"I see. You think I should be unwise to try and find out who he is?"
"There is no one who knows that," M. Duval said slowly. "No one! But maybe this poor Duval, who paints pictures that the world laughs at, maybe he might - one day — know - who is - Le Moine." He was smiling as he said it, and his eyes were clouded and far away. His voice sank still lower till it was little more than a whisper. "And if I know, then, then at last I will be free, and I will have revenge! Ah, but that will be sweet!" His claw-like hands curled as though they strangled some unseen thing.
"Forgive me," said Charles, "but has the Monk done you some injury?"
His words jerked Duval back from that dreamy, halfdrugged state. He picked up his brush again. "It is a ghost," he muttered. "You have said it yourself."
Seeing that for the present at least there was little hope of getting anything more out of the artist, Charles prepared to take his departure. "Ghost or no ghost," he said deliberately, "I intend to find out - what I can. You seem to have some idea of doing the same thing. If you want my assistance I suggest you come and call on me at the Priory."
"I do not want assistance," Duval said, hunching his shoulders rather like a pettish child.
"No? Yet if I were to say one day that I had seen the face of the Monk . ?" Charles left the end of the sentence unfinished, but its effect was even more than he had hoped.
Duval swung round eagerly. "You have seen - but no! You have seen nothing. He does not show his face, the Monk, and it is better if you do not try to see it." He fixed his eyes on Charles' face, and said in a low voice: "One man - saw - just once in his life. One man alone, m'sieur!"
"Oh? Who is he?"
"It does not matter now, m'sieur, who he is, for he is dead."