With a sign of farewell the general turned and disappeared beneath the gloomy portal.
Bertha worked her way through the close-pressed ranks of the crowd until she reached the nearest church, which she entered. There she remained a long time kneeling on the cold stone pavement.
When she rose the stones were wet with tears.
Then she crossed the town and the pont Rousseau. Approaching the inn of the Point du Jour, she saw her father sitting at the threshold of the door. Within the last few hours the Marquis de Souday had aged ten years; his eye had lost the humorous, bantering look which gave it such expression; he carried his head low, like a man whose burden was too heavy for him.
Warned by the priest who had received the last confession of Maître Jacques, and who went to the forest of Touvois to tell the marquis what had happened, the old man started at once for Nantes. A mile from the pont Rousseau he met Bertha, whose horse had fallen, having broken a tendon in the furious pace to which she had urged him.
The girl confessed to her father what had happened. The old man did not reproach her, but he broke the stick he held in his hand against the stones of the road.
When they reached the pont Rousseau public rumor informed them, though it was only seven in the morning, of the arrest of the princess before that arrest was actually accomplished. Bertha, not daring to raise her eyes to her father, rushed toward Nantes; the old man seated himself on the bench before the inn, where we find him four hours later.
This sorrow was the only one against which his selfish and epicurean philosophy was impotent. He would have pardoned his daughter many faults; but he could not think without despair that she had covered his name with the crime and shame of lèze-chivalry, and that a Souday, the last of the name, should have helped to fling royalty into the gulf.
When Bertha approached him he silently held out to her a paper a gendarme had given him. It was her passport from the general.
"Father, will you not forgive me as she forgave me?" said the girl, in a gentle, humble tone which contrasted strangely with her self-assuming manner in other days.