For a few moments the abbé, with frowning brows, inflexibly continued his pacing. Then at last:
“You are acquainted, I know, with Father Boudin, with whom I am lunching this very morning—” (he pulled out his watch) “I shall be late. Make out a cheque in his name; he will be able to cash the sixty thousand at once and hand it over to me. When you see him again, just say that it was ‘for the expiatory chapel’; he is a man of discretion and tact—he will not insist further. Well! What are you waiting for?”
The Countess, prostrate on the sofa, rose, dragged herself towards a small bureau, which she opened, and took out from it an olive-green cheque-book, a leaf of which she filled in with her long pointed handwriting.
“Excuse me for having been a little severe with you just now, Madame la comtesse,” said the abbé in a softened voice as he took the cheque she held out to him, “but such interests are at stake!”
Then, slipping the cheque into an inner pocket:
“It would be impious to thank you, would it not?—even in the name of Him in whose hands I am but an unworthy instrument.”
He was overcome by a brief fit of sobbing, which he stifled in his handkerchief; but recovering himself in a moment, with a sharp stamp of his heel on the ground, he rapidly murmured a few words in a foreign language.
“Are you Italian?” asked the Countess.
“Spanish! The sincerity of my emotions betrays me.”
“Your accent doesn’t. Really your French is so perfect....”