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Updated: June 1, 2025
He wished, therefore, to lose no time, and to continue his investigations as long as they "should not have seized his person." Two days after my removal to Bourges, Marcasse produced a document which had been drawn up at his instance by two notaries of La Chatre.
At last Marcasse, perspiring profusely, stopped, and said to me: "This is very stupid; if we searched all night we should not find a spring if there is none; and however hard we hammered, we could not break in the door if there happened to be big iron bars behind it, as I have sometimes seen in other old country-houses."
Believe me, but yesterday your family was a proud vessel, whose helm was in your hands; to-day it is a drifting wreck, without either sail or pilot left to be handled by cabinboys, as friend Marcasse says. Well, my poor mariner, do not persist in drowning yourself; I am throwing you a rope; take it a day more, and it may be too late.
Then we shut ourselves in the room, in order to explore it at our ease; for it was now almost evident that what I had seen was by no means a ghost, but John Mauprat himself, or a man very like him, whom I had mistaken for John. Marcasse having aroused Blaireau by voice and gesture, watched all his movements.
"Oh, well! that may be, sir," she replied. "I do not know how they left it the last time some one slept here; I did not pay any attention to that as I put on the sheets; all I know is that M. Bernard's cloak was lying on the top." "My cloak?" I exclaimed. "It was left in the stable." "And mine, too," said Marcasse. "I have just folded both together and put them on the corn-bin."
When the first of them arrived in the garret whither Antony Mauprat had fled, he found him grappling with Marcasse, who, quite carried away by his triumph and forgetting that it was not a question of killing an enemy but of capturing him, set about lunging at him with his long rapier as if he had been a weasel. But the sham Trappist was a formidable enemy.
Marcasse fell on his knees by my bed and implored me to be calm, and a score of times he repeated the following words, which to me were like the meaningless words one hears in dreams: "You did not do it on purpose; I know well enough. No, you did not do it on purpose. It was an accident; a gun going off in your hand by chance." "Come, now, what do you mean?" I exclaimed impatiently. "What gun?
It is true that among the former Marcasse was the only one who could really be considered as a witness for the defence. The rest merely affirmed that a "monk bearing a resemblance to the Mauprats" had been roaming about Varenne at the period in question, and that he had even appeared to hide himself on the evening of the event. Since then he had not been seen.
"You shall tell me them the next time we come; and that will not be so soon; for my affairs are going on much better than if I interfered with them; and I should not like to get into the habit of drinking Madeira to prevent myself from being frightened at my own shadow. And now, Marcasse, I must ask you as a favour not to tell any one what has happened.
When, by dint of blowing the brand, the servant had filled the room with dense smoke, she went off to fetch some embers and left me alone. Marcasse had remained in the stable to attend to our horses. Blaireau had followed me; lying down by the hearth, he glanced at me from time to time with a dissatisfied air, as if to ask me the reason of such wretched lodging and such a poor fire.
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