Other People's Money by Emile Gaboriau (superbooks4u txt) 📖

“What will she say,” thought Maxence, “when she learns the horrible truth?”

And he felt a cold perspiration starting on his temples when he remembered Mlle. Lucienne’s pride, and that honor has her only faith, the safety-plank to which she had desperately clung in the midst of the storms of her life.  What if she should leave him, now that the name he bore was disgraced!

A rapid and light step on the landing drew him from his gloomy thoughts.  Almost immediately, the door opened, and Mlle. Lucienne came in.

She must have dressed in haste; for she was just finishing hooking her dress, the simplicity of which seemed studied, so marvelously did it set off the elegance of her figure, the splendors of her waist, and the rare perfections of her shoulders and of her neck.

A look of intense dissatisfaction could be read upon her lovely features; but, as soon as she had seen Maxence, her countenance changed.

And, in fact, his look of utter distress, the disorder of his garments, his livid paleness, and the sinister look of his eyes, showed plainly enough that a great misfortune had befallen him.  In a voice whose agitation betrayed something more than the anxiety and the sympathy of a friend,

“What is the matter?  What has happened?” inquired the girl.

“A terrible misfortune,” he replied.

He was hesitating:  he wished to tell every thing at once, and knew not how to begin.

“I have told you,” he said, “that my family was very rich.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we have nothing left, absolutely nothing!”  She seemed to breathe more freely, and, in a tone of friendly irony,

“And it is the loss of your fortune,” she said, “that distresses you thus?”

He raised himself painfully to his feet, and, in a low hoarse voice,

“Honor is lost too,” he uttered.

“Honor?”

“Yes.  My father has stolen:  my father has forged!”

She had become whiter than her collar.

“Your father!” she stammered.

“Yes.  For years he has been using the money that was intrusted to him, until the deficit now amounts to twelve millions.”

“Great heavens!”

“And, notwithstanding the enormity of that sum, he was reduced, during the latter months, to the most miserable expedients,—going from door to door in the neighborhood, soliciting deposits, until he actually basely swindled a poor newspaper-vender out of five hundred francs.”

“Why, this is madness!  And how did you find out?”

“Last night they came to arrest him.  Fortunately we had been notified; and I helped him to escape through a window of my sister’s room, which opens on the yard of an adjoining house.”

“And where is he now?”

“Who knows?”

“Had he any money?”

“Everybody thinks that he carries off millions.  I do not believe it.  He even refused to take the few thousand francs which M. de Thaller had brought him to facilitate his flight.”

Mlle. Lucienne shuddered.

“Did you see M. de Thaller?” she asked.

“He got to the house a few moments in advance of the commissary of police; and a terrible scene took place between him and my father.”

“What was he saying?”

“That my father had ruined him.”

“And your father?”

“He stammered incoherent phrases.  He was like a man who has received a stunning blow.  But we have discovered incredible things.  My father, so austere and so parsimonious at home, led a merry life elsewhere, spending money without stint.  It was for a woman that he robbed.”

“And—do you know who that woman is?”

“No.  But I can find out from the writer of the article in this paper, who says that he knows her.  See!”

Mlle. Lucienne took the paper which Maxence was holding out to her:  but she hardly condescended to look at it.

“But what’s your idea now?”

“I do not believe that my father is innocent; but I believe that there are people more guilty than he,—skillful and prudent knaves, who have made use of him as a man of straw,—villains who will quietly digest their share of the millions (the biggest one, of course), while he will be sent to prison.”

A fugitive blush colored Mlle. Lucienne’s cheeks.

“That being the case,” she interrupted, “what do you expect to do?”

“Avenge my father, if possible, and discover his accomplices, if he has any.”

She held out her hand to him.

“That’s right,” she said.  “But how will you go about it?”

“I don’t know yet.  At any rate, I must first of all run to the newspaper office, and get that woman’s address.”

But Mlle. Lucienne stopped him.

“No,” she uttered:  “it isn’t there that you must go.  You must come with me to see my friend the commissary.”

Maxence received this suggestion with a gesture of surprise, almost of terror.

“Why, how can you think of such a thing?” he exclaimed.  “My father is fleeing from justice; and you want me to take for my confidant a commissary of police,—the very man whose duty it is to arrest him, if he can find him!”

But he interrupted himself for a moment, staring and gaping, as if the truth had suddenly flashed upon his mind in dazzling evidence.

“For my father has not gone abroad,” he went on.  “It is in Paris that he is hiding:  I am sure of it.  You have seen him?”

Mlle. Lucienne really thought that Maxence was losing his mind.

“I have seen your father—I?” she said.

“Yes, last evening.  How could I have forgotten it?  While you were waiting for me down stairs, between eleven and half-past eleven a middle-aged man, thin, wearing a long overcoat, came and asked for me.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“He spoke to you in the yard.”

“That’s a fact.”

“What did he tell you?”