“I am going to wash it first,” came his voice from within. The Marquis put his head back against the chair. He suddenly looked exhausted.
The sound of pouring water was heard. “This solitary Republican had a musket, I imagine—or was it a pistol? The wound looks to me rather like a pistol-wound.”
“No, it was a musket . . . at least I suppose so,” replied the duellist almost inaudibly. The priest came to the door of the bedroom and looked at him for a second; then he vanished again and reappeared with a glass in his hand.
“Drink this, if you please, Gaston!” he said authoritatively. His brother opened his eyes.
“I detest brandy,” he said, almost petulantly. “And you surely do not think that I am going to faint?”
“That is as it may be,” returned the Abbé, watching the speaker narrowly as he took and drained the glass. And he washed and bandaged very speedily, asking not a single further question during the operation. Perhaps he had come to the conclusion that he were better advised not to do so, for other reasons than that his patient was not in the most fitting condition to answer them. After which, refusing in his own turn to satisfy any enquiries about the treasure that evening, he announced his intention of acting as the Marquis’s body-servant for the nonce; and did so.
“You’ll do best with this pillow under your arm,” he observed when the wounded man was in bed. “We will have the surgeon from Lanvennec as early as we can get him to-morrow morning.”
“Damnable nuisance, that!” muttered the sufferer impatiently. “Are you sure that you could not manage to extract the ball yourself, Pierre?”
“Having some small idea of the intricate structure even of the human arm,” responded M. Chassin, arranging the pillow under the arm in question, “I am quite sure that I could not, without possibly maiming you for life. And why should you object to having a surgeon?—Is that comfortable?”
“Since you succeeded in extracting the gold from Mirabel,” observed Mirabel’s owner, looking up at him with a rather feverish brilliance in his eyes, “I should have thought that a trifle like this would be nothing to you. My God, Pierre, have you really got it all—twenty-five thousand pistoles? It is almost too good to believe! Why, with half that amount——”