“And you have relatives in Paris who could help you!” said Marthe, turning her eyes on him.
“Well, no, hardly help,” said Roland slowly, thinking of his ancient and peaceful kinsmen. “But they could give me a roof. . . .”
“And I could give you money to bribe anyone who needed bribing,” declared Marthe. “At least, I have my pearls.”
“Oh, curse this arm!” muttered the wounded hero. “Yet, after all, I do not see why I also——”
“No! no!” exclaimed both the others. “No, we know what the surgeon said. That would be the sheerest folly”—as if what they had in their own inflammable heads were cold wisdom.
Artamène leant dejectedly against the side of the arbour. “I don’t see how you could do anything, Roland. You have not the plan of the late lamented of the time of Mazarin. You could not go and dig all over a place of that size on chance, even if the Directory gave you permission, which it certainly would not!”
“But I saw the plan!” retorted the Vicomte de Céligny. “I saw it perfectly clearly over the Abbé’s shoulder that night. Why, I could draw it now, if I had a pencil. Nobody has one? Well, look here!”
He broke off a twig from the lime-tree and began a series of scratches on the gravel, just as a bell clanged from the house to summon them to the midday meal—scratches which Séraphin diligently raked out during that repast.
By sunlight and by twilight and by lamplight, under the arbour, on the lawn, in the salon, the rough plan made from that fleeting glimpse of the original was constructed and reconstructed and discussed. So much were their young heads bent over it the next evening that Mme de la Vergne said they looked like conspirators.