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Updated: June 4, 2025
"Yes; she is at home. But Mlle. Delhasse?" But the old woman would not be hurried. She asked again: "What concern have you, sir, with Marie Delhasse?" I looked her in the face as I answered plainly: "To save her from the Duke of Saint-Maclou." "And from her own mother, sir?" "Yes, above all from her own mother."
Then I looked at Marie: and I found in her words no more a rebuke, but a provocation aye, a challenge to prove that by no possibility could I, who loved her so passionately, ever have been so much as half in love with any woman in the whole world, the Duchess of Saint-Maclou not excepted.
Yet, when I had been married to Marie Delhasse some six months, I received a letter from my good friend Gustave de Berensac, informing me of his approaching union with Mme. de Saint-Maclou. And, if I might judge from Gustave's letter, he repudiated utterly the idea which I have ventured to suggest concerning the duchess.
And then, before I had time to form any plan, or to do anything save stand staring in the middle of the floor, the latch was lifted again, the door opened, and in walked the Duke of Saint-Maclou! As a Man Possessed. The dim light served no further than to show that a man was there. "Well, Jean, what news?" asked the duke, drawing the door close behind him. "I am not Jean," said I.
"Whatever you please," returned Mme. de Saint-Maclou; and without another word, without another glance, either at me or at the necklace, she walked out of the stable, and left me alone with the necklace and the ass. The ass had given one start as the necklace fell with a thud on the floor; but he was old and wise, and soon fell again to his meal. I sat drumming my heels against the corn bin.
I think that at first the Duke of Saint-Maclou could not, as the old saying goes, believe his eyes. He sat looking from me to the red box, and from the red box back to my face. Then he stretched out a slow, wavering hand and drew the box nearer to him till it rested in the circle of his spread-out arm and directly under his poring gaze.
"And if you will search," said I, "some six yards behind the wall, and maybe a quarter of a mile from the road, I fancy you will find Bontet; he may have crawled a little way, but could not far, I think. As for the Duke of Saint-Maclou, gentlemen, his body was in the carriage that passed you this moment.
"But I mean about their history." "They are bought, I suppose bought and sold." "I happen to know just a little about such things. In fact, I have a book at home in which there is a picture of this necklace. It is known as the Cardinal's Necklace. The stones were collected by Cardinal Armand de Saint-Maclou, Archbishop of Caen, some thirty years ago.
He spared me the remark, but not the sly leer that had been made to accompany it. He clapped his heels to his horse's side and trotted off in the direction from which he had come. So that he could swear he had been to Avranches, he was satisfied! Marie Delhasse turned to me, asking haughtily: "What is the meaning of this? What do you know of the Duke or Duchess of Saint-Maclou?"
Be that as it might, I had no time to press my host further at that moment; for I heard a step behind me and a voice I knew saying: "Bontet, who is this gentleman?" I turned. In the doorway of the room stood the Duke of Saint-Maclou. He was in the same dress as when he had parted from me; he was dusty, his face was pale, and the skin had made bags under his eyes.
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