"No, Mr. Lisimon, it is rather too late in the day for insinuations," answered the attorney, with a sardonic laugh, "you were left in charge of a sum of money; you were told to place it in this room to which no one but yourself had access. The fact is only too clear; you have disgraced the bounty of your patron; you are a thief!"
"A thief!" shrieked Paul. The lawyer's gold-headed bamboo cane stood in one corner of the office; before the clerk, Morisson, could interpose, Paul Lisimon snatched this cane in his convulsed grasp, and bounding upon Silas Craig, struck him across the face.
"Liar!" he cried, "I see the drift of this double-dyed villainy. I am the victim of a plot, so demoniac, that I shudder at the blackness of its treachery. The money has been removed through your agency—removed in order that my name may be branded with a crime. I fear you not, vile schemer; be it yours to tremble, for Heaven looks down upon us, and will defend the innocent."
He rushed from the office, and had left the house before Silas recovered from the terror these words had struck to his guilty heart.
"Pursue him!" he cried, hoarse with fury; "pursue him, and drag him to prison. Yet, stay, it is too late now to overtake him. I know where to find him—at the Villa Moraquitos."
CHAPTER XII.
TRISTAN'S SECRET.
Tristan, the negro, sat in his little chamber, in that quarter of Don Juan's splendid mansion, which was devoted solely to the slaves.
A dark and gloomy shadow rested upon the inky brow of the negro. For some time past the watchful eye of his mother, the old negress, Zarah, had detected her son's unhappiness, but she sought in vain to penetrate the cause. There was much of the savage in the character of this man, and even in his mother he sometimes inspired alarm and suspicion.
His was one of those natures, burning as Africa's skies, created, sometimes, like the venomous serpents of those tropical climes, only to terrify and destroy.