"There is only one course open," I answered. "We must brazen it out."
She agreed. But this, though a very easy course to advise, was one anything but easy to pursue. I discovered that, a few minutes later, when I went out to see if the carriage was ready, and found De Géol in the doorway with a face as hard as his own hills. "You are starting?" he said.
"I find that I have to congratulate you," he continued, with a smile of unpleasant meaning.
"On finding your family," he answered, looking at me with a bitter sort of humour. "To discover both a mother and a sister in twenty-four hours must be great happiness. But--may I give you a hint, M. le Vicomte?"
"If you please," I said, with desperate coolness.
"Then if--being so happy in making discoveries--you happen to light next on M. Froment--on M. Froment, the firebrand of Nîmes, false Capuchin, and false traitor!--do not adopt him also! That is all."
"I am not acquainted with him," I said coldly. He had spoken with passion and fire.
I shrugged my shoulders, and he said no more; and in a moment Madame and Mademoiselle came out, and took their seats, and I set out to walk up the hill beside the horses.
The ascent was steep and long and toilsome, and a dozen times as we climbed out of the valley we had to halt to breathe the cattle; a dozen times I looked back at the grey mountain inn lying on the desolate grey plateau at our feet. Always I found the Baron looking up at us, stern and gaunt and motionless as the house before which he stood. And I shivered.
This encounter served neither to raise my spirits nor to remove the apprehensions with which I looked forward to our arrival in places more populous; places where suspicion, once roused, might be less easily allayed. True, Géol had not betrayed me, but he might have his reasons for that; nor did the fact any the more reconcile me to having on our trail this grim stalking-horse in whose person a fanaticism I had deemed dead lurked behind modern doctrines, and sought under the cloak of a new party to avenge old injuries. The barren slopes and rugged peaks that rose above us, as we plodded toilsomely onward, the windswept passes over which the horses scarce dragged the empty carriage, the melancholy fields of snow that lay to right and left, all tended to deepen the impression made on my mind; so that feeling him one with his native hills, I longed to escape from them, I longed to be clear of this desolation and to see before me the sunshine and olive slopes sweep down to the southern sea.