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He threw the abbe back, so that the little man fell heavily against the table; Susini recovered himself with the litheness of a wild animal, but when he flew at the closed door again it was Denise who stood in front of it. "I do believe yourself against yourself, And will henceforward rather die than doubt."
It is to the Abbe Susini at Olmeta; and it contains some of those things, my cousin, that I cannot tell you." "Do you think I care," said the baroness, "for your stupid politics? Do you think any woman cares for politics who has found some stupid man to care for her? There is my stupid in the street on his new horse." In a moment Lory was at the window. "A new horse," he said earnestly.
You know where he is." "He is there," said the count, pointing over the priest's shoulder. "Then God bless him," said the Abbe Susini, turning on his heel. "I do not ask that flowers should always spring beneath my feet." Colonel Gilbert was not one of those visionaries who think that the lot of the individual man is to be bettered by a change from, say, an empire to a republic.
"Ah!" said the count, and made no farther comment. Then, without pausing to consider his own motives, Lory hurried up to the Casa Perucca to tell the ladies there his great news. He must, it seemed, tell somebody, and he knew no one else within reach, except perhaps the Abbe Susini, who did not pretend to be a Frenchman.
"Tell me," said Lory, gently, at length, as if he were speaking to a child; "why have you done this?" "Then you did not know that I was alive?" inquired his father in return, with an uncanny, quiet laugh, as he sat down. "No." "No; no one knows that no one but the Abbe Susini and Jean there. You saw Jean as you came in.
But there were here, it seemed, understandings and misunderstandings which the lawyer failed to comprehend. The Abbe Susini had crossed the room and was whispering something hurriedly to Mademoiselle Brun, who acquiesced curtly and rather angrily. She had the air of the man at the wheel, to whom one must not speak.
He paused and looked round him with the slow and distant glance which any may perceive in the eyes of a caged wild beast. "They are all down from the mountains," he said. Even the Abbe Susini glanced uneasily over his shoulder. These still, stony valleys were peopled by the noiseless, predatory Ishmaels of the macquis.
He had to push aside the ivy which hung from the walls in great ropes, and only found the keyhole after a hurried search. But the lock was in good order. Jean, it appeared, was a careful man. Susini hurried through a long passage to the little round room where the Count de Vasselot had lived so long. He stopped with his nose in the air, and sniffed aloud.
The road now mounted steadily, and presently led through the rocky defile where Susini had turned back on a similar errand scarce a week earlier. The rider now emerged into the open, and made his careful way along the face of a mountain. The chill air bespoke a great altitude, which was confirmed by that waiting, throbbing silence which is of the summits.
"That story was buried with Perucca," he said, after a long pause. "Perhaps the Abbe Susini knows it. Who can tell what a priest knows? There were two Peruccas once fine, big men and neither married. The other Andrei Perucca who has been in hell these thirty years, made sheep's eyes, they told me, at de Vasselot's young wife. She was French, and willing enough, no doubt.
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