"You must kindly put down your own price for these things," he said, as he opened the third volume.
On the second page he saw the face he had been looking for, the face he had expected to see. But, although this thing did not come upon him as a surprise; although that pencilled likeness, the last link of the chain, served only to confirm the settled conviction which had gradually taken possession of his mind, the shock was sharp enough to drive the blood from his face, to set his heart beating like a sledgehammer.
It was so, then. It was as he had thought, ever since his conversation with Barbe Leroux. This was the man. This was Marie Prévol's lover, and her murderer. This was the cold-blooded assassin of Léonie Lemarque.
He sat silent, breathless, staring blankly at the face before him: a vigorous pencil-drawing of strongly marked features, eager eyes under drooping hair, a sensitive face, a face alive with passionate feeling. The eyes looked straight at the spectator; the lips seemed as if, in the next instant, they would move in speech. The attitude was careless, hands clasped on the back of a chair, chin resting on the clasped hands, the whole bust full of power and intention. Yes, just so might an ardent thinker, an eloquent speaker have looked at one of those midnight gatherings of wits and romancers. The sketch was evidently an immediate reminiscence, and must have been made when the subject was a vivid image in the artist's mind.
Happily for Heathcote's secret, his agitation entirely escaped Eugène Tillet's notice. The painter was dreamily contemplating the sketches he had just cut out of his book, and thinking what a great man he had been when he had made them.
"I should like to have this one," said Heathcote, when he had recovered himself, "and this, and this, and this," he added, turning the leaves hastily, and choosing at random, so as to make that first choice less particular.
Monsieur Tillet cut out all that were indicated to him.
"That is the man I was talking to you about," he said, as he laid the portrait of Georges with the rest of the sketches. "It is a wonderful likeness, too, an extraordinary likeness, dashed off at a white heat one morning, after I had been particularly impressed by the charm of his society. He was a man in a thousand, poor devil. A pity that he should have got himself into such a disagreeable scrape later. But he was a fool for running away. He ought to have given himself up and stood his trial."
"Why?"
"Because he would have inevitably been acquitted. You may murder anybody you like in France, if you can show a sentimental motive for the crime; and this business of poor Georges was entirely a sentimental murder. He would have had the press and the public with him. The verdict would have been 'Not Guilty.' The populace would have cheered him as he left the Palais de Justice, the press would have raved about him, and he would have been the rage in Parisian society for a month afterwards."