The Sacrificial Altar

There was nothing but to humor him. Once more he took his arm, and led him out into the street. Slowly the two men climbed the hills through the fog, for one, though gallant, was no longer young, and the other, although tragically young, was very weak. When they reached the foot of the steep incline which led up to the old Bac mansion M. Dupont cunningly would have passed on, but Louis swung about peremptorily, and the philosophical old boulevardier, who cared for no further argument or confiscation of his precious evening hours, shrugged his shoulders and followed his erratic young friend up and into the house.

The economical Seraphine never left a light burning in the hall. Louis struck a match and led the way into the old double parlors he used as his study, and lit a gas-jet. M. Cesar sat down on one of the horsehair chairs and opened his cigar-case.

“Mon Dieu!” he cried. “What a way to live in this amiable world. Fireless, dank, chairs stuffed with rocks. No wonder you look as if you had been in cold-storage.”

“Oh, do not trouble yourself to light a cigar, Monsieur. It will go out, I assure you.”

He pulled open a drawer of his desk and pointed to a pile of loose gold and half a dozen diamonds of fair size.

“My God!”

M. Cesar experienced an awful feeling of disintegration. The cigar fell from his relaxed hand and he sagged as far back in the chair as its uncompromising back would permit. He stared at the contents of the drawer throughout a long moment while he shivered with the impression that the waters of death were rising in that bleak and horribly silent room. But at the end of those sixty indelible seconds he sat very erect and the angry color rushed to his face.

“No!” he exclaimed. “That is not evidence. I am quite unconvinced. I have not the least idea how much gold Berthe had in her desk, and one gold-piece is like another. I am a judge of diamonds, for I, alas! have bought many; but diamonds of the same size and water are as hard to identify. Those, no doubt, were your mother’s.”

“My mother had no diamonds. And what do you suppose I do with diamonds in my desk?”

“Properties, no doubt. How do I know that you have not in another drawer burglars’ kits and tools, and all the other instruments of destruction with which your characters celebrate themselves? Those diamonds were larger than any poor Berthe possessed.”

“They may have looked small in the heavy art nouveau setting. I noticed the bracelet the night of the dinner.”

“I never saw it until I saw it in ruins. Let me see those stones.” Louis gathered them up and poured them into M. Cesar’s steady hand. The old Frenchman felt of them, held them up to the light, flung them back contemptuously into the drawer. “Paste! I thought as much. For why should you buy real diamonds? As for Berthe—what few stones the poor child had were genuine. She could neither afford stones of that size nor would she condescend to wear paste.”

“Do you mean to say you will not believe me?” Louis looked sharply at M. Cesar.