[The Midnight Passenger by Richard Henry Savage]@TWC D-Link book
The Midnight Passenger

CHAPTER VI
11/32

He would like to spoil our game; he shall spoil his own." And the traitor hastened away to entrap Braun, little dreaming that the acute druggist would never trust himself to the hands of the "gang" at Hamburg.
Randall Clayton had been startled by Madame Raffoni's eager disclosure as he approached the place of rendezvous.

He had studied the still handsome face of the disguised Leah Einstein when she told him that the Fraeulein was really ill and most unhappy.

He managed to pick out from her dialect that the diva had been plunged in some secret sorrow.
Quietly restraining himself, he watched the voluptuous form of the Jewess mingle with the crowd of guests on the hotel terrace.
"That poor woman, a worn-out theater beauty, is without guile.

What can this mean ?" He had rightly judged the good-hearted Leah's concern, and he never knew of the long hours of the discarded mistress' ministrations to the "reigning beauty." Timorous at heart, Leah Einstein's evil career had been only one of petty wheedling craft, and an easy self-surrender.
Violence she both feared and abhorred, and now, in the wane of her beauty, she was easily content with such crumbs of money profit as could be picked up by an easy code of a plastic surface morality which covered only her petty intrigues.
Loyal to Irma Gulyas, Randall Clayton dared not question the poor mock duenna; in fact, her jargon vocabulary would have failed her, but there had been no deceit in the sympathetic tears which clung to Madame Raffoni's eyelids.
Seated on a half-burned spar, there where the roar of the restless waves reached their ears, with her face veiled, the Magyar witch awaited her all unsuspicious lover.

The golden sunset faded now far in the west, the piled up purple clouds were turning blacker, and around them "The mists arose, the waters swelled," "Gulls screamed, their flight recalling." The woman's heart was racked with the deceit which had entrapped a man she now madly loved.
The freshening wind was driving the black smoke of the steamers, far out at sea, in long funereal wreaths, athwart the foaming wake, and the silver-sailed schooners began to reef, in anticipation of the coming storm.
An infinite tenderness seized upon Randall Clayton as he motioned to Madame Raffoni to leave them, and then took that beloved head to its shelter upon his breast.
His heart panted for the day when they could be all in all to each other.


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