“Not that,” she responded, shaking her well-poised head. “Age matters nothing when a woman really loves.”
“You love that man Edmond Valentin,” he snapped, almost savagely.
She nodded in the affirmative, but no word escaped her lips.
Arnaud Rigaux set his teeth, and his fingers clenched themselves into his palms. But only for a second, and she, with her eyes cast down upon the carpet, did not detect the fire of hatred which shone, for a second, in his crafty, narrow-set eyes.
Next second his manner entirely changed. He was one of those men whose cunning enables them to conceal their feelings so cleverly that, while they smile and hold out the hand of friendship, murder lurks within their heart. This attribute is, alas! one of the elements of success in business in our modern days, and is a habit cultivated by the man whom the world admires as “keen and smart.”
“But, my darling?” he exclaimed, in a voice broken by an emotion which was so cleverly feigned that it deceived even her woman’s sharp observance, “you do not know how very deeply I love you,” he declared, bending to her, and again trying to take her hand, which, however, she again snatched away and placed behind her. “All these years I have watched you grow up, and I have longed and longed for the day when I might beg of you to become my wife. Think of what our marriage would mean to you—to your father, the Baron, and to myself. He and I, united, could rule the whole finances of the nation; we could dictate terms to the Chamber, and we should be the greatest power in Belgium—next to his Majesty himself. Surely your position as my wife would be preferable to that of the wife of a poor struggling lawyer, however estimable he may be.”
She sat listening without interrupting him. She had heard this man’s praises sung daily by her father for so long that at last they now fell upon deaf ears. She listened quite coldly to his outpourings, yet, at the moment, she despised him in her innermost heart.
What Edmond had declared was the bare, naked truth. Arnaud Rigaux was only seeking to gain further personal riches and aggrandisement by doing her the honour of offering her his hand in marriage.
Her anger arose within her as his words fell upon her ears. She had not been blind to his stealthy unscrupulousness, for she remembered how, on one occasion, she had overheard her father upbraid him for participating in some shady financial transaction with some electric tramways in Italy, the details of which she, as a woman, had been unable to follow. But her father’s bitter words of reproach had been, to her, all-sufficient. The Baron had told him, openly and plainly, that he had swindled the Italian company, and she had always remembered his outspoken words.
The man seated before her suddenly rose, and unable to take her hand because she was holding it behind her, placed his sensuous grasp upon her shoulder, and bent in an attempt to kiss her.