"I do not think that I shall ever see England again," went on the Marquis. "If I do not, and you escape, I want you to promise me to look after Anne. Don't refuse me, Fortuné! Mr. Elphinstone is an old man, and when he dies there will be nobody of my blood—nobody of our nationality even—about the boy, and he is French, and I should wish him to remain French, although in exile. By my will he inherits all I have, and nearly all his grandfather's property will eventually come to him, so he will be well provided for. There is no one in the world, after his grandfather, to whom I would rather commit him than you. He is very fond of you—and, Fortuné, he has a kind of claim on you already, since you did that for him which can never be forgotten, though you will not allow me even to thank you for it!"
La Vireville had heard him silently to the end, looking down at the beaten earth of the cottage floor. "But if we come to final disaster, which, God knows, seems probable enough," he said quietly, "it is not likely that I shall see England again either. Not that I have any special presentiments about my own fate—one soon gets rid of those en chouannant—but because I think, with you, that we are in a desperate strait. Unless Puisaye, now that d'Hervilly is dying . . . though I do not believe that Puisaye is the man to save us. Yet we may beat them off."
"Will you promise me, then, to do your utmost, if the worst happens, to save yourself, for Anne's sake, if not for your own? Will you promise me that, Fortuné?"
La Vireville looked him in the eyes and gripped the hand he held. "Yes, I promise you that, René. So it be not inconsistent with honour, I will do my best to save myself—and if you are killed, and I live to return, Anne shall be my . . . son."
But how far off, how incongruous, in the midst of this welter of blood and catastrophe, was the thought of that little boy, with his confiding ways! Outside his own quarters at St. Pierre, Fortuné met the surgeon who was attending to the Chouan wounded, and, going in with him, displaced Grain d'Orge, who, looking like a necromancer, was giving attentions of very doubtful value to the moaning Le Goffic on his heap of seaweed.
"Monsieur Augustin," whispered the self-constituted leech, while the surgeon examined the young Breton, "this is not a good place, this Quiberon!"
"Your remark is very just, mon vieux!" returned La Vireville, half sadly, half humorously. "You are not the first to make it, either. Do you want to go back to the Côtes-du-Nord? There is the devil of a deal of fighting before you if you wish to do that."
"Ma Doué, I am sure of it!" said Grain d'Orge with a chuckle. He rubbed off some blood, presumably Le Goffic's, from his hands on to his baggy breeches. "You and I, Monsieur Augustin, have seen much of that—and of this too," he added, laying a grimy finger on La Vireville's wounded arm. "And I know that I shall see my parish again, because the wise woman told me so before I left. But not many of the others, perhaps."
A sudden compunction invaded La Vireville. It was his influence which had led these children of Northern Brittany away from their homes to perish in what was, to them, almost a foreign land.