“Sonia Danidoff! I wanted to kill her!”
Instinctively Fantômas doubled his fists and cast a look of menace at the speaker; he would have hurled himself upon his defiant mistress, but the latter with an air of sardonic insolence stood before him, a superb figure of defiance, and never flinched. Yes, she defied her lover; Fantômas dared not go near her; yet curiosity, the craving to know what had become of Sonia, compelled him to hide his anger.
“What have you done with her? Where is she? Speak!”
Breathing all her hate in a dolorous cry, Lady Beltham wrung her beautiful hands, and groaning aloud, cried:
“Go, Tom Bob, go and ask the officers of justice, go and learn from the police the fate I have reserved for your mistress, and the opinion she now has of you!”
“Of me!”
“Yes, sir, of you!”
It was the brigand’s turn now to tremble with apprehension, but such was the empire he possessed over himself, he was able to hide his agitation under a mask of smiling irony.
“Lady Beltham,” he asked quietly, “so you have told the princess who I am, have you?”
Very certainly, Lady Beltham had not gone so far as this, for despite her jealousy, she still cherished for the outlaw one of those monstrous passions that are like consuming fires devouring women’s hearts, fires that are only extinguished by death! Nevertheless the jealous woman suffered her lover to believe that during a scene of angry altercation she had revealed to her rival the ignominy, the baseness, the crimes of the man whom the too trustful Sonia Danidoff had thought well to choose as the object of her heart’s desire.