The Clique of Gold, Emile Gaboriau [if you liked this book .txt] 📗

“What, my dear Sir Thorn!” exclaimed the count, “your leg still gives you trouble?”

“Oh, a great deal!” replied the honorable gentleman, with a very marked English accent,—“a great deal since this morning. The doctor thinks there must be something the matter with the bone.”

At the same time, obeying the tendency which we all have to display our ailments, he slightly drew up his trousers, so that the bandages became visible which he wore around his leg. Count Ville-Handry looked at it with pity; then, forgetting that he had introduced Daniel already the night before at the opera, he presented him once more; and, when the ceremony was over, he said to Sir Thorn,—

“Upon my word, I am almost ashamed to appear so early; but I knew you expected company to-night.”

“Oh, only a few persons!”

“And I desired to see you for a few moments alone.”

A strange grimace represented the only smile of which the honorable gentleman was capable. He made it twice, and then said, caressing his primly-cut whiskers,—

“They have told Miss Sarah that you are here, my dear count; and I heard her tell Mrs. Brian that she was nearly ready. I cannot imagine how she can spend so much time at her toilet.”

They were thus chatting away before the fireplace, Sir Thorn stretched out in an easy-chair, and the count leaning against the mantlepiece, while Daniel had withdrawn into the embrasure of a window which looked upon the court-yard and the garden behind the house. There, his brow pressed against the cool window-panes, he was meditating. He could not understand this wound of M. Elgin’s.

“Is it possible that his fall was an intentional fall?” he thought, “or did he really break his leg? If he did so, that fainting-fit might have been natural, and not prearranged; but”—

He was just plunging into these doubts and speculations, when the noise of a carriage entering the court-yard, aroused him from his thoughts.

He looked out. A coupe had driven up to the back porch of the house. A lady stepped out; and he was on the point of uttering a cry of surprise, for he thought he recognized Miss Sarah in that woman. But could that be so? He was unwilling to believe it, when she suddenly raised her head in order to speak to the coachman, and the light from the lamps fell full upon her face.

There was no doubt now on his mind. It was Miss Brandon.

She flew up the steps, and entered the house. He heard distinctly the heavy door close behind her.

At the opera, the night before, a single word uttered by Miss Brandon had sufficed to enlighten Daniel. But now this was a very different matter. It was a potent fact, unmistakable and tangible, which came to him in support of his suspicions.

In order to increase the passionate impatience of the count, they had told him that Miss Brandon was still dressing, but that she was making all haste to come down to him. Not a word had been said of her being out, and of her return at that very moment. Where had she been? What new intrigues had compelled her to leave the house just then? It must have evidently been something of great importance to have kept her out till so late an hour, and when she knew, moreover, that the count was waiting for her.

This incident threw a flood of light on the cunning policy pursued in this house, and on the clever and active complicity of M. Thomas Elgin and Mrs. Brian. What their game really was, and how Count Ville-Handry had been caught in the trap, he now understood well enough; he would have been caught in it himself.

How clever these actors were! how perfect all the arrangements! and how scientifically the smallest details were prepared! How marvellously well even the parlor was arranged to serve the purposes of the owners! This simple elegance could not but banish all doubts; and this horrible portrait of the so-called Gen. Brandon—what a stroke of genius!

As to the lame leg of Sir Thorn, Daniel no longer believed in it.

“His leg is no more broken than mine,” he thought.

But at the same time he marvelled at the self-denial of this gentleman, who, in order to prove a falsehood, consented to wear his leg bandaged up for months, as if it really had been severely injured.

“And to-night,” said Daniel to himself, “the performance, no doubt, is to be specially artistic, as they expected me.”

Still, like a duellist, who tries to regain all his strength after a sleepless night, Daniel was now fully prepared for the battle. He even returned to the fireplace, for fear that his standing alone, and his preoccupation, might betray his thoughts.

The conversation between Count Ville-Handry and M. Elgin had in the meantime become very familiar; and the count was just detailing all his arrangements for the approaching wedding. He would live, he said, with his wife in the second story of his palace. The first story was to be divided into two suites of apartments,—one for M. Thomas Elgin, and the other for Mrs. Brian; for he knew very well that his adored Sarah would never consent to part with her dear relatives, who had been father and mother to her.

The last words remained in his throat; he stood as if he were petrified, his eyes starting from their sockets, his mouth wide open.

Mrs. Brian had entered the room, followed by Miss Brandon. Daniel was even more struck by her strange beauty to-day than at the opera; it was literally dazzling. She wore on that night a dress of tea-color embroidered with tiny bouquets in Chinese silk, and trimmed below with an immense flounce of plaited muslin. In her hair, which looked even more carelessly put up than usually, she had nothing but a branch of fuschia, the crimson bells falling gracefully down upon her neck, where they mingled with her golden curls.

She came smilingly up to Count Ville-Handry, and, offering him her brow to kiss, she said,—

“Do I look well, dear count?”

He trembled from head to foot; and all he could do was to stretch out his lips, and to stammer in an almost ecstatic tone of voice,—

“Oh, beautiful! too beautiful!”

“It has taken you long enough, I am sure,” said Sir Thorn severely,—“too long!”

He might have known that Miss Brandon had accomplished a miracle of expeditiousness; for it was not a quarter of an hour since she returned to the house.

“You are an impertinent villain, Thorn,” she said, laughing in the fresh and hearty manner of a child; “and I am very happy that the presence of the count relieves me from your eternal sermons.”

“Sarah!” exclaimed Mrs. Brian reprovingly.

But she had already turned round, with her hand outstretched towards Daniel,—

“I am so glad you