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Updated: May 18, 2025
There is the sun at last What a picture! And the shame of it! I am hungry!" At half after six the yacht let go her anchor a few hundred yards from the quay. Every one was astir by now; but at the breakfast table there was one vacant chair Breitmann's. M. Ferraud and Fitzgerald exchanged significant glances. In fact, the Frenchman drank his coffee hurriedly and excused himself.
"Would I not follow you to any land? Would I not share with you any miseries? Have you ever doubted the strength of my love?" "Knowing that there was another?" "Knowing even that." "It is I who am little and you who are great. Hildegarde, we'll have our friend Ferraud seek a priest this afternoon and square accounts." Her head dropped to the coverlet.
M. Ferraud had not jested; Breitmann was mad, obsessed, a monomaniac. It was grotesque; it troubled the senses as a Harlequin's dance troubles the eyes. A great-grandson of Napoleon, and plotting to enter France! And, good Lord! with what? Two million francs and half a dozen spendthrifts. Never had there been a wilder, more hopeless dreamer than this!
"Perhaps divide it, perhaps turn it over to France, providing France agrees to use it for charitable purposes." "A fine plan, is it not, Mr. Breitmann?" said M. Ferraud. "Findings is keepings," repeated Breitmann, with a pale smile. The eyes of Hildegarde von Mitter burned and burned. Could she but read what lay behind that impassive face! And he took it all with a smile!
"Do you know, monsieur, that I am lawyer to the Countess Ferraud," he said, interrupting the speaker, "Colonel Chabert's widow?" "My wife yes monsieur. Therefore, after a hundred fruitless attempts to interest lawyers, who have all thought me mad, I made up my mind to come to you.
Derville had without knowing it laid his finger on the hidden wound, put his hand on the canker that consumed Madame Ferraud. She received him in a pretty winter dining-room, where she was at breakfast, while playing with a monkey tethered by a chain to a little pole with climbing bars of iron.
But hate burned fiercely in the breast against the man who could compel him to lower his eyes. Some day he would pay back that glance. Now, M. Ferraud had missed nothing. He twisted the talk into other channels with his usual adroitness, but all the while there was bubbling in his mind the news that these two men had met before. The history of Hildegarde von Mitter was known to him.
The captain's vanity was soothed, but he was not aware that he had put doubt upon his own veracity. "That's kind of you." "An' say!" went on the captain, drinking his tea, not because he liked it but because it was customary, "I've got a character forwards. I'm allus shippin' odds and ends. Got a Frenchman; hands like a lady." Breitmann leaned forward, and M. Ferraud sat up.
But for a casual glance at the little man's hands, neither would he have had any. He determined to prod M. Ferraud. He was well trained in repression; so, while he often lost patience, there was never any external sign of it. Besides, there was another affair which over-shadowed it and at times engulfed it. Love. The cross-tides of sense and sentiment made a pretty disturbance.
"He is inclined to be too much reserved. But last night Mr. Ferraud succeeded in tearing down some of it. If I could put in a book what all you men have seen and taken part in! Mr. Breitmann would be almost handsome but for those scars." He kicked the turf at the foot of the wall. "In Germany they are considered beauty-spots." "I am not in sympathy with that custom."
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