The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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СКАЧАТЬ nay, contrived and arranged an interview with so charming a person as yourself, I could possibly be so deficient in foresight as to allow that interview to be disturbed at the expiration of one quarter of an hour? No; Monsieur Don Giovanni will not be here to-night.”

      Again she tries to speak, but the words refuse to come. He continues, as though he interpreted what she wants to say,—

      “You will naturally ask what other engagement detains him from his lovely wife’s society? Well, it is, as I think, a supper at the Trois Frères. As there are ladies invited, the party will no doubt break up early; and you will, I dare say, see Monsieur de Lancy by four or five o’clock in the morning.”

      She tries to resume her employment with the paper-knife, but this time she tears the leaves to pieces in her endeavours to cut them. Her anguish and her womanhood get the better of her pride and her power of endurance. She crumples the book in her clenched hands, and throws it into the fire. Her visitor smiles. His blows are beginning to tell.

      For a few minutes there is silence. Presently he takes out his cigar-case.

      “I need scarcely ask permission, madame. All these opera-singers smoke, and no doubt you are indulgent to the weakness of our dear Elvino?”

      “Monsieur de Lancy is a gentleman, and would not presume to smoke in a lady’s presence. Once more, monsieur, be good enough to say how much money you require of me to ensure your silence?”

      “Nay, madame,” he replies, as he bends over the wood fire, and lights his cigar by the blaze of the burning book, “there is no occasion for such desperate haste. You are really surprisingly superior to the ordinary weakness of your sex. Setting apart your courage, self-endurance, and determination, which are positively wonderful, you are so entirely deficient in curiosity.”

      She looks at him with a glance which seems to say she scorns to ask him what he means by this.

      “You say your maid, Finette, or the good priest, Monsieur Pérot, must have betrayed your confidence. Suppose it was from neither of those persons I received my information?”

      “There is no other source, monsieur, from which you could obtain it.”

      “Nay, madame, reflect. Is there no other person whose vanity may have prompted him to reveal this secret? Do you think it, madame, so utterly improbable that Monsieur de Lancy himself may have been tempted to boast over his wine of his conquest of the heiress of all the De Cevennes?”

      “It is a base falsehood, monsieur, which you are uttering.”

      “Nay, madame, I make no assertion. I am only putting a case. Suppose at a supper at the Maison Dorée, amongst his comrades of the Opera and his admirers of the stalls—to say nothing of the coryphées, who, somehow or other, contrive to find a place at these recherché little banquets—suppose our friend, Don Giovanni, imprudently ventures some allusion to a lady of rank and fortune whom his melodious voice or his dark eyes have captivated? This little party is not, perhaps, satisfied with an allusion; it requires facts; it is incredulous; it lays heavy odds that Elvino cannot name the lady; and in the end the whole story is told, and the health of Valerie de Cevennes is drunk in Cliquot’s finest brand of champagne. Suppose this, madame, and you may, perhaps, guess whence I got my information.”

      Throughout this speech Valerie has sat facing him, with her eyes fixed in a strange and ghastly stare. Once she lifts her hand to her throat, as if to save herself from choking; and when the schemer has finished speaking she slides heavily from her chair, and falls on her knees upon the Persian hearth-rug, with her small hands convulsively clasped about her heart. But she is not insensible, and she never takes her eyes from his face. She is a woman who neither weeps nor faints—she suffers.

      “I am here, madame,” the lounger continues—and now she listens to him eagerly; “I am here for two purposes. To help myself before all things; to help you afterwards, if I can. I have had to use a rough scalpel, madame, but I may not be an unskilful physician. You love this tenor singer very deeply; you must do so; since for his sake you were willing to brave the contempt of that which you also love very much—the world—the great world in which you move.”

      “I did love him, monsieur—O God! how deeply, how madly, how blindly! Nay, it is not to such an eye as yours that I would reveal the secrets of my heart and mind. Enough, I loved him! But for the man who could degrade the name of the woman who had sacrificed so much for his sake, and hold the sacrifice so lightly—for the man who could make that woman’s name a jest among the companions of a tavern, Valerie de Cevennes has but one sentiment, and that is—contempt.”

      “I admire your spirit, madame; but then, remember, the subject can scarcely be so easily dismissed. A husband is not to be shaken off so lightly; and is it likely that Monsieur de Lancy will readily resign a marriage which, as a speculation, is so brilliantly advantageous? Perhaps you do not know that it has been, ever since his début, his design to sell his handsome face to the highest bidder; that he has—pardon me, madame—been for two years on the look-out for an heiress possessed of more gold than discrimination, whom a few pretty namby-pamby speeches selected from the librettos of the operas he is familiar with would captivate and subdue.”

      The haughty spirit is bent to the very dust. This girl, truth itself, never for a moment questions the words which are breaking her heart. There is something too painfully probable in this bitter humiliation.

      “Oh, what have I done,” she cries, “what have I done, that the golden dream of my life should be broken by such an awakening as this?”

      “Madame, I have told you that I wish, if I can, to help you. I pretend no disinterested or Utopian generosity. You are rich, and can afford to pay me for my services. There are only three persons who, besides yourself, were witnesses of or concerned in this marriage—Father Pérot, Finette, and Monsieur de Lancy. The priest and the maid-servant may be silenced; and for Don Giovanni—we will talk of him to-morrow. Stay, has he any letters of yours in his possession?”

      “He returns my letters one by one as he receives them,” she mutters.

      “Good—it is so easy to retract what one has said; but so difficult to deny one’s handwriting.”

      “The De Cevennes do not lie, monsieur!”

      “Do they not? What, madame, have you acted no lies, though you may not have spoken them? Have you never lied with your face, when you have worn a look of calm indifference, while the mental effort with which you stopped the violent beating of your heart produced a dull physical torture in your breast; when, in the crowded opera-house, you heard his step upon the stage? Wasted lies, madame; wasted torture; for your idol was not worth them. Your god laughed at your worship, because he was a false god, and the attributes for which you worshipped him—truth, loyalty, and genius, such as man never before possessed—were not his, but the offspring of your own imagination, with which you invested him, because you were in love with his handsome face. Bah! madame, after all, you were only the fool of a chiselled profile and a melodious voice. You are not the first of your sex so fooled; Heaven forbid you should be the last!”

      “You have shown me why I should hate this man; show me my revenge, if you wish to serve me. My countrywomen do not forgive. O Gaston de Lancy, to have been the slave of your every word; the blind idolator of your every glance; to have given so much; and, as my reward, to reap only your contempt!”

      There are no tears in her eyes as she says this in a hoarse voice. Perhaps long years hence she may come to weep over this wild infatuation—now, her despair is too bitter for tears.

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