The tragedy surpassed all expectation, and yet all admitted that there was no other course.
Hubert d'Arny was found dead in a little hotel at Passy that very night. He had blown out his brains upon the eve of his daughter's wedding. People thought rather of Claudine than of him. Much that would have been written and said was obliterated or hushed when she was mentioned. Who would break it to her? Such a blow had not been struck at the Republic since the Humbert scandal.
Faber knew nothing of the coming wedding, and he heard the news of Hubert d'Arny's death without emotion. There were primitive traits in his character which this affair made dominant. If pity urged claims, he thrust them aside when he remembered his dead father. "An eye for an eye—and for death, the dead." A sense of power and authority nerved his will and flattered a well-balanced vanity. After all, his brains and money had won this victory against all the shining armour of France. He perceived that the financier was, after all, the most considerable power in the world to-day. Kings can make war when the bankers will pay for it. He had been his own general and his money was his army. A stroke of the pen had laid one of the most powerful men in Paris dead at his feet—as vulgar tragedy would put it. A mind that had little subtlety and much common sense rose to no analytical attitudes. He had killed the man just as a Southerner shoots down a nigger—and of the two the nigger was perhaps the more deserving.
In this frame of mind, he was greatly astonished to receive a visit from Gabrielle Silvester very early on the following morning. He had even forgotten that she knew anything of his dealings with General d'Arny, nor did he immediately connect her with the tragedy of which all Paris was talking. She had come to tell him that the yacht was sailing, he thought; then he noticed that she did not offer him her hand, while her manner toward him was utterly changed—a chill womanly manner he could not mistake.
"Why!" he said. "Still in Paris?"
She avoided the question, and went straight to the heart of the matter.
"I have come to ask you, Mr. Faber, if you knew that Claudine d'Arny was to have been married to-day?"
He stepped back a pace and looked her full in the face. Rarely in his life had he flinched before man or woman, but the accusation stunned him.
"Was I aware? But how should I be aware?"
She drew nearer, her face aflame and her heart beating wildly.