“I would rather depend upon your silence than
your assurances. Still, you shall have your chance.
I am a fool, perhaps, but I have a reluctance to
shed blood. Go into the house, Fresnel.
Go, man. I follow you.”
In the shabby main room of that dwelling, Andre-Louis
halted him again. “Get me a length of
rope,” he commanded, and was readily obeyed.
Five minutes later Fresnel was securely bound to a
chair, and effectively silenced by a very uncomfortable
gag improvised out of a block of wood and a muffler.
On the threshold the departing Andre-Louis turned.
“Good-night, Fresnel,” he said.
Fierce eyes glared mute hatred at him. “It
is unlikely that your ferry will be required again
to-night. But some one is sure to come to your
relief quite early in the morning. Until then
bear your discomfort with what fortitude you can,
remembering that you have brought it entirely upon
yourself by your uncharitableness. If you spend
the night considering that, the lesson should not
be lost upon you. By morning you may even have
grown so charitable as not to know who it was that
tied you up. Good-night.”
He stepped out and closed the door.
To unlock the ferry, and pull himself across the swift-running
waters, on which the faint moonlight was making a silver
ripple, were matters that engaged not more than six
or seven minutes. He drove the nose of the boat
through the decaying sedges that fringed the southern
bank of the stream, sprang ashore, and made the little
craft secure. Then, missing the footpath in the
dark, he struck out across a sodden meadow in quest
of the road.
THE TRESPASSERS
Coming presently upon the Redon road, Andre-Louis,
obeying instinct rather than reason, turned his face
to the south, and plodded wearily and mechanically
forward. He had no clear idea of whither he
was going, or of whither he should go. All that
imported at the moment was to put as great a distance
as possible between Gavrillac and himself.
He had a vague, half-formed notion of returning to
Nantes; and there, by employing the newly found weapon
of his oratory, excite the people into sheltering
him as the first victim of the persecution he had
foreseen, and against which he had sworn them to take
up arms. But the idea was one which he entertained
merely as an indefinite possibility upon which he
felt no real impulse to act.
Meanwhile he chuckled at the thought of Fresnel as
he had last seen him, with his muffled face and glaring
eyeballs. “For one who was anything but
a man of action,” he writes, “I felt that
I had acquitted myself none so badly.”
It is a phrase that recurs at intervals in his sketchy
“Confessions.” Constantly is he reminding
you that he is a man of mental and not physical activities,
and apologizing when dire necessity drives him into
acts of violence. I suspect this insistence upon
his philosophic detachment — for which I confess
he had justification enough — to betray his
besetting vanity.
