“I do not doubt it,” said the Countess, earnestly. “Don’t think that I mean to turn away from you or to push you away. There is nothing of the Pharisee in me. I would gladly trust you with what I have. I will consult you and advise with you, Mr. Buckhurst—”
“And ... despise me.”
The unhappy Countess looked at me. It goes hard with a woman when her guide and mentor falls.
“If you return to Paradise, in Morbihan,... as we had planned, may I go,” he asked, humbly, “only as 102 an obscure worker in the cause? I beg, madame, that you will not cast me off.”
So he wanted to go to Morbihan—to the village of Paradise? Why?
The Countess said: “I welcome all who care for the cause. You will never hear an unkind word from me if you desire to resume the work in Paradise. Dr. Delmont will be there; Monsieur Tavernier also, I hope; and they are older and wiser than I, and they have reached that lofty serenity which is far above my troubled mind. Ask them what you have asked of me; they are equipped to answer you.”
It was time for another discord from me, so I said: “Madame, you have seen a thousand men lay down their lives for France. Has it not shaken your allegiance to that ghost of patriotism which you call the ’Internationale’?”
Here was food for thought, or rather fodder for asses—the Police Oracle turned missionary under the nose of the most cunning criminal in France and the vainest. Of course Buckhurst’s contempt for me at once passed all bounds, and, secure in that contempt, he felt it scarcely worth while to use his favorite weapon—persuasion. Still, if the occasion should require it, he was quite ready, I knew, to loose his eloquence on the Countess, and on me too.
The Countess turned her troubled eyes to me.
“What I have seen, what I have thought since yesterday has distressed me dreadfully,” she said. “I have tried to include all the world in a broader pity, a broader, higher, and less selfish love than the jealous, single-minded love for one country—”