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Updated: June 7, 2025
Renine resumed, pausing between each proposal: "I'll double my offer.... I'll treble it.... Hang it all, Pancaldi, you're unreasonable!... I suppose you want me to make it a round sum? All right: a hundred thousand francs." He held out his hand as if there was no doubt that they would give him the clasp.
Hortense did not even need to turn round to feel assured that Renine was coming to her assistance and that it was his inexplicable appearance that was causing the dealer such dismay. As a matter of fact, a slender figure stole through a heap of easy chairs and sofas: and Renine came forward with a tranquil step. "Who are you?" repeated Pancaldi. "Where do you come from?"
Pancaldi, in fact, was grey in the face; his lips were trembling and a drop of saliva was trickling from their corners. It was easy to guess the seething turmoil of his whole being, shaken by conflicting emotions, by the clash between greed and fear.
Pancaldi gave way to a moment of despair. He folded his hands and mumbled a few words of entreaty. Then, defeated and suddenly resigned, he said, more distinctly: "You insist?..." "I do. You must give it to me." "Yes, yes, I must ... I agree." "Speak!" she ordered, more harshly still. "Speak, no, but write: I will write my secret.... And that will be the end of me."
The bullet struck the mirror of a cheval-glass. But Pancaldi collapsed and began to groan, as though he were wounded. Hortense made a great effort not to lose her composure: "Renine warned me," she reflected. "The man's a play-actor. He has kept the envelope. He has kept his revolver, I won't be taken in by him."
Two of my friends are posted on the road by which he returns and, in the absence of instructions to the contrary, will kidnap him as he passes." Madame Pancaldi lost her head at once: "My son! Oh, please, please ... not that!... I swear that I know nothing. My husband would never consent to confide in me." Renine continued: "Next point.
"So you see, on the one hand, what you are risking," he said to the Pancaldi pair. "The disappearance of your child ... and prison: prison for certain, since there is the book with its confessions. And now, on the other hand, here's my offer: twenty thousand francs if you hand over the clasp immediately, this minute. Remember, it isn't worth three louis." No reply. Madame Pancaldi was crying.
Hortense now saw a prosperous-looking shop which occupied almost the whole of the ground-floor and whose windows, blazing with electric light, displayed a huddled array of old furniture and antiquities. She stood there for a few seconds, gazing at it absently. A sign-board bore the words "The Mercury," together with the name of the owner of the shop, "Pancaldi."
I got out of that window, which is just over the signboard and beside the niche containing the little god. And I exchanged the two, that is to say, I took the statue which was outside and put the one which Pancaldi gave me in its place." "But doesn't that one lean forward?" "No, no more than the others do, on the shelf in his shop. But Pancaldi is not an artist.
"No," said the dealer, who seemed to recover all his energy at the very thought of restoring the clasp. "And you, Madame Pancaldi." "I don't know where it is," the wife declared. "Very well. Then let us come to deeds. Madame Pancaldi, you have a son of seven whom you love with all your heart. This is Thursday and, as on every Thursday, your little boy is to come home alone from his aunt's.
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