Elysée de Marion clutched the arms of his leather wing chair with clawlike hands, half rising from it. Raoul stood staring at the two of them, panting and trembling.
Elysée said quietly, "Why did you do that, Raoul?"
"To make you listen." Raoul's voice was deep and strong, and it resounded powerfully against the beamed ceiling and stone walls of the great hall. But in its tones Pierre heard the screams of that hysterical boy whose tantrums and nightmares, after they'd finally succeeded in ransoming him from the Potawatomi, had wrenched the hearts of the whole household and renewed their grief over the loss of Helene.
But now that painfully thin, frightened child was a broad-shouldered man over six feet tall with a knife as big as a broadsword and a pistol strapped to his waist. A very dangerous man. A man who, they said, had killed half a dozen or more opponents in fights up and down the Mississippi.
"We have been listening," Elysée said.
"Pierre hasn't," Raoul said resentfully. "You tell him, Papa. Tell him he'd better leave his damned squaw in the woods where she belongs."
Damned squaw. The words pierced Pierre's chest like arrows.
Elysée sat back down in his wing chair and stroked his jaw. He looked like an old turkey cock, with fierce eyes, a hooked nose and a long, wrinkled neck. The leather-bound copy of Montaigne's essays that had been lying in his lap had slipped to the floor to join newspapers piled around his feet like autumn leaves, a mixture of local papers like Frank Hopkins's Victor Visitor, and the Galena Miners Journal, months-old papers from the East—the New York Evening Post, the Boston Evening Transcript, the National Intelligencer from Washington City, the even older copies of Mercure de France from Paris.
"Come here, both of you," Elysée sighed.
Hoping his father could reconcile them where he had failed so dismally, Pierre went to stand before Elysée's chair. After a moment's hesitation Raoul approached too. But Pierre saw that he was pointedly keeping more than an arm's-length distance between the two of them.