"You may leave us."
The priest rose from his chair without assistance. From the time when the terror of death had forced him to reveal the murderer's name, a great change had passed over him. He had given his answers with the immoveable calmness of a man on whose mind all human interests had lost their hold. He now left the room, strangely absorbed in himself; moving with the mechanical regularity of a sleep-walker; lost to all perception of things and persons about him. At the door he stopped—woke, as it seemed, from the trance that possessed him—and looked at the three brothers with a steady changeless sorrow, which they had never seen in him before, which they never afterwards forgot.
"I forgive you," he said, quietly and solemnly. "Pray for me, when my time comes."
With those last words, he left them.
IV. The End.
The night was far advanced; but the three brothers determined to set forth instantly for Toulouse, and to place their information in the magistrate's hands, before the morning dawned.
Thus far, no suspicion had occurred to them of the terrible consequences which were to follow their night-interview with the priest. They were absolutely ignorant of the punishment to which a man in holy orders exposed himself, if he revealed the secrets of the confessional. No infliction of that punishment had been known in their neighbourhood—for, at that time, as at this, the rarest of all priestly offences was a violation of the sacred trust confided to the confessor by the Roman Church. Conscious that they had forced the priest into the commission of a clerical offence, the brothers sincerely believed that the loss of his curacy would be the heaviest penalty which the law could exact from him. They entered Toulouse that night, discussing the atonement which they might offer to Monsieur Chaubard, and the means which they might best employ to make his future life easy to him.
The first disclosure of the consequences which would certainly follow the outrage they had committed, was revealed to them when they made their deposition before the officer of justice. The magistrate listened to their narrative with horror vividly expressed in his face and manner.
"Better you had never been born," he said, "than have avenged your father's death, as you three have avenged it. Your own act has doomed the guilty and the innocent to suffer alike."
Those words proved prophetic of the truth. The end came quickly, as the priest had foreseen it, when he spoke his parting words.