“Yes … yes … but the way in which the countess was saved?”
Lupin burst out laughing:
“My dear old chap”—Lupin sometimes condescends to address me in this affectionate manner—“my dear old chap, you may be rather smart at relating my exploits, but, by Jove, you do want to have the i’s dotted for you! I assure you, the countess did not ask for explanations!”
“Very likely. But there’s no pride about me,” I added, laughing. “Dot those i’s for me, will you?”
He took out a five-franc piece and closed his hand over it.
“What’s in my hand?”
“A five-franc piece.”
He opened his hand. The five-franc piece was gone.
“You see how easy it is! A working jeweller, with his nippers, cuts a ring with a date engraved upon it: 23rd of October. It’s a simple little trick of sleight-of-hand, one of many which I have in my bag. By Jove, I didn’t spend six months with Dickson, the conjurer,3 for nothing!”
“But then … ?”
“Out with it!”
“The working jeweller?”
“Was Horace Velmont! Was good old Lupin! Leaving the countess at three o’clock in the morning, I employed the few remaining minutes before the husband’s return to have a look round his study. On the table I found the letter from the working jeweller. The letter gave me the address. A bribe of a few louis enabled me to take the workman’s place; and I arrived with a wedding-ring ready cut and engraved. Hocus-pocus! Pass! … The count couldn’t make head or tail of it.”
“Splendid!” I cried. And I added, a little chaffingly, in my turn, “But don’t you think that you were humbugged a bit yourself, on this occasion?”
“Oh! And by whom, pray?”
“By the countess?”
“In what way?”
“Hang it all, that name engraved as a talisman! … The mysterious Adonis who loved her and suffered for her sake! … All that story seems very unlikely; and I wonder whether, Lupin though you be, you did not just drop upon a pretty love-story, absolutely genuine and … none too innocent.”
Lupin looked at me out of the corner of his eye:
“No,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“If the countess made a misstatement in telling me that she knew that man before her marriage—and that he was dead—and if she really did love him in her secret heart, I, at least, have a positive proof that it was an ideal love and that he did not suspect it.”
“And where is the proof?”
“It is inscribed inside the ring which I myself broke on the countess’s finger … and which I carry on me. Here it is. You can read the name she had engraved on it.”
He handed me the ring. I read:
“Horace Velmont.”
There was a moment of silence between Lupin and myself; and, noticing it, I also observed on his face a certain emotion, a tinge of melancholy.
I resumed:
“What made you tell me this story … to which you have often alluded in my presence?”
“What made me … ?”
He drew my attention to a woman, still exceedingly handsome, who was passing on a young man’s arm. She saw Lupin and bowed.
“It’s she,” he whispered. “She and her son.”
“Then she recognized you?”
“She always recognizes me, whatever my disguise.”
“But since the burglary at the Château de Thibermesnil,4 the police have identified the two names of Arsène Lupin and Horace Velmont.”
“Yes.”
“Therefore she knows who you are.”
“Yes.”
“And she bows to you?” I exclaimed, in spite of myself.
He caught me by the arm and, fiercely:
“Do you think that I am Lupin to her? Do you think that I am a burglar in her eyes, a rogue, a cheat? … Why, I might be the lowest of miscreants, I might be a murderer even … and still she would bow to me!”
“Why? Because she loved you once?”
“Rot! That would be an additional reason, on the contrary, why she should now despise me.”
“What then?”
“I am the man who gave her back her son!”
III
The Sign of the Shadow
“I received your telegram and here I am,” said a gentleman with a grey moustache, who entered my study, dressed in a dark-brown frock-coat and a wide-brimmed hat, with a red ribbon in his buttonhole. “What’s the matter?”
Had I not been expecting Arsène Lupin, I should certainly never have recognized him in the person of this old half-pay officer:
“What’s the matter?” I echoed. “Oh, nothing much: a rather curious coincidence, that’s all. And, as I know that you would just as soon clear up a mystery as plan one. …”
“Well?”
“You seem in a great hurry!”
“I am … unless the mystery in question is worth putting myself out for. So let us get to the point.”
“Very well. Just begin by casting your eye on this little picture, which I picked up, a week or two ago, in a grimy old shop on the other side of the river. I bought it for the sake of its Empire frame, with the palm-leaf ornaments on the mouldings … for the painting is execrable.”
“Execrable, as you say,” said Lupin, after he had examined it, “but the subject itself is rather nice. That corner of an old courtyard, with its rotunda of Greek columns, its sundial and its fishpond and that ruined well with the Renaissance roof and those stone steps and stone benches: all very picturesque.”
“And genuine,” I added. “The picture, good or bad, has never been taken out of its Empire frame. Besides, it is dated. … There, in the left-hand bottom corner: those red figures, 15. 4. 2, which obviously stand for 15 April, 1802.”
“I dare say … I dare say. … But you were speaking of a coincidence and, so far, I fail to see. …”
I went to a corner of my study, took a telescope, fixed it on its stand and pointed it, through the open window, at the open window of a little room facing my flat, on the other side of the street. And I asked
