LITMIR.BIZ

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"I will only ask your permission, for my comrade and myself, to spend the night where we can hear you if you call."

      "As you please, Monsieur. Perhaps, after all, that will be best."

      At that moment one of the servants knocked and came in to say that his mistress wished to see the master before she went out. Madame Fauville entered almost immediately. She bowed pleasantly as Perenna and Mazeroux rose from their chairs.

      She was a woman between thirty and thirty-five, a woman of a bright and smiling beauty, which she owed to her blue eyes, to her wavy hair, to all the charm of her rather vapid but amiable and very pretty face. She wore a long, figured-silk cloak over an evening dress that showed her fine shoulders.

      Her husband said, in surprise

      "Are you going out to-night?"

      "You forget," she said. "The Auverards offered me a seat in their box at the opera; and you yourself asked me to look in at Mme. d'Ersingen's party afterward—"

      "So I did, so I did," he said. "It escaped my memory; I am working so hard."

      She finished buttoning her gloves and asked:

      "Won't you come and fetch me at Mme. d'Ersingen's?"

      "What for?"

      "They would like it."

      "But I shouldn't. Besides, I don't feel well enough."

      "Then I'll make your apologies for you."

      "Yes, do."

      She drew her cloak around her with a graceful gesture, and stood for a few moments, without moving, as though seeking a word of farewell. Then she said:

      "Edmond's not here! I thought he was working with you?"

      "He was feeling tired."

      "Is he asleep?"

      "Yes."

      "I wanted to kiss him good-night."

      "No, you would only wake him. And here's your car; so go, dear. Amuse yourself."

      "Oh, amuse myself!" she said. "There's not much amusement about the opera and an evening party."

      "Still, it's better than keeping one's room."

      There was some little constraint. It was obviously one of those ill-assorted households in which the husband, suffering in health and not caring for the pleasures of society, stays at home, while the wife seeks the enjoyments to which her age and habits entitle her.

      As he said nothing more, she bent over and kissed him on the forehead. Then, once more bowing to the two visitors, she went out. A moment later they heard the sound of the motor driving away.

      Hippolyte Fauville at once rose and rang the bell. Then he said:

      "No one here has any idea of the danger hanging over me. I have confided in nobody, not even in Silvestre, my own man, though he has been in my service for years and is honesty itself."

      The manservant entered.

      "I am going to bed, Silvestre," said M. Fauville. "Get everything ready."

      Silvestre opened the upper part of the great sofa, which made a comfortable bed, and laid the sheets and blankets. Next, at his master's orders, he brought a jug of water, a glass, a plate of biscuits, and a dish of fruit.

      M. Fauville ate a couple of biscuits and then cut a dessert-apple. It was not ripe. He took two others, felt them, and, not thinking them good, put them back as well. Then he peeled a pear and ate it.

      "You can leave the fruit dish," he said to his man. "I shall be glad of it, if I am hungry during the night…. Oh, I was forgetting! These two gentlemen are staying. Don't mention it to anybody. And, in the morning, don't come until I ring."

      The man placed the fruit dish on the table before retiring. Perenna, who was noticing everything, and who was afterward to remember every smallest detail of that evening, which his memory recorded with a sort of mechanical faithfulness, counted three pears and four apples in the dish.

      Meanwhile, Fauville went up the winding staircase, and, going along the gallery, reached the room where his son lay in bed.

      "He's fast asleep," he said to Perenna, who had joined him.

      The bedroom was a small one. The air was admitted by a special system of ventilation, for the dormer window was hermetically closed by a wooden shutter tightly nailed down.

      "I took the precaution last year," Hippolyte Fauville explained. "I used to make my electrical experiments in this room and was afraid of being spied upon, so I closed the aperture opening on the roof."

      And he added in a low voice:

      "They have been prowling around me for a long time."

      The two men went downstairs again.

      Fauville looked at his watch.

      "A quarter past ten: bedtime, I am exceedingly tired, and you will excuse me—"

      It was arranged that Perenna and Mazeroux should make themselves comfortable in a couple of easy chairs which they carried into the passage between the study and the entrance hall. But, before bidding them good-night, Hippolyte Fauville, who, although greatly excited, had appeared until then to retain his self-control, was seized with a sudden attack of weakness. He uttered a faint cry. Don Luis turned round and saw the sweat pouring like gleaming water down his face and neck, while he shook with fever and anguish.

      "What's the matter?" asked Perenna.

      "I'm frightened! I'm frightened!" he said.

      "This is madness!" cried Don Luis. "Aren't we here, the two of us? We can easily spend the night with you, if you prefer, by your bedside."

      Fauville replied by shaking Perenna violently by the shoulder, and, with distorted features, stammering:

      "If there were ten of you—if there were twenty of you with me, you need not think that it would spoil their schemes! They can do anything they please, do you hear, anything! They have already killed Inspector Vérot—they will kill me—and they will kill my son. Oh, the blackguards! My God, take pity on me! The awful terror of it! The pain I suffer!"

      He had fallen on his knees and was striking his breast and repeating:

      "O God, have pity on me! I can't die! I can't let my son die! Have pity on me, I beseech Thee!"

      He sprang to his feet and led Perenna to a glass-fronted case, which he rolled back on its brass castors, revealing a small safe built into the wall.

      "You will find my whole story here, written up day by day for the past three years. If anything should happen to me, revenge will be easy."

      He hurriedly turned the letters of the padlock and, with a key which he took from his pocket, opened the safe.

      It was three fourths empty; but on one of the shelves, between some piles of papers, was a diary bound in drab cloth, with a rubber band round it. He took the diary, and, emphasizing his words, said:

      "There, look, it's all in here. With this, the hideous business can be reconstructed…. There are my suspicions first and then my certainties…. Everything, everything … how to trap them and how to do for them…. You'll remember, won't you? A diary bound in drab cloth…. I'm putting it back in the safe."

      Gradually his calmness returned. He pushed back the glass case, tidied a few papers, switched on the electric lamp above his bed, put out the lights in the middle of the ceiling, and asked Don Luis and Mazeroux to leave him.

      Don Luis, who was walking round the room and examining the iron shutters of the two windows, noticed a door opposite the entrance door and asked the engineer about it.

      "I use it for my regular clients," said Fauville, "and sometimes I go out that way."

      "Does it open on the garden?"

      "Yes."

      "Is it properly closed?"

      "You can see for yourself; it's locked and bolted with a safety bolt.

      Both keys are on my bunch; so is the key of the garden

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