The Hollow Needle; Further adventures of Arsene Lupin Part 20

"If I change the sense of the article, if I confirm the version of your death and if I undertake never to contradict the false version which I shall have sanctioned, do you swear that my father will be free?"

"I swear it. My friends have taken your father by motor car to another provincial town. At seven o'clock to-morrow morning, if the article in the Grand Journal is what I want it to be, I shall telephone to them and they will restore your father to liberty."

"Very well," said Beautrelet. "I submit to your conditions."

Quickly, as though he saw no object in prolonging the conversation after accepting his defeat, he rose, took his hat, bowed to me, bowed to Lupin and went out. Lupin watched him go, listened to the sound of the door closing and muttered:

"Poor little beggar!"

At eight o'clock the next morning, I sent my man out to buy the Grand Journal. It was twenty minutes before he brought me a copy, most of the kiosks being already sold out.

I unfolded the paper with feverish hands. Beautrelet's article appeared on the front page. I give it as it stood and as it was quoted in the press of the whole world:

THE AMBRUMESY MYSTERY

I do not intend in these few sentences to set out in detail the mental processes and the investigations that have enabled me to reconstruct the tragedy-I should say the twofold tragedy-of Ambrumesy. In my opinion, this sort of work and the judgments which it entails, deductions, inductions, a.n.a.lyses and so on, are only interesting in a minor degree and, in any case, are highly commonplace. No, I shall content myself with setting forth the two leading ideas which I followed; and, if I do that, it will be seen that, in so setting them forth and in solving the two problems which they raise, I shall have told the story just as it happened, in the exact order of the different incidents.

It may be said that some of these incidents are not proved and that I leave too large a field to conjecture. That is quite true. But, in my view, my theory is founded upon a sufficiently large number of proved facts to be able to say that even those facts which are not proved must follow from the strict logic of events. The stream is so often lost under the pebbly bed: it is nevertheless the same stream that reappears at intervals and mirrors back the blue sky.

The first riddle that confronted me, a riddle not in detail, but as a whole, was how came it that Lupin, mortally wounded, one might say, managed to live for five or six weeks without nursing, medicine or food, at the bottom of a dark hole?

Let us start at the beginning. On Thursday the sixteenth of April, at four o'clock in the morning, a.r.s.ene Lupin, surprised in the middle of one of his most daring burglaries, runs away by the path leading to the ruins and drops down shot. He drags himself painfully along, falls again and picks himself up in the desperate hope of reaching the chapel. The chapel contains a crypt, the existence of which he has discovered by accident. If he can burrow there, he may be saved. By dint of an effort, he approaches it, he is but a few yards away, when a sound of footsteps approaches. Hara.s.sed and lost, he lets himself go. The enemy arrives. It is Mlle. Raymonde de Saint-Veran.

This is the prologue or rather the first scene of the drama.

What happened between them? This is the easier to guess inasmuch as the sequel of the adventure gives us all the necessary clues. At the girl's feet lies a wounded man, exhausted by suffering, who will be captured in two minutes. THIS MAN HAS BEEN WOUNDED BY HERSELF. Will she also give him up?

If he is Jean Daval's murderer, yes, she will let destiny take its course. But, in quick sentences, he tells her the truth about this awful murder committed by her uncle, M. de Gesvres. She believes him. What will she do?

n.o.body can see them. The footman Victor is watching the little door. The other, Albert, posted at the drawing-room window, has lost sight of both of them. Will she give up the man she has wounded?

The girl is carried away by a movement of irresistible pity, which any woman will understand. Instructed by Lupin, with a few movements she binds up the wound with his handkerchief, to avoid the marks which the blood would leave. Then, with the aid of the key which he gives her, she opens the door of the chapel. He enters, supported by the girl. She locks the door again and walks away. Albert arrives.

If the chapel had been visited at that moment or at least during the next few minutes, before Lupin had had time to recover his strength, to raise the flagstone and disappear by the stairs leading to the crypt, he would have been taken. But this visit did not take place until six hours later and then only in the most superficial way. As it is, Lupin is saved; and saved by whom? By the girl who very nearly killed him.

Thenceforth, whether she wishes it or no, Mlle. de Saint-Veran is his accomplice. Not only is she no longer able to give him up, but she is obliged to continue her work, else the wounded man will perish in the shelter in which she has helped to conceal him. Therefore she continues.

For that matter, if her feminine instinct makes the task a compulsory one, it also makes it easy. She is full of artifice, she foresees and forestalls everything. It is she who gives the examining magistrate a false description of a.r.s.ene Lupin (the reader will remember the difference of opinion on this subject between the cousins). It is she, obviously, who, thanks to certain signs which I do not know of, suspects an accomplice of Lupin's in the driver of the fly. She warns him. She informs him of the urgent need of an operation. It is she, no doubt, who subst.i.tutes one cap for the other. It is she who causes the famous letter to be written in which she is personally threatened. How, after that, is it possible to suspect her?

It is she, who at that moment when I was about to confide my first impressions to the examining magistrate, pretends to have seen me, the day before, in the copsewood, alarms M. Filleul on my score and reduces me to silence: a dangerous move, no doubt, because it arouses my attention and directs it against the person who a.s.sails me with an accusation which I know to be false; but an efficacious move, because the most important thing of all is to gain time and close my lips.

Lastly, it is she who, during forty days, feeds Lupin, brings him his medicine (the chemist at Ouville will produce the prescriptions which he made up for Mlle. de Saint-Veran), nurses him, dresses his wound, watches over him AND CURES HIM.

Here we have the first of our two problems solved, at the same time that the Ambrumesy mystery is set forth. a.r.s.ene Lupin found, close at hand, in the chateau itself, the a.s.sistance which was indispensable to him in order, first, not to be discovered and, secondly, to live.

He now lives. And we come to the second problem, corresponding with the second Ambrumesy mystery, the study of which served me as a conducting medium. Why does Lupin, alive, free, at the head of his gang, omnipotent as before, why does Lupin make desperate efforts, efforts with which I am constantly coming into collision, to force the idea of his death upon the police and the public?

We must remember that Mlle. de Saint-Veran was a very pretty girl. The photographs reproduced in the papers after her disappearance give but an imperfect notion of her beauty. That follows which was bound to follow. Lupin, seeing this lovely girl daily for five or six weeks, longing for her presence when she is not there, subjected to her charm and grace when she is there, inhaling the cool perfume of her breath when she bends over him, Lupin becomes enamored of his nurse. Grat.i.tude turns to love, admiration to pa.s.sion. She is his salvation, but she is also the joy of his eyes, the dream of his lonely hours, his light, his hope, his very life.

He respects her sufficiently not to take advantage of the girl's devotion and not to make use of her to direct his confederates. There is, in fact, a certain lack of decision apparent in the acts of the gang. But he loves her also, his scruples weaken and, as Mlle. de Saint-Veran refuses to be touched by a love that offends her, as she relaxes her visits when they become less necessary, as she ceases them entirely on the day when he is cured-desperate, maddened by grief, he takes a terrible resolve. He leaves his lair, prepares his stroke and, on Sat.u.r.day the sixth of June, a.s.sisted by his accomplices, he carries off the girl.

This is not all. The abduction must not be known. All search, all surmises, all hope, even, must be cut short. Mlle. de Saint-Veran must pa.s.s for dead. There is a mock murder: proofs are supplied for the police inquiries. There is doubt about the crime, a crime, for that matter, not unexpected, a crime foretold by the accomplices, a crime perpetrated to revenge the chief's death. And, through this very fact-observe the marvelous ingenuity of the conception-through this very fact, the belief in this death is, so to speak, stimulated.

It is not enough to suggest a belief; it is necessary to compel a certainty. Lupin foresees my interference. I am sure to guess the trickery of the chapel. I am sure to discover the crypt. And, as the crypt will be empty, the whole scaffolding will come to the ground.

THE CRYPT SHALL NOT BE EMPTY.

In the same way, the death of Mlle. de Saint-Veran will not be definite, unless the sea gives up her corpse.

THE SEA SHALL GIVE UP THE CORPSE OF MLLE. DE SAINT-VERAN.

The difficulty is tremendous. The double obstacle seems insurmountable. Yes, to any one but Lupin, but not to Lupin.

As he had foreseen, I guess the trickery of the chapel, I discover the crypt and I go down into the lair where Lupin has taken refuge. His corpse is there!

Any person who had admitted the death of Lupin as possible would have been baffled. But I had not admitted this eventuality for an instant (first, by intuition and, secondly, by reasoning). Pretense thereupon became useless and every scheme vain. I said to myself at once that the block of stone disturbed by the pickaxe had been placed there with a very curious exactness, that the least knock was bound to make it fall and that, in falling, it must inevitably reduce the head of the false a.r.s.ene Lupin to pulp, in such a way as to make it utterly irrecognizable.

Another discovery: half an hour later, I hear that the body of Mlle. de Saint-Veran has been found on the rocks at Dieppe-or rather a body which is considered to be Mlle. de Saint-Veran's, for the reason that the arm has a bracelet similar to one of that young lady's bracelets. This, however, is the only mark of ident.i.ty, for the corpse is irrecognizable.

Thereupon I remember and I understand. A few days earlier, I happened to read in a number of the Vigie de Dieppe that a young American couple staying at Envermeu had committed suicide by taking poison and that their bodies had disappeared on the very night of the death. I hasten to Envermeu. The story is true, I am told, except in so far as concerns the disappearance, because the brothers of the victims came to claim the corpses and took them away after the usual formalities. The name of these brothers, no doubt, was a.r.s.ene Lupin & Co.

Consequently, the thing is proved. We know why Lupin shammed the murder of the girl and spread the rumor of his own death. He is in love and does not wish it known. And, to reach his ends, he shrinks from nothing, he even undertakes that incredible theft of the two corpses which he needs in order to impersonate himself and Mlle. de Saint-Veran. In this way, he will be at ease. No one can disturb him. No one will ever suspect the truth which he wishes to suppress.

No one? Yes-three adversaries, at the most, might conceive doubts: Ganimard, whose arrival is hourly expected; Holmlock Shears, who is about to cross the Channel; and I, who am on the spot. This const.i.tutes a threefold danger. He removes it. He kidnaps Ganimard. He kidnaps Holmlock Shears. He has me stabbed by Bredoux.

One point alone remains obscure. Why was Lupin so fiercely bent upon s.n.a.t.c.hing the doc.u.ment about the Hollow Needle from me? He surely did not imagine that, by taking it away, he could wipe out from my memory the text of the five lines of which it consists! Then why? Did he fear that the character of the paper itself, or some other clue, could give me a hint?

Be that as it may, this is the truth of the Ambrumesy mystery. I repeat that conjecture plays a certain part in the explanation which I offer, even as it played a great part in my personal investigation. But, if one waited for proofs and facts to fight Lupin, one would run a great risk either of waiting forever or else of discovering proofs and facts carefully prepared by Lupin, which would lead in a direction immediately opposite to the object in view. I feel confident that the facts, when they are known, will confirm my surmise in every respect.

So Isidore Beautrelet, mastered for a moment by a.r.s.ene Lupin, distressed by the abduction of his father and resigned to defeat, Isidore Beautrelet, in the end, was unable to persuade himself to keep silence. The truth was too beautiful and too curious, the proofs which he was able to produce were too logical and too conclusive for him to consent to misrepresent it. The whole world was waiting for his revelations. He spoke.

On the evening of the day on which his article appeared, the newspapers announced the kidnapping of M. Beautrelet, senior. Isidore was informed of it by a telegram from Cherbourg, which reached him at three o'clock.

CHAPTER FIVE

ON THE TRACK

Young Beautrelet was stunned by the violence of the blow. As a matter of fact, although, in publis.h.i.+ng his article, he had obeyed one of those irresistible impulses which make a man despise every consideration of prudence, he had never really believed in the possibility of an abduction. His precautions had been too thorough. The friends at Cherbourg not only had instructions to guard and protect Beautrelet the elder: they were also to watch his comings and goings, never to let him walk out alone and not even to hand him a single letter without first opening it. No, there was no danger. Lupin, wis.h.i.+ng to gain time, was trying to intimidate his adversary.

The blow, therefore, was almost unexpected; and Isidore, because he was powerless to act, felt the pain of the shock during the whole of the remainder of the day. One idea alone supported him: that of leaving Paris, going down there, seeing for himself what had happened and resuming the offensive.

He telegraphed to Cherbourg. He was at Saint-Lazare a little before nine. A few minutes after, he was steaming out of the station in the Normandy express.

It was not until an hour later, when he mechanically unfolded a newspaper which he had bought on the platform, that he became aware of the letter by which Lupin indirectly replied to his article of that morning:

To the Editor of the Grand Journal.