“You quite understand?” she asked. “You are going to open this envelope. It contains the secret of the diamonds—a fortune.”
Once more she stopped abruptly, as if struck by a sudden thought, something she had unexpectedly observed.
Webster said to her:
“He certainly understands. When he opens the letter and reads it, the whole of the past will come back to his memory. We may give it to him.”
George Errington supported him.
“Yes, mademoiselle, we may give it to him. It’s a secret which belongs to him.”
Dorothy however did not perform the action she had suggested. She looked at the old man with the most earnest attention. Then she took the lamp, moved it away, then near, examined the mutilated hand, and then suddenly burst into a fit of wild laughter; it burst out with all the violence of laughter long restrained.
Bent double, holding her ribs, she laughed till it hurt her. Her pretty head shook her wavy hair in a series of jerks. And it was a laugh so fresh and so young, of such irresistible gayety that the young men burst out laughing in their turn. Maître Delarue, on the other hand, irritated by a hilarity which seemed to him out of place in the circumstances protested in a tone of annoyance:
“Really, I’m amazed. … There’s nothing to laugh at in all this. … We are in the presence of a really extraordinary occurrence. …”
His shocked air redoubled Dorothy’s merriment. She stammered:
“Yes—extraordinary—a miracle! Goodness, how funny it is! And what a pleasure it is to let one’s self go! I had been holding myself in quite long enough. Yes, I was manifestly serious … uneasy. … But all the same I did want to laugh! … It is all so funny!”
The notary muttered:
“I don’t see anything funny in it. … The Marquis—”
Dorothy’s delight passed all bounds. She repeated, wringing her hands, with tears in her eyes:
“The Marquis! … The friend of Fontenelle! The revivified Marquis! Lazarus de Beaugreval! Then you didn’t see?”
“I saw the film on the mirror … the eyes open.”
“Yes, yes: I know. But the rest?”
“What rest?”
“In his mouth?”
“What on earth is it?”
“There’s a. …”
“A what? Out with it!”
“A false tooth!”
Maître Delarue repeated slowly:
“There’s a false tooth?”
“Yes, a molar … a molar all of gold!”
“Well, what about it?”
Dorothy did not immediately reply. She gave Maître Delarue plenty of time to collect his wits and to grasp the full value of this discovery.
He said again in a less assured tone:
“Well?”
“Well, there you are?” she said, very much out of breath. “I ask myself, with positive anguish: did they make gold teeth in the days of Louis XIV and Louis XV? … Because, you see, if the Marquis was unable to get his gold tooth before he died, he must have had his dentist come here—to this tower—while he was dead. That is to say, he must have learnt from the newspapers, or from some other source, that he could have a false tooth put in the place of the one which used to ache in the days of Louis XIV.”
Dorothy had finally succeeded in repressing the ill-timed mirth which had so terribly shocked Maître Delarue. She was merely smiling—but smiling with an extremely mischievous and delighted air. Naturally the four strangers, grouped closely round her, were also smiling with the air of people amused beyond words.
On his bed, the man, always impassive and stupid, continued his breathing exercises. The notary drew his companions out of the alcove, into the outer room so that they formed a group with their backs to the bed, and said in a low voice:
“Then, according to you, mademoiselle, this is a mystification?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said, tossing her head with a humorous air.
“But the Marquis?”
“The Marquis has nothing to do with the matter,” she said. “The adventure of the Marquis came to an end on the 12th of July, 1721, when he swallowed a drug which put an end to his brilliant existence for good and all. All that remains of the Marquis, in spite of his hopes of a resurrection, is: firstly, a pinch of ashes mingled with the dust of this room; secondly, the authentic and curious letter which Maître Delarue read to us; thirdly, a lot of enormous diamonds hidden somewhere or other; fourthly, the clothes he was wearing at the supreme hour when he voluntarily shut himself up in his tomb, that is to say in this room.”
“And those clothes?”
“Our man is dressed in them—unless he bought others, since the old ones must have been in a very bad state.”
“But how could he get here? This window is too narrow; besides it’s inaccessible. Then how? …”
“Doubtless the same way we did.”
“Impossible! Think of all the obstacles, the difficulties, the wall of briers which barred the road.”
“Are we sure that this wall was not already pierced in some other place, that the plaster partition had not been broken down and reconstructed, that the door of this room had not been opened before we came?”
“But it would have been necessary for this man to know the secret combinations of the Marquis, the mechanical device of the two stones and so on.”
“Why not? Perhaps the Marquis left a copy of his letter … or a draft of it. But no. … Of course! … Better than that! We know the truth from the Marquis de Beaugreval himself. … He foresaw it, since he alludes to an always possible defection of his old servant, Geoffrey, and takes into account the possibility of the good fellow’s writing a description of what had taken place. This description the good fellow did write, and along different lines it has come down to our time.”
“It’s a simple supposition.”
“It’s a supposition more than probable, Maître Delarue, since besides us, besides these four young men and myself, there are other families in which the history, or a part of the history of Beaugreval, has been handed down; and as a consequence for some months I’ve been fighting for the possession of the indispensable gold medal stolen from my father.”
Her words made
