“Yes,” responded the Vicomte grimly, “I was very much conscious. It was at those times that I regretted Marie-Pierre’s pious intervention.”
“I thought that you must have been conscious,” said the elder man quietly. “Madame Gloannec believed that you were not, always.” He paused, and his voice changed. “Have you ever thought, Louis, what the martyr’s crown must have seemed to the onlookers—objectless, useless suffering? But you know in what terms the Church speaks of it, when she commemorates a martyr at her altars? ‘A crown of precious stones,’ that is what their blood and torments are to her—and were to them.”
“What do you mean?” exclaimed the young man, startled.
“Only that something of their high honour has been yours, my child.”
“Shall we have a bet,” suggested the invalid one day, “that I get off this bed of roses in—in how many days, mon père?”
“Certainly not!” replied M. des Graves. “Louis, if you are going to talk nonsense——”
“Mea culpa! Then if I am to stop here for ever, would you be so good as to move that string of onions, and give me something else to count instead. I am no agriculturist like——” He stopped suddenly, and said, between laughing and something else: “I believe that if Gilbert had been in my place they would have been a comfort to him.” And he turned his head away on the pillow.
Yet they often spoke of Gilbert, and of the others gone down like him to the place of heroes.
“I wonder what has become of Henri,” said Louis, one afternoon towards the end of March. “I suppose that he, too, is dead by now.”