“Indeed,” commented Mathurin, who was evidently living through the scene again, “it was no wonder that I disbelieved Marie-Pierre when he said that the young man was not dead, for I do not know how he lived through the cold of the night.”
“I think,” said his son, “that it was the cold which stopped the flow of blood. And then, on the other hand, perhaps the body of the peasant kept some warmth in him for a time.”
“I wonder who it was,” said M. des Graves, running over the names of those who remained at the time of his capture.
“A young man,” replied Marie-Pierre. “He had been shot through the breast.”
“God rest him,” said the priest, and “Amen” said the two Bretons, crossing themselves.
So neither Toussaint Lelièvre’s rosary nor his own body had been given in vain. And since, in a way he did not dream of, he had kept his word to Louis, he would not probably have minded that no one ever knew.
A little metal crucifix was hanging on a beam at the foot of the bed. Surely it had not been there before! And though it was a perfectly ordinary crucifix, and had evidently been much used—indeed, just because it was so worn—Louis seemed somehow to recognise it, seemed even to have seen it recently. It was rather puzzling.
A tiny noise suggestive of snipping made him remove his gaze from this source of bewilderment to a greater. At a short distance a grey-haired man was standing, with his back to him, by a small table on which was a bowl and a heap of something white. It was from him, apparently, that the snipping proceeded. But though he was clad in the short vest and very full pleated breeches with which occasional glimpses of Mathurin and Marie-Pierre had rendered Louis familiar, the back of his head belonged to neither of the Gloannecs. It was too young for one, and too old for the other. And yet he had seen it before. . . . His pulses began to quicken. Why did it suggest amice and chasuble, and candles under bending boughs at daybreak?. . . . He must be delirious . . . and yet—that head had known the tonsure.
The Vicomte’s languid curiosity was all at once transmuted into an emotion much more vivid, and his heart suddenly began to beat suffocatingly. He tried vainly to move, whispering a name.