The Hollow Needle

THE HOLLOW NEEDLE

CHAPTER ONE

THE SHOT

Raymonde listened. The noise was repeated twice over, clearly enough to be
distinguished from the medley of vague sounds that formed the great silence of
the night and yet too faintly to enable her to tell whether it was near or far,
within the walls of the big country-house, or outside, among the murky recesses
of the park.

She rose softly. Her window was half open: she flung it back wide. The
moonlight lay over a peaceful landscape of lawns and thickets, against which
the straggling ruins of the old abbey stood out in tragic outlines, truncated
columns, mutilated arches, fragments of porches and shreds of flying
buttresses. A light breeze hovered over the face of things, gliding noiselessly
through the bare motionless branches of the trees, but shaking the tiny budding
leaves of the shrubs.

And, suddenly, she heard the same sound again. It was on the left and on the
floor below her, in the living rooms, therefore, that occupied the left wing of
the house. Brave and plucky though she was, the girl felt afraid. She slipped
on her dressing gown and took the matches.

“Raymonde—Raymonde!”

A voice as low as a breath was calling to her from the next room, the door of
which had not been closed. She was feeling her way there, when Suzanne, her
cousin, came out of the room and fell into her arms:

“Raymonde—is that you? Did you hear—?”

“Yes. So you’re not asleep?”

“I suppose the dog woke me—some time ago. But he’s not
barking now. What time is it?”

“About four.”

“Listen! Surely, some one’s walking in the drawing room!”

“There’s no danger, your father is down there, Suzanne.”

“But there is danger for him. His room is next to the boudoir.”

“M. Daval is there too—”

“At the other end of the house. He could never hear.”

They hesitated, not knowing what course to decide upon. Should they call out?
Cry for help? They dared not; they were frightened of the sound of their own
voices. But Suzanne, who had gone to the window, suppressed a scream:

“Look!—A man!—Near the fountain!”

A man was walking away at a rapid pace. He carried under his arm a fairly large
load, the nature of which they were unable to distinguish: it knocked against
his leg and impeded his progress. They saw him pass near the old chapel and
turn toward a little door in the wall. The door must have been open, for the
man disappeared suddenly from view and they failed to hear the usual grating of
the hinges.

“He came from the drawing room,” whispered Suzanne.

“No, the stairs and the hall would have brought him out more to the
left—Unless—”

The same idea struck them both. They leant out. Below them, a ladder stood
against the front of the house, resting on the first floor. A glimmer lit up
the stone balcony. And another man, who was also carrying something, bestrode
the baluster, slid down the ladder and ran away by the same road as the first.

Suzanne, scared to the verge of swooning, fell on her knees, stammering:

“Let us call out—let us call for help—”

“Who would come? Your father—and if there are more of them
left—and they throw themselves upon him—?”

“Then—then—we might call the servants—Your bell rings
on their floor.”

“Yes—yes—perhaps, that’s better. If only they come in
time!”

Raymonde felt for the electric push near her bed and pressed it with her
finger. They heard the bell ring upstairs and had an impression that its shrill
sound must also reach any one below.

They waited. The silence became terrifying and the very breeze no longer shook
the leaves of the shrubs.

“I’m frightened—frightened,” said Suzanne.

And, suddenly, from the profound darkness below them, came the sound of a
struggle, a crash of furniture overturned, words, exclamations and then,
horrible and ominous, a hoarse groan, the gurgle of a man who is being
murdered—

Raymonde leapt toward the door. Suzanne clung desperately to her arm:

“No—no—don’t leave me—I’m
frightened—”

Raymonde pushed her aside and darted down the corridor, followed by Suzanne,
who staggered from wall to wall, screaming as she went. Raymonde reached the
staircase, flew down the stairs, flung herself upon the door of the big drawing
room and stopped short, rooted to the threshold, while Suzanne sank in a heap
by her side. Facing them, at three steps’ distance, stood a man, with a
lantern in his hand. He turned it upon the two girls, blinding them with the
light, stared long at their pale faces, and then, without hurrying, with the
calmest movements in the world, took his cap, picked up a scrap of paper and
two bits of straw, removed some footmarks from the carpet, went to the balcony,
turned to the girls, made them a deep bow and disappeared.

Suzanne was the first to run to the little boudoir which separated the big
drawing-room from her father’s bedroom. But, at the entrance, a hideous
sight appalled her. By the slanting rays of the moon, she saw two apparently
lifeless bodies lying close to each other on the floor. She leaned over one of
them:

“Father!—Father!—Is it you? What has happened to you?”
she cried, distractedly.

After a moment, the Comte de Gesvres moved. In a broken voice, he said:

“Don’t be afraid—I am not wounded—Daval?—Is he
alive?—The knife?—The knife?—”

Two men-servants now arrived with candles. Raymonde flung herself down before
the other body and recognized Jean Daval, the count’s private secretary.
A little stream of blood trickled from his neck. His face already wore the
pallor of death.

Then she rose, returned to the drawing room, took a gun that hung in a trophy
of arms on the wall and went out on the balcony. Not more than fifty or sixty
seconds had elapsed since the man had set his foot on the top rung of the
ladder. He could not, therefore, be very far away, the more so as he had taken
the precaution to remove the ladder, in order to prevent the inmates of the
house from using it. And soon she saw him skirting the remains of the old
cloister. She put the gun to her shoulder, calmly took aim and fired. The man
fell.

“That’s done it! That’s done it!” said one of the
servants. “We’ve got this one. I’ll run down.”

“No, Victor, he’s getting up.... You had better go down by the
staircase and make straight for the little door in the wall. That’s the
only way he can escape.”

Victor hurried off, but, before he reached the park, the man fell down again.
Raymonde called the other servant:

“Albert, do you see him down there? Near the main cloister?—”

“Yes, he’s crawling in the grass. He’s done for—”

“Watch him from here.”

“There’s no way of escape for him. On the right of the ruins is the
open lawn—”

“And, Victor, do you guard the door, on the left,” she said, taking
up her gun.

“But, surely, you are not going down, miss?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, with a resolute accent and abrupt movements;
“let me be—I have a cartridge left—If he stirs—”

She went out. A moment later, Albert saw her going toward the ruins. He called
to her from the window:

“He’s dragged himself behind the cloister. I can’t see him.
Be careful, miss—”

Raymonde went round the old cloisters, to cut off the man’s retreat, and
Albert soon lost sight of her. After a few minutes, as he did not see her
return, he became uneasy and, keeping his eye on the ruins, instead of going
down by the stairs he made an effort to reach the ladder. When he had
succeeded, he scrambled down and ran straight to the cloisters near which he
had seen the man last. Thirty paces farther, he found Raymonde, who was
searching with Victor.

“Well?” he asked.

“There’s no laying one’s hands on him,” replied Victor.

“The little door?”

“I’ve been there; here’s the key.”

“Still—he must—”

“Oh, we’ve got him safe enough, the scoundrel—He’ll be
ours in ten minutes.”

The farmer and his son, awakened by the shot, now came from the farm buildings,
which were at some distance on the right, but within the circuit of the walls.
They had met no one.

“Of course not,” said Albert. “The ruffian can’t have
left the ruins—We’ll dig him out of some hole or other.”

They organized a methodical search, beating every bush, pulling aside the heavy
masses of ivy rolled round the shafts of the columns. They made sure that the
chapel was properly locked and that none of the panes were broken. They went
round the cloisters and examined every nook and corner. The search was
fruitless.

There was but one discovery: at the place where the man had fallen under
Raymonde’s gun, they picked up a chauffeur’s cap, in very soft buff
leather; besides that, nothing.

The gendarmerie of Ouville-la-Rivière were informed at six o’clock in the
morning and at once proceeded to the spot, after sending an express to the
authorities at Dieppe with a note describing the circumstances of the crime,
the imminent capture of the chief criminal and “the discovery of his
headgear and of the dagger with which the crime had been committed.”

At ten o’clock, two hired conveyances came down the gentle slope that led
to the house. One of them, an old-fashioned calash, contained the deputy public
prosecutor and the examining magistrate, accompanied by his clerk. In the
other, a humble fly, were seated two reporters, representing the Journal de
Rouen and a great Paris paper.

The old château came into view—once the abbey residence of the priors of
Ambrumésy, mutilated under the Revolution, both restored by the Comte de
Gesvres, who had now owned it for some twenty years. It consists of a main
building, surmounted by a pinnacled clock-tower, and two wings, each of which
is surrounded by a flight of steps with a stone balustrade. Looking across the
walls of the park and beyond the upland supported by the high Norman cliffs,
you catch a glimpse of the blue line of the Channel between the villages of
Sainte-Marguerite and Varengeville.

Here the Comte de Gesvres lived with his daughter Suzanne, a delicate,
fair-haired, pretty creature, and his niece Raymonde de Saint-Véran, whom he
had taken to live with him two years before, when the simultaneous death of her
father and mother left Raymonde an orphan. Life at the château was peaceful and
regular. A few neighbors paid an occasional visit. In the summer, the count
took the two girls almost every day to Dieppe. He was a tall man, with a
handsome, serious face and hair that was turning gray. He was very rich,
managed his fortune himself and looked after his extensive estates with the
assistance of his secretary, Jean Daval.

Immediately upon his arrival, the examining magistrate took down the first
observations of Sergeant Quevillon of the gendarmes. The capture of the
criminal, imminent though it might be, had not yet been effected, but every
outlet of the park was held. Escape was impossible.

The little company next crossed the chapter-hall and the refectory, both of
which are on the ground floor, and went up to the first story. They at once
remarked the perfect order that prevailed in the drawing room. Not a piece of
furniture, not an ornament but appeared to occupy its usual place; nor was
there any gap among the ornaments or furniture. On the right and left walls
hung magnificent Flemish tapestries with figures. On the panels of the wall
facing the windows were four fine canvases, in contemporary frames,
representing mythological scenes. These were the famous pictures by Rubens
which had been left to the Comte de Gesvres, together with the Flemish
tapestries, by his maternal uncle, the Marqués de Bobadilla, a Spanish grandee.

M. Filleul remarked:

“If the motive of the crime was theft, this drawing room, at any rate,
was not the object of it.”

“You can’t tell!” said the deputy, who spoke little, but who,
when he did, invariably opposed the magistrate’s views.

“Why, my dear sir, the first thought of a burglar would be to carry off
those pictures and tapestries, which are universally renowned.”

“Perhaps there was no time.”

“We shall see.”

At that moment, the Comte de Gesvres entered, accompanied by the doctor. The
count, who did not seem to feel the effects of the attack to which he had been
subjected, welcomed the two officials. Then he opened the door of the boudoir.

This room, which no one had been allowed to enter since the discovery of the
crime, differed from the drawing room inasmuch as it presented a scene of the
greatest disorder. Two chairs were overturned, one of the tables smashed to
pieces and several objects—a traveling-clock, a portfolio, a box of
stationery—lay on the floor. And there was blood on some of the scattered
pieces of note-paper.

The doctor turned back the sheet that covered the corpse. Jean Daval, dressed
in his usual velvet suit, with a pair of nailed boots on his feet, lay
stretched on his back, with one arm folded beneath him. His collar and tie had
been removed and his shirt opened, revealing a large wound in the chest.

“Death must have been instantaneous,” declared the doctor.
“One blow of the knife was enough.”

“It was, no doubt, the knife which I saw on the drawing-room mantelpiece,
next to a leather cap?” said the examining magistrate.

“Yes,” said the Comte de Gesvres, “the knife was picked up
here. It comes from the same trophy in the drawing room from which my niece,
Mlle. de Saint-Véran, snatched the gun. As for the chauffeur’s cap, that
evidently belongs to the murderer.”

M. Filleul examined certain further details in the room, put a few questions to
the doctor and then asked M. de Gesvres to tell him what he had seen and heard.
The count worded his story as follows:

“Jean Daval woke me up. I had been sleeping badly, for that matter, with
gleams of consciousness in which I seemed to hear noises, when, suddenly
opening my eyes, I saw Daval standing at the foot of my bed, with his candle in
his hand and fully dressed—as he is now, for he often worked late into
the night. He seemed greatly excited and said, in a low voice:
‘There’s some one in the drawing room.’ I heard a noise
myself. I got up and softly pushed the door leading to this boudoir. At the
same moment, the door over there, which opens into the big drawing room, was
thrown back and a man appeared who leaped at me and stunned me with a blow on
the temple. I am telling you this without any details, Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction, for the simple reason that I remember only the principal
facts, and that these facts followed upon one another with extraordinary
swiftness.”

“And after that?—”

“After that, I don’t know—I fainted. When I came to, Daval
lay stretched by my side, mortally wounded.”

“At first sight, do you suspect no one?”

“No one.”

“You have no enemy?”

“I know of none.”

“Nor M. Daval either?”

“Daval! An enemy? He was the best creature that ever lived. M. Daval was
my secretary for twenty years and, I may say, my confidant; and I have never
seen him surrounded with anything but love and friendship.”

“Still, there has been a burglary and there has been a murder: there must
be a motive for all that.”

“The motive? Why, it was robbery pure and simple.”

“Robbery? Have you been robbed of something, then?”

“No, nothing.”

“In that case—?”

“In that case, if they have stolen nothing and if nothing is missing,
they at least took something away.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But my daughter and my niece will tell you, with
absolute certainty, that they saw two men in succession cross the park and that
those two men were carrying fairly heavy loads.”

“The young ladies—”

“The young ladies may have been dreaming, you think? I should be tempted
to believe it, for I have been exhausting myself in inquiries and suppositions
ever since this morning. However, it is easy enough to question them.”

The two cousins were sent for to the big drawing room. Suzanne, still quite
pale and trembling, could hardly speak. Raymonde, who was more energetic, more
of a man, better looking, too, with the golden glint in her brown eyes,
described the events of the night and the part which she had played in them.

“So I may take it, mademoiselle, that your evidence is positive?”

“Absolutely. The men who went across the park were carrying things away
with them.”

“And the third man?”

“He went from here empty-handed.”

“Could you describe him to us?”

“He kept on dazzling us with the light of his lantern. All that I could
say is that he is tall and heavily built.”

“Is that how he appeared to you, mademoiselle?” asked the
magistrate, turning to Suzanne de Gesvres.

“Yes—or, rather, no,” said Suzanne, reflecting. “I
thought he was about the middle height and slender.”

M. Filleul smiled; he was accustomed to differences of opinion and sight in
witnesses to one and the same fact:

“So we have to do, on the one hand, with a man, the one in the drawing
room, who is, at the same time, tall and short, stout and thin, and, on the
other, with two men, those in the park, who are accused of removing from that
drawing room objects—which are still here!”

M. Filleul was a magistrate of the ironic school, as he himself would say. He
was also a very ambitious magistrate and one who did not object to an audience
nor to an occasion to display his tactful resource in public, as was shown by
the increasing number of persons who now crowded into the room. The journalists
had been joined by the farmer and his son, the gardener and his wife, the
indoor servants of the château and the two cabmen who had driven the flies from
Dieppe.

M. Filleul continued:

“There is also the question of agreeing upon the way in which the third
person disappeared. Was this the gun you fired, mademoiselle, and from this
window?”

“Yes. The man reached the tombstone which is almost buried under the
brambles, to the left of the cloisters.”

“But he got up again?”

“Only half. Victor ran down at once to guard the little door and I
followed him, leaving the second footman, Albert, to keep watch here.”

Albert now gave his evidence and the magistrate concluded:

“So, according to you, the wounded man was not able to escape on the
left, because your fellow-servant was watching the door, nor on the right,
because you would have seen him cross the lawn. Logically, therefore, he is, at
the present moment, in the comparatively restricted space that lies before our
eyes.”

“I am sure of it.”

“And you, mademoiselle?”

“Yes.”

“And I, too,” said Victor.

The deputy prosecutor exclaimed, with a leer:

“The field of inquiry is quite narrow. We have only to continue the
search commenced four hours ago.”

“We may be more fortunate.”

M. Filleul took the leather cap from the mantel, examined it and, beckoning to
the sergeant of gendarmes, whispered:

“Sergeant, send one of your men to Dieppe at once. Tell him to go to
Maigret, the hatter, in the Rue de la Barre, and ask M. Maigret to tell him, if
possible, to whom this cap was sold.”

The “field of inquiry,” in the deputy’s phrase, was limited
to the space contained between the house, the lawn on the right and the angle
formed by the left wall and the wall opposite the house, that is to say, a
quadrilateral of about a hundred yards each way, in which the ruins of
Ambrumésy, the famous mediæval monastery, stood out at intervals.

They at once noticed the traces left by the fugitive in the trampled grass. In
two places, marks of blackened blood, now almost dried up, were observed. After
the turn at the end of the cloisters, there was nothing more to be seen, as the
nature of the ground, here covered with pine-needles, did not lend itself to
the imprint of a body. But, in that case, how had the wounded man succeeded in
escaping the eyes of Raymonde, Victor and Albert? There was nothing but a few
brakes, which the servants and the gendarmes had beaten over and over again,
and a number of tombstones, under which they had explored. The examining
magistrate made the gardener, who had the key, open the chapel, a real gem of
carving, a shrine in stone which had been respected by time and the
revolutionaries, and which, with the delicate sculpture work of its porch and
its miniature population of statuettes, was always looked upon as a marvelous
specimen of the Norman-Gothic style. The chapel, which was very simple in the
interior, with no other ornament than its marble altar, offered no
hiding-place. Besides, the fugitive would have had to obtain admission. And by
what means?

The inspection brought them to the little door in the wall that served as an
entrance for the visitors to the ruins. It opened on a sunk road running
between the park wall and a copsewood containing some abandoned quarries. M.
Filleul stooped forward: the dust of the road bore marks of anti-skid pneumatic
tires. Raymonde and Victor remembered that, after the shot, they had seemed to
hear the throb of a motor-car.

The magistrate suggested:

“The man must have joined his confederates.”

“Impossible!” cried Victor. “I was here while mademoiselle
and Albert still had him in view.”

“Nonsense, he must be somewhere! Outside or inside: we have no
choice!”

“He is here,” the servants insisted, obstinately.

The magistrate shrugged his shoulders and went back to the house in a more or
less sullen mood. There was no doubt that it was an unpromising case. A theft
in which nothing had been stolen; an invisible prisoner: what could be less
satisfactory?

It was late. M. de Gesvres asked the officials and the two journalists to stay
to lunch. They ate in silence and then M. Filleul returned to the drawing room,
where he questioned the servants. But the sound of a horse’s hoofs came
from the courtyard and, a moment after, the gendarme who had been sent to
Dieppe entered.

“Well, did you see the hatter?” exclaimed the magistrate, eager at
last to obtain some positive information.

“I saw M. Maigret. The cap was sold to a cab-driver.”

“A cab-driver!”

“Yes, a driver who stopped his fly before the shop and asked to be
supplied with a yellow-leather chauffeur’s cap for one of his customers.
This was the only one left. He paid for it, without troubling about the size,
and drove off. He was in a great hurry.”

“What sort of fly was it?”

“A calash.”

“And on what day did this happen?”

“On what day? Why, to-day, at eight o’clock this morning.”

“This morning? What are you talking about?”

“The cap was bought this morning.”

“But that’s impossible, because it was found last night in the
park. If it was found there, it must have been there; and, consequently, it
must have been bought before.”

“The hatter told me it was bought this morning.”

There was a moment of general bewilderment. The nonplussed magistrate strove to
understand. Suddenly, he started, as though struck with a gleam of light:

“Fetch the cabman who brought us here this morning! The man who drove the
calash! Fetch him at once!”

The sergeant of gendarmes and his subordinate ran off to the stables. In a few
minutes, the sergeant returned alone.

“Where’s the cabman?”

“He asked for food in the kitchen, ate his lunch and then—”

“And then—?”

“He went off.”

“With his fly?”

“No. Pretending that he wanted to go and see a relation at Ouville, he
borrowed the groom’s bicycle. Here are his hat and greatcoat.”

“But did he leave bare-headed?”

“No, he took a cap from his pocket and put it on.”

“A cap?”

“Yes, a yellow leather cap, it seems.”

“A yellow leather cap? Why, no, we’ve got it here!”

“That’s true, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, but his is just
like it.”

The deputy sniggered:

“Very funny! Most amusing! There are two caps—One, the real one,
which constituted our only piece of evidence, has gone off on the head of the
sham flyman! The other, the false one, is in your hands. Oh, the fellow has had
us nicely!”

“Catch him! Fetch him back!” cried M. Filleul. “Two of your
men on horseback, Sergeant Quevillon, and at full speed!”

“He is far away by this time,” said the deputy.

“He can be as far as he pleases, but still we must lay hold of
him.”

“I hope so; but I think, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that your
efforts should be concentrated here above all. Would you mind reading this
scrap of paper, which I have just found in the pocket of the coat?”

“Which coat?”

“The driver’s.”

And the deputy prosecutor handed M. Filleul a piece of paper, folded in four,
containing these few words written in pencil, in a more or less common hand:

“Woe betide the young lady, if she has killed the governor!”

The incident caused a certain stir.

“A word to the wise!” muttered the deputy. “We are now
forewarned.”

“Monsieur le Comte,” said the examining magistrate, “I beg
you not to be alarmed. Nor you either, mademoiselle. This threat is of no
importance, as the police are on the spot. We shall take every precaution and I
will answer for your safety. As for you, gentlemen. I rely on your discretion.
You have been present at this inquiry, thanks to my excessive kindness toward
the Press, and it would be making me an ill return—”

He interrupted himself, as though an idea had struck him, looked at the two
young men, one after the other, and, going up to the first, asked:

“What paper do you represent, sir?”

“The Journal de Rouen.”

“Have you your credentials?”

“Here.”

The card was in order. There was no more to be said. M. Filleul turned to the
other reporter:

“And you, sir?”

“I?”

“Yes, you: what paper do you belong to?”

“Why, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, I write for a number of
papers—all over the place—”

“Your credentials?”

“I haven’t any.”

“Oh! How is that?”

“For a newspaper to give you a card, you have to be on its regular
staff.”

“Well?”

“Well, I am only an occasional contributor, a free-lance. I send articles
to this newspaper and that. They are published or declined according to
circumstances.”

“In that case, what is your name? Where are your papers?”

“My name would tell you nothing. As for papers, I have none.”

“You have no paper of any kind to prove your profession!”

“I have no profession.”

“But look here, sir,” cried the magistrate, with a certain
asperity, “you can’t expect to preserve your incognito after
introducing yourself here by a trick and surprising the secrets of the
police!”

“I beg to remark, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that you asked me
nothing when I came in, and that therefore I had nothing to say. Besides, it
never struck me that your inquiry was secret, when everybody was
admitted—including even one of the criminals!”

He spoke softly, in a tone of infinite politeness. He was quite a young man,
very tall, very slender and dressed without the least attempt at fashion, in a
jacket and trousers both too small for him. He had a pink face like a
girl’s, a broad forehead topped with close-cropped hair, and a scrubby
and ill-trimmed fair beard. His bright eyes gleamed with intelligence. He
seemed not in the least embarrassed and wore a pleasant smile, free from any
shade of banter.

M. Filleul looked at him with an aggressive air of distrust. The two gendarmes
came forward. The young man exclaimed, gaily:

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, you clearly suspect me of being an
accomplice. But, if that were so, would I not have slipped away at the right
moment, following the example of my fellow-criminal?”

“You might have hoped—”

“Any hope would have been absurd. A moment’s reflection, Monsieur
le Juge d’Instruction, will make you agree with me that, logically
speaking—”

M. Filleul looked him straight in the eyes and said, sharply:

“No more jokes! Your name?”

“Isidore Beautrelet.”

“Your occupation?”

“Sixth-form pupil at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly.”

M. Filleul opened a pair of startled eyes.

“What are you talking about? Sixth-form pupil—”

“At the Lycée Janson, Rue de la Pompe, number—”

“Oh, look here,” exclaimed M. Filleul, “you’re trying
to take me in! This won’t do, you know; a joke can go too far!”

“I must say, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that your astonishment
surprises me. What is there to prevent my being a sixth-form pupil at the Lycée
Janson? My beard, perhaps? Set your mind at ease: my beard is false!”

Isidore Beautrelet pulled off the few curls that adorned his chin, and his
beardless face appeared still younger and pinker, a genuine schoolboy’s
face. And, with a laugh like a child’s, revealing his white teeth:

“Are you convinced now?” he asked. “Do you want more proofs?
Here, you can read the address on these letters from my father: ‘To
Monsieur Isidore Beautrelet, Indoor Pupil, Lycée
Janson-de-Sailly.’”

Convinced or not, M. Filleul did not look as if he liked the story. He asked,
gruffly:

“What are you doing here?”

“Why—I’m—I’m improving my mind.”

“There are schools for that: yours, for instance.”

“You forget, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that this is the
twenty-third of April and that we are in the middle of the Easter
holidays.”

“Well?”

“Well, I have every right to spend my holidays as I please.”

“Your father—”

“My father lives at the other end of the country, in Savoy, and he
himself advised me to take a little trip on the North Coast.”

“With a false beard?”

“Oh, no! That’s my own idea. At school, we talk a great deal about
mysterious adventures; we read detective stories, in which people disguise
themselves; we imagine any amount of terrible and intricate cases. So I thought
I would amuse myself; and I put on this false beard. Besides, I enjoyed the
advantage of being taken seriously and I pretended to be a Paris reporter. That
is how, last night, after an uneventful period of more than a week, I had the
pleasure of making the acquaintance of my Rouen colleague; and, this morning,
when he heard of the Ambrumésy murder, he very kindly suggested that I should
come with him and that we should share the cost of a fly.”

Isidore Beautrelet said all this with a frank and artless simplicity of which
it was impossible not to feel the charm. M. Filleul himself, though maintaining
a distrustful reserve, took a certain pleasure in listening to him. He asked
him, in a less peevish tone:

“And are you satisfied with your expedition?”

“Delighted! All the more as I had never been present at a case of the
sort and I find that this one is not lacking in interest.”

“Nor in that mysterious intricacy which you prize so highly—”

“And which is so stimulating, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction! I
know nothing more exciting than to see all the facts coming up out of the
shadow, clustering together, so to speak, and gradually forming the probable
truth.”

“The probable truth! You go pretty fast, young man! Do you suggest that
you have your little solution of the riddle ready?”

“Oh, no!” replied Beautrelet, with a laugh.

“Only—it seems to me that there are certain points on which it is
not impossible to form an opinion; and others, even, are so precise as to
warrant—a conclusion.”

“Oh, but this is becoming very curious and I shall get to know something
at last! For I confess, to my great confusion, that I know nothing.”

“That is because you have not had time to reflect, Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction. The great thing is to reflect. Facts very seldom fail to
carry their own explanation!”

“And, according to you, the facts which we have just ascertained carry
their own explanation?”

“Don’t you think so yourself? In any case, I have ascertained none
besides those which are set down in the official report.”

“Good! So that, if I were to ask you which were the objects stolen from
this room—”

“I should answer that I know.”

“Bravo! My gentleman knows more about it than the owner himself. M. de
Gesvres has everything accounted for: M. Isidore Beautrelet has not. He misses
a bookcase in three sections and a life-size statue which nobody ever noticed.
And, if I asked you the name of the murderer?”

“I should again answer that I know it.”

All present gave a start. The deputy and the journalist drew nearer. M. de
Gesvres and the two girls, impressed by Beautrelet’s tranquil assurance,
listened attentively.

“You know the murderer’s name?”

“Yes.”

“And the place where he is concealed, perhaps?”

“Yes.”

M. Filleul rubbed his hands.

“What a piece of luck! This capture will do honor to my career. And can
you make me these startling revelations now?”

“Yes, now—or rather, if you do not mind, in an hour or two, when I
shall have assisted at your inquiry to the end.”

“No, no, young man, here and now, please.” At that moment Raymonde
de Saint-Véran, who had not taken her eyes from Isidore Beautrelet since the
beginning of this scene, came up to M. Filleul:

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction—”

“Yes, mademoiselle?”

She hesitated for two or three seconds, with her eyes fixed on Beautrelet, and
then, addressing M. Filleul:

“I should like you to ask monsieur the reason why he was walking
yesterday in the sunk road which leads up to the little door.”

It was an unexpected and dramatic stroke. Isidore Beautrelet appeared
nonplussed:

“I, mademoiselle? I? You saw me yesterday?”

Raymonde remained thoughtful, with her eyes upon Beautrelet, as though she were
trying to settle her own conviction, and then said, in a steady voice:

“At four o’clock in the afternoon, as I was crossing the wood, I
met in the sunk road a young man of monsieur’s height, dressed like him
and wearing a beard cut in the same way—and I received a very clear
impression that he was trying to hide.”

“And it was I?”

“I could not say that as an absolute certainty, for my recollection is a
little vague. Still—still, I think so—if not, it would be an
unusual resemblance—”

M. Filleul was perplexed. Already taken in by one of the confederates, was he
now going to let himself be tricked by this self-styled schoolboy? Certainly,
the young man’s manner spoke in his favor; but one can never tell!

“What have you to say, sir?”

“That mademoiselle is mistaken, as I can easily show you with one word.
Yesterday, at the time stated, I was at Veules.”

“You will have to prove it, you will have to. In any case, the position
is not what it was. Sergeant, one of your men will keep monsieur
company.”

Isidore Beautrelet’s face denoted a keen vexation.

“Will it be for long?”

“Long enough to collect the necessary information.”

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, I beseech you to collect it with
all possible speed and discretion.”

“Why?”

“My father is an old man. We are very much attached to each
other—and I would not have him suffer on my account.”

The more or less pathetic note in his voice made a bad impression on M.
Filleul. It suggested a scene in a melodrama. Nevertheless, he promised:

“This evening—or to-morrow at latest, I shall know what to
think.”

The afternoon was wearing on. The examining magistrate returned to the ruins of
the cloisters, after giving orders that no unauthorized persons were to be
admitted, and patiently, methodically, dividing the ground into lots which were
successively explored, himself directed the search. But at the end of the day
he was no farther than at the start; and he declared, before an army of
reporters who, during that time, had invaded the château:

“Gentlemen, everything leads us to suppose that the wounded man is here,
within our reach; everything, that is, except the reality, the fact. Therefore,
in our humble opinion, he must have escaped and we shall find him
outside.”

By way of precaution, however, he arranged, with the sergeant of gendarmes, for
a complete watch to be kept over the park and, after making a fresh examination
of the two drawing rooms, visiting the whole of the château and surrounding
himself with all the necessary information, he took the road back to Dieppe,
accompanied by the deputy prosecutor.

Night fell. As the boudoir was to remain locked, Jean Daval’s body had
been moved to another room. Two women from the neighborhood sat up with it,
assisted by Suzanne and Raymonde. Downstairs, young Isidore Beautrelet slept on
the bench in the old oratory, under the watchful eye of the village policeman,
who had been attached to his person. Outside, the gendarmes, the farmer and a
dozen peasants had taken up their position among the ruins and along the walls.

All was still until eleven o’clock; but, at ten minutes past eleven, a
shot echoed from the other side of the house.

“Attention!” roared the sergeant. “Two men remain here: you,
Fossier—and you, Lecanu—The others at the double!”

They all rushed forward and ran round the house on the left. A figure was seen
to make away in the dark. Then, suddenly, a second shot drew them farther on,
almost to the borders of the farm. And, all at once, as they arrived, in a
band, at the hedge which lines the orchard, a flame burst out, to the right of
the farmhouse, and other flames also rose in a thick column. It was a barn
burning, stuffed to the ridge with straw.

“The scoundrels!” shouted the sergeant. “They’ve set
fire to it. Have at them, lads! They can’t be far away!”

But the wind was turning the flames toward the main building; and it became
necessary, before all things, to ward off the danger. They all exerted
themselves with the greater ardor inasmuch as M. de Gesvres, hurrying to the
scene of the disaster, encouraged them with the promise of a reward. By the
time that they had mastered the flames, it was two o’clock in the
morning. All pursuit would have been vain.

“We’ll look into it by daylight,” said the sergeant.
“They are sure to have left traces: we shall find them.”

“And I shall not be sorry,” added M. de Gesvres, “to learn
the reason of this attack. To set fire to trusses of straw strikes me as a very
useless proceeding.”

“Come with me, Monsieur le Comte: I may be able to tell you the
reason.”

Together they reached the ruins of the cloisters. The sergeant called out:

“Lecanu!—Fossier!”

The other gendarmes were already hunting for their comrades whom they had left
standing sentry. They ended by finding them at a few paces from the little
door. The two men were lying full length on the ground, bound and gagged, with
bandages over their eyes.

“Monsieur le Comte,” muttered the sergeant, while his men were
being released; “Monsieur le Comte, we have been tricked like
children.”

“How so?”

“The shots—the attack on the barn—the fire—all so much
humbug to get us down there—a diversion. During that time they were tying
up our two men and the business was done.”

“What business?”

“Carrying off the wounded man, of course!”

“You don’t mean to say you think—?”

“Think? Why, it’s as plain as a pikestaff! The idea came to me ten
minutes ago—but I’m a fool not to have thought of it earlier. We
should have nabbed them all.” Quevillon stamped his foot on the ground,
with a sudden attack of rage. “But where, confound it, where did they go
through? Which way did they carry him off? For, dash it all, we beat the ground
all day; and a man can’t hide in a tuft of grass, especially when
he’s wounded! It’s witchcraft, that’s what it
is!—”

Nor was this the last surprise awaiting Sergeant Quevillon. At dawn, when they
entered the oratory which had been used as a cell for young Isidore Beautrelet,
they realized that young Isidore Beautrelet had vanished.

On a chair slept the village policeman, bent in two. By his side stood a
water-bottle and two tumblers. At the bottom of one of those tumblers a few
grains of white powder.

On examination, it was proved, first, that young Isidore Beautrelet had
administered a sleeping draught to the village policeman; secondly, that he
could only have escaped by a window situated at a height of seven or eight feet
in the wall; and lastly—a charming detail, this—that he could only
have reached this window by using the back of his warder as a footstool.

CHAPTER TWO

ISIDORE BEAUTRELET, SIXTH-FORM SCHOOLBOY

From the Grand Journal.

LATEST NEWS

DOCTOR DELATTRE KIDNAPPED

A MAD PIECE OF CRIMINAL DARING

At the moment of going to press, we have received an item of news which we dare
not guarantee as authentic, because of its very improbable character. We print
it, therefore, with all reserve.

Yesterday evening, Dr. Delattre, the well-known surgeon, was present, with his
wife and daughter, at the performance of Hernani at the Comédie
Française. At the commencement of the third act, that is to say, at about ten
o’clock, the door of his box opened and a gentleman, accompanied by two
others, leaned over to the doctor and said to him, in a low voice, but loud
enough for Mme. Delattre to hear:

“Doctor, I have a very painful task to fulfil and I shall be very
grateful to you if you will make it as easy for me as you can.”

“Who are you, sir?”

“M. Thézard, commissary of police of the first district; and my
instructions are to take you to M. Dudouis, at the prefecture.”

“But—”

“Not a word, doctor, I entreat you, not a movement—There is some
regrettable mistake; and that is why we must act in silence and not attract
anybody’s attention. You will be back, I have no doubt, before the end of
the performance.”

The doctor rose and went with the commissary. At the end of the performance, he
had not returned. Mme. Delattre, greatly alarmed, drove to the office of the
commissary of police. There she found the real M. Thézard and discovered, to
her great terror, that the individual who had carried off her husband was an
impostor.

Inquiries made so far have revealed the fact that the doctor stepped into a
motor car and that the car drove off in the direction of the Concorde.

Readers will find further details of this incredible adventure in our second
edition.

Incredible though it might be, the adventure was perfectly true. Besides, the
issue was not long delayed and the Grand Journal, while confirming the
story in its midday edition, described in a few lines the dramatic ending with
which it concluded:

THE STORY ENDS

AND

GUESS-WORK BEGINS

Dr. Delattre was brought back to 78, Rue Duret, at nine o’clock this
morning, in a motor car which drove away immediately at full speed.

No. 78, Rue Duret, is the address of Dr. Delattre’s clinical surgery, at
which he arrives every morning at the same hour. When we sent in our card, the
doctor, though closeted with the chief of the detective service, was good
enough to consent to receive us.

“All that I can tell you,” he said, in reply to our questions,
“is that I was treated with the greatest consideration. My three
companions were the most charming people I have ever met, exquisitely
well-mannered and bright and witty talkers: a quality not to be despised, in
view of the length of the journey.”

“How long did it take?”

“About four hours and as long returning.”

“And what was the object of the journey?”

“I was taken to see a patient whose condition rendered an immediate
operation necessary.”

“And was the operation successful?”

“Yes, but the consequences may be dangerous. I would answer for the
patient here. Down there—under his present conditions—”

“Bad conditions?”

“Execrable!—A room in an inn—and the practically absolute
impossibility of being attended to.”

“Then what can save him?”

“A miracle—and his constitution, which is an exceptionally strong
one.”

“And can you say nothing more about this strange patient?”

“No. In the first place, I have taken an oath; and, secondly, I have
received a present of ten thousand francs for my free surgery. If I do not keep
silence, this sum will be taken from me.”

“You are joking! Do you believe that?”

“Indeed I do. The men all struck me as being very much in earnest.”

This is the statement made to us by Dr. Delattre. And we know, on the other
hand, that the head of the detective service, in spite of all his insisting,
has not yet succeeded in extracting any more precise particulars from him as to
the operation which he performed, the patient whom he attended or the district
traversed by the car. It is difficult, therefore, to arrive at the truth.

This truth, which the writer of the interview confessed himself unable to
discover, was guessed by the more or less clear-sighted minds that perceived a
connection with the facts which had occurred the day before at the Château
d’Ambrumésy, and which were reported, down to the smallest detail, in all
the newspapers of that day. There was evidently a coincidence to be reckoned
with in the disappearance of a wounded burglar and the kidnapping of a famous
surgeon.

The judicial inquiry, moreover, proved the correctness of the hypothesis. By
following the track of the sham flyman, who had fled on a bicycle, they were
able to show that he had reached the forest of Arques, at some ten miles’
distance, and that from there, after throwing his bicycle into a ditch, he had
gone to the village of Saint-Nicolas, whence he had dispatched the following
telegram:

A. L. N., Post-office 45, Paris.

    Situation desperate. Operation urgently necessary. Send celebrity by
national road fourteen.

The evidence was undeniable. Once apprised the accomplices in Paris hastened to
make their arrangements. At ten o’clock in the evening they sent their
celebrity by National Road No. 14, which skirts the forest of Arques and ends
at Dieppe. During this time, under cover of the fire which they themselves had
caused, the gang of burglars carried off their leader and moved him to an inn,
where the operation took place on the arrival of the surgeon, at two
o’clock in the morning.

About that there was no doubt. At Pontoise, at Gournay, at Forges,
Chief-inspector Ganimard, who was sent specially from Paris, with Inspector
Folenfant, as his assistant, ascertained that a motor car had passed in the
course of the previous night. The same on the road from Dieppe to Ambrumésy.
And, though the traces of the car were lost at about a mile and a half from the
château, at least a number of footmarks were seen between the little door in
the park wall and the abbey ruins. Besides, Ganimard remarked that the lock of
the little door had been forced.

So all was explained. It remained to decide which inn the doctor had spoken of:
an easy piece of work for a Ganimard, a professional ferret, a patient old
stager of the police. The number of inns is limited and this one, given the
condition of the wounded man, could only be one quite close to Ambrumésy.
Ganimard and Sergeant Quevillon set to work. Within a circle of five hundred
yards, of a thousand yards, of fifteen hundred yards, they visited and
ransacked everything that could pass for an inn. But, against all expectation,
the dying man persisted in remaining invisible.

Ganimard became more resolved than ever. He came back to sleep at the château,
on the Saturday night, with the intention of making his personal inquiry on the
Sunday. On Sunday morning, he learned that, during the night, a posse of
gendarmes had seen a figure gliding along the sunk road, outside the wall. Was
it an accomplice who had come back to investigate? Were they to suppose that
the leader of the gang had not left the cloisters or the neighborhood of the
cloisters?

That night, Ganimard openly sent the squad of gendarmes to the farm and posted
himself and Folenfant outside the walls, near the little door.

A little before midnight, a person passed out of the wood, slipped between
them, went through the door and entered the park. For three hours, they saw him
wander from side to side across the ruins, stooping, climbing up the old
pillars, sometimes remaining for long minutes without moving. Then he went back
to the door and again passed between the two inspectors.

Ganimard caught him by the collar, while Folenfant seized him round the body.
He made no resistance of any kind and, with the greatest docility, allowed them
to bind his wrists and take him to the house. But, when they attempted to
question him, he replied simply that he owed them no account of his doings and
that he would wait for the arrival of the examining magistrate. Thereupon, they
fastened him firmly to the foot of a bed, in one of the two adjoining rooms
which they occupied.

At nine o’clock on Monday morning, as soon as M. Filleul had arrived,
Ganimard announced the capture which he had made. The prisoner was brought
downstairs. It was Isidore Beautrelet.

“M. Isidore Beautrelet!” exclaimed M. Filleul with an air of
rapture, holding out both his hands to the newcomer. “What a delightful
surprise! Our excellent amateur detective here! And at our disposal too! Why,
it’s a windfall!—M. Chief-inspector, allow me to introduce to you
M. Isidore Beautrelet, a sixth-form pupil at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly.”

Ganimard seemed a little nonplussed. Isidore made him a very low bow, as though
he were greeting a colleague whom he knew how to esteem at his true value, and,
turning to M. Filleul:

“It appears, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that you have received
a satisfactory account of me?”

“Perfectly satisfactory! To begin with, you were really at
Veules-les-Roses at the time when Mlle. de Saint-Véran thought she saw you in
the sunk road. I dare say we shall discover the identity of your double. In the
second place, you are in very deed Isidore Beautrelet, a sixth-form pupil and,
what is more, an excellent pupil, industrious at your work and of exemplary
behavior. As your father lives in the country, you go out once a month to his
correspondent, M. Bernod, who is lavish in his praises of you.”

“So that—”

“So that you are free, M. Isidore Beautrelet.”

“Absolutely free?”

“Absolutely. Oh, I must make just one little condition, all the same. You
can understand that I can’t release a gentleman who administers
sleeping-draughts, who escapes by the window and who is afterward caught in the
act of trespassing upon private property. I can’t release him without a
compensation of some kind.”

“I await your pleasure.”

“Well, we will resume our interrupted conversation and you shall tell me
how far you have advanced with your investigations. In two days of liberty, you
must have carried them pretty far?” And, as Ganimard was preparing to go,
with an affectation of contempt for that sort of practice, the magistrate
cried, “Not at all, M. Inspector, your place is here—I assure you
that M. Isidore Beautrelet is worth listening to. M. Isidore Beautrelet,
according to my information, has made a great reputation at the Lycée
Janson-de-Sailly as an observer whom nothing escapes; and his schoolfellows, I
hear, look upon him as your competitor and a rival of Holmlock Shears!”

“Indeed!” said Ganimard, ironically.

“Just so. One of them wrote to me, ‘If Beautrelet declares that he
knows, you must believe him; and, whatever he says, you may be sure that it is
the exact expression of the truth.’ M. Isidore Beautrelet, now or never
is the time to vindicate the confidence of your friends. I beseech you, give us
the exact expression of the truth.”

Isidore listened with a smile and replied:

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, you are very cruel. You make fun
of poor schoolboys who amuse themselves as best they can. You are quite right,
however, and I will give you no further reason to laugh at me.”

“The fact is that you know nothing, M. Isidore Beautrelet.”

“Yes, I confess in all humility that I know nothing. For I do not call it
‘knowing anything’ that I happen to have hit upon two or three more
precise points which, I am sure, cannot have escaped you.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, the object of the theft.”

“Ah, of course, you know the object of the theft?”

“As you do, I have no doubt. In fact, it was the first thing I studied,
because the task struck me as easier.”

“Easier, really?”

“Why, of course. At the most, it’s a question of reasoning.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“Nothing more.”

“And what is your reasoning?”

“It is just this, stripped of all extraneous comment: on the one hand,
there has been a theft, because the two young ladies are agreed and
because they really saw two men running away and carrying things with
them.”

“There has been a theft.”

“On the other hand, nothing has disappeared, because M. de Gesvres
says so and he is in a better position than anybody to know.”

“Nothing has disappeared.”

“From those two premises I arrive at this inevitable result: granted that
there has been a theft and that nothing has disappeared, it is because the
object carried off has been replaced by an exactly similar object. Let me
hasten to add that possibly my argument may not be confirmed by the facts. But
I maintain that it is the first argument that ought to occur to us and that we
are not entitled to waive it until we have made a serious examination.”

“That’s true—that’s true,” muttered the
magistrate, who was obviously interested.

“Now,” continued Isidore, “what was there in this room that
could arouse the covetousness of the burglars? Two things. The tapestry first.
It can’t have been that. Old tapestry cannot be imitated: the fraud would
have been palpable at once. There remain the four Rubens pictures.”

“What’s that you say?”

“I say that the four Rubenses on that wall are false.”

“Impossible!”

“They are false a priori, inevitably and without a doubt.”

“I tell you, it’s impossible.”

“It is very nearly a year ago, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction,
since a young man, who gave his name as Charpenais, came to the Château
d’Ambrumésy and asked permission to copy the Rubens pictures. M. de
Gesvres gave him permission. Every day for five months Charpenais worked in
this room from morning till dusk. The copies which he made, canvases and
frames, have taken the place of the four original pictures bequeathed to M. de
Gesvres by his uncle, the Marqués de Bobadilla.”

“Prove it!”

“I have no proof to give. A picture is false because it is false; and I
consider that it is not even necessary to examine these four.”

M. Filleul and Ganimard exchanged glances of unconcealed astonishment. The
inspector no longer thought of withdrawing. At last, the magistrate muttered:

“We must have M. de Gesvres’s opinion.”

And Ganimard agreed:

“Yes, we must have his opinion.”

And they sent to beg the count to come to the drawing room.

The young sixth-form pupil had won a real victory. To compel two experts, two
professionals like M. Filleul and Ganimard to take account of his surmises
implied a testimony of respect of which any other would have been proud. But
Beautrelet seemed not to feel those little satisfactions of self-conceit and,
still smiling without the least trace of irony, he placidly waited.

M. de Gesvres entered the room.

“Monsieur le Comte,” said the magistrate, “the result of our
inquiry has brought us face to face with an utterly unexpected contingency,
which we submit to you with all reserve. It is possible—I say that it is
possible—that the burglars, when breaking into the house, had it as their
object to steal your four pictures by Rubens—or, at least, to replace
them by four copies—copies which are said to have been made last year by
a painter called Charpenais. Would you be so good as to examine the pictures
and to tell us if you recognize them as genuine?”

The count appeared to suppress a movement of annoyance, looked at Isidore
Beautrelet and at M. Filleul and replied, without even troubling to go near the
pictures:

“I hoped, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that the truth might have
remained unknown. As this is not so, I have no hesitation in declaring that the
four pictures are false.”

“You knew it, then?”

“From the beginning.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“The owner of a work is never in a hurry to declare that that work is
not—or, rather, is no longer genuine.”

“Still, it was the only means of recovering them.”

“I consider that there was another and a better.”

“Which was that?”

“Not to make the secret known, not to frighten my burglars and to offer
to buy back the pictures, which they must find more or less difficult to
dispose of.”

“How would you communicate with them?”

As the count did not reply, Isidore answered for him:

“By means of an advertisement in the papers. The paragraph inserted in
the agony column of the Journal, the Écho de Paris and the
Matin runs, ‘Am prepared to buy back the pictures.’”

The count agreed with a nod. Once again, the young man was teaching his elders.
M. Filleul showed himself a good sportsman.

“There’s no doubt about it, my dear sir,” he exclaimed.
“I’m beginning to think your school-fellows were not quite wrong.
By Jove, what an eye! What intuition! If this goes on, there will be nothing
left for M. Ganimard and me to do.”

“Oh, none of this part was so very complicated!”

“You mean to say that the rest was more so I remember, in fact, that,
when we first met you seemed to know all about it. Let me see, a far as I
recollect, you said that you knew the name of the murderer.”

“So I do.”

“Well, then, who killed Jean Daval? Is the man alive? Where is he
hiding?”

“There is a misunderstanding between us, Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction, or, rather, you have misunderstood the facts from the
beginning The murderer and the runaway are two distinct persons.”

“What’s that?” exclaimed M. Filleul. “The man whom M.
de Gesvres saw in the boudoir and struggled with, the man whom the young ladies
saw in the drawing-room and whom Mlle. de Saint-Véran shot at, the man who fell
in the park and whom we are looking for: do you suggest that he is not the man
who killed Jean Daval?”

“I do.”

“Have you discovered the traces of a third accomplice who disappeared
before the arrival of the young ladies?”

“I have not.”

“In that case, I don’t understand.—Well, who is the murderer
of Jean Daval?”

“Jean Daval was killed by—”

Beautrelet interrupted himself, thought for a moment and continued:

“But I must first show you the road which I followed to arrive at the
certainty and the very reasons of the murder—without which my accusation
would seem monstrous to you.—And it is not—no, it is not monstrous
at all.—There is one detail which has passed unobserved and which,
nevertheless, is of the greatest importance; and that is that Jean Daval, at
the moment when he was stabbed, had all his clothes on, including his walking
boots, was dressed, in short, as a man is dressed in the middle of the day,
with a waistcoat, collar, tie and braces. Now the crime was committed at four
o’clock in the morning.”

“I reflected on that strange fact,” said the magistrate, “and
M. de Gesvres replied that Jean Daval spent a part of his nights in
working.”

“The servants say, on the contrary, that he went to bed regularly at a
very early hour. But, admitting that he was up, why did he disarrange his
bedclothes, to make believe that he had gone to bed? And, if he was in bed,
why, when he heard a noise, did he take the trouble to dress himself from head
to foot, instead of slipping on anything that came to hand? I went to his room
on the first day, while you were at lunch: his slippers were at the foot of the
bed. What prevented him from putting them on rather than his heavy nailed
boots?”

“So far, I do not see—”

“So far, in fact, you cannot see anything, except anomalies. They
appeared much more suspicious to me, however, when I learned that Charpenais
the painter, the man who copied the Rubens pictures, had been introduced and
recommended to the Comte de Gesvres by Jean Daval himself.”

“Well?”

“Well, from that to the conclusion that Jean Daval and Charpenais were
accomplices required but a step. I took that step at the time of our
conversation.”

“A little quickly, I think.”

“As a matter of fact, a material proof was wanted. Now I had discovered
in Daval’s room, on one of the sheets of the blotting-pad on which he
used to write, this address: ‘Monsieur A.L.N., Post-office 45,
Paris.’ You will find it there still, traced the reverse way on
the blotting-paper. The next day, it was discovered that the telegram sent by
the sham flyman from Saint-Nicolas bore the same address: ‘A.L.N.,
Post-office 45.’ The material proof existed: Jean Daval was in
correspondence with the gang which arranged the robbery of the pictures.”

M. Filleul raised no objection.

“Agreed. The complicity is established. And what conclusion do you
draw?”

“This, first of all, that it was not the runaway who killed Jean Daval,
because Jean Daval was his accomplice.”

“And after that?”

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, I will ask you to remember the
first sentence uttered by Monsieur le Comte when he recovered from fainting.
The sentence forms part of Mlle. de Gesvres’ evidence and is in the
official report: ‘I am not wounded.—Daval?—Is he
alive?—The knife?’ And I will ask you to compare it with that part
of his story, also in the report, in which Monsieur le Comte describes the
assault: ‘The man leaped at me and felled me with a blow on the
temple!’ How could M. de Gesvres, who had fainted, know, on waking, that
Daval had been stabbed with a knife?”

Isidore Beautrelet did not wait for an answer to his question. It seemed as
though he were in a hurry to give the answer himself and to avoid all comment.
He continued straightway:

“Therefore it was Jean Daval who brought the three burglars to the
drawing room. While he was there with the one whom they call their chief, a
noise was heard in the boudoir. Daval opened the door. Recognizing M. de
Gesvres, he rushed at him, armed with the knife. M. de Gesvres succeeded in
snatching the knife from him, struck him with it and himself fell, on receiving
a blow from the man whom the two girls were to see a few minutes after.”

Once again, M. Filleul and the inspector exchanged glances. Ganimard tossed his
head in a disconcerted way. The magistrate said:

“Monsieur le Comte, am I to believe that this version is correct?”

M. de Gesvres made no answer.

“Come, Monsieur le Comte, your silence would allow us to suppose—I
beg you to speak.”

Replying in a very clear voice, M. de Gesvres said:

“The version is correct in every particular.”

The magistrate gave a start.

“Then I cannot understand why you misled the police. Why conceal an act
which you were lawfully entitled to commit in defense of your life?”

“For twenty years,” said M. de Gesvres, “Daval worked by my
side. I trusted him. If he betrayed me, as the result of some temptation or
other, I was, at least, unwilling, for the sake of the past, that his treachery
should become known.”

“You were unwilling, I agree, but you had no right to be.”

“I am not of your opinion, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction. As long
as no innocent person was accused of the crime, I was absolutely entitled to
refrain from accusing the man who was at the same time the culprit and the
victim. He is dead. I consider death a sufficient punishment.”

“But now, Monsieur le Comte, now that the truth is known, you can
speak.”

“Yes. Here are two rough drafts of letters written by him to his
accomplices. I took them from his pocket-book, a few minutes after his
death.”

“And the motive of his theft?”

“Go to 18, Rue de la Barre, at Dieppe, which is the address of a certain
Mme. Verdier. It was for this woman, whom he got to know two years ago, and to
supply her constant need of money that Daval turned thief.”

So everything was cleared up. The tragedy rose out of the darkness and
gradually appeared in its true light.

“Let us go on,” said M. Filluel after the count had withdrawn.

“Upon my word,” said Beautrelet, gaily, “I have said almost
all that I had to say.”

“But the runaway, the wounded man?”

“As to that, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, you know as much as I
do. You have followed his tracks in the grass by the cloisters—you
have—”

“Yes, yes, I know. But, since then, his friends have removed him and what
I want is a clue or two as regards that inn—”

Isidore Beautrelet burst out laughing:

“The inn! The inn does not exist! It’s an invention, a trick to put
the police on the wrong scent, an ingenious trick, too, for it seems to have
succeeded.”

“But Dr. Delattre declares—”

“Ah, that’s just it!” cried Beautrelet, in a tone of
conviction. “It is just because Dr. Delattre declares that we
mustn’t believe him. Why, Dr. Delattre refused to give any but the
vaguest details concerning his adventure! He refused to say anything that might
compromise his patient’s safety!—And suddenly he calls attention to
an inn!—You may be sure that he talked about that inn because he was told
to. You may be sure that the whole story which he dished up to us was dictated
to him under the threat of terrible reprisals. The doctor has a wife. The
doctor has a daughter. He is too fond of them to disobey people of whose
formidable power he has seen proofs. And that is why he has assisted your
efforts by supplying the most precise clues.”

“So precise that the inn is nowhere to be found.”

“So precise that you have never ceased looking for it, in the face of all
probability, and that your eyes have been turned away from the only spot where
the man can be, the mysterious spot which he has not left, which he has been
unable to leave ever since the moment when, wounded by Mlle. de Saint-Véran, he
succeeded in dragging himself to it, like a beast to its lair.”

“But where, confound it all?—In what corner of Hades—?”

“In the ruins of the old abbey.”

“But there are no ruins left!—A few bits of wall!—A few
broken columns!”

“That’s where he’s gone to earth. Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction!” shouted Beautrelet. “That’s where you
will have to look for him! It’s there and nowhere else that you will find
Arsène Lupin!”

“Arsène Lupin!” yelled M. Filleul, springing to his feet.

There was a rather solemn pause, amid which the syllables of the famous name
seemed to prolong their sound. Was it possible that the vanquished and yet
invisible adversary, whom they had been hunting in vain for several days, could
really be Arsène Lupin? Arsène Lupin, caught in a trap, arrested, meant
immediate promotion, fortune, glory to any examining magistrate!

Ganimard had not moved a limb. Isidore said to him:

“You agree with me, do you not, M. Inspector?”

“Of course I do!”

“You have not doubted either, for a moment have you, that he managed this
business?”

“Not for a second! The thing bears his signature. A move of Arsène
Lupin’s is as different from a move made by another man as one face is
from another. You have only to open your eyes.”

“Do you think so? Do you think so?” said M. Filleul.

“Think so!” cried the young man. “Look, here’s one
little fact: what are the initials under which those men correspond among
themselves? ‘A. L. N.,’ that is to say, the first letter of the
name Arsène and the first and last letters of the name Lupin.”

“Ah,” said Ganimard, “nothing escapes you! Upon my word,
you’re a fine fellow and old Ganimard lays down his arms before
you!”

Beautrelet flushed with pleasure and pressed the hand which the chief-inspector
held out to him. The three men had drawn near the balcony and their eyes now
took in the extent of the ruins. M. Filleul muttered:

“So he ought to be there.”

“He is there,” said Beautrelet, in a hollow voice. “He
has been there ever since the moment when he fell. Logically and practically,
he could not escape without being seen by Mlle. de Saint-Véran and the two
servants.”

“What proof have you?”

“His accomplices have furnished the proof. On the very morning, one of
them disguised himself as a flyman and drove you here—”

“To recover the cap, which would serve to identify him.”

“Very well, but also and more particularly to examine the spot, find out
and see for himself what had become of the ‘governor.’”

“And did he find out?”

“I presume so, as he knew the hiding-place. And I presume that he became
aware of the desperate condition of his chief, because, under the impulse of
his alarm, he committed the imprudence to write that threat: ‘Woe betide
the young lady, if she has killed the governor!’”

“But his friends were able to take him away afterward?”

“When? Your men have never left the ruins. And where could they have
moved him to? At most, a few hundred yards away, for one doesn’t let a
dying man travel—and then you would have found him. No, I tell you, he is
there. His friends would never have removed him from the safest of
hiding-places. It was there that they brought the doctor, while the gendarmes
were running to the fire like children.”

“But how is he living? How will he keep alive? To keep alive you need
food and drink.”

“I can’t say. I don’t know. But he is there, I will swear it.
He is there, because he can’t help being there. I am as sure of it as if
I saw as if I touched him. He is there.”

With his finger outstretched toward the ruins, he traced in the air a little
circle which became smaller and smaller until it was only a point. And that
point his two companions sought desperately, both leaning into space, both
moved by the same faith in Beautrelet and quivering with the ardent conviction
which he had forced upon them. Yes, Arsène Lupin was there. In theory and in
fact, he was there: neither of them was now able to doubt it.

And there was something impressive and tragic in knowing that the famous
adventurer was lying in some dark shelter, below the ground, helpless, feverish
and exhausted.

“And if he dies?” asked M. Filleul, in a low voice.

“If he dies,” said Beautrelet, “and if his accomplices are
sure of it, then see to the safety of Mlle. de Saint-Véran. Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction, for the vengeance will be terrible.”

A few minutes later and in spite of the entreaties of M. Filleul, who would
gladly have made further use of this fascinating auxiliary, Isidore Beautrelet,
whose holidays ended that day, went off by the Dieppe Road. He stepped from the
train in Paris at five o’clock and, at eight o’clock, returned to
the Lycée Janson together with his schoolfellows.

Ganimard, after a minute, but utterly useless exploration of the ruins of
Ambrumésy, returned to Paris by the fast night-train. On reaching his apartment
in the Rue Pergolese, he found an express letter awaiting him:

Monsieur l’Inspecteur Principal:

    Finding that I had a little time to spare at the end of the day, I have
succeeded in collecting a few additional particulars which are sure to interest
you.

    Arsène Lupin has been living in Paris for twelve months under the name of
Étienne de Vaudreix. It is a name which you will often come across in the
society notes or the sporting columns of the newspapers. He is a great traveler
and is absent for long periods, during which, by his own account, he goes
hunting tigers in Bengal or blue foxes in Siberia. He is supposed to be in
business of some kind, although nobody is able to say for certain what his
business is.

    His present address is 38, Rue Marbeuf; and I will call your attention to
the fact that the Rue Marbeuf is close to Post-office Number 45. Since Thursday
the twenty-third of April, the day before the burglary at Ambrumésy, there has
been no news at all of Étienne de Vaudreix.

    With very many thanks for the kindness which you have shown me, believe me
to be,

Monsieur l’Inspecteur Principal,

Yours sincerely,

ISIDORE BEAUTRELET.

P.S.—Please on no account think that it cost me any great trouble to
obtain this information. On the very morning of the crime, while M. Filleul was
pursuing his examination before a few privileged persons, I had the fortunate
inspiration to glance at the runaway’s cap, before the sham flyman came
to change it. The hatter’s name was enough, as you may imagine, to enable
me to find the clue that led to the identification of the purchaser and his
address.

The next morning, Ganimard called at 36, Rue Marbeuf. After questioning the
concierge, he made him open the door of the ground-floor flat on the right, a
very comfortable apartment, elegantly furnished, in which, however, he
discovered nothing beyond some cinders in the fireplace. Two friends had come,
four days earlier, to burn all compromising papers.

But, just as he was leaving, Ganimard passed the postman, who was bringing a
letter for M. de Vaudreix. That afternoon, the public prosecutor was informed
of the case and ordered the letter to be given up. It bore an American postmark
and contained the following lines, in English:

DEAR SIR:

    I write to confirm the answer which I gave your representative. As soon as
you have M. de Gesvres’s four pictures in your possession, you can
forward them as arranged.

    You may add the rest, if you are able to succeed, which I doubt.

    An unexpected business requires my presence in Europe and I shall reach
Paris at the same time as this letter. You will find me at the Grand Hôtel.

Yours faithfully,

EPHRAIM B. HARLINGTON.

That same day, Ganimard applied for a warrant and took Mr. E. B. Harlington, an
American citizen, to the police-station, on a charge of receiving and
conspiracy.

Thus, within the space of twenty-four hours, all the threads of the plot had
been unraveled, thanks to the really unforeseen clues supplied by a schoolboy
of seventeen. In twenty-four hours, what had seemed inexplicable became simple
and clear. In twenty-four hours, the scheme devised by the accomplices to save
their leader was baffled; the capture of Arsène Lupin, wounded and dying, was
no longer in doubt, his gang was disorganized, the address of his establishment
in Paris and the name which he assumed were known and, for the first time, one
of his cleverest and most carefully elaborated feats was seen through before he
had been able to ensure its complete execution.

An immense clamor of astonishment, admiration and curiosity arose among the
public. Already, the Rouen journalist, in a very able article, had described
the first examination of the sixth-form pupil, laying stress upon his personal
charm, his simplicity of manner and his quiet assurance. The indiscretions of
Ganimard and M. Filleul, indiscretions to which they yielded in spite of
themselves, under an impulse that proved stronger than their professional
pride, suddenly enlightened the public as to the part played by Isidore
Beautrelet in recent events. He alone had done everything. To him alone the
merit of the victory was due.

The excitement was intense. Isidore Beautrelet awoke to find himself a hero;
and the crowd, suddenly infatuated, insisted upon the fullest information
regarding its new favorite. The reporters were there to supply it. They rushed
to the assault of the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, waited for the day-boarders to
come out after schoolhours and picked up all that related, however remotely, to
Beautrelet. It was in this way that they learned the reputation which he
enjoyed among his schoolfellows, who called him the rival of Holmlock Shears.
Thanks to his powers of logical reasoning, with no further data than those
which he was able to gather from the papers, he had, time after time,
proclaimed the solution of very complicated cases long before they were cleared
up by the police.

It had become a game at the Lycée Janson to put difficult questions and
intricate problems to Beautrelet; and it was astonishing to see with what
unhesitating and analytical power and by means of what ingenious deductions he
made his way through the thickest darkness. Ten days before the arrest of
Jorisse, the grocer, he showed what could be done with the famous umbrella. In
the same way, he declared from the beginning, in the matter of the Saint-Cloud
mystery, that the concierge was the only possible murderer.

But most curious of all was the pamphlet which was found circulating among the
boys at the school, a typewritten pamphlet signed by Beautrelet and manifolded
to the number of ten copies. It was entitled, Arsène Lupin and his method,
showing in how far the latter is based upon tradition and in how far original.
Followed by a comparison between English humor and French irony.

It contained a profound study of each of the exploits of Arsène Lupin, throwing
the illustrious burglar’s operations into extraordinary relief, showing
the very mechanism of his way of setting to work, his special tactics, his
letters to the press, his threats, the announcement of his thefts, in short,
the whole bag of tricks which he employed to bamboozle his selected victim and
throw him into such a state of mind that the victim almost offered himself to
the plot contrived against him and that everything took place, as it were, with
his own consent.

And the work was so just, regarded as a piece of criticism, so penetrating, so
lively and marked by a wit so clever and, at the same time, so cruel that the
lawyers at once passed over to his side, that the sympathy of the crowd was
summarily transferred from Lupin to Beautrelet and that, in the struggle
engaged upon between the two, the schoolboy’s victory was loudly
proclaimed in advance.

Be this as it may, both M. Filleul and the Paris public prosecutor seemed
jealously to reserve the possibility of this victory for him. On the one hand,
they failed to establish Mr. Harlington’s identity or to furnish a
definite proof of his connection with Lupin’s gang. Confederate or not,
he preserved an obstinate silence. Nay, more, after examining his handwriting,
it was impossible to declare that he was the author of the intercepted letter.
A Mr. Harlington, carrying a small portmanteau and a pocket-book stuffed with
bank-notes, had taken up his abode at the Grand Hôtel: that was all that could
be stated with certainty.

On the other hand, at Dieppe, M. Filleul lay down on the positions which
Beautrelet had won for him. He did not move a step forward. Around the
individual whom Mlle. de Saint-Véran had taken for Beautrelet, on the eve of
the crime, the same mystery reigned as heretofore. The same obscurity also
surrounded everything connected with the removal of the four Rubens pictures.
What had become of them? And what road had been taken by the motor car in which
they were carried off during the night?

Evidence of its passing was obtained at Luneray at Yerville, at Yvetot and at
Caudebec-en-Caux, where it must have crossed the Seine at daybreak in the
steam-ferry. But, when the matter came to be inquired into more thoroughly, it
was stated that the motor car was an uncovered one and that it would have been
impossible to pack four large pictures into it unobserved by the ferryman.

It was very probably the same car; but then the question cropped up again: what
had become of the four Rubenses?

These were so many problems which M. Filleul unanswered. Every day, his
subordinates searched the quadrilateral of the ruins. Almost every day, he came
to direct the explorations. But between that and discovering the refuge in
which Lupin lay dying—if it were true that Beautrelet’s opinion was
correct—there was a gulf fixed which the worthy magistrate did not seem
likely to cross.

And so it was natural that they should turn once more to Isidore Beautrelet, as
he alone had succeeded in dispelling shadows which, in his absence, gathered
thicker and more impenetrable than ever. Why did he not go on with the case?
Seeing how far he had carried it, he required but an effort to succeed.

The question was put to him by a member of the staff of the Grand
Journal, who had obtained admission to the Lycée Janson by assuming the
name of Bernod, the friend of Beautrelet’s father. And Isidore very
sensibly replied:

“My dear sir, there are other things besides Lupin in this world, other
things besides stories about burglars and detectives. There is, for instance,
the thing which is known as taking one’s degree. Now I am going up for my
examination in July. This is May. And I don’t want to be plucked. What
would my worthy parent say?”

“But what would he say if you delivered Arsène Lupin into the hands of
the police?”

“Tut! There’s a time for everything. In the next
holidays—”

“Whitsuntide?”

“Yes—I shall go down on Saturday the sixth of June by the first
train.”

“And, on the evening of that Saturday, Lupin will be taken.”

“Will you give me until the Sunday?” asked Beautrelet, laughing.

“Why delay?” replied the journalist, quite seriously.

This inexplicable confidence, born of yesterday and already so strong, was felt
with regard to the young man by one and all, even though, in reality, events
had justified it only up to a certain point. No matter, people believed in him!
Nothing seemed difficult to him. They expected from him what they were entitled
to expect at most from some phenomenon of penetration and intuition, of
experience and skill. That day of the sixth of June was made to sprawl over all
the papers. On the sixth of June, Isidore Beautrelet would take the fast train
to Dieppe: and Lupin would be arrested on the same evening.

“Unless he escapes between this and then,” objected the last
remaining partisans of the adventurer.

“Impossible! Every outlet is watched.”

“Unless he has succumbed to his wounds, then,” said the partisans,
who would have preferred their hero’s death to his capture.

And the retort was immediate:

“Nonsense! If Lupin were dead, his confederates would know it by now, and
Lupin would be revenged. Beautrelet said so!”

And the sixth of June came. Half a dozen journalists were looking out for
Isidore at the Gare Saint-Lazare. Two of them wanted to accompany him on his
journey. He begged them to refrain.

He started alone, therefore, in a compartment to himself. He was tired, thanks
to a series of nights devoted to study, and soon fell asleep. He slept heavily.
In his dreams, he had an impression that the train stopped at different
stations and that people got in and out. When he awoke, within sight of Rouen,
he was still alone. But, on the back of the opposite seat, was a large sheet of
paper, fastened with a pin to the gray cloth. It bore these words:

“Every man should mind his own business. Do you mind yours. If not, you
must take the consequences.”

“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands with delight.
“Things are going badly in the adversary’s camp. That threat is as
stupid and vulgar as the sham flyman’s. What a style! One can see that it
wasn’t composed by Lupin.”

The train threaded the tunnel that precedes the old Norman city. On reaching
the station, Isidore took a few turns on the platform to stretch his legs. He
was about to re-enter his compartment, when a cry escaped him. As he passed the
bookstall, he had read, in an absent-minded way, the following lines on the
front page of a special edition of the Journal de Rouen; and their
alarming sense suddenly burst upon him:

STOP-PRESS NEWS

We hear by telephone from Dieppe that the Château d’Ambrumésy was broken
into last night by criminals, who bound and gagged Mlle. de Gesvres and carried
off Mlle. de Saint-Véran. Traces of blood have been seen at a distance of five
hundred yards from the house and a scarf has been found close by, which is also
stained with blood. There is every reason to fear that the poor young girl has
been murdered.

Isidore Beautrelet completed his journey to Dieppe without moving a limb. Bent
in two, with his elbows on his knees and his hands plastered against his face,
he sat thinking.

At Dieppe, he took a fly. At the door of Ambrumésy, he met the examining
magistrate, who confirmed the horrible news.

“You know nothing more?” asked Beautrelet.

“Nothing. I have only just arrived.”

At that moment, the sergeant of gendarmes came up to M. Filleul and handed him
a crumpled, torn and discolored piece of paper, which he had picked up not far
from the place where the scarf was found. M. Filleul looked at it and gave it
to Beautrelet, saying:

“I don’t suppose this will help us much in our
investigations.”

Isidore turned the paper over and over. It was covered with figures, dots and
signs and presented the exact appearance reproduced below:

CHAPTER THREE

THE CORPSE

At six o’clock in the evening, having finished all he had to do, M.
Filluel, accompanied by M. Brédoux, his clerk, stood waiting for the carriage
which was to take him back to Dieppe. He seemed restless, nervous. Twice over,
he asked:

“You haven’t seen anything of young Beautrelet, I suppose?”

“No, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, I can’t say I
have.”

“Where on earth can he be? I haven’t set eyes on him all
day!”

Suddenly, he had an idea, handed his portfolio to Brédoux, ran round the
château and made for the ruins. Isidore Beautrelet was lying near the
cloisters, flat on his face, with one arm folded under his head, on the ground
carpeted with pine-needles. He seemed drowsing.

“Hullo, young man, what are you doing here? Are you asleep?”

“I’m not asleep. I’ve been thinking.”

“Ever since this morning?”

“Ever since this morning.”

“It’s not a question of thinking! One must see into things first,
study facts, look for clues, establish connecting links. The time for thinking
comes after, when one pieces all that together and discovers the truth.”

“Yes, I know.—That’s the usual way, the right one, I dare
say.—Mine is different.—I think first, I try, above all, to get the
general hang of the case, if I may so express myself. Then I imagine a
reasonable and logical hypothesis, which fits in with the general idea. And
then, and not before, I examine the facts to see if they agree with my
hypothesis.”

“That’s a funny method and a terribly complicated one!”

“It’s a sure method, M. Filleul, which is more than can be said of
yours.”

“Come, come! Facts are facts.”

“With your ordinary sort of adversary, yes. But, given an enemy endowed
with a certain amount of cunning, the facts are those which he happens to have
selected. Take the famous clues upon which you base your inquiry: why, he was
at liberty to arrange them as he liked. And you see where that can lead you,
into what mistakes and absurdities, when you are dealing with a man like Arsène
Lupin. Holmlock Shears himself fell into the trap.”

“Arsène Lupin is dead.”

“No matter. His gang remains and the pupils of such a master are masters
themselves.”

M. Filleul took Isidore by the arm and, leading him away:

“Words, young man, words. Here is something of more importance. Listen to
me. Ganimard is otherwise engaged at this moment and will not be here for a few
days. On the other hand, the Comte de Gesvres has telegraphed to Holmlock
Shears, who has promised his assistance next week. Now don’t you think,
young man, that it would be a feather in our cap if we were able to say to
those two celebrities, on the day of their arrival, ‘Awfully sorry,
gentlemen, but we couldn’t wait. The business is done’?”

It was impossible for M. Filleul to confess helplessness with greater candor.
Beautrelet suppressed a smile and, pretending not to see through the worthy
magistrate, replied:

“I confess. Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, that, if I was not
present at your inquiry just now, it was because I hoped that you would consent
to tell me the results. May I ask what you have learned?”

“Well, last night, at eleven o’clock, the three gendarmes whom
Sergeant Quevillon had left on guard at the château received a note from the
sergeant telling them to hasten with all speed to Ouville, where they are
stationed. They at once rode off, and when they arrived at
Ouville—”

“They discovered that they had been tricked, that the order was a forgery
and that there was nothing for them to do but return to Ambrumésy.”

“This they did, accompanied by Sergeant Quevillon. But they were away for
an hour and a half and, during this time, the crime was committed.”

“In what circumstances?”

“Very simple circumstances, indeed. A ladder was removed from the farm
buildings and placed against the second story of the château. A pane of glass
was cut out and a window opened. Two men, carrying a dark lantern, entered
Mlle. de Gesvres’s room and gagged her before she could cry out. Then,
after binding her with cords, they softly opened the door of the room in which
Mlle. de Saint-Véran was sleeping. Mlle. de Gesvres heard a stifled moan,
followed by the sound of a person struggling. A moment later, she saw two men
carrying her cousin, who was also bound and gagged. They passed in front of her
and went out through the window. Then Mlle. de Gesvres, terrified and
exhausted, fainted.”

“But what about the dogs? I thought M. de Gesvres had bought two almost
wild sheep-dogs, which were let loose at night?”

“They were found dead, poisoned.”

“By whom? Nobody could get near them.”

“It’s a mystery. The fact remains that the two men crossed the
ruins without let or hindrance and went out by the little door which we have
heard so much about. They passed through the copsewood, following the line of
the disused quarries. It was not until they were nearly half a mile from the
château, at the foot of the tree known as the Great Oak, that they
stopped—and executed their purpose.”

“If they came with the intention of killing Mlle. de Saint-Véran, why
didn’t they murder her in her room?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps the incident that settled their
determination only occurred after they had left the house. Perhaps the girl
succeeded in releasing herself from her bonds. In my opinion, the scarf which
was picked up was used to fasten her wrists. In any case, the blow was struck
at the foot of the Great Oak. I have collected indisputable
proofs—”

“But the body?”

“The body has not been found, but there is nothing excessively surprising
in that. As a matter of fact, the trail which I followed brought me to the
church at Varengeville and the old cemetery perched on the top of the cliff.
From there it is a sheer precipice, a fall of over three hundred feet to the
rocks and the sea below. In a day or two, a stronger tide than usual will cast
up the body on the beach.”

“Obviously. This is all very simple.”

“Yes, it is all very simple and doesn’t trouble me in the least.
Lupin is dead, his accomplices heard of it and, to revenge themselves, have
killed Mlle. de Saint-Véran. These are facts which did not even require
checking. But Lupin?”

“What about him?”

“What has become of him? In all probability, his confederates removed his
corpse at the same time that they carried away the girl; but what proof have
we? None at all. Any more than of his staying in the ruins, or of his death, or
of his life. And that is the real mystery, M. Beautrelet. The murder of Mlle.
Raymonde solves nothing. On the contrary, it only complicates matters. What has
been happening during the past two months at the Château d’Ambrumésy? If
we don’t clear up the riddle, young man, others will give us the
go-by.”

“On what day are those others coming?”

“Wednesday—Tuesday perhaps—”

Beautrelet seemed to be making an inward calculation and then declared:

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, this is Saturday. I have to be
back at school on Monday evening. Well, if you will have the goodness to be
here at ten o’clock exactly on Monday morning, I will try to give you the
key to the riddle.”

“Really, M. Beautrelet—do you think so? Are you sure?”

“I hope so, at any rate.”

“And where are you going now?”

“I am going to see if the facts consent to fit in with the general theory
which I am beginning to perceive.”

“And if they don’t fit in?”

“Well, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction,” said Beautrelet, with
a laugh, “then it will be their fault and I must look for others which,
will prove more tractable. Till Monday, then?”

“Till Monday.”

A few minutes later, M. Filleul was driving toward Dieppe, while Isidore
mounted a bicycle which he had borrowed from the Comte de Gesvres and rode off
along the road to Yerville and Caudebec-en-Caux.

There was one point in particular on which the young man was anxious to form a
clear opinion, because this just appeared to him to be the enemy’s
weakest point. Objects of the size of the four Rubens pictures cannot be
juggled away. They were bound to be somewhere. Granting that it was impossible
to find them for the moment, might one not discover the road by which they had
disappeared?

What Beautrelet surmised was that the four pictures had undoubtedly been
carried off in the motor car, but that, before reaching Caudebec, they were
transferred to another car, which had crossed the Seine either above Caudebec
or below it. Now the first horse-boat down the stream was at Quillebeuf, a
greatly frequented ferry and, consequently, dangerous. Up stream, there was the
ferry-boat at La Mailleraie, a large, but lonely market-town, lying well off
the main road.

By midnight, Isidore had covered the thirty-five or forty miles to La
Mailleraie and was knocking at the door of an inn by the waterside. He slept
there and, in the morning, questioned the ferrymen.

They consulted the counterfoils in the traffic-book. No motor-car had crossed
on Thursday the 23rd of April.

“A horse-drawn vehicle, then?” suggested Beautrelet. “A cart?
A van?”

“No, not either.”

Isidore continued his inquiries all through the morning. He was on the point of
leaving for Quillebeuf, when the waiter of the inn at which he had spent the
night said:

“I came back from my thirteen days’ training on the morning of
which you are speaking and I saw a cart, but it did not go across.”

“Really?”

“No, they unloaded it onto a flat boat, a barge of sorts, which was
moored to the wharf.”

“And where did the cart come from?”

“Oh, I knew it at once. It belonged to Master Vatinel, the carter.”

“And where does he live?”

“At Louvetot.”

Beautrelet consulted his military map. The hamlet of Louvetot lay where the
highroad between Yvetot and Caudebec was crossed by a little winding road that
ran through the woods to La Mailleraie.

Not until six o’clock in the evening did Isidore succeed in discovering
Master Vatinel, in a pothouse. Master Vatinel was one of those artful old
Normans who are always on their guard, who distrust strangers, but who are
unable to resist the lure of a gold coin or the influence of a glass or two:

“Well, yes, sir, the men in the motor car that morning had told me to
meet them at five o’clock at the crossroads. They gave me four great, big
things, as high as that. One of them went with me and we carted the things to
the barge.”

“You speak of them as if you knew them before.”

“I should think I did know them! It was the sixth time they were
employing me.”

Isidore gave a start:

“The sixth time, you say? And since when?”

“Why every day before that one, to be sure! But it was other things
then—great blocks of stone—or else smaller, longish ones, wrapped
up in newspapers, which they carried as if they were worth I don’t know
what. Oh, I mustn’t touch those on any account!—But what’s
the matter? You’ve turned quite white.”

“Nothing—the heat of the room—”

Beautrelet staggered out into the air. The joy, the surprise of the discovery
made him feel giddy. He went back very quietly to Varengeville, slept in the
village, spent an hour at the mayor’s offices with the school-master and
returned to the château. There he found a letter awaiting him “care of M.
le Comte de Gesvres.” It consisted of a single line:

“Second warning. Hold your tongue. If not—”

“Come,” he muttered. “I shall have to make up my mind and
take a few precautions for my personal safety. If not, as they
say—”

It was nine o’clock. He strolled about among the ruins and then lay down
near the cloisters and closed his eyes.

“Well, young man, are you satisfied with the results of your
campaign?”

It was M. Filleul.

“Delighted, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction.”

“By which you mean to say—?”

“By which I mean to say that I am prepared to keep my promise—in
spite of this very uninviting letter.”

He showed the letter to M. Filleul.

“Pooh! Stuff and nonsense!” cried the magistrate. “I hope you
won’t let that prevent you—”

“From telling you what I know? No, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction.
I have given my word and I shall keep it. In less than ten minutes, you shall
know—a part of the truth.”

“A part?”

“Yes, in my opinion, Lupin’s hiding-place does not constitute the
whole of the problem. Far from it. But we shall see later on.”

“M. Beautrelet, nothing that you do could astonish me now. But how were
you able to discover—?”

“Oh, in a very natural way! In the letter from old man Harlington to M.
Étienne de Vaudreix, or rather to Lupin—”

“The intercepted letter?”

“Yes. There is a phrase which always puzzled me. After saying that the
pictures are to be forwarded as arranged, he goes on to say, ‘You may add
the rest, if you are able to succeed, which I doubt.’”

“Yes, I remember.”

“What was this ‘rest’? A work of art, a curiosity? The
château contains nothing of any value besides the Rubenses and the tapestries.
Jewelry? There is very little and what there is of it is not worth much. In
that case, what could it be?—On the other hand, was it conceivable that
people so prodigiously clever as Lupin should not have succeeded in adding
‘the rest,’ which they themselves had evidently suggested? A
difficult undertaking, very likely; exceptional, surprising, I dare say; but
possible and therefore certain, since Lupin wished it.”

“And yet he failed: nothing has disappeared.”

“He did not fail: something has disappeared.”

“Yes, the Rubenses—but—”

“The Rubenses and something besides—something which has been
replaced by a similar thing, as in the case of the Rubenses; something much
more uncommon, much rarer, much more valuable than the Rubenses.”

“Well, what? You’re killing me with this procrastination!”

While talking, the two men had crossed the ruins, turned toward the little door
and were now walking beside the chapel. Beautrelet stopped:

“Do you really want to know, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction?”

“Of course, I do.”

Beautrelet was carrying a walking-stick, a strong, knotted stick. Suddenly,
with a back stroke of this stick, he smashed one of the little statues that
adorned the front of the chapel.

“Why, you’re mad!” shouted M. Filleul, beside himself,
rushing at the broken pieces of the statue. “You’re mad! That old
saint was an admirable bit of work—”

“An admirable bit of work!” echoed Isidore, giving a whirl which
brought down the Virgin Mary.

M. Filleul took hold of him round the body:

“Young man, I won’t allow you to commit—”

A wise man of the East came toppling to the ground, followed by a manger
containing the Mother and Child. . . .

“If you stir another limb, I fire!”

The Comte de Gesvres had appeared upon the scene and was cocking his revolver.
Beautrelet burst out laughing:

“That’s right, Monsieur le Comte, blaze away!—Take a shot at
them, as if you were at a fair!—Wait a bit—this chap carrying his
head in his hands—”

St. John the Baptist fell, shattered to pieces.

“Oh!” shouted the count, pointing his revolver. “You young
vandal!—Those masterpieces!”

“Sham, Monsieur le Comte!”

“What? What’s that?” roared M. Filleul, wresting the Comte de
Gesvres’s weapon from him.

“Sham!” repeated Beautrelet. “Paper-pulp and plaster!”

“Oh, nonsense! It can’t be true!”

“Hollow plaster, I tell you! Nothing at all!”

The count stooped and picked up a sliver of a statuette.

“Look at it, Monsieur le Comte, and see for yourself: it’s plaster!
Rusty, musty, mildewed plaster, made to look like old stone—but plaster
for all that, plaster casts!—That’s all that remains of your
perfect masterpiece!—That’s what they’ve done in just a few
days!-That’s what the Sieur Charpenais who copied the Rubenses, prepared
a year ago.” He seized M. Filleul’s arm in his turn. “What do
you think of it, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction? Isn’t it fine?
Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it gorgeous? The chapel has been removed! A
whole Gothic chapel collected stone by stone! A whole population of statues
captured and replaced by these chaps in stucco! One of the most magnificent
specimens of an incomparable artistic period confiscated! The chapel, in short,
stolen! Isn’t it immense? Ah, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, what
a genius the man is!”

“You’re allowing yourself to be carried away, M. Beautrelet.”

“One can’t be carried away too much, monsieur, when one has to do
with people like that. Everything above the average deserves our admiration.
And this man soars above everything. There is in his flight a wealth of
imagination, a force and power, a skill and freedom that send a thrill through
me!”

“Pity he’s dead,” said M. Filleul, with a grin.
“He’d have ended by stealing the towers of Notre-Dame.”

Isidore shrugged his shoulders:

“Don’t laugh, monsieur. He upsets you, dead though he may
be.”

“I don’t say not, I don’t say not, M. Beautrelet, I confess
that I feel a certain excitement now that I am about to set eyes on
him—unless, indeed, his friends have taken away the body.”

“And always admitting,” observed the Comte de Gesvres, “that
it was really he who was wounded by my poor niece.”

“It was he, beyond a doubt, Monsieur le Comte,” declared
Beautrelet; “it was he, believe me, who fell in the ruins under the shot
fired by Mlle. de Saint-Véran; it was he whom she saw rise and who fell again
and dragged himself toward the cloisters to rise again for the last
time—this by a miracle which I will explain to you presently—to
rise again for the last time and reach this stone shelter—which was to be
his tomb.”

And Beautrelet struck the threshold of the chapel with his stick.

“Eh? What?” cried M. Filleul, taken aback. “His
tomb?—Do you think that that impenetrable hiding-place—”

“It was here—there,” he repeated.

“But we searched it.”

“Badly.”

“There is no hiding-place here,” protested M. de Gesvres. “I
know the chapel.”

“Yes, there is, Monsieur le Comte. Go to the mayor’s office at
Varengeville, where they have collected all the papers that used to be in the
old parish of Ambrumésy, and you will learn from those papers, which belong to
the eighteenth century, that there is a crypt below the chapel. This crypt
doubtless dates back to the Roman chapel, upon the site of which the present
one was built.”

“But how can Lupin have known this detail?” asked M. Filleul.

“In a very simple manner: because of the works which he had to execute to
take away the chapel.”

“Come, come, M. Beautrelet, you’re exaggerating. He has not taken
away the whole chapel. Look, not one of the stones of this top course has been
touched.”

“Obviously, he cast and took away only what had a financial value: the
wrought stones, the sculptures, the statuettes, the whole treasure of little
columns and carved arches. He did not trouble about the groundwork of the
building itself. The foundations remain.”

“Therefore, M. Beautrelet, Lupin was not able to make his way into the
crypt.”

At that moment, M. de Gesvres, who had been to call a servant, returned with
the key of the chapel. He opened the door. The three men entered. After a short
examination Beautrelet said:

“The flag-stones on the ground have been respected, as one might expect.
But it is easy to perceive that the high altar is nothing more than a cast.
Now, generally, the staircase leading to the crypt opens in front of the high
altar and passes under it.”

“What do you conclude?”

“I conclude that Lupin discovered the crypt when working at the
altar.”

The count sent for a pickaxe and Beautrelet attacked the altar. The plaster
flew to right and left. He pushed the pieces aside as he went on.

“By Jove!” muttered M. Filleul, “I am eager to
know—”

“So am I,” said Beautrelet, whose face was pale with anguish.

He hurried his blows. And, suddenly, his pickaxe, which, until then, had
encountered no resistance, struck against a harder material and rebounded.
There was a sound of something falling in; and all that remained of the altar
went tumbling into the gap after the block of stone which had been struck by
the pickaxe. Beautrelet bent forward. A puff of cold air rose to his face. He
lit a match and moved it from side to side over the gap:

“The staircase begins farther forward than I expected, under the
entrance-flags, almost. I can see the last steps, there, right at the
bottom.”

“Is it deep?”

“Three or four yards. The steps are very high—and there are some
missing.”

“It is hardly likely,” said M. Filleul, “that the accomplices
can have had time to remove the body from the cellar, when they were engaged in
carrying off Mlle. de Saint-Véran—during the short absence of the
gendarmes. Besides, why should they?—No, in my opinion, the body is
here.”

A servant brought them a ladder. Beautrelet let it down through the opening and
fixed it, after groping among the fallen fragments. Holding the two uprights
firmly:

“Will you go down, M. Filleul?” he asked.

The magistrate, holding a candle in his hand, ventured down the ladder. The
Comte de Gesvres followed him and Beautrelet, in his turn, placed his foot on
the first rung.

Mechanically, he counted eighteen rungs, while his eyes examined the crypt,
where the glimmer of the candle struggled against the heavy darkness. But, at
the bottom, his nostrils were assailed by one of those foul and violent smells
which linger in the memory for many a long day. And, suddenly, a trembling hand
seized him by the shoulder.

“Well, what is it?”

“B-beautrelet,” stammered M. Filleul.
“B-beau-trelet—”

He could not get a word out for terror.

“Come, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, compose yourself!”

“Beautrelet—he is there—”

“Eh?”

“Yes—there was something under the big stone that broke off the
altar—I pushed the stone—and I touched—I shall
never—shall never forget.—”

“Where is it?”

“On this side.—Don’t you notice the smell?—And then
look—see.”

He took the candle and held it towards a motionless form stretched upon the
ground.

“Oh!” exclaimed Beautrelet, in a horror-stricken tone.

The three men bent down quickly. The corpse lay half-naked, lean, frightful.
The flesh, which had the greenish hue of soft wax, appeared in places through
the torn clothes. But the most hideous thing, the thing that had drawn a cry of
terror from the young man’s lips, was the head, the head which had just
been crushed by the block of stone, the shapeless head, a repulsive mass in
which not one feature could be distinguished.

Beautrelet took four strides up the ladder and fled into the daylight and the
open air.

M. Filleul found him again lying flat on the around, with his hands glued to
his face:

“I congratulate you, Beautrelet,” he said. “In addition to
the discovery of the hiding-place, there are two points on which I have been
able to verify the correctness of your assertions. First of all, the man on
whom Mlle. de Saint-Véran fired was indeed Arsène Lupin, as you said from the
start. Also, he lived in Paris under the name of Étienne de Vaudreix. His linen
is marked with the initials E. V. That ought to be sufficient proof, I think:
don’t you?”

Isidore did not stir.

“Monsieur le Comte has gone to have a horse put to. They’re sending
for Dr. Jouet, who will make the usual examination. In my opinion, death must
have taken place a week ago, at least. The state of decomposition of the
corpse—but you don’t seem to be listening—”

“Yes, yes.”

“What I say is based upon absolute reasons. Thus, for
instance—”

M. Filleul continued his demonstrations, without, however, obtaining any more
manifest marks of attention. But M. de Gesvres’s return interrupted his
monologue. The comte brought two letters. One was to tell him that Holmlock
Shears would arrive next morning.

“Capital!” cried M. Filleul, joyfully. “Inspector Ganimard
will be here too. It will be delightful.”

“The other letter is for you, Monsieur le Juge
d’Instruction,” said the comte.

“Better and better,” said M. Filleul, after reading it.
“There will certainly not be much for those two gentlemen to do. M.
Beautrelet, I hear from Dieppe that the body of a young woman was found by some
shrimpers, this morning, on the rocks.”

Beautrelet gave a start:

“What’s that? The body—”

“Of a young woman.—The body is horribly mutilated, they say, and it
would be impossible to establish the identity, but for a very narrow little
gold curb-bracelet on the right arm which has become encrusted in the swollen
skin. Now Mlle. de Saint-Véran used to wear a gold curb-bracelet on her right
arm. Evidently, therefore, Monsieur le Comte, this is the body of your poor
niece, which the sea must have washed to that distance. What do you think,
Beautrelet?”

“Nothing—nothing—or, rather, yes—everything is
connected, as you see—and there is no link missing in my argument. All
the facts, one after the other, however contradictory, however disconcerting
they may appear, end by supporting the supposition which I imagined from the
first.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You soon will. Remember, I promised you the whole truth.”

“But it seems to me—”

“A little patience, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction. So far, you
have had no cause to complain of me. It is a fine day. Go for a walk, lunch at
the château, smoke your pipe. I shall be back by four o’clock. As for my
school, well, I don’t care: I shall take the night train.”

They had reached the out-houses at the back of the château. Beautrelet jumped
on his bicycle and rode away.

At Dieppe, he stopped at the office of the local paper, the Vigie, and
examined the file for the last fortnight. Then he went on to the market-town of
Envermeu, six or seven miles farther. At Envermeu, he talked to the mayor, the
rector and the local policeman. The church-clock struck three. His inquiry was
finished.

He returned singing for joy. He pressed upon the two pedals turn by turn, with
an equal and powerful rhythm; his chest opened wide to take in the keen air
that blew from the sea. And, from time to time, he forgot himself to the extent
of uttering shouts of triumph to the sky, when he thought of the aim which he
was pursuing and of the success that was crowning his efforts.

Ambrumésy appeared in sight. He coasted at full speed down the slope leading to
the château. The top rows of venerable trees that line the road seemed to run
to meet him and to vanish behind him forthwith. And, all at once, he uttered a
cry. In a sudden vision, he had seen a rope stretched from one tree to another,
across the road.

His machine gave a jolt and stopped short. Beautrelet was flung three yards
forward, with immense violence, and it seemed to him that only chance, a
miraculous chance, caused him to escape a heap of pebbles on which, logically,
he ought to have broken his head.

He lay for a few seconds stunned. Then, all covered with bruises, with the skin
flayed from his knees, he examined the spot. On the right lay a small wood, by
which his aggressor had no doubt fled. Beautrelet untied the rope. To the tree
on the left around which it was fastened a small piece of paper was fixed with
string. Beautrelet unfolded it and read:

“The third and last warning.”

He went on to the château, put a few questions to the servants and joined the
examining magistrate in a room on the ground floor, at the end of the right
wing, where M. Filleul used to sit in the course of his operations. M. Filleul
was writing, with his clerk seated opposite to him. At a sign from him, the
clerk left the room; and the magistrate exclaimed:

“Why, what have you been doing to yourself, M. Beautrelet? Your hands are
covered with blood.”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” said the young man.
“Just a fall occasioned by this rope, which was stretched in front of my
bicycle. I will only ask you to observe that the rope comes from the château.
Not longer than twenty minutes ago, it was being used to dry linen on, outside
the laundry.”

“You don’t mean to say so!”

“Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, I am being watched here, by some
one in the very heart of the place, who can see me, who can hear me and who,
minute by minute, observes my actions and knows my intentions.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am sure of it. It is for you to discover him and you will have no
difficulty in that. As for myself, I want to have finished and to give you the
promised explanations. I have made faster progress than our adversaries
expected and I am convinced that they mean to take vigorous measures on their
side. The circle is closing around me. The danger is approaching. I feel
it.”

“Nonsense, Beautrelet—”

“You wait and see! For the moment, let us lose no time. And, first, a
question on a point which I want to have done with at once. Have you spoken to
anybody of that document which Sergeant Quevillon picked up and handed you in
my presence?”

“No, indeed; not to a soul. But do you attach any value—?”

“The greatest value. It’s an idea of mine, an idea, I confess,
which does not rest upon a proof of any kind—for, up to the present, I
have not succeeded in deciphering the document. And therefore I am mentioning
it—so that we need not come back to it.”

Beautrelet pressed his hand on M. Filleul’s and whispered:

“Don’t speak—there’s some one
listening—outside—”

The gravel creaked. Beautrelet ran to the window and leaned out:

“There’s no one there—but the border has been trodden
down—we can easily identify the footprints—”

He closed the window and sat down again:

“You see, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, the enemy has even ceased
to take the most ordinary precautions—he has not time left—he too
feels that the hour is urgent. Let us be quick, therefore, and speak, since
they do not wish us to speak.”

He laid the document on the table and held it in position, unfolded:

“One observation, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, to begin with.
The paper consists almost entirely of dots and figures. And in the first three
lines and the fifth—the only ones with which we have to do at present,
for the fourth seems to present an entirely different character—not one
of those figures is higher than the figure 5. There is, therefore, a great
chance that each of these figures represents one of the five vowels, taken in
alphabetical order. Let us put down the result.”

He wrote on a separate piece of paper:

e . a . a . . e . . e . a . . a . .

a . . . e . e .        . e oi . e . . e .

. ou . . e . o . . . e . . e . o . . e

ai . ui . . e            . . eu . e

Then he continued:

“As you see, this does not give us much to go upon. The key is, at the
same time, very easy, because the inventor has contented himself with replacing
the vowels by figures and the consonants by dots, and very difficult, if not
impossible, because he has taken no further trouble to complicate the
problem.”

“It is certainly pretty obscure.”

“Let us try to throw some light upon it. The second line is divided into
two parts; and the second part appears in such a way that it probably forms one
word. If we now seek to replace the intermediary dots by consonants, we arrive
at the conclusion, after searching and casting about, that the only consonants
which are logically able to support the vowels are also logically able to
produce only one word, the word demoiselles.”

“That would refer to Mlle. de Gesvres and Mlle. de Saint-Véran.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And do you see nothing more?”

“Yes. I also note an hiatus in the middle of the last line; and, if I
apply a similar operation to the beginning of the line, I at once see that the
only consonant able to take the place of the dot between the diphthongs
fai and ui is the letter g and that, when I have thus
formed the first five letters of the word, aigui, it is natural and
inevitable that, with the two next dots and the final e, I should arrive
at the word aiguille.”

“Yes, the word aiguille forces itself upon us.”

“Finally, for the last word, I have three vowels and three consonants. I
cast about again, I try all the letters, one after the other, and, starting
with the principle that the two first letters are necessary consonants, I find
that three words apply: fleuve, preuve and creuse. I
eliminate the words fleuve and preuve, as possessing no possible
relation to a needle, and I keep the word creuse.”

“Making ‘hollow needle’! By jove! I admit that your solution
is correct, because it needs must be; but how does it help us?”

“Not at all,” said Beautrelet, in a thoughtful tone. “Not at
all, for the moment.—Later on, we shall see.—I have an idea that a
number of things are included in the puzzling conjunction of those two words,
aiguille creuse. What is troubling me at present is rather the material
on which the document is written, the paper employed.—Do they still
manufacture this sort of rather coarse-grained parchment? And then this ivory
color.—And those folds—the wear of those folds—and, lastly,
look, those marks of red sealing-wax, on the back—”

At that moment Beautrelet, was interrupted by Brédoux, the magistrate’s
clerk, who opened the door and announced the unexpected arrival of the chief
public prosecutor. M. Filleul rose:

“Anything new? Is Monsieur le Procureur Général downstairs?”

“No, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction. Monsieur le Procureur Général
has not left his carriage. He is only passing through Ambrumésy and begs you to
be good enough to go down to him at the gate. He only has a word to say to
you.”

“That’s curious,” muttered M. Filleul.
“However—we shall see. Excuse me, Beautrelet, I shan’t be
long.”

He went away. His footsteps sounded outside. Then the clerk closed the door,
turned the key and put it in his pocket.

“Hullo!” exclaimed Beautrelet, greatly surprised. “What are
you locking us in for?”

“We shall be able to talk so much better,” retorted Brédoux.

Beautrelet rushed toward another door, which led to the next room. He had
understood: the accomplice was Brédoux, the clerk of the examining magistrate
himself. Brédoux grinned:

“Don’t hurt your fingers, my young friend. I have the key of that
door, too.”

“There’s the window!” cried Beautrelet.

“Too late,” said Brédoux, planting himself in front of the
casement, revolver in hand.

Every chance of retreat was cut off. There was nothing more for Isidore to do,
nothing except to defend himself against the enemy who was revealing himself
with such brutal daring. He crossed his arms.

“Good,” mumbled the clerk. “And now let us waste no
time.” He took out his watch. “Our worthy M. Filleul will walk down
to the gate. At the gate, he will find nobody, of course: no more public
prosecutor than my eye. Then he will come back. That gives us about four
minutes. It will take me one minute to escape by this window, clear through the
little door by the ruins and jump on the motor cycle waiting for me. That
leaves three minutes, which is just enough.”

Brédoux was a queer sort of misshapen creature, who balanced on a pair of very
long spindle-legs a huge trunk, as round as the body of a spider and furnished
with immense arms. A bony face and a low, small stubborn forehead pointed to
the man’s narrow obstinacy.

Beautrelet felt a weakness in the legs and staggered. He had to sit down:

“Speak,” he said. “What do you want?”

“The paper. I’ve been looking for it for three days.”

“I haven’t got it.”

“You’re lying. I saw you put it back in your pocket-book when I
came in.”

“Next?”

“Next, you must undertake to keep quite quiet. You’re annoying us.
Leave us alone and mind your own business. Our patience is at an end.”

He had come nearer, with the revolver still aimed at the young man’s
head, and spoke in a hollow voice, with a powerful stress on each syllable that
he uttered. His eyes were hard, his smile cruel.

Beautrelet gave a shudder. It was the first time that he was experiencing the
sense of danger. And such danger! He felt himself in the presence of an
implacable enemy, endowed with blind and irresistible strength.

“And next?” he asked, with less assurance in his voice.

“Next? Nothing.—You will be free.—We will
forget—”

There was a pause. Then Brédoux resumed:

“There is only a minute left. You must make up your mind. Come, old chap,
don’t be a fool.—We are the stronger, you know, always and
everywhere.—Quick, the paper—”

Isidore did not flinch. With a livid and terrified face, he remained master of
himself, nevertheless, and his brain remained clear amid the breakdown of his
nerves. The little black hole of the revolver was pointing at six inches from
his eyes. The finger was bent and obviously pressing on the trigger. It only
wanted a moment—

“The paper,” repeated Brédoux. “If not—”

“Here it is,” said Beautrelet.

He took out his pocket-book and handed it to the clerk, who seized it eagerly.

“Capital! We’ve come to our senses. I’ve no doubt
there’s something to be done with you.—You’re troublesome,
but full of common sense. I’ll talk about it to my pals. And now
I’m off. Good-bye!”

He pocketed his revolver and turned back the fastening of the window. There was
a noise in the passage.

“Good-bye,” he said again. “I’m only just in
time.”

But the idea stopped him. With a quick movement, he examined the pocket-book:

“Damn and blast it!” He grated through his teeth. “The
paper’s not there.—You’ve done me—”

He leaped into the room. Two shots rang out. Isidore, in his turn, had seized
his pistol and fired.

“Missed, old chap!” shouted Brédoux. “Your hand’s
shaking.—You’re afraid—”

They caught each other round the body and came down to the floor together.
There was a violent and incessant knocking at the door. Isidore’s
strength gave way and he was at once over come by his adversary. It was the
end. A hand was lifted over him, armed with a knife, and fell. A fierce pain
burst into his shoulder. He let go.

He had an impression of some one fumbling in the inside pocket of his jacket
and taking the paper from it. Then, through the lowered veil of his eyelids, he
half saw the man stepping over the window-sill.

The same newspapers which, on the following morning, related the last episodes
that had occurred at the Château d’Ambrumésy—the trickery at the
chapel, the discovery of Arsène Lupin’s body and of Raymonde’s body
and, lastly, the murderous attempt made upon Beautrelet by the clerk to the
examining magistrate—also announced two further pieces of news: the
disappearance of Ganimard, and the kidnapping of Holmlock Shears, in broad
daylight, in the heart of London, at the moment when he was about to take the
train for Dover.

Lupin’s gang, therefore, which had been disorganized for a moment by the
extraordinary ingenuity of a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, was now resuming the
offensive and was winning all along the line from the first. Lupin’s two
great adversaries, Shears and Ganimard, were put away. Isidore Beautrelet was
disabled. The police were powerless. For the moment there was no one left
capable of struggling against such enemies.

CHAPTER FOUR

FACE TO FACE

One evening, five weeks later, I had given my man leave to go out. It was the
day before the 14th of July. The night was hot, a storm threatened and I felt
no inclination to leave the flat. I opened wide the glass doors leading to my
balcony, lit my reading lamp and sat down in an easy-chair to look through the
papers, which I had not yet seen.

It goes without saying that there was something about Arsène Lupin in all of
them. Since the attempt at murder of which poor Isidore Beautrelet had been the
victim, not a day had passed without some mention of the Ambrumésy mystery. It
had a permanent headline devoted to it. Never had public opinion been excited
to that extent, thanks to the extraordinary series of hurried events, of
unexpected and disconcerting surprises. M. Filleul, who was certainly accepting
the secondary part allotted to him with a good faith worthy of all praise, had
let the interviewers into the secret of his young advisor’s exploits
during the memorable three days, so that the public was able to indulge in the
rashest suppositions. And the public gave itself free scope. Specialists and
experts in crime, novelists and playwrights, retired magistrates and
chief-detectives, erstwhile Lecocqs and budding Holmlock Shearses, each had his
theory and expounded it in lengthy contributions to the press. Everybody
corrected and supplemented the inquiry of the examining magistrate; and all on
the word of a child, on the word of Isidore Beautrelet, a sixth-form schoolboy
at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly!

For really, it had to be admitted, the complete elements of the truth were now
in everybody’s possession. What did the mystery consist of? They knew the
hiding-place where Arsène Lupin had taken refuge and lain a-dying; there was no
doubt about it: Dr. Delattre, who continued to plead professional secrecy and
refused to give evidence, nevertheless confessed to his intimate
friends—who lost no time in blabbing—that he really had been taken
to a crypt to attend a wounded man whom his confederates introduced to him by
the name of Arsène Lupin. And, as the corpse of Étienne de Vaudreix was found
in that same crypt and as the said Étienne de Vaudreix was none other than
Arsène Lupin—as the official examination went to show—all this
provided an additional proof, if one were needed, of the identity of Arsène
Lupin and the wounded man. Therefore, with Lupin dead and Mlle. de
Saint-Véran’s body recognized by the curb-bracelet on her wrist, the
tragedy was finished.

It was not. Nobody thought that it was, because Beautrelet had said the
contrary. Nobody knew in what respect it was not finished, but, on the word of
the young man, the mystery remained complete. The evidence of the senses did
not prevail against the statement of a Beautrelet. There was something which
people did not know, and of that something they were convinced that he was in
position to supply a triumphant explanation.

It is easy, therefore, to imagine the anxiety with which, at first, people
awaited the bulletins issued by the two Dieppe doctors to whose care the Comte
de Gesvres entrusted his patient; the distress that prevailed during the first
few days, when his life was thought to be in danger; and the enthusiasm of the
morning when the newspapers announced that there was no further cause for fear.
The least details excited the crowd. People wept at the thought of Beautrelet
nursed by his old father, who had been hurriedly summoned by telegram, and they
also admired the devotion of Mlle. Suzanne de Gesvres, who spent night after
night by the wounded lad’s bedside.

Next came a swift and glad convalescence. At last, the public were about to
know! They would know what Beautrelet had promised to reveal to M. Filleul and
the decisive words which the knife of the would-be assassin had prevented him
from uttering! And they would also know everything, outside the tragedy itself,
that remained impenetrable or inaccessible to the efforts of the police.

With Beautrelet free and cured of his wound, one could hope for some certainty
regarding Harlington, Arsène Lupin’s mysterious accomplice, who was still
detained at the Santé prison. One would learn what had become, after the crime,
of Brédoux the clerk, that other accomplice, whose daring was really
terrifying.

With Beautrelet free, one could also form a precise idea concerning the
disappearance of Ganimard and the kidnapping of Shears. How was it possible for
two attempts of this kind to take place? Neither the English detectives nor
their French colleagues possessed the slightest clue on the subject. On
Whit-Sunday, Ganimard did not come home, nor on the Monday either, nor during
the five weeks that followed. In London, on Whit-Monday, Holmlock Shears took a
cab at eight o’clock in the evening to drive to the station. He had
hardly stepped in, when he tried to alight, probably feeling a presentiment of
danger. But two men jumped into the hansom, one on either side, flung him back
on the seat and kept him there between them, or rather under them. All this
happened in sight of nine or ten witnesses, who had no time to interfere. The
cab drove off at a gallop. And, after that, nothing. Nobody knew anything.

Perhaps, also, Beautrelet would be able to give the complete explanation of the
document, the mysterious paper to which. Brédoux, the magistrate’s clerk,
attached enough importance to recover it, with blows of the knife, from the
person in whose possession it was. The problem of the Hollow Needle it was
called, by the countless solvers of riddles who, with their eyes bent upon the
figures and dots, strove to read a meaning into them. The Hollow Needle! What a
bewildering conjunction of two simple words! What an incomprehensible question
was set by that scrap of paper, whose very origin and manufacture were unknown!
The Hollow Needle! Was it a meaningless expression, the puzzle of a schoolboy
scribbling with pen and ink on the corner of a page? Or were they two magic
words which could compel the whole great adventure of Lupin the great
adventurer to assume its true significance? Nobody knew.

But the public soon would know. For some days, the papers had been announcing
the approaching arrival of Beautrelet. The struggle was on the point of
recommencing; and, this time, it would be implacable on the part of the young
man, who was burning to take his revenge. And, as it happened, my attention,
just then, was drawn to his name, printed in capitals. The Grand Journal
headed its front page with the following paragraph:

We have persuaded

M. ISIDORE BEAUTRELET

to give us the first right of printing his revelations. To-morrow, Tuesday,
before the police themselves are informed, the Grand Journal will
publish the whole truth of the Ambrumésy mystery.

“That’s interesting, eh? What do you think of it, my dear
chap?”

I started from my chair. There was some one sitting beside me, some one I did
not know. I cast my eyes round for a weapon. But, as my visitor’s
attitude appeared quite inoffensive, I restrained myself and went up to him.

He was a young man with strongly-marked features, long, fair hair and a short,
tawny beard, divided into two points. His dress suggested the dark clothes of
an English clergyman; and his whole person, for that matter, wore an air of
austerity and gravity that inspired respect.

“Who are you?” I asked. And, as he did not reply, I repeated,
“Who are you? How did you get in? What are you here for?”

He looked at me and said:

“Don’t you know me?”

“No—no!”

“Oh, that’s really curious! Just search your memory—one of
your friends—a friend of a rather special
kind—however—”

I caught him smartly by the arm:

“You lie! You lie! No, you’re not the man you say you
are—it’s not true.”

“Then why are you thinking of that man rather than another?” he
asked, with a laugh.

Oh, that laugh! That bright and clear young laugh, whose amusing irony had so
often contributed to my diversion! I shivered. Could it be?

“No, no,” I protested, with a sort of terror. “It cannot
be.”

“It can’t be I, because I’m dead, eh?” he retorted.
“And because you don’t believe in ghosts.” He laughed again.
“Am I the sort of man who dies? Do you think I would die like that, shot
in the back by a girl? Really, you misjudge me! As though I would ever consent
to such a death as that!”

“So it is you!” I stammered, still incredulous and yet greatly
excited. “So it is you! I can’t manage to recognize you.”

“In that case,” he said, gaily, “I am quite easy. If the only
man to whom I have shown myself in my real aspect fails to know me to-day, then
everybody who will see me henceforth as I am to-day is bound not to know me
either, when he sees me in my real aspect—if, indeed, I have a real
aspect—”

I recognized his voice, now that he was no longer changing its tone, and I
recognized his eyes also and the expression of his face and his whole attitude
and his very being, through the counterfeit appearance in which he had shrouded
it:

“Arsène Lupin!” I muttered.

“Yes, Arsène Lupin!” he cried, rising from his chair. “The
one and only Arsène Lupin, returned from the realms of darkness, since it
appears that I expired and passed away in a crypt! Arsène Lupin, alive and
kicking, in the full exercise of his will, happy and free and more than ever
resolved to enjoy that happy freedom in a world where hitherto he has received
nothing but favors and privileges!”

It was my turn to laugh:

“Well, it’s certainly you, and livelier this time than on the day
when I had the pleasure of seeing you, last year—I congratulate
you.”

I was alluding to his last visit, the visit following on the famous adventure
of the diadem,[1] his interrupted marriage, his flight with Sonia Kirchnoff and
the Russian girl’s horrible death. On that day, I had seen an Arsène
Lupin whom I did not know, weak, down-hearted, with eyes tired with weeping,
seeking for a little sympathy and affection.

[1] Arsène Lupin, play in three acts and four scenes, by Maurice Leblanc
and Francis de Croisset.]

“Be quiet,” he said. “The past is far away.”

“It was a year ago,” I observed.

“It was ten years ago,” he declared. “Arsène Lupin’s
years count for ten times as much as another man’s.”

I did not insist and, changing the conversation:

“How did you get in?”

“Why, how do you think? Through the door, of course. Then, as I saw
nobody, I walked across the drawing room and out by the balcony, and here I
am.”

“Yes, but the key of the door—?”

“There are no doors for me, as you know. I wanted your flat and I came
in.”

“It is at your disposal. Am I to leave you?”

“Oh, not at all! You won’t be in the way. In fact, I can promise
you an interesting evening.”

“Are you expecting some one?”

“Yes. I have given him an appointment here at ten o’clock.”
He took out his watch. “It is ten now. If the telegram reached him, he
ought to be here soon.”

The front-door bell rang.

“What did I tell you? No, don’t trouble to get up: I’ll
go.”

With whom on earth could he have made an appointment? And what sort of scene
was I about to assist at: dramatic or comic? For Lupin himself to consider it
worthy of interest, the situation must be somewhat exceptional.

He returned in a moment and stood back to make way for a young man, tall and
thin and very pale in the face.

Without a word and with a certain solemnity about his movements that made me
feel ill at ease. Lupin switched on all the electric lamps, one after the
other, till the room was flooded with light. Then the two men looked at each
other, exchanged profound and penetrating glances, as if, with all the effort
of their gleaming eyes, they were trying to pierce into each other’s
souls.

It was an impressive sight to see them thus, grave and silent. But who could
the newcomer be?

I was on the point of guessing the truth, through his resemblance to a
photograph which had recently appeared in the papers, when Lupin turned to me:

“My dear chap, let me introduce M. Isidore Beautrelet.” And,
addressing the young man, he continued, “I have to thank you, M.
Beautrelet, first, for being good enough, on receipt of a letter from me, to
postpone your revelations until after this interview and, secondly, for
granting me this interview with so good a grace.”

Beautrelet smiled:

“Allow me to remark that my good grace consists, above all, in obeying
your orders. The threat which you made to me in the letter in question was the
more peremptory in being aimed not at me, but at my father.”

“My word,” said Lupin laughing, “we must do the best we can
and make use of the means of action vouchsafed to us. I knew by experience that
your own safety was indifferent to you, seeing that you resisted the arguments
of Master Brédoux. There remained your father—your father for whom you
have a great affection—I played on that string.”

“And here I am,” said Beautrelet, approvingly.

I motioned them to be seated. They consented and Lupin resumed, in that tone of
imperceptible banter which is all his own:

“In any case, M. Beautrelet, if you will not accept my thanks, you will
at least not refuse my apologies.”

“Apologies! Bless my soul, what for?”

“For the brutality which Master Brédoux showed you.”

“I confess that the act surprised me. It was not Lupin’s usual way
of behaving. A stab—”

“I assure you I had no hand in it. Brédoux is a new recruit. My friends,
during the time that they had the management of our affairs, thought that it
might be useful to win over to our cause the clerk of the magistrate himself
who was conducting the inquiry.”

“Your friends were right.”

“Brédoux, who was specially attached to your person, was, in fact, most
valuable to us. But, with the ardor peculiar to any neophyte who wishes to
distinguish himself, he pushed his zeal too far and thwarted my plans by
permitting himself, on his own initiative, to strike you a blow.”

“Oh, it was a little accident!”

“Not at all, not at all! And I have reprimanded him severely! I am bound,
however, to say in his favor that he was taken unawares by the really
unexpected rapidity of your investigation. If you had only left us a few hours
longer, you would have escaped that unpardonable attempt.”

“And I should doubtless have enjoyed the enormous advantage of undergoing
the same fate as M. Ganimard and Mr. Holmlock Shears?”

“Exactly,” said Lupin, laughing heartily. “And I should not
have known the cruel terrors which your wound caused me. I have had an
atrocious time because of it, believe me, and, at this moment, your pallor
fills me with all the stings of remorse. Can you ever forgive me?”

“The proof of confidence which you have shown me in delivering yourself
unconditionally into my hands—it would have been so easy for me to bring
a few of Ganimard’s friends with me—that proof of confidence wipes
out everything.”

Was he speaking seriously? I confess frankly that I was greatly perplexed. The
struggle between the two men was beginning in a manner which I was simply
unable to understand. I had been present at the first meeting between Lupin and
Holmlock Shears, in the café near the Gare Montparnesse,[2] and I could not
help recalling the haughty carriage of the two combatants, the terrific clash
of their pride under the politeness of their manners, the hard blows which they
dealt each other, their feints, their arrogance.

[2] Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears, by Maurice Leblanc.

Here, it was quite different. Lupin, it is true, had not changed; he exhibited
the same tactics, the same crafty affability. But what a strange adversary he
had come upon! Was it even an adversary? Really, he had neither the tone of one
nor the appearance. Very calm, but with a real calmness, not one assumed to
cloak the passion of a man endeavoring to restrain himself; very polite, but
without exaggeration; smiling, but without chaff, he presented the most perfect
contrast to Arsène Lupin, a contrast so perfect even that, to my mind, Lupin
appeared as much perplexed as myself.

No, there was no doubt about it: in the presence of that frail stripling, with
cheeks smooth as a girl’s and candid and charming eyes, Lupin was losing
his ordinary self-assurance. Several times over, I observed traces of
embarrassment in him. He hesitated, did not attack frankly, wasted time in
mawkish and affected phrases.

It also looked as though he wanted something. He seemed to be seeking, waiting.
What for? Some aid?

There was a fresh ring of the bell. He himself ran and opened the door. He
returned with a letter:

“Will you allow me, gentlemen?” he asked.

He opened the letter. It contained a telegram. He read it—and became as
though transformed. His face lit up, his figure righted itself and I saw the
veins on his forehead swell. It was the athlete who once more stood before me,
the ruler, sure of himself, master of events and master of persons. He spread
the telegram on the table and, striking it with his fist, exclaimed:

“Now, M. Beautrelet, it’s you and I!”

Beautrelet adopted a listening attitude and Lupin began, in measured, but harsh
and masterful tones:

“Let us throw off the mask—what say you?—and have done with
hypocritical compliments. We are two enemies, who know exactly what to think of
each other; we act toward each other as enemies; and therefore we ought to
treat with each other as enemies.”

“To treat?” echoed Beautrelet, in a voice of surprise.

“Yes, to treat. I did not use that word at random and I repeat it, in
spite of the effort, the great effort, which it costs me. This is the first
time I have employed it to an adversary. But also, I may as well tell you at
once, it is the last. Make the most of it. I shall not leave this flat without
a promise from you. If I do, it means war.”

Beautrelet seemed more and more surprised. He said very prettily:

“I was not prepared for this—you speak so funnily! It’s so
different from what I expected! Yes, I thought you were not a bit like that!
Why this display of anger? Why use threats? Are we enemies because
circumstances bring us into opposition? Enemies? Why?”

Lupin appeared a little out of countenance, but he snarled and, leaning over
the boy:

“Listen to me, youngster,” he said. “It’s not a
question of picking one’s words. It’s a question of a fact, a
positive, indisputable fact; and that fact is this: in all the past ten years,
I have not yet knocked up against an adversary of your capacity. With Ganimard
and Holmlock Shears I played as if they were children. With you, I am obliged
to defend myself, I will say more, to retreat. Yes, at this moment, you and I
well know that I must look upon myself as worsted in the fight. Isidore
Beautrelet has got the better of Arsène Lupin. My plans are upset. What I tried
to leave in the dark you have brought into the full light of day. You annoy me,
you stand in my way. Well, I’ve had enough of it—Brédoux told you
so to no purpose. I now tell you so again; and I insist upon it, so that you
may take it to heart: I’ve had enough of it!”

Beautrelet nodded his head:

“Yes, but what do you want?”

“Peace! Each of us minding his own business, keeping to his own
side!”

“That is to say, you free to continue your burglaries undisturbed, I free
to return to my studies.”

“Your studies—anything you please—I don’t care. But you
must leave me in peace—I want peace.”

“How can I trouble it now?”

Lupin seized his hand violently:

“You know quite well! Don’t pretend not to know. You are at this
moment in possession of a secret to which I attach the highest importance. This
secret you were free to guess, but you have no right to give it to the
public.”

“Are you sure that I know it?”

“You know it, I am certain: day by day, hour by hour, I have followed
your train of thought and the progress of your investigations. At the very
moment when Brédoux struck you, you were about to tell all. Subsequently, you
delayed your revelations, out of solicitude for your father. But they are now
promised to this paper here. The article is written. It will be set up in an
hour. It will appear to-morrow.”

“Quite right.”

Lupin rose, and slashing the air with his hand,

“It shall not appear!” he cried.

“It shall appear!” said Beautrelet, starting up in his turn.

At last, the two men were standing up to each other. I received the impression
of a shock, as if they had seized each other round the body. Beautrelet seemed
to burn with a sudden energy. It was as though a spark had kindled within him a
group of new emotions: pluck, self-respect, the passion of fighting, the
intoxication of danger. As for Lupin, I read in the radiance of his glance the
joy of the duellist who at length encounters the sword of his hated rival.

“Is the article in the printer’s hands?”

“Not yet.”

“Have you it there—on you?”

“No fear! I shouldn’t have it by now, in that case!”

“Then—”

“One of the assistant editors has it, in a sealed envelope. If I am not
at the office by midnight, he will have set it up.”

“Oh, the scoundrel!” muttered Lupin. “He has provided for
everything!”

His anger was increasing, visibly and frightfully. Beautrelet chuckled, jeering
in his turn, carried away by his success.

“Stop that, you brat!” roared Lupin. “You’re forgetting
who I am—and that, if I wished—upon my word, he’s daring to
laugh!”

A great silence fell between them. Then Lupin stepped forward and, in muttered
tones, with his eyes on Beautrelet’s:

“You shall go straight to the Grand Journal.”

“No.”

“Tear up your article.”

“No.”

“See the editor.”

“No.”

“Tell him you made a mistake.”

“No.”

“And write him another article, in which you will give the official
version of the Ambrumésy mystery, the one which every one has accepted.”

“No.”

Lupin took up a steel ruler that lay on my desk and broke it in two without an
effort. His pallor was terrible to see. He wiped away the beads of perspiration
that stood on his forehead. He, who had never known his wishes resisted, was
being maddened by the obstinacy of this child. He pressed his two hands on
Beautrelet’s shoulder and, emphasizing every syllable, continued:

“You shall do as I tell you, Beautrelet. You shall say that your latest
discoveries have convinced you of my death, that there is not the least doubt
about it. You shall say so because I wish it, because it has to be believed
that I am dead. You shall say so, above all, because, if you do not say
so—”

“Because, if I do not say so—?”

“Your father will be kidnapped to-night, as Ganimard and Holmlock Shears
were.”

Beautrelet gave a smile.

“Don’t laugh—answer!”

“My answer is that I am very sorry to disappoint you, but I have promised
to speak and I shall speak.”

“Speak in the sense which I have told you.”

“I shall speak the truth,” cried Beautrelet, eagerly. “It is
something which you can’t understand, the pleasure, the need, rather, of
saying the thing that is and saying it aloud. The truth is here, in this brain
which has guessed it and discovered it; and it will come out, all naked and
quivering. The article, therefore, will be printed as I wrote it. The world
shall know that Lupin is alive and shall know the reason why he wished to be
considered dead. The world shall know all.” And he added, calmly,
“And my father shall not be kidnapped.”

Once again, they were both silent, with their eyes still fixed upon each other.
They watched each other. Their swords were engaged up to the hilt. And it was
like the heavy silence that goes before the mortal blow. Which of the two was
to strike it?

Lupin said, between his teeth:

“Failing my instructions to the contrary, two of my friends have orders
to enter your father’s room to-night, at three o’clock in the
morning, to seize him and carry him off to join Ganimard and Holmlock
Shears.”

A burst of shrill laughter interrupted him:

“Why, you highwayman, don’t you understand,” cried
Beautrelet, “that I have taken my precautions? So you think that I am
innocent enough, ass enough, to have sent my father home to his lonely little
house in the open country!” Oh, the gay, bantering laughter that lit up
the boy’s face! It was a new sort of laugh on his lips, a laugh that
showed the influence of Lupin himself. And the familiar form of address which
he adopted placed him at once on his adversary’s level. He continued:

“You see, Lupin, your great fault is to believe your schemes infallible.
You proclaim yourself beaten, do you? What humbug! You are convinced that you
will always win the day in the end—and you forget that others can have
their little schemes, too. Mine is a very simple one, my friend.”

It was delightful to hear him talk. He walked up and down, with his hands in
his pockets and with the easy swagger of a boy teasing a caged beast. Really,
at this moment, he was revenging, with the most terrible revenges, all the
victims of the great adventurer. And he concluded:

“Lupin, my father is not in Savoy. He is at the other end of France, in
the centre of a big town, guarded by twenty of our friends, who have orders not
to lose sight of him until our battle is over. Would you like details? He is at
Cherbourg, in the house of one of the keepers of the arsenal. And remember that
the arsenal is closed at night and that no one is allowed to enter it by day,
unless he carries an authorization and is accompanied by a guide.”

He stopped in front of Lupin and defied him, like a child making faces at his
playmate:

“What do you say to that, master?”

For some minutes, Lupin had stood motionless. Not a muscle of his face had
moved. What were his thoughts? Upon what action was he resolving? To any one
knowing the fierce violence of his pride the only possible solution was the
total, immediate, final collapse of his adversary. His fingers twitched. For a
second, I had a feeling that he was about to throw himself upon the boy and
wring his neck.

“What do you say to that, master?” Beautrelet repeated.

Lupin took up the telegram that lay on the table, held it out and said, very
calmly:

“Here, baby, read that.”

Beautrelet became serious, suddenly, impressed by the gentleness of the
movement. He unfolded the paper and, at once, raising his eyes, murmured:

“What does it mean? I don’t understand.”

“At any rate, you understand the first word,” said Lupin,
“the first word of the telegram—that is to say, the name of the
place from which it was sent—look—‘Cherbourg.’”

“Yes—yes,” stammered Beautrelet. “Yes—I
understand—‘Cherbourg’-and then?”

“And then?—I should think the rest is quite plain: ‘Removal
of luggage finished. Friends left with it and will wait instructions till eight
morning. All well.’ Is there anything there that seems obscure? The word
‘luggage’? Pooh, you wouldn’t have them write ‘M.
Beautrelet, senior’! What then? The way in which the operation was
performed? The miracle by which your father was taken out of Cherbourg Arsenal,
in spite of his twenty body-guards? Pooh, it’s as easy as A B C! And the
fact remains that the luggage has been dispatched. What do you say to that,
baby?”

With all his tense being, with all his exasperated energy, Isidore tried to
preserve a good countenance. But I saw his lips quiver, his jaw shrink, his
eyes vainly strive to fix upon a point. He lisped a few words, then was silent
and, suddenly, gave way and, with his hands before his face, burst into loud
sobs:

“Oh, father! Father!”

An unexpected result, which was certainly the collapse which Lupin’s
pride demanded, but also something more, something infinitely touching and
infinitely artless. Lupin gave a movement of annoyance and took up his hat, as
though this unaccustomed display of sentiment were too much for him. But, on
reaching the door, he stopped, hesitated and then returned, slowly, step by
step.

The soft sound of the sobs rose like the sad wailing of a little child overcome
with grief. The lad’s shoulders marked the heart-rending rhythm. Tears
appeared through the crossed fingers. Lupin leaned forward and, without
touching Beautrelet, said, in a voice that had not the least tone of
pleasantry, nor even of the offensive pity of the victor:

“Don’t cry, youngster. This is one of those blows which a man must
expect when he rushes headlong into the fray, as you did. The worst disasters
lie in wait for him. The destiny of fighters will have it so. We must suffer it
as bravely as we can.” Then, with a sort of gentleness, he continued,
“You were right, you see: we are not enemies. I have known it for long.
From the very first, I felt for you, for the intelligent creature that you are,
an involuntary sympathy—and admiration. And that is why I wanted to say
this to you—don’t be offended, whatever you do: I should be
extremely sorry to offend you—but I must say it: well, give up struggling
against me. I am not saying this out of vanity—nor because I despise
you—but, you see, the struggle is too unequal. You do not
know—nobody knows all the resources which I have at my command. Look
here, this secret of the Hollow Needle which you are trying so vainly to
unravel: suppose, for a moment, that it is a formidable, inexhaustible
treasure—or else an invisible, prodigious, fantastic refuge—or both
perhaps. Think of the superhuman power which I must derive from it! And you do
not know, either, all the resources which I have within myself—all that
my will and my imagination enable me to undertake and to undertake
successfully. Only think that my whole life—ever since I was born, I
might almost say—has tended toward the same aim, that I worked like a
convict before becoming what I am and to realize, in its perfection, the type
which I wished to create—which I have succeeded in creating. That being
so—what can you do? At that very moment when you think that victory lies
within your grasp, it will escape you—there will be something of which
you have not thought—a trifle—a grain of sand which I shall have
put in the right place, unknown to you. I entreat you, give up—I should
be obliged to hurt you; and the thought distresses me.” And, placing his
hand on the boy’s forehead, he repeated, “Once more, youngster,
give up. I should only hurt you. Who knows if the trap into which you will
inevitably fall has not already opened under your footsteps?”

Beautrelet uncovered his face. He was no longer crying. Had he heard
Lupin’s words? One might have doubted it, judging by his inattentive air.

For two or three minutes, he was silent. He seemed to weigh the decision which
he was about to take, to examine the reasons for and against, to count up the
favorable and unfavorable chances. At last, he said to Lupin:

“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 AMBRUMÉSY 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 Ambrumésy. In my
opinion, this sort of work and the judgments which it entails, deductions,
inductions, analyses 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, Arsène 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. Harassed and lost, he lets
himself go. The enemy arrives. It is Mlle. Raymonde de Saint-Véran.

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?

Nobody 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-Véran 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
Arsène 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 substitutes 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 assails 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-Véran), 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
Ambrumésy mystery is set forth. Arsène Lupin found, close at hand, in the
château itself, the assistance 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
Ambrumésy 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-Véran 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. Gratitude turns to love, admiration to passion. 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-Véran 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 Saturday the sixth of June,
assisted 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-Véran must pass 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-Véran will not be definite, unless
the sea gives up her corpse.

The sea shall give up the corpse of Mlle. de Saint-Véran.

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 Arsène 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-Véran has been found on the rocks at Dieppe—or rather a body which
is considered to be Mlle. de Saint-Véran’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 identity, 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 Arsène 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-Véran. 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 constitutes a threefold
danger. He removes it. He kidnaps Ganimard. He kidnaps Holmlock Shears. He has
me stabbed by Brédoux.

One point alone remains obscure. Why was Lupin so fiercely bent upon snatching
the document 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 Ambrumésy 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 Arsène 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 publishing 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, wishing 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.

SIR: I cannot pretend but that my modest personality, which
would certainly have passed unnoticed in more heroic times, has acquired a
certain prominence in the dull and feeble period in which we live. But there is
a limit beyond which the morbid curiosity of the crowd cannot go without
becoming indecently indiscreet. If the walls that surround our private lives be
not respected, what is to safeguard the rights of the citizen?

Will those who differ plead the higher interest of truth? An empty pretext in
so far as I am concerned, because the truth is known and I raise no difficulty
about making an official confession of the truth in writing. Yes, Mlle. de
Saint-Véran is alive. Yes, I love her. Yes, I have the mortification not to be
loved by her. Yes, the results of the boy Beautrelet’s inquiry are
wonderful in their precision and accuracy. Yes, we agree on every point. There
is no riddle left. There is no mystery. Well, then, what?

Injured to the very depths of my soul, bleeding still from cruel wounds, I ask
that my more intimate feelings and secret hopes may no longer be delivered to
the malevolence of the public. I ask for peace, the peace which I need to
conquer the affection of Mlle. de Saint-Véran and to wipe out from her memory
the thousand little injuries which she has had to suffer at the hands of her
uncle and cousin—this has not been told—because of her position as
a poor relation. Mlle. de Saint-Véran will forget this hateful past. All that
she can desire, were it the fairest jewel in the world, were it the most
unattainable treasure, I shall lay at her feet. She will be happy. She will
love me.

But, if I am to succeed, once more, I require peace. That is why I lay down my
arms and hold out the olive-branch to my enemies—while warning them, with
every magnanimity on my part, that a refusal on theirs might bring down upon
them the gravest consequences.

One word more on the subject of Mr. Harlington. This name conceals the identity
of an excellent fellow, who is secretary to Cooley, the American millionaire,
and instructed by him to lay hands upon every object of ancient art in Europe
which it is possible to discover. His evil star brought him into touch with my
friend Étienne de Vaudreix, alias Arsène Lupin, alias myself. He
learnt, in this way, that a certain M. de Gesvres was willing to part with four
pictures by Rubens, ostensibly on the condition that they were replaced by
copies and that the bargain to which he was consenting remained unknown. My
friend Vaudreix also undertook to persuade M. de Gesvres to sell his chapel.
The negotiations were conducted with entire good faith on the side of my friend
Vaudreix and with charming ingenuousness on the side of Mr. Harlington, until
the day when the Rubenses and the carvings from the chapel were in a safe place
and Mr. Harlington in prison. There remains nothing, therefore, to be done but
to release the unfortunate American, because he was content to play the modest
part of a dupe; to brand the millionaire Cooley, because, for fear of possible
unpleasantness, he did not protest against his secretary’s arrest; and to
congratulate my friend Étienne de Vaudreix, because he is revenging the
outraged morality of the public by keeping the hundred thousand francs which he
was paid on account by that singularly unattractive person, Cooley.

Pray, pardon the length of this letter and permit me to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

ARSÈNE LUPIN.

Isidore weighed the words of this communication as minutely, perhaps, as he had
studied the document concerning the Hollow Needle. He went on the principle,
the correctness of which was easily proved, that Lupin had never taken the
trouble to send one of his amusing letters to the press without absolute
necessity, without some motive which events were sure, sooner or later, to
bring to light.

What was the motive for this particular letter? For what hidden reason was
Lupin confessing his love and the failure of that love? Was it there that
Beautrelet had to seek, or in the explanations regarding Mr. Harlington, or
further still, between the lines, behind all those words whose apparent meaning
had perhaps no other object than to suggest some wicked, perfidious, misleading
little idea?

For hours, the young man, confined to his compartment, remained pensive and
anxious. The letter filled him with mistrust, as though it had been written for
his benefit and were destined to lead him, personally, into error. For the
first time and because he found himself confronted not with a direct attack,
but with an ambiguous, indefinable method of fighting, he underwent a distinct
sensation of fear. And, when he thought of his good old, easy-going father,
kidnapped through his fault, he asked himself, with a pang, whether he was not
mad to continue so unequal a contest. Was the result not certain? Had Lupin not
won the game in advance?

It was but a short moment of weakness. When he alighted from his compartment,
at six o’clock in the morning, refreshed by a few hours’ sleep, he
had recovered all his confidence.

On the platform, Froberval, the dockyard clerk who had given hospitality to M.
Beautrelet, senior, was waiting for him, accompanied by his daughter Charlotte,
an imp of twelve or thirteen.

“Well?” cried Isidore.

The worthy man beginning to moan and groan, he interrupted him, dragged him to
a neighboring tavern, ordered coffee and began to put plain questions, without
permitting the other the slightest digression:

“My father has not been carried off, has he? It was impossible.”

“Impossible. Still, he has disappeared.”

“Since when?”

“We don’t know.”

“What!”

“No. Yesterday morning, at six o’clock, as I had not seen him come
down as usual, I opened his door. He was gone.”

“But was he there on the day before, two days ago?”

“Yes. On the day before yesterday, he did not leave his room. He was a
little tired; and Charlotte took his lunch up to him at twelve and his dinner
at seven in the evening.”

“So it was between seven o’clock in the evening, on the day before
yesterday, and six o’clock on yesterday morning that he
disappeared?”

“Yes, during the night before last. Only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, it’s like this: you can’t leave the arsenal at
night.”

“Do you mean that he has not left it?”

“That’s impossible! My friends and I have searched the whole naval
harbor.”

“Then he has left it!”

“Impossible, every outlet is guarded!”

Beautrelet reflected and then said:

“What next?”

“Next, I hurried to the commandant’s and informed the officer in
charge.”

“Did he come to your house?”

“Yes; and a gentleman from the public prosecutor’s also. They
searched all through the morning; and, when I saw that they were making no
progress and that there was no hope left, I telegraphed to you.”

“Was the bed disarranged in his room?”

“No.”

“Nor the room disturbed in any way?”

“No. I found his pipe in its usual place, with his tobacco and the book
which he was reading. There was even this little photograph of yourself in the
middle of the book, marking the page.”

“Let me see it.”

Froberval passed him the photograph. Beautrelet gave a start of surprise. He
had recognized himself in the snapshot, standing, with his two hands in his
pockets, on a lawn from which rose trees and ruins.

Froberval added:

“It must be the last portrait of yourself which you sent him. Look, on
the back, you will see the date, 3 April, the name of the photographer, R. de
Val, and the name of the town, Lion—Lion-sur-Mer, perhaps.”

Isidore turned the photograph over and read this little note, in his own
handwriting:

“R. de Val.—3.4—Lion.”

He was silent for a few minutes and resumed:

“My father hadn’t shown you that snapshot yet?”

“No—and that’s just what astonished me when I saw it
yesterday—for your father used so often to talk to us about you.”

There was a fresh pause, greatly prolonged. Froberval muttered:

“I have business at the workshop. We might as well go in—”

He was silent. Isidore had not taken his eyes from the photograph, was
examining it from every point of view. At last, the boy asked:

“Is there such a thing as an inn called the Lion d’Or at a short
league outside the town?”

“Yes, about a league from here.”

“On the Route de Valognes, is it?”

“Yes, on the Route de Valognes.”

“Well, I have every reason to believe that this inn was the head-quarters
of Lupin’s friends. It was from there that they entered into
communication with my father.”

“What an idea! Your father spoke to nobody. He saw nobody.”

“He saw nobody, but they made use of an intermediary.”

“What proof have you?”

“This photograph.”

“But it’s your photograph!”

“It’s my photograph, but it was not sent by me. I was not even
aware of its existence. It was taken, without my knowledge, in the ruins of
Ambrumésy, doubtless by the examining-magistrate’s clerk, who, as you
know, was an accomplice of Arsène Lupin’s.”

“And then?”

“Then this photograph became the passport, the talisman, by means of
which they obtained my father’s confidence.”

“But who? Who was able to get into my house?”

“I don’t know, but my father fell into the trap. They told him and
he believed that I was in the neighborhood, that I was asking to see him and
that I was giving him an appointment at the Golden Lion.”

“But all this is nonsense! How can you assert—?”

“Very simply. They imitated my writing on the back of the photograph and
specified the meeting-place: Valognes Road, 3 kilometres 400, Lion Inn. My
father came and they seized him, that’s all.”

“Very well,” muttered Froberval, dumbfounded, “very well. I
admit it—things happened as you say—but that does not explain how
he was able to leave during the night.”

“He left in broad daylight, though he waited until dark to go to the
meeting-place.”

“But, confound it, he didn’t leave his room the whole of the day
before yesterday!”

“There is one way of making sure: run down to the dockyard, Froberval,
and look for one of the men who were on guard in the afternoon, two days
ago.—Only, be quick, if you wish to find me here.”

“Are you going?”

“Yes, I shall take the next train back.”

“What!—Why, you don’t know—your inquiry—”

“My inquiry is finished. I know pretty well all that I wanted to know. I
shall have left Cherbourg in an hour.”

Froberval rose to go. He looked at Beautrelet with an air of absolute
bewilderment, hesitated a moment and then took his cap:

“Are you coming, Charlotte?”

“No,” said Beautrelet, “I shall want a few more particulars.
Leave her with me. Besides, I want to talk to her. I knew her when she was
quite small.”

Froberval went away. Beautrelet and the little girl remained alone in the
tavern smoking room. A few minutes passed, a waiter entered, cleared away some
cups and left the room again. The eyes of the young man and the child met; and
Beautrelet placed his hand very gently on the little girl’s hand. She
looked at him for two or three seconds, distractedly, as though about to choke.
Then, suddenly hiding her head between her folded arms, she burst into sobs.

He let her cry and, after a while, said:

“It was you, wasn’t it, who did all the mischief, who acted as
go-between? It was you who took him the photograph? You admit it, don’t
you? And, when you said that my father was in his room, two days ago, you knew
that it was not true, did you not, because you yourself had helped him to leave
it—?”

She made no reply. He asked:

“Why did you do it? They offered you money, I suppose—to buy
ribbons with a frock—?”

He uncrossed Charlotte’s arms and lifted up her head. He saw a poor
little face all streaked with tears, the attractive, disquieting, mobile face
of one of those little girls who seem marked out for temptation and weakness.

“Come,” said Beautrelet, “it’s over, we’ll say no
more about it. I will not even ask you how it happened. Only you must tell me
everything that can be of use to me.—Did you catch anything—any
remark made by those men? How did they carry him off?”

She replied at once:

“By motor car. I heard them talking about it—”

“And what road did they take?”

“Ah, I don’t know that!”

“Didn’t they say anything before you—something that might
help us?”

“No—wait, though: there was one who said, ‘We shall have no
time to lose—the governor is to telephone to us at eight o’clock in
the morning—’”

“Where to?”

“I can’t say.—I’ve forgotten—”

“Try—try and remember. It was the name of a town, wasn’t
it?”

“Yes—a name—like Château—”

“Châteaubriant?—Château-Thierry?—”

“No-no—”

“Châteauroux?”

“Yes, that was it—Châteauroux—”

Beautrelet did not wait for her to complete her sentence. Already he was on his
feet and, without giving a thought to Froberval, without even troubling about
the child, who stood gazing at him in stupefaction, he opened the door and ran
to the station:

“Châteauroux, madame—a ticket for Châteauroux—”

“Over Mans and Tours?” asked the booking-clerk.

“Of course—the shortest way. Shall I be there for lunch?”

“Oh, no!”

“For dinner? Bedtime—?”

“Oh, no! For that, you would have to go over Paris. The Paris express
leaves at nine o’clock. You’re too late—”

It was not too late. Beautrelet was just able to catch the train.

“Well,” said Beautrelet, rubbing his hands, “I have spent
only two hours or so at Cherbourg, but they were well employed.”

He did not for a moment think of accusing Charlotte of lying. Weak, unstable,
capable of the worst treacheries, those petty natures also obey impulses of
sincerity; and Beautrelet had read in her affrighted eyes her shame for the
harm which she had done and her delight at repairing it in part. He had no
doubt, therefore, that Châteauroux was the other town to which Lupin had
referred and where his confederates were to telephone to him.

On his arrival in Paris, Beautrelet took every necessary precaution to avoid
being followed. He felt that it was a serious moment. He was on the right road
that was leading him to his father: one act of imprudence might ruin all.

He went to the flat of one of his schoolfellows and came out, an hour later,
irrecognizable, rigged out as an Englishman of thirty, in a brown check suit,
with knickerbockers, woolen stockings and a cap, a high-colored complexion and
a red wig. He jumped on a bicycle laden with a complete painter’s outfit
and rode off to the Gare d’Austerlitz.

He slept that night at Issoudun. The next morning, he mounted his machine at
break of day. At seven o’clock, he walked into the Châteauroux
post-office and asked to be put on to Paris. As he had to wait, he entered into
conversation with the clerk and learnt that, two days before, at the same hour,
a man dressed for motoring had also asked for Paris.

The proof was established. He waited no longer.

By the afternoon, he had ascertained, from undeniable evidence, that a
limousine car, following the Tours road, had passed through the village of
Buzancais and the town of Châteauroux and had stopped beyond the town, on the
verge of the forest. At ten o’clock, a hired gig, driven by a man
unknown, had stopped beside the car and then gone off south, through the valley
of the Bouzanne. There was then another person seated beside the driver. As for
the car, it had turned in the opposite direction and gone north, toward
Issoudun.

Beautrelet easily discovered the owner of the gig, who, however, had no
information to supply. He had hired out his horse and trap to a man who brought
them back himself next day.

Lastly, that same evening, Isidore found out that the motor car had only passed
through Issoudun, continuing its road toward Orleans, that is to say, toward
Paris.

From all this, it resulted, in the most absolute fashion, that M. Beautrelet
was somewhere in the neighborhood. If not, how was it conceivable that people
should travel nearly three hundred miles across France in order to telephone
from Châteauroux and next to return, at an acute angle, by the Paris road?

This immense circuit had a more definite object: to move M. Beautrelet to the
place assigned to him.

“And this place is within reach of my hand,” said Isidore to
himself, quivering with hope and expectation. “My father is waiting for
me to rescue him at ten or fifteen leagues from here. He is close by. He is
breathing the same air as I.”

He set to work at once. Taking a war-office map, he divided it into small
squares, which he visited one after the other, entering the farmhouses making
the peasants talk, calling on the schoolmasters, the mayors, the parish
priests, chatting to the women. It seemed to him that he must attain his end
without delay and his dreams grew until it was no longer his father alone whom
he hoped to deliver, but all those whom Lupin was holding captive: Raymonde de
Saint-Véran, Ganimard, Holmlock Shears, perhaps, and others, many others; and,
in reaching them, he would, at the same time, reach Lupin’s stronghold,
his lair, the impenetrable retreat where he was piling up the treasures of
which he had robbed the wide world.

But, after a fortnight’s useless searching, his enthusiasm ended by
slackening and he very soon lost confidence. Because success was slow in
appearing, from one day to the next, almost, he ceased to believe in it; and,
though he continued to pursue his plan of investigations, he would have felt a
real surprise if his efforts had led to the smallest discovery.

More days still passed by, monotonous days of discouragement. He read in the
newspapers that the Comte de Gesvres and his daughter had left Ambrumésy and
gone to stay near Nice. He also learnt that Harlington had been released, that
gentleman’s innocence having become self-obvious, in accordance with the
indications supplied by Arsène Lupin.

Isidore changed his head-quarters, established himself for two days at the
Châtre, for two days at Argenton. The result was the same.

Just then, he was nearly throwing up the game. Evidently, the gig in which his
father had been carried off could only have furnished a stage, which had been
followed by another stage, furnished by some other conveyance. And his father
was far away.

He was thinking of leaving, when, one Monday morning, he saw, on the envelope
of an unstamped letter, sent on to him from Paris, a handwriting that set him
trembling with emotion. So great was his excitement that, for some minutes, he
dared not open the letter, for fear of a disappointment. His hand shook. Was it
possible? Was this not a trap laid for him by his infernal enemy?

He tore open the envelope. It was indeed a letter from his father, written by
his father himself. The handwriting presented all the peculiarities, all the
oddities of the hand which he knew so well.

He read:

Will these lines ever reach you, my dear son? I dare not believe it.

During the whole night of my abduction, we traveled by motor car; then, in the
morning, by carriage. I could see nothing. My eyes were bandaged. The castle in
which I am confined should be somewhere in the midlands, to judge by its
construction and the vegetation in the park. The room which I occupy is on the
second floor: it is a room with two windows, one of which is almost blocked by
a screen of climbing glycines. In the afternoon, I am allowed to walk about the
park, at certain hours, but I am kept under unrelaxing observation.

I am writing this letter, on the mere chance of its reaching you, and fastening
it to a stone. Perhaps, one day, I shall be able to throw it over the wall and
some peasant will pick it up.

But do not be distressed about me. I am treated with every consideration.

Your old father, who is very fond of you and very sad to think of the trouble
he is giving you,

BEAUTRELET.

Isidore at once looked at the postmarks. They read, “Cuzion,
Indre.”

The Indre! The department which he had been stubbornly searching for weeks!

He consulted a little pocket-guide which he always carried. Cuzion, in the
canton of Éguzon—he had been there too.

For prudence’s sake, he discarded his personality as an Englishman, which
was becoming too well known in the district, disguised himself as a workman and
made for Cuzion. It was an unimportant village. He would easily discover the
sender of the letter.

For that matter, chance served him without delay:

“A letter posted on Wednesday last?” exclaimed the mayor, a
respectable tradesman in whom he confided and who placed himself at his
disposal. “Listen, I think I can give you a valuable clue: on Saturday
morning, Gaffer Charel, an old knife-grinder who visits all the fairs in the
department, met me at the end of the village and asked, ‘Monsieur le
maire, does a letter without a stamp on it go all the same?’ ‘Of
course,’ said I. ‘And does it get there?’ ‘Certainly.
Only there’s double postage to pay on it, that’s all the
difference.’”

“And where does he live?”

“He lives over there, all alone—on the slope—the hovel that
comes next after the churchyard.—Shall I go with you?”

It was a hovel standing by itself, in the middle of an orchard surrounded by
tall trees. As they entered the orchard, three magpies flew away with a great
splutter and they saw that the birds were flying out of the very hole in which
the watch-dog was fastened. And the dog neither barked nor stirred as they
approached.

Beautrelet went up in great surprise. The brute was lying on its side, with
stiff paws, dead.

They ran quickly to the cottage. The door stood open. They entered. At the back
of a low, damp room, on a wretched straw mattress, flung on the floor itself,
lay a man fully dressed.

“Gaffer Charel!” cried the mayor. “Is he dead, too?”

The old man’s hands were cold, his face terribly pale, but his heart was
still beating, with a faint, slow throb, and he seemed not to be wounded in any
way.

They tried to resuscitate him and, as they failed in their efforts, Beautrelet
went to fetch a doctor. The doctor succeeded no better than they had done. The
old man did not seem to be suffering. He looked as if he were just asleep, but
with an artificial slumber, as though he had been put to sleep by hypnotism or
with the aid of a narcotic.

In the middle of the night that followed, however, Isidore, who was watching by
his side, observed that the breathing became stronger and that his whole being
appeared to be throwing off the invisible bonds that paralyzed it.

At daybreak, he woke up and resumed his normal functions: ate, drank and moved
about. But, the whole day long, he was unable to reply to the young man’s
questions and his brain seemed as though still numbed by an inexplicable
torpor.

The next day, he asked Beautrelet:

“What are you doing here, eh?”

It was the first time that he had shown surprise at the presence of a stranger
beside him.

Gradually, in this way, he recovered all his faculties. He talked. He made
plans. But, when Beautrelet asked him about the events immediately preceding
his sleep, he seemed not to understand.

And Beautrelet felt that he really did not understand. He had lost the
recollection of all that had happened since the Friday before. It was like a
sudden gap in the ordinary flow of his life. He described his morning and
afternoon on the Friday, the purchases he had made at the fair, the meals he
had taken at the inn. Then—nothing—nothing more. He believed
himself to be waking on the morrow of that day.

It was horrible for Beautrelet. The truth lay there, in those eyes which had
seen the walls of the park behind which his father was waiting for him, in
those hands which had picked up the letter, in that muddled brain which had
recorded the whereabouts of that scene, the setting, the little corner of the
world in which the play had been enacted. And from those hands, from that brain
he was unable to extract the faintest echo of the truth so near at hand!

Oh, that impalpable and formidable obstacle, against which all his efforts
hurled themselves in vain, that obstacle built up of silence and oblivion! How
clearly it bore the mark of Arsène Lupin! He alone, informed, no doubt, that M.
Beautrelet had attempted to give a signal, he alone could have struck with
partial death the one man whose evidence could injure him. It was not that
Beautrelet felt himself to be discovered or thought that Lupin, hearing of his
stealthy attack and knowing that a letter had reached him, was defending
himself against him personally. But what an amount of foresight and real
intelligence it displayed to suppress any possible accusation on the part of
that chance wayfarer! Nobody now knew that within the walls of a park there lay
a prisoner asking for help.

Nobody? Yes, Beautrelet. Gaffer Charel was unable to speak. Very well. But, at
least, one could find out which fair the old man had visited and which was the
logical road that he had taken to return by. And, along this road, perhaps it
would at last be possible to find—

Isidore, as it was, had been careful not to visit Gaffer Charel’s hovel
except with the greatest precautions and in such a way as not to give an alarm.
He now decided not to go back to it. He made inquiries and learnt that Friday
was market-day at Fresselines, a fair-sized town situated a few leagues off,
which could be reached either by the rather winding highroad or by a series of
short cuts.

On the Friday, he chose the road and saw nothing that attracted his attention,
no high walled enclosure, no semblance of an old castle.

He lunched at an inn at Fresselines and was on the point of leaving when he saw
Gaffer Charel arrive and cross the square, wheeling his little knife-grinding
barrow before him. He at once followed him at a good distance.

The old man made two interminable waits, during which he ground dozens of
knives. Then, at last, he went away by a quite different road, which ran in the
direction of Crozant and the market-town of Éguzon.

Beautrelet followed him along this road. But he had not walked five minutes
before he received the impression that he was not alone in shadowing the old
fellow. A man was walking along between them, stopping at the same time as
Charel and starting off again when he did, without, for that matter, taking any
great precautions against being seen.

“He is being watched,” thought Beautrelet. “Perhaps they want
to know if he stops in front of the walls—”

His heart beat violently. The event was at hand.

The three of them, one behind the other, climbed up and down the steep slopes
of the country and arrived at Crozant, famed for the colossal ruins of its
castle. There Charel made a halt of an hour’s duration. Next he went down
to the riverside and crossed the bridge.

But then a thing happened that took Beautrelet by surprise. The other man did
not cross the river. He watched the old fellow move away and, when he had lost
sight of him, turned down a path that took him right across the fields.

Beautrelet hesitated for a few seconds as to what course to take, and then
quietly decided. He set off in pursuit of the man.

“He has made sure,” he thought, “that Gaffer Charel has gone
straight ahead. That is all he wanted to know and so he is going—where?
To the castle?”

He was within touch of the goal. He felt it by a sort of agonizing gladness
that uplifted his whole being.

The man plunged into a dark wood overhanging the river and then appeared once
more in the full light, where the path met the horizon.

When Beautrelet, in his turn, emerged from the wood, he was greatly surprised
no longer to see the man. He was seeking him with his eyes when, suddenly, he
gave a stifled cry and, with a backward spring, made for the line of trees
which he had just left. On his right, he had seen a rampart of high walls,
flanked, at regular distances, by massive buttresses.

It was there! It was there! Those walls held his father captive! He had found
the secret place where Lupin confined his victim.

He dared not quit the shelter which the thick foliage of the wood afforded him.
Slowly, almost on all fours, he bore to the right and in this way reached the
top of a hillock that rose to the level of the neighboring trees. The walls
were taller still. Nevertheless, he perceived the roof of the castle which they
surrounded, an old Louis XIII. roof, surmounted by very slender bell-turrets
arranged corbel-wise around a higher steeple which ran to a point.

Beautrelet did no more that day. He felt the need to reflect and to prepare his
plan of attack without leaving anything to chance. He held Lupin safe; and it
was for Beautrelet now to select the hour and the manner of the combat.

He walked away.

Near the bridge, he met two country-girls carrying pails of milk. He asked:

“What is the name of the castle over there, behind the trees?”

“That’s the Château de l’Aiguille, sir.”

He had put his question without attaching any importance to it. The answer took
away his breath:

“The Château de l’Aiguille?—Oh!—But in what department
are we? The Indre?”

“Certainly not. The Indre is on the other side of the river. This side,
it’s the Creuse.”

Isidore saw it all in a flash. The Château de l’Aiguille! The department
of the Creuse! L’Aiguille Creuse! The Hollow Needle! The very key
to the document! Certain, decisive, absolute victory!

Without another word, he turned his back on the two girls and went his way,
tottering like a drunken man.

CHAPTER SIX

AN HISTORIC SECRET

Beautrelet’s resolve was soon taken: he would act alone. To inform the
police was too dangerous. Apart from the fact that he could only offer
presumptions, he dreaded the slowness of the police, their inevitable
indiscretions, the whole preliminary inquiry, during which Lupin, who was sure
to be warned, would have time to effect a retreat in good order.

At eight o’clock the next morning, with his bundle under his arm, he left
the inn in which he was staying near Cuzion, made for the nearest thicket, took
off his workman’s clothes, became once more the young English painter
that he had been and went to call on the notary at Éguzon, the largest place in
the immediate neighborhood.

He said that he liked the country and that he was thinking of taking up his
residence there, with his relations, if he could find a suitable house.

The notary mentioned a number of properties. Beautrelet took note of them and
let fall that some one had spoken to him of the Château de l’Aiguille, on
the bank of the Creuse.

“Oh, yes, but the Château de l’Aiguille, which has belonged to one
of my clients for the last five years, is not for sale.”

“He lives in it, then?”

“He used to live in it, or rather his mother did. But she did not care
for it; found the castle rather gloomy. So they left it last year.”

“And is no one living there at present?”

“Yes, an Italian, to whom my client let it for the summer season: Baron
Anfredi.”

“Oh, Baron Anfredi! A man still young, rather grave and
solemn-looking—?”

“I’m sure I can’t say.—My client dealt with him direct.
There was no regular agreement, just a letter—”

“But you know the baron?”

“No, he never leaves the castle.—Sometimes, in his motor, at night,
so they say. The marketing is done by an old cook, who talks to nobody. They
are queer people—”

“Do you think your client would consent to sell his castle?”

“I don’t think so. It’s an historic castle, built in the
purest Louis XIII. style. My client was very fond of it; and, unless he has
changed his mind—”

“Can you give me his name and address?”

“Louis Valméras, 34, Rue du Mont-Thabor.”

Beautrelet took the train for Paris at the nearest station. On the next day but
one, after three fruitless calls, he at last found Louis Valméras at home. He
was a man of about thirty, with a frank and pleasing face. Beautrelet saw no
need to beat about the bush, stated who he was and described his efforts and
the object of the step which he was now taking:

“I have good reason to believe,” he concluded, “that my
father is imprisoned in the Château de l’Aiguille, doubtless in the
company of other victims. And I have come to ask you what you know of your
tenant, Baron Anfredi.”

“Not much. I met Baron Anfredi last winter at Monte Carlo. He had heard
by accident that I was the owner of the Château de l’Aiguille and, as he
wished to spend the summer in France, he made me an offer for it.”

“He is still a young man—”

“Yes, with very expressive eyes, fair hair—”

“And a beard?”

“Yes, ending in two points, which fall over a collar fastened at the
back, like a clergyman’s. In fact, he looks a little like an English
parson.”

“It’s he,” murmured Beautrelet, “it’s he, as I
have seen him: it’s his exact description.”

“What! Do you think—?”

“I think, I am sure that your tenant is none other than Arsène
Lupin.”

The story amused Louis Valméras. He knew all the adventures of Arsène Lupin and
the varying fortunes of his struggle with Beautrelet. He rubbed his hands:

“Ha, the Château de l’Aiguille will become famous!—I’m
sure I don’t mind, for, as a matter of fact, now that my mother no longer
lives in it, I have always thought that I would get rid of it at the first
opportunity. After this, I shall soon find a purchaser. Only—”

“Only what?”

“I will ask you to act with the most extreme prudence and not to inform
the police until you are quite sure. Can you picture the situation, supposing
my tenant were not Arsène Lupin?”

Beautrelet set forth his plan. He would go alone at night; he would climb the
walls; he would sleep in the park— Louis Valméras stopped him at once:

“You will not climb walls of that height so easily. If you do, you will
be received by two huge sheep-dogs which belonged to my mother and which I left
behind at the castle.”

“Pooh! A dose of poison—”

“Much obliged. But suppose you escaped them. What then? How would you get
into the castle? The doors are massive, the windows barred. And, even then,
once you were inside, who would guide you? There are eighty rooms.”

“Yes, but that room with two windows, on the second story—”

“I know it, we call it the glycine room. But how will you find it? There
are three staircases and a labyrinth of passages. I can give you the clue and
explain the way to you, but you would get lost just the same.”

“Come with me,” said Beautrelet, laughing.

“I can’t. I have promised to go to my mother in the South.”

Beautrelet returned to the friend with whom he was staying and began to make
his preparations. But, late in the day, as he was getting ready to go, he
received a visit from Valméras.

“Do you still want me?”

“Rather!”

“Well, I’m coming with you. Yes, the expedition fascinates me. I
think it will be very amusing and I like being mixed up in this sort of
thing.—Besides, my help will be of use to you. Look, here’s
something to start with.”

He held up a big key, all covered with rust and looking very old.

“What does the key open?” asked Beautrelet.

“A little postern hidden between two buttresses and left unused since
centuries ago. I did not even think of pointing it out to my tenant. It opens
straight on the country, just at the verge of the wood.”

Beautrelet interrupted him quickly:

“They know all about that outlet. It was obviously by this way that the
man whom I followed entered the park. Come, it’s fine game and we shall
win it. But, by Jupiter, we must play our cards carefully!”

Two days later, a half-famished horse dragged a gipsy caravan into Crozant. Its
driver obtained leave to stable it at the end of the village, in an old
deserted cart-shed. In addition to the driver, who was none other than
Valméras, there were three young men, who occupied themselves in the
manufacture of wicker-work chairs: Beautrelet and two of his Janson friends.

They stayed there for three days, waiting for a propitious, moonless night and
roaming singly round the outskirts of the park. Once Beautrelet saw the
postern. Contrived between two buttresses placed very close together, it was
almost merged, behind the screen of brambles that concealed it, in the pattern
formed by the stones of the wall.

At last, on the fourth evening, the sky was covered with heavy black clouds and
Valméras decided that they should go reconnoitring, at the risk of having to
return again, should circumstances prove unfavorable.

All four crossed the little wood. Then Beautrelet crept through the heather,
scratched his hands at the bramble-hedge and, half raising himself, slowly,
with restrained movements, put the key into the lock. He turned it gently.
Would the door open without an effort? Was there no bolt closing it on the
other side? He pushed: the door opened, without a creak or jolt. He was in the
park.

“Are you there, Beautrelet?” asked Valméras. “Wait for me.
You two chaps, watch the door and keep our line of retreat open. At the least
alarm, whistle.”

He took Beautrelet’s hand and they plunged into the dense shadow of the
thickets. A clearer space was revealed to them when they reached the edge of
the central lawn. At the same moment a ray of moonlight pierced the clouds; and
they saw the castle, with its pointed turrets arranged around the tapering
spire to which, no doubt, it owed its name. There was no light in the windows;
not a sound.

Valméras grasped his companion’s arm:

“Keep still!”

“What is it?”

“The dogs, over there—look—”

There was a growl. Valméras gave a low whistle. Two white forms leapt forward
and, in four bounds, came and crouched at their master’s feet.

“Gently—lie down—that’s it—good dogs—stay
there.”

And he said to Beautrelet:

“And now let us push on. I feel more comfortable.”

“Are you sure of the way?”

“Yes. We are near the terrace.”

“And then?”

“I remember that, on the left, at a place where the river terrace rises
to the level of the ground-floor windows, there is a shutter which closes badly
and which can be opened from the outside.”

They found, when they came to it, that the shutter yielded to pressure.
Valméras removed a pane with a diamond which he carried. He turned the
window-latch. First one and then the other stepped over the balcony. They were
now in the castle, at the end of a passage which divided the left wing into
two.

“This room,” said Valméras, “opens at the end of a passage.
Then comes an immense hall, lined with statues, and at the end of the hall a
staircase which ends near the room occupied by your father.”

He took a step forward.

“Are you coming, Beautrelet?”

“Yes, yes.”

“But no, you’re not coming—What’s the matter with
you?”

He seized him by the hand. It was icy cold and he perceived that the young man
was cowering on the floor.

“What’s the matter with you?” he repeated.

“Nothing—it’ll pass off—”

“But what is it?”

“I’m afraid—”

“You’re afraid?”

“Yes,” Beautrelet confessed, frankly, “it’s my nerves
giving way—I generally manage to control them—but, to-day, the
silence—the excitement—And then, since I was stabbed by that
magistrate’s clerk—But it will pass off—There, it’s
passing now—”

He succeeded in rising to his feet and Valméras dragged him out of the room.
They groped their way along the passage, so softly that neither could hear a
sound made by the other.

A faint glimmer, however, seemed to light the hall for which they were making.
Valméras put his head round the corner. It was a night-light placed at the foot
of the stairs, on a little table which showed through the frail branches of a
palm tree.

“Halt!” whispered Valméras.

Near the night-light, a man stood sentry, carrying a gun.

Had he seen them? Perhaps. At least, something must have alarmed him, for he
brought the gun to his shoulder.

Beautrelet had fallen on his knees, against a tub containing a plant, and he
remained quite still, with his heart thumping against his chest.

Meanwhile, the silence and the absence of all movement reassured the man. He
lowered his weapon. But his head was still turned in the direction of the tub.

Terrible minutes passed: ten minutes, fifteen. A moonbeam had glided through a
window on the staircase. And, suddenly, Beautrelet became aware that the
moonbeam was shifting imperceptibly, and that, before fifteen, before ten more
minutes had elapsed, it would be shining full in his face.

Great drops of perspiration fell from his forehead on his trembling hands. His
anguish was such that he was on the point of getting up and running
away—But, remembering that Valméras was there, he sought him with his
eyes and was astounded to see him, or rather to imagine him, creeping in the
dark, under cover of the statues and plants. He was already at the foot of the
stairs, within a few steps of the man.

What was he going to do? To pass in spite of all? To go upstairs alone and
release the prisoner? But could he pass?

Beautrelet no longer saw him and he had an impression that something was about
to take place, something that seemed foreboded also by the silence, which hung
heavier, more awful than before.

And, suddenly, a shadow springing upon the man, the night-light extinguished,
the sound of a struggle—Beautrelet ran up. The two bodies had rolled over
on the flagstones. He tried to stoop and see. But he heard a hoarse moan, a
sigh; and one of the adversaries rose to his feet and seized him by the arm:

“Quick!—Come along!”

It was Valméras.

They went up two storys and came out at the entrance to a corridor, covered by
a hanging.

“To the right,” whispered Valméras. “The fourth room on the
left.”

They soon found the door of the room. As they expected, the captive was locked
in. It took them half an hour, half an hour of stifled efforts, of muffled
attempts, to force open the lock. The door yielded at last.

Beautrelet groped his way to the bed. His father was asleep.

He woke him gently:

“It’s I—Isidore—and a friend—don’t be
afraid—get up—not a word.”

The father dressed himself, but, as they were leaving the room, he whispered:

“I am not alone in the castle—”

“Ah? Who else? Ganimard? Shears?”

“No—at least, I have not seen them.”

“Who then?”

“A young girl.”

“Mlle. de Saint-Véran, no doubt.”

“I don’t know—I saw her several times at a distance, in the
park—and, when I lean out of my window, I can see hers. She has made
signals to me.”

“Do you know which is her room?”

“Yes, in this passage, the third on the right.”

“The blue room,” murmured Valméras. “It has folding doors:
they won’t give us so much trouble.”

One of the two leaves very soon gave way. Old Beautrelet undertook to tell the
girl.

Ten minutes later, he left the room with her and said to his son:

“You were right—Mlle. de Saint-Véran—;”

They all four went down the stairs. When they reached the bottom, Valméras
stopped and bent over the man. Then, leading them to the terrace-room:

“He is not dead,” he said. “He will live.”

“Ah!” said Beautrelet, with a sigh of relief.

“No, fortunately, the blade of my knife bent: the blow is not fatal.
Besides, in any case, those rascals deserve no pity.”

Outside, they were met by the dogs, which accompanied them to the postern.
Here, Beautrelet found his two friends and the little band left the park. It
was three o’clock in the morning.

This first victory was not enough to satisfy Beautrelet. As soon as he had
comfortably settled his father and Mlle. de Saint-Véran, he asked them about
the people who lived at the castle, and, particularly, about the habits of
Arsène Lupin. He thus learnt that Lupin came only every three or four days,
arriving at night in his motor car and leaving again in the morning. At each of
his visits, he called separately upon his two prisoners, both of whom agreed in
praising his courtesy and his extreme civility. For the moment, he was not at
the castle.

Apart from him, they had seen no one except an old woman, who ruled over the
kitchen and the house, and two men, who kept watch over them by turns and never
spoke to them: subordinates, obviously, to judge by their manners and
appearance.

“Two accomplices, for all that,” said Beautrelet, in conclusion,
“or rather three, with the old woman. It is a bag worth having. And, if
we lose no time—”

He jumped on his bicycle, rode to Éguzon, woke up the gendarmerie, set them all
going, made them sound the boot and saddle and returned to Crozant at eight
o’clock, accompanied by the sergeant and eight gendarmes. Two of the men
were posted beside the gipsy-van. Two others took up their positions outside
the postern-door. The last four, commanded by their chief and accompanied by
Beautrelet and Valméras, marched to the main entrance of the castle.

Too late. The door was wide open. A peasant told them that he had seen a motor
car drive out of the castle an hour before.

Indeed, the search led to no result. In all probability, the gang had installed
themselves there picnic fashion. A few clothes were found, a little linen, some
household implements; and that was all.

What astonished Beautrelet and Valméras more was the disappearance of the
wounded man. They could not see the faintest trace of a struggle, not even a
drop of blood on the flagstones of the hall.

All said, there was no material evidence to prove the fleeting presence of
Lupin at the Château de l’Aiguille; and the authorities would have been
entitled to challenge the statements of Beautrelet and his father, of Valméras
and Mlle. de Saint-Véran, had they not ended by discovering, in a room next to
that occupied by the young girl, some half-dozen exquisite bouquets with Arsène
Lupin’s card pinned to them, bouquets scorned by her, faded and
forgotten—One of them, in addition to the card, contained a letter which
Raymonde had not seen. That afternoon, when opened by the examining magistrate,
it was found to contain page upon page of prayers, entreaties, promises,
threats, despair, all the madness of a love that has encountered nothing but
contempt and repulsion.

And the letter ended:

I shall come on Tuesday evening, Raymonde. Reflect between now and then. As for
me, I will wait no longer. I am resolved on all.

Tuesday evening was the evening of the very day on which Beautrelet had
released Mlle. de Saint-Véran from her captivity.

The reader will remember the extraordinary explosion of surprise and enthusiasm
that resounded throughout the world at the news of that unexpected issue: Mlle.
de Saint-Véran free! The pretty girl whom Lupin coveted, to secure whom he had
contrived his most Machiavellian schemes, snatched from his claws! Free also
Beautrelet’s father, whom Lupin had chosen as a hostage in his
extravagant longing for the armistice demanded by the needs of his passion!
They were both free, the two prisoners! And the secret of the Hollow Needle was
known, published, flung to the four corners of the world!

The crowd amused itself with a will. Ballads were sold and sung about the
defeated adventurer: Lupin’s Little Love-Affairs!—Arsène’s
Piteous Sobs!—The Lovesick Burglar! The Pickpocket’s
Lament!—They were cried on the boulevards and hummed in the
artists’ studios.

Raymonde, pressed with questions and pursued by interviewers, replied with the
most extreme reserve. But there was no denying the letter, or the bouquets of
flowers, or any part of the pitiful story! Then and there, Lupin, scoffed and
jeered at, toppled from his pedestal.

And Beautrelet became the popular idol. He had foretold everything, thrown
light on everything. The evidence which Mlle. de Saint-Véran gave before the
examining magistrate confirmed, down to the smallest detail, the hypothesis
imagined by Isidore. Reality seemed to submit, in every point, to what he had
decreed beforehand. Lupin had found his master.—

Beautrelet insisted that his father, before returning to his mountains in
Savoy, should take a few months’ rest in the sunshine, and himself
escorted him and Mlle. de Saint-Véran to the outskirts of Nice, where the Comte
de Gesvres and his daughter Suzanne were already settled for the winter. Two
days later, Valméras brought his mother to see his new friends and they thus
composed a little colony grouped around the Villa de Gesvres and watched over
day and night by half a dozen men engaged by the comte.

Early in October, Beautrelet, once more the sixth-form pupil, returned to Paris
to resume the interrupted course of his studies and to prepare for his
examinations. And life began again, calmer, this time, and free from incident.
What could happen, for that matter. Was the war not over?

Lupin, on his side, must have felt this very clearly, must have felt that there
was nothing left for him but to resign himself to the accomplished fact; for,
one fine day, his two other victims, Ganimard and Holmlock Shears, made their
reappearance. Their return to the life of this planet, however, was devoid of
any sort of glamor or fascination. An itinerant rag-man picked them up on the
Quai des Orfèvres, opposite the headquarters of police. Both of them were
gagged, bound and fast asleep.

After a week of complete bewilderment, they succeeded in recovering the control
of their thought and told—or rather Ganimard told, for Shears wrapped
himself in a fierce and stubborn silence—how they had made a voyage of
circumnavigation round the coast of Africa on board the yacht
Hirondelle, a voyage combining amusement with instruction, during which
they could look upon themselves as free, save for a few hours which they spent
at the bottom of the hold, while the crew went on shore at outlandish ports.

As for their landing on the Quai des Orfèvres, they remembered nothing about it
and had probably been asleep for many days before.

This liberation of the prisoners was the final confession of defeat. By ceasing
to fight, Lupin admitted it without reserve.

One incident, moreover, made it still more glaring, which was the engagement of
Louis Valméras and Mlle. de Saint-Véran. In the intimacy created between them
by the new conditions under which they lived, the two young people fell in love
with each other. Valméras loved Raymonde’s melancholy charm; and she,
wounded by life, greedy for protection, yielded before the strength and energy
of the man who had contributed so gallantly to her preservation.

The wedding day was awaited with a certain amount of anxiety. Would Lupin not
try to resume the offensive? Would he accept with a good grace the
irretrievable loss of the woman he loved? Twice or three times,
suspicious-looking people were seen prowling round the villa; and Valméras even
had to defend himself one evening against a so-called drunken man, who fired a
pistol at him and sent a bullet through his hat. But, in the end, the ceremony
was performed at the appointed hour and day and Raymonde de Saint-Véran became
Mme. Louis Valméras.

It was as though Fate herself had taken sides with Beautrelet and countersigned
the news of victory. This was so apparent to the crowd that his admirers now
conceived the notion of entertaining him at a banquet to celebrate his triumph
and Lupin’s overthrow. It was a great idea and aroused general
enthusiasm. Three hundred tickets were sold in less than a fortnight.
Invitations were issued to the public schools of Paris, to send two sixth-form
pupils apiece. The press sang pæans. The banquet was what it could not fail to
be, an apotheosis.

But it was a charming and simple apotheosis, because Beautrelet was its hero.
His presence was enough to bring things back to their due proportion. He showed
himself modest, as usual, a little surprised at the excessive cheering, a
little embarrassed by the extravagant panegyrics in which he was pronounced
greater than the most illustrious detectives—a little embarrassed, but
also not a little touched.

He said as much in a few words that pleased all his hearers and with the
shyness of a child that blushes when you look at it. He spoke of his delight,
of his pride. And really, reasonable and self-controlled as he was, this was
for him a moment of never-to-be-forgotten exultation. He smiled to his friends,
to his fellow-Jansonians, to Valméras, who had come specially to give him a
cheer, to M. de Gesvres, to his father.

When he had finished speaking; and while he still held his glass in his hand, a
sound of voices came from the other end of the room and some one was
gesticulating and waving a newspaper. Silence was restored and the importunate
person sat down again: but a thrill of curiosity ran round the table, the
newspaper was passed from hand to hand and, each time that one of the guests
cast his eyes upon the page at which it was opened, exclamations followed: