‘He is past pain,’ I answered gently. ‘He is dead—yes, dead, Mademoiselle, but in his own way. Take comfort.’
She stifled a sob; then before I could say more, the Lieutenant, with his sergeant and light, were at my elbow. He saluted Mademoiselle roughly. She looked at him with shuddering abhorrence.
‘Are you come to flog me too, sir?’ she said passionately. ‘Is it not enough that you have murdered my servant?’
‘On the contrary, it was he who killed my Captain,’ the Lieutenant answered, in another tone than I had expected. ‘If your servant is dead so is my comrade.’
‘Captain Larolle?’ she murmured, gazing with startled eyes, not at him but at me.
I nodded.
‘How?’ she asked.
‘Clon flung the Captain and himself—into the river pool above the bridge,’ I said.
She uttered a low cry of awe and stood silent; but her lips moved and I think that she prayed for Clon, though she was a Huguenot. Meanwhile, I had a fright. The lanthorn, swinging in the sergeant’s hand, and throwing its smoky light now 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 and shivering, stood a pitcher of food. Beside her, in that place, it was damning evidence, and I trembled least the Lieutenant’s eye should fall upon it, lest the sergeant should see it; and then, in a moment, I forgot all about it. The Lieutenant was speaking and his voice was 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 that 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 now be alive. But when he said a few minutes ago that he was glad—glad of it, d—him!—then I fixed it in my mind that I would be even with him. And I am going to be!’