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JEWEL MYSTERIES
[Illustration: "He had turned the pistol to his head and blown his
brains out."
--_Page 27_]
Jewel Mysteries
From a Dealer's Note Book
BY
MAX PEMBERTON
_Author of "The Garden of Swords,"
"Kronstadt," "The Iron
Pirate," etc., etc._
R. F. FENNO & COMPANY
_9 & 11 East Sixteenth Street, New York City: 1904_
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH 9
THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS 33
THE COMEDY OF THE JEWELED LINKS 57
TREASURE OF WHITE CREEK 79
THE ACCURSED GEMS 109
THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR 133
THE SEVEN EMERALDS 157
THE PURSUIT OF THE TOPAZ 187
THE RIPENING RUBIES 217
MY LADY OF THE SAPPHIRES 245
THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH.
THE OPAL OF CARMALOVITCH.
Dark was falling from a dull and humid sky, and the lamps were beginning
to struggle for brightness in Piccadilly, when the opal of Carmalovitch
was first put into my hand. The day had been a sorry one for business:
no light, no sun, no stay of the downpour of penetrating mist which had
been swept through the city by the driving south wind from the late dawn
to the mock of sunset. I had sat in my private office for six long
hours, and had not seen a customer. The umbrella-bearing throng which
trod the street before my window hurried quickly through the mud and the
slush, as people who had no leisure even to gaze upon precious stones
they could not buy. I was going home, in fact, as the one sensible
proceeding on such an afternoon, and had my hand upon the great safe to
shut it, when the mirror above my desk showed me the reflection of a
curious-looking man who had entered the outer shop, and stood already at
the counter.
At the first glance I judged that this man was no ordinary customer. His
dress was altogether singular. He had a black coat covering him from his
neck to his heels--a coat half-smothered in astrachan, and one which
could have been made by no English tailor. But his hands were ungloved,
and he wore a low hat, which might have been the hat of an office boy. I
could see from the little window of my private room, which gives my eye
command of the shop, that he had come on foot, and for lack of any
umbrella was pitiably wet. Yet there was fine bearing about him, and he
was clearly a man given to command, for my assistant mounted to my room
with his name at the first bidding.
"Does he say what he wants?" I asked, reading the large card upon which
were the words--
"STENILOFF CARMALOVITCH";
but the man replied,--
"Only that he must see you immediately. I don't like the look of him at
all."
"Is Abel in the shop?"
"He's at the door."
"Very well; let him come to the foot of my stairs, and if I ring as
usual, both of you come up."
In this profession of jewel-selling--for every calling is a profession
nowadays--we are so constantly cheek by jowl with swindlers that the
coming of one more or less is of little moment in a day's work. At my
own place of business the material and personal precautions are so
organized that the cleverest scoundrel living would be troubled to get
free of the shop with sixpenny-worth of booty on him. I have two armed
men ready at the ring of my bell--Abel is one of them--and a private
wire to the nearest police-station. From an alcove well hidden on the
right hand of the lower room, a man watches by day the large cases where
the smaller gems are shown, and by night a couple of special guards have
charge of the safe and the premises. I touch a bell twice in my room,
and my own detective follows any visitor who gives birth in my mind to
the slightest doubt. I ring three times, and any obvious impostor is
held prisoner until the police come. These things are done by most
jewelers in the West End; there is nothing in them either unusual or
fearful. There are so many professed swindlers--so many would-be
snappers up of unconsidered and considerable trifles--that precautions
such as I have named are the least that common sense and common prudence
will allow one to take. And they have saved me from loss, as they have
saved others again and again.
I had scarce given my instructions to Michel, my assistant--a rare
reader of intention, and a fine judge of faces--when the shabby-genteel
man entered. Michel placed a chair for him on the opposite side of my
desk, and then left the room. There was no more greeting between the
newcomer and myself than a mutual nodding of heads; and he on his part
fell at once upon his business. He took a large paper parcel from the
inside pocket of his coat and began to unpack it; but there was so much
paper, both brown and tissue, that I had some moments of leisure in
which to examine him more closely before we got to talk. I set him down
in my mind as a man hovering on the boundary line of the middle age, a
man with infinite distinction marked in a somewhat worn face, and with
some of the oldest clothes under the shielding long coat that I have
ever looked upon. These I saw when he unbuttoned the enveloping cape to
get at his parcel in the inner pocket; and while he undid it, I could
observe that his fingers were thin as the talons of a bird, and that he
trembled all over with the mere effort of unloosing the string.
The operation lasted some minutes. He spoke no word during that time,
but when he had reduced the coil of brown paper to a tiny square of
wash-leather, I asked him,--
"Have you something to show me?"
He looked up at me with a pair of intensely, ridiculously blue eyes, and
shrugged his shoulders.
"Should I undo all these papers if I had not?" he responded; and I saw
at once that he was a man who, from a verbal point of view, stood
objectionably upon the defensive.
"What sort of a stone is it?" I went on in a somewhat uninterested tone
of voice; "not a ruby, I hope. I have just bought a parcel of rubies."
By way of answer he opened the little wash-leather bag, and taking up my
jewel-tongs, which lay at his hand, he held up an opal of such
prodigious size and quality that I restrained myself with difficulty
from crying out at the sight of it. It was a Cerwenitza stone, I saw at
a glance, almost a perfect circle in shape, and at least four inches in
diameter. There was a touch of the oxide in its color which gave it the
faintest suspicion of black in the shade of its lights; but for wealth
of hue and dazzling richness in its general quality, it surpassed any
stone I have ever known, even that in the imperial cabinet at Vienna.
So brilliant was it, so fascinating in the ever-changing play of its
amazing variegations, so perfect in every characteristic of the finest
Hungarian gem, that for some moments I let the man hold it out to me,
and said no word. There was running through my mind the question which
must have arisen under such circumstances: Where had he got it from? He
had stolen it, I concluded at the first thought; and again, at the
second, How else could a man who wore rags under an astrachan coat have
come to the possession of a gem upon which the most commercial instinct
would have hesitated to set a price?
I had fully determined that I was face to face with a swindler, when his
exclamation reminded me that he expected me to speak.
"Well," he said, "are you frightened to look at it?"
He had been holding out the tongs, in which he gripped the stone
lightly, for some seconds, and I had not yet ventured to touch them,
sitting, I do not doubt, with surprise written all over my face. But
when he spoke, I took the opal from him, and turned my strong glass upon
it.
"You seem to have brought me a fine thing," I said as carelessly as I
could. "Is it a stone with a history?"
"It has no history--at least, none that I should care to write."
"And yet," I continued, "there cannot be three larger opals in Europe;
do you know the stone at Vienna?"
"Perfectly; but it has not the black of this, and is coarser. This is an
older stone, so far as the birth of its discovery goes, by a hundred
years."
I thought that he was glib with his tale for a man who had such a poor
one; and certainly he looked me in the face with amazing readiness. He
had not the eyes of a rogue, and his manner was not that of one
criminally restless.
"If you will allow me," I said, when I had looked at the stone for a few
moments, "I will examine this under the brighter light there; perhaps
you would like to amuse yourself with this parcel of rubies."
This was a favorite little trick of mine. I had two or three parcels of
stones to show to any man who came to me laboring under a sorry and
palpably poor story; and one of these I then took from my desk and
spread upon the table under the eyes of the Russian. The stones were all
imitation, and worth no more than sixpence apiece. If he were a judge,
he would discover the cheat at the first sight of them; if he were a
swindler, he would endeavor to steal them. In either case the test was
useful. And I took care to turn my back upon him while I examined the
opal, to give him every opportunity of filling his pockets should he
choose.
When I had the jewel under the powerful light of an unshaded
incandescent lamp I could see that it merited all the appreciation I had
bestowed upon it at first sight. It was flawless, wanting the demerit of
a single mark which could be pointed to in depreciation of its price.
For play of color and radiating generosity of hues, I have already said
that no man has seen its equal. I put it in the scales, called Michel
to establish my own opinions, tried it by every test that can be applied
to a gem so fragile and so readily harmed, and came to the only
conclusion possible--that it was a stone which would make a sensation in
any market, and call bids from all the courts in Europe. It remained for
me to learn the history of it, and with that I went back to my desk and
resumed the conversation, first glancing at the sham parcel of rubies,
to find that the man had not even looked at them.
"It is a remarkable opal," I said; "the finest ever put before me. You
have come here to sell it, I presume?"
"Exactly. I want five thousand pounds for it."
"And if I make you a bid you are prepared to furnish me with the history
both of it and of yourself?"
He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "If you think that I have
stolen it we had better close the discussion at once. I am not prepared
to tell my history to every tradesman I deal with."
"In that case," said I, "you have wasted your time. I buy no jewels that
I do not know all about."
His superciliousness was almost impertinent. It would have been quite so
if it had not been dominated by an absurd and almost grotesque pride,
which accounted for his temper. I was sure then that he was either an
honest man or the best actor I had ever seen.
"Think the matter over," I added in a less indifferent tone; "I am
certain that you will then acquit me of unreasonableness. Call here
again in a day or two, and we will have a chat about it."
This softer speech availed me as little as the other. He made no sort of
answer to it, but packing his opal carefully again, he rose abruptly and
left the shop. As he went I touched my bell twice, and Abel followed him
quietly down Piccadilly, while I sent a line to Scotland Yard informing
the Commissioners of the presence of such a man as the Russian in
London, and of the Gargantuan jewel which he carried. Then I went home
through the fog and the humid night; but my way was lighted by a memory
of the magnificent gem I had seen, and the hunger for the opal was
already upon me.
The inquiry at Scotland Yard proved quite futile. The police telegraphed
to Paris, to Berlin, to St. Petersburg, to New York, but got no tidings
either of a robbery or of the man whom mere circumstances pointed at as
a pretender. This seemed to me the more amazing since I could not
conceive that a stone such as this was should not have made a sensation
in some place. Jewels above all material things do not hide their light
under bushels. Let there be a great find at Kimberley or in the Burmese
mines; let a fine emerald or a perfect turquoise be brought to Europe,
and every dealer in the country knows its weight, its color, and its
value before three days have passed. If this man, who hugged this small
fortune to him, and without it was a beggar, had been a worker at
Cerwenitza, he would have told me the fact plainly. But he spoke of the
opal being older even than the famous and commonly cited specimen at
Vienna. How came it that he alone had the history of such an ancient
gem? There was only one answer to such a question--the history of his
possession of it, at any rate, would not bear inquiry.
Such perplexity was not removed by Abel's account of his journey after
Carmalovitch. He had followed the man from Piccadilly to Oxford Circus;
thence, after a long wait in Regent's Park, where the Russian sat for at
least an hour on a seat near the Botanical Gardens entrance, to a small
house in Boscobel Place. This was evidently a lodging-house, offering
that fare of shabbiness and dirt which must perforce be attractive to
the needy. There was a light burning at the window of the pretentiously
poor drawing-room when the man arrived, and a girl, apparently not more
than twenty-five years of age, came down into the hall to greet him, the
pair afterwards showing at the window for a moment before the blinds
were drawn. An inquiry by my man for apartments in the house elicited
only a shrill cackle and a negative from a shuffling hag who answered
the knock. A tour of the little shops in the neighborhood provided the
further clue "that they paid for nothing." This suburban estimation of
personal worth was a confirmation of my conclusion drawn from the rags
beneath the astrachan coat. The Russian was a poor man; except for the
possession of the jewel he was near to being a beggar. And yet he had
not sought to borrow money of me, and he had put the price of L5,000
upon his property.
All these things did not leave my mind for the next week. I was in
daily communication with Scotland Yard, but absolutely to no purpose.
Their sharpest men handled the case, and confessed that they could make
nothing of it. We had the house in Boscobel Place watched, but, so far
as we could learn, Carmalovitch, as he called himself, never left it.
Meanwhile, I began to think that I had betrayed exceedingly poor
judgment in raising the question at all. As the days went by I suffered
that stone hunger which a student of opals alone can know. I began to
believe that I had lost by my folly one of the greatest possessions that
could come to a man in my business. I knew that it would be an act of
childishness to go to the house and re-open the negotiations, for I
could not bid for that which the first telegram from the Continent might
prove to be feloniously gotten, and the embarkation of such a sum as was
asked was a matter not for the spur of the moment, but for the closest
deliberation, to say nothing of financial preparation. Yet I would have
given fifty pounds if the owner of it had walked into my office again;
and I never heard a footstep in the outer shop during the week following
his visit but I looked up in the hope of seeing him.
A fortnight passed, and I thought that I had got to the beginning and
the end of the opal mystery, when one morning, the moment after I had
entered my office, Michel told me that a lady wished to see me. I had
scarce time to tell him that I could see no one for an hour when the
visitor pushed past him into the den, and sat herself down in the chair
before my writing-desk. As in all business, we appreciate, and listen
to, impertinence in the jewel trade; and when I observed the magnificent
impudence of the young lady, I asked Michel to leave us, and waited for
her to speak. She was a delicate-looking woman--an Italian, I thought,
from the dark hue of her skin and the lustrous beauty of her eyes--but
she was exceedingly shabbily dressed, and her hands were ungloved. She
was not a woman you would have marked in the stalls of a theater as the
fit subject for an advertising photographer; but there was great
sweetness in her face, and those signs of bodily weakness and want of
strength which so often enhance a woman's beauty. When she spoke,
although she had little English, her voice was well modulated and
remarkably pleasing.
"You are Monsieur Bernard Sutton?" she asked, putting one hand upon my
table, and the other between the buttons of her bodice.
I bowed in answer to her.
"You have met my husband--I am Madame Carmalovitch--he was here, it is
fifteen days, to sell you an opal. I have brought it again to you now,
for I am sure you wish to buy it."
"You will pardon me," I said, "but I am waiting for the history of the
jewel which your husband promised me. I rather expected that he would
have sent it."
"I know! oh, I know so well; and I have asked him many times," she
answered; "but you can believe me, he will tell of his past to no one,
not even to me. But he is honest and true; there is not such a man in
all your city--and he has suffered. You may buy this beautiful thing
now, and you will never regret it. I tell you so from all my heart."
"But surely, Madame," said I, "you must see that I cannot pay such a
price as your husband is asking for his property if he will not even
tell me who he is, or where he comes from."
"Yes, that is it--not even to me has he spoken of these things. I was
married to him six years now at Naples, and he has always had the opal
which he offers to you. We were rich then, but we have known suffering,
and this alone is left to us. You will buy it of my husband, for you in
all this London are the man to buy it. It will give you fame and money;
it must give you both, for we ask but four thousand pounds for it."
I started at this. Here was a drop of a thousand pounds upon the price
asked but fifteen days ago. What did it mean? I took up the gem, which
the woman had placed upon the table, and saw in a moment. The stone was
dimming. It had lost color since I had seen it; it had lost, too, I
judged, at least one-third of its value. I had heard the old woman's
tales of the capricious changefulness of this remarkable gem, but it was
the first time that I had ever witnessed for myself such an
unmistakeable depreciation. The woman read the surprise in my eyes, and
answered my thoughts, herself thoughtful, and her dark eyes touched with
tears.
"You see what I see," she said. "The jewel that you have in your hand is
the index to my husband's life. He has told me so often. When he is
well, it is well; when hope has come to him, the lights which shine
there are as the light of his hope. When he is ill, the opal fades; when
he dies, it will die too. That is what I believe and he believes; it is
what his father told him when he gave him the treasure, nearly all that
was left of a great fortune."
This tale astounded me; it betrayed absurd superstition, but it was the
first ray of coherent explanation which had been thrown upon the case. I
took up the thread with avidity and pursued it.
"Your husband's father was a rich man?" I asked. "Is he dead?"
She looked up with a start, then dropped her eyes quickly, and mumbled
something. Her hesitation was so marked that I put her whole story from
me as a clever fabrication, and returned again to the theory of robbery.
"Madame," I said, "unless your husband can add to that which you tell
me, I shall be unable to purchase your jewel."
"Oh, for the love of God don't say that!" she cried; "we are so poor, we
have hardly eaten for days! Come and see Monsieur Carmalovitch and he
shall tell you all; I implore you, and you will never regret this
kindness! My husband is a good friend; he will reward your friendship.
You will not refuse me this?"
It is hard to deny a pretty woman; it is harder still when she pleads
with tears in her voice. I told her that I would go and see her husband
on the following evening at nine o'clock, and counseled her to persuade
him in the between time to be frank with me, since frankness alone could
avail him. She accepted my advice with gratitude, and left as she had
come, her pretty face made handsomer by its look of gloom and
pensiveness. Then I fell to thinking upon the wisdom, or want of wisdom,
in the promise I had given. Stories of men drugged, or robbed, or
murdered by jewel thieves crowded upon my mind, but always with the
recollection that I should carry nothing to Boscobel Place. A man who
had no more upon him than a well-worn suit of clothes and a Swiss lever
watch in a silver case, such as I carry invariably, would scarce be
quarry for the most venturesome shop-hawk that the history of knavery
has made known to us. I could risk nothing by going to the house, I was
sure; but I might get the opal, and for that I longed still with a fever
for possession which could only be accounted for by the beauty of the
gem.
Being come to this determination, I left my own house in a hansom-cab on
the following evening at half-past eight o'clock, taking Abel with me,
more after my usual custom than from any prophetic alarm. I had money
upon me sufficient only for the payment of the cab; and I took the
extreme precaution of putting aside the diamond ring that I had been
wearing during the day. As I live in Bayswater, it was but a short drive
across Paddington Green and down the Marylebone Road to Boscobel Place;
and when we reached the house we found it lighted up on the drawing-room
floor as Abel had seen it at his first going there. But the hall was
quite in darkness, and I had to ring twice before the shrill-voiced dame
I had heard of answered to my knock. She carried a frowsy candle in her
hand; and was so uncanny-looking that I motioned to Abel to keep a watch
from the outside upon the house before I went upstairs to that which was
a typical lodging-house room. There was a "tapestry" sofa against one
wall; half a dozen chairs in evident decline stood in hilarious
attitudes; some seaweed, protected for no obvious reason by shades of
glass, decorated the mantelpiece, and a sampler displayed the obviously
aggravating advice to a tenant of such a place, "Waste not, want not."
But the rickety writing-table was strewn with papers, and there was half
a cigar lying upon the edge of it, and a cup of coffee there had grown
cold in the dish.
The aspect of the place amazed me. I began to regret that I had set out
upon any such enterprise, but had no time to draw back before the
Russian entered. He wore an out-at-elbow velvet coat, and the rest of
his dress was shabby enough to suit his surroundings. I noticed,
however, that he offered me a seat with a gesture that was superb, and
that his manner was less agitated than it had been at our first meeting.
"I am glad to see you," he said. "You have come to buy my opal?"
"Under certain conditions, yes."
"That is very good of you; but I am offering you a great bargain. My
price for the stone now is L3,000, one thousand less than my wife
offered it at yesterday."
"It has lost more of its color, then?"
"Decidedly; or I should not have lowered my claim--but see for
yourself."
He took the stone from the wash-leather bag, and laid it upon the
writing-table. I started with amazement and sorrow at the sight of it.
The glorious lights I had admired not twenty days ago were half gone; a
dull, salty-red tinge was creeping over the superb green and the
scintillating black which had made me covet the jewel with such longing.
Yet it remained, even in its comparative poverty, the most remarkable
gem I have ever put hand upon.
"The stone is certainly going off," I said in answer to him. "What
guarantee have I that it will not be worthless in a month's time?"
"You have my word. It is a tradition of our family that he who owns that
heirloom when it begins to fade must sell it or die--and sell it at its
worth. If I continue to possess it, the tradition must prove itself, for
I shall die of sheer starvation."
"And if another has it?"
"It will regain its lights, I have no doubt of it, for it has gone like
this before when a death has happened amongst us. If you are content to
take my word, I will return to you in six months' time and make good any
loss you have suffered by it. But I should want some money now,
to-night, before an hour--could you let me have it?"
"If I bought your stone, you could have the money for it; my man, who is
outside, would fetch my check-book."
At the word "man," he went to the window, and saw Abel standing beneath
the gas-lamp. He looked fixedly at the fellow for a moment, and then
drew down the blinds in a deliberate way which I did not like at all.
"That servant of yours has been set to watch this house for ten days,"
he said. "Was that by your order?"
I was so completely taken aback by his discovery that I sat for a moment
dumfounded, and gave him no answer. He, however, seemed trembling with
passion.
"Was it by your orders?" he asked again, standing over me and almost
hissing out his words.
"It was," I answered after a pause; "but, you see, circumstances were
suspicious."
"Suspicious! Then you _did_ believe me to be a rogue. I have shot men
for less."
I attempted to explain, but he would not hear me. He had lost command of
himself, stalking up and down the room with great strides until the
temper tautened his veins, and his lean hands seemed nothing but wire
and bones. At last, he took a revolver from the drawer in his table, and
deliberately put cartridges into it. I stood up at the sight of it and
made a step towards the window; but he pointed the pistol straight at
me, crying,--
"Sit down, if you wish to live another minute--and say, do you still
believe me to be a swindler?"
The situation was so dangerous, for the man was obviously but half sane,
that I do not know what I said in answer to him; yet he pursued my
words fiercely, scarce hearing my reply before he continued,--
"You have had my house watched, and, as I know now, you have branded my
name before the police as that of a criminal; you shall make atonement
here on the spot by buying that opal, or you do not leave the room
alive!"
It was a desperate trial, and I sat for some minutes as a man on the
borderland of death. Had I been sensible then and fenced with him in his
words I should now possess the opal; but I let out the whole of my
thoughts--and the jewel went with them.
"I cannot buy your stone," I said, "until I have your history and your
father's----" But I said no more, for at the mention of his father he
cried out like a wounded beast, and fired the revolver straight at my
head. The shot skinned my forehead and the powder behind it blackened my
face; but I had no other injury, and I sprang upon him.
For some moments the struggle was appalling. I had him gripped about the
waist with my left arm, my right clutching the hand wherein he held the
pistol. He, in turn, put his left hand upon my throat and threw his
right leg round mine with a sinewy strength that amazed me. Thus we
were, rocking like two trees blown in a gale, now swaying towards the
window, now to the door, now crashing against the table, or hurling the
papers and the ink and the ornaments in a confused heap, as, fighting
the ground foot by foot, we battled for the mastery. But I could not cry
out, for his grip about my neck was the grip of a maniac; and as it
tightened and tightened, the light grew dim before my eyes and I felt
that I was choking. This he knew, and with overpowering fury pressed his
fingers upon my throat until he cut me with his nails as with knives.
Then, at last, I reeled from the agony of it; and we fell with
tremendous force under the window, he uppermost.
Of that lifelong minute that followed, I remember but little. I know
only that he knelt upon my chest, still gripping my throat with his left
hand, and began to reach out for his revolver, which had dropped beneath
the table in our struggle. I had just seen him reach it with his
finger-tips, and so draw it inch by inch towards him, when a fearful
scream rang out in the room, and his hand was stayed. The scream was
from the woman who had come to Piccadilly the day before, and it was
followed by a terrible paroxysm of weeping, and then by a heavy fall, as
the terrified girl fainted. He let me go at this, and stood straight up;
but at the first step towards his wife he put his foot upon the great
opal, which we had thrown to the ground in our encounter, and he crushed
it into a thousand fragments.
When he saw what he had done, one cry, and one alone, escaped from him;
but before I could raise a hand to stay him, he had turned the pistol to
his head, and had blown his brains out.
* * * * *
The story of the opal of Carmalovitch is almost told. A long inquiry
after the man's death added these facts to the few I had already
gleaned. He was the son of a banker in Buda-Pesth, a noble Russian, who
had emigrated to Hungary and taken his wealth with him to embark it in
his business. He himself had been educated partly in England, partly in
France; but at the moment when he should have entered the great firm in
Buda-Pesth, there came the Argentine crash, and his father was one of
those who succumbed. But he did more than succumb, he helped himself to
the money of his partners, and being discovered, was sentenced as a
common felon, and is at this moment in a Hungarian prison.
Steniloff, the son, was left to clear up the estate, and got from it,
when all was settled, a few thousand pounds, by the generosity of the
father's partners. Beyond these he had the opal, which the family had
possessed for three hundred years, buying it originally in Vienna. This
possession, however, had been, for the sake of some absurd tradition,
always kept a profound secret, and when the great crash came, the man
whose death I had witnessed took it as his fortune. For some years he
had lived freely at Rome, at Nice, at Naples, where he married; but his
money being almost spent, he brought his wife to England, and there
attempted to sell the jewel. As he would tell nothing of his history,
lest his father's name should suffer, he found no buyer, and dragged on
from month to month, going deeper in the byways of poverty until he came
to me. The rest I have told you.
Of the opal which I saw so wofully crushed in the lodging-house in
Boscobel Place, but one large fragment remained. I have had that set in
a ring, and have sold it to-day for fifty pounds. The money will go to
Madame Carmalovitch, who has returned to her parents in Naples. She has
suffered much.
THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.
THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.
I can remember perfectly well the day upon which I received the order
from my eccentric old friend, Francis Brewer, to make him a necklace of
green diamonds. It was the 2d of May in the year 1890, exactly three
days after his marriage with the fascinating little singer, Eugenie
Clarville, who had set Paris aflame with the piquancy of her acting and
her delightful command of a fifth-rate voice some six months after
Brewer had left London to take up the management of a great banking
enterprise in the French capital. He was then well into the forties; but
he had skipped through life with scarce a jostle against the venial
sins, and was as ignorant as a babe where that mortal septette of vices
which the clergy anathematize on the first Wednesday in Lent was
concerned. I have never known a more childish man, or one who held your
affection so readily with simplicity. He was large-hearted, trusting,
boyish, by no means unintellectual, and in no sense a fool. Indeed, his
commercial knowledge was highly valuable; and his energy in working up a
business was a reproach to those who, like myself, love to sit in
arm-chairs and watch the ebb of life from a plate-glass window.
When he was married he wrote to me, and I laid his letter upon my table
with a whistle. Not that he was in any way suited for the celibate
state, for his instinct was wholly cast in the marrying mould. Had I
been called upon to paint him, I should have sat him in an arm-chair by
the side of a roaring fire, with a glass of punch to toast a buxom
goodwife, and a pipe as long as the stick of my umbrella to make rings
of smoke for a new generation at his knee. Such a man should, said
common sense, have been yoked to an English dame, to one used to the
odor of the lemon, and motherly by instinct and by training. I could not
imagine him married to a lady from the vaudeville; the contrast between
his iron-headed directness and the gauze and tinsel of opera bouffe
seemed grotesque almost to incredulity. Yet there was the letter, and
there were his absurd ravings about a woman he had known distantly for
six months, and intimately for three days.
"I have married," he said in this memorable communication, "the dearest
little soul that God ever brought into the world--fresh as the breeze,
bright as the sky, eyes like the night, and temper like an angel. You
must come and see her, old boy, the moment we set foot in our house at
Villemomble. I shan't let you lose an hour; you must learn for yourself
what a magnificent Benedick I make. Why, the days go like flashes of the
sun--and there never was a happier man in or out of this jolly city.
Oh, you slow-goers in London, you poor lame cab-horses, what do you know
of life or of woman, or even of the sky above you? Come to Paris, old
man; come, I say, and we'll put you through your paces, and you shall
meet her, the very best little wife that ever fell to an old dray-horse
in this fair of high-steppers."
There was a good deal more of this sort of thing; but the kernel of the
letter was in a postscriptum, as was the essence of most of his
communications. He told me there that he desired to make some
substantial present to the girl he had just married; and he enclosed a
rough sketch of a necklace which he thought would be a pretty thing if
rare stones were used to decorate it. I fell in with his whim at once;
and as it chanced that I had just received from the Jaegersfontein mine a
parcel of twenty very fine greenish diamonds, I determined to use them
in the business. I may say that these stones were of a delicious pale
green tint, almost the color of the great jewel in the vaults at
Dresden, and that their fire was amazing. I have known a gem of the hue
to be worth nearly a hundred pounds a carat; and as the lot I had
averaged two carats apiece, their worth was very considerable. I had not
learnt what were Brewer's instructions in the matter of expense; but I
wrote to him by the next post congratulating him on his marriage and
informing him that I would set the green diamonds in a necklace, and
sell them for two thousand pounds. He accepted the offer by a cablegram,
and on the following day sent a long letter of instruction, the pith of
which was the order to engrave on the inner side of the pendant the
words, _major lex amor est nobis_. I laughed at his Latin, and the
amatory exuberance which it betrayed; but fell upon the work, and
finished it in the course of three weeks, during which time I had many
and irritating requests from him for constant and detailed accounts of
its progress.
When the trinket reached him, his satisfaction was quite childish. He
wrote of his delight, and of "Eugy's," and spoilt three sheets of good
note-paper telling me of her appearance at the English ball early in
June; and of the sensation such an extraordinary bauble caused. Then I
heard from him no more until August, when I read in an evening paper
that he had been returning from Veulettes after a short holiday, and had
been in a great train smash near Rouen. A later telegram gave a list of
the dead, in which was the name of his wife; and three days after I
received from him the most pitiful letter that it has ever been my
misfortune to read. The whole wounded soul of the man seemed laid bare
upon the paper; the simplicity of his words was so touching and so
expressive of his agony, that I could scarce trust myself to go through
the long pages over which he let his sorrow flow. Yet one paragraph
remained long in my mind, for it was one that recalled the necklace of
green diamonds, and it was so astonishing that I did not doubt that
Brewer was, for the time at any rate, on the high-road to madness. "I
have put them round her dear neck," he said, "and they shall cling
always to her in her long sleep."
At the end of the month he wrote again, mentioning that, despite my
sharp remonstrance, he had seen the jewels buried with her, and that his
heart was broken. He said that he thought of coming to stay with me, and
of retiring from business; but went on in the next paragraph to confess
his inability to leave the city in which she was buried, and the places
which kept her memory so sharply before him. I wrote an answer, advising
him to plunge into work as an antidote to grief, and had posted it but
an hour when the mystery of the green diamond necklace began.
The circumstances were these. My clerk had left with the letters, and I
was sitting at my table examining a few unusually large cat's-eyes which
had been offered to me that morning. I heard the shop door open, and saw
from the small window near my desk a man in a fur coat, who seemed in
something of a hurry when he went to the counter. Three minutes
afterwards, Michel came up to me breathlessly and stammering. He carried
in his hand the identical necklace which I had made for my friend
Brewer, and which he had buried with his wife, as his letter said, not a
month before. My amazement at the sight of it was so great that for many
minutes I sat clasping and unclasping the snap of the trinket, and
reading again that strange inscription, _major lex amor est nobis_,
which had caused me so much amusement when I had first ordered it to be
cut. Then I asked Michel,--
"Who brought this?"
"A man in the shop below--the agent of Green and Sons, who have been
offered it by a customer at Dieppe."
"Have they put a price upon it?"
"They ask one thousand five hundred pounds for it."
"Oh, five hundred less than we sold it for; that is curious. Ask the man
if he will leave it on approval for a week."
"I have put the question already. His people are quite willing."
"Then write out a receipt."
He went away to do so, still fumbling and amazed. The thing was so
astounding to one who knew the whole of the circumstances, as I did,
that I told him nothing more, but examined the necklace minutely at
least half a dozen times. Was it possible that there could be two sets
of matching green diamonds, two infatuated lovers who had chosen the
same pattern of ornament, the same strange inscription, and the same
tint of stones? Such a thing was out of the question. Either Brewer had
made a mistake when he said that the necklace had been buried with his
wife--a theory which presupposed his return to his normal common
sense--or some scoundrel had stolen it from her coffin. I determined to
wire to him at once, and had written out a message when the second
mystery in the history of the trinket began to unfold itself. It came to
me in the form of a cablegram from Brewer himself, who asked me to go to
him at Paris without delay, as something which troubled him beyond
description had happened since he wrote to me.
I need not say that at the time when I received this telegram I had no
idea that a second mystery had engendered it. I believed that Brewer had
discovered the loss of the necklace, and had sent for me to trace the
thieves. This task I entered upon very willingly; and when I had
instructed Michel to ask Green & Co.--with whom we did a large
business--to give me as a special and private favor the real name of the
seller of the necklace, I took the eight o'clock train from Victoria;
and was in Paris at dawn on the following morning. Early as it was,
Brewer waited for me at the Gare du Nord, and greeted me with a welcome
which was almost hysterical in its effusiveness. This I could not
return, for the shock of the sight of him was enough to make any man
voiceless. He had aged in look twenty years in as many months. His
clothes hung in folds upon a figure that had once been the figure of a
robust and finely built man; his face was wan and colorless; there were
hollows above his temples, and furrows as of great age in the cheeks,
which erstwhile shone with all the healthy coloring that physical vigor
can give. His aspect, indeed, was pitiable; but I made a great effort to
convince him that I had not noticed it, and said cheerily,--
"Well, and how is my old friend?"
"I am a widower," he answered; and there was more pathos in the simple
remark than in any lament I ever heard from him. It was quite evident
that his one grief still reigned in his thoughts; and I made no other
attempt to conquer it.
"You have important news, or you would not have summoned me from
London," I said, as we left the station in a fiacre. "Won't you give me
an idea of it now?"
"When we reach my place I will tell you everything and show you
everything. It's very kind of you to come, very kind indeed; but I'd
sooner speak of such things at my own house."
"You are still at Villemomble?"
"Yes; but I have an apartment by the Rue de Morny, and am staying there
now; the old home is not the same. She is dead, you know."
I thought this remark very strange, and his manner of giving it no less
curious. He nodded his head gravely, and continued to nod it, repeating
the words and holding my hand like some great schoolboy who feared to be
alone. He was scarcely better when we arrived at his lodging, and he
took me to a luxurious apartment which was well worthy of his consummate
taste; but the moment he had shut the outer door his manner changed,
becoming quick, interested, and distinctly nervous.
"Bernard," he said, "I brought you to Paris because the strangest thing
possible has happened. You remember the necklace of green diamonds I
gave my poor wife, and buried with her?"
"Am I likely to forget that folly?" I asked.
"Well," he continued, "it was stolen from her grave in the little
cemetery near Raincy----"
"I know that," said I.
"You know it!" he cried, looking up aghast. "How could you know it?"
"Because it was offered to me yesterday."
"Good God!" he exclaimed, "offered to you yesterday! But it could not
have been, for my servant bought it in a shabby jeweler's near the Rue
St. Lazarre! Look for yourself, and say what do you call that?"
He had unlocked a small safe as he spoke, and he threw a jewel case upon
the table. I opened it quickly, and it was then my turn to call out as
he had done a moment before. The case contained a second necklace of
green diamonds exactly resembling the one I had made, and had then in my
pocket; and it bore even the memorable inscription--_major lex amor est
nobis_.
When I made this discovery there seemed something so uncanny and
terrible about it that the beads of perspiration stood on my forehead,
and my hand shook until I nearly dropped the case.
"Frank," I said, "there's deeper work here than you think; this is the
necklace which you believe you buried with your wife; well, what is this
one, then, that I have in my pocket?"
I opened the second case and laid the jewels side by side. You could not
have told one bauble from the other unless you had possessed such an eye
as mine, which will fidget over a sham diamond when it is yet a yard
away. He had no doubt that they were identical; and when he saw them
together, he began to cry like a frightened woman.
"What does it mean?" he asked. "Have they robbed my wife's grave? My
God!--two necklaces alike down to the very engraving. Who has done it?
Who could do such a thing with a woman who never harmed a living soul?
Bernard, if I spend every shilling I possess, I will get to the bottom
of this thing! Oh, my wife, my wife----"
His distress would have moved an adamantine heart, and was not a thing
to cavil at. The mystery, which had completely unnerved him, had
fascinated me so strangely that I determined not to leave Paris until
the last line of its solution was written. The robbery of the grave I
could quite understand, but that there should be two necklaces, one of
them with real stones and the other with imitation, was a fact before
which my imagination reeled. As for him, he continued to sit in his
arm-chair, and to fret like a child; and there I left him while I went
to consult the first detective I could run against.
The difficulties in getting at the police of Paris are proverbial. The
officials there hold it such an impertinence for a mere civilian to
inform them of anything at all, that the unfortunate pursuer of the
criminal comes at last to believe himself guilty of some crime. I put up
with some hours, badgering at the nearest bureau, and then having no
French but that which is fit for publication, I returned to the Rue de
Morny, getting on the way some glimmer of a plan into my head. I found
Brewer in the same wandering state as I had left him; and although he
listened when I spoke, I felt sure that his mind was in that infantile
condition which can neither beget a plan nor realize one. For himself,
he had a single idea; and upon that he harped _usque ad nauseam_.
"I must send for Jules," he kept muttering; "Jules knew her well; he
was one of her oldest friends; he would help me in a case like this, I
feel sure. He always told her that green diamonds were unlucky; I was
insane to touch the things, positively insane. Jules will come at once,
and I will tell him everything, and he will explain things we do not
understand. Perhaps you will send a letter to him now; Robert is in the
kitchen and he will take it."
"I will send a note with pleasure if you think this man can help us; but
who is he, and why have I not heard of him before?"
"You must have heard of him," he answered testily; "he was always with
us when she lived--always."
"Do you see him often now?"
"Yes, often; he was here a week ago; that is his photograph on the
cabinet there."
The picture was that of a finely built but very typical Frenchman, a man
with a pointed, well-brushed beard, and a neatly curled mustache. The
head was not striking, being cramped above the eyes and bulging behind
the ears; but the smile was very pleasant, and the general effect one of
geniality. I examined the photograph, and then asked casually:
"What is this M. Jules? you don't tell me the rest of his name."
"Jules Galimard. I must have mentioned him to you. He is the editor, or
something, of _Paris et Londres_. We will write for him now, and he will
come over at once."
I sent the letter to please him, asking the man to come across on
important business, and then told him of my plan.
"The first thing to do," said I, "is to go to Raincy, and to ascertain
if the grave of your wife has been tampered with--and when. If you will
stay here and nurse yourself, I will do that at once?"
He seemed to think over the proposition for some minutes; and when he
answered me he was calmer.
"I will come with you," he said; "if--if any one is to look upon her
face again, it shall be me."
I could see that a terrible love gave him strength even for such an
ordeal as this. He began to be meaningly and even alarmingly calm; and
when we set out for Raincy he betrayed no emotion whatever. I will not
describe anything but the result of that never-to-be-forgotten mission,
although the scene haunts my memory to this day. Suffice it to say that
we found indisputable evidence of a raid upon the vault; and discovered
that the necklace had been torn from the body of the woman. When nothing
more was to be learnt, I took my friend back to Paris. There I found a
letter from the office of _Paris et Londres_ saying that Galimard was at
Dieppe but would be with us in the evening.
The mystery had now taken such hold of me that I could not rest. Brewer,
whose calm was rather dangerous than reassuring, seemed strangely
lethargic when he reached his rooms, and began to doze in his arm-chair.
This was the best thing he could have done; but I had no intention of
dozing myself; and when I had wormed from him the address of the shop
where the sham necklace had been purchased--it proved to be in the Rue
Stockholm--I took a fiacre at once and left him to his dreaming. The
place was a poor one, though the taste of a Frenchman was apparent in
the display and arrangement of the few jewels, bronzes, and pictures
which were the stock-in-trade of the dealer. He himself was a lifeless
creature, who listened to me with great patience, and appeared to be
completely astounded when I told him that I desired to have an interview
with the vendor of the necklace and the green diamonds.
"You could not have come at a more fortunate moment," said he, "the
stones were pretty, I confess and I fear to have sold them for much less
than they were worth; but my client will be here in half an hour for his
money, and if you come at that time you can meet him."