Very early next morning Madame Geffroi’s voice floated up the ladder. Gilbert raised himself from where he lay face downwards in the hay and descended into the shed below.
“Your brother is better,” said the lady. “He is sleeping quietly. But no—you shall not see him yet. Later in the day, perhaps. And see that you do not show yourself to-day; it is possible that they may search for you.”
“Then, Madame,” broke in the Marquis hastily, “we must go. I cannot think of exposing you——”
“Bah!” returned his hostess with infinite scorn. “Do you think I shall let that young man out of his bed? He could not stand if I did. And I should like to see those gentry try to search my house! But they may come prowling round, so be careful. If they should come here you can hide in the hay—or, wait a moment, there is a place up in the rafters where no one will ever think of looking. Here is plenty of food—you did not take any last night.”
With this somewhat casual recital of precautions she tendered him a basket and made off. The inadequacy of the former scarcely struck the Marquis, so little did the idea of being taken seen to matter. He climbed back to the loft and threw himself down in his former position.
As hour succeeded hour, the stupor which, in spite of the most active suffering, had held his brain all through the sleepless night began to dissolve. “He trusts us! he trusts us!” Yes, he had trusted them indeed, and with a trust so profound as to be unconscious of its own existence. “He trusts us!” Which of them had said that to the other? It was round these words that the stupor, losing its hold, crystallised into a fierce and absorbing resolution. By no word or deed of his should Louis know that he was aware of his treachery—until the day that he chose. Louis, too, in his turn, should be tricked, gulled, befooled. It should be a part—a small part—of his revenge; though indeed there was in his resolve less of the lust of vengeance than of the instinctive self-defence of his own unspeakably lacerated pride.
And Lucienne . . . O God, Lucienne! image of all that was pure and untouched! . . . Yet even now he blamed her little. She was so young. She did not know. Hers was innocency wronged, lured into an attachment which was surely no more than a young girl’s fancy, a passing light entanglement from which he must protect her, which he must make her forget. Had she not written in her distress, pleading to be shielded from it—for so, in memory, he read her letter now. She would forget. . . . But Louis! That was different. It might be that it was with him, too, a passing affair, like so many others. The supposition seemed rather to aggravate than to lessen his guilt. And there was much to support the idea. How, if he really cared for her, could he have been so light-hearted these last few days since he parted from her? Damn him! he was equally a scoundrel either way!
The Marquis raised himself and sat up, brushing the hair off his forehead with a sudden gesture. He had at that moment a very distinct vision of a certain copse at Chantemerle where there was a clearing, convenient and remote. There, among the saplings his father had planted, he saw himself and Louis facing each other, sword in hand. . . .
But the solacing dream of steel was gone as quickly as it had come, and Gilbert flung himself down again, engulfed once more in the full tide of his anguish—an anguish all the bitterer, though he did not know it, for the self-condemnation which he had recently been meting out to himself.