With a pencil she rapidly traced these lines:—
'My heart bleeds for thee, sweet Lucy. I cannot speak—I know it all. Look for me the first hour I regain myself.'
Again she threw herself upon the bed, and lay motionless.
III
Toward sundown that evening, Pierre stood in one of the three bespoken chambers in the Black Swan Inn; the blue chintz-covered chest and the writing-desk before him. His hands were eagerly searching through his pockets.
'The key! the key! Nay, then, I must force it open. It bodes ill, too. Yet lucky is it, some bankers can break into their own vaults, when other means do fail. Not so, ever. Let me see:—yes, the tongs there. Now then for the sweet sight of gold and silver. I never loved it till this day. How long it has been hoarded;—little token pieces, of years ago, from aunts, uncles, cousins innumerable, and from—but I won't mention them; dead henceforth to me! Sure there'll be a premium on such ancient gold. There's some broad bits, token pieces to my—I name him not—more than half a century ago. Well, well, I never thought to cast them back into the sordid circulations whence they came. But if they must be spent, now is the time, in this last necessity, and in this sacred cause. 'Tis a most stupid, dunderheaded crowbar. Hoy! so! ah, now for it:—snake's nest!'
Forced suddenly back, the chest-lid had as suddenly revealed to him the chair-portrait lying on top of all the rest, where he had secreted it some days before. Face up, it met him with its noiseless, ever-nameless, and ambiguous, unchanging smile. Now his first repugnance was augmented by an emotion altogether new. That
