“Accept my offer, and see if it be really meant or not. I know you to be of a dogged, stubborn nature. I know, to my cost, that once you take a crotchet into your head, nothing can displace it. I once appealed to your love—a passion I neither believe in nor comprehend—I wept at your feet, and you turned a deaf ear to my entreaties. Silence! Hear me!
“I never cared for you, and now I hate you! I appealed to your love—now I appeal to your interest. Surely—surely—surely you will not refuse a fortune. Surely your hate of me cannot lead you to vindictively mar my brilliant prospects. Perhaps it is folly to admit that a few injurious words from you could turn his highness against me; but I am frank with you.
“Of course, I might laugh your accusations to scorn, but the prince might—well, your words might hurt me, for that man is as proud as Lucifer, although his absurd infatuation, which he calls love, induces him to lay all his earthly possessions, all his ancient prejudices, at the feet of a ‘singing-woman.’ With ten thousand pounds you will be rich; you will begin a new life, be happy with some meek-spirited, pretty Griselda, who may fly to fulfil your slightest wish or command.”
She had spoken so rapidly that, as she paused, her breath came in quick gasps. For the first time since she had entered on this conversation, her heart beat violently.
“You think I would sell my soul for ten thousand pounds,” Leonardo Gilardoni slowly said—“my soul and yours, my wife? I decline.”
“You do not mean it! You say so that I may double the price!” exclaimed the signora. “No. Speak. What sum do you ask to fall in with my wishes?”
Gilardoni looked fixedly into the luminous eyes so eagerly fastened upon him, as if he would read the innermost thoughts they so partially revealed.
“You know me well enough, you say, to be aware that once I have made up my mind to what is right, nothing will turn me from it,” he coldly replied. “I say distinctly that you are my wife, by all the laws of Heaven and man, and while I live you cannot marry any other. I refuse to comply with your infamous desire. I have said it. Had I the means, I would go to South America, to seek your brother, who could prove our marriage. What have you done with the book you stole?”
A sudden thought seized Lucia Guiscardini. Paul Desfrayne had surely discovered her previous marriage, and was about to send Gilardoni in search of the Padre Josef. If so, she was probably ruined. Her plan had been to rid herself by bribery of Gilardoni, and then to make a proposition to Paul Desfrayne, making it a matter of mutual interest to keep the second marriage a dead secret.
Only too well she knew that once Gilardoni had said no, it would be impossible to persuade him to say yes. If these two men—he and his master—combined against her, adieu to her dazzling hopes. She had trusted that Gilardoni’s evident poverty would render him a willing accomplice to her nefarious scheme, and now she was furious at her failure.