"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 dumbfounded, 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 woefully 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 2nd 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 anathematise 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 odour 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