“I came, expecting to deal with M. de Thaller alone. I have been compelled, by what has happened, to alter my intentions. It is to you that I must speak first.”
Mme. de Thaller continued to manifest the same tranquil assurance; but she stood up. Feeling the approach of the storm, she wished to be up, and ready to meet it.
“You honor me,” she said with an ironical smile.
There was, henceforth, no human power capable of turning Marius de Tregars from the object he had in view.
“It is to you I shall speak,” he repeated, “because, after you have heard me, you may perhaps judge that it is your interest to join me in endeavoring to obtain from your husband what I ask, what I demand, what I must have.”
With an air of surprise marvelously well simulated, if it was not real, the baroness was looking at him.
“My father,” he proceeded to say, “the Marquis de Tregars, was once rich: he had several millions. And yet when I had the misfortune of losing him, three years ago, he was so thoroughly ruined, that to relieve the scruples of his honor, and to make his death easier, I gave up to his creditors all I had in the world. What had become of my father’s fortune? What filter had been administered to him to induce him to launch into hazardous speculations,—he an old Breton gentleman, full, even to absurdity, of the most obstinate prejudices of the nobility? That’s what I wished to ascertain.
“And now, madame, I—have ascertained.”
She was a strong-minded woman, the Baroness de Thaller. She had had so many adventures in her life, she had walked on the very edge of so many precipices, concealed so many anxieties, that danger was, as it were, her element, and that, at the decisive moment of an almost desperate game, she could remain smiling like those old gamblers whose face never betrays their terrible emotion at the moment when they risk their last stake. Not a muscle of her face moved; and it was with the most imperturbable calm that she said,
“Go on, I am listening: it must be quite interesting.”