“I am happy, madam, to return your greeting.”
The grand duchess seemed sceptical; with panting breath, for she was greatly agitated, she questioned:
“Tell me, sir! tell me, Tom Bob, what fresh crisis, what pressing necessity obliges you to come to me like this?”
Tom Bob, for he it was, hesitated a moment before replying. Slowly he lifted his glance and fixed it on the grand duchess’s face. The lovely creature and the wily detective looked long into each other’s eyes.
The grand duchess?... Tom Bob? In truth, there was no need for play-acting between these two, they were by themselves, alone, without witnesses. They could avow to one another who they really were—she, Lady Beltham, the mysterious, the redoubtable mistress of the most abominable brigand in all the earth; he, that same brigand, Fantômas!
And now the tragic lovers, after a hundred changes of fortune, intentional or accidental, that had hindered their meeting, found themselves face to face and under untoward circumstances that forced them to exchange terrible, bitter speeches; for these two felt for one another at once an atrocious hate and an ineradicable love! Yes, in very deed, those two beings who were perpetually at daggers drawn, who had ever between them the most appalling episodes, the most fearful deeds and memories, were straitly bound one to the other by an unbreakable chain of love, whose links were riveted by the strongest of all implements, the crimes they had committed together.
It was in the drawing room of the mansion where dwelt the great lady who for all the world was the Grand Duchess Alexandra, but in reality was no other than Lady Beltham, that the painful interview took place.
“What have you come here for? what do you want?” demanded the lady; but Fantômas, in a hollow voice he endeavoured to make cold and peremptory, but which only the more betrayed his anguish, only replied by another question.
“Sonia Danidoff,” he asked, “what has happened to Sonia Danidoff?”
The brigand—he too was breathless with emotion—felt he must know the truth, his heart as a lover laid an obligation on him, an obligation that wounded his self-love, anxiously to question the mistress he had forsaken as to the fate which she, in her jealous rage, had reserved for the other who had now become the favourite. Lady Beltham fought hard against her agitation and the pain that tore her breast; she articulated in a voice that whistled between the clenched teeth: