“I will give you a bit of good news; that is, that you are innocent of the Langrune affair when you were Charles Rambert, and innocent also of the Danidoff affair, when you were Mademoiselle Jeanne. I need not say anything about the scrap last night, in which you played a still more distinguished part.”
“Why tell me that?” asked Charles Rambert nervously. “Of course I know I did not rob Princess Sonia Danidoff; but how did you recognise me last night, and how did you find out that I was Mademoiselle Jeanne?”
Juve smiled, and shook back a lock of hair that was falling over his eyes.
“Listen, my boy: do you suppose that thundering blow you dealt the excellent Henri Verbier when he was making love to Mademoiselle Jeanne, could fail to make me determined to find out who that young lady was who had the strength of a man?”
The allusion made Charles Rambert most uneasy.
“But that does not explain how you recognised me in Paul tonight. I recognised you in Henri Verbier at the hotel, but I had no idea that it was you last night.”
“That’s nothing,” said Juve with a shake of the head. “And you may understand once for all that when I have once looked anybody square in the face, he needs to be an uncommonly clever fellow to escape me afterwards by means of any disguise. You don’t know how to make up, but I do; and that’s why I took you in and you did not take me in.”
“What makes you believe I did not rob Princess Sonia Danidoff?” Charles Rambert asked after a pause. “I am quite aware that everything points to my having been the thief.”
“Not quite everything,” Juve answered gently. “There are one or two things you don’t know, and I’ll tell you one of them. The Princess was robbed by the same man who robbed Mme. Van den Rosen, wasn’t she? Well, Mme. Van den Rosen was the victim of a burglary: some of the furniture in her room was broken into, and the tests I made this morning with the dynamometer proved to me that you are not strong enough to have caused those fractures.”
“Not strong enough?” Charles Rambert ejaculated.
“No. I told you at the time that your innocence would be proved if you were strong enough, but I said that to prevent you from playing tricks and not putting out all your strength. As a matter of fact it was your comparative weakness that saved you. The dynamometer tests and the figures I obtained just now prove absolutely that you are innocent of the Van den Rosen robbery and, consequently, of the robbery from Sonia Danidoff.”
Again the lad reflected for a minute or two.
“But you didn’t know who I was when you came to the hotel, did you? And therefore had no suspicion that I was Charles Rambert? That’s true, isn’t it? How did you find out? I was supposed to be dead.”
“That was a child’s job,” Juve replied. “I got the anthropometric records of the body that had been buried as yours, and I planned to get symmetrical photographs of you in your character of Mademoiselle Jeanne, as I did of you today at headquarters. My first job was to lay hands upon Mademoiselle Jeanne, and I very soon found her, as I expected, turned into a man again, and living in the most disreputable company. I made any number of enquiries, and when I went to the Saint-Anthony’s Pig last evening I knew that it was some unknown person who had been buried in your stead; that Paul was Mademoiselle Jeanne; and that Mademoiselle Jeanne was Charles Rambert. It was my intention to arrest you, and to ascertain definitely by means of the dynamometer that you were innocent of the Langrune and the Danidoff crimes.”
“What you tell me about the dynamometer explains how you know I am not the man who committed the robbery at the hotel, but what clears me in your eyes of the Langrune murder?”
“Bless my soul!” Juve retorted, “you are arguing as if you wanted to prove you were guilty. Well, my boy, it’s the same story as the other. The man who murdered the Marquise de Langrune smashed things, and the dynamometer has proved that you are not strong enough to have been the man.”
“And suppose I had been mad at the time,” Charles Rambert said, his hesitation and his tone betraying his anxiety about the answer, “could I have been strong enough then? Might I have committed these crimes without knowing anything about it?”
But Juve shook his head.
“I know: you are referring to your mother, and are haunted by an idea that through some hereditary taint you might be a somnambulist and have done these things in your sleep. Come, Charles Rambert, finish your breakfast and put all that out of your head. To begin with, you would not have been strong enough, even then; and in the next place there is nothing at present to show that you are mad, nor even that your poor mother—But I need not go on: I’ve got some rather odd notions on that subject.”
“Then, M. Juve—”
“Drop the ‘monsieur’; call me ‘Juve.’ ”
“Then, if you know that I am innocent, you can go and tell my father? I have nothing to fear? I can reappear in my own name?”
Juve looked at the lad with an ironical smile.
“How you go ahead!” he exclaimed. “Please understand that although
