"You speak of my crimes, Jean Oullier, and you forget that my young master, who will soon become yours, owes me his life; and that if I had been the traitor that you call me I should have delivered him up to the soldiers who passed and repassed my house every day while he was there. You forget all that, while, on the contrary, you rake up every trifling circumstance against me."
"If you did save your master," continued Jean Oullier, in the same inexorable tone, "it is because that sham devotion was useful to your plans. Better for him, better for those two poor girls, if you had let them end their days honorably, gloriously, than to have mixed them up in these shameless intrigues. That is what I have against you, Courtin; that thought alone doubles the hatred I feel to you."
"The proof that I don't hate you, Jean Oullier, is that if I had chosen you would long ago have been put out of this world."
"What do you mean?"
"On the day of that hunt when the father of Monsieur Michel was killed--murdered, Monsieur Jean, we won't blink the word--a beater was not ten paces from him; and the name of that beater was Courtin."
Jean Oullier rose to his full height.
"Yes," continued the farmer, "and this beater saw it was Jean Oullier's ball that brought the traitor down."
"Yes," said Jean Oullier; "but it was not a crime it was an expiation. I am proud to have been the man whom God selected to punish that criminal."
"God alone may punish, God alone may curse," said the mayor.
"No, I am not mistaken; it is He who has put into my heart this hatred of sin, this ineradicable recollection of treachery; it was the finger of God touching my heart when that heart quivered at the name of the traitor. When my shot struck that Judas I felt the breath of the divine Justice cross my face and cool it; and, from that moment to this I have found the peace and calmness I never had while that unpunished criminal prospered before my eyes. God was with me."