“But,” he said, “what mystery can there be between you two?”
“You shall hear!” she said, with her sphinx-like smile.
The General mechanically took up a book. She stirred the fire, and reflected. As she liked terror, danger, and dramatic incidents to blend with her intrigues, she should have been content; for at that moment shame, ruin, and death were at her door. But, to tell the truth, it was too much for her; and when she looked, in the midst of the silence which surrounded her, at the true character and scope of the perils which surrounded her, she thought her brain would fail and her heart break.
She was not mistaken as to the origin of the letter. This shameful work had indeed been planned by Madame de la Roche-Jugan. To do her justice, she had not suspected the force of the blow she was dealing. She still believed in the virtue of the Marquise; but during the perpetual surveillance she had never relaxed, she could not fail to see the changed nature of the intercourse between Camors and the Marquise. It must not be forgotten that she dreamed of securing for her son Sigismund the succession to her old friend; and she foresaw a dangerous rivalry—the germ of which she sought to destroy. To awaken the distrust of the General toward Camors, so as to cause his doors to be closed against him, was all she meditated. But her anonymous letter, like most villainies of this kind, was a more fatal and murderous weapon than its base author imagined.
The young Marquise, then, mused while stirring the fire, casting, from time to time, a furtive glance at the clock.
M. de Camors would soon arrive—how could she warn him? In the present state of their relations it was not impossible that the very first words of. Camors might immediately divulge their secret: and once betrayed, there was not only for her personal dishonor, a scandalous fall, poverty, a convent—but for her husband or her lover—perhaps for both—death!
When the bell in the lower court sounded, announcing the Count’s approach, these thoughts crowded into the brain of the Marquise like a legion of phantoms. But she rallied her courage by a desperate effort and strained all her faculties to the execution of the plan she had hastily conceived, which was her last hope. And one word, one gesture, one mistake, or one carelessness of her lover, might overthrow it in a second. A moment later the door was opened by a servant, announcing M. de Camors. Without speaking, she signed to her husband to gain his hiding-place. The General, who had risen at the sound of the bell, seemed still to hesitate, but shrugging his shoulders, as if in disdain of himself, retired behind the curtain which faced the door.
M. de Camors entered the room carelessly, and advanced toward the fireplace where sat the Marquise; his smiling lips half opened to speak, when he was struck by the peculiar expression on the face of the Marquise, and the words were frozen on his lips. This look, fixed upon him from his entrance, had a strange, weird intensity, which, without expressing anything, made him fear everything. But he was accustomed to trying situations, and as wary and prudent as he was intrepid. He ceased to smile and did not speak, but waited.
She gave him her hand without ceasing to look at him with the same alarming intensity.
“Either she is mad,” he said to himself, “or there is some great peril!”