Artamène’s mobile face changed, “Of course you will repeat that I was asleep, which is a lie. But I never heard it—nor the sentries, I presume, since none of them reported it.”
“But, my dear friend,” enquired Lucien earnestly, “if I was able to hear one shot, why didn’t I hear two?”
They stared at each other in the dim light, these two young investigators, the one sitting up in his shirt on his pallet, the other, booted and sword-girt, kneeling beside him.
“You mean,” said the latter after a moment, “that if you heard the shot which this solitary Blue fired at M. le Marquis, why did you not hear the shot which M. de Brencourt fired at the Blue?”
“That is my meaning,” responded Lucien weightily.
“So that—provided you were not dreaming—there was only one shot fired . . . and that was fired at the Marquis.”
Lucien nodded. “Obviously, since he has been hit.”
“And that shot could not have fired itself.”
“It is usual to infer a finger on the trigger.”
“The question is, Whose finger?—No, Lucien, we had better not go any further! As we have already said, there has been storm in the atmosphere lately. And this desire for exercise in the moonlight! . . . Yet it must have been all en règle, even though there were no witnesses, since they came back together on good terms—arm in arm, in fact. But for the Marquis to proceed to such an extremity!—I never did like M. de Brencourt!”
“I think you are going too fast, mon ami,” remarked the soberer Lucien. “They would never have chosen pistols, and risked being heard at headquarters.”
“They seem to have chosen _a_ pistol, however,” retorted Artamène. “Whatever has happened, I am convinced that there has been the devil of a lot of lying done to-night . . . and that there will be even more to-morrow!”
“Charlemagne, I regret to say,” responded his friend, shaking his head, “—Charlemagne, who recently read me such a homily on truthfulness!”
Up in the Marquis de Kersaint’s room M. Pierre Chassin, priest and plotter, tired as he was, had been for some time pacing uneasily up and down. He had just returned from the mouth of the Seine and the successful despatch to England of the gold of Mirabel, which (as the agent in Paris at whose house it had been accumulating had indeed come under suspicion) the Abbé had had to pack up with exceeding haste, and take to the coast himself. But though he had just passed some agitated days and nights between Paris and Harfleur, the memory of them was as nothing to that of the shock and emotion he had experienced in the chapel at Mirabel. So that he was thinking at the moment scarcely at all of what he had so dexterously got out of the château, but of what he had left in it. And he was fairly distracted.