Escorted by two lackeys, the Marquis passed out of the room.
“Dismiss all the servants, Juliette; I have something to say,” said the old Duc, and the young girl, silent, obedient, did as her father bade her.
Father and sister were alone with their dead. As soon as the last hushed footsteps of the retreating servants died away in the distance, the Duc de Marny seemed to throw away the lethargy which had enveloped him until now. With a quick, feverish gesture he seized his daughter’s wrist, and murmured excitedly:
“His name. You heard his name, Juliette?”
“Yes, father,” replied the child.
“Paul Déroulède! Paul Déroulède! You’ll not forget it?”
“Never, father!”
“He killed your brother! You understand that? Killed my only son, the hope of my house, the last descendant of the most glorious race that has ever added lustre to the history of France.”
“In fair fight, father!” protested the child.
“ ’Tis not fair for a man to kill a boy,” retorted the old man, with furious energy.
“Déroulède is thirty: my boy was scarce out of his teens: may the vengeance of God fall upon the murderer!”
Juliette, awed, terrified, was gazing at her father with great, wondering eyes. He seemed unlike himself. His face wore a curious expression of ecstasy and of hatred, also of hope and exultation, whenever he looked steadily at her.
That the final glimmer of a tottering reason was fast leaving the poor, aching head she was too young to realise. Madness was a word that had only a vague meaning for her. Though she did not understand her father at the present moment, though she was half afraid of him, she would have rejected with scorn and horror any suggestion that he was mad.
Therefore when he took her hand and, drawing her nearer to the bed and to himself, placed it upon her dead brother’s breast, she recoiled at the touch of the inanimate body, so unlike anything she had ever touched before, but she obeyed her father without any question, and listened to his words as to those of a sage.
“Juliette, you are now fourteen, and able to understand what I am going to ask of you. If I were not chained to this miserable chair, if I were not a hopeless, abject cripple, I would not depute anyone, not even you, my only child, to do that, which God demands that one of us should do.”
He paused a moment, then continued earnestly:
“Remember, Juliette, that you are of the house of Marny, that you are a Catholic, and that God hears you now. For you shall swear an oath before Him and me, an oath from which only death can relieve you. Will you swear, my child?”
“If you wish it, father.”
“You have been to confession lately, Juliette?”
“Yes, father; also to holy communion, yesterday,” replied the child. “It was the Fête-Dieu, you know.”
“Then you are in a state of grace, my child?”
“I was yesterday morning, father,” replied the young girl naively, “but I have committed some little sins since then.”
“Then make your confession to God in your heart now. You must be in a state of grace when you speak the oath.”
The child closed her eyes, and as the old man watched her, he could see the lips framing the words of her spiritual confession.
Juliette made the sign of the cross, then opened her eyes and looked at her father.
“I am ready, father,” she said; “I hope God has forgiven me the little sins of yesterday.”
“Will you swear, my child?”
“What, father?”
“That you will avenge your brother’s death on his murderer?”
“But, father—”
“Swear it, my child!”
“How can I fulfil that oath, father?—I don’t understand—”
“God will guide you, my child. When you are older you will understand.”
For a moment Juliette still hesitated. She was just on that borderland between childhood and womanhood when all the sensibilities, the nervous system, the emotions, are strung to their highest pitch.
Throughout her short life she had worshipped her father with a wholehearted, passionate devotion, which had completely blinded her to his weakening faculties and the feebleness of his mind.
She was also in that initial stage of enthusiastic piety which overwhelms every girl of temperament, if she be brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, when she is first initiated into the mysteries of the Sacraments.
Juliette had been to confession and communion. She had been confirmed by Monseigneur, the Archbishop. Her ardent nature had responded to the full to the sensuous and ecstatic expressions of the ancient faith.
And somehow her father’s wish, her brother’s death, all seemed mingled in her brain with that religion, for which in her juvenile enthusiasm she would willingly have laid down her life.
She thought of all the saints, whose lives she had been reading. Her young heart quivered at the thought of their sacrifices, their martyrdoms, their sense of duty.
An exaltation, morbid perhaps, superstitious and overwhelming, took possession of her mind; also, perhaps, far back in the innermost recesses of her heart, a pride in her own importance, her mission in life, her individuality: for she was a girl after all, a mere child, about to become a woman.
But the old Duc was waxing impatient.
“Surely you do not hesitate, Juliette, with your dead brother’s body clamouring mutely for revenge? You, the only Marny left now!—for from this day I too shall be as dead.”
“No, father,” said the young girl in an awed whisper, “I do not hesitate. I will swear, just as you bid me.”
“Repeat the words after me, my child.”
“Yes, father.”
“Before the face of Almighty God, who sees and hears me—”
“Before the face of Almighty God, who sees and hears me,” repeated Juliette firmly.
“I swear that I will seek out Paul Déroulède.”
“I swear that I will seek out Paul Déroulède.”
“And in any manner which God may dictate to me encompass his death, his ruin or dishonour, in revenge for my brother’s death.”
“And in any manner which God may dictate to me encompass his death, his ruin
