Within an Inch of His Life by Emile Gaboriau (good summer reads .TXT) 📖

to her grandfather’s study, her youthful face expressed the most profound despair.

“This is horrible!” she said.

The same idea crossed, like a sharp arrow, the minds of M. de Chandore and M. Folgat. Had Jacques confessed?

“Look, read yourself!” said Dionysia, handing them the translation.

Jacques wrote,—

“Thanks for your letter, my darling. A presentiment had warned me, and I had asked for a copy of Cooper.

“I understand but too well how grieved you must be at seeing me kept in prison without my making an effort to establish my innocence. I kept silence, because I hoped the proof of my innocence would come from outside. I see that it would be madness to hope so any longer, and that I must speak. I shall speak. But what I have to say is so very serious, that I shall keep silence until I shall have had an opportunity of consulting with some one in whom I can feel perfect confidence. Prudence alone is not enough now: skill also is required. Until now I felt secure, relying on my innocence. But the last examination has opened my eyes, and I now see the danger to which I am exposed.

“I shall suffer terribly until the day when I can see a lawyer. Thank my mother for having brought one. I hope he will pardon me, if I address myself first to another man. I want a man who knows the country and its customs.

“That is why I have chosen M. Magloire; and I beg you will tell him to hold himself ready for the day on which, the examination being completed, I shall be relieved from close confinement.

“Until then, nothing can be done, nothing, unless you can obtain that the case be taken out of M. G——-’s hands, and be given to some one else. That man acts infamously. He wants me to be guilty. He would himself commit a crime in order to charge me with it, and there is no kind of trap he does not lay for me. I have the greatest difficulty in controlling myself every time I see this man enter my cell, who was my friend, and now is my accuser.

“Ah, my dear ones! I pay a heavy price for a fault of which I have been, until now, almost unconscious.

“And you, my only friend, will you ever be able to forgive me the terrible anxiety I cause you?

“I should like to say much more; but the prisoner who has handed me your note says I must be quick, and it takes so much time to pick out the words!

“J.”

When the letter had been read, M. Folgat and M. de Chandore sadly turned their heads aside, fearing lest Dionysia should read in their eyes the secret of their thoughts. But she felt only too well what it meant.

“You cannot doubt Jacques, grandpapa!” she cried.

“No,” murmured the old gentleman feebly, “no.”

“And you, M. Folgat—are you so much hurt by Jacques’s desire to consult another lawyer?”

“I should have been the first, madam, to advise him to consult a native.”

Dionysia had to summon all her energy to check her tears.

“Yes,” she said, “this letter is terrible; but how can it be otherwise? Don’t you see that Jacques is in despair, that his mind wanders after all these fearful shocks?”

Somebody knocked gently at the door.

“It is I,” said the marchioness.

Grandpapa Chandore, M. Folgat, and Dionysia looked at each other for a moment; and then the advocate said,—

“The situation is too serious: we must consult the marchioness.” He rose to open the door. Since the three friends had been holding the council in the baron’s study, a servant had come five times in succession to knock at the door, and tell them that the soup was on the table.

“Very well,” they had replied each time.

At last, as they did not come down yet, Jacques’s mother had come to the conclusion that something extraordinary had occurred.

“Now, what could this be, that they should keep it from her?” she thought. If it were something good, they would not have concealed it from her. She had come up stairs, therefore, with the firm resolution to force them to let her come in. When M. Folgat opened the door, she said instantly,—

“I mean to know all!”

Dionysia replied to her,—

“Whatever you may hear, my dear mother, pray remember, that if you allow a single word to be torn from you, by joy or by sorrow, you cause the ruin of an honest man, who has put us all under such obligations as can never be fully discharged. I have been fortunate enough to establish a correspondence between Jacques and us.”

“O Dionysia!”

“I have written to him, and I have received his answer. Here it is.”

The marchioness was almost beside herself, and eagerly snatched at the letter. But, as she read on, it was fearful to see how the blood receded from her face, how her eyes grew dim, her lips turned pale, and at last her breath failed to come. The letter slipped from her trembling hands; she sank into a chair, and said, stammering,—

“It is no use to struggle any longer: we are lost!”

There was something grand in Dionysia’s gesture and the admirable accent of her voice, as she said,—

“Why don’t you say at once, my mother, that Jacques is an incendiary and an assassin?”

Raising her head with an air of dauntless energy, with trembling lips, and fierce glances full of wrath and disdain, she added,—

“And do I really remain the only one to defend him,—him, who, in his days of prosperity, had so many friends? Well, so be it!”

Naturally, M. Folgat had been less deeply moved than either the marchioness or M. de Chandore; and hence he was also the first to recover his calmness.

“We shall be two, madam, at all events,” he said; “for I should never forgive myself, if I allowed myself to be influenced by that letter. It would be inexcusable, since I know by experience what your heart has told you instinctively. Imprisonment has horrors which affect the strongest and stoutest of minds. The days in prison are interminable, and the nights have nameless terrors. The innocent man in his lonely cell feels as if he were becoming guilty, as the man of soundest intellect would begin to doubt himself in a madhouse”—

Dionysia did not let him conclude. She cried,—

“That is exactly what I felt, sir; but I could not express it as clearly as you do.”