“But surely, my dear child, Jacques told you--you--something more
precise?”
“No.”
“You did not ask him even what those improbable facts were?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Well?”
“He said that I was the very last person who could be told.”
“That man ought to be burnt over a slow fire,” said M. de Chandore to
himself. Then he added in a louder voice,--
“And you do not think all this very strange, very extraordinary?”
“It seems to me horrible!”
“I understand. But what do you think of Jacques?”
“I think, dear papa, that he cannot act otherwise, or he would not do
it. Jacques is too intelligent and too courageous to deceive himself
easily. As he alone knows every thing, he alone can judge. I, of course,
am bound to respect his will more than anybody else.”
But the old gentleman did not think himself bound to respect it; and,
exasperated as he was by this resignation of his grandchild, he was
on the point of telling her his mind fully, when she got up with some
effort, and said, in an almost inaudible voice,--
“I am broken to pieces! Excuse me, grandpapa, if I go to my room.” She
left the parlor. M. de Chandore accompanied her to the door, remained
there till he had seen her get up stairs, where her maid was waiting for
her, and then came back to M. Folgat.
“They are going to kill me, sir!” he cried, with an explosion of wrath
and despair which was almost frightful in a man of his age. “She had in
her eyes the same look that her mother had when she told me, after her
husband’s death, ‘I shall not survive him.’ And she did not survive my
poor son. And then I, old man, was left alone with that child; and who
knows but she may have in her the germ of the same disease which killed
her mother? Alone! And for these twenty years I have held my breath to
listen if she is still breathing as naturally and regularly”--
“You are needlessly alarmed,” began the advocate.