"What you now desire," the man wrote, who had once been Cyprien de Beauvilliers, "is impossible. First, on the ground of religion, and secondly, because of yourself. I am now of the Protestant faith, have embraced that faith in Holland, to which country you appear to have tracked my steps, I know not how. Yet that you shall never be able to do so in the future, I leave it at once, and from the time when I quit it I defy you to ever discover my whereabouts. Let me remind you that this change of faith alone is a bar to my ever reassuming my position as your successor; if it were not such bar I would proceed to even other extremes to deprive myself of the succession; would draw my sword against France if by doing so I could more utterly sever myself from you and all connected with you.
"You ask me if I hate you? I reply that I hate the man who drove my mother to evil by his intolerant and contemptible pride, and, fallen as she became, I love and adore her memory. But my heart is not large enough to find space in it for aught else. Not large enough----"
There was no more. The sheet of paper turned over at the word "enough," and no other succeeded to it.
Again Martin lay back musing.
"He was firm," he murmured. "Firm. The years which have rolled by and become forgotten since he wrote these lines, now so faded, prove that; otherwise she would have known of his existence, his whereabouts. And--and--she was a just woman in spite of the deception of her life. If she had known that he was still alive she would never have consented to usurp all his rights. Nay, not though every priest in France bade her do so."
As the word "priest" rose to his mind he started with a new thought.
"Who were the others," he whispered, "she said who knew of it? Louis, the king! Almost it seems impossible. Then, next, the woman--his wife--Madame! Also La Chaise and Chamillart. La Chaise, a bigot--Chamillart, the man they speak of as une fine lame! They all know it, and will keep the secret well. What was it she said? 'They will never tell.'"
Once more from St. Eustache close at hand the hour rolled forth; almost it seemed as if the deep boom of the great bell echoed in his ears the words he had repeated to himself, "They will never tell."
"Will they not?" he mused again. "Will they not? Neither Louis, nor his wife, nor the priest, nor the scheming politicians. Will never tell! Therefore all search must be unavailing. Yet--yet---we will see. Only, even though I should find him, even though I forced from one of them the acknowledgment that he still lived, was the true heir, would he himself consent to take what is his? The man who wrote that letter in bygone years will not have grown softer, more easily persuaded by now. Yet I will make some attempt."
He sought his bed now, and once there, still lay awake for some time longer, musing and meditating on the secret which had been confided to him; wondering, too, if what he was doing was owing absolutely to a determination to right a great wrong, or, instead, was only the outcome of that strong, latterly-embraced Protestantism of his, which, through this embrace, now caused him to desire to outwit these scheming papists. Yet he might have found the answer by studying his own feelings, his own resolves, arrived at the moment he learned of the hidden secret of the great family to which he was allied. For if he held his tongue now it was easily enough to be supposed that all which he had inherited from the dead woman would at once be made over to him. If he spoke on the subject of the lawful inheritor, not one jot of the fortune that woman had left him would ever come his way.