“You remember quite rightly, Madame. And I am that foster-brother, that Breton peasant, Pierre Chassin.”
Had he suddenly revealed himself as Louis XVIII. or the Comte d’Artois the devoted old spinster could scarcely have shown more emotion.
“God be praised! God be praised for this mercy!” she quavered. “His foster-brother! Yes, I remember hearing from my lady all about your mother. Six years before I entered her service it was . . .”
“—Remembering then, Madame, what I too owe to your lady of blessed memory, and to the Duc, who, as you probably know, had me educated and gave me a cure on his estates in the south, you may trust me, may you not, with the document?”
“Yes, indeed!” returned the old lady, and there was no shadow of doubt in her tone now. But the shock of joy, her devotion to the great family with whom her life had been bound up, and the advent of this man who, if he were not himself the rose, was almost a graft from the tree—all these seemed to have benumbed her faculties, for she lay quiet, tears of weakness and happiness stealing from under the closed lids. Presently she said,
“He is in France again then, the Duc?”
“I am afraid I cannot tell you that, my daughter. But, on the faith of a Christian and a priest he shall have the secret in his hands very shortly.”
“He will not be able to make use of it now.”
“Who knows? And if not now, when happier days come, perhaps. If he can make use of it, it will be of immeasurably greater service to him to-day than it would ever have been a quarter of a century ago. For this much I can tell you, Madame, that, wherever he is, he is fighting for the King.”
“As a Trélan should!” she murmured with a smile. But the smile had gone when she added, “And the terrible fate of his wife, the Duchesse Valentine?”