It was excellent; and when I had done she handed me the liqueur, which I also drank.
“Come back, dearest, to the next room,” she said. “By this time those terrible people must have gone away, and we shall be safer there, for the present, than here.”
“You shall direct, and I obey; you shall command me, not only now, but always, and in all things, my beautiful queen!” I murmured.
My heroics were unconsciously, I daresay, founded upon my ideal of the French school of lovemaking. I am, even now, ashamed as I recall the bombast to which I treated the Countess de St. Alyre.
“There, you shall have another miniature glass—a fairy glass—of noyau,” she said, gaily. In this volatile creature, the funereal gloom of the moment before, and the suspense of an adventure on which all her future was staked, disappeared in a moment. She ran and returned with another tiny glass, which, with an eloquent or tender little speech, I placed to my lips and sipped.
I kissed her hand, I kissed her lips, I gazed in her beautiful eyes, and kissed her again unresisting.
“You call me Richard, by what name am I to call my beautiful divinity?” I asked.
“You call me Eugenie, it is my name. Let us be quite real; that is, if you love as entirely as I do.”
“Eugenie!” I exclaimed, and broke into a new rapture upon the name.
It ended by my telling her how impatient I was to set out upon our journey; and, as I spoke, suddenly an odd sensation overcame me. It was not in the slightest degree like faintness. I can find no phrase to describe it, but a sudden constraint of the brain; it was as if the membrane in which it lies, if there be such a thing, contracted, and became inflexible.
“Dear Richard! what is the matter?” she exclaimed, with terror in her looks. “Good Heavens! are you ill? I conjure you, sit down; sit in this chair.” She almost forced me into one; I was in no condition to offer the least resistance. I recognised but too truly the sensations that supervened. I was lying back in the chair in which I sat without the power, by this time, of uttering a syllable, of closing my eyelids, of moving my eyes, of stirring a muscle. I had in a few seconds glided into precisely the state in which I had passed so many appalling hours when approaching Paris, in my night-drive with the Marquis d’Harmonville.
Great and loud was the lady’s agony. She seemed to have lost all sense of fear. She called me by my name, shook me by the shoulder, raised my arm and let it fall, all the time imploring of me, in distracting sentences, to make the slightest sign of life, and vowing that if I did not, she would make away with herself.
These ejaculations, after a minute or two, suddenly subsided. The lady was perfectly silent and cool. In a very businesslike way she took a candle and stood before me, pale indeed, very pale, but with an expression only of intense scrutiny with a dash of horror in it. She moved the candle before my eyes slowly, evidently watching the effect. She then set it down, and rang a hand-bell two or three times sharply. She placed the two cases (I mean hers containing the jewels) and my strong box, side by side on the table; and I saw her carefully lock the door that gave access to the room in which I had just now sipped my coffee.
XXIV
Hope
She had scarcely set down my heavy box, which she seemed to have considerable difficulty in raising on the table, when the door of the room in which I had seen the coffin, opened, and a sinister and unexpected apparition entered.
It was the Count de St. Alyre, who had been, as I have told you, reported to me to be, for some considerable time, on his way to Père la Chaise. He stood before me for a moment, with the frame of the doorway and a background of darkness enclosing him, like a portrait. His slight, mean figure was draped in the deepest mourning. He had a pair of black gloves in his hand, and his hat with crape round it.
When he was not speaking his face showed signs of agitation; his mouth was puckering and working. He looked damnably wicked and frightened.
“Well, my dear Eugenie? Well, child—eh? Well, it all goes admirably?”
“Yes,” she answered, in a low, hard tone. “But you and Planard should not have left that door open.”
This she said sternly. “He went in there and looked about wherever he liked; it was fortunate he did not move aside the lid of the coffin.”
“Planard should have seen to that,” said the Count, sharply. “Ma foi! I can’t be everywhere!” He advanced half-a-dozen short quick steps into the room toward me, and placed his glasses to his eyes.
“Monsieur Beckett,” he cried sharply, two or three times, “Hi! don’t you know me?”
He approached and peered more closely in my face; raised my hand and shook it, calling me again, then let it drop, and said—“It has set in admirably, my pretty mignonne. When did it commence?”
The Countess came and stood beside him, and looked at me steadily for some seconds.
You can’t conceive the effect of the silent gaze of those two pairs of evil eyes.
The lady glanced to where, I recollected, the mantelpiece stood, and upon it a clock, the regular click of which I sharply heard.
“Four—five—six minutes and a half,” she said slowly, in a cold hard way.
“Brava! Bravissima! my beautiful queen!
