“Continue! Let us have it all;” and M. le Comte bowed his head upon his breast.
“Expelled from the house and from your service,” went on Pasdeloup, “Goujon spent his days and nights watching the château in the hope that chance might yet give madame into his hands. He lived by poaching, as you happened to discover. After you had punished him he still lingered for a time in your woods, defying death. He was half-mad, I think: he was willing to suffer any torment, face any torture, if he could die with the consciousness of having possessed madame. Not only his passion for her, but his hatred of you urged him on. At last he thought of a better way; he joined the assassins at Paris, and now he has returned armed with a power which will give him his revenge. All of this,” he added, with a gesture toward the hall below, “is for the purpose of enabling him to taste that revenge. You can guess now why he ordered that madame should be delivered into his hands unharmed.”
M. le Comte’s face was livid.
“Is he in this mob?” he asked hoarsely. “Point him out to me, Pasdeloup!”
“I do not think he is here,” answered Pasdeloup. “Not yet—but he will come—and perhaps, who knows, fate may give you a chance at him.”
M. le Comte grew suddenly silent, searching the other’s face with eyes intent.
“How came you to be with Goujon two nights ago?” he questioned. “Have you been consorting with these scoundrels?”
“If I have, M. le Comte,” answered Pasdeloup simply, “it was that I might better serve my master—that I might pay my debt.”
“Your debt?”
“Ah, that is another thing he does not remember,” said Pasdeloup, turning to me with a sad little smile. “But he was only a boy at the time and it was to him a little thing not worth remembering. We lived in a hut on the edge of the wood yonder, my mother and I. Every morning my mother cleaned the sties here at the château and gave the pigs their food. For this she received every day a loaf of black bread, and she managed now and then to snatch a few morsels from the trough when no one was near. For the rest, we lived on the roots and nuts we gathered in the forest, and we were permitted also to use such wood as the storms swept from the trees. In this manner we somehow managed to keep alive.