Thereupon she introduced Raoul Davernoie, Count Octave and his wife. They exchanged vigorous handshakes.
“Excellent,” she said. “We are united as I desired, and we have thousands and thousands of things to talk about. I’ve seen d’Estreicher again, Raoul; and as I predicted he has been hanged. Also I met your grandfather and Juliet Assire a long way from here. But perhaps we are getting along a bit too quickly. First of all there is a most urgent duty to fulfill with regard to our three cousins who are bitter enemies of the dry regime.”
She opened the cupboard and found a bottle of port and some biscuits, and as she poured out the wine, she set about relating her expedition to Roche-Périac. She told the story quickly and a trifle incoherently, omitting details and getting them in the wrong order, but for the most part giving them a comic turn which greatly amused the Count and Countess de Chagny.
“Then,” said the Countess when she came to the end of her story, “the diamonds are lost?”
“That,” she replied, “is the business of my three cousins. Ask them.”
During the young girl’s explanations, they had all three stood rather apart, listening to Dorothy, pleasant to their hosts, but wearing an absentminded air, as if they were absorbed in their own thoughts; and those thoughts the Countess must be thinking too, as well as the Count, for there was one matter which filled the minds of all of them and made them ill at ease, till it should be cleared up.
It was Errington who took the matter up, before the Countess had asked the question; and he said to the young girl:
“Cousin Dorothy, we don’t understand. … No, we’re quite in the dark; and I think you won’t think us indiscreet if we speak quite openly.”
“Speak away, Errington.”
“Ah, well, it’s this—that three hundred thousand francs—”
“Where did they come from?” said Dorothy ending his sentence for him. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
She bent towards the Englishman’s ear and whispered:
“All my savings … earned by the sweat of my brow.”
“I beg you. …”
“Doesn’t that explanation satisfy you? Then I’ll be frank.”
She bent towards his other ear, and in a lower whisper still:
“I stole them.”
“Oh, don’t joke about it, cousin.”
“But goodness, George Errington, if I did not steal them, what do you suppose I did do?”
He said slowly:
“My friends and I are asking ourselves if you didn’t find them.”
“Where?”
“In the ruins of Périac!”
She clapped her hands.
“Bravo! They’ve guessed it. You’re right, George Errington, of London: I found them at the foot of a tree, under a heap of dead leaves and stones. That’s where the Marquis de Beaugreval hid his banknotes and six percents.”
The other two cousins stepped forward. Marco Dario, who looked very worried, said gravely: “Be serious, cousin Dorothy, we beg you, and don’t laugh at us. Are we to consider the diamonds lost or found? It’s a matter of great importance to some of us—I admit that it is to me. I had given up hopes of them. But now all at once you let us imagine an unexpected miracle. Is there one?”
She said:
“But why this supposition?”
“Firstly because of this unexpected money which we might attribute to the sale of one of the diamonds. And then … and then. … I must say it, because it seems to us, taking it all round, quite impossible that you should have given up the search for that treasure. What? You, Dorothy, after months of conflicts and victories, at the moment you reach your goal, you suddenly decide to stand by with your arms folded! Not a single effort! Not one investigation! No, no, on your part it’s incredible.”
She looked from one to the other mischievously.
“So that according to you, cousins, I must have performed the double miracle of finding the diamonds without searching for them.”
“There’s nothing you couldn’t do,” said Webster gayly.
The Countess supported them:
“Nothing, Dorothy. And I see from your air that you’ve succeeded in this too.”
She did not say no. She smiled quietly. They were all round her, curious or anxious. The Countess murmured:
“You have succeeded. Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
She had succeeded! The insoluble problem, with which so many minds had wrestled so many times and at such length, for ages—she had solved it!
“But when? At what moment?” cried George Errington. “You never left us!”
“Oh, it goes a long way further back than that. It goes back to my visit to the Château de Roborey.”
“Eh, what? What’s that you say?” cried the astounded Count de Chagny.
“From the first minute I knew at any rate the nature of the hiding-place in which the treasure was shut up.”
“But how?”
“From the motto.”
“From the motto?”
“But it’s so plain! So plain that I’ve never understood the blindness of those who have searched for the treasure, and that I went so far as to declare the man who, when concealing a treasure, gave so much information about it, ingenuous in the extreme. But he was right, was the Marquis de Beaugreval. He could engrave it all over the place, on the clock of his château, on the wax of his seals, since to his descendants his motto meant nothing at all.”
“If you knew, why didn’t you act at once?” said the Countess.
“I knew the nature of the hiding-place, but not the spot on which it stood. This information was supplied by the gold medal. Three hours after my arrival at the ruins I knew all about it.”
Marco Dario repeated several times.
“In robore fortuna. … In robore fortuna. …”
And the others also pronounced the three words, as if they were a cabalistic formula, the mere utterance of which is sufficient to produce marvelous results.
“Dario,” she said, “you know Latin? And you, Errington? And you, Webster?”
“Well enough,” said Dario, “to make out the sense of those three words—there’s nothing tricky about them. Fortuna means the fortune. …”
“In this case the diamonds,” said
