Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully.
He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of endangering Chirac's reputation and situation--as a sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness!
And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation.
He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple.
And as for common prudence--had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days?
Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at nothing whatever.
"You did not know that he was coming to me?" asked Chirac, pulling his short, silky brown beard.
"No," Sophia answered.
"But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to me!"
He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly accepting, in his quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature--reconciling himself to them at once.
Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of Gerald's rascality.
"It is fortunate that I can pay you," she said.
"But----" he tried to protest.
"I have quite enough money."
She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from amour- propre.
She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a man bereft of all honour.
And so she clothed Gerald with the rag of having, at any rate, not left her in destitution as well as in sickness.
Her assertion seemed a strange one, in view of the fact that he had abandoned her on the previous evening--that is to say, immediately after the borrowing from Chirac.
But Chirac did not examine the statement.
"Perhaps he has the intention to send me the money.
Perhaps, after all, he is now at the offices----"
"No," said Sophia.
"He is gone.
Will you go downstairs and wait for me.
We will go together to Cook's office.
It is English money I have."
"Cook's?" he repeated.
The word now so potent had then little significance.
"But you are ill.
You cannot----"
"I feel better."
She did.
Or rather, she felt nothing except the power of her resolve to remove the painful anxiety from that wistful brow.
The shame of the trick played on Chirac awakened new forces in her.
She dressed in a physical torment which, however, had no more reality than a nightmare.
She searched in a place where even an inquisitive husband would not think of looking, and then, painfully, she descended the long stairs, holding to the rail, which swam round and round her, carrying the whole staircase with it.
"After all," she thought, "I can't be seriously ill, or I shouldn't have been able to get up and go out like this.
I never guessed early this morning that I could do it!
I can't possibly be as ill as I thought I was!"
And in the vestibule she encountered Chirac's face, lightening at the sight of her, which proved to him that his deliverance was really to be accomplished.
"Permit me----"
"I'm all right," she smiled, tottering.
"Get a cab."
It suddenly occurred to her that she might quite as easily have given him the money in English notes; he could have changed them.
But she had not thought.
Her brain would not operate.
She was dreaming and waking together.
He helped her into the cab.
V
In the bureau de change there was a little knot of English, people, with naive, romantic, and honest faces, quite different from the faces outside in the street.