“Yes, that is all over Maxime de Brevan.”
And, according to the different phases of the account, he would laugh
bitterly and almost convulsively, or he would break out in imprecations.
“What a trick!” he murmured with an accent of deep horror, “what an
infernal snare!”
At another point he turned deadly pale, and almost trembled on his
chair, as if he were feeling ill, and were about to fall. Henrietta was
telling him at that moment, from Daniel’s recital, the circumstances
under which M. de Kergrist had died, and Malgat had disappeared,--that
poor cashier who had left such an immense deficit behind; who had been
condemned to penal servitude; and whose body the police believed to have
found in a wood near Paris. But, as soon as the young girl had finished,
he rose all of a sudden, and cried out in a formidable voice,--
“I have them now, the wretches! this time I have them!”
And, breaking down under his excessive excitement, he sank into his
chair, covering his face with his hands. Henrietta was dumfounded; she
looked aghast at the old man, in whom she now placed all her hopes.
Already, the night before, she had had some suspicions that he was not
what he seemed to be; now she was quite sure. But who was he? She had
nothing to go by to solve that riddle.
This only she thought she saw clearly, that Sarah Brandon, Mrs. Brian,
and M. Thomas Elgin, as well as M. de Brevan, had at some time or other
come in personal contact with Papa Ravinet, and that he hated them
mortally.
“Unless he should try to deceive me,” she thought, not having quite
shaken off all doubts yet.
He had in the meantime mastered his emotion, and was regaining all his
composure.
“Let no one, henceforth, deny Providence!” he exclaimed. “Ah! fools and
idiots alone can do so. M. de Brevan had every reason to think that this
house would keep the secret of his crime as safe as the grave, and so
brought you here. And here it happens I must chance to live,--of all
men, I,--and he remain unaware of it! By a kind of miracle we are
brought together under the same roof,--you, the daughter of Count
Ville-Handry, and I, one after the other, without knowing each other;
and, at the very moment when this Brevan is about to triumph, Providence
brings us together, and this meeting ruins him!”
His voice betrayed his fierce joy at approaching vengeance; his sallow
cheeks flushed up; and his eyes shone brilliantly.
“For M. de Brevan was triumphing last night. The woman Chevassat,
his confederate, had watched you, and noticing your preparations for
committing suicide, had said to him, ‘Rejoice! at last we shall get rid
of her.’”