The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  From Dijon we left the Paris road and struck due north by Chaumont and Bar-le-duc to Verdun, Sedan, and Givet, where we passed into Belgium. At the Métropole, in Brussels, we spent a welcome twenty-four hours, and slept most of the time. Then on again, still due North, first to Boxtel, in Holland, and then on to Utrecht.

  Until that day—a week after leaving Monte Carlo on our rush across Europe—Bindo practically preserved a complete silence as to his intentions or as to what had happened.

  All I had been able to gather from him was that Mademoiselle was still at the Bristol, and that Blythe was still dancing attendance upon her and the ugly old lady who acted as chaperon.

  With Utrecht in sight across the flat, uninteresting country, traversed everywhere by canals, we suddenly had a bad tyre-burst. Fortunately we had a spare one, therefore it was only the half-hour delay that troubled us.

  Bindo helped me to take off the old cover, adjust a new tube and cover, and worked the pump with a will. Then, just as I was giving the nuts a final screw-up, preparatory to packing the tools away in the back, he said—

  “I expect, Ewart, this long run of ours has puzzled you very much, hasn’t it?”

  “Of course it has,” I replied. “I don’t see the object of it all.”

  “The object was to get here before the police could trace us. That’s why we took such a roundabout route.”

  “And now we are here,” I exclaimed, glancing over the dull, grey landscape, “what are we going to do?”

  “Do?” he echoed. “You ought to ask what we’ve done, my dear fellow!”

  “Well, what have we done?” I inquired.

  “About the neatest bit of business that we’ve ever brought off in our lives,” he laughed.

  “How?”

  “Let’s get up and drive on,” he said; “we won’t stop in Utrecht, it’s such a miserable hole. Listen, and I’ll explain as we go along.”

  So I locked up the back, got up to the wheel again, and we resumed our journey.

  * * * *

  “It was like this, you see,” he commenced. “I own I was entirely misled in the beginning. That little girl played a trick on me. She’s evidently not the ingenuous miss that I took her to be.”

  “You mean Pierrette?” I laughed. “No, I quite agree with you. She’s been to Monte Carlo before, I believe.”

  “Well,” exclaimed the debonnair Bindo, “I met her in London, as you know. Our acquaintance was quite a casual one, in the big hall of the Cecil—where I afterwards discovered she was staying with Madame. She was an adventurous little person, and met me at the lions, in Trafalgar Square, next morning, and I took her for a walk across St. James’s Park. From what she told me of herself, I gathered that she was the daughter of a wealthy Frenchman. Our conversation naturally turned upon her mother, as I wanted to find out if the latter possessed any jewels worth looking after. She told me a lot—how that her mother, an old marquise, had a quantity of splendid jewellery. Madame Vernet, who was with her at the Cecil, was her companion, and her father had, I understood, a fine château near Troyes. Her parents, religious bigots, were, however, sending her, very much against her will, to the seclusion of a convent close to Fontainebleau—not as a scholastic pupil—but to be actually trained for the Sisterhood! She seemed greatly perturbed about this, and I could see that the poor girl did not know how to act, and had no outside friend to assist her. To me, it at once occurred that by aiding her I could obtain her confidence, and so get to know this mother with the valuable sparklers. Therefore I arranged that you should, on a certain morning, travel to Fontainebleau, and that she should manage to escape from the good Sisters and travel down to Beaulieu. Madame Vernet was to be in the secret, and should join her later.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I understood all that. She misled you regarding her mother.”

  “And she was still more artful, for she never told me the truth as to who her father really was, or the reason why they were there in London—in search of him,” he remarked. “I learnt the truth for the first time from you—the truth that she was the daughter of old Dumont, of the Rue de la Paix, and that he and his clerk were missing with jewels of great value.”

  “Then another idea struck you, I presume?”

  “Of course,” he answered, laughing. “I wondered for what reason Mademoiselle was to be placed in a convent; why she had misled me regarding her parentage; and, above all, why she was so very desirous of coming to the Riviera. So I returned, first to Paris—where I found that Dumont and Martin were actually both missing. I managed to get photographs of both men, and then crossed to London, and there commenced active inquiries. Within a week I had the whole of the mysterious affair at my fingers’ ends, and moreover I knew who had taken the sparklers, and in fact the complete story. The skein was a very tangled one, but gradually I drew out the threads. When I had done so, however, I heard, to my dismay, that certain of our enemies had got to know the direction in which I was working, and had warned the Paris Sureté. I was therefore bound to travel back to Monte Carlo, if I intended to be successful, so I had to come by the roundabout route through Italy and by the Tenda.”

  “I suspected that,” I said.

  “Yes. But the truth was stranger than I had ever imagined. As you know, things do not surprise me very often, but in this affair I confess I’d been taken completely aback.”

  “How?”

  “Because when I returned to Monty I made some absolutely surprising discoveries. Among them was that Mademoiselle was in the habit of secretly meeting a long-nosed man.”

  “A long-nosed man!” I exclaimed. “You mean the police-agent?”

  “I mean Monsieur Martin, the clerk. Don’t you recognise him?” he asked, taking the photograph out of his pocket and handing it to me.

  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.”

  THE CHAIR OF PHILANTHROMATHEMATICS, by O. Henry

  “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 charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case, take, let’s say, A. A made his millions selling oil to poor students who sit up nights studying political economy and methods for regulating the trusts. So, back to the universities and colleges goes his conscience dollars.

  “There’s B got his from the common laboring man that works with his hands and tools. How’s he to get some of the remorse fund back into their overalls?

  “‘Aha!’ says B, ‘I’ll do it in the name of Education. I’ve skinned the laboring man,’ says he to himself, ‘but, according to the old proverb, “Charity covers a multitude of skins.”’

  “So he puts up eighty million dollars’ worth of libraries; and the boys with the dinner pail that builds ‘em gets the benefit.

  “‘Where’s the books?’ asks the reading public.

  “‘I dinna ken,’ says B. ‘I offered ye libraries; and there they are. I suppose if I’d given ye preferred steel trust stock instead ye’d have wanted the water in it set out in cut glass decanters. Hoot, for ye!’

  “But, as I said, the owning of so much money was beginning to give me philanthropitis. It was the first time me and Andy had ever made a pile big enough to make us stop and think how we got it.

  “‘Andy,’ says I, ‘we’re wealthy—not beyond the dreams of average; but in our humble way we are comparatively as rich as Greasers. I feel as if I’d like to do something for as well as to humanity.’

  “‘I was thinking the same thing, Jeff,’ says he. ‘We’ve been gouging the public for a long time with all kinds of little schemes from selling self-igniting celluloid collars to flooding Georgia with Hoke Smith presidential campaign buttons. I’d like, myself, to hedge a bet or two in the graft game if I could do it without actually banging the cymbalines in the Salvation Army or teaching a bible class by the Bertillon system.

  “‘What’ll we do?’ says Andy. ‘Give free grub to the poor or send a couple of thousand to George Cortelyou?’

  “‘Neither,’ says I. ‘We’ve got too much money to be implicated in plain charity; and we haven’t got enough to make restitution. So, we’ll look about for something that’s about half way between the two.’

  “The next day
in walking around Floresville we see on a hill a big red brick building that appears to be disinhabited. The citizens speak up and tell us that it was begun for a residence several years before by a mine owner. After running up the house he finds he only had $2.80 left to furnish it with, so he invests that in whiskey and jumps off the roof on a spot where he now requiescats in pieces.

  “As soon as me and Andy saw that building the same idea struck both of us. We would fix it up with lights and pen wipers and professors, and put an iron dog and statues of Hercules and Father John on the lawn, and start one of the finest free educational institutions in the world right there.

  “So we talks it over to the prominent citizens of Floresville, who falls in fine with the idea. They give a banquet in the engine house to us, and we make our bow for the first time as benefactors to the cause of progress and enlightenment. Andy makes an hour-and-a-half speech on the subject of irrigation in Lower Egypt, and we have a moral tune on the phonograph and pineapple sherbet.

  “Andy and me didn’t lose any time in philanthropping. We put every man in town that could tell a hammer from a step ladder to work on the building, dividing it up into class rooms and lecture halls. We wire to Frisco for a car load of desks, footballs, arithmetics, penholders, dictionaries, chairs for the professors, slates, skeletons, sponges, twenty-seven cravenetted gowns and caps for the senior class, and an open order for all the truck that goes with a first-class university. I took it on myself to put a campus and a curriculum on the list; but the telegraph operator must have got the words wrong, being an ignorant man, for when the goods come we found a can of peas and a curry-comb among ‘em.

  “While the weekly papers was having chalk-plate cuts of me and Andy we wired an employment agency in Chicago to express us f.o.b., six professors immediately—one English literature, one up-to-date dead languages, one chemistry, one political economy—democrat preferred—one logic, and one wise to painting, Italian and music, with union card. The Esperanza bank guaranteed salaries, which was to run between $800 and $800.50.