The passionate devotion that throbbed through his words almost disconcerted Laurent, no half-hearted adherent himself, but he could see that Aymar accepted quite simply even this extreme manifestation. Only, looking down at his follower with evident relief and pleasure, his face suddenly changed. He touched him on the shoulder.
"Did you lose that hand at Pont-aux-Rochers, Eveno?" And there was the sharpest pain in his tone.
"Afterwards, Monsieur le Vicomte. They cut it off at Saint-Goazec. It was nothing; they were very kind to me. If we had won at the bridge—if you had been there—I would not give a sou for it . . . But your arm . . . you are ill yet . . . have you not been very ill, Monsieur Aymar?"
His hand slid caressingly along his leader's sound arm. Aymar stepped back.
"Eveno, that hand of yours is my doing. I was responsible for Pont-aux-Rochers—nobody else. I planned it, and the plan——" He turned his head away.
The peasant's face lit up as he knelt there. "You planned it! We thought it was a mistake of M. de Fresne's. But if it was your plan, L'Oiseleur, there is nothing to regret. You could have had both my hands!"
So the carriage, when they started again, contained Jacques Eveno also, for in spite of his protests Aymar had insisted on conveying him to his home, a plan which necessitated only a slight detour, since he lived with his old father on the borders of a wood about seven miles from Sessignes.
In the vehicle, therefore, he sat, dusty and abashed, answering his leader's questions about his treatment and his comrades' fate, but gazing all the while at L'Oiseleur with the eyes of idolatry. And, mainly for his friend's sake, Laurent was relieved to gather from what he said that the actual death-roll of Pont-aux-Rochers was much lighter than might have been expected.
Just as Aymar was instructing Eveno to come to Sessignes in a day or two to help him make a list of casualties, the chaise stopped. Aymar got out as well as the Chouan, and Laurent followed their example. He saw the smoke ascending blue from a thatched cottage against fir trees, a path going into a wood, and two saddle-horses, one of them a beautiful bay mare, tied to an oak. Aymar, saying farewell to Eveno, did not appear to have noticed these; but suddenly the mare pricked her ears, threw up her head, and whinnied.
Aymar turned. "Hirondelle!" he exclaimed, and made at once for the oak tree, the mare, when she saw him coming, whinnying again and lifting up a suppliant forefoot. But before he got up to her her master stopped, perhaps only perceiving in that moment what Laurent had already noticed, that it was a lady's saddle she was carrying.