“Bah! Think! I do nothing else but think! I think all the time. I remember that my family was one which no stain had touched until I married you, and you dragged me into this thievish business! I remember that, although we were poor, we were proud of an illustrious past, than which nobody in France could boast a better. I remember——”
“Enough! I will not hear you!”
“And how long, pray, must this continue before you will consider that you have enough to pay your debts and to live on the income of what is left to you after that of your stolen fortune?”
“How long? Who knows! As I have said, if other affairs prosper me as well as this one to-night has done, it will not be long. Think of it! To-night—to-night alone—I have collected almost a quarter of a million, in the value of dollars! To-night I have added to my store more than a million francs!”
“Aye; but much of it you will never be able to use.”
“I shall use it all. The melting-pot is ever handy; and there are other means of disposing of——”
“What, for example, shall you do with the trophy cups you have taken from some of your victims?” she demanded.
“Ah!” he replied. “They are valuable! Very valuable! I have thought out a method by which their owners can be induced to redeem them for cash at much more than their value and without danger to me. That Monsieur Kane, for example—he would gladly give fifty thousand dollars rather than lose his cups—his petted race cups. And what is fifty thousand dollars to him? Faugh! It is nothing! He would think no more of that amount than I do of the ash of this cigar, which I throw from me—so. And Monsieur Burton—oui, oui! With him it is the same. Fifty thousand? He would give a hundred thousand, so Jean tells me. And he is not as rich as Monsieur Kane! But his trophies are dearer to him. And to-night? To-night I have collected others. Ha, Hortense! It is the millennium that is at hand for us!”
“The millennium!” she exclaimed scornfully. “Say, rather, it is Cayenne, Toulon, the Château d’If, the Bastile, or the guillotine!”
The pirate shrugged his shoulders resignedly.