“It is! It is!... Oh! it serves me right! It serves me right!” he repeated.
She was touched.
“And, besides, it never begins like that. Shall I call Madam in to tell you so?... No? Well, then, you’d better go out a little to distract your thoughts. Go and get a glass of Marsala.” She kept silent for a moment. At last, unable to restrain herself any longer:
“Listen,” she broke out. “I’ve something serious to tell you. You didn’t happen to meet a sort of curé yesterday, with white hair, did you?”
“Why?” asked Fleurissoire in amazement.
“Well ...” she hesitated again; then, looking at him and seeing how pale he was, she went on impulsively: “Well, don’t trust him. Take my word for it, you poor lamb; he means to fleece you. I oughtn’t to tell you so, but ... don’t you trust him.”
Amédée was getting ready to go out, not knowing whether he was on his head or on his heels; he was already on the stairs, when she called him back:
“And mind, if you see him again, don’t tell him that I said anything. You’d as good as murder me.”
Decidedly, life was becoming too complicated for Amédée. And, what is more, his feet were frozen, his head burning and his ideas topsyturvy. How was he to know where he was, if Father Cave himself turned out to be a humbug?... Then, the Cardinal too perhaps?... But the cheque then? He took the paper out of his pocket, felt it and was reassured by its reality. No, no! It wasn’t possible! Carola was wrong. And then what did she know of the mysterious interests that compelled poor Cave to play double? It was much more likely that the whole thing was some paltry vengeance of Baptistin’s, against whom, in fact, the abbé had warned him.... No matter! he would keep his eyes open wider than ever; he would suspect Cave for the future just as he already suspected Baptistin; and who knows if even Carola ...?
“And, indeed,” he said to himself, “here we have at once the consequence and the proof of that initial vice—the collapse of the Holy See; everything comes tottering down with that. Whom can one trust if not the Pope? And once the corner-stone on which the Church was built gives way, nothing else deserves to be true.”