"Your sense of justice, my dear patron," answered Obenreizer, "states in a word the cruelty of the case. Does it stop there? No. For, what follows upon that?"
"True, my poor boy," said the notary, with a comforting nod or two; "your ward rebels upon that."
"Rebels is too soft a word," retorted Obenreizer. "My ward revolts from me with horror. My ward defies me. My ward withdraws herself from my authority, and takes shelter (Madame Dor with her) in the house of that English lawyer, Mr. Bintrey, who replies to your summons to her to submit herself to my authority, that she will not do so."
"--And who afterwards writes," said the notary, moving his large snuff- box to look among the papers underneath it for the letter, "that he is coming to confer with me."
"Indeed?" replied Obenreizer, rather checked. "Well, sir. Have I no legal rights?"
"Assuredly, my poor boy," returned the notary. "All but felons have their legal rights."
"And who calls me felon?" said Obenreizer, fiercely.
"No one. Be calm under your wrongs. If the House of Defresnier would call you felon, indeed, we should know how to deal with them."
While saying these words, he had handed Bintrey's very short letter to Obenreizer, who now read it and gave it back.
"In saying," observed Obenreizer, with recovered composure, "that he is coming to confer with you, this English lawyer means that he is coming to deny my authority over my ward."
"You think so?"
"I am sure of it. I know him. He is obstinate and contentious. You will tell me, my dear sir, whether my authority is unassailable, until my ward is of age?"
"Absolutely unassailable."
"I will enforce it. I will make her submit herself to it. For," said Obenreizer, changing his angry tone to one of grateful submission, "I owe it to you, sir; to you, who have so confidingly taken an injured man under your protection, and into your employment."
"Make your mind easy," said Maitre Voigt. "No more of this now, and no thanks! Be here to-morrow morning, before the other clerk comes--between seven and eight. You will find me in this room; and I will myself initiate you in your work. Go away! go away! I have letters to write. I won't hear a word more."
Dismissed with this generous abruptness, and satisfied with the favourable impression he had left on the old man's mind, Obenreizer was at leisure to revert to the mental note he had made that Maitre Voigt once had a client whose name was Vendale.
"I ought to know England well enough by this time;" so his meditations ran, as he sat on a bench in the yard; "and it is not a name I ever encountered there, except--" he looked involuntarily over his shoulder--"as his name. Is the world so small that I cannot get away from him, even now when he is dead? He confessed at the last that he had betrayed the trust of the dead, and misinherited a fortune. And I was to see to it. And I was to stand off, that my face might remind him of it. Why my face, unless it concerned me? I am sure of his words, for they have been in my ears ever since. Can there be anything bearing on them, in the keeping of this old idiot? Anything to repair my fortunes, and blacken his memory? He dwelt upon my earliest remembrances, that night at Basle. Why, unless he had a purpose in it?"