“Thanks be to Heaven that I met that excellent abbé!” murmured Fleurissoire as he returned homewards. “What should I have done without him?”
And Protos murmured as he went:
“You shall have a jolly good dose of your Cardinal, my boy!... Why, if he had been left to himself, I’m hanged if he wouldn’t have gone to see the real one.”
V
As Fleurissoire complained of great fatigue, Carola had allowed him to sleep that night notwithstanding the interest she took in him and the tender compassion she was thrown into when he confessed his ignorance in the matter of love ... sleep, that is, as much as he was able for the intolerable itching of the bites—fleas’ as well as mosquitoes’—which covered his whole body.
“You oughtn’t to scratch like that, dearie,” she said to him the next morning, “you only irritate it. Oh, how inflamed this one is!” and she touched the spot on his chin. Then as he was getting ready to go out: “Here! wear these in remembrance of me.” And she fastened the grotesque trinkets which Protos had objected to her wearing, into the pilgrim’s cuffs. Amédée promised to come back the same evening, or at latest the next morning.
“You’ll swear that you’ll not hurt him?” repeated Carola a moment later to Protos, who had come through the secret door already disguised; and as he was late because he had waited for Fleurissoire to leave before showing himself, he was obliged to take a carriage to the station.
In his new aspect, with his open shirt, his brown breeches, his sandals, laced over his blue stockings, his short pipe and his tan-coloured hat with its small flat brim, it must be admitted that he looked far more like a regular Abruzzi brigand than like a curé. Fleurissoire, who was walking up and down the platform waiting for him, hesitated to recognise the individual who, like St. Peter Martyr, with a finger on his lips, passed by him without seeming to see him and disappeared into a carriage at the head of the train. But after a moment he reappeared at the door of the carriage, and looking in Amédée’s direction with one eye half shut, he made him a surreptitious sign with his hand to come up; and as Amédée was about to get in:
“Please see whether there’s anyone next door,” whispered Protos.
No one; and their compartment was the last in the carriage.