“As you see, Antoine. We flatter ourselves that we have had a great success, and at but small cost. They have drawn off.”
Saint-Ermay mounted the step as he spoke, bare-headed and flushed, with sparkling eyes. But for his disordered hair and his naked sword he might have been dancing. “They have drawn off,” he repeated. “Come in, men!”
But Antoine with the lantern moved between the young man and his followers, blocking the narrow doorway. “Yes, they have drawn off, M. Louis . . . too late. Monsieur le Marquis——”
“Hit?”
“Half an hour ago. It is good that you are come at last, because—because——”
“God!” said Louis. And he threw down his sword.
They had laid a mattress on the polished floor of the hall, just underneath the turn of the great staircase, and on this Gilbert was lying at full length with a cloak flung across him. On the other side, facing Louis as he put aside the curtain that hung over the doorway, knelt M. des Graves, with a stole over his soutane, and after a moment Louis knew why everybody else in the hall was standing apart from the kneeling and the prostrate figure. Gilbert was making his last confession—had made it, for almost as the realisation of the scene came to him, Saint-Ermay saw the priest lift his hand in absolution. He looked on at what followed as at something happening miles away, with the sense of not being there at all himself; and while peasant and servant knelt, and M. des Graves administered Viaticum, Louis alone stood on his feet where he was, motionless and frozen.
After a while he became aware that M. des Graves was making a sign to him, and he went forward. Of the disarray of Gilbert’s clothing, of bandages, or of blood, he was at the moment hardly conscious; he saw only his face, of an unearthly pallor, accentuated to a startling degree by his scattered black hair and by the dark cushion which supported his head. As Louis knelt down by his side the Marquis looked up quite collectedly, and smiled at him.
“You have come back, Louis . . . as you promised.”