“Having made Madame his wife, and legitimatized her son by the marriage, Monsieur the Marshal instituted legal proceedings to recover the dowry paid by Madame’s father, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, to the Mother Prioress of the Carmelite Convent when his daughter took the Veil. Monsieur the Marshal did not think it necessary to tell Madame what he was doing.... Her determination some years later, to resume the habit of the Carmelite Order—provided the Church she had outraged would receive her—was violently opposed by him. But eventually”—de Moulny’s eyes flickered between their thick eyelids, and he licked his lips again as though Hector’s hot stare scorched them—“eventually he permitted it to be clearly understood; he stated in terms, the plainness of which there was no mistaking, that, if the Church would repay the dowry of the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz to the husband of Madame Dunoisse, Sœur Térèse de Saint François might return to the Carmel whenever she felt disposed.”
Hector was sick at the pit of his stomach with loathing of the picture of a father evoked. He blinked his stiff eyelids, clenched and unclenched his hot hands, opened and shut his mouth without bringing any words out of it. The Catholics among the listeners understood why very well. The Freethinkers yawned or smiled, the Atheists sneered or tittered, the Protestants wondered what all the rumpus was about? And de Moulny went on:
“Here M. de Beyras broke in. He said: ‘The Swiss innkeeper spoke there!’ I do not know what he meant by that. The General answered, sniffing the bouquet of the Burgundy in his glass: ‘Rather than the Brigand of the Grand Army!’ Of course, I understood that allusion perfectly well!”
The prolonged effort of memory had taxed de Moulny. He puffed. Hector made yet another effort, and got out in a strangling croak:
“The—the dowry. He did not succeed in——?”
De Moulny wrinkled his nose as though a nasty smell had offended the organ.
“Unfortunately he did, although the money had been expended by the Prioress in clearing off a building-debt and endowing a House of Mercy for the incurable sick poor. I do not know how the Prioress managed to repay it. Probably some wealthy Catholic nobleman came to her aid. But what I do know is that the reply of the Reverend Mother to Monsieur the Marshal, conveyed to him through Madame Dunoisse’s Director, ran like this: ‘We concede to you this money, the price of a soul. Sister Térèse de Saint François will return to the Convent forthwith.’”
Hector groaned.
“It was a great sum, this dowry?”
“My father says,” answered de Moulny, “the amount in silver thalers of Germany, comes to one million, one hundred-and-twenty-five thousand of our francs. That will be forty-five thousand of your English sovereigns,” he added with a side-thrust at Hector’s weakness of claiming, on the strength of a bare month’s holiday spent in the foggy island, an authoritative acquaintance with its coinage, customs, scenery, people and vernacular. “The money,” he went on, “was bequeathed to the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz by her mother, whose dowry it had been. My father did not say so; possibly that may not be true.”