"Valentin," he said, returning to the bed and gazing down at the young man who lay there with his eyes still open, "Valentin, I think I know--think I have penetrated your meaning. You believe De Bois-Vallée has disappeared, because, now--since you told him that I knew all--he fears me more than ever. Is it not so?"
To his amazement--his utter amazement--he had not, after all, hit the mark; it was not this that Debrasques meant. It was no increased fear of him that had prompted his enemy to disappear.
"What then? What then?" muttered Andrew. "What, if not that?"
But from the sick man nothing came that could assist him--only, once more, the look of grief at being unable to make himself understood.
Yet, unsatisfactory, disheartening as this was, it told Andrew one thing at least--there was in truth no mystery about the man's disappearance. It was plain that he had a reason for so removing himself.
"Still," pondered the soldier, musing over what such reason could be, or what powerful motives could have urged him thus to disappear from the army in a time of war, and to, thereby, incur the necessity of giving a thorough explanation of his conduct when he should reappear or be for ever disgraced, a ruined and a broken soldier; "still it all hangs, must hang, on Debrasques' words shouted to him in delirium, yet near enough unto the truth to fright him; the words, 'I have told him all.' Would that he had! Would that he had!"
And again at night, as he turned restlessly on his bed, which was placed in the same room as his friend's so that he might be near to minister to him if required, he asked himself, "What more was there to tell? What villainy that even I do not know of?"
Also he remembered that, when he first found Valentin amidst the heap of dead and dying dragoons by whom he was surrounded, he had said something about the woman, Marion Wyatt--had exclaimed that she was--what? Oh! that he had been able to finish that speech; to say what Marion Wyatt was, or had been, in connection with this matter, in connection with the bitter treachery that had broken Philip's heart. "I would almost believe," he thought, "that he meant to say 'Innocent,' were it not that such must be impossible. Innocent! innocent! How could that be? She who stole down the garden to the gate that led to the Mall, who disappeared for ever from my brother's and her father's knowledge; from whom no word ever came after that night. It is impossible! How could she be innocent and he guilty?"
Nevertheless, he decided now, that, as he had put other questions to Debrasques in the hopes of hitting on some suggestion which might prove to be the right one, so he would put this one--"Did he intend to say that Marion Wyatt was an innocent woman?" Yet, even though that answer should be Yes, it would bring him no nearer to understanding why De Bois-Vallée had fled from the army! Only, if it could be proved so--if, by any chance under heaven, it should be so--his determination to be avenged on De Bois-Vallée for the wrong done his weak and helpless brother would be intensified by a further determination to avenge the wrong done also to that brother's affianced wife.
But, how--how could such be the case? Though Debrasques should testify to it he might still be mistaken.