The man's head was still buried in Raymond's soutane, his hands still clasped tightly at Raymond's knees. Raymond did not speak—the question was in his eyes as they met Lemoyne's.
Lemoyne shook his head hopelessly, and, taking the document back from Raymond, returned it slowly to his pocket.
“I will leave you alone with him, Monsieur le Curé—it will be better,” he said in a low voice. He stepped across the cell, and for a moment laid his hand on the shoulder of the kneeling man. “Courage, Henri—I will come back to-morrow,” he whispered, and passed on to the door.
“Wait!”—Raymond stepped to Lemoyne's side, as the lawyer rattled upon the door for the turnkey. “There—there is nothing more that can be done?” His throat was dry, even his undertone rasped and grated in his own ears. “Nothing?”
“Nothing!” Lemoyne's wet eyes lifted to meet Raymond's, and again he shook his head. “I shall ask, as a matter of course, that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment—but it will not be granted. It—it would be cruelty even to suggest it to him, Monsieur le Curé.” And then, as the door opened, he wrung Raymond's hand, and went hurriedly from the cell.
Slowly Raymond turned away from the door. There was hollow laughter in his soul. A mocking voice was in his ears—that inner voice.
“Well, that is decided! Now put your own decision into effect, and have done with this! Have done with it—do you hear! Have done with it—have done with it—once for all!”
His eyes swept the narrow cell, its white walls, the bare, cold floor, the cot with its rumpled blanket, the iron bars on the window that sullenly permitted an oblong shaft of sunlight to fall obliquely on the floor—and upon the figure that, still upon its knees, held out its arms imploringly to him, that cried again to him piteously.
“Father—Father Aubert—help me—tell them to have pity upon me—save me, father—Father François Aubert—save me!”
And Raymond, though he fought to shift his eyes again to those iron bars, to the sunlight's shaft, to anywhere, could not take them from that figure. The man was distraught, stricken, beside himself; weakness, illness, the weeks of confinement, the mental anguish, crowned in this moment as he saw his last hope swept away, had done their work. The tears raced down the pallid cheeks; the eyes were like—like they had been in the courtroom that day—like dumb beast's in agony.