Memoirs of Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc [librera reader txt] 📗

“I will obey.”

“May you be accursed, if you do not,” said Beaumagnan.

His voice was growing fainter broken by harsh gasps between which the words came more and more indistinct. Bent down, with his ear a little above his mouth, Ralph just caught them.

“You’ll pursue her, Ralph.⁠ ⁠… You must tear the jewels from her.⁠ ⁠… She’s a devil.⁠ ⁠… Listen.⁠ ⁠… I have discovered.⁠ ⁠… At Havre.⁠ ⁠… She has a vessel.⁠ ⁠… The Glowworm.⁠ ⁠… Listen.”

He was at the very end of his strength. Nevertheless Ralph yet heard:

“Go.⁠ ⁠… At once.⁠ ⁠… Hunt her down.⁠ ⁠… This very day.”

His eyes closed, the death rattle began.

Godfrey d’Etigues still went on beating his breast, on his knees at the bottom of the hole.

Ralph left them.

That evening one of the Paris papers published in its final issue the following paragraph:

M. Beaumagnan, a barrister well known in militant royalist circles, whose death in Spain had already been reported by mistake, committed suicide this morning at a village in Normandy of the name of Mesnil-sous-Jumièges, on the banks of the Seine. The reasons for this suicide are absolutely mysterious. Two of his friends, Baron d’Etigues and M. Oscar de Bennetot, who were with him, declare that they were spending the night at the château de Tancarville, where they were staying for some days, when Monsieur Beaumagnan awoke them. He was wounded and in a state of great agitation. He insisted on their harnessing a horse to a dogcart and driving at once to Jumièges and from there to a meadow near Mesnil-sous-Jumièges. Why? Why this nocturnal expedition to a lonely meadow? Why this suicide? Questions to which they can give no answer.

The next day the Havre papers published accounts of an incident which are summed up fairly well in the following article:

Last night Prince Lavosneff, who had come to Havre to try a yacht which he had recently purchased, witnessed a terrible drama. He was returning to the French coast when he saw a column of flame about a mile and a half away and heard a loud explosion⁠—an explosion, by the way, which was heard at several places along the coast. The Prince at once steered his yacht towards the spot at which this sinister incident had taken place, and there he found fragments of a wreck. On one of them was a sailor whom they succeeded in rescuing. But they had hardly the time to learn from him that the wrecked vessel was called the Glowworm and belonged to the Countess of Cagliostro, when all at once he sprang overboard again crying: “There she is! There she is!”

By the light of the ship’s lanterns they perceived another fragment of the wreck, to which a woman was clinging, with her head just above the water. The man succeeded in swimming to her and getting hold of her. But she clung to him so tightly that she prevented him using his arms, and the two of them sank. All efforts to find them were vain.

On his return to Havre Prince Lavosneff made a deposition to this effect, which was also signed by four of his crew.

The paper added:

Later information leads us to believe that the Countess of Cagliostro was an adventuress well known under the name of Pellegrini and sometimes also under the name of Balsamo. Wanted by the police, who had two or three times just missed capturing her in localities in the Caux country, where she had recently been operating, she must have decided to go abroad, and in this way perished with her confederates in the wreck of her yacht, the Glowworm. We must also mention, with all proper reservations, that there is a rumor to the effect that there is a close connection between certain adventures of the Countess of Cagliostro and the mysterious drama at Mesnil-sous-Jumièges. There is a story going about of treasure unearthed and stolen, of plots and documents of great antiquity. But at this point we enter the domain of fable. We will stop therefore and leave it to justice to throw light on the affair.

On the afternoon of the day on which this article appeared, that is to say exactly sixty hours after the drama at Mesnil-sous-Jumièges, Ralph entered the study of the Baron Godfrey at Haie d’Etigues, the study into which he had made his way one night four months before. How many roads had he traversed since that night and how many years older had he grown than the stripling he then was!

At a small table the two cousins were drinking, at a considerable pace, a bottle of brandy.

Without beating about the bush, Ralph said: “I have come to claim the hand of Mademoiselle d’Etigues.”

He was hardly wearing the correct costume in which to ask a lady’s hand in marriage. He was hatless and dressed in an old fisherman’s jersey and trousers much too short for him which revealed his bare feet in grass shoes without any laces.

But Ralph’s costume and his errand were of very little interest to Godfrey d’Etigues. Hollow-eyed, with the face of one of the damned, he held out towards Ralph a bundle of newspapers and groaned:

“Have you seen them? The Countess?”

“Yes, I know all that,” said Ralph.

He detested the man; and he could not refrain from adding: “All the better for you. What? The definite death of Josephine Balsamo must have lifted a heavy burden from your mind.”

“But the sequel⁠—the consequences!” stammered the Baron.

“What consequences?” said Ralph.

“The law. It’s sure to try to get at the bottom of this business. People are already saying that Josephine Balsamo was mixed up with the suicide of Beaumagnan. If the police get hold of all the threads of the affair they will go further⁠—to the very end of it.”

“Yes,” said Ralph in a jeering tone, “to the Widow Rousselin and the murder of Jaubert. That’s to say to you and cousin de Bennetot.”

The two men shuddered. Ralph set their minds at rest.

“You can drink at your ease, both of you,” he said.