Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/112

108 them. Her anguish and her womanhood get the better of her pride and her power of endurance. She crumples the book in her clenched hands, and throws it into the fire. Her visitor smiles. His blows are beginning to tell.

For a few minutes there is silence. Presently he takes out his cigar-case.

"I need scarcely ask permission, madame. All these opera-singers smoke, and no doubt you are indulgent to the weakness of our dear Elvino?"

"Monsieur de Lancy is a gentleman, and would not presume to smoke in a lady's presence. Once more, monsieur, be good enough to say how much money you require of me to ensure your silence?"

"Nay, madame," he replies, as he bends over the wood fire, and lights his cigar by the blaze of the burning book, "there is no occasion for such desperate haste. You are really surprisingly superior to the ordinary weakness of your sex. Setting apart your courage, self-endurance, and determination, which are positively wonderful, you are so entirely deficient in curiosity."

She looks at him with a glance which seems to say she scorns to ask him what he means by this.

"You say your maid, Finette, or the good priest, Monsieur Perot, must have betrayed your confidence. Suppose it was from neither of those persons I received my information?"

"There is no other source, monsieur, from which you could obtain it."

"Nay, madame, reflect. Is there no other person whose vanity may have prompted him to reveal this secret? Do you think it, madame, so utterly improbable that Monsieur de Lancy himself may have been tempted to boast over his wine of his conquest of the heiress of all the De Cevennes?"

"It is a base falsehood, monsieur, which you are uttering."

"Nay, madame, I make no assertion. I am only putting a case. Suppose at a supper at the Maison Dorée, amongst his comrades of the Opera and his admirers of the stalls—to say nothing of the coryphées, who, somehow or other, contrive to find a place at these recherché little banquets—suppose our friend, Don Giovanni, imprudently ventures some allusion to a lady of rank and fortune whom his melodious voice or his dark eyes have captivated? This little party is not, perhaps, satisfied with an allusion; it requires facts; it is incredulous; it lays heavy odds that Elvino cannot name the lady; and in the end the whole story is told, and the health of Valerie de Cevennes is drank in Cliquot's finest brand of champagne. Suppose this, madame, and you may, perhaps, guess whence I got my information."

Throughout this speech Valerie has sat facing him, with her