‘And you would have me assist you?’
‘On consideration of paying you one-fifth of whatever possessions might fall to the Marchioness thereupon. Do you agree to this?’
‘Go on,’ was Lachaussée’s reply, ‘and tell me the means.’
‘Ay—the means—there lies the difficulty,’ said Sainte-Croix. ‘What think you of——?’
There was a minute of silence, as they regarded each other with fixed intensity, waiting for the suggestion. Plunged as they were in the dregs of crime, they hesitated to unfold their plan, although they knew there was but one scheme intended. Lachaussée was the first who spoke.
‘Diseases are hereditary,’ said he. ‘The present lieutenant-civil, and his brother the councillor, might follow their father to the cemetery, which keeps the secrets of its occupants even better than the Bastille.’
‘We are agreed,’ observed Gaudin; ‘but some care and patience will be necessary. Of course there is a barrier between the brothers of Madame de Brinvilliers and myself that must for ever prevent our meeting. I will provide the means, and you their application.’
‘I care not if I do,’ answered Lachaussée. ‘But what assurance have I that you will fulfil your part of our intent? Our words are breaths of air—our souls are no longer our own to deal with.’
‘You shall have a fair and written compact on your own part,’ said Gaudin; ‘on mine, I have still your letter after the affair at Milan.’
He rose to depart as he uttered these words; and, when he had quitted the room, Gaudin threw himself into a fauteuil and was for a time wrapt in silence. Then divesting himself of his upper garments, he put on a dingy working-dress, corroded into holes, and black with the smoke and dirt of a laboratory, and passing into an adjoining chamber, fitted up with a chemical apparatus as if for the study of alchemy—the outward pretext which most of the disciples of Tofana adopted to veil their proceedings—he applied himself to work with the most intense application. Certain as the action was of the poisons he had hitherto used, defying all attempts to trace their existence, except of those who had created them, yet they appeared too slow for the projects he was conceiving; and he was now commencing a series of experiments upon the properties of the deadly elements in his possession, before the results of which the achievements of Spara and Tofana fell into insignificance.