“Of course.”
The Marquis ran a lace handkerchief along his blade to wipe it. As he let the dainty fabric fall, he explained himself. “He had, as I told him, a too dangerous gift of eloquence.”
And he turned away, leaving completest understanding with Andre-Louis. Still supporting the limp, draining body, the young man called to him.
“Come back, you cowardly murderer, and make yourself quite safe by killing me too!”
The Marquis half turned, his face dark with anger. Then M. de Chabrillane set a restraining hand upon his arm. Although a party throughout to the deed, the Chevalier was a little appalled now that it was done. He had not the high stomach of M. de La Tour d’Azyr, and he was a good deal younger.
“Come away,” he said. “The lad is raving. They were friends.”
“You heard what he said?” quoth the Marquis.
“Nor can he, or you, or any man deny it,” flung back Andre-Louis. “Yourself, monsieur, you made confession when you gave me now the reason why you killed him. You did it because you feared him.”
“If that were true—what, then?” asked the great gentleman.
“Do you ask? Do you understand of life and humanity nothing but how to wear a coat and dress your hair—oh, yes, and to handle weapons against boys and priests? Have you no mind to think, no soul into which you can turn its vision? Must you be told that it is a coward’s part to kill the thing he fears, and doubly a coward’s part to kill in this way? Had you stabbed him in the back with a knife, you would have shown the courage of your vileness. It would have been a vileness undisguised. But you feared the consequences of that, powerful as you are; and so you shelter your cowardice under the pretext of a duel.”
The Marquis shook off his cousin’s hand, and took a step forward, holding now his sword like a whip. But again the Chevalier caught and held him.
“No, no, Gervais! Let be, in God’s name!”
“Let him come, monsieur,” raved Andre-Louis, his voice thick and concentrated. “Let him complete his coward’s work on me, and thus make himself safe from a coward’s wages.”
M. de Chabrillane let his cousin go. He came white to the lips, his eyes glaring at the lad who so recklessly insulted him. And then he checked. It may be that he remembered suddenly the relationship in which this young man was popularly believed to stand to the Seigneur de Gavrillac, and the well-known affection in which the Seigneur held him. And so he may have realized that if he pushed this matter further, he might find himself upon the horns of a dilemma. He would be confronted with the alternatives of shedding more blood, and so embroiling himself with the Lord of Gavrillac at a time when that gentleman’s friendship was of the first importance to him, or else of withdrawing with such hurt to his dignity as must impair his authority in the countryside hereafter.
Be it so or otherwise, the fact remains that he stopped short; then, with an incoherent ejaculation, between anger and contempt, he tossed his arms, turned on his heel and strode off quickly with his cousin.
When the landlord and his people came, they found Andre-Louis, his arms about the body of his dead friend, murmuring passionately into the deaf ear that rested almost against his lips:
“Philippe! Speak to me, Philippe! Philippe… Don’t you hear me? O God of Heaven! Philippe!”
At a glance they saw that here neither priest nor doctor could avail. The cheek that lay against Andre-Louis’s was leaden-hued, the half-open eyes were glazed, and there was a little froth of blood upon the vacuously parted lips.
Half blinded by tears Andre-Louis stumbled after them when they bore the body into the inn. Upstairs in the little room to which they conveyed it, he knelt by the bed, and holding the dead man’s hand in both his own, he swore to him out of his impotent rage that M. de La Tour d’Azyr should pay a bitter price for this.
“It was your eloquence he feared, Philippe,” he said. “Then if I can get no justice for this deed, at least it shall be fruitless to him. The thing he feared in you, he shall fear in me. He feared that men might be swayed by your eloquence to the undoing of such things as himself. Men shall be swayed by it still. For your eloquence and your arguments shall be my heritage from you. I will make them my own. It matters nothing that I do not believe in your gospel of freedom. I know it—every word of it; that is all that matters to our purpose, yours and mine. If all else fails, your thoughts shall find expression in my living tongue. Thus at least we shall have frustrated his vile aim to still the voice he feared. It shall profit him nothing to have your blood upon his soul. That voice in you would never half so relentlessly have hounded him and his as it shall in me—if all else fails.”
It was an exulting thought. It calmed him; it soothed his grief, and he began very softly to pray. And then his heart trembled as he considered that Philippe, a man of peace, almost a priest, an apostle of Christianity, had gone to his Maker with the sin of anger on his soul. It was horrible. Yet God would see the righteousness of that anger. And in no case—be man’s interpretation of Divinity what it might—could that one sin outweigh the loving good that Philippe had ever practised, the noble purity of his great heart. God after all, reflected Andre-Louis, was not a grand-seigneur.
CHAPTER V
THE LORD OF GAVRILLAC
For the second time that day Andre-Louis set out for the chateau, walking briskly, and heeding not at all the curious eyes that followed him through the village, and the whisperings that marked his passage through the people, all agog by now with that day’s event in which he had been an actor.
He was ushered by Benoit, the elderly body-servant, rather grandiloquently called the seneschal, into the ground-floor room known traditionally as the library. It still contained several shelves of neglected volumes, from which it derived its title, but implements of the chase—fowling-pieces, powder-horns, hunting-bags, sheath-knives—obtruded far more prominently than those of study. The furniture was massive, of oak richly carved, and belonging to another age. Great massive oak beams crossed the rather lofty whitewashed ceiling.
Here the squat Seigneur de Gavrillac was restlessly pacing when Andre-Louis was introduced. He was already informed, as he announced at once, of what had taken place at the Breton arme. M. de Chabrillane had just left him, and he confessed himself deeply grieved and deeply perplexed.
“The pity of it!” he said. “The pity of it!” He bowed his enormous head. “So estimable a young man, and so full of promise. Ah, this La Tour d’Azyr is a hard man, and he feels very strongly in these matters. He may be right. I don’t know. I have never killed a man for holding different views from mine. In fact, I have never killed a man at all. It isn’t in my nature. I shouldn’t sleep of nights if I did. But men are differently made.”
“The question, monsieur my godfather,” said Andre-Louis, “is what is to be done.” He was quite calm and self-possessed, but very white.
M. de Kercadiou stared at him blankly out of his pale eyes.
“Why, what the devil is there to do? From what I am told, Vilmorin went so far as to strike M. le Marquis.”
“Under the very grossest provocation.”
“Which he himself provoked by his revolutionary language. The poor lad’s head was full of this encyclopaedist trash. It comes of too much reading. I have never set much store by books, Andre; and I have never known anything but trouble to come out of learning. It unsettles a man. It complicates his views of life, destroys the simplicity which makes for peace of mind and happiness. Let this miserable affair be a warning to you, Andre. You are, yourself, too prone to these new-fashioned speculations upon a different constitution of the social order. You see what comes of it. A fine, estimable young man, the only prop of his widowed mother too, forgets himself, his position, his duty to that mother—everything; and goes and gets himself killed like this. It is infernally sad. On my soul it is sad.” He produced