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 Jägersfontein 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