“Hide! hide yourself!” she said to him. “Although we go out very rarely, our movements are known, our footsteps are spied upon.”
“What is there new in that?” demanded another old lady, seated beside the fire.
“The man who has been prowling around the house since yesterday followed me to-night.”
At these words the three occupants of the attic regarded one another, allowing signs of profound terror to appear on their faces. The old man was the least agitated of the three, perhaps because he was in the greatest danger. Under the weight of a great calamity, or under the yoke of persecution, a courageous man begins, so to say, by making the sacrifice of himself; he looks upon his days as just so many victories won back from destiny. The looks of the two women, fastened upon this old man, made it easy to divine that he was the sole object of their intense solicitude.
“Why despair of God, my sisters?” said he in a voice low but impressive. “We sang His praises amid the cries which the assassins raised, and the groans of the dying at the Carmelite convent. If He decreed that I should be saved from that butchery, it was doubtless in order to reserve me for a destiny which I must accept without murmuring. God protects his own, He may dispose of them at His pleasure. It is of you, and not of me, that we must think.”
“No,” said one of the old ladies; “what are our lives in comparison with that of a priest?”
“When once I found myself outside of the Abbey of Chelles, I considered myself as dead,” said that one of the two nuns who had not gone out.
“Here,” replied the one who had come in, handing the priest the little box, “here are the wafers.... But,” she cried, “I hear some one mounting the stairs!”
All three thereupon listened intently. The sounds ceased.
“Do not be affrighted,” said the priest, “if some one should essay to enter. A person upon whose fidelity we can count has undoubtedly taken all needful measures to pass the frontier, and will come to seek the letters which I have written to the Duc de Langeais and to the Marquis de Beauséant, asking them to consider the means of rescuing you from this terrible country, from the death or the misery which awaits you here.”