Memoirs of Arsène Lupin - Maurice Leblanc (books like beach read TXT) 📗

Dieppe. She spent the whole of a day there, and profiting by the fact that the building had been abandoned, searched it. Then I lost sight of her. I found her at Rouen. You have heard what followed, from d’Etigues. How the trap was laid and how she fell into it, attracted by the bait of this Candlestick with Seven Branches, which, as she believed, a peasant had unearthed.

“Such is the character of this woman. You realize the reasons which prevent us from handing her over to the law. The scandal of the proceedings would reflect on us, and throwing the full light of day on to our enterprises, would render them impossible. Our duty, however dreadful it may appear, is to judge her ourselves, without hatred, but with all the severity that she deserves.”

Beaumagnan was silent. He had ended his indictment with a seriousness more dangerous to the accused than his anger. She appeared undoubtedly guilty, almost a monster in this series of useless murders. For his part, Ralph d’Andresy no longer knew what to think; but he cursed in his heart this man who had loved the young woman and who had just recalled, trembling with emotion, that sacrilegious love.

The Countess of Cagliostro rose and looked her adversary full in the face, always with a faintly mocking air.

“I was quite right,” she said. “It is the stake?”

“That will be according as we decide,” he said. “Nothing at any rate can prevent the execution of our just sentence.”

“A sentence? By what right?” said she. “There are judges for that. You are not judges. You talk about the fear of scandal. What does it matter to me that you need darkness and silence for your schemes? Set me free.”

“Free? Free to continue your work of death? You are in our power. You will suffer our sentence,” he said sternly.

“Your sentence for what? If there were a single judge among you, a single man who had any sense of reason and probability, he would laugh at your stupid charges and your unconnected proofs.”

“Words! Phrases!” he cried. “What we want are proofs to the contrary.⁠ ⁠… Something to disprove the evidence that my eyes gave me.”

“What use would it be to defend myself? You have made up your minds.”

“We have made them up because you are guilty.”

“Guilty of pursuing the same end as you; yes, that I admit. And that is the reason why you committed that shameful action of coming to spy upon me and play that comedy of love. If you were caught by your own snare, all the worse for you. If you have revealed to me facts about the enigma, of which I already knew the existence from the document of Cagliostro, all the worse for you! Now it is an obsession with me; and I have sworn to attain that end, whatever happens, in spite of you. That and that only is my crime⁠—in your eyes.”

“Your crime is murder,” asserted Beaumagnan, who was again losing his temper.

“I have not murdered anyone,” she said firmly.

“You pushed Saint-Hébert over the cliff; you fractured d’Isneauval’s skull.”

“Saint-Hébert? D’Isneauval? I never knew them. I hear their names for the first time today,” she protested.

“And me! And me!” he exclaimed violently. “Didn’t you know me? Didn’t you try to poison me?”

“No.”

He lost his temper utterly and in an access of fury he roared: “But I saw you, Josephine Balsamo! I saw you as clearly as I see you now! While you were putting that poison in the box, I saw your smile grow ferocious and the corners of your lips rise in the grin of the damned!”

She shook her head and said firmly:

“It was not I.”

He appeared to choke. How dared she say such a thing?

But quite coolly she laid her hand on his shoulder and said quietly:

“Hate is making you lose your wits, Beaumagnan. Your fanatical soul is in a wild revolt against the sin of love. However, in spite of that, I suppose you’ll allow me to defend myself?”

“It is your right, but be quick about it,” he said less loudly, but coldly.

“It won’t take long. Ask your friends for the miniature, painted in 1816, of the Countess of Cagliostro.”

Beaumagnan obeyed and took the miniature from the hands of the Baron.

“Good. Look at it carefully,” she went on. “It is my portrait, isn’t it?”

“What are you driving at?” he said.

“Answer. Is it my portrait?” she said impatiently.

“Yes,” he said with decision.

“Then if that is my portrait it means that I was alive at that time? It is eighty years ago; and from that portrait I was then twenty-five or thirty? Consider carefully before answering. What! In the face of such a miracle you hesitate, do you? You dare not assert that it is a fact; now, dare you?”

She paused, gazing at him with compelling eyes; then she continued:

“But there is more to come. Open the frame of this miniature, the back of it, and you will find on the other side of the porcelain, another portrait. The portrait of a smiling woman, wearing a veil, an almost invisible veil, which descends as far as her eyebrows, and through which you can see her hair parted into two waving rolls. It is me again, isn’t it?”

While Beaumagnan carried out her instructions she had put on a light veil of tulle, the bottom of which touched the line of her eyebrows; and she lowered her eyes with an expression of charming reserve.

Beaumagnan compared her face with the portrait and stammered: “B-B-B-But it is you! It is!”

“Is there any doubt about it?”

“Not the slightest. It is you,” he declared.

“Well, read the date on the right side of it.”

Beaumagnan read out: “Painted at Milan in the year 1498.”

She repeated: “In 1498⁠—that’s four hundred years ago?”

She laughed outright, a clear, ringing laugh.

“Don’t look so astonished,” she said. “I have known of the existence of this double portrait for a long time, and I have been hunting for it. But you may take it from me that there