In the parlour she found M. de Brencourt—the first time she had seen him that day.
“You are setting out already, Madame?” he asked, bending over her hand. She told him why, thinking how worn and ill he looked, and how possessed (as indeed he was) by a spirit of restless energy.
“I would beg leave to escort you part of the way,” he said, “but having missed Hyde de Neuville at his lodging, and hearing he had something of importance to say to me and was coming here, I must await him. Roland, I suppose, accompanies you?”
“Yes—but he will not be able to see M. de Trélan, I am afraid. Is there any message you wish conveyed about to-morrow night?”
M. de Brencourt shook his head. “Communications of that kind, Madame, go by their own channel. Besides, there is nothing fresh to say. The Duc knows the attempt is to be made; his part is merely passive.”
She said nothing for a moment. Then, flooding up from the depths, came the thing she had not yet allowed to escape her. “O, Monsieur de Brencourt, if only he had listened to you!”
The Comte shook his head. “No, Madame, say rather, If only the warning had come from other lips! I was the one man in the world who should not have carried it. . . . Duchesse, we cannot put off our past so easily; it clings, like the shirt of fable, and poisons everything. . . . You may tell the Duc, if you will, that I accept his apology in the same spirit in which he sent it. I cannot blame him for disbelieving my veracity—however much, being only human, I resent it. But it was inevitable; and that he is where he is now is Nemesis—the Nemesis I have drawn down on both of us.”
She could find no words before the sadness of his tone. He opened the door for her.
(2)
When he had shut the door behind Mme de Trélan the Comte turned and threw himself down in a chair, his chin on his breast, staring into the fire. His brain was weary, for he had been up most of the night. He could not forget (even if Valentine did, as he sometimes suspected) that the Duc de Trélan was not only a prisoner but a condemned prisoner—not a man awaiting trial, but one already under sentence of death—and that his position was very precarious. Any hour might conceivably bring the tidings that the sentence had been carried out on him; for his own part he wished the rescue had been fixed for that evening, but it had not proved possible to have every thread in place so soon.