The Confessions of Arsène Lupin Page 5

  “I don’t maintain, mother,” said the count, “I declare. I declare on my oath that, three months ago, during the holidays, the upholsterer, when laying the carpet in this room and the boudoir, found the wedding-ring which I gave my wife lying in a crack in the floor. Here is the ring. The date of the 23rd of October is engraved inside.”

  “Then,” said the countess, “the ring which your wife carries …”

  “That is another ring, which she ordered in exchange for the real one. Acting on my instructions, Bernard, my man, after long searching, ended by discovering in the outskirts of Paris, where he now lives, the little jeweller to whom she went. This man remembers perfectly and is willing to bear witness that his customer did not tell him to engrave a date, but a name. He has forgotten the name, but the man who used to work with him in his shop may be able to remember it. This working jeweller has been informed by letter that I required his services and he replied yesterday, placing himself at my disposal.

  Bernard went to fetch him at nine o’clock this morning. They are both waiting in my study.”

  He turned to his wife:

  “Will you give me that ring of your own free will?”

  “You know,” she said, “from the other night, that it won’t come off my finger.”

  “In that case, can I have the man up? He has the necessary implements with him.”

  “Yes,” she said, in a voice faint as a whisper.

  She was resigned. She conjured up the future as in a vision: the scandal, the decree of divorce pronounced against herself, the custody of the child awarded to the father; and she accepted this, thinking that she would carry off her son, that she would go with him to the ends of the earth and that the two of them would live alone together and happy …

  Her mother-in-law said:

  “You have been very thoughtless, Yvonne.”

  Yvonne was on the point of confessing to her and asking for her protection. But what was the good? How could the Comtesse d’Origny possibly believe her innocent? She made no reply.

  Besides, the count at once returned, followed by his servant and by a man carrying a bag of tools under his arm.

  And the count said to the man:

  “You know what you have to do?”

  “Yes,” said the workman. “It’s to cut a ring that’s grown too small … That’s easily done … A touch of the nippers …”

  “And then you will see,” said the count, “if the inscription inside the ring was the one you engraved.”

  Yvonne looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to eleven. She seemed to hear, somewhere in the house, a sound of voices raised in argument; and, in spite of herself, she felt a thrill of hope. Perhaps Velmont has succeeded … But the sound was renewed; and she perceived that it was produced by some costermongers passing under her window and moving farther on.

  It was all over. Horace Velmont had been unable to assist her. And she understood that, to recover her child, she must rely upon her own strength, for the promises of others are vain.

  She made a movement of recoil. She had felt the workman’s heavy hand on her hand; and that hateful touch revolted her.

  The man apologized, awkwardly. The count said to his wife:

  “You must make up your mind, you know.”

  Then she put out her slim and trembling hand to the workman, who took it, turned it over and rested it on the table, with the palm upward. Yvonne felt the cold steel. She longed to die, then and there; and, at once attracted by that idea of death, she thought of the poisons which she would buy and which would send her to sleep almost without her knowing it.

  The operation did not take long. Inserted on the slant, the little steel pliers pushed back the flesh, made room for themselves and bit the ring. A strong effort … and the ring broke. The two ends had only to be separated to remove the ring from the finger. The workman did so.

  The count exclaimed, in triumph:

  “At last! Now we shall see! … The proof is there! And we are all witnesses …”

  He snatched up the ring and looked at the inscription. A cry of amazement escaped him. The ring bore the date of his marriage to Yvonne: “23rd of October”! …

  We were sitting on the terrace at Monte Carlo. Lupin finished his story, lit a cigarette and calmly puffed the smoke into the blue air.

  I said:

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Why, the end of the story …”

  “The end of the story? But what other end could there be?”

  “Come … you’re joking …”

  “Not at all. Isn’t that enough for you? The countess is saved. The count, not possessing the least proof against her, is compelled by his mother to forego the divorce and to give up the child. That is all. Since then, he has left his wife, who is living happily with her son, a fine lad of sixteen.”

  “Yes … yes … but the way in which the countess was saved?”

  Lupin burst out laughing:

  “My dear old chap”—Lupin sometimes condescends to address me in this affectionate manner—“my dear old chap, you may be rather smart at relating my exploits, but, by Jove, you do want to have the i’s dotted for you! I assure you, the countess did not ask for explanations!”

  “Very likely. But there’s no pride about me,” I added, laughing. “Dot those i’s for me, will you?”

  He took out a five-franc piece and closed his hand over it.

  “What’s in my hand?”

  “A five-franc piece.”

  He opened his hand. The five-franc piece was gone.

  “You see how easy it is! A working jeweller, with his nippers, cuts a ring with a date engraved upon it: 23rd of October. It’s a simple little trick of sleight-of-hand, one of many which I have in my bag. By Jove, I didn’t spend six months with Dickson, the conjurer, for nothing!”

  “But then …?”

  “Out with it!”

  “The working jeweller?”

  “Was Horace Velmont! Was good old Lupin! Leaving the countess at three o’clock in the morning, I employed the few remaining minutes before the husband’s return to have a look round his study. On the table I found the letter from the working jeweller. The letter gave me the address. A bribe of a few louis enabled me to take the workman’s place; and I arrived with a wedding-ring ready cut and engraved. Hocus-pocus! Pass! … The count couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

  “Splendid!” I cried. And I added, a little chaffingly, in my turn, “But don’t you think that you were humbugged a bit yourself, on this occasion?”

  “Oh! And by whom, pray?”

  “By the countess?”

  “In what way?”

  “Hang it all, that name engraved as a talisman! … The mysterious Adonis who loved her and suffered for her sake! … All that story seems very unlikely; and I wonder whether, Lupin though you be, you did not just drop upon a pretty love-story, absolutely genuine and … none too innocent.”

  Lupin looked at me out of the corner of his eye:

  “No,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “If the countess made a misstatement in telling me that she knew that man before her marriage—and that he was dead—and if she really did love him in her secret heart, I, at least, have a positive proof that it was an ideal love and that he did not suspect it.”

  “And where is the proof?”

  “It is inscribed inside the ring which I myself broke on the countess’s finger … and which I carry on me. Here it is. You can read the name she had engraved on it.”

  He handed me the ring. I read:

  “Horace Velmont.”

  There was a moment of silence between Lupin and myself; and, noticing it, I also observed on his face a certain emotion, a tinge of melancholy.

  I resumed:

  “What made you tell me this story … to which you have often alluded in my presence?”

  “What made me …?”

  He drew my attention to a woman, still
exceedingly handsome, who was passing on a young man’s arm. She saw Lupin and bowed.

  “It’s she,” he whispered. “She and her son.”

  “Then she recognized you?”

  “She always recognizes me, whatever my disguise.”

  “But since the burglary at the Château de Thibermesnil, the police have identified the two names of Arsène Lupin and Horace Velmont.”

  “Yes.”

  “Therefore she knows who you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she bows to you?” I exclaimed, in spite of myself.

  He caught me by the arm and, fiercely:

  “Do you think that I am Lupin to her? Do you think that I am a burglar in her eyes, a rogue, a cheat? … Why, I might be the lowest of miscreants, I might be a murderer even … and still she would bow to me!”

  “Why? Because she loved you once?”

  “Rot! That would be an additional reason, on the contrary, why she should now despise me.”

  “What then?”

  “I am the man who gave her back her son!”

  III. THE SIGN OF THE SHADOW

  “I received your telegram and here I am,” said a gentleman with a grey moustache, who entered my study, dressed in a dark-brown frock-coat and a wide-brimmed hat, with a red ribbon in his buttonhole. “What’s the matter?”

  Had I not been expecting Arsène Lupin, I should certainly never have recognized him in the person of this old half-pay officer:

  “What’s the matter?” I echoed. “Oh, nothing much: a rather curious coincidence, that’s all. And, as I know that you would just as soon clear up a mystery as plan one …”

  “Well?”

  “You seem in a great hurry!”

  “I am … unless the mystery in question is worth putting myself out for. So let us get to the point.”

  “Very well. Just begin by casting your eye on this little picture, which I picked up, a week or two ago, in a grimy old shop on the other side of the river. I bought it for the sake of its Empire frame, with the palm-leaf ornaments on the mouldings … for the painting is execrable.”

  “Execrable, as you say,” said Lupin, after he had examined it, “but the subject itself is rather nice. That corner of an old courtyard, with its rotunda of Greek columns, its sun-dial and its fish-pond and that ruined well with the Renascence roof and those stone steps and stone benches: all very picturesque.”

  “And genuine,” I added. “The picture, good or bad, has never been taken out of its Empire frame. Besides, it is dated … There, in the left-hand bottom corner: those red figures, 15. 4. 2, which obviously stand for 15 April, 1802.”

  “I dare say … I dare say … But you were speaking of a coincidence and, so far, I fail to see …”

  I went to a corner of my study, took a telescope, fixed it on its stand and pointed it, through the open window, at the open window of a little room facing my flat, on the other side of the street. And I asked Lupin to look through it.

  He stooped forward. The slanting rays of the morning sun lit up the room opposite, revealing a set of mahogany furniture, all very simple, a large bed and a child’s bed hung with cretonne curtains.

  “Ah!” cried Lupin, suddenly. “The same picture!”

  “Exactly the same!” I said. “And the date: do you see the date, in red? 15. 4. 2.”

  “Yes, I see … And who lives in that room?”

  “A lady … or, rather, a workwoman, for she has to work for her living … needlework, hardly enough to keep herself and her child.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Louise d’Ernemont … From what I hear, she is the great-granddaughter of a farmer-general who was guillotined during the Terror.”

  “Yes, on the same day as André Chénier,” said Lupin. “According to the memoirs of the time, this d’Ernemont was supposed to be a very rich man.” He raised his head and said, “It’s an interesting story … Why did you wait before telling me?”

  “Because this is the 15th of April.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I discovered yesterday—I heard them talking about it in the porter’s box—that the 15th of April plays an important part in the life of Louise d’Ernemont.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Contrary to her usual habits, this woman who works every day of her life, who keeps her two rooms tidy, who cooks the lunch which her little girl eats when she comes home from the parish school … this woman, on the 15th of April, goes out with the child at ten o’clock in the morning and does not return until nightfall. And this has happened for years and in all weathers. You must admit that there is something queer about this date which I find on an old picture, which is inscribed on another, similar picture and which controls the annual movements of the descendant of d’Ernemont the farmer-general.”

  “Yes, it’s curious … you’re quite right,” said Lupin, slowly. “And don’t you know where she goes to?”

  “Nobody knows. She does not confide in a soul. As a matter of fact, she talks very little.”

  “Are you sure of your information?”

  “Absolutely. And the best proof of its accuracy is that here she comes.”

  A door had opened at the back of the room opposite, admitting a little girl of seven or eight, who came and looked out of the window. A lady appeared behind her, tall, good-looking still and wearing a sad and gentle air. Both of them were ready and dressed, in clothes which were simple in themselves, but which pointed to a love of neatness and a certain elegance on the part of the mother.

  “You see,” I whispered, “they are going out.”

  And presently the mother took the child by the hand and they left the room together.

  Lupin caught up his hat:

  “Are you coming?”

  My curiosity was too great for me to raise the least objection. I went downstairs with Lupin.

  As we stepped into the street, we saw my neighbour enter a baker’s shop. She bought two rolls and placed them in a little basket which her daughter was carrying and which seemed already to contain some other provisions. Then they went in the direction of the outer boulevards and followed them as far as the Place de l’Étoile, where they turned down the Avenue Kléber to walk toward Passy.

  Lupin strolled silently along, evidently obsessed by a train of thought which I was glad to have provoked. From time to time, he uttered a sentence which showed me the thread of his reflections; and I was able to see that the riddle remained as much a mystery to him as to myself.

  Louise d’Ernemont, meanwhile, had branched off to the left, along the Rue Raynouard, a quiet old street in which Franklin and Balzac once lived, one of those streets which, lined with old-fashioned houses and walled gardens, give you the impression of being in a country-town. The Seine flows at the foot of the slope which the street crowns; and a number of lanes run down to the river.

  My neighbour took one of these narrow, winding, deserted lanes. The first building, on the right, was a house the front of which faced the Rue Raynouard. Next came a moss-grown wall, of a height above the ordinary, supported by buttresses and bristling with broken glass.

  Half-way along the wall was a low, arched door. Louise d’Ernemont stopped in front of this door and opened it with a key which seemed to us enormous. Mother and child entered and closed the door.

  “In any case,” said Lupin, “she has nothing to conceal, for she has not looked round once …”

  He had hardly finished his sentence when we heard the sound of footsteps behind us. It was two old beggars, a man and a woman, tattered, dirty, squalid, covered in rags. They passed us without paying the least attention to our presence. The man took from his wallet a key similar to my neighbour’s and put it into the lock. The door closed behind them.

  And, suddenly, at the top of the lane, came the noise of a motor-car stopping … Lupin dragged me fifty yards lower down, to a corner in which we were able to hide. And we saw coming down the lane, carrying a little dog under her arm, a young an
d very much over-dressed woman, wearing a quantity of jewellery, a young woman whose eyes were too dark, her lips too red, her hair too fair. In front of the door, the same performance, with the same key … The lady and the dog disappeared from view.

  “This promises to be most amusing,” said Lupin, chuckling. “What earthly connection can there be between those different people?”

  There hove in sight successively two elderly ladies, lean and rather poverty-stricken in appearance, very much alike, evidently sisters; a footman in livery; an infantry corporal; a fat gentleman in a soiled and patched jacket-suit; and, lastly, a workman’s family, father, mother, and four children, all six of them pale and sickly, looking like people who never eat their fill. And each of the newcomers carried a basket or string-bag filled with provisions.

  “It’s a picnic!” I cried.

  “It grows more and more surprising,” said Lupin, “and I sha’n’t be satisfied till I know what is happening behind that wall.”

  To climb it was out of the question. We also saw that it finished, at the lower as well as at the upper end, at a house none of whose windows overlooked the enclosure which the wall contained.

  During the next hour, no one else came along. We vainly cast about for a stratagem; and Lupin, whose fertile brain had exhausted every possible expedient, was about to go in search of a ladder, when, suddenly, the little door opened and one of the workman’s children came out.

  The boy ran up the lane to the Rue Raynouard. A few minutes later he returned, carrying two bottles of water, which he set down on the pavement to take the big key from his pocket.

  By that time Lupin had left me and was strolling slowly along the wall. When the child, after entering the enclosure, pushed back the door Lupin sprang forward and stuck the point of his knife into the staple of the lock. The bolt failed to catch; and it became an easy matter to push the door ajar.

  “That’s done the trick!” said Lupin.

  He cautiously put his hand through the doorway and then, to my great surprise, entered boldly. But, on following his example, I saw that, ten yards behind the wall, a clump of laurels formed a sort of curtain which allowed us to come up unobserved.