But as he read it some colour came back to his face.
“My God! Then, Mon——”
“Mon père, I hope you were going to say,” interposed M. de Trélan smiling, as he took the letter from his suddenly shaking hand and tore it across. “No, my son, there are some things that one does not do, and one is, to play, in a situation such as mine, the enemy’s game. You see from that letter what—as far as any mortal can penetrate into his heart—the First Consul would like to happen—and therefore, quite plainly, it is just what shall not happen. Either he must release me of his own act, unconditionally—a step which is extremely improbable—or he must go on to the end. That end he will regret . . . for his own sake.” He opened the door of the stove, and threw in the paper. “I have shown you that letter, Roland,” he went on, turning to him again, “because you are a man now, but I have particularly kept the knowledge of what it says from the Duchesse; still more must it be kept from her if I die. It would make it too hard for her . . . you understand? I fear I have made it hard enough as it is . . . You can tell her, if you like, some day—years hence. And I want you to warn the Comte de Brencourt and M. Hyde de Neuville not to let her know on any account—if I die, that is. If I escape, it is of no consequence.”
“If you escape!” cried Roland feverishly, “but you shall escape! That plan—if only I might take part in it! But Mon—mon père, I have been thinking out there . . . I am not so tall as you, but since I am like you a little (though I never knew it), if you would but get into my clothes now and go away with Mme de Trélan while I——”
“My dearest boy,” said Gaston, touched and laughing too, as he put his arm round his shoulders, “that thousand-year-old device! As if I could pass for a young man of twenty! Alas, never again! But I have every confidence in . . . the official scheme for to-morrow evening. Yet in case——” He slipped the emerald ring with the phoenix off his finger and put it on Roland’s.
A quiver ran through the boy. He clasped the hand thus decorated to his breast as though it were wounded. “Then you have not every confidence . . . O mon père, take it back!”
“I will take it back when I am free,” replied his father, smiling. “A loan, you see.—Here is my patient Bernard.” He took him in his arms and kissed him on either cheek. “Be happy with Marthe—she shall wear the rubies after all. And try to get your grandfather, some day, to think less hardly of me.”
Roland, shaking with the sobs he was striving so hard to suppress, said almost inaudibly, “But he does. I have had a letter. He is greatly distressed.”
“Then I have gained something by being sentenced to death,” thought Gaston to himself, with a rather grim amusement. “You must go, my boy,” he said aloud. “And God go with you, always!”
He watched his son walk, blind with tears, to the door, and then made a sign to the gaoler. “Give us one last moment, Bernard, for pity’s sake!” For, before the bayonets could cross themselves again, Valentine had slipped in, and come straight into his arms where he stood under that heartbreaking window. And Bernard compassionately went out again and closed the door.