For a moment or two Mora stared at him in silence; then she said in a low voice: ‘And you propose this to me!—to me!’
‘Sérieusement, ma chère—sérieusement. It is a beautiful little scheme.’
‘If you will not take your price and leave me, I at least can leave you,’ she answered in low, determined tones. ‘No power on earth can compel me to live with you for a single hour as your wife, and no power shall. I would sooner drop dead at your feet.’
The Frenchman bent his head and sniffed at the flower in his button-hole. When he lifted his face again there was a strange expression in his eyes, which his unhappy wife remembered only too well, and caused her to shudder in spite of herself. She felt that the scorpion’s sting of what he had to say to her was yet to come. When he next spoke, there was the same cold, cruel glitter in his eyes that travellers tell us is to be seen in the eyes of a cobra at the moment it is about to strike.
‘Mademoiselle your sister—what a beautiful young lady she is!’ he said, speaking even more softly than he had done before, and balancing his cane on a couple of fingers as he spoke. ‘I saw her this morning for the first time. She is to be married in a little while to the son of a rich English milord. Is it not so? Eh bien! I wonder what this rich milord, this Sir William, would say, and what the young gentleman, his son, would say, if they were told that the sister of the charming Mademoiselle Clarice was the wife of a déporté—of Hector Laroche, a man who had worked out a sentence of penal servitude at Noumea. Of course the rich Sir William would at once take Monsieur Laroche to lunch with him at his club, and the young gentleman would present him with a little cheque for five or six thousand francs; and he would be asked to give the bride away at the wedding, and he would sign his name in the register, thus—“Hector Laroche, ex-déporté, number 897.”’
For a moment or two it seemed to Mora as if earth and heaven were coming together.
‘So, fiend! miscreant! that is your scheme, is it?’
‘I have shown you my cards,’ he answered with a shrug. ‘I have hidden nothing from you. So now, chère Madame De Vigne, you have only to give your promise to marry your devoted De Miravel; and the moment you do that, Hector Laroche dies and is buried out of sight for ever, and neither Sir William nor his son will know that such a vaurien ever existed.’
‘Leave me—leave me!’ she exclaimed in a hoarse whisper.
He glanced at her keenly. It was evident that just at present she could bear no more. It was not his policy to drive her to extremities. He rose from his seat.