“How stupid of you to whistle so loudly,” she murmured with restrained anger….”I told you not to come. What do you want?”
“Oh, let’s go up,” said Maxime, surprised at this reception. “I will tell you upstairs. You will catch cold.”
But as he made a step forward she held him back, and he then noticed that she was horribly pale. She was bowed with a silent terror. Her petticoats, the lace of her underclothing, hung down like tragic shreds upon her trembling skin.
He examined her with growing astonishment.
“What is the matter? Are you ill?”
And he instinctively raised his eyes and glanced through the glass panes of the conservatory at the dressing-room window where he had seen a light.
“But there’s a man in your room!” he said suddenly.
“No, no, it’s not true,” she stammered, beseeching, distraught.
“Nonsense, my dear, I can see his shadow.”
Then for a minute they remained there, face to face, not knowing what to say to one another. Renée’s teeth chattered with terror, and it seemed to her as if buckets of ice-cold water were being emptied over her feet. Maxime felt more annoyance than he would have believed; but he still remained sufficiently self-possessed to reflect, and to say to himself that the opportunity was a good one for breaking off the connection.
“You won’t make me believe that Céleste wears a top-coat,” he continued. “If the panes of the conservatory were not so thick, I might perhaps recognize the gentleman.”
She pushed him deeper into the gloom of the foliage, and seized with a growing terror, said, with clasped hands:
“I beg of you, Maxime…”
But all the young man’s mischievousness was aroused, a fierce sense of mischief that sought for vengeance. He was too puny to find relief in anger. Spite compressed his lips; and instead of striking her, as he had at first felt inclined to do, he rejoined in a strident voice:
“You should have told me, I should not have come to disturb you…. That happens every day, that people cease to care for one another. I was beginning to have enough of it myself…. Come, don’t grow impatient. I’ll let you go up again; but not till you have told me the gentleman’s name….”
“Never, never!” murmured Renée, forcing back her tears.
“It’s not to challenge him, I only want to know…. His name, tell me his name quick, and I’ll go.”
He was holding her by the wrists, and he looked at her with his bad laugh. And she struggled, distraught, refusing to open her lips, lest the name he asked for should escape her.
“We shall make a noise soon, then you’ll be much better off. What are you afraid of? we’re good friends, are we not?… I want to know who replaces me, that’s fair enough…. Wait, let me assist you. It’s M. de Mussy, whose grief has touched you?”
She made no reply. She bowed her head beneath this interrogatory.
“Not M. de Mussy?… The Duc de Rozan, then? Really, not he either?… The Comte de Chibray, perhaps? Not even he?…”
He stopped, he reflected.
“The deuce, I can’t think of anybody…. It’s not my father, after what you told me?…”
Renée started as though she had been scalded, and in a hollow voice:
“No, you know he no longer comes to me. I wouldn’t allow it, it would be too degrading.”
“Then who is it?”
And he tightened his grasp on her wrists. The poor woman struggled a few moments longer.
“Oh, Maxime, if you knew!… And yet I can’t tell you….”
Then, conquered, crushed, looking up with affright at the light in the window:
“It’s M. de Saffré,” she stammered, in a whisper.
Maxime, who had taken delight in his cruel pastime, turned extremely pale before the avowal which he had evoked with so much persistence. He was vexed at the unexpected pain this man’s name caused him. He violently threw back Renée’s wrists, came up to her, and said to her, full in her face, between his clenched teeth:
“Look here, if you want to know, you’re a…!”
He said the word. And he was going away when she ran to him, sobbing, and took him in her arms, murmured words of love, appeals for forgiveness, swore to him that she still adored him, and that she would explain everything the next day. But he disengaged himself, and banging the door of the conservatory, replied:
“No, no, no! it’s over, I’ve had quite enough of it.”
She remained crushed. She watched him crossing the garden. The trees of the hothouse seemed to be revolving around her. Then she slowly dragged her bare feet over the gravel of the pathways, climbed up the steps, her skin mottled with cold, she still more tragical in the disorder of her lace. Upstairs she said, in reply to her husband’s questions, who was waiting for her, that she thought she would have been able to remember where a little memorandum-book might have got to that had been lost since the morning. And when she was in bed, she suddenly felt an infinite despair when she reflected that she ought to have told Maxime that his father had come in with her and had followed her into her room in order to discuss some question of money with her.
It was on the next day that Saccard resolved to bring to a head the Charonne business. His wife belonged to him; he had just felt her soft and inert in his hands, like a yielding thing. On the other hand the direction of the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène was about to be settled, and it was necessary that Renée should be despoiled before the news got about of the approaching expropriation. Saccard put an artist’s love of his work into this piece of business; he watched his plan ripen with devotion, and set his traps with the refinement of a sportsman who takes a special pride in catching his game skilfully. In his case it was simply the self-satisfaction of an expert gamester, of a man who derives a peculiar enjoyment from ill-gotten gains; he wanted to buy the ground for an old song, and was quite ready then to give his wife a hundred thousand francs’ worth of jewellery in the exaltation of his triumph. The simplest operations became complicated so soon as he touched them, and turned into sombre tragedies: he became impassioned, he would have beaten his father for a five-franc piece. And afterwards he scattered his gold right royally.
But before obtaining from Renée the transfer of her share of the property, he had the foresight to go and sound Larsonneau as to the blackmailing intentions of which he suspected him. His intuition saved him in this instance. The expropriation-agent had thought, on his side, that the fruit was now ripe and waiting to be gathered. When Saccard walked into the office in the Rue de Rivoli, he found his associate overcome, giving signs of the most violent despair.
“Ah, my friend,” murmured the latter, taking hold of Saccard’s hands, “we are lost…. I was just coming round to you to discuss the best way out of this terrible scrape….”
While he wrung his hands, and endeavoured to force out a sob, Saccard noticed that he had been engaged in signing letters as he came in, and that the signatures were admirably firm. He looked at him calmly, and then said:
“Pooh, what has happened, then?”
But the other did not at once reply; he threw himself into his armchair in front of his writing-table, and there, with his elbows on his blotting-book, and his forehead between his hands, furiously shook his head. At last, in a hollow voice:
“They have stolen the ledger, I tell you….”
And he told how one of his clerks, a rogue fit for the galleys, had abstracted a large number of books, among which was the famous ledger. The worst of it was that the thief had realized to what use he could put that book, and would only sell it back again for a hundred