Presently he resumed reading the Unknown’s last words, and varying emotions of amazement and fear shot across his face. He looked wonderingly over to the crucifix as if to ask: “Do you know all this?” But as he continued reading his credulity vanished, and the lines of his lips drew hard and straight. Sometimes his fist involuntarily clenched, a flush burned in his pale, sunken cheeks; sparks of a hidden fire flashed from his blue-black eyes, blazed, died out, then burned with a steadier flame. Sometimes the veins in his forehead and over his temples stood out like whipcords. His breath came in even heavy pulsations.
The letter of the Unknown was drawing to an end. The Breton rose from his chair and bent over against the candle flame, as if with brighter light to fathom out the terror and the truth of those unread pages.
The last sheet fluttered from his hand.
Standing by the table his head gradually sank forward; his eyes closed, and into his face came a stony uncertain tension. Presently, like one awakening, he pressed his hand across his eyes, as if to arouse himself more surely to the scene before him. Then mechanically he gathered up the sheets of the Unknown’s letter and put them back in the envelope—all but the last sheet, which was afterwards found on the floor under the table, and on which were written these enigmatic words:
“My son, I cannot continue this category of sin. Day now breaks and I must be on my way—a way from which there is no returning at all, forever. You will look into what I have written, then—go away.
“What will come of all this I do not know, but these people will not submit forever. Why they have done so this long I do not understand, nor do I know what is going to happen except that in the chronology of such acts comes inevitably the century end of wrong and that awful number ‘Ninety-three.’ I see already the rim of a reign of terror, I hear noises that are the clamour of vengeance, I discover signs in the heavens and it is the judgment of God.
“To-night is the end! What melancholy forebodings this may bring to you, my son, will remain forever unknown to me. But I leave you, as is my duty—that you may grapple with this double-headed dragon that now assails you. Alone you must conquer or alone succumb. In the battles of the heart and soul there can be no allies.
“I have left you in the other envelope certain secrets, which you are not to discover until you have left this place, to return no more.”
The Breton continued standing by the table, staring emptily into those shadows out of which so often come forms real and terrible.
The candle burned low and flickered.