"Recollect, Monsieur, that no legal bar exists to this most virtuous and irreproachable aspiration. And understand that unless a favorable answer is shortly received by our firm to the application now made by us to you on behalf of our client, her next appeal will be made to your daughter and hers.
"We remain, etc.,
"WIEGELT, NADIER AND BIDUQUET,
"Solicitors."
By the chill light of the new day the Colonel for the twentieth time re-read the letter, and its cunning mixture of truth and falsehood, the venomed hint at knowledge and complicity, struck fangs once more into his quivering heart.
A devout Catholic, he had never sought to divorce the wife who had betrayed him. Thus a civil marriage with her paramour had been rendered impossible to Adelaide, even had the Count desired it. Now, furnished with ample means by the generosity of her dead lover, did the false wife seek at the hands of the injured husband rehabilitation, in return for a heap of tainted gold?
Horrible thought! The walls of the room seemed to close upon De Bayard suffocatingly. He opened the window and leaned out, drawing in deep drafts of the frosty morning air. It cleared his brain; he realized, in the event of his contemptuous rejection of the hideous bargain, a menace to his daughter's peace of mind.
Motherhood is of all earthly relationships the most sacred. Yet there are mothers who in revenge for disappointed hopes and thwarted ambitions have not hesitated to strike, through their own offspring, at husbands abhorred. More than ever the husband of Adelaide bent to his determination of placing Juliette, at the earliest moment, safe out of reach of that spotted maternal embrace.
XXI
Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted Mademoiselle to the dwelling of Madame Tessier. You may conceive that the portly little warrior, when panoplied in the full-skirted, black frock-coat, gray peg-top trousers, black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk chimney-pot of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume of fine blue cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black silk cord, and wearing a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet, consisting of a knot or two of blue velvet, a froth of lace, and half-a-dozen richly-tinted oak-leaves on her coils of black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant simplicity and youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl knows how to combine perfectly.
During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a quarter of an hour, Juliette occupied herself in the endeavor to glean a few meager items of information with regard to her destined husband. To her timidly-cast bait the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise. One may imagine a dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies, running somewhat after this fashion: