Part 8

The count hesitated. What line would he take with this bold individual? Ring for the servants? Cause a scandal? Unmask the one who had once stripped him bare? But it was so long ago! And who would admit that absurd tale of a guilty child? No, it was better to accept the situation, affecting not to grasp its true meaning. And the count, approaching Floriani, cried out with a playful air:

--Very amusing, very curious, your novel. I swear it fascinates me. But, according to you, what became of that good young man, that model of sons? I hope he did not stop on so fine a road.

--Oh! certainly not.

--Of course not! After such a beginning! To take the Queen's Necklace at six years of age, the famous necklace that Marie-Antoinette coveted!

--And to take it, observed Floriani, playing along with the count, to take it without the least discomfort to himself, without anyone thinking to examine the state of the panes or noticing that the window ledge is too clean, that ledge which he had wiped to erase the traces of his passage in the thick dust... Admit that it was enough to turn the head of a boy his age. So it is that easy? One has only to wish and to reach out a hand?... Upon my word, he wished...

--And he reached out a hand.

--Both hands, resumed the chevalier with a laugh.

A shudder passed through them. What mystery lay hidden in the life of this so-called Floriani? How extraordinary must be the existence of this adventurer, a thieving genius at six, who today, from a dilettante's refinement in search of emotion, or at most to satisfy a feeling of resentment, came to defy his victim in her own home, audaciously, madly, and yet with all the propriety of a gentleman on a visit!

He rose and approached the countess to take his leave. She repressed a movement of recoil. He smiled.

--Oh! Madame, you are afraid! Have I then carried my little comedy of the drawing-room sorcerer too far!

She mastered herself and replied with the same slightly mocking ease:

--Not at all, Monsieur. The legend of that good son has on the contrary greatly interested me, and I am happy that my necklace should have been the occasion of so brilliant a destiny. But do you not think that the son of that... woman, of that Henriette, was obeying chiefly his vocation?

He started, feeling the barb, and retorted:

--I am persuaded of it, and that vocation must indeed have been serious for the child not to be discouraged.

--And how so?

--But yes, you know it, most of the stones were false. Only a few diamonds bought back from the English jeweler were real, the others having been sold one by one according to the harsh necessities of life.

--It was still the Queen's Necklace, Monsieur, said the countess haughtily, and that, it seems to me, is what the son of Henriette could not understand.

--He must have understood, Madame, that, false or true, the necklace was above all an object of display, a badge.

M. de Dreux made a gesture. His wife at once checked him.

--Monsieur, said she, if the man to whom you allude has the least shame...

She broke off, intimidated by Floriani's calm gaze.

He repeated:

--If that man has the least shame...

She felt she would gain nothing by speaking to him thus, and in spite of herself, in spite of her anger and indignation, all a-tremble with humiliated pride, she said to him almost politely:

--Monsieur, the legend holds that Rétaux de Villette, when he had the Queen's Necklace in his hands and had made all the diamonds leap out with Jeanne de Valois, did not dare to touch the setting. He understood that the diamonds were but the ornament, the accessory, but that the setting was the essential work, the very creation of the artist, and he respected it. Do you think that man understood likewise?

--I do not doubt that the setting exists. The child respected it.

--Well then, Monsieur, if you happen to meet him, you will tell him that he unjustly keeps one of those relics which are the property and the glory of certain families, and that he could tear out the stones without the Queen's Necklace ceasing to belong to the house of Dreux-Soubise. It belongs to us as does our name, as does our honor.

The chevalier answered simply:

--I will tell him, Madame.

He bowed before her, saluted the count, saluted one after another all the guests, and withdrew.

* * *

Four days later, Mme de Dreux found upon the table of her chamber a red leather case bearing the Cardinal's arms. She opened it. It was the Queen's slave necklace.

But as all things must, in the life of a man concerned with unity and logic, converge toward the same end--and a little publicity is never amiss--the next day the _Écho de France_ published these sensational lines:

"The Queen's Necklace, the celebrated historic jewel once stolen from the family of Dreux-Soubise, has been recovered by Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin hastened to return it to its rightful owners. One can only applaud this delicate and chivalrous attention."

------

THE SEVEN OF HEARTS

A question presents itself, and it was often put to me:

--How did I come to know Arsène Lupin?

No one doubts that I know him. The details I accumulate concerning this disconcerting man, the irrefutable facts I set forth, the new proofs I bring, the interpretation I give of certain acts whose outward manifestations alone had been seen, without penetrating their secret reasons or invisible mechanism, all this proves, if not an intimacy--which the very existence of Lupin would render impossible--at least friendly relations and a sustained confidence.

But how did I come to know him? Whence comes to me the favor of being his historiographer? Why me and not another?

The answer is easy: chance alone presided over a choice in which my merit had no part. It is chance that put me in his path. It is by chance that I was mixed up in one of his strangest and most mysterious adventures, by chance finally that I was an actor in a drama of which he was the marvelous stage-manager, an obscure and complex drama, bristling with such peripeties that I feel a certain embarrassment in undertaking its recital.

The first act takes place during that famous night of the 22nd to the 23rd of June of which so much has been said. And, for my part, let it be said at once, I attribute the rather abnormal conduct I displayed on that occasion to the very special state of mind in which I found myself on returning home. We had dined among friends at the restaurant of the Cascade, and, all evening long, while we smoked and the orchestra of gypsies played melancholy waltzes, we spoke of nothing but crimes and thefts, of frightful and murky intrigues. That is always a poor preparation for sleep.

The Saint-Martins went off in an automobile. Jean Daspry,--that charming and careless Daspry who was to be killed so tragically six months later on the frontier of Morocco,--Jean Daspry and I came back on foot through the dark and warm night. When we arrived before the small hotel I had inhabited for a year at Neuilly, on the boulevard Maillot, he said to me:

--Are you never afraid?

--What an idea!

--Why, this pavilion is so isolated! no neighbors... vacant lots... Truly, I am no coward, and yet...

--Well, you are cheerful, you are!

--Oh! I say that as I might say anything else. The Saint-Martins impressed me with their tales of brigands.

Having shaken my hand he went away. I took my key and opened.

--Come now! good, I murmured, Antoine forgot to light a candle for me.

And suddenly I remembered: Antoine was absent, I had given him leave.

At once the shadow and the silence were disagreeable to me. I went up to my room groping, as fast as possible, and, immediately, contrary to my habit, I turned the key and pushed the bolt.

The flame of the candle restored my composure. Yet I took care to draw my revolver from its holster, a large long-range revolver, and I placed it beside my bed. This precaution finished reassuring me. I lay down and, as usual, to fall asleep, I took from the night-table the book that awaited me there each evening.

I was very surprised. In place of the paper-knife with which I had marked it the night before, there was an envelope, sealed with five seals of red wax. I seized it eagerly. It bore as address my name and first name, accompanied by this notation: "Urgent."

A letter! a letter to my name! who could have placed it there? A little nervous, I tore open the envelope, and read:

"_From the moment you open this letter, whatever happens, whatever you hear, do not move, do not make a gesture, do not utter a cry. Otherwise, you are lost._"

I am no coward either, and, as well as another, I know how to hold my own in the face of real danger, or smile at the chimerical perils with which our imagination is affrighted. But, I repeat, I was in an abnormal state of mind, more easily impressed, my nerves raw. And besides, was there not in all this something troubling and inexplicable that would have shaken the soul of the most intrepid?

My fingers clutched the sheet of paper feverishly, and my eyes read again and again the threatening phrases... "Do not make a gesture... do not utter a cry... otherwise, you are lost..." Nonsense! I thought, it is some jest, an imbecile prank.

I was on the point of laughing, I even wished to laugh aloud. What prevented me? What uncertain fear compressed my throat?

At least I would blow out the candle. No, I could not blow it out. "Not a gesture, or you are lost," was it written.

But why struggle against these kinds of auto-suggestion more imperious often than the most precise facts? There was nothing to do but close one's eyes. I closed my eyes.

At the same moment, a slight noise passed through the silence, then creakings. And this came, it seemed to me, from a large adjoining room where I had installed my study and from which I was separated only by the antechamber.

The approach of real danger excited me, and I had the sensation that I was about to rise, seize my revolver and hurl myself into that room. I did not rise: facing me, one of the curtains of the left-hand window had moved.

Doubt was impossible: it had moved. It was still moving! And I saw--oh! I saw it distinctly--that there was, between the curtains and the window, in that too-narrow space, a human form whose thickness prevented the fabric from falling straight.

And the being also saw me, it was certain that he saw me through the very wide meshes of the fabric. Then I understood all. While the others carried off their booty, his mission was to hold me in check. Rise? Seize a revolver? Impossible... he was there! at the least movement, at the least cry, I was lost.

A violent blow shook the house, followed by little blows grouped by two or three, like those of a hammer striking upon tacks and rebounding. Or at least that is what I imagined, in the confusion of my brain. And other noises intercrossed, a veritable uproar which proved that one was not troubling oneself, and that one acted in full security.

They were right: I did not stir. Was it cowardice? No, rather annihilation, total inability to move a single one of my limbs. Wisdom also, for after all why struggle? Behind that man, there were ten others who would come at his call. Was I to risk my life to save a few tapestries and a few knick-knacks?

And all night long this torture lasted. Intolerable torture, terrible anguish! The noise had ceased, but _I did not cease to expect_ that it would begin again. And the man! the man who watched me, weapon in hand! My frightened gaze never left him. And my heart beat! and sweat streamed from my brow and from all my body!

And suddenly an inexpressible well-being invaded me: a milkman's cart whose rumble I knew well passed upon the boulevard, and I had at the same time the impression that dawn was slipping between the closed shutters and that a little daylight outside mingled with the shadow.

And daylight penetrated the chamber. And other carts passed. And all the phantoms of the night vanished.

Then I drew an arm from the bed, slowly, furtively. Opposite, nothing moved. I marked with my eyes the fold of the curtain, the precise spot at which one must aim, I made the exact count of the movements I had to execute, and, rapidly, I gripped my revolver and fired.

I leapt from the bed with a cry of deliverance, and I bounded upon the curtain. The fabric was pierced, the pane was pierced. As for the man, I had not been able to reach him... for the excellent reason that there was no one there.

No one! Thus, all night, I had been hypnotized by a fold of curtain! And during that time, malefactors... Furiously, with an impulse nothing could have checked, I turned the key in the lock, I opened my door, I crossed the antechamber, I opened another door, and I rushed into the room.

But a stupor nailed me upon the threshold, panting, dumbfounded, more astonished even than I had been at the man's absence: nothing had disappeared. All the things I supposed carried off, furniture, paintings, old velvets and old silks, all those things were in their place!

An incomprehensible spectacle! I could not believe my eyes! Yet that uproar, those sounds of removal... I went round the room, I inspected the walls, I drew up the inventory of all those objects I knew so well. Nothing was missing! And what disconcerted me most, is that nothing either revealed the passage of the malefactors, no indication, not a chair displaced, not a trace of a footstep.

--Come now, come now, said I to myself, taking my head in both hands, I am surely not mad! I heard it well!

Inch by inch, with the most minute procedures of investigation, I examined the room. It was in vain. Or rather... but could I consider that a discovery? Beneath a small Persian rug, thrown upon the parquet, I picked up a card, a playing card. It was a seven of hearts, like all the seven of hearts of French card games, but which caught my attention by a rather curious detail. The extreme point of each of the seven red marks in the shape of a heart, was pierced with a hole, the round and regular hole that the end of a punch might have made.

That was all. A card and a letter found in a book. Apart from that, nothing. Was that enough to affirm that I had not been the plaything of a dream?

* * *

All day long, I pursued my researches in the salon. It was a large room out of proportion with the smallness of the hotel, and whose ornamentation attested the bizarre taste of him who had conceived it. The parquet was made of a mosaic of little multicolored stones, forming broad symmetrical designs. The same mosaic covered the walls, arranged in panels, Pompeian allegories, Byzantine compositions, a medieval fresco. A Bacchus bestrode a barrel. An emperor crowned with gold, with a flowering beard, held a sword in his right hand.

At the very top, somewhat in the fashion of a studio, was cut the unique and vast window. This window being always open at night, it was probable that the men had passed through there, by means of a ladder. But, here again, no certainty. The uprights of the ladder ought to have left traces upon the beaten earth of the courtyard: there were none. The grass of the vacant lot surrounding the hotel ought to have been freshly trampled: it was not.

I admit that the idea of applying to the police did not occur to me, so inconsistent and absurd were the facts I should have had to set forth. They would have mocked me. But, the day after the next, it was my day for the chronicle at the _Gil Blas_, where I was then writing. Obsessed by my adventure, I told it at length.

The article did not pass unnoticed, but I saw well that it was hardly taken seriously, and that it was considered rather a fantasy than a real story. The Saint-Martins railed at me. Daspry, however, who was not lacking in a certain competence in such matters, came to see me, had the affair explained and studied it... without further success either.

Now, one of the following mornings, the gate bell rang, and Antoine came to tell me a gentleman wished to speak with me. He had not wished to give his name. I bade him come up.

He was a man of about forty, very dark, of energetic visage, and whose clean but worn clothes announced a concern for elegance that contrasted with his rather vulgar manners.

Without preamble, he said to me--in a husky voice, with accents which confirmed the social station of the individual:

--Monsieur, traveling, in a café, the _Gil Blas_ fell under my eyes. I read your article. It interested me... much.

--I thank you.

--And I came back.

--Ah!

--Yes, to speak with you. Are all the facts you recounted exact?

--Absolutely exact.

--Is there not one of them of your invention?

--Not one.

--In that case I might perhaps have information to give you.

--I am listening.

--No.

--How, no?

--Before speaking, I must verify whether they are correct.

--And to verify them?

--I must remain alone in this room.

I looked at him with surprise.

--I do not see very well...

--It is an idea that came to me on reading your article. Certain details establish a coincidence truly extraordinary with another adventure that chance revealed to me. If I am mistaken, it is preferable that I keep silent. And the only means of knowing, is that I remain alone...

What lay beneath this proposal? Later I recalled that in formulating it the man had an anxious air, an expression of worried countenance. But, at the moment, though a little astonished, I found nothing particularly abnormal in his request. And then such curiosity stimulated me!

I answered:

--Very well. How much time do you need?

--Oh! three minutes, no more. Within three minutes, I will rejoin you.

I left the room. Below, I drew my watch. A minute passed. Two minutes... Why did I feel oppressed? Why did those instants seem to me more solemn than others?

Two minutes and a half... Two minutes three quarters... And suddenly a gunshot rang out.

In a few strides I climbed the steps and entered. A cry of horror escaped me.

In the middle of the room the man lay, motionless, stretched upon his left side. Blood flowed from his skull, mingled with fragments of brain. Near his fist, a revolver, still smoking.

A convulsion agitated him, and that was all.

But even more than that frightful spectacle, something struck me, something which made me not call for help at once, and not throw myself on my knees to see if the man breathed. Two paces from him, on the ground, there was a seven of hearts!

I picked it up. The seven extremities of the seven red marks were pierced with a hole...

* * *

Half an hour later, the police commissioner of Neuilly arrived, then the coroner, then the chief of the Sûreté, M. Dudouis. I had taken good care not to touch the corpse. Nothing could falsify the first findings.

They were brief, all the briefer in that at first one discovered nothing, or very little. In the dead man's pockets no papers, upon his clothes no name, upon his linen no initials. All told, not a single clue capable of establishing his identity. And in the room the same order as before. The furniture had not been disturbed, and the objects had kept their former position. Yet this man had not come to my house with the sole intention of killing himself, and because he judged my dwelling more suitable than any other for his suicide! There must have been a motive that determined him to this act of despair, and that motive itself must have resulted from a new fact, noted by him in the course of the three minutes he had spent alone.

What fact? What had he seen? What had he surprised? What frightful secret had he penetrated? No supposition was permissible.

But, at the last moment, an incident occurred which seemed to us of considerable interest. As two agents bent to lift the corpse and carry it off on a stretcher, they perceived that the left hand, until then closed and clenched, had relaxed, and that a visiting card, all crumpled, escaped from it.

This card bore: Georges Andermatt, 37 rue de Berry.

What did that signify? Georges Andermatt was a wealthy Paris banker, founder and president of that Comptoir des métaux which had given such an impulse to the metallurgical industries of France. He kept a grand establishment, possessing mail-coach, automobiles, racing stables. His gatherings were much frequented and Mme Andermatt was cited for her grace and her beauty.

--Would that be the name of the dead man? I murmured.

The chief of the Sûreté bent down.

--It is not he. M. Andermatt is a pale man and rather graying.

--But then why this card?

--You have the telephone, Monsieur?

--Yes, in the vestibule. If you will be so good as to accompany me.

He looked in the directory and asked for 415.21.

--Is M. Andermatt at home?--Be so kind as to tell him that M. Dudouis prays him to come in all haste to 102 boulevard Maillot. It is urgent.

Twenty minutes later, M. Andermatt descended from his automobile. They set forth the reasons that necessitated his intervention, then they led him before the corpse.

He had a second of emotion which contracted his face, and pronounced in a low voice, as if speaking in spite of himself:

--Étienne Varin.

--You knew him?

--No... or at least yes... but by sight only. His brother...

--He has a brother?

--Yes, Alfred Varin... His brother came once to solicit me... I no longer know on what pretext...

--Where does he live?

--The two brothers lived together... rue de Provence, I believe.

--And you do not suspect the reason why this one killed himself?

--Not at all.

--And yet this card that he held in his hand?... Your card with your address!

--I understand nothing of it. It is evidently but a chance that the investigation will explain to us.

A chance in any case very curious, I thought, and I felt that we all experienced the same impression.

This impression, I found again in the newspapers of the next day, and among all those of my friends with whom I spoke of the adventure. Amid the mysteries that complicated it, after the double discovery, so disconcerting, of that seven of hearts seven times pierced, after the two events as enigmatic one as the other of which my dwelling had been the theater, this visiting card seemed at last to promise a little light. By it one would arrive at the truth.

But, contrary to expectations, M. Andermatt furnished no indication.

--I have said what I knew, he repeated. What more is wanted of me? I am the first astonished that this card was found there, and I await like everyone else that this point be cleared up.

It was not. The inquiry established that the Varin brothers, of Swiss origin, had led under different names a very restless life, frequenting gambling dens, in relations with a whole band of foreigners with whom the police concerned itself, and which had dispersed after a series of burglaries to which their participation was established only later. At number 24 rue de Provence where the Varin brothers had indeed lived six years before, one was ignorant of what had become of them.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”