And with these words the priest quitted the apartment, leaving Jacques Ferrand and Polidori alone there. No sooner was the door closed than a fearful imprecation burst from the lips of Jacques Ferrand, whose rage and despair, so long and forcibly repressed, now broke forth with redoubled fury. Breathless and excited, he continued, with wild and haggard looks, to pace to and fro like a furious tiger going the length of his chain, and then again retracing his infuriated march; while Polidori, preserving the most imperturbable look and manner, gazed on him with insulting calmness. "Damnation!" exclaimed Jacques Ferrand, at last, in a voice of concentrated wrath and violence; "the idea of my fortune being thus swallowed up in founding these humbugging philanthropic institutions, and to be obliged to give away my riches in such absurdities as building banks for other people! Your master must be the fiend himself to torture a man as he is doing me!" "I have no master," replied Polidori, coldly; "only, like yourself, I have a judge whose decrees there is no escaping!" "But thus blindly and idiotically to follow the most trifling order of this man!" continued Jacques Ferrand, with redoubled rage. "To compel me, constrain me, to the very actions most galling and hateful to me!" "Nay, you have your chance between obedience and the scaffold!" "And to think that there should be no way to escape this accursed domination! To be obliged to part with such a sum as that I lately handed over to that old proser,--a million sterling! The very extent of all my earthly possessions are now this house and about one hundred thousand francs. What more can he want with me?" "Oh, but you have not done yet! The prince has learned, through Badinot, that your man of straw, 'Petit Jean,' was only your own assumed title, under which you made so many usurious loans to the Count de Remy, whom you so roughly took to task for his forgeries. The sums repaid by Saint-Remy were supplied him by a lady of high rank; and you may, very probably, be called upon to make a second restitution in that case, as well as the former; however, you may escape that in consequence of the fear entertained of wounding the delicacy of the noble lender, were the facts brought before the public." "And fixed, chained here!" "As firmly as though bound by an iron cable!" "With such a wretch as you for my gaoler!" "Why, it is the prince's system to punish crime by crime,--the guilty by the hand of his accomplice. So how can you object to me?" "Oh, rage!"