not I who hid them!” responded Mlle Magny impatiently. “It was the first Duc, in the days of Mazarin, who hid a great store of money and jewels at Mirabel. And no one was ever able to find them again. Stolen . . . hidden . . . hidden . . . stolen . . . they make a beautiful couple, and when Monseigneur de Paris has married them and the nuptial mass is finished. . . .”
A long pause. Then the old lady whispering, “Sainte Vierge, how tired I am!” clasped her hands on her breast. The Abbé got up and bent over her. Her eyes were closed, and he heard her murmur indistinctly, “Mater amabilis, virgo prudentissima, grant me soon to see my sainted lady!”
To be on the brink of so important, so long-lost a secret—too late for it to be of use . . . yet, after all, perhaps, not too late—and to be baffled at the very moment of discovery! When such an extraordinary coincidence had brought him, of all men in the world, to this bedside, for its possessor to take the secret unrevealed out of life with her! It was hard!
Yet, as M. Chassin was a priest, he put away regret, and tried to think only of the needs of this soul about to pass through the great door. Mlle Magny had had the last rites, that he knew. Was the moment come for the commendatory prayer? He slipped his fingers round her wrist. But the pulse, though feeble and irregular, was not at the last flutter. And slowly, as if his touch had roused her, the old lady opened her eyes again. The look in them was different; meeting it, the priest knew that she was no longer wandering in the mists of nearly thirty years ago. She was back in the present; so much so, indeed, that she was capable of astonishment at seeing this unknown man in peasant’s dress bending over her—more, of resenting it.
“Who are you, Monsieur, and . . . what . . . what are you doing here?” she demanded, in a tone which, if scarcely more than the frailest of whispers, yet conveyed some of that masterfulness which was written on her face.
“I am a priest, Madame, an insermenté, and M. Charlot, your neighbour, brought me here, at your niece’s desire.”
“Clotilde always . . . takes too much upon herself,” said the thread of a voice in a tone of displeasure. “I have already had . . . the Last Sacraments.”
“Yes, Madame,” assented M. Chassin, realising that Mlle Magny’s recovery of her senses was not advancing him much. “It was not for the purpose of administering you that I came.”
Her look asked him what his purpose was.
“Because, my daughter, you were speaking of—Mirabel.”
“Nonsense!” retorted Mlle Magny quite sharply. “I am not in . . . in the habit of . . . discussing my past life with strangers!”
“You have been ill, Madame,” said the priest gently. “And has not Mirabel something to do with your present life too?” Then, being a man who knew how to wait, he took his seat beside her again, and exercised this power.
“Have I been wandering?” asked the dying woman, suddenly turning her eyes upon him.
“A little, yes.”
“I have been very ill . . . and they tell me I shall not get better. . . . Is that so, Father?”
“It is what I have been given to understand, my daughter. But you have made your peace with God.”
“Yes,” said she. “But there is something else that I desire to do . . . before I die . . . yet God knows how I am to do it.”
The priest bent forward. “God does indeed know, my daughter, and it was doubtless He Who sent me here to-day. You wish, do you not, to give into the hands of the Duc de Trélan a paper now in your possession concerning a treasure which has been for many years hidden in his château of Mirabel.”
A flush rose in the ivory face. “I talked of that?”
“Of that—and of a wedding at Mirabel.”
Mlle Magny put a trembling hand over her eyes. “Indeed, you must forgive me! . . . All these years I cannot forget it—the lights, the jewels, the beauty of that couple, my lady’s happiness. For I was tirewoman, mon père, during many years, to the Duchesse Eléonore, the Dowager Duchess, a saint on earth. God rest her soul! She only lived for a short time after her son’s marriage.”
The priest nodded, as one who knows already. “I, too, have cause to say ‘God rest her!’—And the paper you spoke of?”
“What paper?” demanded the old voice, suddenly suspicious again.
“The paper containing the secret of the hoard hidden at Mirabel in Mazarin’s time, which has come into your hands, Madame, and which you were wishing that you could have given to the Duc de Trélan on his wedding day so many years ago.”
There was silence from the bed. “Well,” said the old lady at last, with more animation, “if I told you . . . all that . . . I may as well tell you the rest.”
And slowly, with pauses for breath, she told him how the Duc de Trélan of Mazarin’s day, implicated in the rebellion of the Fronde, and not knowing which party would finally triumph in that kaleidoscope of civil conflict, buried gold and jewels in his once-royal château of Mirabel and made a memorandum of the hiding-place for his son, then away fighting with Condé. The Duc himself had to flee before Mazarin’s vengeance and died in exile; Mirabel was for a space confiscated, and when the next Duc was reinstated the treasure could not be found. The memorandum of its hiding-place had been stolen by the late Duc’s steward, who offered to sell it for a large sum to the successor to the title. Suspecting a hoax the latter refused; yet, as was not difficult for a great noble in those days, he procured a lettre de cachet against the offender, who dragged out the rest of his life in prison. Before his arrest, however, he had placed the memorandum in the hands of a friend; but the friend never took any steps to utilise it, and merely preserved it in such a manner that it was to all intents and purposes lost—for he pasted the parchment, face downwards, against the back of his wife’s portrait. Probably, said the old lady, he was waiting till the man who had confided it to him came out of prison; but this the steward never did, and a short time before his death in captivity his friend, Mlle Magny’s great-great-grandfather, died too. And there, gummed against the picture of the flourishing bourgeoise dame of Louis XIII.’s day, the parchment had remained for nearly a hundred and fifty years, till, some two years ago, on Cousin François’ death, the portrait had come into Mlle Magny’s possession, and the old lady herself, in examining it, had lighted on the parchment, and realised of what irony Fate was capable.
“Ah, if only I had had it earlier!” she concluded wistfully. “What a gift to have made my sainted lady, who was sometimes pressed for money for her charities, since, like all the Saint-Chamans, both her husband and her son spent their means royally. And now these two years that I have had it it is useless! Where is the Duc de Trélan now? Alas, we know where his wife, the Duchesse Valentine, went! . . . And what is Mirabel to-day?”
“No, Madame,” said the priest, as the voice ceased exhausted, “two years ago you could have done nothing. But to-day, as Heaven has so ordered it, you can give that paper to the Duc de Trélan, if you wish.”
She turned her sunken eyes on him again. The lustre was already fading.
“And how is that, if you please?”
“Because I am . . . in close touch with the Duc. If you commit the paper to me he shall have it before—before I am many days older.”
“But—if he is still alive—he
