In her heart of hearts she knew that she had not the remotest intention of ever paying him.
“How will you pay me if I do?” he repeated. A look came into his eyes as they stared on her which might have warned her that he was not a man who would go for ever unpaid. She was silent; she really did not know what to say. She knew that she hated him horribly. But she had no other chance.
He enjoyed her discomfiture.
“You’ll pay me somehow, I reckon,” he said, after leaving her in torture for a few moments. “Well, I’ll do this thing for you. I’ll go to Paris to-night. Send me a line from you authorizing me to treat for you with this jeweler. I’ll get back to-morrow evening. You’ll be at your house by ten o’clock, and I’ll come there straight from Cannon Street. Mind you’re alone.”
The rough authority of the sentences chilled her to the bone; she realized that he was no more her timid obedient slave, but her master, and a master with a whip. Something in the expression of his face made her sick with fear. But there was no other means, no other saviour; if she offended him, if she rejected the aid she had asked for, the false stones would go to Hunt and Roskell, and her brother and brothers-in-law would know everything.
“You’d better go now,” said William Massarene, reading in her mind as if it were a book. “This aren’t a place to talk secrets; and pull your veil down, for you look out of sorts, my dear!”
A shudder of rage passed through her as she heard his words. Oh, how she hated herself that she had been such an imbecile as to drift into a position in which this wretched cad could dare speak to her as he would speak to a mill-hand in Milwaukee.
Oh, heavens! How dreadful it was, she thought, to loathe and despise a man, and yet to be obliged to use him! It was all her brother’s fault, who had placed her in such an odious and agonizing position! It seemed as if the whole of humanity, dead and living, were in conspiracy against her!
“Look here, my dear,” said Mr. Massarene in a low tone, as they crossed the Speaker’s Court, “I’ll send you round to your house in an hour a line or two that you’ll sign. Mere matter of form, but must be done, or I can’t treat with your jeweler. Sign it, put it in a sealed envelope, and send it back by the bearer. When I get it, I’ll take the club train at nine o’clock. To-morrow’s Sunday. There’s nothing odd in going out of town on Sunday.”
“Very well,” she said faintly; for it had never occurred to her mind that Billy would be business-like with herself. She was used to people who, whether they had little or much, never stooped to marchander. Nobody had ever asked her to sign anything before, except Beaumont.