"Their names, lad!"
Then, seeing him unsuspecting, the fury in my heart surged up and
covered every other feeling. I burst out:
"Gervais de Grammont and the Comte de Mar."
He looked me in the face, and he knew I was telling the truth.
Unexpected as it was, hideous as it was, yet he knew I was telling the
truth.
I had seen cowards turn pale, but never the colour washed from a brave
man's face. The sight made my fingers itch to strangle that gray-eyed
cheat.
With a cry Monsieur sprang toward me.
"You lie, you cur!"
"No, Monsieur," I gasped; "it is the truth."
He let me go then, and laid his hand on the collar of the dog, who had
sprung to his aid. But Monsieur had got a hurt from which the dumb
beast's loyalty could not defend him. He stood with bowed head, a man
stricken to the heart's core. Full of wrath as I was, the tears came to
my eyes for Monsieur.
He recovered himself.
"It is some damnable mistake! You have been tricked!"
My rage blazed up again.
"No! They tricked me once. Not again! Not this time. I knew not who they
were till now, when I talked with Marcel. The two things fitted."
"Then it is your guess! You dare to say--"
"No, I know!" I interrupted rudely, too excited to remember respect.
"Shall I tell what these men were like? I had never seen M. le Comte nor
M. de Grammont before. One was broad-shouldered and heavy, with a black
beard and a black scowl, whom the other called Gervais. The younger was
called Étienne, tall and slender, with gray eyes and fair hair. And like
Monsieur!" I cried, suddenly aware of it. "Mordieu, how he is like,
though he is light! In face, in voice, in manner! He speaks like
Monsieur. He has Monsieur's laugh. I was blind not to see it. I believe
that was why I loved him so much."
"It was he whom you would not betray?"
"Aye. That was before I knew."
Thinking of the trust I had given him, my wrath boiled up again.
Monsieur took me by the shoulder and looked at me as if he would look
through me to the naked soul.
"How do I know that you are not lying?"
"Monsieur does know it."
"Yes," he answered after a moment. "Alas! yes, I know it."
He stood looking at me, with the dreariest face I ever saw--the face of
a man whose son has sought to murder him. Looking back on it now, I
wonder that I ever went to Monsieur with that story. I wonder why I did
not bury the shame and disgrace of it in my own heart, at whatever cost
keep it from Monsieur. But the thought never entered my head then. I was
so full of black rage against Yeux-gris--him most of all, because he had
won me so--that I could feel nothing else. I knew that I pitied
Monsieur, yet I hardly felt it.
"Tell me everything--how you met them--all. Else I shall not believe a
word of your devilish rigmarole," Monsieur cried out.
I told him the whole shameful story, every word, from my lightning
vision to my gossip with Marcel in the antechamber, he listening in
hopeless silence. At length I finished. It seemed hours since he had
spoken. At last he said, "Then it is true." The grayness of his face
drew the cry from me:
"The villain! the black-hearted villain!"
"Take care, Félix, he is my son!"