CHAPTER XI.

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE.

“Stand back, all of you!” said Nick Carter, facing them all. “This man on the floor is my prisoner, and the one among you who attempts to interfere with me now will be sorry.”

The constable and his assistants halted; they hesitated; and then Mr. Remsen pressed forward toward Nick.

“Mr. Carter; Mr. Carter,” he expostulated, “you are going beyond your authority. You had no right to strike Mr. Dinwiddie. You——”

“One moment, Mr. Remsen. As an officer, I admit that I had not the right to strike him in the way I did; but as a man, I not only had every right, but it was my duty. He was defaming a good woman, and doing it in a shamefaced manner that long ago earned him the title he bears—for, in spite of all that he has said, this man is none other than that very Bare-Faced Jimmy he has been talking about.”

“Oh, you brute! you brute!” cried Lenore, striving in vain to escape from her mother’s detaining arms.

Nick merely glanced at her and murmured, “Poor girl!” then he went on, addressing the constable, who was still reluctant to perform what he considered to be his duty.

“Where did you come from?” Nick demanded of the constable.

“From the village,” was the reply. “What is that to you, anyhow?”

“You’ll find out what it is to me presently. Who asked you to come here?”

“Mr. Dinwiddie; that man there, whom you knocked down.”

“And why did he ask you to come here?”

“He told me that there had been a jewel robbery, and that if I was on hand at this hour to-night, he would expose the thief, and that I would get the credit for the arrest.”

“I thought so. He had it all nicely arranged, didn’t he? When did he tell you all that, Mr. Constable?”

“He didn’t tell me; he sent a letter by one of the grooms. But he had seen me yesterday, and had given me an inkling of what would happen. And, now stand aside. I want that woman whom he has exposed. I arrest her——”

“No you don’t. You won’t arrest anybody, Mr. Constable, unless you have a warrant, which I doubt; and if you have one, and serve it, you’ll regret it as long as you live. You won’t make any arrest, just now, unless I direct it, constable.”

“Who says I won’t? I——”

“I say so. I have the warrant, constable.”

Duryea was beginning to move; he was recovering, and quick as a flash Nick Carter bent forward and snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

“Stop that!” cried Mr. Remsen. “You cannot arrest that man, here, Mr. Carter. He is my guest, and you are my guest. You are abusing my hospitality—and besides, just now you said that no arrests could be made without a warrant.”

Nick Carter turned to Remsen. He spoke quietly, and in a kindly tone.

“Mr. Remsen,” he said, “I have two duties to perform here to-night, and one of them, in particular, supersedes all the claims that might be made in the name of hospitality. I am doing you a very great service in saving your daughter from that man on the floor. He is as vile a scoundrel as ever went unhung. He is Bare-Faced Jimmy, the crook. He is the one who stole the jewels, and who has now tried to charge it upon a defenseless woman, after slandering her in a way that requires no answer. That is why I told Miss Nightingale not to speak.”

“But the warrant! The warrant!”

“I have it here, Mr. Remsen. I secured it before I left the city. It is a bench warrant and is good anywhere in the State—and it directs me to arrest and to hold the person of James Duryea, alias Ledger Dinwiddie, alias Bare-Faced Jimmy. Here it is. Are you satisfied as to that?”

“Y-yes,” reluctantly.

“He told you partly the truth, regarding that scene in the summerhouse, for he did have the face to defy me. I offered him his liberty, if he would leave the country, after returning the jewels he had stolen; but he dared to face me; to claim that he could prove that he is Ledger Dinwiddie, and not James Duryea.”

“But where is the man who was in the library with Miss——”

“He is there, on the floor,” replied Nick, interrupting. “The real circumstance is just the reverse from the manner in which he told it. It was Miss Nightingale who found him there. He had the jewels in his possession at the time. She saw them. That was why she asked me to come out here to-day—and even you will admit that I came here upon her invitation.”

“Why doesn’t Nick Carter produce the jewels, since he seems to know so much about them, Mr. Remsen?” said a drawling voice from the floor, and then they saw the fallen Ledger Dinwiddie draw himself to a sitting posture, and attempt to caress his bruised jaw with his manacled hands.

“I think I can do that, too, now that the time has come,” said the detective, smiling. He turned to Mrs. Remsen, who had drawn nearer to Nan, and was now holding her by the hand.

“Madam,” he said, “I wish to ask you a few questions about the interior arrangements of your house; that is, about some of its ornamentations. Will you indulge me?”

“Certainly, sir. What is it?”

“Before I ask the questions, I wish to make a statement for all of you—and if you interrupt me, Jimmy, before I have done, I’ll put a gag in your mouth. Just for the present, I am running this show, as you may have noticed.”

“Go ahead and run it, then. I’ll do my talking after you have exploded all your detective theories.”

“The statement is this, Mrs. Remsen. During that scene in the summerhouse with this scoundrel on the floor, I suspected that he had concealed the jewels somewhere in the rooms of Miss Nightingale, because he openly threatened to accuse her of the theft.

“This evening after dinner, I came to these rooms and examined them, hoping that I could find where he had concealed them; but I was unable to do that. I was not able to discover anything that suggested a possible hiding place, although I searched as thoroughly as I could do so, while I was here. When I went out, I encountered the real thief in the hall, waiting for me.

“He ran away before I was able to stop him. He descended the stairs ahead of me; but a very few minutes later, he was missing from the rooms downstairs, and I suspected that he had returned here. I concluded, in fact, that when I saw him in the hall, as I went out of these rooms, he had not followed me there, and did not suspect that I was there, but had gone there on some errand of his own.

“Now, madam, I have not been inside of these rooms since then, but nevertheless, in the short time that I have been here, I have discovered a certain change in the ornamentation of this particular room. I will ask you to look carefully about you, and to tell me if you perceive any change. Please do so. You, also, Nan.”

Both women turned.

Everybody else in the room, including the nonplused constable and his three men, did the same.

Nan and Mrs. Remsen searched with care, using their eyes, but both of them presently shook their heads negatively.

“I see no change, Mr. Carter,” said Mrs. Remsen.

“And you, Nan, do you observe none?” asked Nick.

“No,” she replied. “What do you mean, Mr. Carter?”

He did not reply to her. He turned again to Mrs. Remsen.

“Madam,” he said, “I have observed, since I have been a guest in your home, that you are evidently a collector of rare vases. Is that true?”

“Oh, yes; it has always been a hobby with me. But what——”

“In every room that I have entered, there are several, but in no case have I noticed two that are exactly alike. Will you tell me if you have two vases that are precisely alike, now in your possession?”

“Why, yes, now that you speak of it, there are two. But——”

“Pardon me, but will you tell me where those two vases are, now? Is one of them in this room? Don’t squirm, Jimmy. We’re getting warm, I know, but please remember that you are not to interrupt unless you want a gag in your mouth. Madam, is one of the vases, of which you have two alike, now in this room?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Remsen pointed toward a vase that stood upon a bracket in one corner of the room. “That one, there.”

“Precisely. That is what I thought. Now, will you tell us where the other one—the one that is precisely like this one—is located at the present moment, to the best of your knowledge?”

“Why, it is—or at least it should be—in the parlor of the red suite.”

“And who occupies the so-called red suite of rooms?”

“Mr. Dinwiddie.”

“Precisely. Now, I have not been inside the rooms occupied by Mr. Dinwiddie, as you call Jimmy, here, so I will have to ask you if those two vases are, in reality, precisely alike. Has not one of them been broken at some time, and mended?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, one has. That is how I came to have two of them. A gentleman who was staying with us last fall broke one, but he found another like it and sent it to me after I had had the broken one mended.”

“Madam, did it happen that the gentleman referred to was Mr. Dinwiddie?”

“Y-yes, sir. It was Mr. Dinwiddie.”

“And the broken vase—the one that was mended, I mean—is it now in the red suite that has been occupied by Mr. Dinwiddie since last Thursday?”

“No,” she replied, pleased that he had asked the first question that called for a negative reply. “I thought he deserved to have the good one in his room, so I put it there, and brought the one that had been broken to this room. There it is now.”

“Thank you. Will you be so good as to examine it more closely, so that you can assure yourself that you have made no mistake in regard to it?”

Mrs. Remsen crossed the room to the vase. She raised it from the bracket, and held it in her hand for a moment. Then she exclaimed:

“Why, this is strange. This is the vase that was broken; and there is something inside of it that I never noticed before.”

“The jewels, Mrs. Remsen, by any chance?”

“No. Something white. It looks like plaster of Paris. It——”

“Permit me to see for myself,” said Nick, interrupting her, and he crossed the room with quick strides.

One glance into the vase was enough. He saw what had been done, on the instant.

He raised his eyes to Mrs. Remsen; he turned as if to speak to her; and then, as if it were done entirely by accident, he permitted the vase to fall crashing to the floor, where, weakened as it was by reason of a former fracture, it fell apart into three pieces. The diamond necklace that was Lenore Remsen’s property was exposed to view.