He looked up, dazed, and saw Aymar de la Rocheterie scanning him in a way he could not interpret. "I see, indeed, that you had not believed it," came his voice, cool and faint. "Well, now I have convinced you. But in justice to my . . . my executioners, I should like you to know that they were not directly responsible for the state of my wrists. I did that myself, trying to get free—afterwards. . . . Have you ever been tied to a tree, Monsieur de Courtomer, and left there? Hardly, I suppose."
This must be stopped somehow. "Monsieur de la Rocheterie," said Laurent firmly, "I refuse to hear another word. But I am going to say just one thing myself. Your men may have shot you—since you tell me so I suppose I must believe you—but even you cannot make me think that they did it otherwise than under a misapprehension. The sun must fall from heaven before I can believe that you did—what rumour accuses you of! Surely you know that!"
He spoke with passion. The Vicomte de la Rocheterie stared at him out of his great sunken eyes, words visibly smitten from him. Then he dragged up his right hand and covered them. "You are . . . very hard to convince," he said with a catch of the breath. And at that moment, to Laurent's intense relief, M. Perrelet came in.
He looked from one to the other. "You have been talking to him," he said sharply to Laurent.
"No, I have been talking to him," put in his patient quickly.
"Then you will kindly not do it any more," grumbled the little doctor, stooping over him. "A nice state you have got yourself into! M. de Courtomer should have stopped you!"
Laurent had turned blindly away to the window. So it was true—his own men!
(10)
For about the sixth time that night Laurent dragged himself out of his bed and went over to his charge. The dawn was beginning. He was so tired that he could hardly stand, his eyes kept closing from lack of sleep, but his brain seemed to him unusually clear. Peering at the clock he saw that there wanted twenty minutes yet before La Rocheterie's bouillon was due. He dropped into the chair by the bed; it was not worth returning to his own again. Even yet, after half a day and a night, he could scarcely realize it, though he had tried hard to face the reversal of what he had so stoutly upheld. That haggard young man who lay there asleep before him had really been through the horrors of execution at the hands of his own followers—and survived. His men, his own men who followed him with passion, who would, as he once said, have cut their hands off for him, had fastened him to a tree and deliberately shot him—L'Oiseleur, their brilliant and adored leader! Now he understood why he had said that he would never need his floating locks again; the laurels were indeed cut down! Now he understood why he was so sensitive about his lacerated wrists, so terribly bitter about the whole affair, so unapproachable! Why, it was enough to have sent him crazy—quite enough to make him beg to be allowed to die, as with his own ears Laurent had heard him!
Yet, since their painful conversation of yesterday afternoon, La Rocheterie's demeanour towards him had undergone a certain change. He had not said the things that hurt so much, and, in the earlier part of the night, when he had been restless and in pain after the operation, he had even asked, and almost naturally, for such alleviation as Laurent could give, and had not paid him in those frigid thanks to which the young man would infinitely have preferred no thanks at all. Somehow, then, they were a little nearer to each other.