"No—it was before she fell down—to make her let me go and see M. de Soucy."
"Well?" said Mr. Elphinstone, still more perplexed.
"Eh bien, he arranged it," said the successful petitioner, in a tone of satisfaction. "He pushed Elspeth, no doubt, that she slipped on the stairs, and so I was able to go. I did not ask him to make her slip, Grandpapa," he hastened to add.
But still the old man did not realise whither all this was tending. The Vicomte de Soucy also, his threadbare coat showing very greenish in the strong light near the window, was looking at the little boy with puzzled, unhappy eyes.
"So now," proceeded Anne, "since I have asked St. Michel himself to take care of Papa—did I not, M. le Vicomte?—he will be quite safe, and I do not want any more to go to France. That is the secret, Grandpapa—and when you have finished reading that letter will you show me the elephants?"
"If Elspeth can be disposed of by the heavenly powers, even the Blues are not beyond their control—is that it?" observed M. de Soucy with a grating laugh, half to Mr. Elphinstone and half to the child. "Good God, if only one could believe it!"
As Anne, his mind at ease, climbed up into his grandfather's chair by the table with a view to the elephants, Mr. Elphinstone finished and let fall the letter, his apple cheeks gone grey. Then he turned without a word to the window and stood there, his back to the room, while into the silence came, with a strange little effect of calamity, the sound of a scud of summer rain beating against the glass.
(5)
And the rain was falling steadily on the white sand of Quiberon Bay also, on the low dunes, on Hoche's triumphant grenadiers, on the little fort, now abandoned, on the useless English ships, and on the upturned face of René de Flavigny, who lay, wrapped in a cloak, a short stone's cast from the rising tide. All about him were the evidences of the great disaster, but he had never heeded them, lying where the two soldiers had left him, by a little spur of rock that had its extremity in the sea. It had proved impossible to get him off to a boat; there was no chance for an unconscious man when even good swimmers perished. So his bearers had laid him down by the rock; he was no worse off than hundreds of others, and neither the cries of the drowning nor the boom of the English cannon had wakened him.
But now he had drifted back to pain, and the thirst of the stricken, and the numbing remembrance of catastrophe. He had tried to raise his head, but desisted from the distress of the effort. The fingers of his left hand ploughed idly into the sand. As it dribbled through them, white as lime, he remembered everything. . . . His eyes, so like Anne-Hilarion's, darkened. Since there was no one to make an end of him, he would do it himself, not so much to ease the pain and to hasten an otherwise lingering death as because everything was lost. And he would go to Jeannette.