The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ® - Морис Леблан

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      It was the same!

      “To be away from Martin’s influence, my dear Ewart, the good jeweller Dumont had arranged for Mademoiselle to go into the convent. The father had, no doubt, discovered his daughter’s secret love affair. Martin knew this, and with the connivance of Pierrette and Madame had decamped with the gems from the Charing Cross Hotel, in order to feather his nest.”

      “And the missing Dumont?”

      “Dumont, when he realised his enormous loss, saw that if he complained to the police it would get into the papers, and his creditors—who had lately been very pressing—would lose confidence in the stability of the business in the Rue de la Paix. So he resolved to disappear, get away to Norway, and, if possible, follow Martin and regain possession of the jewels. In this he very nearly succeeded, but fortunately for us, Martin was no fool.”

      “How?”

      “Why, he took the jewels to Nice with him when he went to meet Pierrette, and, having acquaintance with Regnier through his friend Raoul, gave them over to ‘The President’ to sell for him, well knowing that Regnier had, like we ourselves, a secret market for such things. I’ve proved, by the way, that this fellow Martin has had one or two previous dealings with Regnier while in various situations in Paris.”

      “Well?” I asked, astounded at all this. “That’s the reason they warned me against her. What else?”

      “What else?” he asked. “You may well ask what else? Well, I acted boldly.”

      “How do you mean?”

      “I simply told the dainty Mademoiselle, Raoul, Martin, and the rest of them, of my intention—to explain to the police the whole queer story. I knew quite well that Regnier had the jewels intact in a bag in his room at the Hermitage, and rather feared lest he might pitch the whole lot into the sea, and so get rid of them. That there were grave suspicions against him regarding the mysterious death of a banker at Aix six months before—you recollect the case—I knew quite well, and I was equally certain that he dare not risk any police inquiries. I had a tremendously difficult fight for it, I can assure you; but I stood quite firm, and notwithstanding their threats and vows of vengeance—Mademoiselle was, by the way, more full of venomous vituperation than them all—I won.”

      “You won?” I echoed. “In what manner?”

      “I compelled Regnier to disgorge the booty in exchange for my silence.”

      “You got the jewels!” I gasped.

      “Certainly. What do you think we are here for—on our way to Amsterdam—if not on business?” he answered, with a smile.

      “But where are they? I haven’t seen them when our luggage has been overhauled at the frontiers,” I said.

      “Stop the car, and get down.”

      I did so. He went along the road till he found a long piece of stick. Then, unscrewing the cap of the petrol-tank, he stuck in the stick and moved it about.

      “Feel anything?” he asked, giving me the stick.

      I felt, and surely enough in the bottom of the tank was a quantity of small loose stones! I could hear them rattle as I stirred them up.

      “The settings were no use, and would tell tales, so I flung them away,” he explained; “and I put the stones in there while you were in Nice, the night before we left. Come, let’s get on again;” and he re-screwed the cap over one of the finest hauls of jewels ever made in modern criminal history.

      “Well—I’m hanged!” I cried, utterly dumbfounded. “But what of Mademoiselle’s father?”

      Bindo merely raised his shoulders and laughed. “Mademoiselle may be left to tell him the truth—if she thinks it desirable,” he said. “Martin has already cleared out—to Buenos Ayres, minus everything; Regnier is completely sold, for no doubt the too confiding Martin would have got nothing out of ‘The President’; while Mademoiselle and Madame are now wondering how best to return to Paris and face the music. Old Dumont will probably have to close his doors in the Rue de la Paix, for we have here a selection of his very best. But, after all, Mademoiselle—whose plan to go to London in search of her father was a rather ingenious one—certainly has me to thank that she is not under arrest for criminal conspiracy with her long-nosed lover!”

      I laughed at Bindo’s final remark, and put another “move” on the car.

      At ten o’clock that same night we took out the petrol-tank and emptied from it its precious contents, which half an hour later had been washed and were safely reposing from the eyes of the curious between tissue paper in the safe in the old Jew’s dark den in the Kerk Straat, in Amsterdam.

      That was a year ago, and old Dumont still carries on business in the Rue de la Paix. Sir Charles Blythe, who is our informant, as always, tells us that although the pretty Pierrette is back in her convent, the jeweller is still in ignorance of Martin’s whereabouts, of how his property passed from hand to hand, or of any of the real facts concerning its disappearance.

      One thing is quite certain: he will never see any of it again, for every single stone has been re-cut, and so effectually disguised as to be beyond identification.

      Honesty spells poverty, Bindo always declares to me.

      But some day very soon I intend, if possible, to cut my audacious friends and reform.

      And yet how hard it is—how very hard! One can never, alas! retract one’s downward steps. I am “The Count’s Chauffeur,” and shall, I suppose, continue to remain so until the black day when we all fall into the hands of the police.

      Therefore the story of my further adventures will, in all probability, be recounted in the Central Criminal Court at a date not very far distant.

      For the present, therefore, I must write “The End.”

      “I see that the cause of Education has received the princely gift of more than fifty millions of dollars,” said I.

      I was gleaning the stray items from the evening papers while Jeff Peters packed his briar pipe with plug cut.

      “Which same,” said Jeff, “calls for a new deck, and a recitation by the entire class in philanthromathematics.”

      “Is that an allusion?” I asked.

      “It is,” said Jeff. “I never told you about the time when me and Andy Tucker was philanthropists, did I? It was eight years ago in Arizona. Andy and me was out in the Gila mountains with a two-horse wagon prospecting for silver. We struck it, and sold out to parties in Tucson for $25,000. They paid our check at the bank in silver—a thousand dollars in a sack. We loaded it in our wagon and drove east a hundred miles before we recovered our presence of intellect. Twenty-five thousand dollars doesn’t sound like so much when you’re reading the annual report of the Pennsylvania Railroad or listening to an actor talking about his salary; but when you can raise up a wagon sheet and kick around your bootheel and hear every one of ’em ring against another it makes you feel like you was a night-and-day bank with the clock striking twelve.

      “The third day out we drove into one of the most specious and tidy little towns that Nature or Rand and McNally ever turned out. It was in the foothills, and mitigated with trees and flowers and about 2,000 head of cordial and dilatory inhabitants. The town seemed to be called Floresville, and Nature had not contaminated it with many railroads, fleas or Eastern tourists.

      “Me and Andy deposited our money to the credit of Peters and Tucker in the Esperanza Savings Bank, and got rooms at the Skyview Hotel. After supper we lit up, and sat out on the gallery and smoked. Then was when the philanthropy idea struck me. I suppose every grafter gets it sometime.

      “When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it. And if you’ll watch close and notice the way his

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