“The count has said nothing about his daughter.”
“Well, then, my saddest presentiments have been fulfilled. Unhappy girl!
I did what I could to keep her in the right way. But she fell, step by
step, and finally so low, that one day, when a ray of sense fell upon
her mind, she went and killed herself.”
It was done. Sarah had overcome the last hesitation which Daniel still
felt. Now he was in the right temper to meet cunning with cunning. He
answered in an admirably-feigned tone of indifference,--
“Ah!”
Then, encouraged by the joyous surprise he read in Sarah’s face, he went
on,--
“This expedition has cost me dear. Count Ville-Handry has just informed
me that he has lost his whole fortune. I am in the same category.”
“What! You are”--
“Ruined. Yes; that is to say, I have been robbed,--robbed of every cent
I ever had. On the eve of my departure, I intrusted a hundred thousand
dollars, all I ever possessed, to M. de Brevan, with orders to hold
it at Miss Henrietta’s disposal. He found it easier to appropriate the
whole to himself. So, you see, I am reduced to my pittance of pay as a
lieutenant. That is not much.”
Sarah looked at Daniel with perfect amazement. In any other man, this
prodigious confidence in a friend would have appeared to her the extreme
of human folly; in Daniel, she thought it was sublime.
“Is that the reason why they have arrested M. de Brevan?” she asked.
Daniel had not heard of his arrest.
“What!” he said. “Maxime”--
“Was arrested last night, and is kept in close confinement.”
However well prepared Daniel was by Papa Ravinet’s account, he could
never have hoped to manage the conversation as well as chance did. He
replied,--
“It cannot be for having robbed me. M. de Brevan must have been arrested
for having attempted to murder me.”
The lioness who has just been robbed of her whelps does not rise with
greater fury in her eyes than Sarah did when she heard these words.
“What!” she cried aloud. “He has dared touch you!”
“Not personally; oh, no! But he hired for the base purpose a wretched
felon, who was caught, and has confessed everything. I see that the
order to apprehend my friend Maxime must have reached here before me,
although it left Saigon some time later than I did.”
Might not M. de Brevan be as cowardly as Crochard when he saw that all
was lost? This idea, one would think, would have made Sarah tremble. But
it never occurred to her.
“Ah, the wretch!” she repeated. “The scoundrel, the rascal!”
And, sitting down by Daniel, she asked him to tell her all the details
of these attempted assassinations, from which he had escaped only by a
miracle.
The Countess Sarah, in fact, never doubted for a moment but that Daniel
was as madly in love with her as Planix, as Malgat, and Kergrist, and
all the others, had been, she had become so accustomed to find her
beauty irresistible and all powerful. How could it ever have occurred to
her, that this man, the very first whom she loved sincerely, should also
be the first and the only one to escape from her snares? She was taken
in, besides, by the double mirage of love and of absence.
During the last two years she had so often evoked the image of Daniel,
she had so constantly lived with him in her thoughts, that she mistook
the illusion of her desires for the reality, and was no longer able to
distinguish between the phantom of her dreams and the real person.
In the meantime he entertained her by describing to her his actual
position, lamenting over the treachery by which he had been ruined, and
adding how hard he would find it at thirty to begin the world anew.
And she, generally, so clearsighted, was not surprised to find that
this man, who had been disinterestedness itself, should all of a sudden
deplore his losses so bitterly, and value money so highly.
“Why do you not marry a rich woman?” she suddenly asked him.
He replied with a perfection of affected candor which he would not have
suspected to be in his power the day before,--
“What? Do you--you, Sarah--give me such advice?”
He said it so naturally, and with such an air of aggrieved surprise,
that she was delighted and carried away by it, as if he had made her the
most passionate avowal.
“You love me? Do you really, really love me?”
The sound of a key turning in the door interrupted them.