“I do not mean in money,” said Camain, watching her. “If you really want this paper—and you ought to want it, for it would be beyond price to a person in your situation—you will be willing to give me in exchange for it what I conceive you value most.”
Valentine changed colour a little. “And what is that?” she asked.
“Your secret,” said the Deputy.
She stared at him, bereft of speech.
“By that I mean—your real name,” explained M. Camain. “You cannot flatter yourself that, by this time, I do not almost know it. Did you not realise when you refused my suit, when you were for once your real self, how you betrayed your origin? That scorn——”
“It was not scorn of you, Monsieur Camain,” she broke in quickly. “You mistook me. I did not resent your offer, but the . . . the grounds on which you based it. However, it is no good going back to that.”
“No,” said the Deputy, looking at her as she stood there by the blazoned and defaced hearth, so plainly dressed, yet clothed with the grace and dignity that never left her. “No, it is no use going back to that. But, to be frank with you, even after your treatment of me the other day in the garden, I meant to renew my suit. I told myself that a man,” involuntarily he drew himself up, “is a man after all, and we are every one equal in these days. But now, I think you are too clever for the wife of a bourgeois, and too innately ci-devant after all, in spite of the life you have lived of late, and your conciergeship and the rest. There is, as the Scripture says, a great gulf fixed between us. I was aiming too high, was I not, Madame la . . . what was the title you used to bear?”
Valentine did not answer, but said very gravely indeed, turning her gaze full on him. “There is indeed a great gulf fixed, Monsieur le Député, between such as you are and such as I. It is filled with blood—and mostly with innocent blood—the blood of my class . . . shed by yours.”
Georges Camain shifted uneasily. “There may have been mistakes,” he muttered, and Valentine wondered for a second over what private and accusing memories of his own his mind went glancing as he looked at the floor. “But come,” he said, recovering himself, “we must keep to business. I can replace you to-morrow, and you can start to-morrow. You observe I do not ask your destination. To get there, wherever it be, you have only to show this paper. It will open any gate to you, for that dissolute scoundrel’s signature is still all-powerful. You have only to tell me, Madame Vidal, what you called yourself in the days before you became Suzon Tessier’s aunt, and it is yours.”
“And,” said Valentine slowly, “if my name should chance not to please you, you would have me arrested at once, before I had an opportunity of using your paper.”