“Leave us, Monsieur Camusot,” said the public prosecutor at once.
“I was about to suggest that you should bind me hand and foot,” Jacques Collin coolly added, with an ominous glare at the two gentlemen.
He paused, and then said with great gravity: “Monsieur le Comte, you had my esteem, but you now command my admiration.”
“Then you think you are formidable?” said the magistrate, with a look of supreme contempt.
“Think myself formidable?” retorted the convict. “Why think about it?
I am, and I know it.” Jacques Collin took a chair and sat down, with all the ease of a man who feels himself a match for his adversary in an interview where they would treat on equal terms.
At this instant Monsieur Camusot, who was on the point of closing the door behind him, turned back, came up to Monsieur de Granville, and handed him two folded papers.
“Look!” said he to Monsieur de Granville, pointing to one of them.
“Call back Monsieur Gault!” cried the Comte de Granville, as he read the name of Madame de Maufrigneuse’s maid — a woman he knew.
The governor of the prison came in.
“Describe the woman who came to see the prisoner,” said the public prosecutor in his ear.
“Short, thick-set, fat, and square,” replied Monsieur Gault.
“The woman to whom this permit was given is tall and thin,” said Monsieur de Granville. “How old was she?”
“About sixty.”
“This concerns me, gentlemen?” said Jacques Collin. “Come, do not puzzle your heads.
That person is my aunt, a very plausible aunt, a woman, and an old woman.
I can save you a great deal of trouble. You will never find my aunt unless I choose. If we beat about the bush, we shall never get forwarder.”
“Monsieur l’Abbe has lost his Spanish accent,” observed Monsieur Gault; “he does not speak broken French.”
“Because things are in a desperate mess, my dear Monsieur Gault,” replied Jacques Collin with a bitter smile, as he addressed the Governor by name.
Monsieur Gault went quickly up to his chief, and said in a whisper,
“Beware of that man, Monsieur le Comte; he is mad with rage.”
Monsieur de Granville gazed slowly at Jacques Collin, and saw that he was controlling himself; but he saw, too, that what the governor said was true.
This treacherous demeanor covered the cold but terrible nervous irritation of a savage.
In Jacques Collin’s eyes were the lurid fires of a volcanic eruption, his fists were clenched.
He was a tiger gathering himself up to spring.
“Leave us,” said the Count gravely to the prison governor and the judge.
“You did wisely to send away Lucien’s murderer!” said Jacques Collin, without caring whether Camusot heard him or no; “I could not contain myself, I should have strangled him.”
Monsieur de Granville felt a chill; never had he seen a man’s eyes so full of blood, or cheeks so colorless, or muscles so set.
“And what good would that murder have done you?” he quietly asked.
“You avenge society, or fancy you avenge it, every day, monsieur, and you ask me to give a reason for revenge?
Have you never felt vengeance throbbing in surges in your veins? Don’t you know that it was that idiot of a judge who killed him? — For you were fond of my Lucien, and he loved you!
I know you by heart, sir.
The dear boy would tell me everything at night when he came in; I used to put him to bed as a nurse tucks up a child, and I made him tell me everything. He confided everything to me, even his least sensations! “The best of mothers never loved an only son so tenderly as I loved that angel!
If only you knew!
All that is good sprang up in his heart as flowers grow in the fields.
He was weak; it was his only fault, weak as the string of a lyre, which is so strong when it is taut.
These are the most beautiful natures; their weakness is simply tenderness, admiration, the power of expanding in the sunshine of art, of love, of the beauty God has made for man in a thousand shapes!
— In short, Lucien was a woman spoiled.
Oh! what could I not say to that brute beast who had just gone out of the room! “I tell you, monsieur, in my degree, as a prisoner before his judge, I did what God A’mighty would have done for His Son if, hoping to save Him, He had gone with Him before Pilate!”
A flood of tears fell from the convict’s light tawny eyes, which just now had glared like those of a wolf starved by six months’ snow in the plains of the Ukraine.
He went on:
“That dolt would listen to nothing, and he killed the boy!
— I tell you, sir, I bathed the child’s corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power I do not know, and which is above us all!
I, who do not believe in God! —(For if I were not a materialist, I should not be myself.) “I have told everything when I say that.
You don’t know — no man knows what suffering is. I alone know it.
The fire of anguish so dried up my tears, that all last night I could not weep. Now I can, because I feel that you can understand me.
I saw you, sitting there just now, an Image of Justice. Oh! monsieur, may God — for I am beginning to believe in Him — preserve you from ever being as bereft as I am! That cursed judge has robbed me of my soul, Monsieur le Comte!
At this moment they are burying my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my powers!
Imagine a dog from which a chemist had extracted the blood. — That’s me!
I am that dog ——