“God!” said Gaston de Trélan, and smote his fist upon his saddle. The thoroughbred reared a little, and the Abbé caught the reins.
“I tried to force him to tell you. But my own position was so difficult,” he began.
“To keep silent after I had consented to meet him,” exclaimed the Duc, his eyes blazing, “after he had taken my hand . . . it revolts me! I can hardly believe it—be quiet, Zéphyr!”
“He was mad, I suppose, at seeing her again,” said the priest, shaking his head. “It has revolted me, too. Perhaps his disappearance—Where are you going, Gaston?”
For M. de Trélan, already back in the saddle, was turning his horse’s head in the opposite direction.
“I must get away for a little,” he said, very grim. “This is a thunderbolt—horrible. I must have time to get accustomed to it before I can face anybody. Go on after the men, Pierre; do not get left behind.”
He set spurs to his horse in earnest; Zéphyr went half across to the opposite bank, tried vainly to get his head down, and next moment was going down the road like an arrow, and, annoyed at his cavalier treatment, pulling so hard that for a moment or two his rider thought that he would prove too much for his bridle hand, and regretted his disabled right arm. The struggle for mastery, however, gave him some physical relief in the black whirlwind of repulsion and horror that had broken on him. Between the demands of leadership and the overwhelming news about his wife, he had had no time or inclination these two days to think out the part de Brencourt had played—scarcely time, indeed, till this homeward march, to think of him at all, in spite of his singular disappearance. And now the realisation of the Comte’s cold-blooded treachery and deceit, coming on top of his provocations, on top of the duel, on top of his own sparing of him, despite his resolve to the contrary—for Gaston de Trélan was no more exclusively right-handed than another—and, most repulsive of all, on top of their reconciliation . . . it was surely enough to put any decent man beside himself, and how much more the man who had been his victim! He turned Zéphyr on to a track that made for the lande, and for a space, in which time hardly seemed to exist, galloped him madly over the heather.
Gradually he began to regain control over himself, too. The man had probably taken himself off for good; though he could never forgive him, nor forget what he had done, he would not be called upon to meet him again. And he had not succeeded in his devil’s work. So he himself would rather think of this tremendous news of Valentine’s survival—if indeed it were not after all some mistake, some cruel imposture, which he would discover for such when he got to Mirabel.
—No, the evidence was too strong! She was there—no impostress, but the real Valentine; not the dead Valentine whom he had grown to love and look to, but the living. And so their meeting was to be in this world after all—though he himself in the last few days had so nearly gone to another. And how would the living Valentine receive him? Perhaps she would altogether turn from him. Could he blame her if she did?
He rode off the lande by way of the Ferme des Vieilles, Zéphyr by this time quieted, indeed exhausted. “Poor Zéphyr!” said his master remorsefully. “Because I have been treated like a brute, I have treated you like one!”