When at last he turned round he turned his whole body. The muscles of his neck were numbed still his knees shook, and his face was ghastly. Monsieur Louis of the Café Montmartre, brave of tongue and gallant of bearing, had suddenly collapsed. Monsieur Louis, the drug-sodden degenerate of a family whose nobles had made gay the scaffolds of the Place de la République, cowered in his place.
It was the worst upon which he looked with chattering teeth, but without surprise. The door of the inner room was open, and upon the threshold stood Toquet, small, dark, and saturnine—Toquet, with something which glittered in his hand, so that Monsieur Louis, already the prey of a diseased and ghastly imagination, felt the pain of the bullet in his heart. On an easy-chair by the fireside Henri de Bergillac was lounging, with a queer smile upon his lips.
"My friend," he said quietly, though the scorn which underlay his words seemed to bite the air, "you have solved for us a double problem: first, how to account for the absence of our host; and secondly, how to open that very formidable-looking safe. You will be so good as to place upon the table that document which you hold in your hands."
For a single second Monsieur Louis hesitated. Some lingering vestige of a courage, purely hereditary, showed him in one lightning-like flash how at least he might carry with him to a swift grave some vestige of his ruined self-respect. A traitor to his old friends, he might keep faith with the new. He had time to destroy. Even the agonies of death might last long enough to complete the task. But the impulse was only momentary. He shuddered afresh at the thought that he might have yielded to it. He threw it upon the table.
The Vicomte rose to his feet, glanced through the closely written page with something of the same excitement which had inspired its recent possessor, and carefully buttoned it up in his breast-pocket. Then he turned once more to the man who stood before them broken and trembling.
"Louis," he said, "you are the first traitor whom our society has hatched. I look upon you with curiosity as a thing I once called my friend. What imbecility prompted you to this?"
Monsieur Louis found nerve to shrug his shoulders.
"A million francs!" he answered.
"Heavens, but what folly!" the Vicomte murmured. "Did we not all know that a German was in Paris who offered a million, or two million francs for the missing page of that treaty? Do you think that he was not watched day and night? Bah! I have no patience to talk of this. What have you done with our host?"
"Arrested him for—Flossie! He is in a ditch half-way to Norwich."