She uttered an exclamation of awe, and stood silent. But her lips moved; I think she was praying for Clon, though she was a Huguenot. Meanwhile I had a fright. The lanthorn, swinging in the sergeant's hand, and now throwing its smoky light on the stone seat, now on the rough wall above it, showed me something else. On the seat, doubtless where Mademoiselle's hand had lain, as she sat in the dark, listening and watching, stood a pitcher of food. Beside her, in that place, it was damning evidence. I trembled lest the lieutenant's eye should fall upon it, lest the sergeant should see it; I thought what I could do to hide it; and then in a moment I forgot all about it. The lieutenant was speaking, and his voice was like doom. My throat grew dry as I listened. My tongue stuck to my mouth; I tried to look at Mademoiselle, but I could not.
"It is true, the captain is gone," he said stiffly. "But others are alive, and about one of them, a word with you,--by your leave, Mademoiselle. I have listened to a good deal of talk from this fine gentleman friend of yours. He has spent the last twenty-four hours saying, 'You shall!' and 'You shall not!' He came from you, and took a very high tone because we laid a little whip-lash about that dumb devil of yours. He called us brutes and beasts, and but for him I am not sure that my friend would not be alive. But when he said a few minutes ago that he was glad,--glad of it, damn him!--then I fixed it in my mind that I would be even with him. And I am going to be!"
"What do you mean?" Mademoiselle asked, wearily interrupting him. "If you think you can prejudice me against that gentleman--"
"That is precisely what I do think! And I am going to do it. And a little more than that!"
"You will be only wasting your breath!" she answered proudly.
"Wait! wait, Mademoiselle, until you have heard!" he said. "If ever a black-hearted scoundrel, a dastardly, sneaking spy, trod the earth, it is this fellow! This friend of yours! And I am going to expose him. Your own eyes and your own ears shall persuade you. Why, I would not eat, I would not drink, I would not sit down with him! I would not! I would rather be beholden to the meanest trooper in my squadron than to him! Ay, I would, so help me Heaven!" And the lieutenant, turning squarely on his heels, spat on the ground.
CHAPTER X.
[THE ARREST.]
So it had come! And come in such a fashion that I saw no way of escape. The sergeant was between us, and I could not strike him. And I found no words. A score of times I had thought with shrinking how I should reveal my secret to Mademoiselle, what I should say, and how she would take it. But in my mind it had always been a voluntary act, this disclosure. It had been always I who had unmasked myself, and she who listened--alone; and in this voluntariness and this privacy there had been something which seemed to take from the shame of anticipation. But here--here was no voluntary act on my part, no privacy, nothing but shame. I stood mute, convicted, speechless--like the thing I was.
Yet if anything could have braced me, it was Mademoiselle's voice, when she answered him. "Go on, Monsieur," she said, with the perfect calmness of scorn. "You will have done the sooner."