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Updated: June 24, 2025
If I see my way to save your estate, and give a mauvais quart d'heure to Louvier, so much the better for you, M. le Marquis; if I cannot, I will say frankly, 'Make the best terms you can with your creditor." "Nothing can be more delicately generous than the way you put it," said Alain; "but pardon me, if I say that the pleasantry with which you narrate your grudge against M. Louvier does not answer its purpose in diminishing my sense of obligation."
We resumed the journey with more diligence: thenceforward posted day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals; and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of my cousin Alain. For two-pence I could have gone farther and taken four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened conscience. But I feared to be conspicuous.
It was thus that Isaura woke the morning after the conversation with Alain de Rochebriant, and as certain words, then spoken, echoed back on her ear, she knew why she was so happy, why the world was so changed. In those words she heard the voice of Graham Vane nor she had not deceived herself she was loved! she was loved! What mattered that long cold interval of absence?
"Encounter at arms does Louvier fight?" asked Alain, innocently. "In his own way he is always fighting; but I speak metaphorically. You see this small house of mine so pinched in by the houses next to it that I can neither get space for a ball-room for Valerie, nor a dining-room for more than a friendly party like that which has honoured me to-day. Eh bien!
I do not understand you." "Marquis," said Duplessis, seating himself, and regarding Alain with a look in which were blended the sort of admiration and the sort of contempt with which a practical man of the world, who, having himself gone through certain credulous follies, has learned to despise the follies, but retains a reminiscence of sympathy with the fools they bewitch, "Marquis, pardon me; you talk finely, but you do not talk common sense.
"I am delighted to see M. le Capitaine," was the girl's reply, as she rose and made an obeisance, immediately resuming her seat. Poor Alain! the cold of the autumn evening outside was nothing in comparison with the chill that fell upon him by that blazing hearth. Weary as he was, and as soon appeared wounded also, his nerve, shaken by fatigue, gave way before this reception.
Entering his hotel, he went at once to Valerie's chamber. "Sleep well to-night, child; Alain has told me that he adores thee, and if he will go to the war, it is that he may lay his laurels at thy feet. Bless thee, my child, thou couldst not have made a nobler choice."
"If disposed to fall in love with Valerie," thought Duplessis, "he would have taken more pains to please her father. Well, thank heaven, there are better matches to be found for her than a noble without fortune and a Legitimist without career." In fact, Alain felt no more for Valerie than for any other pretty girl in the room.
The rider, checking his steed, lifted his hat to Alain and uttered a word of apology in the courtesy of ancient high-breeding, but still with condescension as to an inferior.
Literally speaking, Lemercier was starving. Alain had been badly wounded in the sortie of the 21st, and was laid up in an ambulance. Even if he could have been got at, he had probably nothing left to bestow upon Lemercier.
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