“I must be mad,” he muttered; “this business is too much for my brain. Why did you lead me into it, Bourdon? Are you the Devil, that you must always prompt me to some new mischief?”
“You shall ask me that next week, my friend, when you are the master of this house. Get that paper there, and come away: unless you want to stop till your maiden aunts make their appearance.”
Launcelot Darrell snatched up the paper which Eleanor had put upon the chair by the cabinet. He was going to thrust it into his breast-pocket, when the Frenchman took it away from him.
“You don’t particularly want to keep that document; or to drop it anywhere about the garden; do you? We’ll burn it, if it’s all the same to you, and save them all trouble at—what you call your law court—Common doctors, Proctor’s Commons, eh?”
Monsieur Bourdon had put his bull’s-eye lantern in his coat-pocket, after looking for spies amongst the evergreens. He now produced a box of fusees, and setting one of them alight, watched it fizz and sparkle for a moment, and then held it beneath the corner of the document in his left hand.
The paper was slow to catch fire, and Monsieur Bourdon had occasion to light another fusee before he succeeded in doing more than scorching it. But it blazed up by-and-by, and by the light of the blaze Eleanor Monckton saw the eager faces of the two men. Launcelot Darrel’s livid countenance was almost like that of a man who looks on at an assassination. The commercial traveller watched the slow burning of the document with a smile upon his face—a smile of triumph, as it seemed to Eleanor Monckton.
“V’là!” he exclaimed, as the paper dropped, a frail sheet of tinder, from his hand, and fluttered slowly to the ground. “V’là!” he cried, stamping upon the feathery grey ashes; “so much for that; and now our little scheme of to-night is safe, I fancy, my friend.”
Launcelot Darrell drew a long breath.
“Thank God, it’s over,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t go through this business again for twenty fortunes.”
Eleanor, still crouching upon the damp grass close against the wall, waited for the two men to go away. She waited, with her hands clasped upon her heart; thinking of her triumph.