"Tell me all you know," she said. "I will not interrupt you; but do not pity me."
"The Baron Giraud did my old patron a great wrong when, in his selfish fear, he placed that great fortune in his care. For it appears that no man may trust himself where money is concerned, and no other has a right to tempt him. So far as we can judge, the Vicomte had all that he could want. I know he had more money than he cared to spend. You are aware, Madame, that I had the greatest respect and admiration for your husband. During the months that we were in daily intercourse he endeared himself to me by a hundred kindnesses, a thousand tokens of what I hope was affection."
Madame nodded briefly, and I hastened on with my narrative, for suspense is the keenest arrow in the quiver of human suffering.
"What I have learnt has been gathered with the greatest care from many sources, and what I now tell you is neither known nor suspected by any other on earth. If you so desire, the knowledge can well remain the property of two persons only."
"My friend," Madame said on the impulse of the kindest heart in the world, "I think your strength lies in the depth of your thought for others."
"The Vicomte was tempted," I went on. "He had in his nature a latent love of money. The same is in many natures, but the majority have never the opportunity of gratifying it. He did what ninety-nine out of a hundred other men would have done—what I think I should have done myself. He yielded. He had at hand a ready tool and the cleverest aid in Charles Miste, who actually carried the money, but for some reason—possibly because he was unable to forge the necessary signatures—could not obtain the cash for the drafts without the Vicomte's assistance. Unconsciously, I repeatedly prevented their meeting, and thus frustrated the design."
All the while Madame sat and looked down into the valley. Her self-command was infinite, for she must have had a thousand questions to ask.
"It was, I think, my patron's intention to go to the New World with his great wealth and there begin life afresh—this, however, is one of the details that must ever remain incomprehensible. Possibly when the temptation gripped him he ceased to reflect at all—else he must assuredly have recognised all that he was sacrificing for the mere possession of money that he could never live to spend. Men usually pay too high a price for their desires. In order to carry out his scheme he conceived and accomplished—with a strange cunning, which develops, I am told, after crime—a clever ruse."
Madame turned and looked at me for a moment.
"We must think of him, Madame," I explained, "as one suffering from a mental disease; for the love of money in its acute stages is nothing else, lacking, as it assuredly does, common sense. The most singular part of his mental condition was the rapidity and skill with which he turned events to his own advantage, and seized each opportunity for the furtherance of his ends. The Baron Giraud died at the Hôtel Clericy—here was a chance. The Vicomte, with a cunning which was surely unnatural—you remember his strange behaviour at that time, how he locked himself in his study for hours together—took therefore the Baron's body from the coffin, dressed it in his own garments, placed in the clothing his own purse, and pocket-book, and cast the body into the Seine. I have had the coffin that we laid in Père la Chaise exhumed and opened. It contained only old books from the upper shelves in the study in the Rue des Palmiers. The Vicomte must have packed it thus when he took the Baron's body—doubtless with Miste's clever aid—and threw it into the river for us to find and identify."