But the husband, continuing to laugh, had approached her, and having drawn a chair to the writing table, stroked her hair lovingly.
“You were afraid; but of what? You think, perhaps, that I am come to make a scene, or perhaps to kill you, and then myself after. No, no; I only like double suicides on the stage or in novels, provided the author of the book or the drama has talent. But here, why stain this beautiful Persian carpet with your blood, why scatter mine over the elegant paper you were covering with your words of love? It would really be a pity, a crime, and above all a folly. I am come to make a compact,” and he laid a long kiss on the little fair curls at her neck.
It seemed to the lady as if that kiss burnt her like a red-hot iron.
She withdrew her head and gazed at her husband with glassy eyes, petrified with astonishment.
No, he had not really the look of an assassin. He was calm, cheerful, like a good-tempered fellow who was playing an innocent joke, a very innocent one.
“Give me a cigarette. The air is heavy with the odour of your cigarettes! They must be very good ones. Probably Count B. brought them for you from Constantinople?” He did not wait for her to give it to him, but took one himself from a bronze bowl and lighted it. “I told you, then, that I was come to make a compact with you, a compact of purchase and sale, in which we shall both gain something. Look!”
And here the husband took out of the pocket of his greatcoat a perfumed packet of letters tied with a golden cord.
“I have a treasure here! the entire and complete collection of all the letters the count has written you. Not one is missing! The lady’s maid you dismissed last week made me a present of them, gave them to me for nothing. There are a hundred and thirty, written in three months! How much will you give me for this treasure?”
The lady, being suddenly reassured that her husband’s intentions were not homicidal, looked at him with a gaze full of contempt and cruelty. She no longer felt fear or remorse. She could have wished at that moment that the letters might have been not from one lover only, but from ten, a hundred, and that each one could strike him and spit in his face. She began to laugh too.
“Bravo! capital! you are a man of spirit. Give me a kiss!”