The widow bent over Courtin. The ropes were so tightly bound around his arms that they entered the flesh which was red and swollen on each side of them. The farmer's face, above all, betrayed the misery he was enduring and was paler than that of Maître Jacques.
"He can't stir," said Marianne. "See! Besides, I'll turn the key on him."
"Very good; it won't be for long. You will go at once, won't you, la Picaut?"
"Yes, I promise."
"Thank you. Ah! the thanks I give you are nothing to those the man you have over there will give when you tell him all."
"Well, well! Now let me carry you to the citadel, where you can have the care you need. The confessor and the doctor will both hold their tongues, don't be afraid of that."
"Very good; carry me along. It will be queer to see Maître Jacques die in a bed, when he never, in all his life, slept on anything but ferns and heather."
The widow took him in her arms and carried him to the little room we have mentioned, and laid him on a pallet that was kept there. Maître Jacques, in spite of the suffering he must have endured, in spite of the gravity of his position, continued, in the presence of death, the same merry but sardonic being he had been all his life. The nature of this man, totally unlike that of his compatriots, never belied itself for a single instant. But, in the midst of his lively sarcasms, flung at the things he had defended quite as much as at those he had attacked, he never ceased to urge the widow Picaut to go at once and fulfil the errand to Jean Oullier which he had intrusted to her.
Thus urged, Marianne only took time to lock the door and push the bolts of the fruit-room in which she left Courtin a prisoner. She crossed the garden, re-entered the inn, and found her old mother greatly alarmed by the noise of the shots which had reached her. Her daughter's absence increased the old woman's fears, and she was beginning to be terribly alarmed lest the widow had been made the victim of some trap by her brother-in-law, when Marianne returned.
The widow, without telling her mother a word of what had happened, begged her not to let any one pass into the ruins; then, flinging her mantle over her shoulders, she prepared to go out. Just as she laid her hand on the latch of the door a light knock was given without. Marianne turned back to her mother.