The unexpected attack for an instant staggered the furious young man. He swallowed down something that might have been an oath ere he answered curtly “I do. I have every right to think so. But I will not trouble you with my reasons. They are not worth your attention.” And he turned to go.
“Louis . . . Louis!” said M. des Graves in a voice of such pain and tenderness that the Vicomte stopped.
“It is no use, Father,” he replied wildly. “Nothing is any use; it is no use my having tried to behave with some show of honour—Gilbert says that I have none . . . perhaps he is right . . . if you say so, too . . . I had better go. . . .” But instead of going he sank slowly down on the nearest chair, and his head went down on his arms along the back of it.
The priest stood there and looked sorrowfully down at the bowed head. For a long moment there was intense silence, into which only the clock on the mantelpiece intruded. At last he spoke. “I want to help you, Louis; I think you know that.”
Louis lifted a pale, dangerous face. “I don’t know anything,” he said with extraordinary intensity. “I have no feelings about anybody in the world—except Gilbert. And I hate him. . . . Let me go!”
The priest stood aside. “You can go, Louis. . . . Twenty years of comradeship and two days hatred. . . . Perhaps you can see better than I how it will end. God have mercy on all of us!”
The Vicomte flashed out. “But he hates me, too! He must have hated me for months. All the time he knew, curse him . . . all the time that I thought I had hidden it . . . all the time that he was away in Brittany. . . .” And the stream broke its bounds at last, and all that he had suffered, all that he had foregone, his love, his struggle, his victory won for Gilbert’s sake, came pouring out, tinged with the passionate resentment which made Gilbert’s very name difficult to utter.
The priest made no effort to stem an outburst for which indeed he was thankful, and which left Louis spent and shaken, so that he threw himself down at last on the window-seat and looked out of the window. M. des Graves, who had stood without moving during the storm, began to pace slowly up and down in his accustomed fashion, to give the young man time to recover himself. At last he came and sat down beside him.
“Do you want me to say anything to you, Louis?”
Slowly, very slowly, the set profile turned towards him. A gleam of humour flickered for a moment in the angry grey eyes. “I have said a good deal to you,” was all Saint-Ermay’s answer, but he leaned his head back against the window-frame as though he were waiting.