“You put me into a hard position, Father Hamilton,” I said. “My freedom—my life, perhaps—depends on whether I can tell them your secret or not, and here you throw it in my face.”
“And why not?” he asked, simply. “I merely wish to show myself largely the creature of circumstances, and so secure a decent Scot's most favourable opinion of me before the end.”
“But I might be tempted to betray you.”
The old eagle looked again out at his eyes. He gently slapped my cheek with a curious touch of fondness almost womanly, and gave a low, contented laugh.
“Farceur!” he said. “As if I did not know my Don Dolorous, my merry Andrew's nephew!” His confidence hugely moved me, and, lest he should think I feared to trust myself with his secrets, I listened to the remainder of his story, which I shall not here set down, as it bears but slightly on my own narrative, and may even yet be revealed only at cost of great distress among good families, not only on the Continent but in London itself.
When he had done, he thanked me for listening so attentively to a matter that was so much on his mind that it gave him relief to share it with some one. “And not only for that, M. Greig,” said he, “are my thanks due, for you saved the life that might have been the prince's instead of my old gossip, Buhot's. To take the bullet out of my pistol was the device your uncle himself would have followed in the like circumstances.”
“But I did not do that!” I protested.
He looked incredulous.
“Buhot said as much,” said he; “he let it out unwittingly that I had had my claws clipped by my own household.”
“Then assuredly not by me, Father Hamilton.”