M. Chassin paused a moment when he got inside the building. This, then, was where his foster-brother had married the “beautiful and unfortunate lady” as M. de Brencourt had justly called her. Little as Mme Vidal had been able to do, the place had something the air of requiem; he saw the candles, the pall—and then the arms on the pall. Surely she, a former domestic, would not have brought that out save for a member of the house! Then he thought, wondering at his own slow-wittedness, that of course she wanted a Mass said for the Duchesse Valentine. He was more than glad to say one here for the repose of that soul.
As he moved forward again Mme Vidal pointed out the sacristy. “I will light the candles while you vest, Father,” she added. “But, before you begin Mass, I should like to make my confession, for I wish to communicate. And then I will tell you for whose soul I am asking for this Mass.”
M. Chassin, feeling that he hardly needed now to be told, disappeared into the sacristy. Valentine lit the candles on the altar and those round the pall. Before she had finished the priest emerged in alb and stole, tying the girdle of the former round him as he came, for there was need of haste in all this business. He entered the confessional, whose elaborate carving bore scars from axe or hammer, and drew the curtain after him. She went and knelt down at the right-hand grille.
There was absolute silence when Valentine had finished. All through the priest had hardly said a word or asked her a question, and from the beginning she had resolved to make no mysteries, but here, under the seal, to be perfectly frank about her identity. It would have meant, perhaps, evasions else.
But the silence was so prolonged that at last she raised her eyes, and could just see through the grille enough to gather that the Abbé had covered his own eyes with his hand. It was not till then that Valentine fully recognised how even to this man, unconnected, save as a political plotter, with the house of Trélan, it must come as a shock to learn, in the very chapel of Mirabel itself, her identity with its supposedly murdered mistress. She had not been thinking enough of herself to realise that; rather of her relations to Gaston. She waited; and after a moment or two more her confessor seemed to collect himself, and in a shaken voice named her penance and gave her absolution.
Bent under the weight of freedom Valentine bowed her head, and so remained—till she suddenly heard the rungs of the curtain in front of the confessional rattle on their little pole, and it came to her that the priest, still so strangely silent, was preparing to leave the box. But there was still something for her to say.
“Father, now you can guess for whose soul I wish this Mass said—for that of my husband, Gaston, Duc de Trélan.”
Still silence. M. Chassin had, in fact, only drawn aside the curtain because in the tumult of his emotions he felt that he was suffocating. He was not thinking of moving at that moment; he was incapable of it. What was he to do! what, in God’s name, was he to do! And there was no time to think, that was the terrible part of it. He could not knowingly enact a sacrilege. . . . And this, this was the murdered Duchesse! It was incredible—yet obviously true, though his brain could hardly grasp it yet. . . . But the other side of the business! Of course Gaston’s repeated injunction to respect his secret to the uttermost, an injunction laid on him afresh not long ago at Hennebont, did not apply to this case, which the Duc could not have foreseen . . . no man could have imagined a resurrection like this! Yet what was it, “nobody in the world,” “whatever you think might be gained by it.” He must have a little time to consider. . . . And he must say something now. . . .
“My child,” he managed to get out, “I cannot well say a requiem Mass unless I have reason to . . . to know the person dead.”