There remain to be mentioned, as characters in the drama then being played, Doctor Louis, Eric, and Father Daniel.
The crimes of the two ruffians who had attempted to enter Doctor Louis's house remained for long fresh in the memories of the villagers. They were both dead, one murdered, the other executed for a deed of which only one person in Nerac had an uneasy sense of his innocence--Father Daniel. The good priest, having received from the unfortunate man a full account of his life from childhood, journeyed shortly afterwards to the village in which he had been born and was best known, for the purpose of making inquiries into its truth. He found it verified in every particular, and he learnt, moreover, that although the hunchback had been frequently in trouble, it was rather from sheer wretchedness and poverty than from any natural brutality of disposition that he had drifted into crime. It stood to his credit that Father Daniel could trace to him no acts of cruel violence; indeed, the priest succeeded in bringing to light two or three circumstances in the hunchback's career which spoke well for his humanity, one of them being that he was kind to his bedridden mother. Father Daniel returned to Nerac much shaken by the reflection that in this man's case justice had been in error. But if this were so, if the hunchback were innocent, upon whom to fix the guilt? A sadness weighed upon the good priest's heart as he went about his daily duties, and gazed upon his flock with an awful suspicion in his mind that there was a murderer among them, for whose crime an innocent man had been executed.
Gabriel Carew was happy. The gloom of his early life, which threatened to cast dark shadows over all his days, seemed banished for ever. He was liked and respected in the village in which he had found his happiness; his charities caused men and women to hold him in something like affectionate regard; he was Father Daniel's friend, and no case of suffering or poverty was mentioned to him which he was not ready to relieve; in Doctor Louis's home he held an honoured place; and he was loved by a good and pure woman, who had consented to link her fate with his. Surely in this prospect there was nothing that could be productive of aught but good.