“I have done what my father did,” he thought. “I, who set out to atone for him.” And he laughed aloud with so much mockery at his own pretensions that the laughter startled him. “I can plead a different reason. But what of that? I have done what my father did!”
He folded the tunic reverently, and laid it down again in the alcove. As he stood up he was startled by the clatter of something falling overhead and the sharp explosion of a pistol. He looked upwards. The sound had come from behind those curtains where Marguerite was hidden. Had she been watching? Had she seen him fondling the tunic? Had she heard his bitter laughter? Perhaps he had spoken aloud. For a moment his heart stood still. Some words that Henriette had said to him—oh, ever so long ago, in the Villa Iris, flashed back into his mind. “Even if the grand passion comes—oh la, la la!—she will blow her brains out, the little fool!”
He sprang up the stairs, crying “Marguerite! Marguerite!” and stumbling in his haste. No answer was returned to him. He tore the curtains aside, and saw her lying on the floor by the side of a divan. The pistol had slipped from her hand and fallen a little way from her. Paul flung himself upon his knees beside her, lifted her, and pressed her close to his heart. “Marguerite! Marguerite!” he whispered. There was no wound, and she was breathing, and in a moment or two her eyes opened. Paul understood in that supreme moment of relief how greatly his love of Marguerite overpowered his grief at honour lost.
“Oh, my dear, you frightened me!” he said.
She smiled as he lifted her onto the divan.
“I was foolish,” she answered.
She had waited upon the outcome of that wild scene in the court below, her nerves steady, her mind unconscious of any effort to steel herself against catastrophe. She could catch but a glimpse of what was going forward; she did not understand the trick by which Paul Ravenel had appeased the invaders; she heard the wild babble of their frenzied voices and Paul’s voice over-topping them. She had waited serenely with her little pistol in her hand, safety to be reached so easily by the mere pressure of a finger. Then suddenly all was over; the court was empty, the house which had rung with fury a moment since was silent; and as she heard the bolts of the door shot once more into their sockets her strength had melted away. She had stood for a little while in a daze and, catching at the divan as she fell, had slipped in a swoon to the floor. The pistol fell from her hand and exploded as it fell.
“I was foolish,” she repeated; “I didn’t understand what had happened. I don’t even now.”
“I was afraid that some time or another some one had seen me enter this house and remembered it,” Paul Ravenel explained. “Last night something happened outside the door—what, I don’t know, but enough to trouble me a little. So after you had gone to bed I boiled a kettle—”
“Yes, I heard it.”