A last flicker of light caused the bandit's face to loom into sight so dramatically that Françoise opened her mouth to cry aloud in horror, but her very horror stifled the cry, and she fell her length on the floor.
She did not lose consciousness. In the next room a muffled whisper bore witness that the conversation was continuing between the two friends. But she could not hear what was said. In her ears rang a buzzing sound, which seemed to be a messenger of madness.
She managed to drag herself to her room and to stretch herself on the bed.
Chéri-Bibi, in the study, cut short Didier's desire for an explanation of how he came to be there. It was not a question of explaining his presence, but of knowing what the Nut was going to do in view of the danger which threatened him. Here the bandit found himself up against a rock.
Nothing that he could say to dissuade the Nut from keeping the appointment which the Parisian had made in so barefaced a manner altered his resolution. He would not swerve from his opinion that he must try a policy of conciliation, and the prospect which was guilelessly opened up to him by Chéri-Bibi, who proposed to get rid at the earliest moment—that very evening if necessary—of the miscreants who were threatening him, was not one likely to make him change his mind. Notwithstanding his ten years in a penal settlement, it was difficult for him to treat seriously an idea, put forward so definitely, for the suppression of these human obstacles. Thus he was not content to implore his old comrade from the inferno to refrain from any intervention in the formidable business, he put it to him as a peremptory command.
At the outset he had welcomed the almost natural appearance of Chéri-Bibi as an unexpected help which Providence had vouchsafed him in the hour of adversity, but after a few minutes' talk the artlessness of his friend's project struck him with dismay, and led him almost to regret that, in circumstances in which all might yet perhaps be saved by the display of tact and resource, he should meet again a protector of such savage zeal that human life seemed to mean little or nothing to him.
Seeing him in such a pitiful frame of mind, Chéri-Bibi expressed his shame of what he called his lack of pluck, and, somewhat vexed, no longer concealed from him that he had already taken it upon himself to remove the commonest of his enemies from his path.
"Whom do you mean?" asked Didier in a voice strained with anxiety.
"The Caid. The man whose dead body was found at Mont Boron. It made quite a stir. I did it," returned Chéri-Bibi frankly.
Didier shuddered, refusing, however, to believe his own ears.