“And when you have heard it,” Andre-Louis went on, relentlessly, interrupting the interruption, “you will agree with me as to its character.”
M. de Lesdiguieres considered him very sternly.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Andre-Louis Moreau.”
“Well, Andre-Louis Moreau, if you can state your plea briefly, I will hear you. But I warn you that I shall be very angry if you fail to justify the impertinence of this insistence at so inopportune a moment.”
“You shall be the judge of that, monsieur,” said Andre-Louis, and he proceeded at once to state his case, beginning with the shooting of Mabey, and passing thence to the killing of M. de Vilmorin. But he withheld until the end the name of the great gentleman against whom he demanded justice, persuaded that did he introduce it earlier he would not be allowed to proceed.
He had a gift of oratory of whose full powers he was himself hardly conscious yet, though destined very soon to become so. He told his story well, without exaggeration, yet with a force of simple appeal that was irresistible. Gradually the great man’s face relaxed from its forbidding severity. Interest, warming almost to sympathy, came to be reflected on it.
“And who, sir, is the man you charge with this?”
“The Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr.”
The effect of that formidable name was immediate. Dismayed anger, and an arrogance more utter than before, took the place of the sympathy he had been betrayed into displaying.