Part 2

Naturally, the wretched man was accused of having staged this attack against himself. But apart from the fact that it would have been impossible for him to bind himself in that manner, it was established that the handwriting on the card differed entirely from Rozaine's handwriting, and resembled, to the point of being mistaken for it, that of Arsène Lupin, as reproduced by an old newspaper found on board.

Thus Rozaine was no longer Arsène Lupin. Rozaine was Rozaine, son of a Bordeaux merchant! And the presence of Arsène Lupin asserted itself once more, and by what a dreadful act!

It was terror. No one dared remain alone in their cabin, nor venture alone into the more remote parts. Prudently people grouped themselves among those mutually trusted. And still, an instinctive distrust divided even the closest friends. For the threat did not come from an isolated individual, watched, and thereby less dangerous. Arsène Lupin, now, was... was everybody. Our overexcited imagination attributed to him a miraculous and unlimited power. We supposed him capable of assuming the most unexpected disguises, of being in turn the respectable Major Rawson, or the noble Marquis de Raverdan, or even—for we no longer halted at the accusing initial—or even such and such a person known to all, with wife, children, servants.

The first wireless dispatches brought no news. At least the captain did not share any with us, and such silence was not calculated to reassure us.

Thus the last day seemed interminable. We lived in anxious expectation of a misfortune. This time, it would no longer be a theft, no longer a simple assault, it would be crime, murder. We could not admit that Arsène Lupin would content himself with those two insignificant larcenies. Absolute master of the ship, the authorities reduced to impotence, he had but to will it, all was permitted him, he disposed of goods and of lives.

Delicious hours for me, I confess, for they won me the confidence of Miss Nelly. Impressed by so many events, and of an already anxious nature, she spontaneously sought at my side a protection, a security that I was happy to offer her.

At bottom, I blessed Arsène Lupin. Was it not he who brought us together? Was it not thanks to him that I had the right to abandon myself to the fairest dreams? Dreams of love and dreams less chimerical—why not confess it? The Andrézy are of good Poitevin stock, but their blazon is somewhat tarnished, and it does not seem unworthy of a gentleman to think of restoring to his name its lost lustre.

And these dreams, I felt, did not offend Nelly. Her smiling eyes authorized me to dream them. The sweetness of her voice bade me hope.

And until the very last moment, leaning on the rail, we remained one near the other, while the line of the American coast sailed toward us.

The searches had been interrupted. They waited. From the upper decks to the steerage where the emigrants swarmed, they waited for the supreme minute when at last the insoluble enigma would be explained. Who was Arsène Lupin? Under what name, under what mask did the famous Arsène Lupin hide?

And that supreme minute arrived. Were I to live a hundred years, I should not forget the least detail of it.

—How pale you are, Miss Nelly, I said to my companion who leaned on my arm, quite faint.

—And you! she answered me, ah! you are so changed!

—Think of it! this minute is thrilling, and I am so happy to live it beside you, Miss Nelly. It seems to me your memory will linger now and then...

She was not listening, breathless and feverish. The gangplank was lowered. But before we had the liberty to cross it, people came aboard, customs officers, men in uniform, messengers.

Miss Nelly stammered:

—That Arsène Lupin escaped during the crossing I should not be surprised.

—Perhaps he preferred death to dishonour, and plunging into the Atlantic rather than being arrested.

—Do not laugh, she said, irritated.

Suddenly I started, and as she questioned me, I said to her:

—Do you see that little old man standing at the end of the gangplank?

—With an umbrella and an olive-green frock coat?

—That is Ganimard.

—Ganimard?

—Yes, the famous policeman, the one who swore Arsène Lupin would be arrested by his own hand. Ah! I understand now why no information came from this side of the Ocean. Ganimard was there! and he rather likes no one to meddle in his little affairs.

—Then Arsène Lupin is sure to be caught?

—Who knows? Ganimard has apparently never seen him except made up and disguised. Unless he knows his borrowed name...

—Ah! she said, with that somewhat cruel curiosity of a woman, if I could witness the arrest!

—Let us wait. Certainly Arsène Lupin has already noticed his enemy's presence. He will prefer to disembark among the last, when the old man's eye is tired.

The landing began. Leaning on his umbrella, an indifferent air, Ganimard seemed not to pay attention to the crowd pressing between the two railings. I noted that an officer of the ship, posted behind him, informed him from time to time.

The Marquis de Raverdan, Major Rawson, the Italian Rivolta, filed past, and others, and many others... And I caught sight of Rozaine approaching.

Poor Rozaine! he did not seem recovered from his misadventures!

—Perhaps it is he after all, Miss Nelly said to me... What do you think?

—I think it would be most interesting to have Ganimard and Rozaine on the same photograph. Take my camera, I am so laden.

I gave it to her, but too late for her to use it. Rozaine was passing. The officer bent to Ganimard's ear, the latter slightly shrugged his shoulders, and Rozaine passed.

But then, my God, who was Arsène Lupin?

—Yes, she said aloud, who is it?

There were no more than some twenty people. She observed them in turn, with the confused fear that he might not be, *him*, among those twenty persons.

I said to her:

—We cannot wait longer.

She stepped forward. I followed. But we had not taken ten steps when Ganimard barred our passage.

—Well, what? I cried.

—One moment, sir, who is in such haste?

—I am accompanying the young lady.

—One moment, he repeated in a more imperious voice.

He scrutinized me deeply, then he said to me, eye to eye:

—Arsène Lupin, is it not?

I began to laugh.

—No, Bernard d'Andrézy, simply.

—Bernard d'Andrézy died three years ago in Macedonia.

—If Bernard d'Andrézy were dead, I would no longer be in this world. And that is not the case. Here are my papers.

—They are his. How you came by them is what I shall have the pleasure of explaining to you.

—But you are mad! Arsène Lupin embarked under the name of R.

—Yes, another of your tricks, a false trail on which you set them, over there. Ah! you are a fine one, my lad. But this time, luck has turned. Come now, Lupin, show yourself a good sport.

I hesitated a second. With a sharp blow, he struck my right forearm. I gave a cry of pain. He had struck the still poorly closed wound signaled by the telegram.

Well, I had to resign myself. I turned toward Miss Nelly. She listened, livid, staggering.

Her gaze met mine, then lowered to the kodak I had handed her. She made a sudden gesture, and I had the impression, I had the certainty that she understood all at once. Yes, it was there, between the narrow walls of black leather, in the hollow of the little object I had taken the precaution to place in her hands before Ganimard arrested me, it was there indeed that Rozaine's twenty thousand francs were, the pearls and diamonds of Lady Jerland.

Ah! I swear it, at that solemn moment, while Ganimard and two of his accomplices surrounded me, all was indifferent to me, my arrest, the hostility of people, all, save this: the resolution Miss Nelly would take regarding what I had entrusted to her.

That she held against me this material and decisive proof, I did not even think to fear it, but this proof—would Miss Nelly decide to produce it?

Should I be betrayed by her? lost by her? Would she act as an enemy who does not forgive, or as a woman who remembers and whose contempt softens with a little indulgence, a little involuntary sympathy?

She passed before me, I bowed very low, without a word. Mingled with the other travellers, she headed toward the gangplank, my kodak in hand.

No doubt, I thought, she dares not, in public. It is in an hour, in an instant, that she will give it up.

But, arrived at the middle of the gangplank, by a movement of simulated clumsiness, she let it fall into the water, between the quay wall and the ship's side.

Then I saw her walk away.

Her pretty silhouette was lost in the crowd, appeared to me again and vanished. It was finished, finished forever.

For an instant, I remained motionless, sad and at the same time filled with a sweet tenderness, then I sighed, to Ganimard's great astonishment:

—A pity, all the same, not to be an honest man...

Thus it was that one winter evening Arsène Lupin told me the story of his arrest. The chance of incidents whose account I shall write some day had knit between us bonds... shall I say of friendship? Yes, I dare believe that Arsène Lupin honours me with some friendship, and that it is by friendship that he sometimes arrives at my home unannounced, bringing, into the silence of my study, his youthful gaiety, the radiance of his ardent life, his fine humour of a man for whom destiny has only favours and smiles.

His portrait? How could I draw it? Twenty times I have seen Arsène Lupin, and twenty times it is a different being that has appeared to me... or rather the same being of whom twenty mirrors would have returned me as many deformed images, each having its particular eyes, its special shape of face, its own gesture, its silhouette and character.

—Myself, he said to me, I no longer well know who I am. In a mirror I no longer recognize myself.

A jest, certainly, and a paradox, but truth with regard to those who meet him and who ignore his infinite resources, his patience, his art of make-up, his prodigious faculty of transforming even the proportions of his face, and of altering the very relation of his features among themselves.

—Why, he said again, should I have a definitive appearance? Why not avoid that danger of an always identical personality? My deeds designate me sufficiently.

And he specifies with a touch of pride:

—So much the better if one can never say with certainty: Here is Arsène Lupin. The essential is that one says without fear of error: Arsène Lupin did that.

It is some of those deeds, some of those adventures that I try to reconstruct, according to the confidences with which he favoured me, certain winter evenings, in the silence of my study...

------

ARSÈNE LUPIN IN PRISON

There is no tourist worthy of the name who does not know the banks of the Seine, and who has not remarked, going from the ruins of Jumièges to the ruins of Saint-Wandrille, the strange little feudal château of Malaquis, so proudly set upon its rock, in mid-river. The arch of a bridge links it to the road. The base of its dark towers merges with the granite that supports it, an enormous block detached from who knows what mountain and flung there by some formidable convulsion. All around, the calm water of the great river plays among the reeds, and wagtails tremble on the damp crest of the pebbles.

The history of Malaquis is harsh like its name, surly like its silhouette. It was but combats, sieges, assaults, rapine and massacres. In the evening gatherings of the Pays de Caux, they evoke with a shudder the crimes committed there. They tell mysterious legends. They speak of the famous underground passage that once led to the abbey of Jumièges and to the manor of Agnès Sorel, the fair friend of Charles VII.

In this ancient lair of heroes and brigands dwells Baron Nathan Cahorn, Baron Satan as he was formerly called at the Bourse where he grew rich somewhat too abruptly. The lords of Malaquis, ruined, had to sell him, for a crust of bread, the dwelling of their ancestors. He installed there his admirable collections of furniture and paintings, faience and carved wood. He lives there alone, with three old servants. None ever enters. None has ever contemplated, in the decor of those antique halls, the three Rubens he owns, his two Watteau, his Jean Goujon pulpit, and so many other marvels wrested by means of banknotes from the richest habitués of public sales.

Baron Satan is afraid. He is afraid not for himself, but for the treasures accumulated with so tenacious a passion and the perspicacity of an amateur whom the shrewdest dealers cannot boast of having misled. He loves them, his bric-a-brac. He loves them bitterly, like a miser; jealously, like a lover.

Each day, at sunset, the four iron-bound doors that command the two ends of the bridge and the entrance to the honour court are closed and bolted. At the least shock, electric bells would vibrate in the silence. On the Seine side, nothing to fear: the rock rises there sheer.

Now, one Friday in September, the postman presented himself as usual at the bridgehead. And, according to the daily rule, it was the baron who opened a crack in the heavy leaf.

He examined the man as minutely as if he did not already know, for years, that jolly face and those roguish peasant's eyes, and the man said laughing:

—It is always me, Monsieur le Baron. I am not another who would have taken my smock and my cap.

—One never knows? murmured Cahorn.

The postman handed him a pile of newspapers. Then he added:

—And now, Monsieur le Baron, there is something new.

—Something new?

—A letter... and registered, besides.

Isolated, without friend or person interested in him, the baron never received letters, and at once this seemed to him an event of ill omen about which there was reason to worry. Who was this mysterious correspondent who came to hunt him down in his retreat?

—You must sign, Monsieur le Baron.

He signed grumbling. Then he took the letter, waited until the postman had disappeared around the bend in the road, and after pacing a few steps back and forth, he leaned against the bridge parapet and tore the envelope. It held a sheet of ruled paper with this handwritten heading: Prison de la Santé, Paris. He looked at the signature: *Arsène Lupin*. Stupefied, he read:

"Monsieur le Baron,

"There is, in the gallery that joins your two salons, a painting by Philippe de Champaigne of excellent workmanship which pleases me infinitely. Your Rubens are also to my taste, as is your smaller Watteau. In the right salon, I note the Louis XIII credence, the Beauvais tapestries, the Empire guéridon signed Jacob and the Renaissance buffet. In the left one, the whole display case of jewels and miniatures.

"For this time, I shall content myself with these objects which will, I believe, be easy to dispose of. I therefore beg you to have them properly packed and shipped to my name (post paid), at the Batignolles station, within a week... failing which, I shall myself proceed to their removal on the night of Wednesday the 27th to Thursday the 28th of September. And, as is only right, I shall not content myself with the above-mentioned objects.

"Kindly excuse the slight trouble I cause you, and accept the expression of my respectful consideration.

"ARSÈNE LUPIN."

"P.S.—Above all do not send me the largest of the Watteau. Although you paid thirty thousand francs for it at the Hôtel des Ventes, it is only a copy, the original having been burned, under the Directory, by Barras, one evening of revelry. Consult the unpublished *Memoirs* of Garat.

"I do not care either for the Louis XV chatelaine whose authenticity seems doubtful to me."

This letter upset Baron Cahorn. Signed by anyone else, it would already have considerably alarmed him, but signed by Arsène Lupin!

An assiduous reader of newspapers, aware of all that passed in the world in the way of theft and crime, he was ignorant of none of the exploits of the infernal burglar. Certainly, he knew that Lupin, arrested in America by his enemy Ganimard, was indeed incarcerated, that his trial was being prepared—with what difficulty!--

But he also knew that one might expect anything from him. Besides, this exact knowledge of the château, of the arrangement of the paintings and furniture, was one of the most redoubtable signs. Who had informed him of things no one had seen?

The baron raised his eyes and contemplated the fierce silhouette of Malaquis, its abrupt pedestal, the deep water that surrounds it, and shrugged his shoulders. No, decidedly, there was no danger. No one in the world could penetrate to the inviolable sanctuary of his collections.

No one, granted, but Arsène Lupin? For Arsène Lupin, do doors, drawbridges, walls exist? What use are the best conceived obstacles, the cleverest precautions, if Arsène Lupin has decided to reach a certain goal?

That very evening, he wrote to the public prosecutor at Rouen. He sent the threatening letter and demanded help and protection.

The reply was not long in coming: the named Arsène Lupin being currently detained at the Santé, closely watched, and unable to write, the letter could only be the work of a hoaxer. Everything demonstrated it, logic and common sense, as well as the reality of the facts. However, and by excess of prudence, an expert had been commissioned to examine the handwriting, and the expert declared that, despite certain analogies, this handwriting was not that of the prisoner.

"Despite certain analogies"—the baron retained only those three frightful words, in which he saw the admission of a doubt which alone ought to have sufficed for justice to intervene. His fears grew exasperated. He never ceased rereading the letter. "I shall myself proceed to their removal." And that precise date: the night of Wednesday the 27th to Thursday the 28th of September!...

Suspicious and taciturn, he had not dared confide in his servants, whose devotion did not seem to him proof against every trial. However, for the first time in years, he felt the need to speak, to take counsel. Abandoned by the justice of his country, he no longer hoped to defend himself with his own resources, and he was on the point of going as far as Paris and imploring the assistance of some former policeman.

Two days passed. The third, on reading his newspapers, he started with joy. The *Réveil de Caudebec* published this item:

"We have the pleasure of possessing within our walls, for nearly three weeks now, Chief Inspector Ganimard, one of the veterans of the Sûreté service. M. Ganimard, to whom the arrest of Arsène Lupin, his latest feat, has earned a European reputation, is resting from his long fatigues by teasing the gudgeon and the bleak."

Ganimard! here was the very helper Baron Cahorn sought! Who better than the wily and patient Ganimard would know how to foil Lupin's plans?

The baron did not hesitate. Six kilometres separate the château from the little town of Caudebec. He covered them with a brisk step, like a man excited by the hope of salvation.

After several unsuccessful attempts to learn the address of the chief inspector, he directed himself toward the offices of the *Réveil*, situated in the middle of the quay. He found there the writer of the item who, approaching the window, cried:

—Ganimard? but you are sure to meet him along the quay, rod in hand. It is there we made acquaintance, and I read by chance his name engraved on his fishing cane. Look, the little old man one sees over there, under the promenade trees.

—In frock coat and straw hat?

—Exactly! Ah! a queer type, not talkative and rather surly.

Five minutes later, the baron accosted the famous Ganimard, introduced himself and tried to enter into conversation. Failing therein, he frankly approached the question and exposed his case.

The other listened, motionless, without losing sight of the fish he watched, then he turned his head toward him, looked him up and down with an air of profound pity, and pronounced:

—Sir, it is hardly the habit to warn the people one means to rob. Arsène Lupin, in particular, does not commit such blunders.

—And yet...

—Sir, if I had the least doubt, believe well that the pleasure of fooling again that dear Lupin would prevail over any other consideration. Unfortunately, the young man is behind bars.

—If he escapes?...

—One does not escape from the Santé.

—But, he...

—He, no more than another.

—And yet...

—Well, if he escapes, so much the better, I shall nab him again. Meanwhile, sleep on both ears, and do not frighten that bleak any further.

The conversation was finished. The baron returned home, somewhat reassured by Ganimard's unconcern. He verified the locks, spied on the servants, and forty-eight hours more passed during which he almost persuaded himself that, all in all, his fears were chimerical. No, decidedly, as Ganimard had said, one does not warn the people one means to rob.

The date approached. The morning of Tuesday, eve of the 27th, nothing particular. But at three o'clock, a lad rang. He brought a telegram.

"No parcel at Batignolles station. Prepare all for tomorrow evening.

"ARSÈNE."

Again it was panic, to such a point that he wondered if he would not yield to the demands of Arsène Lupin.

He ran to Caudebec. Ganimard was fishing at the same spot, seated on a folding stool. Without a word, he held out the telegram.

—And then? said the inspector.

—And then? but it is for tomorrow!

—What?

—The burglary! the plundering of my collections!

Ganimard set down his line, turned toward him, and, arms crossed on his chest, cried in a tone of impatience:

—Ah! now, do you imagine I am going to occupy myself with a story as stupid as that!

—What indemnity do you ask to spend the night of the 27th to 28th of September at the château?

—Not a sou, leave me in peace.

—Name your price, I am rich, extremely rich.

The bluntness of the offer disconcerted Ganimard who resumed, calmer:

—I am here on leave and have no right to meddle...

—No one will know. I undertake, whatever happens, to keep silent.

—Oh! nothing will happen.

—Well then, look here, three thousand francs, is that enough?

The inspector took a pinch of snuff, reflected, and let fall:

—Very well. Only, I must declare to you loyally that it is money thrown out the window.

—It is all the same to me.

—In that case... And then, after all, who knows with that devil of a Lupin! He must have a whole gang at his orders... Are you sure of your servants?

—Upon my word...

—Then, let us not count on them. I am going to warn by telegram two lads, friends of mine, who will give us more security... And now, clear off, so we are not seen together. Till tomorrow, around nine o'clock.

* * *

The next day, the date fixed by Arsène Lupin, Baron Cahorn took down his panoply, furbished his weapons, and walked about the surroundings of Malaquis. Nothing equivocal struck him.

In the evening, at half past eight, he dismissed his servants. They occupied a wing facing the road, but set somewhat back, and at the far end of the château. Once alone, he softly opened the four doors. After a moment, he heard steps approaching.

Ganimard presented his two auxiliaries, sturdy great fellows, bull-necked and powerful-handed, then asked certain explanations. Having acquainted himself with the layout of the place, he carefully closed and barricaded all the entrances by which one might penetrate into the threatened halls. He inspected the walls, lifted the tapestries, then at last he installed his agents in the central gallery.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”