"Oh, it's not the past that's worrying me! It's the future."
"Yes, yes, the prophecy made about you to Vorski."
"I know. And it is so horrible to think of that drawing and of other much more dreadful things which you don't know of."
"What! Is that why you hesitate to take me with you, for, after all, that's what we're concerned with?"
"Don't laugh. People don't laugh when they see the flames of hell before them."
Honorine crossed herself, closing her eyes as she spoke. Then she continued:
"Of course . . . you scoff at me . . . you think I'm a superstitious Breton woman, who believes in ghosts and jack-o'-lanterns. I don't say you're altogether wrong. But there, there! There are some truths that blind one. You can talk it over with Maguennoc, if you get on the right side of him."
"One of the four sailors. He's an old friend of your boy's. He too helped to bring him up. Maguennoc knows more about it than the most learned men, more than your father. And yet . . ."
"And yet Maguennoc tried to tempt fate and to get past what men are allowed to know."
"He tried to touch with his hand--you understand, with his own hand: he confessed it to me himself--the very heart of the mystery."
"Well?" said Véronique, impressed in spite of herself.
"Well, his hand was burnt by the flames. He showed me a hideous sore: I saw it with my eyes, something like the sore of a cancer; and he suffered to that degree . . ."
"That it forced him to take a hatchet in his left hand and cut off his right hand himself."
Véronique was dumbfounded. She remembered the corpse at Le Faouet and she stammered:
"His right hand? You say that Maguennoc cut off his right hand?"
"With a hatchet, ten days ago, two days before I left . . . . I dressed the wound myself . . . . Why do you ask?"
"Because," said Véronique, in a husky voice, "because the dead man, the old man whom I found in the deserted cabin and who afterwards disappeared, had lately lost his right hand."
Honorine gave a start. She still wore the sort of scared expression and betrayed the emotional disturbance which contrasted with her usually calm attitude. And she rapped out:
"Are you sure? Yes, yes, you're right, it was he, Maguennoc . . . . He had long white hair, hadn't he? And a spreading beard? . . . Oh, how abominable!"