Old d’Orgemont was now in a state of almost grotesque bewilderment. The pain in his legs, the terror he felt at seeing a human being in the midst of his hoards, could be read in every wrinkle of his face, and yet at the same time his eyes expressed, with unaccustomed fire, a lively emotion excited in him by the presence of his liberator, whose white and rosy cheek invited kisses, and whose velvety black eye sent waves of blood to his heart, so hot that he was much in doubt whether they were signs of life or of death.
“Are you married?” he asked, in a trembling voice.
“No,” she said, smiling.
“I have a little something,” he continued, heaving a sigh, “though I am not so rich as people think for. A young girl like you must love diamonds, trinkets, carriages, money. I’ve got all that to give—after my death. Hey! if you will—”
The old man’s eyes were so shrewd and betrayed such calculation in this ephemeral love that Mademoiselle de Verneuil, as she shook her head in sign of refusal, felt that his desire to marry her was solely to bury his secret in another himself.
“Money!” she said, with a look of scorn which made him satisfied and angry both; “money is nothing to me. You would be three times as rich as you are, if you had all the gold that I have refused—” she stopped suddenly.
“Don’t go near that wall, or—”
“But I hear a voice,” she said; “it echoes through that wall,—a voice that is more to me than all your riches.”
Before the miser could stop her Marie had laid her hand on a small colored engraving of Louis XV. on horseback; to her amazement it turned, and she saw, in a room beneath her, the Marquis de Montauran, who was loading a musket. The opening, hidden by a little panel on which the picture was gummed, seemed to form some opening in the ceiling of the adjoining chamber, which, no doubt, was the bedroom of the royalist general. D’Orgemont closed the opening with much precaution, and looked at the girl sternly.
“Don’t say a word if you love your life. You haven’t thrown your grappling-iron on a worthless building. Do you know that the Marquis de Montauran is worth more than one hundred thousand francs a year from lands which have not yet been confiscated? And I read in the Primidi de l’Ille-et-Vilaine a decree of the Consuls putting an end to confiscation. Ha! ha! you’ll think the Gars a prettier fellow than ever, won’t you? Your eyes are shining like two new louis d’or.”