“Get out!”
Crapaud was jostled against Ledoux, who looked like a great melancholy bird disturbed on its perch. Ledoux was afraid. His red eyes could find nothing pleasant upon which they could come to rest.
“The capitalists have got us, old man!”
“Shut up, you fool.”
Manon had begun to speak, and in that little, quiet room Paul Brent had held out a hand to Marie Castener. Instinctively she drew a motherly chair nearer to the bed.
“Can you hear?”
“Yes; she is telling them everything.”
Paul lay and looked at the blue sky. His body ached; it hurt him to breathe, but he was conscious of a great tranquillity, the contentment of a sick man who surrenders himself and his fate to the care of others.
“I am glad,” he said.
Manon was invisible to them, but her voice and the words that she uttered made her visible to Paul Brent. She was speaking very slowly, and with the naïve persuasiveness of a complete and intimate simplicity. Brent could picture her standing on the raised path in front of her house, rather pale but very determined, looking steadily at these many familiar faces, her eyes as dark as her coal-black hair. She did not hesitate or search for dramatic effect, but told them the tale of her house of adventure—how the English soldier—Paul Brent—had come into her life, how Bibi had grown jealous of their home, and how his brute violence had lost him his sight. She did not attempt to excuse Paul’s concealment of his identity, but she explained it.