Three days after this notion came to me, there appeared in the Paris Figaro a little bit of news which I never should have heard in the ordinary way, but which I read greedily enough under the circumstances. I say that I read it; I should say, perhaps, that I made it out word by word, and chuckled over it like a boy reading his first love-letter. The fact was that Sir Nicolas himself had written it, first in English, then in French; and had sent it along to the paper by one of the writing chaps he used to meet in the Hotel de Lille. It was a short paragraph, but more than enough for our purposes; and as it is necessary to my story, I print the English of it here;
"A MISSING MAZARIN
"Sir Nicolas Steele, whose devotion to every form of le sport has won him the affections of many Parisians, is likely, they say, shortly to offer for sale here a famous white diamond, the history of which is scarcely less eventful than that of the old 'Sancy' stone itself. This is one of the diamonds which Diana of Poictiers wore—one of those stones which Mazarin took, with the 'Mirror of Portugal,' from the Duke of Epernon, to whom they had been sold by Henrietta of France. It will be remembered that the old 'Sancy' stone was stolen in the year 1791. Sir Nicolas Steele has documentary evidence, dating back to the earliest years of the century, that the diamond he now possesses was one of those taken by the mob who sacked the Treasury in the first days of the Revolution. Apart from its most interesting historical associations, the gem is a very fine one, weighing nearly fifty carats, and possessing a lustre only to be found in the choicest treasures of the Brazilian mines."
This is what Sir Nicolas wrote after he had given twenty-four hours' thought to the matter; and I will say that there never was a man who entered into a thing more willingly, or with more spirit.
"Hildebrand," said he, "’tis the idea of a life-time, no less. There's only one corner which frightens me. Where will you be getting your diamond if King takes the bait?"
"You leave that to me, sir," said I. "It's queer if you can't buy a fifty-carat stone somewhere in Paris. And you won't buy it in your own name either. If King came to hear, not only that you were selling diamonds, but buying them, we should have to put up the shutters."
"Ye see far," cried he; "there's few men would have planned it. Yet even now 'tis not all straight to me. You must remember that we've no credit in the place, and who'll be lending us fifty-carat diamonds on our bare word? That's what you're wanting."
"I'm not wanting any thing of the kind, sir," said I. "If this Yankee tumbles into the trap—and the documents we're preparing would deceive the devil himself—he'll either buy or not buy. If he buys, he'll write you a check there and then. You'll have the money in twenty-four hours, and your jeweller will have this. It's strange if he won't wait that long when he hears the tale you can tell, ay, better than any man in Paris."
He began to be convinced at this, and for six days and nights we worked like niggers, getting old musty parchments from Castle Rath, my master's place in Ireland, and writing into them a sham account of the supposed Mazarin diamond. By the time we'd done, we had a pile which would have satisfied all the judges in France; and then only did we communicate with Benjamin King, who was staying at the Hotel Windsor. He replied, by a messenger, saying that he was sorry to miss the opportunity of seeing so famous a diamond, but business compelled him to leave Paris for Vienna that very evening, and he might not be in the city again for three months.
"Was there ever such luck on God's earth?" cried Sir Nicolas, when he heard this tale. "That we should lose him by twenty-four hours! It's enough to make a man shoot himself."
"No such thing, sir," said I. "What is to be done in Paris is to be done in Vienna. For the matter of that, you'll buy the diamond easier there than here, and there won't be so much risk in taking another name. What's to stop you telling King that you also must be in Vienna, say, in a fortnight's time, and will call upon him there? The job's worth the money, any way."
Well, he thought it over, and fourteen days after this talk we found ourselves in the Austrian capital, and at Lobmeyr's shop, as I have told you. Why Sir Nicolas took the name of the Comte de Laon, you know now. To put it short, we meant to buy the diamond in that name, and to sell it in our own. The count was the intimate friend of Horowitz, a well-known man in Vienna, though then at Rome. We had got letters of introduction from Horowitz, who spent part of his summer holidays in Paris, and we had altered them so that they no longer recommended Nicolas Steele but the Comte de Laon. And armed with these, we began our dealings with Lobmeyr, as you have seen; and it remained only to sell the Golden Fleece to Benjamin King as the identical diamond which Mazarin bought from the Duke of Epernon..
You may ask, and naturally, what were the risks we ran in this, the greatest job of all our lives. I can tell you almost in a word. The risks were two—viz. (1) That Lobmeyr might find out that we were buying a diamond in Vienna under a sham name, and refuse to let the stone go out of his possession; (2) that King might learn the same thing, and decline to believe in our documents. In either case, a visit from the police would be likely to follow the discovery. It is to be understood, therefore, that we preferred private apartments in the Singer Strasse to the publicity of an hotel, and that we had no intention of remaining more than forty-eight hours in Vienna if luck would play the game for us in that time.
It was to our private apartments that we turned when we left the shop in the Graben, and began to see how we stood. So far, fortune was with us. We had found the diamond, we had caught our man. If all went well we might settle with King on the following evening, and be off to Paris again by the midnight train. And if it turned out like that, I knew that we should carry away five thousand apiece as the profit of the venture.
You may imagine that the next twenty-four hours were anxious ones. I went up to the Métropole in the morning and engaged a room in the name of Sir Nicolas Steele, saying that he would dine at the hotel with his friend, the Comte de Laon. That carried out our idea of having two names in Vienna. If any one said to Sir Nicolas, "You are not the Comte de Laon," he had only to point to me; if any one said to me, "You are not Sir Nicolas Steele," I had only to point to my master. For the matter of that, a big hotel is far too busy looking after its guests to be bothering about the identity of people; and no one asked me a single question when I booked the room and ordered the dinner, to which we had already invited Benjamin King, the bacon merchant.
Punctually at seven o'clock that night the three of us sat down to table—Sir Nicolas, King, and myself. My master was clever enough to monopolize most of the conversation, giving it out that I spoke French only; and lucky for me, King's daughter, a pretty little thing I'd seen in Paris, had gone off to the theatre with some friends. I could hold my tongue in her absence, and leave Sir Nicolas to do the blarney, which he did in his own pretty way. King was a big, coarse-made man with a rasping Chicago accent on him; and I think that he was not a little pleased at sitting down with a real Irish baronet and a supposed French count—for, in all our dealings with him, I took the name Comte de Laon, while at the jeweller's I was always Sir Nicolas Steele. Any way, he was civil enough, and when the cigars were lit, he began to talk about the diamond.
"Wal," cried he, "and where's your bull's eye, Sir Nicolas. Out with it! Eh, count,"—and here he turned to me,—"you've heard of the marble he carries in his pocket? Belonged to one of the French queens, he says—Dianner or somebody."
"Indeed, and there's no doubt of it," says my master. "Diana of Poictiers wore it upon her own pretty neck, and so did our own Henrietta. There's no more question that it's a Mazarin than that I am Nicolas Steele of Castle Rath. Ye'll have read the papers, Mr. King?"
"That's so; me and my daughter read 'em yesterday. We haven't got the dust off our hands yet."
"Then you know all I can tell you?"
"I guess we do, and I'm waiting to see your bit of glass. What was the figure you named?"
"One hundred thousand dollars," said my master, without turning a hair. "I'd sooner throw it into the Danube than sell it for less."
"It's a long price," said King, looking serious.