The Cordelier thereupon bowed down his large bald head, and raising his fettered hands towards the roof of the cellar muttered in a low voice the funeral invocation of the dying. Odelin threw back his hood, took up the lanthorn, and held it so as to throw a clear light upon his face.
"Brother!" he called out to the monk in a voice that betrayed his profound emotion. "I am Odelin Lebrenn!"
Without rising from his knees, Fra Hervé threw himself back, and examined for a moment the face of Odelin. At length he recognized him, and, a sudden flash of hatred illumining his hollow eyes and an infernal smile curling his livid lips, he cried:
"God has sent you! I shall spit out the truth into the face of the apostate! Oh, that your father were also here!"
"Respect his memory—our father is dead!"
"Did he die impenitent?"
"He died in his faith!"
"He died damned!" replied Fra Hervé with a savage guffaw. "Everlastingly damned! The corruptor of my youth! The heretical leper! The sink of pestilence! Damned along with his wife! It was Thy will, Oh, God! In Thy wrath Thou didst so decree it. The flames of hell will be doubly hot to them! Forever and ever will they be face to face with the spectacle of their daughter, damned through their acts, and damned like themselves, writhing in the midst of everlasting fires!"
"Do not take upon your lips the names of our sister, the poor martyr, or of our mother, you wretched fanatic, author of all their sufferings!"
"'Our' mother! 'Our' father! 'Our' sister!" echoed back the monk, with an outburst of sardonic laughter. "Look at the renegate! He dares invoke bonds that are snapped, and are abhorred! Man—I have no father but the vicar of Christ! No mother but the Church! No brothers but faithful Catholics. Outside of that holy family—holy, thrice holy!—I see only savage beasts, bent in their demoniacal rage upon tearing into shreds the sacred body of my holy mother! And I kill them! I throttle them! I immolate them to God, the avenger! Oh, how I grieve to think that you did not fall, like the likes of you, under my heavy iron crucifix, which the Holy Father blessed! What more beautiful holocaust could I offer to the implacable anger of the Lord, than to say to Him as Abraham did on the mountain: 'Lord! May the vapor of this blood rise to your nostrils. This blood is twofold expiatory! It is my blood, it is the blood of my family!'"