The scissors dropped from M. des Graves’ hand, and he was at the bedside. “My child, my child, lie still! Yes, I am here. I was not killed. No; no questions—you shall know everything in its proper time. You have been very ill, but now, by God’s mercy, you are going to get well. . . . No, I am not going to leave you. I have already been here—some time. When you have drunk something and gone to sleep again, perhaps we will talk a little.”
Surprise on surprise. Louis did go to sleep again, and for a very long time, for when he woke again it was dusk, and a candle was burning. His eyes searched instantly for M. des Graves, for surely his presence was only a dream, difficult to disentangle from the others. But the priest was seated there close to the bed, reading his breviary with those unnecessary spectacles. A sense of enormous content invaded the young man, so that he was satisfied to lie for some appreciable time, merely looking at him, before he attempted to speak. Then he said, with astonishing difficulty, something quite other than he had meant to say. “What . . . have you . . . done . . . with your cassock?”
M. des Graves started. He put down his book, swept off his spectacles, and leaning forward, said with a smile of amusement: “Have I shocked you by this dress, my child?”
“No,” replied Louis, weighing the question quite seriously, his gaze roaming over the intricate pale blue embroideries of the priest’s vest. “No . . . I rather like it. But please tell me why . . . I don’t understand . . . and I cannot——” He frowned, and, struggling visibly to express himself, broke off like a child that has not words to say what it means.
The smile died from about M. des Graves’ mouth as he saw a painful flush beginning to creep over the horribly thin face. “I understand, my dear boy,” he said gently. “It is difficult to talk, is it not, but you would like to listen. Very well, then, I will tell you; but you must not ask any questions.”
And he told him very simply, dwelling little on the unspeakable orgy of horrors which had made of Nantes a name even more vilely stained than that of Paris, how, after his capture, he had been imprisoned there at Le Bouffay, how day after day those who survived its pestilential conditions had been led out to die, yet his turn never came; how one night the jailor had come to him, had led him, uncomprehending, through many passages, and had thrust him with scarcely a word outside the prison gate, where two men awaited him in a boat; how he had voyaged along the Loire, where the river rolled down the corpses of the drowned by hundreds to the burial that their butchers denied them, and, passed on from village to village, had come at last to the house where Marie-Pierre awaited him. . . . On the necessary heavy bribery of the jailor at Nantes, in which he had had no part, on the strangely complete arrangements outside he laid little stress; had Louis been less weak and dazed he would certainly have wanted to know whose hand had set this mysterious machinery in motion. But he accepted the miracle, as he had been bidden, without comment, and if M. des Graves knew or suspected what power had delivered him from the jaws of death he did not communicate his knowledge. He only told the young man that his deliverance was of none of his own seeking, and ending authoritatively, “There, now you must go to sleep again,” got up and settled the pillow and the bedclothes, and lifted Louis—grown very light now—into a more suitable position for repose.
Thereafter, for Louis, this falling asleep and waking, this unfruitful wish to converse and this contentment with silence, recurred for very many days.
CHAPTER XLVIII
MANY WAYS—AND ALL STEEP
“Clamavi in toto corde meo, exaudi me, Domine,” read M. des Graves, “justificationes tuas requiram. Clamavi ad te, salvum me fac; ut custodiam mandata tua. . . .”
The stream of the Latin, widening and sonorous, bathed all the dusty, comfortless loft with a suggestion of better and unchanging places, of choir or cloister, and washed in waves of security and repose over the mean bed and its occupant. A ray of March sunshine, too, had crept through the tiny window, and fell across the little hillock made by Louis’ feet under the coverlet; earlier in the afternoon, when it had barred his body, M. des Graves had found him looking at it with a sort of incredulity. Now, with shut eyes and head turned a little on the pillow, he lay and listened to the psalms for None.