"Little I care for life, God knows!" sighed Gabrielle, wearily, "were it not for----"
"Yes, yes, I know--the cherubs. About this will. It takes me by surprise, and you have deigned to trust me. Your pardon if I seem importunate. I scarcely dare to ask, and yet----"
"What its conditions are to be? There need be no secret as to that, since my mind is quite made up. I intend to leave my dear father's fortune to my mother, in trust for Victor and Camille?"
Here was a sledge-hammer blow, full on the skull from behind. For an instant Pharamond was paralysed, then his nimble brain took in at a glance all the facets of this new and unpalatable situation. Who could have put into her shapely head so inconvenient an idea as this? Good heavens! If this project were not nipped in the bud, averted somehow, the future position of the three brothers promised to be a worse one even than in the days of the maréchal! What the abbé had himself looked upon as a scarcely possible contingency, and had held up to the marquis as a mere red rag to inflame his feelings withal against his wife, might at any moment become an actual and horrible fact. At this rate the marquis and his brothers were not to be provided for at all; were in the event of this woman's death to be pitched out like so much lumber! And she had the brazen presumption to expatiate on their lot to their faces. A gush of ungovernable rage, bubbled into the abbé's brain, an unreasoning whirl, which he vainly endeavoured to master, as he strode up and down the room.
"Clovis is to be made a laughing stock to suit your malice!" he exclaimed hotly, as he turned on the astonished marquise. "He counts for nothing, although your lawful husband. No wonder if you have earned his hate as well as mine, since you are resolved to pour insult upon insult."
"Of course, he will have his allowance secured until his death," Gabrielle explained, with a red spot of annoyance on either cheek.
"Pah! Allowance! Allowance! A pittance for a schoolboy, which he will fling back into your face. If he takes my advice, he will toss your paltry allowance in your lap, since you treat him like a baby! A dole of charity to a beggar!"
The marquise sat dumb with hands before her, petrified, for this man would fain persuade her that she was a monster of iniquity, on the threshold of a stupendous crime, and yet she knew that her motives were of the purest.
He continued, biting his nails in his agitation, addressing his words half to himself and half to her.
"Women's horizon is so circumscribed, her stream of thought so narrow, that if left alone she rarely avoids being ungenerous. Engrossed by trivialities how can it be otherwise? Sly, too, and double-faced. So this is your sublime forgiveness, in which I was fool enough to trust! A trap! A trick! You were but biding your time, till you could injure me by maltreatment of my brother. My first duty is to him, and I tell you plainly, that never with my consent will he accept your ignoble terms."