murmured the young woman, enchanted.
And she seized him round the waist and kissed him.
“Wait,” she said, “I want the curl-papers at once…. Rozan is in my room, I will fetch him.”
But he held her back, and kissing her on the shoulders in his turn:
“You know what commission I asked of you?”
“Why, yes, you great stupid, that’s all right.”
She returned with Rozan. Larsonneau was dressed more correctly than the duc, with better fitting gloves and a more artistic cravat. They touched hands carelessly, and talked of the races of two days ago, when one of their friends had run a loser. Laure stamped about.
“Come, never mind all that, dear,” she said to Rozan, “that big Lar has the money, you know. We had better settle up.”
Larsonneau pretended to remember.
“Ah yes, that’s true,” he said, “I have the amount…. But how much wiser you would have been to have listened to me, old chap! To think that those rogues asked me fifty per cent!… However, I agreed at any cost, as you told me it made no difference….”
Laure d’Aurigny had procured some bill-stamps during the day. But when it became a question of a pen and ink, she looked at the two men with an air of consternation, doubting whether she had such a thing in the house. She proposed to go and look in the kitchen, when Larsonneau took from his pocket, the same pocket that held the bag of sweets, two marvels, a silver penholder that screwed out, and an inkstand in steel and ebony, finished off as daintily as a trinket. And as Rozan sat down:
“Make the notes payable to me,” he said. “You understand, I did not want to compromise you. We will settle that between ourselves…. Six bills of twenty-five thousand francs each, see?”
Laure counted the “curl-papers” at a corner of the table. Rozan did not even see them. When he had signed, and raised his head, they had disappeared in the woman’s pocket. But she came up to him and kissed him on both cheeks, to his evident delight. Larsonneau watched them philosophically as he folded up the bills, and replaced the inkstand and the penholder in his pocket.
Laure was still with her arms round Rozan’s neck, when Aristide Saccard lifted a corner of the door-hangings.
“That’s right, don’t mind me,” he said, laughing.
The duc blushed. But Laure went and shook hands with the financier, exchanging a wink of intelligence with him. She was radiant.
“It’s done, my dear,” she said; “I warned you. You’re not very angry with me?”
Saccard shrugged his shoulders goodnaturedly. He pulled back the hangings, and standing aside to allow Laure and the duc to pass, he cried, in the shrill voice of a gentleman-usher:
“Monsieur the duc, madame the duchesse!”
This joke met with immense success. The newspapers printed it the next day, giving Laure d’Aurigny’s real name, and describing the two men by very transparent initials. The rupture between Aristide Saccard and the fat Laure caused even more stir than their pretended love-affair.
Meantime Saccard had let fall the curtain on the burst of merriment which his joke had occasioned in the drawingroom.
“Eh! what a jolly girl!” he said, turning towards Larsonneau. “And so depraved!… It’s you, you scamp, who get the most out of all this. What are you to have?”
But the other protested with smiles; and he pulled down his shirt-cuffs, which were working up. At last he came and sat down near the door on a couch to which Saccard beckoned him.
“Come here, I don’t want to confess you, dash it all!… Let’s get to serious business, old chap. I had a long conversation with my wife tonight…. It’s all settled.”
“Does she consent to transfer her share?” asked Larsonneau.
“Yes, but it was not without difficulty…. Women are so obstinate! You know my wife had promised an old aunt of hers not to sell out. There was no end to her scruples…. Fortunately I had a quite unanswerable story ready.”
He rose to light a cigar at the candle which Laure had left on the table, and returning stretched himself at his ease on the couch:
“I told my wife,” he continued, “that you were completely ruined…. You had gambled on the Bourse, squandered your money on women, plunged into stupid speculations: in short, you are on the verge of a terrible bankruptcy…. I even gave her to understand that I did not consider you perfectly honest…. Then I explained to her that the Charonne affair would be swallowed up in your disaster, and that the best would be for her to accept the proposal you had made me to release her and to buy her out for an old song, no doubt.”
“I don’t call that clever,” muttered the expropriation-agent. “Do you think your wife will believe such rot as that?”
Saccard smiled. He was in one of his communicative moods.
“How simple you are, my dear fellow!” he resumed. “What has the plot of the story to do with it? It’s the details, the gesture, the accent: that’s the thing. Call Rozan over, and I bet I persuade him it’s broad daylight. And my wife has no more brains than Rozan…. I gave her a glimpse of an abyss. She has no suspicion of the coming expropriation. As she expressed surprise that in the midst of a catastrophe you could think of taking over a still heavier burden, I told her that she no doubt stood in the way of some ugly trick you proposed to play your creditors…. At last I advised her to consent, as being the only way to avoid being mixed up in endless lawsuits and to get some money out of her property.”
Larsonneau still thought the story rather clumsy. His own method was less melodramatic; each of his transactions was put together and unravelled with all the elegance of a drawingroom comedy.
“Personally, I should have thought of something different,” he said. “However, everyone has his own system…. So all we have to do now is to pay up.”
“It is on this subject,” replied Saccard, “that I want to come to an arrangement with you…. Tomorrow I will take the deed of transfer to my wife, and she will only have to send you this deed in order to receive the stipulated price…. I prefer to avoid an interview.”
As a matter of fact he had never allowed Larsonneau to visit them on an intimate footing. He did not ask him to the house, and he went with him to Renée whenever it was absolutely necessary for the two partners to meet; that had happened thrice. He nearly always acted with a power of attorney from his wife, not seeing the use of allowing her to know too much of his affairs.
He opened his pocketbook, and added:
“Here are the two hundred thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by my wife; you must give her those in payment, and add one hundred thousand francs, which I will bring you tomorrow in the course of the morning…. I am ruining myself, my dear friend. This business will cost me a fortune.”
“But that,” observed the expropriation-agent, “will only make three hundred thousand francs…. Will the receipt be made out for that sum?”
“A receipt for three hundred thousand francs!” rejoined Saccard, laughing. “I should think so! We should be in a nice fix later on. According to our inventories, the property must now be estimated at two million five hundred thousand francs. The receipt will be for half that, of course.”
“Your wife will never sign it.”
“Yes, she will. I tell you it’s all right…. Why, I told her it was your first condition. You hold a pistol to our heads, don’t you see, with your bankruptcy? And it is in that matter that I pretended to doubt your honesty and accused you of wishing to cheat your creditors…. Do you think my wife understands a word of all that?”
Larsonneau shook his head and murmured:
“No matter, you