"Monsieur means M. le Capitaine Buton?" the old man answered with a sneer. "He is at Cahors."
"And was any one punished for--for the affair at St. Alais?"
"No one is punished now-a-days," André replied tartly. "Except sometimes a miller, who is hung because corn is dear."
"Then even Petit Jean----"
"Petit Jean went to Paris. Doubtless he is now a Major or a Colonel."
With this shot the old man left me--left me writhing. For through all I had not dared to ask the one thing I wished to know; the one thing that, as my strength increased, had grown with it, from a vague apprehension of evil, which the mind, when bidden do its duty, failed to grasp, to a dreadful anxiety only too well understood and defined; a brooding fear that weighed upon me like an evil dream, and in spite of youth sapped my life, and retarded my recovery.
I have read that a fever sometimes burns out love; and that a man rises cured not only of his illness, but of the passion which consumed him, when he succumbed to it. But this was not my fate; from the moment when that dull anxiety about I knew not what took shape and form, and I saw on the green curtains of my bed a pale child's face--a face that now wept and now gazed at me in sad appeal--from that moment Mademoiselle was never out of my waking mind for an hour. God knows, if any thought of me on her part, if any silent cry of her heart to me in her troubles, had to do with this; but it was the case.
However, on the next day the fear and the weight were removed. I suppose that Father Benôit had made up his mind to broach the subject, which hitherto he had shunned with care; for his first question, after he had learned how I did, brought it up. "You have never asked what happened after you were injured, M. le Vicomte?" he said with a little hesitation. "Do you remember?"
"I remember all," I said with a groan.
He drew a breath of relief. I think he had feared that there was still something amiss with the brain. "And yet you have never asked?" he said.