“Ah! the boy with the bloody foot. Do you want to revenge your father?” said Corentin.
“Good again. Now, don’t leave me except to do what I bid you, and you will obey your mother and earn some big sous--do you like sous?”
“You like sous, and you want to kill the Gars who killed your father--well, I’ll take care of you. Ah! Marie,” he muttered, after a pause, “you yourself shall betray him, as you engaged to do! She is too violent to suspect me--passion never reflects. She does not know the marquis’s writing. Yes, I can set a trap into which her nature will drive her headlong. But I must first see Hulot.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil and Francine were deliberating on the means of saving the marquis from the more than doubtful generosity of Corentin and Hulot’s bayonets.
“I could go and warn him,” said the Breton girl.
“But we don’t know where he is,” replied Marie; “even I, with the instincts of love, could never find him.”
After making and rejecting a number of plans Mademoiselle de Verneuil exclaimed, “When I see him his danger will inspire me.”
She thought, like other ardent souls, to act on the spur of the moment, trusting to her star, or to that instinct of adroitness which rarely, if ever, fails a woman. Perhaps her heart was never so wrung. At times she seemed stupefied, her eyes were fixed, and then, at the least noise, she shook like a half-uprooted tree which the woodsman drags with a rope to hasten its fall. Suddenly, a loud report from a dozen guns echoed from a distance. Marie turned pale and grasped Francine’s hand. “I am dying,” she cried; “they have killed him!”
The heavy footfall of a man was heard in the antechamber. Francine went out and returned with a corporal. The man, making a military salute to Mademoiselle de Verneuil, produced some letters, the covers of which were a good deal soiled. Receiving no acknowledgment, the Blue said as he withdrew, “Madame, they are from the commandant.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, a prey to horrible presentiments, read a letter written apparently in great haste by Hulot:--
“Mademoiselle--a party of my men have just caught a messenger from the Gars and have shot him. Among the intercepted letters is one which may be useful to you and I transmit it--etc.”