"Trusted!" she exclaimed, "trusted, did you say! Father, I ask you, by all your knowledge of mankind, by your faith in Nature's surest index, the human countenance, is that the man to trust any living creature?"
She pointed to Silas Craig as she spoke, and the lawyer quailed beneath her flashing glance. For a moment he shrank back abashed and powerless to reply to the Spanish girl's disdainful words, then recovering himself with an effort, he said, with an assumed air of meekness:
"Donna Camillia is pleased to be severe. We lawyers are certainly not over-trusting in our fellowmen—we are too often deceived; but I thought I might safely trust the protege of Don Juan Moraquitos. I did not think to find him a thief."
"Liar!" cried Paul Lisimon. "Dastard! You know I am no thief. You know the base plot which has been planned by you—from what motive I know not—for my destruction. Now that all is past, I can see the base scheme from the very first. Your pretended confidence; your desire that I should remain alone in your office to receive a sum of money which you might have as well received yourself; your trusting me with the key—of which, you say, you have no duplicate; your simulated friendship, and your affected surprise this morning upon missing the casket containing the money; all these are so many links in the chain of infamy which you have woven around me; but through all I defy you. The money was taken from your office by no common robber; it was removed either by you, or by an agent in your employ."
"The inner office has but one door," answered Silas Craig, "you possessed the only key of that door—nay, more, the mulatto boy, Marcus, slept in the clerk's office, and must have heard anybody who attempted to enter the inner chamber. Heaven knows," ejaculated Silas, sanctimoniously, "how much grief I feel at the discovery of such baseness in the adopted son of my most respected client; but guilt such as yours must not, for the benefit of society, go unpunished."
Paul Lisimon turned from him with a gesture of loathing, and addressed himself to Don Juan.
"You hear this man," he said, "you hear him, yet you surely do not believe one word he utters. Look in his face, on which 'liar' is branded in unmistakable characters, by the hand of Heaven; and then believe him if you can. My patron, my benefactor, friend and protector of my otherwise friendless youth, has any one action of my life, since I have shared the shelter of your roof, and eaten your bread—has any one action of my life given you reason to believe me the base and guilty wretch this man would have you think me? Speak, I implore you."
The young Mexican waited with clasped hands for Don Juan's reply. The Spaniard coldly averted his face. It seemed as if he, too, shrank from meeting that noble countenance.
"Circumstances speak too plainly, Mr. Lisimon," he said; "facts are incontrovertible—they are stronger than words, and they force me to believe."
"They force you to believe that the man who has been reared beneath your own protection, has been guilty of an act worthy of one of the swell-mobsmen, or experienced burglars of New Orleans. One word more, Don Juan Moraquitos—it is the last with which I shall trouble you."