Philippe-Auguste coughed, choking with joy; the boy’s lip curled with ferocious gaiety and reminded Abbé Vilbois of the smile of the woman for love of whom he had lost his head.
“After?” he said.
“After … Ah! Ah! Ah! … There was a big fire in the grate … it was December … in cold weather … she died … Mamma … a big coal fire … I took up the poker … made it all hot … you see … I made crosses on his back, eight, ten, I don’t know how many, then I turned him over again and made the same number on his belly. Wasn’t it funny, eh, Papa! That is how convicts were marked in the old days. He wriggled like an eel … but I had gagged him well, he could not make a noise. Then I took the notes—twelve of them—with my own that made thirteen … but they brought me no luck. Then I made off telling the servants not to disturb the Count until dinnertime as he was asleep.
“I was sure he would say nothing about it from dread of exposure, as he was a senator. But I was mistaken. Four days later I was pinched in a Paris restaurant. I got three years in jail. That is why I could not come and see you sooner.”
He was still drinking and spluttering and could hardly pronounce one word clearly.
“Now … Papa … Papa curé! Isn’t it funny to have a curé for a papa! … Ah! Ah! must be kind, very kind to the darling boy, because darling boy is out of the common … and he played a lovely trick … didn’t he? … a lovely one … on the old man …”
The same feeling of rage that had maddened Abbé Vilbois in that final scene with the mistress who had betrayed him, seized him now towards this abominable wretch.
He who, in God’s name, had dealt out forgiveness to many shameful secrets whispered in the privacy of the confessional, was pitiless, merciless towards himself, he had ceased to call upon an all-merciful Father to help him, for he understood that no protection from heaven or earth could save anyone so afflicted with misfortune.
All the fire of his passionate heart and of his stirring blood, subdued by the discipline of his station in the Church, awoke in an irresistible revolt against this wretch—his own son—against this likeness to himself, and more to that unworthy mother who had conceived the boy in her own likeness—and, more than all, against the fatality which had riveted this scoundrel to his paternal foot like the fetters of a galley-slave.
He saw, he foresaw all this in a flash of clear-sightedness, shocked from his twenty-five years of pious tranquillity and rest into action.
Suddenly aware that he must take a high tone with this criminal and terrify him at the first words, he said through teeth clenched with anger, taking no account of the drunken state of the wretch:
“Now that you have told me all about it, listen. You must go away tomorrow morning. You must live in a place that I will choose and that you may not leave without my permission. I will make you a small allowance, just enough to live upon, for I have no money. If you disobey me once, this arrangement will come to an end and I will deal with you …”
Although stupefied by wine, Philippe-Auguste understood the threat, and the criminal within him rose instantly to the surface. Hiccuping, he spat out some words:
“Ah! Papa, no use trying it on with me. … You are a curé … I’ve got you in my power … you will take it quietly, like the others.”
The Abbé started, the muscles of the old Hercules were aching to seize the bully, to bend him like a reed, and show him that he must submit to authority.
Pushing the table against the boy’s chest, he shouted:
“Take care, take care. … I am afraid of nobody, not I.”
Losing his balance, the drunkard rocked on his chair, then feeling that he was going to fall and that he was in the priest’s power, with a villainous look on his face he stretched out his hand towards a knife that was lying on the cloth. Abbé Vilbois noticed the movement and gave the table a violent push that sent his son head over heels on to the floor, where he lay on his back. The lamp rolled along the ground and went out.
For a few seconds a thin tinkle of glasses jingling against each other sounded through the darkness, then the creeping of soft bodies over the stone floor, then silence.
With the crash of the fallen lamp, black night, swift and unexpected, had fallen upon the two, leaving them dazed as in the presence of some unspeakable horror.
The drunkard, crouching against the wall, never stirred; the priest remained on his chair, plunged in the blackness of the night that was gradually swallowing up his anger. The veil of darkness thrown over him stayed his anger and brought his furious outburst of temper to an end; other ideas took their place, black and sad as the darkness around him.
Silence reigned, a silence as dense as that of a closed tomb, in which nothing seemed to live or breathe. Not a sound came from without, no sound of wheels in the distance, no sound of a dog barking, not even the rustle of a slight breath of wind among the branches or the tapping of a twig against the walls.
The silence dragged on; it might
