Free The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc Page B

gorgeous? The chapel has been removed! A whole Gothic chapel collected stone by stone! A whole population of statues captured and replaced by these chaps in stucco! One of the most magnificent specimens of an incomparable artistic period confiscated! The chapel, in short, stolen! Isn’t it immense? Ah, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, what a genius the man is!”
    “You’re allowing yourself to be carried away, M. Beautrelet.”
    “One can’t be carried away too much, monsieur, when one has to do with people like that. Everything above the average deserves our admiration. And this man soars above everything. There is in his flight a wealth of imagination, a force and power, a skill and freedom that send a thrill through me!”
    “Pity he’s dead,” said M. Filleul, with a grin. “He’d have ended by stealing the towers of Notre-Dame.”
    Isidore shrugged his shoulders:
    “Don’t laugh, monsieur. He upsets you, dead though he may be.”
    “I don’t say not, I don’t say not, M. Beautrelet, I confess that I feel a certain excitement now that I am about to set eyes on him—unless, indeed, his friends have taken away the body.”
    “And always admitting,” observed the Comte de Gesvres, “that it was really he who was wounded by my poor niece.”
    “It was he, beyond a doubt, Monsieur le Comte,” declared Beautrelet; “it was he, believe me, who fell in the ruins under the shot fired by Mlle. de Saint-Veran; it was he whom she saw rise and who fell again and dragged himself toward the cloisters to rise again for the last time—this by a miracle which I will explain to you presently—to rise again for the last time and reach this stone shelter—which was to be his tomb.”
    And Beautrelet struck the threshold of the chapel with his stick.
    “Eh? What?” cried M. Filleul, taken aback. “His tomb?—Do you think that that impenetrable hiding-place—”
    “It was here—there,” he repeated.
    “But we searched it.”
    “Badly.”
    “There is no hiding-place here,” protested M. de Gesvres. “I know the chapel.”
    “Yes, there is, Monsieur le Comte. Go to the mayor’s office at Varengeville, where they have collected all the papers that used to be in the old parish of Ambrumesy, and you will learn from those papers, which belong to the eighteenth century, that there is a crypt below the chapel. This crypt doubtless dates back to the Roman chapel, upon the site of which the present one was built.”
    “But how can Lupin have known this detail?” asked M. Filleul.
    “In a very simple manner: because of the works which he had to execute to take away the chapel.”
    “Come, come, M. Beautrelet, you’re exaggerating. He has not taken away the whole chapel. Look, not one of the stones of this top course has been touched.”
    “Obviously, he cast and took away only what had a financial value: the wrought stones, the sculptures, the statuettes, the whole treasure of little columns and carved arches. He did not trouble about the groundwork of the building itself. The foundations remain.”
    “Therefore, M. Beautrelet, Lupin was not able to make his way into the crypt.”
    At that moment, M. de Gesvres, who had been to call a servant, returned with the key of the chapel. He opened the door. The three men entered. After a short examination Beautrelet said:
    “The flag-stones on the ground have been respected, as one might expect. But it is easy to perceive that the high altar is nothing more than a cast. Now, generally, the staircase leading to the crypt opens in front of the high altar and passes under it.”
    “What do you conclude?”
    “I conclude that Lupin discovered the crypt when working at the altar.”
    The count sent for a pickaxe and Beautrelet attacked the altar. The plaster flew to right and left. He pushed the pieces aside as he went on.
    “By Jove!” muttered M. Filleul, “I am eager to know—”
    “So am I,” said Beautrelet, whose face was pale with anguish.
    He hurried his