He gradually regained the expression of complete satisfaction with himself, and prepared now to show the masterpiece of his work, the contract with Antonio of Modena, the money-lender.
"Here are our financial plans; the usury is high, but there is great risk, so thinks Antonio; egad! perhaps he is right, though it is possible we may pay him. Altogether a most excellent plan, my own work——."
Madame interrupted him, thinking perhaps it was wise that he should not be committed too far that he could not throw the blame on other shoulders. She took advantage of a pause to examine the document with apparent care.
"Yes, excellent, but let us see. Three, seven, twelve, fourteen, twenty-three—here is some mistake. Let us go over it again. Yes, here it is. This is not your accounting. The miserly Lombard would cozen you of your honor if he could but sell it again. Here is an error of near ten thousand livres; let me correct it for you."
And while he stared at her she deftly copied the correct amounts from the slip she held concealed in her hand. She knew the figures were his own, but gave no token.
"I doubt not you would have looked over it more carefully before you signed it, and these matters would have been detected by your own eyes."
"Yes, yes," he replied nervously, reaching out his hand for the paper lest she observe—what her quick eyes had at first seen—that the contract already bore his signature and seal. She gave it him and he replaced it carefully in his breast.
"I will give those careless secretaries a lesson they sorely need," and in this disturbed condition of mind he blustered out of the apartment, forgetting his usual gallantries, which Madame so diplomatically put aside without giving too serious offense.
Jerome leaned against the window-facing, his unseeing eyes resting on the park beyond the little garden at our feet. His brow lowered, not as of a storm, but with the murkiness of a settled and dismal day. Perchance his thoughts wandered with his childhood's sweetheart amid the fertile vales of far away Anjou. Nothing was more distant from him than the gilded furnishings, the frescoes, the marble Venus at his elbow. Beside her table, alone, and abstracted as Jerome, the woman toyed with a dainty fan; her impassive beauty, born of rigid training, betrayed not the inner desolation. Her face was calm and serious enough, the skin lay smooth and glowed with all those delicate tints that women love.
Her quietude reminded me of the slumbering ocean, glassy and tranquil, whose unmarred surface conveyed no hint of sunken ships beneath, of cold dumb faces tossing in the brine, of death-abysses where wrecks abandoned lie.