Other People's Money, Emile Gaboriau [best ebook reader txt] 📗

To seize the meaning of it was not possible; and yet through the door, the upper panels of which were of glass, fragments could be heard; and from time to time such words distinctly reached the ear as dividend, stockholders, deficit, millions, etc.

“What can it all mean? great heaven!” moaned Mme. Favoral.

Doubtless the two interlocutors, the director and the cashier, had drawn nearer to the door of communication; for their voices, which rose more and more, had now become quite distinct.

“It is an infamous trap!”  M. Favoral was saying.  “I should have been notified—”

“Come, come,” interrupted the other.  “Were you not fully warned? did I ever conceal any thing from you?”

Fear, a fear vague still, and unexplained, was slowly taking possession of the guests; and they remained motionless, their forks in suspense, holding their breath.

“Never,” M. Favoral was repeating, stamping his foot so violently that the partition shook,—“never, never!”

“And yet it must be,” declared M. de Thaller.  “It is the only, the last resource.”

“And suppose I will not!”

“Your will has nothing to do with it now.  It is twenty years ago that you might have willed, or not willed.  But listen to me, and let us reason a little.”

Here M. de Thaller dropped his voice; and for some minutes nothing was heard in the dining-room, except confused words, and incomprehensible exclamations, until suddenly,

“That is ruin,” he resumed in a furious tone:  “it is bankruptcy on the last of the month.”

“Sir,” the cashier was replying,—“sir!”

“You are a forger, M. Vincent Favoral; you are a thief!”

Maxence leaped from his seat.

“I shall not permit my father to be thus insulted in his own house,” he exclaimed.

“Maxence,” begged Mme. Favoral, “my son!”

The old lawyer, M. Chapelain, held him by the arm; but he struggled hard, and was about to burst into the parlor, when the door opened, and the director of the Mutual Credit stepped out.

With a coolness quite remarkable after such a scene, he advanced towards Mlle. Gilberte, and, in a tone of offensive protection,

“Your father is a wretch, mademoiselle,” he said; “and my duty should be to surrender him at once into the hands of justice.  On account of your worthy mother, however, of your father himself, above all, on your own account, mademoiselle, I shall forbear doing so.  But let him fly, let him disappear, and never more be heard from.”

He drew from his pocket a roll of bank-notes, and, throwing them upon the table,

“Hand him this,” he added.  “Let him leave this very night.  The police may have been notified.  There is a train for Brussels at five minutes past eleven.”

And, having bowed, he withdrew, no one addressing him a single word, so great was the astonishment of all the guests of this house, heretofore so peaceful.

Overcome with stupor, Maxence had dropped upon his chair.  Mlle. Gilberte alone retained some presence of mind.

“It is a shame,” she exclaimed, “for us to give up thus!  That man is an impostor, a wretch; he lies!  Father, father!”

M. Favoral had not waited to be called, and was standing up against the parlor-door, pale as death, and yet calm.

“Why attempt any explanations?” he said.  “The money is gone; and appearances are against me.”

His wife had drawn near to him, and taken his hand.  “The misfortune is immense,” she said, “but not irreparable.  We will sell everything we have.”

“Have you not friends?  Are we not here,” insisted the others,—M.  Desclavettes, M. Desormeaux, and M. Chapelain.

Gently he pushed his wife aside, and coldly.

“All we had,” he said, “would be as a grain of sand in an ocean.  But we have no longer anything; we are ruined.”

“Ruined!” exclaimed M. Desormeaux,—“ruined!  And where are the forty-five thousand francs I placed into your hands?”

He made no reply.

“And our hundred and twenty thousand francs?” groaned M. and Mme. Desclavettes.

“And my sixty thousand francs?” shouted M. Chapelain, with a blasphemous oath.

The cashier shrugged his shoulders.  “Lost,” he said, “irrevocably lost!”

Then their rage exceeded all bounds.  Then they forgot that this unfortunate man had been their friend for twenty years, that they were his guests; and they commenced heaping upon him threats and insults without name.

He did not even deign to defend himself.

“Go on,” he uttered, “go on.  When a poor dog, carried away by the current, is drowning, men of heart cast stones at him from the bank.  Go on!”

“You should have told us that you speculated,” screamed M. Desclavettes.

On hearing these words, he straightened himself up, and with a gesture so terrible that the others stepped back frightened.

“What!” said he, in a tone of crushing irony, “it is this evening only, that you discover that I speculated?  Kind friends!  Where, then, and in whose pockets, did you suppose I was getting the enormous interests I have been paying you for years?  Where have you ever seen honest money, the money of labor, yield twelve or fourteen per cent?  The money that yields thus is the money of the gaming table, the money of the bourse.  Why did you bring me your funds?  Because you were fully satisfied that I knew how to handle the cards.  Ah!  If I was to tell you that I had doubled your capital, you would not ask how I did it, nor whether I had stocked the cards.  You would virtuously pocket the money.  But I have lost:  I am a thief.  Well, so be it.  But, then, you are all my accomplices.  It is the avidity of the dupes which induces the trickery of the sharpers.”

Here he was interrupted by the servant coming in.  “Sir,” she exclaimed excitedly, “O sir! the courtyard is full of police agents.  They are speaking to the concierge.  They are coming up stairs:  I hear them!”

III

According to the time and place where they are uttered, there are words which acquire a terrible significance.  In this disordered room, in the midst of these excited people, that word, the “police,” sounded like a thunderclap.

“Do not open,” Maxence ordered; “do not open, however they may ring or knock.  Let them burst the door first.”

The very excess of her fright restored to Mme. Favoral