Then the doctor came. M. le Comte had been fortunate in securing him—had with impulsive generosity promised him ample payment—and then brought him along without delay. He praised Mlle. de Cambray for her kindness to the patient, asked a few questions as to how the accident had occurred, and was satisfied that M. de Marmont had slipped on the tiled floor and then struck his head against the door. He was not likely to examine the purple bruises on the patient's throat: his business began and ended with a broken leg to mend. As M. le Comte de Cambray assured him that M. de Marmont was very wealthy, the worthy doctor most readily offered his patient the hospitality of his own house until complete recovery.
He then superintended the lifting of the sick man on to the stretcher, and having taken final leave of M. le Comte, Mademoiselle and all those concerned and given his instructions to the bearers, he was the first to leave the house.
M. le Comte, pleasantly conscious of Christian duty toward an enemy nobly fulfilled, nodded curtly to de Marmont, whom he hated with all his heart, and then turned his back on an exceedingly unpleasant scene, fervently wishing that it had never occurred in his house, and equally fervently thankful that the accident had not more fateful consequences. He retired to his smoking-room, calling to St. Genis and to Crystal to follow him.
But Crystal did not go at once. She stood in the dark corridor—quite still—watching the stretcher bearers in their careful, silent work, little guessing on what a filmy thread her whole destiny was hanging at this moment. The Fates were spinning, spinning, spinning and she did not know it. Had the solemn silence which hung so ominously in the twilight not been broken till after the sick man had been borne away, the whole of Crystal's future would have been shaped differently.
But as with the rain at Waterloo, God had need of a tool for the furtherance of His will and it was Maurice de St. Genis whom He chose—Maurice who with his own words set the final seal to his destiny.
De Marmont's eyes as he was being carried over the threshold dwelt upon the graceful form of Crystal—clad all in white—all womanliness and gentleness now—her sweet face only faintly distinguishable in the gloom. St. Genis, whose nerves were still jarred with all that he had gone through to-day and irritated by Crystal's assiduity beside the sick man, resented that last look of farewell which de Marmont dared to throw upon the woman whom he loved. An ungenerous impulse caused him to try and aim a last moral blow at his enemy:
"Come, Crystal," he said coldly, "the man has been better looked after than he deserves. But for your father's interference I should have wrung his neck like the cowardly brute that he was."
And with the masterful air of a man who has both right and privilege on his side, he put his arm round Crystal's waist and tried to draw her away, and as he did so he whispered a tender: "Come, Crystal!" in her ear.
De Marmont—who at this moment was taking a last fond look at the girl he loved, and was busy the while making plans for a happy future wherein Crystal would play the chief rôle and would console him for all disappointments by the magnitude of her love—de Marmont was brought back from the land of dreams by the tender whisperings of his rival. His own helplessness sent a flood of jealous wrath surging up to his brain. The wild hatred which he had always felt for St. Genis ever since that awful humiliation which he had suffered at Brestalou, now blinded him to everything save to the fact that here was a rival who was gloating over his helplessness—a man who twice already had humiliated him before Crystal de Cambray—a man who had every advantage of caste and of community of sympathy! a man therefore who must be in his turn irretrievably crushed in the sight of the woman whom he still hoped to win!
De Marmont had no definite idea as to what he meant to do. Perhaps, just at this moment, the pale, intangible shadow of Reason had lifted up one corner of the veil that hid the truth from before his eyes—the absolute and naked fact that Crystal de Cambray was not destined for him. She would never marry him—never. The Empire of France was no more—the Emperor was a fugitive. To St. Genis and his caste belonged the future—and the turn had come for the adherents of the fallen Emperor to sink into obscurity or to go into exile.