Volume II Part 31 (1/2)
”Speak!”
”This woman has just been here; she was below just now. She told me she knew it was I who gave up the child.”
”Malediction! who could have told her? Tournemine is at the galleys.”
”I denied everything, treating her as a liar. But she maintains that she has found this child again, now grown up; that she knows where she is, and that it only depends upon herself to discover everything.”
”Is h.e.l.l unchained against me to-day?” cried the notary, in a fit of rage that rendered him hideous.
”What shall be said to the woman? What must we promise, to keep her silent?”
”Does she look as if she were poor?”
”As I treated her like a beggar, she shook her reticule--there was money in it.”
”And she knows where this young girl is now?”
”She declares she knows.”
”And she is the daughter of Countess M'Gregor!” said the notary to himself, ”who just now offered me so much to say that her child was not dead! And the child lives. I can restore her to her! Yes; but this false certificate of death--if any inquiry is made, I am lost! This crime may put them on the scent of others.” After a moment's thought, he said to Madame Seraphin, ”This one-eyed woman knows where the girl is?”
”Yes.”
”And this woman will return to-morrow?”
”To-morrow.”
”Write to Polidori to be here to-night at nine o'clock.”
”Do you mean to get rid of the girl and the old woman? It will be too much for one time, Ferrand!”
”I tell you to write to Folidori to be here to-night by nine o'clock.”
At the close of this day, Rudolph said to Murphy, who had not been able to see the notary, ”Let M. de Graun send a courtier off at once.
Cicily must be in Paris in six days.”
”Once more that infernal she-devil! the execrable wife of poor David, as handsome as she is infamous! For what good, your highness?”
”For what good, Sir Walter? In a month's time you may ask this question of the notary, Jacques Ferrand.”
CHAPTER X.
DENUNCIATION.
About ten o'clock in the evening of the day on which Fleur-de-Marie had been carried off by Screech-owl and the Schoolmaster, a man on horseback arrived at the farm, coming, as he said, on the part of Rudolph, to rea.s.sure Mrs. George as to the disappearance of her young _protegee_, who would return to her in a few days. For several very important reasons, added this man, Rudolph begged Mrs. George, in the event of her having anything to send him, not to write him at Paris, but to hand the letter to the courier, who would take charge of it.
This courier was an emissary of Sarah's. By this she tranquilized Mrs.