M. de Brencourt, thus adjured, exploded in an oath and struck the door of the pigsty so violent a blow that he brought out an enquiring inmate.
“By the God above us, Abbé, you go too far! Do you suppose that I am going to run away from de Kersaint’s—from de Trélan’s—from any man’s anger!—Forgiveness—I have not asked for it! And when the Duc de Trélan wants me he will know where to find me!” He swung off in the direction of the forest.
“I only wish I could hope he did not know where to find you,” muttered the Abbé, gazing after his receding figure, “for, short of a miracle, there will be a terrible day of reckoning for this silence of yours!”
But the flood of joy and gratitude in his heart was too potent; it swept away alike his disgust and his apprehension, and by the pigsty wall itself M. Chassin fell on his knees and covered his face, while the moon, but little declined from her fatal plenitude of four nights ago, looked down benignantly upon him.
CHAPTER IX
THE CHOICE
(1)
The brief but acrimonious interview of M. de Brencourt and M. Chassin had scarcely terminated when Roland de Céligny emerged from his leader’s bedroom to the outer room. He shut the door behind him quickly, and stood there a moment with his back to it, curiously combining the air of a sentinel and that of a fugitive. And indeed, breathing rather fast, he was saying to himself, “No one shall go in—not even the Abbé!”
He had just been witnessing something which, though he did not fully understand it, he felt no eyes ought to have witnessed; he was hot and shaken with the thought that his own unwilling but necessary presence had been an outrage. . . . But since he was there, as he knew, to answer what he was asked, and since the Marquis de Kersaint could ask anything of him, even to his life, he had stayed, and averted his eyes through the storm of questioning, behind which could be divined a man’s very soul on the rack—till that final bowing of the proud, unhappy head over the battered trinket that Roland had withdrawn from his own neck and held out as proof irrefragable . . . yet a proof of what he still did not know.
He was so agitated that it was only after a few seconds of this self-imposed vigil that he realised he was facing an empty room. The Abbé was not there, the Comte was not there. And in a minute or two more, still hearing no movement from within he thought, “I must not stay here; he would not like it . . . I must tell the Abbé something. But I must also contrive that no one else goes in.” And, casting a glance on the wasted victuals of that supper-table which he had been so instrumental in breaking up, he went out.