“Whatever you may hear, my dear mother, pray remember, that if you allow
a single word to be torn from you, by joy or by sorrow, you cause the
ruin of an honest man, who has put us all under such obligations as can
never be fully discharged. I have been fortunate enough to establish a
correspondence between Jacques and us.”
“O Dionysia!”
“I have written to him, and I have received his answer. Here it is.”
The marchioness was almost beside herself, and eagerly snatched at the
letter. But, as she read on, it was fearful to see how the blood receded
from her face, how her eyes grew dim, her lips turned pale, and at last
her breath failed to come. The letter slipped from her trembling hands;
she sank into a chair, and said, stammering,--
“It is no use to struggle any longer: we are lost!”
There was something grand in Dionysia’s gesture and the admirable accent
of her voice, as she said,--
“Why don’t you say at once, my mother, that Jacques is an incendiary and
an assassin?”
Raising her head with an air of dauntless energy, with trembling lips,
and fierce glances full of wrath and disdain, she added,--
“And do I really remain the only one to defend him,--him, who, in his
days of prosperity, had so many friends? Well, so be it!”
Naturally, M. Folgat had been less deeply moved than either the
marchioness or M. de Chandore; and hence he was also the first to
recover his calmness.
“We shall be two, madam, at all events,” he said; “for I should never
forgive myself, if I allowed myself to be influenced by that letter.
It would be inexcusable, since I know by experience what your heart
has told you instinctively. Imprisonment has horrors which affect the
strongest and stoutest of minds. The days in prison are interminable,
and the nights have nameless terrors. The innocent man in his lonely
cell feels as if he were becoming guilty, as the man of soundest
intellect would begin to doubt himself in a madhouse”--