen an inn a few kilometers away, and from there, almost every day, he came on his bicycle to find her in the neighborhood of La Haie d’Etigues.

A motherless girl, Clarice was not fortunate in her father, a hard man, gloomy in character, a fanatic in religion, inordinately proud of his title, greedy of gain to the point that the farmers who rented his land looked upon him as an enemy.

When Ralph, who had not even been introduced to him, had the audacity to ask his daughter’s hand in marriage, the Baron fell into such a fury with this beardless suitor, without a career and without relations, that he would have horse-whipped him if the young man had not quietly held him with something of the gaze of a tamer of wild beasts.

It was in consequence of this interview and to efface the memory of it from Ralph’s spirit that Clarice had entrusted to him the two keys which gave him secret access to her suite.

Later in the morning, pretending that she was not feeling well, she had her mid-day déjeuner brought up to her boudoir while Ralph hid himself in a room at the end of the corridor. After the meal they returned to the couch in front of the window and renewed the transports of the magical night.

A fresh breeze, rising from the sea and blowing across the high ground, caressed their faces. In front of them, beyond the great park enclosed by the wall, and among the plains all golden with the blossom of the colza, a depression allowed them to see, on the right, the white line of the high cliffs as far as Fécamp, on the left Etretat Bay, Aval Harbor, and the point of the enormous Needle.

A cloud fell on Clarice’s spirit. The tears welled up into her eyes.

He said to her gently:

“Don’t be sad, my dearest darling. Life is so sweet at our age; and it will be sweeter still for us when we shall have swept away all the obstacles. Don’t be sad.”

She dried her tears and, gazing at him, tried to smile. He was slender as was she, but broad-shouldered, of a build at once elegant and solid. His face, full of character, displayed a mischievous mouth and eyes shining with gaiety. Wearing knickerbockers and an open jacket over a white woollen sweater, he had an air of incredible suppleness.

“Ralph,” she said in a tone of distress, “at this very moment even while you are looking at me, you are not thinking about me! You are not thinking about me any longer, even though you are with me. It hardly seems possible! What are you thinking about, darling?”

He laughed gently and said:

“About your father.”

“About my father?”

“Yes: about the Baron d’Etigues and his guests. How on earth can men of their age waste their time killing off poor innocent birds on a rock?”

“It’s their amusement.”

“Are you sure of that? For my part I’m rather puzzled about the matter. In fact, if we were not in the year of grace 1892 I should be inclined to think rather.... You’re not going to feel hurt?”

“Go on, dear.”

“Well, they have the air of playing at conspirators! Yes; it really is so ... the Marquis de Rolleville, Matthew de la Vaupaliere, Count Oscar de Bennetot, Rufus d’Estiers, etc., all these noble lords of the Caux country try are up to their necks in a conspiracy!”

She looked at him with incredulous eyes.

“You’re talking nonsense, darling,” she murmured.

“But you listen so prettily,” he replied, assured of her complete ignorance of the plot. “You have such a delightful way of waiting for me to tell you serious things.”

“Things about love, darling.”

He drew her to him almost roughly.

“The whole of my life is nothing but love for you, darling. If I have other cares, other ambitions, they are to win you outright. Suppose that your father, this conspiracy discovered, is arrested and condemned to death and all at once I save him. After that how would he be able to refuse me his daughter’s hand?”

“He will give way some day or other, darling.”

“Never! I have no money ... no means of support.”

“You have your name ... Ralph d’Andresy.”

“Not even that.”

“What do you mean?”

“D’Andresy was my mother’s name, which she took again when she became a widow, and at the bidding of her family whom her marriage had outraged.”

“Why?” said Clarice somewhat dumbfounded by these unexpected revelations.

“Why? Because my father was only an outsider ... as poor as Job ... a simple professor ... and a professor of what? Of gymnastics, fencing, and boxing!”

“Then what is your name?”

“An uncommonly vulgar one.”

“What is it?”

“Arsène Lupin.”

“Arsène Lupin?”

“Yes; it’s hardly a brilliant name, is it? And the best thing to do was to change it, don’t you think?”

Clarice appeared overwhelmed. It made no difference what his name was—to her. But in the eyes of the Baron the particle “de” was the very first qualification of a son-in-law.

She murmured however:

“You ought not to have disowned your father. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being a professor.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of at all,” said he, laughing cheerfully, but with a rather hard laugh which hurt Clarice. “And I can assure you that I’ve benefited to the greatest possible extent by the lessons in boxing and gymnastics which he gave me when I was still at the bottle. But it may be that my mother had other reasons for denying the noble fellow. But that is nobody’s business.”

He hugged her with a sudden violence and then began to dance and pirouette. Then coming back to her:

“But smile, little girl—laugh!” he exclaimed. “All this is really very funny. So laugh. Arsène Lupin or Ralph d’Andresy, what on earth does it matter? The main thing is to succeed. And I shall succeed. About that there is no doubt. Every fortune-teller I have ever come across has predicted a great future and universal renown for me. Ralph d’Andresy will be a general, or a minister, or an ambassador.... Always supposing that he does not remain Arsène Lupin. It is an affair settled before the throne of Destiny, agreed on, signed by both parties. I am quite ready. Muscles of steel and a number one brain! Come, would you like me to walk on my hands, or carry you about at arms’ length? Or would you prefer that I took your watch without your perceiving it, or shall I recite by heart Homer in Greek and Milton in English? Heavens, how sweet life is! Ralph d’Andresy ... Arsène Lupin. The statue with two faces! Which of them will be illumined by glory, the sun of those who really live?”

He stopped short. His lightness seemed all at once to chafe him. Silent, he looked round the quiet little room, the security of which he was troubling, as he had troubled the young girl’s pure and peaceful heart; and with one of those unexpected changes which were the charm of his disposition, he knelt down before Clarice and said to her gravely:

“Forgive me. I did wrong to come here.... But it is not my fault.... It is so difficult for me to keep my balance.... Good and evil, they attract me in turn. You must help me, Clarice, to choose my path, and you must forgive me if I miss my way.”

She took his head between her hands and in passionate accents cried:

“I have nothing to forgive you, darling. I’m happy. You will cause me bitter suffering—I’m sure of it—and I accept beforehand and joyfully all those sorrows you will bring upon me. Here, take my photo, and act in such a way that you never need to blush when you look at it. For my part, I shall always be just what I am to-day—your sweetheart and your wife. I love you, Ralph.”

She kissed him on the brow. But even now he was again laughing; and as he rose to his feet, he said:

“You have armed your knight, lady. Behold me henceforth invincible and ready to confound my enemies. Appear, men of Navarre!... I enter the lists!”

Ralph’s plan—let us drop the name of Arsène Lupin since at that moment, ignorant of his destiny, he himself held it in some contempt—Ralph’s plan was very simple. In the park, on the left of the château, and resting against the boundary wall, of which it formerly formed one of the bastions, there was a truncated tower, very low, roofed over, and almost hidden by waves of ivy. Now he had no doubt that the meeting fixed for four o’clock would take place in the great chamber inside it, where the Baron interviewed his tenants. And Ralph had also observed that an opening, an old window or air-hole, looked over the country.

The ascent to it was easy for a young man of his agility. Leaving the château and creeping along under the ivy, he raised himself, thanks to the huge roots, to the opening in the thick wall. He found it deep enough to allow him to stretch himself at full length in it. So placed, nearly twenty feet from the ground, his head hidden by the leaves, he could not be seen, and he could see the whole of the chamber. It was furnished with a score of chairs, a table, and in the middle of it was set a great bench from some church.

Forty minutes later the Baron entered with his friends. Ralph had foreseen exactly what would happen.

The Baron Godfrey d’Etigues enjoyed the muscular development of a strong man of the music-halls. His face was brick-red and the lower part of it was covered with a red beard. His eyes shone with a strongly vital intelligence. He was accompanied by his cousin, whom Ralph knew by sight, Oscar de Bennetot, who had the same air of the Normandy squire, but was of a commoner and duller type. Both of them appeared to be in a state of considerable excitement.

The Baron walked up and down restlessly and ran over the arrangements: “La Vaupaliere, Rolleville and d’Auppegard are on their way to join us. At four o’clock Beaumagnan will arrive with the Prince of Arcola and de Brie, by way of the park of which I have left the big gate open.... And then ... then ... she will arrive ... if by good luck she falls into the trap.”

“That’s doubtful,” murmured Bennetot.

“Why? She has ordered a brougham; the brougham will be there and she will get into it. D’Ormont, who is driving it, drives her here. At the edge of the four cross-roads Rufus d’Estiers jumps on to the step, opens the door, and overpowers the lady. The two of them truss her up. This is bound to happen.”

They came right under Ralph’s hiding-place; so that he caught Bennetot’s murmur:

“And then?”

“Then I explain the situation to our friends, the part that this woman is playing,” growled the Baron.

“And you imagine that you will be able to get them to agree to condemn her?”

“It doesn’t matter whether they agree or whether they don’t; the result will be the same. Beaumagnan demands it. How can we refuse?” said the Baron.

“That man will be the ruin of us,” affirmed Bennetot.

The Baron d’Etigues shrugged his shoulders and protested:

“We need a man like him to struggle against a woman like her. Is everything ready?”

“Yes. The two boats are on the beach at the bottom of the priests’ staircase. The smaller is scuttled and will sink ten minutes after it is set afloat.”

“You have put a stone in it?” asked the Baron.

“Yes, a good-sized boulder with a hole in it, through which you can run the rope.”

They were silent, casting uneasy glances at the door of the chamber.

Not one of the words they had spoken had escaped the keen ears of Ralph d’Andresy and not one of them had failed to put a keener edge on his already keen curiosity.

“Hang it all! I wouldn’t give up this box on the first tier for an Empire,” he murmured. “What hot stuff they are! They talk about murdering as other people talk about putting on a clean collar.”

Above all Godfrey d’Etigues astonished him. How could the gentle Clarice be the daughter of this gloomy soul? What end was he trying to compass? What were the dark motives on which he was acting? Hate, greed, the lust for revenge, the instinct of cruelty? He brought to one’s mind an executioner of bygone days ready to set about some sinister task. His brick-red face and red beard seemed to be lit up by internal flames.

Then three other guests arrived together. Ralph knew them as frequent visitors at La Haie d’Etigues. They sat down with their backs to the two windows which lighted the chamber as if they desired their faces to be blurred in the shadow.

On the very stroke of four two newcomers entered. One, a man of considerable age and of a soldierly stiffness, tightly buttoned up in a frock coat and wearing on his chin the little beard which in the days of Napoleon III was called an imperial, stopped short on the threshold.

Everyone rose and stepped forward to greet the other. Ralph did not doubt for a moment that he was the author of the unsigned letter, the man for whom they were waiting, whom the Baron had called Beaumagnan. Although he was the only one of them to have no title, nor even the “de” before his name, they welcomed him as one welcomes a leader, with a respect which his air of domination and his imperious eyes seemed naturally to exact. His face was clean-shaven; his cheeks were hollow; there was in the glances of his fine black eyes a quality of passion. In his manner and in his dress there was something severe, even ascetic; he had the air of a dignitary of the Church.

He begged them to sit down, apologized for having been unable to bring his friend the Count de Brie, beckoned his companion forward and introduced him:

“The Prince of Arcola.... I believe you know that the Prince of Arcola is one of us, but, as luck would have it, was unable to be present at our meetings and that his activities were exercised at a distance and with the happiest results. To-day his evidence is necessary to us, since twice already, in eighteen-seventy, he met the infernal creature who threatens us.”

Ralph was conscious of a slight disappointment; working it out, the “infernal creature” must be more than fifty years of age, since her meetings with the Prince of Arcola had taken place two and twenty years before.

Thereupon the Prince sat down beside Oscar de Bennetot; and Beaumagnan drew Godfrey d’Etigues aside. The Baron handed him an envelope, containing doubtless the compromising letter. Then they held in low voices a discussion of a certain liveliness, which Beaumagnan cut short with a gesture of virile command.

“There is no doing anything with the gentlemen,” said Ralph to himself. “The verdict is fixed. Dead men tell no tales. The drowning will take place, for it seems quite clear that that is the solution on which he is resolved.”

Beaumagnan sat down behind the other conspirators. But before sitting down he said in cold and measured tones:

“You know, my friends, to what a degree this hour is serious for us. All of us, in complete agreement and of one mind about the magnificent end which we wish to accomplish, have undertaken a common task of immense importance. It appears to us, and rightly, that the interests of our country, those of our party, and those of our religion—I do not separate the one from the other—are linked with the success of our schemes. Now these schemes have for some time been brought up short by the audacious and implacable hostility of a woman, who, being in possession of certain evidence, has set herself to discover the secret which we are on the very point of discovering. If she discovers it before we do, it means that all our efforts have been wasted, utterly. Her or us: there is no room for the two. Let us pray earnestly that the struggle in which we are engaged may be decided in our favor!”

He sat down, and resting his two arms on the back of a chair, bent his tall figure as if he wished to remain unseen.

Some minutes passed.

The silence of these men met together for reasons which should have excited them to lively converse, was absolute, so keenly was the attention of all fixed on the distant noises which came from the surrounding country. The capture of this woman obsessed their minds. They were in a hurry to hold and to see their adversary.

The Baron d’Etigues raised his hand. They began to catch the dull rhythm of a horse’s hoofs.

“It is my brougham,” he said.

Yes: but was their enemy inside it?

The Baron rose and went to the door. As usual the Park was empty, since the servants’ work kept them busy in the court-yard in front of the château.

The sound of hoofs grew louder. The carriage left the high road and came along the lane. Then it suddenly appeared between the two pillars of the entrance to the Park. The driver waved a reassuring hand; and the Baron exclaimed:

“Victory! They’ve got her!”

The brougham stopped at the door. D’Ormont, who was driving it, jumped smartly down. Rufus d’Estiers stepped out of it. With the help of the Baron they drew from the interior a woman whose wrists and ankles were bound. A gauze scarf covered her face. They carried her to the church bench which stood in the middle of the chamber.

“Not the least difficulty,” said d’Ormont in a tone of triumph. “She came straight out of the train and stepped into the brougham. At the cross-roads we tied her up before she had time to let out more than two squeals.”

“Remove that scarf,” said the Baron; and as d’Ormont stooped to do so, he added: “After all, we may as well restore her freedom of movement. We have her safe.”

He himself untied the cords.

D’Ormont raised the veil and uncovered her face.

There came a cry of amazement from the spectators; and Ralph, up in his observation post, from which he had a view of the prisoner in full daylight, was hard put to it not to betray his presence by a similar exclamation, when there was revealed a young woman in all the splendor of her youth and beauty.

Then a voice rose above the murmurs of astonishment. The Prince of Arcola stepped forward, and his starting eyes glaring in a twitching face, stammered:

“It’s she!... It is she.... I recognize her.... But what a frightful thing it is!”

“What is it?” snapped the Baron. “What’s frightful? Explain!”

And the Prince of Arcola uttered these incredible words:

“She is no older than she was two and twenty years ago!”

The woman was sitting, and sitting quite upright, her clenched fists resting on her knees. Her hat must have fallen off in the course of the attack on her, and her hair, half-undone, fell behind her in a thick mass, partly held up by a gold comb, while two rolls with tawny gleams in them were drawn back evenly above her brow, and were waved a little above her temples.

Her face was of a wonderful beauty, its lines of an astonishing purity; and it was animated by an expression which, even in her impassibility, even in her fear, appeared to be a smile. With her rather delicate chin, rather high cheek bones, deep-set eyes, and heavy eyelids, she recalled those women of Leonardo da Vinci, or rather of Bernardino Luini, all the charm of whom is in a smile you do not actually see, but which you divine, which at once moves and disquiets you.

She was simply dressed: a dust cloak which she let fall, a gray woollen dress which, fitting tightly, gave the lovely curves of her figure their full value.

“Well!” said Ralph, who could not take his eyes off her, softly to himself. “She appears quite inoffensive, this magnificent and infernal creature! And they’re nine or ten to one against her!”

She scrutinized with keen eyes the group of men round her, d’Etigues and his friends, and strove to see clearly those others in the shadow. Then she said:

“What is it you want? I do not recognize any of you. What have you brought me here for?”

“You’re our enemy,” declared Godfrey d’Etigues.

She shook her head gently.

“Your enemy? There must be some mistake. Are you quite sure that you’re not making a mistake? I am Madame Pellegrini.”

“You’re not Madame Pellegrini.”

“But I assure you ...”

“You’re not!” the Baron exclaimed in a loud voice.

Then he added—and the words were little less disconcerting than those uttered a little while before by the Prince of Arcola:

“Pellegrini was one of the aliases adopted in the eighteenth century by the man whose daughter you pretend to be.”

She did not answer for a few seconds, seeming to be taken aback by the absurdity of the statement. Then she said tartly:

“Then what is my name—according to you?”

“Josephine Balsamo, Countess of Cagliostro.”

CHAPTER II.
JOSEPHINE BALSAMO BORN IN 1788

Cagliostro! The astonishing man who puzzled all Europe and so thoroughly upset the Court of France in the reign of Louis XVI! The Queen’s necklace ... Cardinal de Rohan ... Marie Antoinette ... some of the most obscure episodes in history!

A strange man, and enigmatic, dowered with a veritable genius for intrigue. A man who exercised a genuine power of domination. A man on whom full light has not yet been thrown. Impostor? Who knows? Have we the right to deny that certain beings of more delicate sensibilities than ourselves can peer into the world of the living and the dead in a fashion which is forbidden to us? Is one to treat as charlatan or fool the man in whose mind rise the memories of past existences, who, recalling what he has seen, reaps the harvest of acquisitions in the past, of lost secrets, and forgotten knowledge, and exploits a power which we call supernatural, but which is merely putting into action, hesitating perhaps and stumbling action, forces of which we are, it may be, on the point of becoming masters?

If Ralph d’Andresy, from the bottom of his post of observation, remained sceptical, if he laughed in his heart, not perhaps without certain reservations, at the fashion in which events were shaping themselves, it seemed that those taking part in them were accepting on the instant and without question, as realities beyond all discussing, the most extravagant assertions.

Had they then proofs and an understanding of this matter peculiar to themselves? Had they found in her who, according to them, laid claim to be the daughter of Cagliostro, gifts of clairvoyance and divination which, in days gone by, the world attributed to that celebrated worker of wonders, and by reason of them treated him as magician and sorcerer?

Godfrey d’Etigues, who was the only one of them standing, bent towards the young woman and said:

“Your name really is Cagliostro, isn’t it?”

She pondered. One would have said that, taking thought how best to defend herself, she was seeking the best counter-stroke; that she wished, before definitely plunging into the struggle, to know what weapons the enemy had at his command. Then she answered quietly:

“Nothing compels me to give you an answer, since you have no right whatever to question me. However, why should I deny that on my birth certificate is the name Josephine Pellegrini and that it is my whim to call myself Josephine Balsamo, Countess of Cagliostro? The two names Cagliostro and Pellegrini complete the personality of Joseph Balsamo, a personality in which I have always taken the greatest interest.”

“Then it follows that, contrary to certain declarations you used to make, you are not his direct descendant. Is that what you wish to imply?” said the Baron.

She shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. Was it prudence? Was it disdain? Or was it a protest against such an absurdity?

“I do not care to consider this silence either an avowal or a denial,” said Godfrey d’Etigues, turning towards his friends. “What this woman says is of no importance; and it is a waste of time to refute her statements. We’re here to make our decisions, most important decisions, in a matter which we all know in its entirety, but of which certain details are unknown to the majority of us. It is then necessary to run over the main facts. They are set forth as shortly as possible in the memorandum which I am going to read to you, and to which I beg you to give your most earnest attention.”

And he read quietly a document which—at least Ralph had no doubt about it—must have been drawn up by Beaumagnan. It ran:

At the beginning of March, 1870, that is to say, four months before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, among the crowd of strangers who, as was usual every spring, descended on Paris, none excited greater interest than the Countess Cagliostro. Beautiful, charming, lavish of her money, generally alone, but sometimes accompanied by a young man, whom she introduced to people as her brother, everywhere she went, in every house into which she was welcomed, she was the object of the most lively curiosity.

First of all her mere name excited people’s interest, then the truly impressive fashion in which she emphasized her relationship to the famous Cagliostro by her mysterious bearing, by certain miraculous cures she effected, and by the answers she gave to those who consulted her concerning their past or their future. The novel of Alexander Dumas had made Joseph Balsamo, that is to say the Count of Cagliostro, the fashion. Employing the same methods, even more boldly, she boasted that she was Cagliostro’s daughter, declared that she knew the secret of eternal youth, and with a smile spoke of this and that meeting, of this and that event which had befallen her in the days of Napoleon I.

Such was her prestige that she forced open for herself the doors of the Tuileries and appeared at the Court of Napoleon III. People even talked of private séances at which the Empress Eugenie gathered round the beautiful Countess her most faithful intimates. A secret number of that satirical journal, the Charivari, which was instantly suppressed, tells the story of one of the séances in which an occasional collaborator took part. I quote this passage from it:

She is truly a wonderful woman, with something of La Joconde about her. Her expression changes very little but it is very difficult to describe. It is quite as caressing and ingenuous as perverse and cruel. There is a wealth of experience in her gaze and a bitterness in her unchanging smile—such a wealth of experience, indeed, that one is willing to allow her the eighty years she allots to herself. Now and again she draws from her pocket a small golden mirror, lets fall on it two drops from a tiny flask, dries it, and looks at herself in it. And once more she is Youth in its most adorable perfection.

When we questioned her about it, she replied:

“This mirror belonged to Cagliostro. For those who look at themselves in it with assured confidence, time stands still. Look: the date is engraved on the back, 1783, and it is followed by four lines which are the list of the four great enigmas. These enigmas which he had set himself the task of solving, he had from the lips of Queen Marie Antoinette herself; and he was wont to say, so at least they told me, that the man who found the key to them would be a King of Kings.”[A]

“May one hear them?” somebody asked.

“Why not? To know them is not to solve them; and Cagliostro himself hadn’t the time to do so. I can only give you their titles. They are:

“In Robore Fortuna.

“The Flag-stone of the Bohemian Kings.

“The Fortunes of the Kings of France.

“The Candlestick with Seven Branches.”

Afterwards she talked to all of us in turn; and to each she made astonishing revelations.

But that was only the prelude; and the Empress, though she refused to put the most trivial question about matters which concerned her personally, asked her to throw some light on the future.

“Would your Majesty be so good as to breathe lightly on this,” said the Countess, holding out the mirror.

And forthwith, after examining the mist that the Queen’s breath had spread over its surface she murmured:

“I see many excellent things.... In the summer a great war.... Victory.... The return of the troops under the Arc de Triomphe.... They are cheering the Emperor.... The Prince Imperial....”

Godfrey d’Etigues folded the paper and went on:

“Such is the document which has been communicated to us. It is a disconcerting document since it was published several weeks before the war it foretold. What was this woman? Who was this adventuress whose dangerous predictions, acting on the somewhat feeble mind of our unfortunate sovereign, played their part in bringing about the catastrophe of 1870? Someone—you will find it in the same number of the Charivari, said to her one day:

“‘Granted that you are the daughter of Cagliostro, who was your mother?’

“‘For my mother,’ she replied, ‘you must look high among the contemporaries of Cagliostro ... higher still.... Yes: that’s right ... Josephine de Beauharnais, the future wife of Bonaparte, Empress that was to be.’

“The police of Napoleon III could not remain inactive. At the end of June they sent in a report the facts of which were established after a difficult inquiry by one of their best agents. I’ll read it. It runs:

The Signorina’s Italian passport, while making reservations about the date of her birth, describes her as Josephine Pellegrini-Balsamo, Countess of Cagliostro, born at Palermo on the 29th of July, 1788. Having gone to Palermo, I succeeded in discovering the old registers of the Parish of Mortarana; and in one of them, under the date of the 29th of July, 1788, I found the entry of the birth of Josephine Balsamo, daughter of Joseph Balsamo and Josephine de la P., subject of the King of France.

Was it Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, the maiden name of the young wife who was separated from the Vicomte de Beauharnais, and of the future wife of General Bonaparte? I made investigations from this point of view. They required considerable patience; but at the end of them I learnt from the manuscript letters of a Lieutenant de la prévôté, of Paris, that in 1788 they had been on the point of arresting the Count of Cagliostro, who, though he had been expelled from France after the affair of the Queen’s Necklace, was living in a little house at Fontainebleau under the name of Pellegrini; and at that house he was visited every day by a tall and slender lady. Now Josephine de Beauharnais was at this time living at Fontainebleau. She was tall and slender. On the eve of the day fixed for his arrest Cagliostro disappeared. His departure was the very next day followed by the departure of Josephine de Beauharnais.[B] A month later the child was born at Palermo.

These coincidences cannot fail to be impressive. But how much greater is the weight of them, when one considers them in the light of these two additional facts—ten years later the Empress Josephine brought to La Malmaison a young girl whom she declared to be her god-daughter. This child won the heart of the Emperor to such a degree that he took the greatest pleasure in playing with her. What was her name? Josephine, or rather Josine. Secondly, on the fall of the Empire, the Czar Alexander II received this Josine at his Court. What title does she take? That of the Countess de Cagliostro.”

The Baron d’Etigues laid great stress on these last words. They had listened to him with the deepest attention. Ralph, taken aback by this incredible story, tried to catch a shade of emotion or of some feeling on the face of the Countess. But she remained impassive, her beautiful eyes always faintly smiling.

The Baron continued: “This report and probably the dangerous influence which the Countess was beginning to acquire at the Tuileries, were to cut short her brilliant career. A decree for her expulsion was signed and for the expulsion of her brother. Her brother went away to Germany, she to Italy. One morning she arrived at Modena, whither she had been conducted by a young officer. He bowed, saluted her, and left her. This officer was the Prince of Arcola. He it was who was able to procure these two documents, the suppressed number of the Charivari and the secret report, the original of which is actually in his possession, with the official seals and signatures. Lastly it is he who a little while ago assured you of the indubitable identity of the woman he left that morning at Modena with the woman he sees here to-day.”

The Prince of Arcola rose and said gravely:

“I am no believer in miracles; nevertheless what I say is the affirmation of a miracle. But the truth compels me to declare on my honor as a soldier that this is the woman whom I saluted and left at the railway station at Modena two and twenty years ago.”

“Whom you saluted and left without anything in the nature of a polite farewell?” said Josephine Balsamo. She had turned towards the Prince and asked the question in a tone of mocking irony.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a young French officer is too courteous to take his leave of a pretty woman with just a formal salute.”

“Which implies?”

“Which implies that you must have uttered some words.”

“Perhaps. I no longer remember,” said the Prince of Arcola with a touch of embarrassment.

“You bent down towards the exile, Monsieur. You kissed her hand rather longer than was necessary; and you said to her: ‘I hope, Madam, that the hours I have had the pleasure of passing near you will not be without a to-morrow. For my part, I can never forget them.’ And you repeated, emphasizing by your accent your gallant meaning: ‘You understand, Madam? Never.’”

The Prince of Arcola appeared to be a man of admirable manners. However, at this exact revival of a moment that had passed a quarter of a century earlier, he was so upset that he muttered:

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

But, recovering himself on the instant, he took the offensive, and in a bitter voice he said: “Madam, I have forgotten. If the memory of that meeting was pleasant, the memory of the second occasion on which I saw you has blotted it out.”

“And this second occasion, Monsieur?”

“It was at the beginning of the following year, at Versailles, whither I accompanied the French plenipotentiaries entrusted with the task of negotiating the peace of the defeat. I saw you in a café, sitting at a table, drinking and laughing with some German officers, one of whom was an officer of Bismarck’s staff. That day I understood the part you played at the Tuileries and on whose errand you came.”

All these revelations of the vicissitudes of a life which seemed fabulous, were set forth in less than ten minutes. There was no structure of reasoning. No attempt, either logical or rhetorical, to impose this incredible thesis on those who were listening. Nothing but the facts, nothing but the bare proofs, violent, driven home like the blows of a fist, and all the more terrifying that they evoked against a quite young woman memories some of which went back more than a century!

Ralph d’Andresy was almost amazed. The scene appeared to him to savor of romance, or rather to belong to some fantastic and gloomy melodrama. These conspirators, who accepted these fables as if they had been indisputable facts, seemed to him the creatures of a dream. Truly he was quite alive to the poorness of the intelligence of these country bumpkins, relics of an epoch that had passed away. But all the same how on earth could they bring themselves to ignore the very data of the problem presented by the age they attributed to this woman? However credulous they might be, had they not eyes to see?

Again the attitude of the Countess to them appeared even more strange. Why this silence which, when all was said and done, was an acceptance of their theory, practically, at times, a confession? Was she refusing to demolish a legend of eternal youth which was pleasing to her and helpful to the execution of her plans? Or was it that, ignorant of the terrible danger hanging over her head, she looked upon all this theatrical display as merely a practical joke?

“Such is this woman’s past,” continued the Baron d’Etigues solemnly. “I shall not dwell on the intermediate episodes which link that past with to-day. Always keeping behind the scenes, Josephine Balsamo, the Countess of Cagliostro, played a part in the tragi-comedy of Boulangism, in the sordid drama of Panama. One finds her hand in every event which is disastrous to our country. But in these matters we have only indications of the secret part she played. We have no direct proof. Let us leave them and come to this actual epoch. One word before we do so, however. Have you no observations to make about any of these matters, Madam?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let us have them.”

“Well,” said the young woman, with the same note of mocking irony in her delightful voice, “I should like to know, since I appear to be on my trial and you to have formed yourselves into a really mediæval tribunal—of the German brand, of course—whether you attach any real importance to the charges you have heaped up against me. If you do you may as well condemn me to be burnt alive on the spot, as a witch, a spy, and a renegade—all crimes which the Inquisition never pardoned.”

“No,” replied Godfrey d’Etigues. “I have only narrated these different adventures of yours in order to paint, in a few strokes, as vivid a picture of you as possible.”

“You think you have painted as vivid a picture of me as possible?”

“Yes; from the point of view that concerns us.”

“You are certainly easily satisfied,” she said in a faintly contemptuous tone. “And what are the links you think you see between these different adventures?”

“I see three kinds of links,” said the Baron with some heat. “First there is the evidence of all the people who have recognized you, thanks to whom we can go back, step by step, to the end of the eighteenth century. Next your own avowal of your claims.”

“What avowal?”

“You have repeated to the Prince of Arcola the very terms of a conversation which took place between the two of you in the station at Modena.”

“So I did!” she said. “And then?”

“And then I have here three portraits, all three of which are portraits of you. Are they not?”

She looked at them and said: “Yes. They are portraits of me.”

“Well,” said Godfrey d’Etigues in a tone of triumph, “the first is a miniature, painted at Moscow in 1816, of Josine, Countess of Cagliostro. The second is this photograph taken in the year 1870. This is the last, taken recently in Paris. The miniature has your signature on the back, after the words presenting it to Prince Serge Dolgorouki; the two photographs have your signature across the face. All the three signatures are letter for letter the same with the same flourish.”

“What does that prove?” she asked in the same mocking, ironical accents.

“That proves that the same woman retains in 1892 her face of 1816 and of 1870.”

“Then to the stake with her!” she cried and laughed a silvery, rippling laugh.

“Do not laugh, Madam. You know that between you and us a laugh is an abominable blasphemy!” cried the Baron sternly.

She struck the arm of the bench with an impatient hand.

“Look here, Monsieur: we’ve had enough of this nonsense!” she exclaimed, frowning at the Baron. “What is it exactly that you have against me? What am I here for?”

“You’re here, Madam, to pay the penalty of the crimes you have committed.”

“What crimes?”

“My friends and I were twelve, twelve men who were seeking the same end. Now we are only nine. The three others are dead. You murdered them!”

A shadow, perhaps—at least Ralph d’Andresy thought that he saw one—veiled for a moment, like a cloud, the smile of the Giaconda. Then on the instant her beautiful face resumed its usual expression as if nothing could ruffle its serenity, not even this frightful accusation launched at her with so violent a virulence. You might very well have said that the ordinary feelings of humanity were unknown to her, or that at any rate they did not betray themselves by those symptoms of indignation, revolt, and horror with which all human beings are overwhelmed. What an anomaly she was! Guilty or not, any other woman would have risen in revolt. She said never a word. It might have been cynicism; it might have been innocence. There was no saying.

The friends of the Baron remained motionless, their brows knitted, their faces stern. Behind those who hid him almost entirely from the eyes of Josephine Balsamo, Ralph perceived Beaumagnan. His arms still resting on the back of the chair in front of him, he kept his face buried in his hands. But his eyes, gleaming between his parted fingers, never left the face of his enemy.

In a complete silence Godfrey d’Etigues proceeded to develop his indictment, or rather his three terrible indictments. He did so coldly, without raising his voice. It was as if a clerk were reading an indictment in which he had no personal interest.

“Eighteen months ago,” he began, “Denis Saint-Hébert, the youngest of us, was out shooting on his estate in the neighborhood of Le Havre. At the end of the afternoon, he left his bailiff and his keeper and went off, with his gun over his shoulder, to look at the sunset over the sea, from the top of the cliff. He did not turn up that night. Next day they found his body among the rocks uncovered by the ebbing tide.

“Suicide? Denis Saint-Hébert was rich, in the best of health, and of a happy disposition. Why should he have killed himself? A crime. No one dreamt of such a thing. An accident, then.

“In the following June we were again plunged into mourning under analogous conditions. George d’Isneauval, while shooting gulls in the early morning, slipped on the seaweed in such a disastrous fashion that he struck his head against a rock and fractured his skull. Some hours later two fishermen found him. He was dead. He left a widow and two little children.

“Again an accident, I suppose. Yes: an accident for his widow, his children and his family.... But for us? Was it possible that Chance should for the second time have attacked the little group we had formed? Twelve friends form a league to discover a great secret, to attain an end of considerable importance. Two of them are struck down. Are we not compelled to presume the existence of a criminal conspiracy which, in attacking them, at the same time attacks their enterprise?

“It was the Prince of Arcola who opened our eyes and set us on the right path. He knew that we were not the only persons to know of the existence of this great secret. He knew that, in the course of a séance in the suite of rooms of the Empress Eugenie at the Tuileries, someone had revived the list of the four enigmas handed down to his descendants by Cagliostro, and that one of them was called by the very name of the enigma in which we are interested—the enigma of the Candlestick with Seven Branches. Must we not therefore seek among those to whom the legend could have been handed down?

“Thanks to the excellent means of investigation which we had at our disposal, our inquiry bore fruit in barely a fortnight. In a private hotel in a quiet street in Paris was living a lady of the name of Pellegrini. Apparently she was leading an almost secluded life and often disappeared for months at a time. Of uncommon beauty, her behavior was discreetness itself. Indeed it appeared to be her main effort not to attract attention. Under the name of the Countess of Cagliostro she frequented certain circles which busied themselves with magic, the occult, and the black mass.

“We managed to get a photograph of her—this one. We sent it to the Prince of Arcola, who was traveling in Spain. He was amazed to recognize the woman he had formerly known.

“We made inquiries about her movements. On the day of Saint-Hébert’s death, in the neighborhood of Le Havre, she was staying at Le Havre. She was staying at Dieppe when George d’Isneauval met his death at the foot of the Dieppe cliffs!

“I questioned the dead men’s families. The widow of George d’Isneauval confided to me that her husband, towards the end of his life, had had an affair with a woman who caused him, according to her, an infinite amount of suffering. In the other quarter a written confession of Saint-Hébert, and up to then kept secret by his mother, informed us that he had been so foolish as to jot down our twelve names and some facts about the Candlestick with the Seven Branches on one of the leaves of his pocket-book and that pocket-book had been stolen from him by a woman.

“After that everything was clear. Mistress of a part of our secrets, and desirous of knowing more, the woman who had been loved by Saint-Hébert had thrown herself across the path of George d’Isneauval and been loved by him. Then, having wormed their secrets out of them, in her fear of their denouncing her to their friends, she murdered them. That woman is here before us.”

Godfrey d’Etigues paused again. The silence once more became oppressive, so heavy that the judges seemed to be paralyzed in that burdensome atmosphere so loaded with anguish. Only the Countess of Cagliostro maintained her air of aloofness, as if no single word had concerned her.

Always stretched at full length in his post of observation, Ralph admired the young woman’s delightful and voluptuous beauty; at the same time he could not help feeling some distress at perceiving such a mass of evidence being piled up against her. The indictment gripped her tighter and tighter. From every quarter facts thronged to the assault; and Ralph suspected that she was threatened by a yet more direct attack.

“Am I to tell you about the third crime?” said the Baron.

She replied in weary accents:

“If you like. Everything you have been saying is quite unintelligible. You have been talking about people whose very names I never heard before. So a crime more or less——”

“You didn’t know Saint-Hébert and George d’Isneauval?”

She shrugged her shoulders and did not answer.

Godfrey d’Etigues bent closer to her and in a lower voice he said:

“And Beaumagnan?”

She raised limpid eyes to his face:

“Beaumagnan?”

“Yes—the third of our friends you murdered. And only a little while ago.... A few weeks.... He died poisoned.... You did not know him?”

CHAPTER III.
A TRIBUNAL OF THE INQUISITION

What was the meaning of this accusation? Ralph looked at Beaumagnan. He had risen, without raising himself to his full height, and sheltering himself behind his friends drew nearer and nearer to Josephine Balsamo. With her eyes fixed intently on the Baron, she paid no attention to him.

Then Ralph understood why Beaumagnan had hidden himself and the formidable trap they were laying for the young woman. If she had really tried to poison Beaumagnan, if she really believed him dead, with what a fear she would be stricken when he stepped forward in person to face her, living, ready to accuse her! If, on the other hand, she remained untroubled and Beaumagnan appeared to her as great a stranger as the others, what a proof of her innocence!

Ralph found himself extraordinarily anxious. Indeed so keenly did he desire her to succeed in foiling the plotters that he tried to find some method of conveying a warning to her.

But the Baron d’Etigues did not loose his prey; and he continued with scarcely a pause: “Then you don’t remember this crime either, do you?”

For the first time displaying a touch of impatience, she frowned at him; but she said nothing.

“Perhaps you never even knew Beaumagnan?” said the Baron, bending towards her like an examining magistrate watching for a clumsy sentence. “Come, speak up! You never knew him?”

She did not speak up; she did not speak at all. The effect of his obstinate insistence must have been to awaken her distrust, for a shadow of anxiety dimmed her smile. Like a hunted beast, she scented an ambush; and her eyes searched the shadows.

She studied Godfrey d’Etigues, then turned towards de la Vaulpalier and de Bennetot, then to the other side where Beaumagnan was standing. On the instant there was a gesture of dismay, the start of one who sees a phantom; and her eyes closed. She stretched out her hands to thrust away the terrible vision which menaced her and they heard her mutter:

“Beaumagnan! Beaumagnan!”

Was it the avowal? Was she going to weaken and confess her crime? Beaumagnan waited. With all the force of his being, so to speak, visible, with clenched fists, with the veins on his forehead swollen, with his stern face convulsed by a superhuman effort of will, he demanded that access of feebleness in which all resistance crumbles.

For a moment he thought he was succeeding. The young woman was weakening; she was yielding to her tamer. A cruel joy illuminated his face. A vain hope! Recovering from her faintness, she drew herself slowly upright. Every second restored to her a little of her serenity and little by little freed her smile; and she said with a reasonableness which appeared the very expression of the obvious truth:

“You did give me a fright, Beaumagnan! I read in the newspapers the news of your death. Why did your friends try to trick me?”

Ralph realized at once that everything that had passed up to that moment was of no importance. Now the two real adversaries found themselves face to face. Short as it must be, given the weapons of Beaumagnan and the isolation of the young woman, the real struggle was only just beginning. And this was not the cunning and sustained attack of the Baron d’Etigues. But the wild onslaught of an enemy exasperated by rage and hate.

“A lie! A lie!” he cried. “Everything in you is a lie. You are hypocrisy, vileness, treason, vice! Everything sordid and repulsive in the world is masked by your smile. Ah! That smile! What an abominable mask! One longs to tear it from you with red-hot pincers. Your smile is death! It is the everlasting damnation of the man who lets himself be charmed by it.... Heavens! What a wretch this woman is.”

The impression that Ralph had had from the beginning of being a spectator in a scene from the Inquisition, grew infinitely stronger in face of the fury of this man who hurled his anathema with all the violence of a monk of the Middle Ages. His voice trembled with indignation. His gestures were a threat, as if he were going to strangle the impious creature whose divine smile brought madness on her victim and doomed him to the fires of Hell.

“Calm yourself, Beaumagnan,” she said with an excess of gentleness that infuriated him more than if she had hurled an insult at him.

Nevertheless he struggled to restrain himself and to control the words which surged up in him. But they rushed from his mouth, storming, headlong, or muttered so faintly that his friends, whom he now addressed, had sometimes great difficulty in understanding the strange confession he was making, beating himself on the breast exactly like the penitents of the days of yore making public confession of their sins.

“It was I, I, who deliberately entered the arena after the death of d’Isneauval. Yes: I was sure that this sorceress was still raging on our trail.... That I should be stronger than the others.... Safer against temptation.... And I was right! You know I was right!... You all knew my intention at that time. Already dedicated to the service of the Church, I was desirous of assuming the robe of a priest. I was, then, secure from the evil, protected by formal undertakings and even more by the intense ardor of my faith. In that temper I betook myself to one of the Spiritist meetings at which I knew I should find her.

“She was there; and there was no need for the friend who had brought me, to point her out to me; and I confess that, on the very threshold of my enterprise, an obscure apprehension made me hesitate. I watched her. She spoke to few of the people present and wore an air of reserve, content seemingly to listen, smoking cigarettes.

“In accordance with my instructions my friend went and sat down beside her and entered into conversation with the persons among whom she was sitting. Then from a distance he called me by my name; and I saw from her troubled look, without any possibility of being mistaken, that she knew that name. She had read it in the pocket-book stolen from Denis Saint-Hébert. Beaumagnan was one of the twelve associates.... One of the ten survivors. And this woman who appeared to live in a kind of dream, suddenly awoke. A little while after she spoke to me. For two hours she displayed all the charm of her spirit, she used every weapon that beauty gives a woman, and in the end induced me to promise that I would go to see her the next day.

“At that instant, at the very second at which I left her, that night, at the door of her house, I ought to have fled to the end of the world. It was already too late. There was no longer in me either courage, or will, or foresight, nothing but the insane desire to see her again. It is true that I disguised this desire in fine phrases: I was accomplishing a duty.... It was necessary to know the enemy’s game, to bring home her crimes to her and punish her for them, and so forth.... Mere pretexts! In reality at the first assault I had fallen a victim to her fascination; at the first assault I was convinced of her innocence. A smile such as that was clear evidence of a soul of crystal purity.

“Neither the sacred memory of Saint-Hébert, nor that of my poor d’Isneauval cleared my vision. I would not see. I lived for some months in obscurity, tasting the most infamous joys, without even a blush at being an object of reproach and scandal, at renouncing my vows and denying my faith.

“Inconceivable sins in a man like me, I swear it, friends. Nevertheless I committed another which perhaps surpasses them all. I was a traitor to our cause. I broke that vow of silence which we took when we formed our union for that common end. This woman knows as much of the great secret as we know ourselves.”

At these words a murmur of indignation ran round the room. Beaumagnan bent his head.

Now Ralph understood better the drama which was unfolding before him; and the characters who were playing their parts in it assumed their right proportion. Country squires, rustics, bumpkins? Yes—without a doubt. But Beaumagnan was there—Beaumagnan who inspired them with his own spirit and filled them with his exaltation. In the middle of these vulgar lives and these absurd figures he stood forth the prophet and the seer. He had forced on them as a duty some conspirator’s task to which he had devoted himself body and soul, as in the old days one devoted oneself to God, and left one’s castle to go on a crusade.

Mystic passions of this kind transform those in whom they burn into heroes or executioners. In Beaumagnan there was a veritable inquisitor. In the fifteenth century he would have persecuted and mangled to tear from the impious the confession of faith.

He had the instinct of domination and the bearing of a man for whom no obstacle exists. Did a woman rise between him and his end? Let her die. If he loved this woman, a public confession absolved him. And those who listened to him succumbed to the ascendancy of this hard master all the more easily because his hardness appeared to be directed quite as much against himself.

Humiliated by the confession of his fall, he was no longer angry; and he continued in a dull voice:

“Why did I fail? I do not know. A man like me ought not to fail. I have not even the excuse of being able to say that she questioned me. She did not. She often talked about the four enigmas mentioned by Cagliostro; and one day almost without knowing what I was doing, I spoke the irreparable words ... like a wretched weakling ... just to make myself agreeable ... just to seem important to her eyes ... that her smile might grow more tender. I said to myself: ‘She shall be our ally.... She shall help us with her counsel, with her clearsightedness, refined and heightened by years of practice of divination.’ I was mad. The intoxication of sin had set my reason tottering.

“The awakening was terrible. About three weeks ago I had to go to Spain on a mission. I said good-by to her in the morning. In the afternoon, towards three o’clock, having an appointment in the center of Paris I left the set of rooms in which I was living in the Luxembourg. Then it chanced that, having forgotten to give some orders to my man, I returned to my rooms through the court-yard and up the servants’ staircase. My man had gone out and left the kitchen door open. As I came through it, I heard a noise. I went forward quietly. There was someone in my bedroom. It was this woman. I had a good view of her in the looking-glass. What was she doing, bending over my trunk? I watched. She opened a small cardboard box which contained the cachets which I take when I’m traveling, to cure my insomnia. She took out one of these cachets and in its place she put another, a cachet which she took from her purse.

“My emotion was so great that I never even dreamt of seizing her. When I grew composed enough to enter the room, she had gone. I could not overtake her.

“I hurried to a chemist and had the cachets analyzed. One of them contained poison enough to destroy me.

“So I had the irrefutable proof. Having been so imprudent as to tell her everything I knew about the secret, I had been condemned. It was just as well, was it not, to clear out of her path a useless witness and an associate who might one day or other take his share of the spoils, or, it might be, reveal the truth, attack the enemy, and vanquish her. Death then. Death—as for Denis Saint-Hébert and George d’Isneauval. A stupid murder for no sufficient reason.

“I wrote from Spain to one of my friends. Some days afterwards certain newspapers announced the death of a Frenchman named Beaumagnan at Madrid.

“From that time I lived in the shadow and followed her step by step. She betook herself first to Rouen, then to Le Havre, then to Dieppe, that is to say to the very places which bound the scene of our researches. From what I had told her she knew that we were on the point of ransacking an ancient Priory in the neighborhood of Dieppe. She spent the whole of a day there, and profiting by the fact that the building had been abandoned, searched it. Then I lost sight of her. I found her at Rouen. You have heard what followed, from d’Etigues. How the trap was laid and how she fell into it, attracted by the bait of this Candlestick with Seven Branches, which, as she believed, a peasant had unearthed.

“Such is the character of this woman. You realize the reasons which prevent us from handing her over to the law. The scandal of the proceedings would reflect on us, and throwing the full light of day on to our enterprises, would render them impossible. Our duty, however dreadful it may appear, is to judge her ourselves, without hatred, but with all the severity that she deserves.”

Beaumagnan was silent. He had ended his indictment with a seriousness more dangerous to the accused than his anger. She appeared undoubtedly guilty, almost a monster in this series of useless murders. For his part, Ralph d’Andresy no longer knew what to think; but he cursed in his heart this man who had loved the young woman and who had just recalled, trembling with emotion, that sacrilegious love.

The Countess of Cagliostro rose and looked her adversary full in the face, always with a faintly mocking air.

“I was quite right,” she said. “It is the stake?”

“That will be according as we decide,” he said. “Nothing at any rate can prevent the execution of our just sentence.”

“A sentence? By what right?” said she. “There are judges for that. You are not judges. You talk about the fear of scandal. What does it matter to me that you need darkness and silence for your schemes? Set me free.”

“Free? Free to continue your work of death? You are in our power. You will suffer our sentence,” he said sternly.

“Your sentence for what? If there were a single judge among you, a single man who had any sense of reason and probability, he would laugh at your stupid charges and your unconnected proofs.”

“Words! Phrases!” he cried. “What we want are proofs to the contrary.... Something to disprove the evidence that my eyes gave me.”

“What use would it be to defend myself? You have made up your minds.”

“We have made them up because you are guilty.”

“Guilty of pursuing the same end as you; yes, that I admit. And that is the reason why you committed that shameful action of coming to spy upon me and play that comedy of love. If you were caught by your own snare, all the worse for you. If you have revealed to me facts about the enigma, of which I already knew the existence from the document of Cagliostro, all the worse for you! Now it is an obsession with me; and I have sworn to attain that end, whatever happens, in spite of you. That and that only is my crime—in your eyes.”

“Your crime is murder,” asserted Beaumagnan, who was again losing his temper.

“I have not murdered anyone,” she said firmly.

“You pushed Saint-Hébert over the cliff; you fractured d’Isneauval’s skull.”

“Saint-Hébert? D’Isneauval? I never knew them. I hear their names for the first time to-day,” she protested.

“And me! And me!” he exclaimed violently. “Didn’t you know me? Didn’t you try to poison me?”

“No.”

He lost his temper utterly and in an access of fury he roared: “But I saw you, Josephine Balsamo! I saw you as clearly as I see you now! While you were putting that poison in the box, I saw your smile grow ferocious and the corners of your lips rise in the grin of the damned!”

She shook her head and said firmly:

“It was not I.”

He appeared to choke. How dared she say such a thing?

But quite coolly she laid her hand on his shoulder and said quietly:

“Hate is making you lose your wits, Beaumagnan. Your fanatical soul is in a wild revolt against the sin of love. However, in spite of that, I suppose you’ll allow me to defend myself?”

“It is your right, but be quick about it,” he said less loudly, but coldly.

“It won’t take long. Ask your friends for the miniature, painted in 1816, of the Countess of Cagliostro.”

Beaumagnan obeyed and took the miniature from the hands of the Baron.

“Good. Look at it carefully,” she went on. “It is my portrait, isn’t it?”

“What are you driving at?” he said.

“Answer. Is it my portrait?” she said impatiently.

“Yes,” he said with decision.

“Then if that is my portrait it means that I was alive at that time? It is eighty years ago; and from that portrait I was then twenty-five or thirty? Consider carefully before answering. What! In the face of such a miracle you hesitate, do you? You dare not assert that it is a fact; now, dare you?”

She paused, gazing at him with compelling eyes; then she continued:

“But there is more to come. Open the frame of this miniature, the back of it, and you will find on the other side of the porcelain, another portrait. The portrait of a smiling woman, wearing a veil, an almost invisible veil, which descends as far as her eyebrows, and through which you can see her hair parted into two waving rolls. It is me again, isn’t it?”

While Beaumagnan carried out her instructions she had put on a light veil of tulle, the bottom of which touched the line of her eyebrows; and she lowered her eyes with an expression of charming reserve.

Beaumagnan compared her face with the portrait and stammered: “B-B-B-But it is you! It is!”

“Is there any doubt about it?”

“Not the slightest. It is you,” he declared.

“Well, read the date on the right side of it.”

Beaumagnan read out: “Painted at Milan in the year 1498.”

She repeated: “In 1498—that’s four hundred years ago?”

She laughed outright, a clear, ringing laugh.

“Don’t look so astonished,” she said. “I have known of the existence of this double portrait for a long time, and I have been hunting for it. But you may take it from me that there is no miracle about it. I am not going to try to persuade you that I was that painter’s model and that I am four hundred years old. No: that is merely the face of the Virgin Mary; and it is a copy of a fragment of the Holy Family of Bernardino Luini, a Milanese painter and a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Then, with a sudden gravity, and without giving her adversary time to breathe, she said to him: “You understand now what I am driving at, don’t you, Beaumagnan? Between the Virgin of Luini, the young girl of Moscow and myself, there is that elusive, marvellous, and yet undeniable bond, a likeness—an absolute likeness.... Three faces in one. Three faces which are not those of three different women, but which are the face of the same woman. Then why do you refuse to admit that the same phenomenon, after all a perfectly natural phenomenon, should not reproduce itself in other circumstances, and that the woman whom you saw in your bedroom was not me, but another woman who resembles me so closely as to deceive you.... Another woman who knew and murdered your friends Saint-Hébert and d’Isneauval?”

“I saw.... I saw!” protested Beaumagnan, who had come so close to her that he almost touched her, and he drew himself up, pale as death and quivering with indignation. “I saw! I saw with my eyes!”

“Your eyes also see the portrait of twenty-five years ago and the miniature of eighty years ago, and the picture of four hundred years ago. Is that me too?”

She presented to Beaumagnan’s gaze her young face in all its fresh beauty, that perfect row of white teeth, her delicately tinted, rounded cheeks, her clear and limpid child’s eyes.

Weakening, he stammered: “T-T-There are moments, sorceress, when I b-b-believe in this absurdity. With you one never knows! Look: the woman of the miniature has, low down on her bare shoulders, on the white skin of her bosom, a black mark. That mark, it is there, low down on your shoulder.... I have seen it there.... Come.... Show it to the others and let them see it too and be edified!”

He was livid and the sweat was trickling down his forehead. He stretched out his hand towards her high-necked bodice. But she thrust it back, and speaking with considerable dignity, she said:

“That’s enough, Beaumagnan. You don’t know what you’re doing and you haven’t known for months. Listening to you just now I was simply amazed, for you spoke of me as having been your mistress, and I haven’t been your mistress at all. It’s all very fine to beat your bosom in public, but it is also necessary that the confession should be the truth. You hadn’t the courage to tell the truth. The demon of pride forbade you to admit the humiliating check you received; and like a coward, you have let them believe in a thing that never happened. During the months you were crawling at my feet you entreated and threatened without your lips having ever once brushed my hand. That’s the secret of your behavior and your hate.

“Failing to move me, you tried to destroy me and for your friends you painted a frightful picture of me as criminal, spy, and sorceress. Yes, as sorceress! A man like you, to use your own words, could not fail; and if you did fail, it could have been brought about by the action of diabolical witchcraft. No, Beaumagnan: you no longer know what you are doing, or what you are saying. You saw me in your bedroom substituting the cachet which was to poison you, did you? Come now, by what right do you invoke the testimony of your eyes? Your eyes? But they were obsessed by my image; and that other woman showed you a face which was not her own, but mine, and you could not help seeing it. Yes, Beaumagnan: I repeat it, the other woman.... There is another woman on the path we are all of us following.... There’s another woman who has inherited certain documents from Cagliostro and who also uses the names that he assumed. Marquise de Belmonte, Countess de F ... look for her, Beaumagnan. For she it was whom you saw; and it is really upon the stupidest hallucination of a deranged brain that you have reared this structure of so many lying accusations against me. In fact all this business is merely a childish farce; and I was quite right to remain unmoved in the midst of you all, as an innocent woman in the first place, and in the second place as a woman who was in no danger. In spite of your airs of judges and torturers and in spite of the enormous personal interest each of you has in success of your common enterprise, you are at bottom honorable men who would never dare to murder me. You would perhaps, Beaumagnan; because you’re a fanatic who lives in terror of me. But you would have to find here executioners capable of obeying you. And there are none here. Then what are you going to do? Imprison me? Shut me up in some out-of-the-way corner. If that amuses you, do so. But you may make up your minds that there is no cell from which I cannot escape as easily as you can leave the room. So go now: judge me and sentence me. For my part, I am not going to say another word.”

She sat down, pushed up her veil, and setting her elbow on the arm of the bench, rested her face on her hand. She had played her part. She had spoken without any vehemence but with a profound conviction, and in a few sentences, of a really irrefutable logic, she had connected the accusation brought against her with this inexplicable legend of longevity which was the keynote of the affair.

In effect she had said: “It all holds together; and you yourselves have been obliged to base your indictment on the story of my adventures in the past. You had to start it with the narration of events which go back a hundred years, to come to the criminal actions of to-day. If I am mixed up in the latter it is because I was the heroine of the former. If I am the woman you saw, I am also the woman that my different portraits show you.”

What were they to answer?

Beaumagnan was silent. The duel was ending in his defeat; and he did not try to disguise it. Besides his friends no longer had the implacable and harassed faces of men who find themselves forced to the terrible decision of death. Doubt was stirring in them; Ralph d’Andresy was distinctly conscious of it and he would have derived some hope from it, if the memory of the preparations which Godfrey d’Etigues and de Bennetot had made, had not lessened his satisfaction. Beaumagnan and the Baron conversed in low voices for a few moments; then Beaumagnan made his answer in the manner of a man for whom the discussion was closed.

“You have before you, my friends, all the facts of the case,” he began. “The prosecution and the defense have said their last word. You have seen with what genuine conviction Godfrey d’Etigues and myself brought these charges against this woman and with what subtilty she defended herself, entrenching herself behind an inadmissible resemblance and so giving a striking example of her resourcefulness and her infernal cunning. The situation then is quite simple: an opponent of this strength of will and intelligence and disposing of such resources, will never let us rest. Our task is compromised. One after the other she will destroy us. Her existence implies inevitably our ruin and destruction.

“Does that mean that there is no other solution but death and that the punishment she deserves is the only one that we can consider? It does not. Let her disappear, let her be unable to make any fresh attempt. We have no right to demand more; and if our consciences revolt against such an indulgent solution, nevertheless we ought to be content with it because, when all is said and done, we are not here to punish, but to defend ourselves. These then are the arrangements we have made, subject to your approval. To-night an English ship will be cruising off the coast. A boat will be lowered from it, and we shall row out to it and meet it at ten o’clock at the foot of the Needle of Belval. We shall hand over this woman; she will be taken to London, set ashore during the night, and shut up in a mad-house until our task is accomplished. I do not think that any of you will oppose this arrangement, which is not only generous and humane but also makes our task safe and ourselves secure against perils we should never escape.”

Ralph perceived at once Beaumagnan’s game and he thought to himself: “That means death. There is no English ship. There are two boats, of which one with a hole in its bottom will be towed out to sea and sink. The Countess of Cagliostro will disappear without anyone ever knowing what has become of her.”

The duplicity of the scheme and the deceitful fashion in which it had been set forth frightened him. Why should not the friends of Beaumagnan agree to it when they were not even asked to answer in the affirmative? Their silence sufficed. Let none of them make any objection to it and Beaumagnan was free to act through his intermediary, Godfrey d’Etigues. None of them did raise any objection. Without knowing it they had pronounced sentence of death.

They all rose to go, manifestly delighted to have got out of the business so cheaply. No one made any comment. They had the air of leaving a gathering of friends at which they had discussed matters of no moment. Some of them moreover had to catch a train at the neighboring station. At the end of a couple of minutes they had all of them gone except Beaumagnan and the two cousins. So it came about in a fashion which Ralph found disconcerting that this dramatic meeting in which a woman’s life had been dealt with in such an arbitrary manner and her death sentence obtained by so odious a subterfuge, came to a sudden end, like a play the dénouement of which is brought about before the logical moment, like a trial in which sentence is pronounced in the middle of the evidence.

This disingenuous juggling revealed to Ralph d’Andresy the subtile and crafty nature of Beaumagnan with entire clearness. Inexorable and a fanatic, ravaged by love and pride, the man had decided on death. But there were in him scruples, cowardly hypocrisies, confused fears, which obliged him, so to speak, to hide himself from his own conscience and perhaps also from the eyes of justice. Hence this dark solution of the difficulty, this free hand obtained by this abominable trick. Now, standing on the threshold, he was gazing at the woman who was about to die. Livid and scowling, the muscles of his jaw twitching nervously, his arms crossed, he had as usual the rather theatrical air of a romantic personage. His brain must be teeming with tumultuous thoughts. Was he hesitating at the last moment?

In any case his reflections did not last long. He gripped Godfrey d’Etigues by the shoulder and drew him over the threshold, flinging this order over his shoulder to de Bennetot as he went out: “Guard her! And no nonsense! Understand? If there is——”

During the departure of the conspirators and then of their leaders the Countess of Cagliostro did not stir; and her face preserved that thoughtful and serene expression which was so little in keeping with the situation.

“Assuredly she has no suspicion of the danger that threatens her,” Ralph said to himself. “All that she is looking forward to is confinement in a mad-house, and she is not worrying at all about the prospect of that.”

An hour passed; the shades of evening began to darken the chamber. Twice the young woman looked at her watch. Then she tried to enter into conversation with de Bennetot; and of a sudden her face assumed an expression of incredible fascination and her voice inflections that moved one like a caress.

De Bennetot grunted boorishly and did not answer.

Another half-hour passed; she looked round and then gazed at the open door. It was quite clear that she had made up her mind that flight was possible, that she was drawing herself together to spring for the door. For his part, Ralph was trying to find some method of helping her in the effort. If he had had a revolver he would have made no bones about dropping de Bennetot. He thought for a moment of jumping down into the chamber; but the opening of his post of observation was too narrow. Besides some instinct seemed to awake de Bennetot to the danger and he pulled out his revolver, growling:

“A movement, a single movement, and I shoot. By God, I will!”

He was a man to keep that oath. She did not stir.

Ralph, in a growing, torturing anxiety for her, gazed at her untiringly.

Towards seven o’clock Godfrey d’Etigues returned, carrying a traveling rug over his arm.

He lit a lamp and said to Oscar de Bennetot: “Get everything ready. Go and fetch the stretcher. It’s in the coach-house. Then you can go and get some dinner.”

When he was alone with the young woman the Baron appeared to hesitate. Ralph saw that his face was haggard, his eyes wild, and that he was on the point of speech or action. But the words or the acts must have been of a kind from which one shrinks, for he was for some time restless and fidgeting. Then his opening was brutal.

“Pray to God, Madam,” he said suddenly.

She replied in a puzzled tone: “Pray to God? Why are you telling me to do that?”

Then he said in a very low voice: “Do as you like.... Only I must warn you——”

“Warn me of what?” she asked gazing at him in a sudden anxiety.

“There are moments,” he murmured, “when one ought to pray to God as if one was about to die that very night.”

She was stricken with a sudden panic. The facts of the situation suddenly flashed on her. Her arms seemed to stiffen and she clasped her hands in a kind of feverish convulsion.

“Die?... Die?... But there is no question of that, is there?... Beaumagnan never spoke of death.... He spoke of a mad-house.”

He did not answer.

The unfortunate woman murmured:

“Heavens! He has deceived me. The mad-house was a lie.... It’s something else.... You’re going to throw me into the sea.... At night.... It’s horrible!... But it isn’t possible.... Me die—me?... Help!... Help!”

Godfrey d’Etigues caught up the traveling rug and with a furious brutality he covered the young woman’s head with it and pressed his hand over her mouth to smother her cries. As he was doing so, de Bennetot returned carrying the stretcher on his shoulder. The two of them stretched her out on it and tied her down securely and in such a way, that through an opening between the slats, there hung down the iron ring to which a heavy boulder was to be fastened.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SINKING BOAT

The darkness was thickening. Godfrey d’Etigues lit a lamp. Oscar de Bennetot went to the château to get some dinner. He must have made a hasty meal, for he was back in about a quarter of an hour. The two cousins settled down to the death vigil. Even in that dim light Ralph could see that their faces were sinister. He could see the nervous twitchings which the thought of the crime so near at hand provoked.

“You ought to have brought a bottle of rum,” growled Oscar de Bennetot. “There are occasions on which one had better not perceive too clearly what one is doing.”

“This is not one of them,” said the Baron coldly. “On the contrary, we shall need to have all our wits about us.”

“It’s a nice business,” growled de Bennetot.

“Then you ought to have argued it out with Beaumagnan and refused him your help,” said the Baron impatiently.

“It was impossible,” murmured de Bennetot.

“Then obey,” said the Baron sternly.

The time passed slowly. No sound came from the château or from the sleeping countryside.

Once de Bennetot rose, went to their prisoner, and bending down, listened. Then he turned to the Baron and said:

“She is not even groaning. She certainly is a woman of character.”

He went back to his chair and added in a low voice in which there was a note of fear: “Do you believe all these things they say about her?”

“What things?”

“About her age?... And all those stories of bygone days?”

“They’re rubbish!” said the Baron scornfully.

“Beaumagnan believes in them at any rate.”

“Who knows what Beaumagnan believes, or what he doesn’t?” said the Baron impatiently.

“Nevertheless you must admit, Godfrey, that it’s an infernally odd business ... and that everything goes to show that she was not born yesterday.”

“Yes: that is so,” murmured Godfrey d’Etigues. “For my part, when I read that paper Beaumagnan drew up, I spoke to her as if she really had been living all those years ago.”

“Then you do believe it?”

“More or less. But stop talking about it. I’ve already had a good deal more than I bargained for in getting mixed up in this affair. If I had only known what it meant before I started on it, I swear to you——” he raised his voice—“I would have refused to have anything to do with it, and made no bones about it. Only——”

He broke off short. The subject was in the highest degree distasteful to him and he did not wish to say a word more about this infinitely painful business.

But de Bennetot went on: “Yes, and I swear to you that for two pins I’d clear out now; and all the more, look you, because I’ve a notion that Beaumagnan has us all nicely hooked. As I told you before he knows a lot more about the business than we do; and we’re just puppets in his hands. One day or other, when he no longer has any need of us, he’ll bid us a fond farewell and we shall see that he has worked the whole business for his own advantage. I’d bet on it. However——”

Godfrey put his finger to his lip and murmured: “Be quiet. She can hear you.”

“What does that matter?” said de Bennetot. “In a little while she’ll——”

The words died away on his lips; and they seemed no longer to dare to break the silence. Every quarter of an hour the clock of the village church chimed. Ralph fancied he could see their lips move as they counted the strokes, gazing fearfully at one another without saying anything.

But when that clock struck ten, Godfrey d’Etigues banged his fist down on the table with a violence that made the lamp jingle.

“Hell take it! It’s time we started.”

“What a disgusting job it is!” growled de Bennetot. “Are we going by ourselves?”

“The others want to come with us. But I shall send them back from the top of the cliff, since they believe in that English ship,” said the Baron.

“I should much prefer that we went in a body,” said de Bennetot.

“Oh, be quiet! My instructions are that only you and I are to handle the matter. The others might get talking; and that would be a pretty kettle of fish. Hullo! Here they are!”

The others turned out to be the three who had not taken the train, that is to say d’Ormont, Rufus d’Estiers, and Rolleville. The latter was carrying a stable lamp which the Baron made him extinguish.

“No lights,” he said. “Somebody would see it moving about on the cliff and start gossiping about it. Have the servants gone to bed?”

“Yes,” said Rufus d’Estiers.

“And Clarice?”

“She must be upstairs. We haven’t seen anything of her,” said Rolleville.

“As a matter of fact, she’s a little out of sorts to-day,” said the Baron. “Let’s be getting off.”

D’Ormont and Rolleville took the handles of the stretcher. They crossed the park and then a field to the lane which led from the village to the priest’s staircase. The starless sky was black with heavy clouds; and in the darkness the little procession, practically feeling its way, stumbled over ruts and banks. Curses kept slipping out; the Baron d’Etigues angrily hushed them.

“Will you stop that noise, confound you!” he muttered savagely. “Somebody will recognize our voices!”

“Who will recognize our voices, Godfrey? There’s absolutely nobody about, for you took your precautions with regard to the coast-guards,” de Bennetot protested.

“Yes, they’re safe enough. They’re at the inn, guests of a man I can rely on. Nevertheless it’s just possible that a patrol is making its round.”

There came a depression in the plateau which the road followed. Then it rose again; and they made their way as best they might to the spot at which the staircase rose to the top of the cliff.

It had been hollowed out of the cliff many years before on the suggestion of a priest of Benouville, in order that the country people might descend to the beach. It was lighted by openings cut through the chalk. Through them there were magnificent views of the sea, whose waves were dashing against the rocks below, and into which one seemed to be on the point of plunging.

“It’s going to be a difficult job, to get that stretcher down those steps,” said Rolleville. “We’d better help you. At any rate we can light the staircase for you.”

“No,” said the Baron with decision. “It is wiser to separate. So back you get.”

The three of them obeyed without further protest. The Baron lighted a bull’s-eye lantern; and without any delay the two cousins set about the difficult task of getting the stretcher down the staircase.

It proved a long job. The steps were steep and the turnings in the cliff were sometimes so narrow that they were compelled to raise the stretcher right on end to get it round them. The little lamp afforded but a feeble light that illumined but a few steps at a time.

De Bennetot soon lost his temper, and to such a degree that with the natural brutality of a badly brought up boor he proposed simply to “chuck the whole thing down,” that is to say, to push the unfortunate girl, litter and all, through one of the openings in the chalk.

At last they reached the beach, which was composed of a fine gravel, and stopped to recover their breath. A little way off two boats were drawn up side by side. The sea, quite calm, unruffled by the smallest wave, lapped against their keels. De Bennetot pointed out the hole he had made in the bottom of the smaller of the two, which for the time being was closed by a kind of stopper of straw. They set the stretcher on the three thwarts.

“Let’s tie the whole lot together,” said Godfrey d’Etigues.

De Bennetot made a very sensible objection; he said: “And if ever there’s a search, and this boat and stretcher and girl are found tied together at the bottom of the sea, this stretcher will prove damned awkward evidence against us.”

“We’ve got to go far enough out to make it impossible for anyone to recover anything ever,” said the Baron. “Besides it’s an old stretcher which hasn’t been used for the last twenty years. I routed it out from a loft full of lumber. There’s nothing to fear from that.”

He spoke in a shaky, fearful voice that de Bennetot hardly recognized.

“What’s the matter with you, Godfrey?” he asked.

“The matter with me? What should be the matter with me?” muttered the Baron more than a trifle indistinctly.

“Then?...”

“Then shove the boat down into the water.... But first of all, according to the instructions of Beaumagnan, we’ve got to remove her gag and ask her if there is any last wish she wants carrying out. You’d better get it over.”

“Me?” de Bennetot almost howled. “Me touch her? Me see her? I’d rather die!... Suppose you do it!”

“I couldn’t.... I’ll be damned if I could,” murmured the Baron huskily.

“But she’s guilty.... She committed those murders.”

“Of course.... Of course.... At least it’s probable that she did.... The only thing is she looked such a gentle creature.”

“Yes,” said de Bennetot. “And she’s so pretty—as beautiful as the Virgin.”

With one accord they fell on their knees on the pebbles and started to pray aloud for the girl who was about to die and on whose behalf they called for “the intervention of the Virgin Mary.”

Godfrey mingled verses from the burial service with prayers and de Bennetot punctuated them at intervals with fervent amens. This appeared to restore their courage a trifle, for they suddenly rose, burning to get the business over.

De Bennetot brought the great boulder he had ready, and tied it firmly to the iron ring. They pushed the boat down the beach into the still water. Then, together, they pushed the other boat down the beach and clambered into it. Godfrey took the two oars while de Bennetot tied the painter of the boat of the doomed woman to the last thwart of the boat they were in, then shipped the rudder.

So they rowed out to sea to the quiet accompaniment of dripping oars. Shadows darker than the night allowed them to make their slow way safely between lowering rocks towards the open sea. But, at the end of twenty minutes, their progress grew slower and slower; and they came to a stop.

“I can’t go any further,” said the Baron in a faint voice. “My arms have given out. It’s your turn.”

“I couldn’t move her a yard,” de Bennetot protested with manifest sincerity.

Godfrey made another attempt and gave it up.

“What’s the use?” he said. “Surely we’ve got far enough out and to spare. What do you think?”

“Of course we have,” said de Bennetot quickly—“especially since there’s a breeze from the shore which will take the boat further out still.”

“Then pull that straw out of the hole.”

“You’ve got to do that,” protested de Bennetot, to whom the act seemed the very act of murder.

“Enough of that nonsense!” growled the Baron savagely. “Get on with it!”

De Bennetot pulled on the painter. The other boat came slowly up alongside, its gunwale rubbing the gunwale of the boat they were in. He had only to lean over to lay his hand on the straw.

“I’m afraid G-G-Godfrey,” he stammered. “By my eternal salvation, it is not I who do this, but you. Understand that.”

Godfrey growled like a wild beast, sprang forward, thrust him aside, bent over the gunwale, and tore the bolt of straw out of the hole.

There came a gurgle of rising water; and it upset him to such a degree that, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, he wished to stop up the hole again.

He was too late, de Bennetot had slipped into his seat and taken up the oars. Recovering all his strength in an access of panic at that sinister sound, he pulled with such violence that a single stroke drove their boat several fathoms from the other.

“Stop!” shouted the Baron. “Stop! I wish to save her! Stop! Curse you!... It’s you who are killing her, not me!... Murderer!... I would have saved her!”

But de Bennetot, mad with terror, incapable of hearing or of understanding, was plying the oars with a fury that threatened to break them.

The corpse, for what else could one call this inert creature, helpless and doomed to death in that scuttled boat, remained alone. The sea must inevitably fill the boat in a few minutes, and it must sink beneath the waves.

Godfrey realized that. Therefore, making the best of it, he took the other pair of oars, and without caring whether anyone heard the splashes or not, the two confederates strove with the most desperate efforts to escape with the utmost possible speed from the scene of their crime. They dreaded to hear some faint cry of anguish or the terrible murmur of an object that sinks and over which the water closes forever.

The doomed boat floated almost without movement on the surface of the sea, on which the air, loaded with low clouds, appeared to weigh with an extraordinary heaviness.

D’Etigues and de Bennetot must have been half-way back to the shore. The sound of their flight was no longer heard. At that moment the boat heeled over to starboard; and in a kind of stupor of terror and agony that dazed her, the young woman thought that the end had come. She did not wince; she did not shiver. The acceptance of death produces a state of mind in which one seems already on the other side of the grave.

However she was faintly astonished not to feel the touch of icy water. At the moment it was the thing from which her delicate flesh most shrank. No; the boat was not plunging under. It seemed more likely rather to capsize because somebody had passed a leg over the gunwale. Somebody? But who? The Baron? His confederate?

She learned that it was neither the one nor the other, for a voice which she did not know murmured:

“You can stop being frightened. It’s a friend who has come to rescue you.”

This friend bent over her and without even knowing whether she heard or not, continued:

“You have never seen me ... my name is Ralph ... Ralph d’Andresy.... It’s all right now.... I’ve stopped the hole with a stocking rolled round one of the rowlocks. It’s a make-shift; but it will work all right—especially since we are going to get rid of this great boulder.”

With his knife he cut the ropes which fastened the young woman to the stretcher, cut loose the boulder, and succeeded in heaving it overboard.

Then drawing aside the folds of the rug which enveloped her, he said:

“You can’t think how delighted I am things have turned out so much better than I expected. Here you are, safe! The water has not even had time to reach you. What luck we’ve had! You’re feeling all right?”

She whispered so low that he hardly heard it:

“No.... My ankle.... Their ropes twisted my foot and cut into it.”

“That will soon be all right,” he said. “The important thing is to get back to the shore. Your two executioners will have certainly landed by now and must be scrambling up the staircase as hard as they can climb. So we have nothing to fear from them.”

He got to work quickly. He took the two oars, which de Bennetot had not taken the trouble to remove—unless perhaps he had thought that if the boat were found it would look less suspicious if the oars were in it—and began to row towards the shore, telling her how he had come to her help in the nick of time, in a cheerful, careless voice, as if nothing more extraordinary had happened than happens at an ordinary picnic.

“Let me introduce myself in a rather more formal way, though I’m not particularly presentable at the moment, since I am only dressed in my shirt, one stocking, and a knife hanging from a string from my neck,” he said. “I am Ralph d’Andresy, at your service—since chance willed it. And a very simple chance it was.... I overheard a conversation.... I learned that there was a plot in action against a certain lady.... So I took the liberty of forestalling it. I hurried down to the beach, undressed, and when the two cousins came out of the entrance of the tunnel I slipped into the water. All I had to do then was to hide behind your boat and catch hold of the stern when they started to tow it out to sea. And that was what I did do. Neither of them had the slightest idea that they were taking out with their victim a champion swimmer who had made up his mind to save her. But I’ll tell you more about it later when you’re in a state to understand. I’ve got an idea that at the moment I’m babbling away to the empty air.”

He paused.

“I’m feeling very ill,” she murmured. “I’m utterly worn out.”

“I can tell you what to do,” he said quickly. “Lose consciousness. Nothing is so restful as to lose consciousness.”

She seemed to follow his advice, for after a little moan or two, she began to breathe quietly and regularly. He covered her up with the rug and fell to rowing again.

“It’s better as it is,” he said to himself. “I can act exactly as I like without having to explain what I’m doing.”

The fact that there was no one to listen to him did not prevent him from indulging in a sustained monologue, with all the satisfaction of a man who is exceedingly pleased with himself and everything he does. The boat moved quickly towards the shore. The dark mass of the cliffs loomed ahead.

When the keel of the boat ground its way into the pebbles, he jumped out of it, then lifted the unconscious young woman, with an ease which demonstrated the uncommon strength of his muscles, and carried her to the foot of the cliff.

“Boxing champion also,” said he—“to say nothing of the Greco-Roman style. I don’t mind telling you, since you cannot hear me, that I found these useful accomplishments in my inheritance from father ... and a jolly lot of others! But enough of this trifling. Rest here, under this rock, where you’re safe from the treacherous waves.... I shall be back presently. I expect you will be very keen on taking vengeance on those two cousins. That makes it necessary that the boat should not be found and that they should believe you thoroughly and completely drowned. So do not be impatient.”

Without wasting any more time he put this plan into execution. Once more he rowed out the boat to the open sea, pulled out the rowlock and his stocking out of the hole, and, sure that it would sink, took to the water again. As soon as he reached the shore, he put on his clothes which he had hidden in a cranny in the cliff.

He went back to the young woman and said: “Come, the next job is to climb to the top of the cliff; and it’s not the easiest job in the world.”

Little by little she came out of her swoon and he saw faintly the glimmer of her open eyes.

With his help she tried to stand upright, but uttered a cry of pain, and would have fallen but for his arm. He lowered her to the ground, took off her shoe, and found that her stocking was all bloody. It was in no way a serious injury, but uncommonly painful. He used his handkerchief as a temporary bandage. They had to be getting on their way; and he hoisted her on to his shoulder and began the ascent of the staircase.

Three hundred and fifty steps! If Godfrey d’Etigues and Oscar de Bennetot had had great difficulty in carrying, the two of them, the young woman down, what an immense effort was demanded by the ascent, and that from a young man! Four times he had to stop, streaming with sweat, feeling that he would never be able to go on. Nevertheless he went on, all the while with a cheerfulness no fatigue could dash. At the third halt, having sat down with the girl on his knee, he found that she was laughing faintly at his jokes and unflagging spirit. At last he finished the ascent with her charming form hugged tightly to him, his hands and his arms assuring him of its supple firmness.

When he reached the top he gave himself but the shortest rest, for a fresh breeze had risen and was clearing the sky. Fortunately they had no great distance to go to find security; and with a last brisk effort he carried her across a field into a lonely barn which he had had in mind all the while. He carried her up the ladder into the loft, laid her on a heap of straw, covered her with the rug, told her that she was safe and need fear nothing and that he would soon be back. Then he closed the trap-door, unhooked the ladder, hid it under straw, and hurried to the sleeping inn. With cat-like quietness he filled a basket with some cold meat, cheese, bread, a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, and a lantern. He was soon back at the barn, climbed up into the loft with his basket, drew up the ladder, and shut the trap-door.

“Twelve hour’s sleep and safety!” he said in a tone of satisfaction. “No one will disturb us here. At noon to-morrow I’ll get a carriage for you and take you wherever you like.”

Here they were then, shut up together after the most tragic and marvellous adventure that one could imagine. How far away it all seemed now—all those dreadful scenes of the day! The tribunal of enquiry, the inexorable judges, the sinister executioners, Beaumagnan, Godfrey d’Etigues, the condemnation, the descent down to the sea, the boat sinking in the darkness, what nightmares already dim! They had come to an end in an intimate comradeship of victim and rescuer.

By the light of the lantern hanging from a beam he gave the young woman food and drink and dressed her wound with infinite gentleness. Protected by him, far from the snares and hatred of her enemies, Josephine Balsamo lay back in utter trustfulness. She shut her eyes and fell asleep.

The lamp illumined clearly her beautiful face, flushed by the fever of so many emotions. Ralph knelt down in front of her and contemplated her at length. Finding the heat of the barn oppressive, she had unfastened the top of her bodice; and he could see her admirably shaped shoulders and the purity of the line where they joined the neck.

He bethought himself of that black mark of which Beaumagnan had spoken, and which was plain to see in the miniature. How could he have resisted the temptation to make sure if it were really there—on the bosom of the woman he had saved from death? Gently he drew down the top of her frock. Low down on her right shoulder a beauty spot, black as one of those mouches which coquettes used formerly to stick at the corner of their lips, marked the white and silky skin and rose and fell with the even rhythm of her breathing.

“Who are you? Who are you?” he murmured, greatly troubled. “From what world do you come?”

He too, like the others, was conscious of an inexplicable discomfort; like them felt the mysterious impression that emanated from this strange creature, accentuated by those curious details of her life and by her astonishing beauty. And he could not help questioning her as if she were able to answer on behalf of the woman who had, those long years, before been the model of the miniature.

Her lips formed words which he did not understand. And he was so near to them and the breath they breathed forth was so sweet that, trembling like a leaf, he brushed them with his own.

She sighed. Her eyes opened. At the sight of Ralph on his knees before her she blushed and at the same time smiled; and this smile still wreathed her lips when her heavy eyelids had come down again over her eyes and she had sunk back into her slumber.

Ralph was distracted; quivering with passionate admiration, Clarice utterly forgotten, he murmured the most exalted phrases and clasped his hands as before an idol to which he was addressing a hymn of the most ardent and frenzied adoration.

“Oh, how beautiful you are!... I did not think there was so much beauty in the world.... Do not go on smiling.... I can quite understand that men desire to make you weep—your smile is so troubling.... One would like to efface it so that no one might ever see it again.... Ah, do not smile at anyone but me, I implore you!”

Then in a lower voice and even more passionately he continued:

“Josephine Balsamo.... How sweet your name is! And how much more mysterious it makes you!... Did Beaumagnan call you a witch?... He was wrong. You’re an enchantress.... You have emerged from the darkness and you’re the light—the light of the sun!... Josephine Balsamo.... Enchantress.... Magician!... What a world opens before me!... What a wealth of happiness I see.... My life began at the very moment at which I took you in my arms.... I have no other memories but the memory of you.... All my hope is in you.... Heavens how beautiful you are!... It is enough to make one weep with despair.”

He uttered these impassioned words, leaning over her, his mouth close to her mouth; but the kiss he had stolen was the only caress he allowed himself. There was not only a voluptuousness in the smile of Josephine Balsamo, but also such a modesty that he felt a profound respect for her; and his exaltation ended in the words of genuine gravity, full of juvenile devotion.

“I will help you.... The rest of the world shall be able to do nothing against you.... If you desire to reach, in spite of them, the goal at which they are aiming, I promise you that you shall succeed.... Far from you or near you, I shall always be your defender and savior.... Trust in my devotion.”

At last he went to sleep, murmuring promises and oaths which had become rather incoherent; and it was a profound and dreamless sleep like the sleep of children who have to restore their overdriven young organizations.

The church clock struck eleven. He counted the strokes with a growing surprise.

“Eleven o’clock in the morning! Is it really possible?” he cried.

The light was filtering in through the chinks in the shutters and through openings under the old thatched roof. On the right, even, a ray of sunlight fell on the floor.

“Where are you?” he said in a dazed voice. “I do not see you.”

The lamp had been extinguished. He sprang to the shutters and pulled them open. A flood of light filled the loft; but it did not reveal Josephine Balsamo.

He sprang upon the trusses of hay and in a childish fury flung them aside. No one. Josephine Balsamo had disappeared. He hurried down from the loft, hunted through the park, fairly ransacked the plateau and the road. In vain. In spite of the injury to her foot which had, the night before, made it impossible for her to set it on the ground. She had left their hiding-place, crossed the park and the plateau and got away....

He returned to the barn to make a minute inspection of it. He did not have to seek long. He saw on the floor a rectangular piece of cardboard.

He picked it up. It was the photograph of the Countess of Cagliostro. On the back of it, written in pencil, were these two lines:

“My rescuer has all my gratitude, but he must not try to see me again.”

CHAPTER V.
ONE OF THE SEVEN BRANCHES

There are certain stories the hero of which passes through the most extravagant adventures and on the very edge of the dénouement awakes to find that it has all been the mirage of a dream.

When Ralph found his bicycle behind the bank where he had hidden it two nights before, he suddenly had the idea that he had been tossed about in a series of dreams, pleasant, picturesque, terrifying, and, above all, wholly deceptive. He did not cherish the hypothesis for any length of time. The photograph which he had in his possession, and even more perhaps the intoxicating kiss that he had snatched from the lips of Josephine Balsamo, set everything on the firm ground of reality. That at any rate was a certainty from which there was no getting away.

At this moment for the first time—he admitted it with a touch of quickly passing remorse—his thoughts returned to Clarice d’Etigues and to the delightful hours of the morning before.

But at Ralph’s age these ingratitudes and these sentimental contradictions are easily dealt with. It appears that one is divided into two beings, the one of whom will continue to love in a kind of unconsciousness, with a love that is to play its part in the future, while the other abandons himself with frenzy to all the transports of the new passion. The image of Clarice rose before him, troubled and grief-stricken, as if at the back of the little chapel, lighted by flickering candles beside which he would from time to time go and pray. But the Countess of Cagliostro had at once become the unique divinity of his adoration, a despotic and a jealous divinity, who would not suffer one to rob her of the least thought, or the least secret.

Ralph d’Andresy—so we will continue to call the young man who, later, under the name of Arsène Lupin became so illustrious—Ralph d’Andresy had never loved. As a matter of fact he had been prevented from doing so by lack of time rather than by lack of opportunity. Burning with ambition, but not knowing in what sphere and by what means his dreams of glory, of fortune, and of power would be realized, he spent his energy in every direction in order to be ready to answer on the instant the call of destiny. His intelligence, his ingenuity, his will, his agility, the strength of his muscles, his suppleness, and his endurance, he cultivated all his gifts to the extreme limit, always astonished to discover that this limit ever receded further before the violence of his efforts.

With all this, however it was necessary to live, for he had no resources. An orphan, alone in the world, without friends or relations, without a profession, somehow or other he managed to live. How? It was a matter about which he could only give somewhat hazy explanations which he himself did not examine too closely. One lives as best one can. One deals with one’s needs and one’s appetite as circumstances permit. And there again he was astonished to perceive the richness of his aptitudes and the favorable opportunities that Fortune always seemed to bring him.

“The luck is on my side,” he told himself. “Forward then. What will be will; and I have an idea that it will be magnificent.”

It was at this point that he crossed the path of Josephine Balsamo. He perceived at once that, to win her, he would freely spend all the energy he had accumulated. His ambitions? He knew their goal for the future—Josephine Balsamo. Of a sudden he learned the reason of his existence and the significance of his preparations—Josephine Balsamo.

And for him Josephine Balsamo had nothing in common with the “infernal creature” whom Beaumagnan had endeavored to raise before the troubled imagination of his friends. All that vision of bloodshed, those accoutrements of crime, those trappings of the sorceress, vanished like a nightmare in face of the charming photograph in which he contemplated the limpid eyes and pure lips of the young woman.

“I shall find you!” he swore, covering it with kisses. “And you shall love me as I love you. To me you shall be the most submissive and the most adored of mistresses. If you have loved, you shall forget those you have loved; you shall pursue them with your hate. I shall read your mysterious life as one reads an open book. Your power of divination, the miracles you work, your incredible youth, everything which troubles and frightens the rest of the world, shall be so many ingenious devices at which we shall laugh together. Josephine Balsamo, you shall be mine!”

It was an oath he was resolved to keep; but he fully realized its extravagance and the audacity at the moment. In the bottom of his heart, he was still frightened of Josephine Balsamo, and he was not so far from feeling a certain irritation against her, like a child who wishes to be the equal but finds himself the obedient inferior of someone stronger than himself.

For two days he confined himself to the little bedroom which he occupied on the ground floor of the inn, the window of which looked out on a court-yard planted with apple trees. They were days of meditation and waiting. On the afternoon of the third he took a long ride through the plain of Normandy, that is to say to the places where it was possible that he would meet Josephine Balsamo. He thought it quite unlikely that the young woman, still badly shaken by her horrible experiences, would return to her abode in Paris. Alive, it was necessary that those who had murdered her should believe her dead. Moreover not only to avenge herself on them but also to reach before them the goal that they were seeking, it was necessary that she should not leave the field of battle. And that field of battle was the region which they call the Caux country; and in it all the ends of intrigue seemed to be united. In that case why should he not suddenly see her charming figure round the corner of this or that road, or on the outskirts of this or that wood?

When he came back that evening he found on his dressing-table a bunch of spring flowers, periwinkles, narcissi, primroses, and wild strawberry blossoms. He asked the landlord how they came there. No one had been seen in his room.

“It is she!” he thought, kissing the flowers that she had just gathered.

For four consecutive days he posted himself under cover at the back of the court-yard. When he heard the sound of a footstep nearby, his heart jumped. Always he was disappointed. It caused him keen suffering. But at five o’clock on the fourth day, among the trees and bushes which covered the slope down the court-yard, he heard the rustling of a gown. Among them he saw a gown. He was on the point of darting forward, when he stopped short, overwhelmed by a sudden access of rage. He saw that it was Clarice d’Etigues.

She had in her hand a bunch of flowers exactly like the other one. She crossed the court-yard lightly to the window of his bedroom and putting her hand through it set those flowers on his dressing-table.

When she retraced her steps, he had a clear view of her face and was struck by its paleness. Her cheeks had lost their fresh coloring and her sunken eyes were witness to the bitterness of her grief and her hours of sleeplessness.

“You will make me suffer bitterly,” she had said.

She had not foreseen however, that those sufferings would begin so soon and that the very day which had seen their love at its zenith, would be a day of farewell and of inexplicable desertion.

He remembered the prediction and raging at her for the injury he was doing her, furious at his disappointment, that it had been Clarice who had brought the flowers and not she for whom he was waiting, he suffered her to go away without a word.

However it was to Clarice—to Clarice who thus herself destroyed her last chance of happiness—that he owed the precious information which he needed to find his way in the darkness in which he was moving. An hour later he discovered that a letter was fastened to the bouquet. He tore it open and read:

“Is it already finished, dearest? No: it cannot be. There is no real reason for my tears surely?... It is impossible that you should have already had enough, of your Clarice?

“Darling to-night they are all going away by train; and they will not come back till very late to-morrow. You will come, won’t you? You will not leave me to weep again?”

Poor, mournful lines!... Ralph was not softened by them. He considered this journey of which she told him and remembered that accusation of Beaumagnan: “Learning from me that we were soon about to examine from cellar to roof a mansion near Dieppe, she betook herself there hastily——”

Was not this the goal of the expedition? And would he not find there an opportunity of joining in the struggle and drawing from it all the advantage that circumstances might offer?

That very evening at seven o’clock, dressed like a fisherman from the coast in blue flannel trousers, a thick woolen sweater, and a woolen cap pulled down over his ears, unrecognizable under the layer of ochre which reddened his face, he got into the same train as the Baron d’Etigues and Oscar de Bennetot, like them changed twice, and got out at a little village where he spent the night.

Next morning d’Ormont, Rolleville, and Rufus d’Estiers came in a carriage to fetch their two friends. Ralph followed them.

At the end of ten kilometers the carriage stopped before a long, dilapidated mansion called the Château de Gueures. When he came to the open gates, Ralph discovered that a whole host of workmen were swarming in the gardens and park, digging up the paths and the lawns, or scraping the basin of a pool which was fed by a small stream of which they had closed the sluice-gates. It was ten o’clock. On the terrace the contractors welcomed the five associates.

Ralph entered without being noticed, mingled with the workmen, and questioned them. From them he learned that the château had just been bought by the Marquis de Rolleville and that the work of restoration had begun that morning.

“Yes, Monsieur. Instructions have been given that any man who in the course of his digging finds coins, metal objects, copper, iron, and so forth, is to hand them over and he will be rewarded.”

It was quite clear that all this turning things upside down had no other object than the discovery of something. Ralph asked himself what they were trying to find.

He strolled round the park, made a tour of the mansion, hunting through the cellars with especial care, without discovering anything of a nature to solve the problem, the data of which he did not know. It is all very well to seek but it is necessary to know what you are seeking.

At half-past eleven he had arrived at no result of any kind; and the necessity of doing something was impressing itself on his mind more and more strongly. Every delay gave the others greater and greater chances; and he risked finding himself confronted by the accomplished fact.

At that moment the five friends were standing on a long terrace behind the mansion, a terrace which looked down on the park and the lake. A small balustrade ran along the edge of it, broken at regular intervals by twelve brick pillars which served as pedestals for old stone vases, nearly every one of which was broken.

A gang of workmen armed with picks set about demolishing the wall. Ralph watched them do it thoughtfully, his hands in his pockets and a cigarette between his lips, without bothering himself about the fact that his presence on that spot might appear a trifle strange.

Godfrey d’Etigues, rolled a cigarette; and then having no matches, he walked up to Ralph and asked him for a light.

Ralph held out his cigarette and while the Baron was lighting his, a complete plan formed itself in his mind, a spontaneous, very simple plan, of which the least details rose before him in their logical sequence.

He pulled off his cap and displayed his carefully brushed curls which were not at all those of an ordinary fisherman. The Baron d’Etigues gazed at him earnestly, and, suddenly enlightened, fell into a fury.

“You again! And disguised! What is this new intrigue and how dare you follow me here? I’ve already told you in the clearest possible terms that a marriage between my daughter and you is impossible.”

Ralph caught his arm and said imperiously:

“We don’t want a scandal! That would do neither of us any good. Bring your friends to me.”

Godfrey tried to shake him off.

“Bring your friends!” Ralph repeated in a yet more imperious voice. “I am going to render you a service. What are you looking for? Something antique, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the Baron impressed against his will by Ralph’s earnestness. “We’re looking for a candlestick.”

“A candlestick with seven branches, of course that’s what it is! I know its hiding-place. Later I shall be able to give you other information which will be useful to you in the work you have taken in hand. Then we’ll talk about Mademoiselle d’Etigues. To-day there is no question of her. Call your friends!”

Godfrey hesitated; but Ralph’s confident promises impressed him. He called to his friend and they came at once.

“I know this young man,” he said in a grudging voice. “And according to him we shall perhaps succeed in finding——”

Ralph cut him short.

“There’s no perhaps about it, Monsieur,” he said impatiently. “I belong to this part of the country. And when I was a boy, I used to play in this château with the children of an old gardener who was the caretaker of it. One day he pointed out to us a ring affixed to the wall of one of the cellars and said: ‘That’s a hiding-place that is. I’ve often been told of how they put valuables into it—gold candlesticks and clocks and jewelry.’”

These revelations made the Baron and his friends open their eyes. De Bennetot however raised an objection.

He said: “But we’ve already searched the cellars.”

“Not thoroughly,” Ralph declared. “I’m going to show you.”

They made for the cellars by the quickest way, a staircase at the end of the left wing which descended to the basement from the outside of the building. Two large doors opened on to three or four steps, after which came a series of vaulted chambers.

“The third on the left,” said Ralph, who, in the course of the tour he had made through them, had studied the ground. “Here ... this one.”

He made them all precede him, through a door so low that they had to stoop to enter it, into a dark cellar.

“You can’t see an inch before your face,” grumbled Rufus d’Estiers.

“That’s true,” said Ralph. “But here are some matches and I saw a candle-end on one of those steps into the cellars. Half a minute—I’ll run for it.”

He shut the door of the cellar, turned the key quietly, took it out of the door, and called out to his prisoners:

“Mind you light all the seven branches of the candlestick. You will find it under the last slab carefully wrapped up in spiders’ webs!”

Before he got outside the building he heard the five of them hammering furiously at the door. He was sure that, worm-eaten and shaky, it would hold out but a very few minutes. But that was all the time he wanted.

He rushed up on to the terrace. A workman was demolishing the fourth of the little brick pillars. Ralph took his pick from him, saying:

“Hand it over, mate. The proprietor has just told me what to do.”

“Shall I help you?” said the workman.

“There’s no need, thanks.”

Ralph hurried to the ninth pillar, and knocked the vase off it with a stroke of his pick. Then he attacked the top of the pillar, which was covered with cracked cement, which fell to pieces under his blows. Under the cement cap the pillar was hollow, and the hollow had been filled with earth and pebbles. Ralph started to clear them out quickly with the point of his pick. And about a foot down it turned up a piece of corroded metal. A glance showed him that it was veritably a branch of one of those great candlesticks one sees on the altars of many churches.

A group of workmen had gathered round him and at seeing this piece of metal which Ralph picked up and waved in the air, they cheered. It was the first discovery that had been made since they began work.

Doubtless Ralph would have kept his head and gone quietly off, pretending that he was going to find the five friends to give them this metal stem; but at that very moment there was a loud shouting at the corner of the building, and Rolleville, followed by the rest of the five, came bucketing round it, bellowing:

“Thief! Arrest him! Thief!”

Ralph dived through the group of workmen and took to his heels. It was absurd, like the rest of his conduct for the last few minutes, for if he had wished to win the confidence of the Baron and his friends he should not have shut them up in a cellar and robbed them of the object of their search. But since he was really fighting for Josephine Balsamo, he had no other idea in his head but that of offering her sooner or later the trophy he had just acquired.

Since the main road to the gates was blocked by workmen, he ran round the lake, knocked down two men who tried to bar his way and followed, at a distance of thirty yards, by a veritable horde of pursuers howling like madmen, ran into a small kitchen garden, surrounded on every side by a wall of a most discouraging height.

“Confound it!” he muttered. “I’m well shut in! I’m going to be the stag at bay, hang it!... What a mull I’ve made of it!”

Above the left wall of the kitchen garden rose the village church and the graveyard ran right into the interior of the garden in the shape of a small enclosed space, which formerly served as a burial ground of the lords of Gueures. Tall yew trees hung over its wall. As he ran round this enclosure a small door in the wall was half-opened, an arm was stretched out to bar his way, a little hand seized him by the arm; and the astonished Ralph was drawn into a dark archway by a woman who shut the door in the face of his pursuers, and turned the key in the lock.

He divined rather than saw Josephine Balsamo.

“Come on!” she said, plunging into the middle of the yews.

Another door was opened in the opposite wall of the little close; it let them into the village churchyard.

By the apse of the church stood an old-fashioned barouche of the kind one hardly ever sees nowadays anywhere except in the country. Harnessed to it were two thin, badly groomed horses. On the box sat a gray-bearded coachman whose bent back stuck out under his blue blouse.

Ralph and the Countess jumped into the carriage. No one had seen them. She said to the coachman:

“Take the road to Luneray and Doudeville. Be quick!”

The church was at the end of the village; and by taking the road to Luneray, they avoided passing any of the cottages. A long stretch of road rose in a steepish hill to the plateau. The two lean steeds developed the speed of first-class trotters and went up the hill at an astonishing pace.

The interior of this shabby-looking barouche was spacious, comfortable, and protected from the eyes of the indiscreet by shutters of wooden trellis-work. Indeed it conveyed such an impression of intimacy that Ralph fell on his knees and gave vent freely to his amorous exaltation.

He was choking with joy. Whether the Countess was offended or not, he decided that this second meeting, taking place in such extraordinary circumstances and after the night of the rescue, established relations between them which permitted him to omit several stages and begin the conversation with a formal declaration of love.

He did so at once and in an airy fashion which would have disarmed the most prudish of women.

“You? Is it indeed you? But how dramatic! At the very moment at which the hunt was going to tear me to pieces, Josephine Balsamo springs from the shadows and rescues me in my turn. Ah, how happy I am! How I love you! I have loved you for years ... for a hundred years! Yes, I’ve a hundred years of love in me.... An old love as young as you.... And as beautiful as you are lovely!... And you are so lovely!... One cannot look on you without being moved to the depths of one’s being.... It’s a joy; but at the same time it fills one with despair to think that, whatever happens, one will never be able to grasp your beauty in all its fulness. Your expression, your smile, their deepest meanings will forever elude us.”

He quivered and murmured: “Oh, your eyes rest on me! You do not turn them away! You’re not angry with me, then? You allow me to tell you of my love?”

“Suppose I bid you get out?” she said, opening the door.

“I should refuse.”

“And if I were to call the coachman to my aid?”

“I should kill him.”

“And if I got out myself?”

“I should continue the declaration of my love along the road.”

She burst out laughing.

“You have an answer for everything,” she said. “Stay where you are; but no more nonsense! Tell me what happened to you and why those men were pursuing you.”

He had gained his end.

“Yes, I will tell you everything since you do not repulse me.... Since you accept my love.”

“But I accept nothing,” she said, still laughing. “You pile declaration on declaration and you do not even know me.”

“I don’t know you?”

“You hardly saw me that night—just by the light of a lantern.”

“And didn’t I see you during the day before that night? Didn’t I have time to admire you during that abominable ordeal at La Haie d’Etigues?”

She turned suddenly serious and gazed at him earnestly.

“Oh, you were present, were you?” she said quickly.

“I was there, all right,” he said with triumphant cheerfulness. “I was there; and I know who you are. Daughter of Cagliostro, I know you! You can drop your mask. The first Napoleon played with you.... You betrayed Napoleon III, helped Bismarck, and drove the brave General Boulanger to suicide! You bathe in the fountain of youth. You are a hundred years old—and I love you.”

Her brow was furrowed with a faint frown of troubled doubt.

“Ah, you were there.... I guessed as much.... The brutes! How they did make me suffer!... And you heard their hateful accusations?” she said slowly and thoughtfully.

“I heard a lot of stupid things,” he exclaimed. “And I saw a band of fanatics who hate you as they hate everything that is beautiful. But all that was imbecile and silly. Don’t let’s think any more about it. For my part, I only wish to remember the delightful miracles which spring up before your feet like flowers. I wish to believe in your everlasting youth. I wish to believe that you would not have died if I had not rescued you. I wish to believe that my love is supernatural and that it was by enchantment that you issued just now from the trunk of a yew.”

She shook her head gently, serene again.

“No: to visit the Château de Gueure I had already passed through that ancient door, the key of which was in the lock; and knowing that they were going to make a great search this morning I was on the watch,” she said. “I saw them hunting you from the gate of that garden. You were coming to it. I slipped back and waited.”

“A miracle, I tell you!” he declared. “And here is another. For weeks and months, perhaps for longer, they have searched in that park for a candlestick with seven branches. And to find it in a few minutes in the midst of all that crowd and under the very eyes of our opponents, it was only necessary for me to wish to please you.”

She started and stared at him with amazed eyes:

“What? What are you talking about?... You’ve found it?” she cried.

“The candlestick itself: no—only one of its seven branches. Here it is.”

She almost snatched the bronze metal branch from him and examined it almost feverishly. It was round, fairly strong, slightly bent, and the metal of it was hidden by a thick layer of verdigris. One of its ends, a little blackened, had let into one of its faces a large violet stone, rounded en cabochon.

“Yes,” she murmured, “yes: there is no possible doubt about it. The branch has been sawed off level with the main stem. You’ve no idea how grateful I am to you!”

In a few picturesque sentences he gave her an account of his exploit. She could not get over her astonishment.

“But what gave you the idea? Why that inspiration to demolish the ninth pillar rather than another? Was it mere chance?” she asked.

“Not at all,” he declared. “It was a certainty. Eleven out of the twelve pillars had been built before the end of the seventeenth century—the ninth, later.”

“How did you know?” she asked quickly.

“Because the bricks of the eleven others are of a size that has not been in use for the last two hundred years, while the bricks of number nine are those which are in use to-day. Therefore number nine was demolished and then rebuilt. Why, if not to hide this branch of the candlestick?”

She was silent for a good minute. Then she said slowly:

“It’s extraordinary.... I should never have believed it possible to succeed.... And so quickly! There, where we had all failed.... Yes: it really was a miracle.”

“Love’s miracle,” said Ralph.

The carriage sped along with astonishing rapidity, keeping to cross-country lanes, it avoided the passage through villages. Up hill and down dale the ardor of those two little thin horses never flagged. On either side the country passed like images in a dream.

“Was Beaumagnan there?” asked the Countess.

“Luckily for him he was not,” said Ralph with a darkling air.

“Why luckily?”

“If he had been, I should have strangled him,” said Ralph between his teeth. “I hate the gloomy dog.”

“Not so much as I do,” she said bitterly.

“But you haven’t always hated him,” said he unable to hide his jealousy.

“Lies and calumnies,” said Josephine Balsamo coldly, without raising her voice. “Beaumagnan is an impostor, an unbalanced creature, full of morbid pride; and it is because I rejected his love that he desired my death. That I said the other day; and he did not contradict me.... He could not contradict me.”

“But what joyful words!” exclaimed Ralph. “Then you never loved him? What a weight off my spirits! But, after all, the thing was impossible! Josephine Balsamo to fall in love with a Beaumagnan!”

He laughed aloud in his joy.

“But listen, I do not wish to call you that any longer,” he went on. “Josephine is not a pretty name. Let me call you Josine. May I? That’s it, I will call you Josine, as Napoleon and your mother Josephine Beauharnais called you Josine. That’s settled, isn’t it? You are Josine ... my Josine.”

“Respect first, please,” she said smiling at his childishness. “I am not your Josine.”

“Respect! But I’m overflowing with respect. What! We were shut up together.... You were entirely defenseless.... And I remained on my knees before you as before an idol. And I’m full of fear! I’m trembling! If you were to give me your hand to kiss I should not dare to do it!”

CHAPTER VI.
DETECTIVES AND POLICEMEN

The journey was one long protestation of love. Perhaps the Countess of Cagliostro was right not to put Ralph to the test by holding out her hand for him to kiss. But in truth, though he had sworn an oath to win that charming young woman and was resolved to do so, he felt for her a respect which left him just enough courage to ply her with amorous words, and no more.

Did she hear him? For a while, yes—as one listens to a child telling you prettily how fond he is of you. Then she sank into a profound thoughtful silence which disconcerted him.

At last he cried:

“Speak to me, I implore you. I speak jokingly in order to be able to tell you things that I should not dare to tell you seriously. But, at heart, I’m afraid of you; and I do not know what I am saying. Answer me, I beg you. Say just a few words that will recall me to reality.”

“Only a few words?” she said slowly.

“Yes, just a few.”

“Well, then, here they are: Doudeville Station is quite near; and the railway is waiting for you.”

He crossed his arms with an air of indignation.

“And you?” he said.

“I?”

“Yes. What is going to become of you all by yourself?”

“Goodness!” she said quickly. “I shall try to get on as I’ve been getting on up to now.”

“That’s impossible. You cannot do without me any longer. You have entered upon a struggle in which my help is indispensable. Beaumagnan, Godfrey d’Etigues, the Prince of Arcola are so many ruffians who will crush you.”

“They believe me dead.”

“That’s all the more reason for letting me join forces with you. If you are dead how do you wish to act?”

“Don’t let that worry you. I shall act without their seeing me,” she said confidently.

“But how much more easily through me as your agent! No; I beg you—and now I am speaking very seriously—do not reject my aid. There are things which a woman cannot accomplish by herself. Owing to the mere fact that you, a woman, are seeking the same end as these men and are consequently at war with them, they have succeeded in forming the most ignoble plot against you. They brought such charges against you and supported them by proofs apparently so sound that for a moment I actually saw in you the sorceress and criminal whom Beaumagnan was overwhelming with his hatred and contempt. Do not be angry with me for that. As soon as you began to defend yourself against them, I saw my mistake. Beaumagnan and his confederates became nothing more than your hateful and cowardly executioners. You dominated them by your dignity; and to-day not a vestige of all their calumnies lingers in my memory. But you must accept my help. If I have ruffled your sensibilities by telling you that I love you, you will hear no more about that. All I ask for is to be allowed to devote myself to you, as one concentrates oneself to that which is most beautiful and purest.”

She yielded to his earnest pressure. They drove on through Doudeville. A little further on, on the road to Yvetot, the carriage turned into a farm-yard, along the edge of which ran a row of beeches which seemed to be stunting the apple trees with which it was planted, and came to a stop.

“Here we get out,” said the Countess. “This place belongs to Mother Vasseur, an excellent woman who was once my cook. She keeps an inn a little way down the road. Sometimes when I want a rest I come and stay with her for a day or two. We will lunch here, Leonard, and be off again in an hour.”

She and Ralph turned into the high road again. She walked with the light step of a young girl. She was wearing a tightly-fitting gray frock and a mauve hat, with velvet strings, and trimmed with bunches of violets. Ralph walked a little behind her in order to feast his eyes on her.

Round the first corner they found a small white house with a thatched roof; in front of it was a small flower-garden. They stepped right into the bar which ran the length of the house.

“A man’s voice,” said Ralph doubtfully, nodding towards the door of a room on the other side of the bar.

“That’s the room in which Mother Vasseur always gives me my meals,” said the Countess. “I expect some of the villagers are in it.”

On her words the door of it opened and a woman well on in years, wearing an apron and sabots, came out of it.

At the sight of the Countess she appeared utterly flabbergasted, shut the door sharply behind her and stuttered something they could not understand.

“What’s the matter?” said Josephine Balsamo in a tone of anxiety.

Mother Vasseur dropped into a chair and murmured more clearly:

“Be off!... Bolt!... Be quick!”

“But why? Explain?” said the Countess.

The old woman got control of herself and said:

“Detectives.... They’re hunting for you.... They’ve searched your trunks.... They’re expecting the policemen from the town.... Run away, or you’re lost!”

The Countess tottered, and looking as if she were about to faint, leaned against the bar. Her eyes met Ralph’s in a supplication. It was for all the world as if she thought that she was lost and begged him to help her.

Ralph was stupefied. He stammered:

“B-b-but what d-d-do the police matter to you? It isn’t you they’re looking for!... Why on earth——”

“Yes, yes! It is her!” said Mother Vasseur. “They are looking for her!... Save her!”

Without grasping the full significance of this astonishing scene, Ralph divined that here was something in the nature of a tragedy. He caught the Countess by the arm, drew her to the door, and thrust her through it.

But crossing the threshold first, she started back in affright and cried:

“The police! They have seen me!”

The two of them hastily stepped back into the house. Mother Vasseur was trembling in every limb; she muttered stupidly:

“The police ... the detectives.”

“Be quiet!” snapped Ralph in a low voice, keeping quite calm. “I’ll answer for its being all right. How many detectives are there?”

“Two.”

“And two policemen. Then it’s no use trying force; and we’re surrounded. Where are those trunks they’ve searched?”

“Upstairs.”

“Where’s the staircase to them?”

“Here,” she said, pointing to the door on the right.

“Right. You stay here; and don’t give yourself away. Once more I tell you, I’ll answer for its turning out all right.”

Again he took the Countess by the arm and drew her towards the door Mother Vasseur had pointed out. A very narrow staircase brought them to a bedroom under the sloping roof. About it were spread all the frocks and lingerie which the detectives had turned out of two trunks. As they came into it they heard the two detectives come out of the room in which they had been lunching, into the bar; and when Ralph, crossing the room on noiseless feet, peered out through the window under the eaves, he saw the two policemen dismount and tie the reins of their horses to the posts of the garden gate.

The Countess did not stir. Ralph noticed that her face, haggard with fear and anxiety, had perceptibly aged.

“Quick!” he said sharply. “You must change that frock. Put on another ... a black one for choice.”

He returned to the window; and while she changed watched the detectives and the policemen talking in the garden and tried to catch what they were saying. When she had changed, and she was quick about it, he caught up the grey frock she had just taken off and slipped into it. For all his strength, he was uncommonly slender, with a lissom figure. The frock fitted him to perfection; the long skirt of the period, when he had pulled it down hard, hid his feet passably; and he appeared to be so delighted with this disguise and so easy in his mind that the young woman began to recover her confidence.

The voices of the police in the garden rose higher, and they could hear what they were saying.

“Listen,” he said.

The four men were standing at the garden gate. One of the policemen said in the rough drawling voice of the countrymen:

“Are you quite sure that she stayed here occasionally?”

“Quite sure. And the proof of it is that there are two trunks of hers which she has left in storage here. One of them has her name painted on it—Madam Pellegrini. Besides, Mother Vasseur is a respectable woman, isn’t she?” said one of the detectives.

“There isn’t a more respectable woman than Mother Vasseur in this part of the country,” said the policeman.

“Well, Mother Vasseur declares that this Madam Pellegrini has been in the habit of coming from time to time to stay with her for a day or two.”

“Between two burglaries, you bet!”

“Exactly.”

“Then it would be a feather in our caps to capture this Madam Pellegrini?”

“It would indeed—larceny—swindling—receiving stolen goods—the whole bag of tricks in fact—and a swarm of confederates,” said one of the detectives.

“Have they got a description of her?” asked the policeman.

“Yes and no,” replied the detective.

“Yes and no?”

“They have two portraits of her which are entirely different. One is the portrait of a young woman, the other of an old one. As to her age, it is set as between thirty and sixty.”

They laughed; then the rough voice of the country policeman went on: “But you’re on her track?”

“Again yes and no. A fortnight ago she was working at Rouen and Dieppe. There we lost track of her. We found it again on the main line and lost it again. Did she go straight on to le Havre or turn off towards Fécamp? It is impossible to say. She has completely disappeared and left us floundering,” said the detective.

“And what made you come here?”

“Just a chance. A railway porter who brought trunks here on a truck remembered that the name of Pellegrini was painted on one of them, and that it had been hidden under a label which came unstuck.”

“Have you questioned any other travelers who stay at the inn?” asked the country policeman.

“Oh, precious few people stay here.”

“What about the lady we caught sight of just now as we rode up to the inn?”

“A lady?”

“Yes, a lady. She just came out of this door and went straight in again. It rather looked as if she wanted to avoid us.”

“A lady? In this inn? It isn’t possible!”

“A lady in gray. She was too far off for us to be able to recognize her face again. But we saw her gray dress; and she is wearing a hat with flowers in it.”

“The devil she is!” cried the detective. “We must look into this!”

They said no more, but there came the ominous clumping of large police boots along the flagged path of the garden.

During this conversation Ralph and the young woman had listened without uttering a word, staring at one another. As these new facts came to his ears, Ralph’s face had grown darker and darker. She made no attempt to rebut them.

“They’re coming.... They’re coming,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Yes. They’re coming; and we must be doing, or else they’ll come upstairs and find you here,” he said calmly.

As he spoke he snatched up her hat from the toilet table, put it on his head, pulled down the brim a little and tied the strings under his chin to hide yet more of his face. Then he gave her his final instructions.

“I’m going to clear the way for you,” he said. “As soon as it is clear, you will walk quietly along the road to the farm-yard where your carriage is waiting. Get into it, and see that Leonard has the reins in his hands.”

“But what about you?” she said.

“I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.”

“But suppose they arrest you?”

“They won’t arrest me, or you either,” he said confidently. “But no hurry, mind you. Don’t run down the road. Keep cool.”

He stepped to the window and leaned out of it. The four men were on the point of entering the house. He slipped over the sill and dropped into the garden, uttered a cry as if he had just caught sight of them, and dashed off at full speed.

They yelled with one voice.

“Hi! The woman in gray!... It’s her!... Halt! Or I’ll fire!”

He crossed the road in one stride, jumped into the ploughed field on the other side of it, raced across it, and sideways up a slope to a farm. Then came another slope, then some fields; then he ran into a lane which skirted another farm and had a thick, quickset hedge on both sides of it.

He stopped short. He had outdistanced his heavily-booted pursuers considerably. He was out of their sight behind that thick hedge. In a jiffy he pulled off the hat, stripped off the frock, and thrust them well down into the bottom of the overgrown ditch. Then he put on his fisherman’s cap, lit a cigarette, stuck his hands in his pockets, and went back the way he had come.

At the corner of the farm two breathless, bucketting detectives nearly ran into him.

“Hullo, fisherman! Have you met a woman—a woman in gray?”

“Yes.... A woman who was running, you mean?... A regular madwoman,” said Ralph.

“That’s her!... Which way did she go?”

“She went into the farm.”

“How?”

“Through the back gate.”

“How long ago?”

“Not more than a couple of minutes.”

The two men ran on. Ralph continued his descent of the slope, gave the policemen, who were struggling up it, a friendly greeting, walked briskly down to the ploughed field and across it, struck the road a little below the inn, close to the corner.

A hundred yards round it were the beeches and apple trees of the farm-yard where the carriage awaited him.

Leonard was on the box, whip in hand. Josephine Balsamo, inside the carriage, held the door open.

Ralph said to Leonard: “Drive along the road to Yvetot.”

“What?” cried the Countess. “But it takes us past the inn!”

“The essential thing is that they should not guess that we came out of this place. If we go round the corner toward Yvetot, they will not know where we came from. Just a gentle trot, Leonard ... about the pace of a hearse returning empty from a funeral.”

Leonard shook the reins, the horses trotted quietly round the corner along the road, past the inn. On its threshold stood Mother Vasseur. She just threw out her right hand sideways in a gesture of greeting and farewell and turned and went inside.

“That sets her mind at rest, poor old thing,” said the Countess. “Look!”

Against the skyline, up by the farm, stood the four policemen, conferring. From the liveliness of their gestures it was clear that they were not of the same opinion. They had drawn the farm blank and were debating what to do next.

“That’s all right,” said Ralph. “The carriage is the last thing they’ll connect with your flight, for they believe that you’re somewhere on the other side of that hill. In fact, they’d simply laugh if anybody told them you were in it.”

“They’re going to question Mother Vasseur pretty severely,” said the Countess.

“She’ll have to get out of it as best she can. We can’t help her,” he said with decision.

When they had passed out of sight of the policemen, he bade Leonard drive faster.

“I’m afraid the poor beasts will not go much further. How long have they been going already?” said Ralph.

“Since this morning, when we left Dieppe. I spent the night there.”

“And where are we going to?” he asked.

“The banks of the Seine.”

“Goodness! Between forty-five and fifty miles in a day, at this pace! But it’s a marvel!”

She did not say anything.

Between the two front windows of the carriage there was a strip of glass in which he could see her. She had put on a darker frock and a light toque from which a fairly thick veil hung down over her face. She pushed up the veil and took from the shelf fixed under the strip of glass a small leather bag which contained an old, gold hand-glass, and other toilet appurtenances, small, stoppered bottles, rouge, and brushes.

She took the hand-glass from it and gazed at her tired face in it for some time.

Then she poured some drops on it from a tiny crystal bottle and rubbed the wetted surface with a scrap of silk. Once more she looked at herself in the glass.

At first Ralph did not understand; he only observed the somewhat bitter and melancholy expression of a woman gazing at herself when she is not at her best.

Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, passed in this silence and in the manifestly intense effort of that gaze in which all her thought and will were concentrated. The smile appeared first, hesitating, timid, like a ray of winter sunlight. Presently it became bolder and revealed its action by little details which presented themselves in turn to the astonished eyes of Ralph. The corner of the mouth lost its droop. The skin filled again with color. The flesh appeared to grow firm again. The cheeks and the chin recovered their pure outline; and all the grace of youth once more illumined the beautiful and tender face of Josephine Balsamo.

The miracle was accomplished.

“Miracle?” said Ralph to himself. “Not a bit of it. Or rather, to be exact, a miracle of the will. The influence of a clear and tenacious thought which refuses to accept decay, and which reëstablishes discipline where disorder and surrender reign. As for the rest the mirror, the little bottle, the wonderful elixir—just a comedy.”

He took the hand-glass, which she had set down beside her, and examined it. It was evidently the hand-glass described during the meeting of the conspirators at La Haie d’Etigues, that which the Countess of Cagliostro had used in the presence of the Empress Eugenie. The frame was engine-turned, the plate of silver at the back was all dented with blows.

On the handle was a count’s coronet, a date, 1783, and the list of the four enigmas.

Urged by a veritable, painful need to wound her, he said with a sneer: “Your father indeed left you a precious mirror. Thanks to its talismanic power one recovers from the most disagreeable emotions.”

“It’s a fact that I lost my head,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t happen to me often. I’ve kept it in far more serious situations than that one.”

“Oh come—more serious?” he said in a tone of incredulous irony.

She did not protest; and for a long while they did not exchange another word. The horses continued to trot with the same even brisk rhythm. The great plains of Caux, always alike and always different, unfolded vast vistas set with farms and woods. The Countess had lowered her veil. Ralph felt that this woman, who had been so close to him two hours before, to whom he had so joyfully offered his devotion, was drawing slowly and slowly away from him, becoming more and more a stranger. There was no longer any contact between them. That mysterious soul was sinking back into the dark depths in which it belonged; what he had seen of it was so desperately different from what he had dreamed.

The soul of a thief ... a furtive restless soul, hostile to the light of day. Was it indeed possible? How could he admit that this face of a simple, innocent girl, that those eyes, clear as the waters of a virgin spring, were a mirage and a lie?

He had sunk to such a depth of disillusionment that, as they passed through the little village of Yvetot, he thought of nothing but flight. But he lacked the energy to fly; and that redoubled his anger. The memory of Clarice d’Etigues rose in his mind; and in a kind of revengefulness, he summoned up before it the clear image of the gentle young girl whose selfless abandonment had been so noble.

But Josephine Balsamo did not loose her prey. However tarnished she might appear to him, however deformed the idol might have grown, she was there! An intoxicating fragrance emanated from her. He was touching her. With a movement he could take her hand and kiss that perfumed flesh. She was all the passion, all the desire, all the voluptuousness, all the troubling mystery of woman; and once more the memory of Clarice vanished from his mind.

“Josine—Josine,” he murmured so low that she did not hear him.

Moreover, what was the use of bemoaning his love and his suffering? Would she restore to him the confidence he had lost and regain in his eyes the prestige which was hers no longer?

They were drawing near the Seine. On the top of the slope which runs down to the river at Caudebec they turned to the left, among the wooded hills which dominate the valley of Saint Wandrille. They drove along the ruins of the celebrated abbey, followed the course of the water which bathes the foot of its walls, came in sight of the river, and took the road to Rouen.

A few minutes later the carriage stopped. They stepped out of it; and Leonard drove on again, leaving them on the outskirts of a little wood from which they looked across the river. A meadow covered with waving reeds ran between it and them.

Josephine Balsamo held out her hand:

“Good-by, Ralph. A little further on you will find Mailleraie Station.”

“But what about you?” he asked.

“I? My abode is close at hand.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Yes, you do: that barge which you can just see between the branches.”

“I’ll take you to it.”

A narrow embankment ran across the meadow through the middle of the reeds. The Countess took her way along it, followed by Ralph.

So they came to a piece of open ground, close by the barge, which was still hidden behind a curtain of willows. No one could see them or hear them. They were alone under the expanse of blue sky. And there there passed some of those minutes of which one keeps the memory for a lifetime and which influence the whole course of one’s destiny.

“Good-by,” said Josephine Balsamo once more.

He hesitated before this hand stretched out to him in final farewell.

“Won’t you shake hands with me?” she said.

“Yes ... yes....” he murmured. “But why should we separate?”

“Because we no longer have anything to say to one another,” she said sadly.

“Nothing indeed; and yet we never have said anything,” said he.

He took her warm and supple little hand in his and said:

“What those men said?... Their accusations in the garden of that inn?... Was it true?”

He craved some explanation, lie though it might be, which should permit him to retain some doubt.

But with an air of surprise she answered: “What on earth does that matter to you?”

“What? Of course it matters to me!” he cried.

“One might really imagine that those revelations could have some effect on you,” she said looking at him with just a suspicion of mockery in her expression.

“What on earth do you mean?” he said in astonished accents.

“Goodness! It’s very simple. I mean to say that I could have understood your being shocked at the confirmation of the monstrous crimes of which Beaumagnan and the Baron d’Etigues so falsely and stupidly accused me; but there is no longer any question of them.”

“But I haven’t forgotten their accusations either,” he said.

“Their accusations against the woman whose name I gave them, against the Marquise de Belmonte. But it is not a question of crimes at all. What does all that chance revealed to you a little while ago really matter to you?”

He was taken aback by this unexpected question. She looked him straight in the face, smiling, entirely at her ease, and went on a trifle ironically:

“Doubtless the Vicomte Ralph d’Andresy has had his sensibilities ruffled? The Vicomte Ralph d’Andresy must evidently have moral principles, and the delicate sentiments of a gentleman.”

“And supposing he has?” said he. “When I experienced that disillusionment——”

“Steady on!” she said sharply. “You’ve let the cat out of the bag! You’re disappointed. You ran after a beautiful dream and it all vanished, now that the woman appears to you exactly as she is. Answer frankly since we are honestly trying to get things clear. You’re disappointed, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” he said dryly.

They were silent. She gazed deep into his eyes and murmured:

“I’m a thief, am I not? That’s what you mean, isn’t it? A thief?”

“Yes.”

She smiled and said:

“And what about you?”

And as he started back she caught him firmly by the arm, tried to shake him, and cried imperiously:

“Yes, what about you, my young friend? What are you? The time has come for you to lay your cards on the table also. Who are you?”

“My name is Ralph d’Andresy.”

“Rubbish! Your name is Arsène Lupin. Your father Theophrastus Lupin, who combined the occupation of professor of boxing and gymnastics with the more lucrative profession of crook, was convicted and imprisoned in the United States, and died there. Your mother resumed her maiden name and lived as a poor relation at the house of a distant cousin, the Duke of Dreux-Soubise. One day the Duchess discovered that jewels of the greatest historical value, nothing less, in fact, than the famous necklace of Queen Marie Antoinette, had disappeared. In spite of the most exhaustive attempts to discover it no one ever knew who was the author of this theft, executed with a diabolical daring and cleverness. But I, I do know. It was you. You were six years old.”

Ralph listened, pale with anger and grinding his teeth.

He muttered. “My mother was unhappy and humiliated. I wished to set her free.”

“By thieving?”

“I was six years old,” he protested.

“To-day you’re twenty; your mother is dead; you’re robust, intelligent, and overflowing with energy. How do you make a living?”

“I work!” he snapped.

“Yes: in other people’s pockets.”

She gave him no time to deny it.

“You needn’t say anything, Ralph,” she went on quickly. “I know your life down to the last details. And I could tell you things about yourself that would astonish you, things that happened this year, and things that happened years ago. For I’ve been following your career for a very long time and the things I should tell you would certainly not be a bit more pleasant hearing than the things you heard not so very long ago at the inn. Detectives? Policemen? Inquiries? Prosecutions?... You’ve been perfectly well acquainted with them, quite as well acquainted with them as I am, and you’re not twenty! Is it really worth while for us to reproach one another? Hardly. Since I know your life and since chance has uncovered for you a corner of mine, let us throw a veil over both. The act of theft is not a pretty one. Let us turn away our eyes and say nothing about it.”

He remained silent. A great weariness invaded him. All at once he saw existence in a gloomy and depressing light in which nothing any longer had color, nothing beauty or graciousness. He could have wept.

She paused, frowning thoughtfully and rather sadly, then she said: “Well, for the last time, good-by.”

“N-n-no.... N-n-no!” he stammered.

“But it must be good-by, Ralph. I should only do you harm. Do not try to mingle your life with mine. You have ambition, energy, and such qualities that you can choose your path.”

She paused and said in a lower voice: “The path I follow is not a good one, Ralph.”

“Why do you follow it, Josine? That’s exactly what frightens me.”

“It’s too late to find another,” she murmured.

“Then it’s too late for me too!”

“No: you’re young. Save yourself. Fly from the fate with which you are threatened.”

“But you, Josine.... But you?”

“It’s my life,” she declared.

“A dreadful life, which simply causes you suffering,” he asserted.

“If you think so, why do you wish to share it?”

“Because I love you.”

“All the more reason to fly from me, my dear. Any love between us is damned beforehand. You would blush for me; and I should distrust you.”

“I love you,” he persisted.

“To-day. But to-morrow? Obey the order I gave you on my photograph the very first night we met: ‘Do not seek to see me again.’ Now go.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes. You’re right. But it’s terrible to think that everything is at an end between us before even I have had the time to hope ... and that you will forget me.”

“One does not forget a person who has saved one’s life twice.”

“No: but you will forget that I love you.”

She shook her head and said: “I shall not forget.”

Then will a thrill of emotion in her tone she went on more quickly: “Your enthusiasm, your initiative ... everything that is sincere and spontaneous in you ... and other qualities that I have not yet had time to discover in you ... all that touches me profoundly.”

Their two hands were still clasped; their eyes still gazed into one another. Ralph was quivering with tenderness.

She sighed and said gently: “When one says good-by forever, one is bound to return one another’s gifts. Give me back my portrait, Ralph.”

“No, no! Never!” he cried.

“Then I,” she said with a smile which intoxicated him, “I shall be more honest than you and honestly give back to you the gift you gave me.”

“But what gift?” he asked, for he could remember no gift.

“The first night ... in the barn ... while I was sleeping ... you leaned over me; and I felt your lips.”

She bent towards him, put her arms round his neck, drew his head towards her, and their mouths met.

“Oh, Josine!” he cried, lost. “Do what you like with me.... I love you.... I love!”

They walked along the bank of the Seine, the waving reeds below them. They brushed against the long narrow spears shaken by the breeze. They went towards happiness with no other thoughts in their hearts but those which make lovers, walking hand in hand, tremble.

“One word, Ralph,” she said, suddenly stopping short. “I feel that with you I shall be violent and exacting. Is there another woman in your life?”

“Not one,” he said firmly.

“A lie already!” she said bitterly.

“A lie?”

“What about Clarice d’Etigues? You used to meet her in the fields. You were seen together.”

He was a trifle ruffled, and he said sharply: “That’s an old story.... The merest flirtation.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

“All the better,” she said with a somber air. “All the better for her. And let her never come between us! If she does——”

He drew her along, protesting: “I love you only, Josine! I have never loved anyone but you. My life begins to-day.”

CHAPTER VII.
THE DELIGHTS OF CAPUA

The Nonchalante was a barge in no way distinguished from any other barge. It was fairly old; its paint had faded; but it was well polished and kept very clean by a bargeman of the name Delâtre and his wife. From the outside there was very little to see of the Nonchalante’s cargo, a few cases, some old baskets, and three or four casks. But if you had slipped down the ladder into the hold, you would have seen at a glance that she carried absolutely nothing whatever. The whole of the inside had been divided into three rooms of moderate size, uncommonly comfortable and exceedingly well-kept—two staterooms opening into a saloon.

There Ralph and Josephine lived for a month. Monsieur and Madame Delâtre seemed to be morose; and they were certainly silent. Several times Ralph tried in vain to get into conversation with them. They acted as cook and butler. From time to time a small tug came to tow the Nonchalante up a reach of the Seine.

The whole course of the charming river in this way unrolled itself before their eyes in delightful landscapes through which they wandered, Ralph’s arm round Josephine’s waist ... the Brotonne Forest, the ruins of Jumièges, Saint George’s Abbey, the hills of Bouille, Rouen, Pont-de-l’Arche.

They were weeks of intense happiness. During those delightful hours Ralph expended a wealth of gaiety and enthusiasm. The wonderful views, the beautiful Gothic churches, the sunsets and the moonlight, everything served him as pretexts for impassioned declarations of his love. Josine, more silent, smiled as in a happy dream. Every day drew her closer to her lover. If at the beginning she had acted from a mere caprice, she now found herself under the yoke of the law of love which quickened her pulses and taught her the danger and the pain of loving too much.

Of the past, of her secret life, never a word. Once however they did exchange a few sentences on this subject. As Ralph was chaffing her about what he called the miracle of her eternal youth, she said:

“A miracle? I don’t understand what people mean by a miracle. For example, the other day we drove sixty miles.... You cried out that it was a miracle. But if you’d kept your eyes a little wider open, you would have perceived that that distance was covered not by two horses but by four, for Leonard took the pair which had been drawing it out of the carriage and harnessed another pair in their places in that farm-yard at Doudeville, where a relay was waiting for us.”

“You have me there!” exclaimed the young man cheerfully.

“Another example,” she went on: “No one in the world knows that your name is Lupin. But I assure you that that very night you rescued me from death, I knew you as Arsène Lupin and nothing else. A miracle? Not a bit of it. You know that everything that concerns Cagliostro interests me extremely; and when fourteen years ago I heard talk of the disappearance of the Queen’s necklace from the house of the Duchess of Dreux-Soubise, I made the most minute enquiry into the circumstances. That brought me first of all to little Ralph d’Andresy and then to the son of Theophrastus Lupin. Later I found traces of your handiwork in several jobs. I knew where I was.”

Ralph reflected thoughtfully for a good half-minute; then he said very seriously:

“At that date Josine, darling, either you were twelve years old, and it certainly is miraculous that a little girl of that age should have succeeded in an enquiry in which the rest of the world failed, or you were as old as you are to-day, which is even more miraculous, O daughter of Cagliostro!”

She frowned. His jesting did not seem at all to her taste. She said even more seriously than he:

“We won’t talk about that, Ralph—if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ralph, a little annoyed at having been discovered to be Lupin and desiring to score off her in turn. “Nothing in the world interests me more strongly than the problem of your age and the different exploits you have performed during the last hundred years. I’ve got some ideas of my own on the matter which are really worthy of consideration.”

“Keep them to yourself,” she said sharply.

“Wouldn’t you like me to tell you about them?”

She gazed at him, curious in spite of her reluctance to discuss the matter. He took advantage of her hesitation to continue in a faintly mocking tone:

“My train of reasoning rests on two axioms: the first is, as you have pointed out, there are no miracles; the second is that you are your mother’s daughter.”

She smiled and murmured: “It certainly begins well.”

“You are your mother’s daughter,” Ralph repeated. “That means that there was in the first place a Countess of Cagliostro. At the age of twenty-five or thirty, she dazzled all the Paris of the end of the Second Empire with her beauty and excited the liveliest curiosity at the Court of Napoleon III. With the aid of the young man she called her brother—it doesn’t matter whether he was her brother, her friend, or her lover—she had worked up the story of her relationship to Cagliostro and prepared the forged documents of which the police made use when they gave Napoleon III the information about the daughter of Josephine Beauharnais and that great thaumaturge. Expelled from France, she went to Italy, then to Germany, then disappeared—to come to life again twenty-two years later in the person of her adorable daughter, her exact image, the second Countess of Cagliostro, here present. Do we agree so far?”

Josine did not answer; she gazed at him with inexpressive eyes in an impassive face.

He went on: “Between the mother and the daughter the resemblance was perfect—so exact that the affair began, quite naturally, all over again. Why should there be two Countesses? There will only be one, a single one, the unique and genuine Countess, she who has inherited the secrets of her father, Joseph Balsamo, the Count of Cagliostro. And when Beaumagnan sets about making his enquiry, it inevitably happens that he discover the documents which have already sent the police of Napoleon astray, and the series of portraits and miniatures which bear witness to the identity of the ever youthful woman and carries her origin back to the virgin of Luini to whom chance has given her such an astonishing resemblance.

“Moreover there is a living witness: the Prince of Arcola. The Prince of Arcola in the old days knew the Countess of Cagliostro. He conducted her to Modena. He saw her at Versailles. When he saw her a few years ago the exclamation escapes from him: ‘It is she! And not a day older than she was!’

“Thereupon you overwhelm him with a world of proofs. You repeat the actual words exchanged at Modena between him and your mother, the actual words which you read in the very minute diary which your mother kept even of her least important doings and sayings. There is the complete explanation of the affair. And it is extraordinarily simple. A mother and a daughter who are exactly like one another and whose image recalls a picture of Luini.

“There is besides the Marquise de Belmonte. But I expect that the resemblance of that lady to you is fairly vague and that the strong prepossession and deranged brain of Beaumagnan were necessary to mix the two of you up. To sum up, there is nothing dramatic about it. It is merely an amusing and admirably managed intrigue. That’s my account of the business.”

He was silent. It appeared to him that Josine had lost some of her color and that she was frowning. She must be annoyed in her turn; and it made him laugh.

“I’ve hit the right nail on the head? What?” he said cheerfully.

She shrank away from him, saying coldly: “My past is my business and my age concerns nobody but myself. You can believe exactly what you like about them.”

He caught hold of her and kissed her furiously.

“I believe that you are four hundred years old, Josephine Balsamo, and that there is nothing more delightful to kiss than a centenarian. When I think that you have perhaps known Robespierre and perhaps Louis XVI——”

They did not discuss the matter again, for Ralph was so clearly aware of Josephine’s irritation at the slightest indiscreet attempt to probe her secret, that he did not dare to question her again. Besides, did he not know the exact truth?

Certainly he knew it and not a doubt remained in his mind. Nevertheless the young woman retained a mysterious prestige, which impressed him in spite of himself and rather annoyed him. He thought, seeing her withdrawn and aloof, of those Gods of Olympus who enveloped themselves in a thick mist. So round Josephine there were on every side impassable spaces in the midst of which she disappeared from his sight. Why also did she refuse to discuss the candlestick with seven branches and the enterprise of Beaumagnan? Was not that the affair which had brought them together and in a way associated them in a common task of conquest and vengeance?

At the end of the third week Leonard reappeared. Again Ralph saw the barouche with the little lean horses in it; and the Countess drove away in it.

She did not return till the evening. Leonard carried on to the barge two bundles wrapped in napkins which he slipped into a cupboard, of whose existence Ralph had been ignorant.

That night Ralph, having succeeded in opening the cupboard, examined the two bundles. They contained admirable lace and valuable vestments.

The next day there was another expedition. The result, was sixteenth-century tapestry.

On those days Ralph was exceedingly bored. Therefore at Mantes, finding himself once more alone, he hired a bicycle and for some hours rode about the country. After having lunched at an inn, he saw on the outskirts of a small country town a great mansion, the garden of which was swarming with people. He went to it. They were selling by auction some beautiful furniture and plate.

Idly he strolled round the house. The garden at the end of one of the wings was empty and against the wall was a thick shrubbery. Without considering what impulse urged him to the act, Ralph, seeing a ladder hanging against the garden wall, set it up against the house, climbed it, and slipped a leg over the sill of an open window.

There came a faint cry from inside the room; and he saw the startled face of Josephine. She recovered herself on the instant and said in a perfectly composed voice:

“Oh, it’s you, Ralph, is it? I was just admiring a collection of beautifully bound little books. Wonders! And of an extraordinary rarity!”

That was all they said. Ralph examined the books and slipped three Elzevirs into his pocket while the Countess without Ralph’s perceiving it, helped herself to some coins from a glass case.

They went down the main staircase and took their departure. In all that crowd no one took any notice of them. Three hundred yards down the road the carriage was waiting for them.

After that, at Pointoise, at Saint Germain, at Paris, where the Nonchalante, moored to the quay in front of the prefecture of police, continued to serve them as an abode, they “operated” together. Together but in such a fashion that neither could see the other’s actions. “Let us turn our eyes away and say nothing about it,” Josephine Balsamo had said. A supreme modesty which spared them the sight of a mean action.

If the reserved nature and the enigmatic soul of the Countess de Cagliostro found a perfectly natural expression in the accomplishment of these tasks, the impulsive nature of Ralph little by little gained the upper hand; and every time the operation finished in bursts of laughter. Success provoked in him veritable fits of hilarity.

“Since I’ve turned my back on the path of virtue, I may just as well take it lightly as not, and certainly not in the funereal way in which you do, Josine,” he said airily.

At every new essay he discovered in himself unexpected talents and resources of which he had never dreamt. Sometimes, in a shop, on a race-course, at the theater, his companion heard a gentle murmur of joy and saw a watch in her lover’s hands, or a new pin in his cravat—and always the same coolness, always the serenity of an innocent man whom no danger can threaten.

But that did not prevent him taking the manifold precautions demanded by Josephine. They only left the barge in the dress of barge-folk. In a neighboring street, the old barouche with a single horse harnessed to it was waiting for them. In it they changed their clothes. Josephine always hid her face under a beautiful, flowered lace veil.

All these facts and a great many others fully informed Ralph about the real life of his mistress. He had no doubt whatever that she was at the head of a well organized band of confederates, with whom she held communication by means of Leonard. But also he had no doubt that she was prosecuting her search for the Candlestick with Seven Branches and keeping a close watch on the actions of Beaumagnan and his friends.

A double life, which often awoke in Ralph a dull irritation against Josephine, as she herself had foreseen. Forgetting his own actions, he was angry with her for acting in a manner which was not in accord with the ideas which in spite of everything, he retained about that matter of honesty. A mistress who was a thief and leader of a band of thieves shocked him. Now and again there was a collision between them with regard to quite insignificant matters. Their two personalities, so definite and so powerful, came into conflict.

So, when some trifle brought them into conflict, for all that they were confronting common enemies, they learned how much a love like theirs can, at certain moments, contain of rancor, pride, and hostility.

The incident which brought to an end what Ralph called the delights of Capua was an unexpected meeting one evening with Beaumagnan, the Baron d’Etigues, and Oscar de Bennetot. They saw the three friends go into the Theater of Varieties.

“Let’s follow them,” said Ralph.

The Countess hesitated. He insisted.

“What?” he cried. “When such an opportunity presents itself, aren’t we going to profit by it?”

“What’s the use?” she asked.

“What’s the use?” he answered quickly. “But what a funny question! Are you afraid of my finding myself face to face with Beaumagnan?”

“No: but——”

“Look here, Josine: you do as you like. But I’m going after them.”

Both of them went into the theater and established themselves at the back of a box. As they did so, in another box, quite close to the stage, they just had time to perceive before the attendant drew down the screen, the figures of Beaumagnan and his two acolytes.

A problem presented itself to them. Why should Beaumagnan, a churchman and apparently a man of rather ascetic habits, be found straying into a theater of the boulevards, in which they were playing a revue adorned with a very scantily dressed chorus, which could not be of the least interest to him? It was quite evident that there must be a reason of considerable importance and most probably, seeing who were with him, connected with the affair of the Candlestick, to bring him to such a place. To discover that reason was to catch up Beaumagnan in a single stride at the point he had reached in his investigations.

Ralph pointed out these facts to Josephine. She appeared to take no interest whatever in them; and her indifference made it clear to him that she had no intention whatever of taking him into partnership and that she had definitely decided that she did not desire his assistance in this mysterious affair.

“Very well,” he said to her firmly. “Where there is a lack of trust, let each go his own way and each for himself. We shall see who collars the prize.”

On the stage the girls of the chorus were dancing while the chief characters passed in front of them. The leading lady, a very pretty girl with very few clothes on, was taking the part of the spirit of a water-fall and she justified her name by the cascades of false jewels which streamed all round her. Round her forehead was a bandeau set with jewels of many colors, and her hair was lighted up with electric lamps.

During the first two acts the screen in front of the stage box remained down so that no one could see who were its occupants. But, during the interval after the second act, Ralph who had strolled round to the door of that box discovered that it was a little way open. He peeped in. The box was empty. He enquired of the attendant and learned that the three gentlemen had left the theater in the middle of the first act.

He went back to Josephine and said: “There’s nothing to be done here. They’ve cleared out.”

At that moment the curtain rose again. The leading lady once more appeared on the stage. Her hair drawn a little further back made it easier to see the bandeau which she was still wearing. He saw that it was a broad gold ribbon, in which were set large jewels en cabochon, of different colors. There were seven of them.

“Seven!” thought Ralph. “That explains why Beaumagnan came here.”

While Josephine was in the ladies’ cloakroom, he learned from one of the attendants that the leading lady of the revue, Bridget Rousselin, lived in an old house in Montmartre and came every day with a faithful old servant by the name of Valentine, to the rehearsal of the revue they were putting on next.

Next morning at eleven Ralph left the Nonchalante. He lunched in a restaurant in Montmartre, and soon after twelve, strolling down a steep, winding street, he passed in front of a small narrow house with a court-yard in front enclosed by a wall, and next door to a house divided into unfurnished flats. The curtainless windows of the top flat made it quite clear that it was vacant.

Forthwith, with his usual quickness, he formed one of those plans, which, directly it was formed, he put into execution almost mechanically. The situation of the house was uncommonly convenient for his purpose; and he was delighted to think that in a very short time he would know something which Josephine did not know and which would enable him to tease her. At the same time he made up his mind, as a loyal partner, to give her the benefit of his discoveries.

He strolled up and down with the air of a man who was waiting for someone. Of a sudden, taking advantage of the fact that the janitor of the flats was busy mopping the pavement in front of the house, he slipped behind her back into it, ran up the stairs to the top, forced the door of the empty flat, opened one of the windows which looked down on the roof of the house next door, made sure that no one could see him, and slipped out on to the roof.

It was only a few steps to a half-open dormer window. He climbed through it into a garret full of broken furniture, from which one descended to the floor below through a trap-door. He had some difficulty in raising it a little way noiselessly and looked down on to the second-floor landing. There was no ladder.

Below, on the first floor, two women were talking. Listening with all his ears he learned that Bridget Rousselin was lunching in her boudoir, and that her servant, apparently the only other person in the house, was dusting her bedroom and dressing-room in the intervals of waiting on her.

Then Bridget Rousselin called out: “I’ve finished, Valentine. What a blessing it is that there’s no rehearsal to-day! I’m going back to bed till I have to start for the theater!”

This day at home rather upset Ralph’s plans, for he had been expecting to make a thorough search of the house at his ease during her absence at rehearsal. Nevertheless he did not lose patience; he just waited for the luck to turn.

Some minutes passed. Bridget was humming some of the music of the new revue. Then the front-door bell rang.

“That’s odd, Valentine,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to-day. Go and see who it is.”

The maid went downstairs. There came the sound of the opening and shutting of the front door.

She came upstairs again and said: “It’s a gentleman from the theater—the manager’s secretary. He brought this letter.”

“Thanks. You showed him into the drawing-room?”

“Yes.”

From the clearness with which he heard her voice Ralph gathered that Bridget had come out on to the first-floor landing. He heard her tear open the envelope.

Then she said: “That’s funny. The manager wants me to send him the bandeau I wear in the show, by his secretary. He wants to get it copied, and he’ll let me have it back at the theater to-night.”

Ralph swore under his breath: “Hang it!” he thought. “That bandeau is the chief object of my search. Is this manager also on the trail of it? And is Bridget Rousselin going to send it along to him?”

Her next words set his mind at rest.

“But I can’t do it,” she said. “I’ve already promised those stones.”

“That’s a pity,” said Valentine. “The manager will be annoyed.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve promised to sell them—and for a big price too,” said the actress.

“Then what am I to say?” asked Valentine.

“I must write to him,” said Bridget.

She went into her boudoir, wrote the note, and gave it to Valentine.

“By the way, do you know this secretary?” she said carelessly. “Have you seen him at the theater?”

“No, I haven’t. He must be a new one,” said Valentine.

“Tell him to tell the manager how sorry I am, and that I’ll tell him all about it at the theater to-night.”

Valentine went downstairs again; Bridget went to the piano and did two or three voice exercises. They must have drowned the noise of the shutting of the house-door, for Ralph did not hear it. The minutes passed.

He felt somewhat uncomfortable. This business seemed to him rather queer—this secretary they did not know, this request for the jewels looked to him uncommonly like a trap of some sort.

Then he was reassured by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They went to the door of the boudoir.

“Valentine,” he said to himself. “There was nothing in my fancies. The man has gone.”

But of a sudden the playing stopped short in the middle of a run. Evidently the actress jumped up so suddenly as to upset the piano stool, for it banged on the floor. She said in an uneasy voice: