(1) The brief but acrimonious interview of M. de Brencourt and M. Chassin had scarcely terminated when Roland de Céligny emerged from his leader’s bedroom to the outer room. He shut the door behind him quickly, and stood there a moment with his back to it, curiously combining the air of a sentinel and that of a fugitive. And indeed, breathing rather fast, he was saying to himself, “No one shall go in—not even the Abbé!”
He had just been witnessing something which, though he did not fully understand it, he felt no eyes ought to have witnessed; he was hot and shaken with the thought that his own unwilling but necessary presence had been an outrage. . . . But since he was there, as he knew, to answer what he was asked, and since the Marquis de Kersaint could ask anything of him, even to his life, he had stayed, and averted his eyes through the storm of questioning, behind which could be divined a man’s very soul on the rack—till that final bowing of the proud, unhappy head over the battered trinket that Roland had withdrawn from his own neck and held out as proof irrefragable . . . yet a proof of what he still did not know.
He was so agitated that it was only after a few seconds of this self-imposed vigil that he realised he was facing an empty room. The Abbé was not there, the Comte was not there. And in a minute or two more, still hearing no movement from within he thought, “I must not stay here; he would not like it . . . I must tell the Abbé something. But I must also contrive that no one else goes in.” And, casting a glance on the wasted victuals of that supper-table which he had been so instrumental in breaking up, he went out.
A little later he was knocking at the aum?nier’s door. M. Chassin, barely entered himself, opened it. His face lit up when he saw who stood there.
“My dear boy, I am glad to see you! Come in!”
Roland still hesitated. “Are you alone, mon père?”
“Absolutely, my child. Come in!” He almost steered him in. “Now sit down, and we will have a talk. I was hoping that you would come.”
But Roland would not sit down. In his young mind he was afraid, if he did that, of being led into saying more than he wanted to say. He did not know how much he ought to reveal. As a matter of fact he hated saying anything at all about what he had seen, but, bewildered as he was, he felt that the Abbé had better be told something.
Standing there by the bed, he began at the end. “I . . . I ventured to tell the officer of the guard that no one was to approach M. le Marquis to-night except through you—because of his wound,” he said.
“Excellent! Very good indeed!” said the priest, and he clapped him on the shoulder. Roland wondered a little why he seemed so elated; to him, fresh from that scene with his leader, it did not seem quite decent.
“You are perhaps going to see him now, mon père?” he hazarded.
“God forbid, my son! If ever a man’s privacy should be respected, his should be at this moment . . . if you have done what I prayed you might be doing!”
“But, Monsieur l’Abbé,” besought the perplexed and almost unhappy Roland, “what is it that I have done? What is it all?”
“Tell me first what you did do?” said the priest. “No,”—for the boy had instantly turned away and was showing a disposition to go—“I do not want to hear anything about M. de Kersaint. I can see from your face how you feel about it. I only want to know this—how did you convince him . . . if you did . . . that Mme Vidal, who has some brown specks in one of her eyes, was . . . someone he had known before?”
“I showed him,” said Roland, looking at the floor, “a little old locket she gave me when I left. And when he saw that——” He stopped dead.
“Yes, yes,” said the priest, putting a hand on his arm. “When he saw that he was convinced, was he not? That’s all it is necessary for me to know, my child. Please God the rest will come right now.”
“O, Monsieur l’Abbé, couldn’t you tell me what is to come right?”
“Not just yet,” said M. Chassin, smiling. “But you shall know soon. Anyhow, my son, you can go to bed, as I hope you are about to do, with the reflection that you have this evening done the best day’s work you ever did in your young life. . . . I think you have not yet had your scolding for going to Mirabel? No! Well, you will never get it now——from M. de Kersaint.” And adding, “Go to bed! God bless you!” he, to Roland’s astonishment, bestowed upon him a hearty embrace.
And the author of so much disturbance, somewhat comforted, lay down a little later by the side of Artamène and Lucien, whose scrupulous abstention, on his request, from all enquiries about his supper-party seemed a thing phenomenal, an almost chilly lack. So, also, did the absence of the little locket and its chain from Roland’s own neck.
(2)
How well inspired M. l’Abbé Chassin, for his part, had been to lie down to sleep that night almost fully dressed, was proved at about a quarter to five next morning, when he woke to find M. du Ménars, rather scantily clothed, standing beside his bed. He blinked up at him a moment, for if he had expected to be roused by anyone, it was by Gaston himself.
“Do you know where de Brencourt is, Abbé?” asked the Comte’s next in rank. “He is nowhere to be found, and I must see either him or the Marquis at once, the Marquis by preference. But for that I want your permission, as I understand he was not to be disturbed without it.”
“What has happened?” asked the Abbé, getting off the bed.
“Cadoudal has just sent an express to say that the English convoy with muskets and ammunition for the Morbihan which he was expecting has arrived—arrived two days ago,” he added, glancing at the open letter in his hand, “but that, knowing M. de Kersaint to be in need of both, and that he would probably be in a position to repay him in kind later on, he detached one ship for us before it unloaded, and directed it to put in at Sainte-Brigitte, and as the wind is favourable it ought to be there this evening. Splendid news—provided we can reach the coast quickly. And of course we shall want every man we can get together to cover the disembarkation, for the Blues are certain to get wind of it.”
“I will rouse the Marquis instantly,” said M. Chassin. “Only do me the favour, Monsieur du Ménars, of allowing me to see him first. He was much indisposed last night. . . .”
And a few seconds later, with Cadoudal’s despatch in his hand, he was knocking gently on his foster-brother’s door. Receiving no answer he tried the handle. To his surprise it gave, so he went in, shutting the door quickly.
It was light, of course; had been light for long enough, added to which the sun would soon be up. All the eastern sky already expected him. But in the room there still survived the pale, forgotten ghost of a candle flame, and the open window was curtained over. And by the window, fully dressed, his sound arm stretched out along the wide ledge, his head sunk forward on that arm, sat Gaston de Trélan asleep. At least he did not move until the priest touched him on the shoulder.
“Who is it?” he asked without moving. “I thought the door was locked.”
“It is I, Pierre,” answered the Abbé, his voice very stirred. “Gaston, my brother . . .”
And his brother sighed, lifted his head, and pulled himself up from the sill, stiffly, as if he had been there a long time. In his one available hand he held something tightly. He looked like a man who has had as much as he can bear in this world, from whom shock has shorn away everything, even the power to feel joy.
“I fell asleep, I think,” he said uncertainly. “I suppose you have come to tell me, Pierre, that it is all a dream?”
“No, thank the ever-merciful God, it is true. Look in your hand!”
The Duc de............