“He had taken my little pistol secretly from the drawer where I kept it. He did not give it me back again until I promised that I would not use it unless the Moors were on the stair.”
Gerard de Montignac started suddenly and pushed his chair sharply back. Some quite new consideration had flashed into his mind. He looked at Marguerite with a sentence upon his lips. But he did not speak it. He turned away and took a turn across the room towards the window and back again, whilst Marguerite waited with her heart in her mouth.
“What am I to do?” he asked; and to Marguerite the fact of his actually addressing the question to her made the interview more of a nightmare than ever. He was standing close to her (breaking the breech of his revolver and snapping it to again, and almost unaware of who she was, and quite unaware that with each click and snap of the mechanism she could have screamed aloud). “What am I to do, Marguerite?”
“Those trenches outside Mulai Idris,” she said. “They were dug to resist the Zemmour. The people here might have used them against you but for Paul. He warned the Basha that he couldn’t win, that he would find you just and fair and careful of all his rights. Do you believe that?”
“Yes, I do,” he said, slowly. “After all, he charged with Laguessière when Laguessière was put to it.”
“Charged with Laguessière?” repeated Marguerite.
“Yes—in Fez—one afternoon during the revolt. He had a great staff and used it—used it well. So much of the old creed remained with him, at all events.”
Yes, thought Marguerite, there had been an afternoon when Paul had been on edge and she had sent him out. He had come back, appeased, and a new man. The riddle of that change was now explained to her. But she had no leisure to dwell upon the explanation. Gerard had swung away again from her, and was now standing close to the window looking out across the chasm to the dark blue of the hill in the shadow opposite. One little step would carry him on to the balcony, and the butt of his revolver was still in his hand.
“Listen to me, Marguerite,” he said, in a low voice; and suddenly he became, to her thought, more dangerous in his calm than he had been in his anger. “Here’s a law broken by you and Paul, and see what misery has come of it! What loss! Shall I repair that law by breaking another? Hardly! Look at me, Marguerite!”