“But,” cried he on seeing his daughter, “tell me, did they take the book from him?”
“I believe so, Father,” she replied, “but they did not take him.”
“Whom do you mean?”
“Pitou; he has escaped from them, and they are still running after him. They must already have got to Cayolles or Vauciennes.”
“So much the better! Poor fellow! It is I who have brought this upon him.”
“Oh, Father, do not feel uneasy about him, but think only of what we have to do! Pitou, you may rest assured, will get out of this scrape. But what disorder! good heaven! only look, mother.”
“Oh, my linen wardrobe!” cried Madame Billot; “they have not even respected my linen wardrobe! What villains they must be!”
“They have searched the wardrobe where the linen was kept!” exclaimed Billot.
And he rushed towards the wardrobe, which the exempt, as we have before stated, had carefully closed again, and plunged his hands into piles of towels and table napkins, all confusedly huddled together.
“Oh,” cried he, “it cannot be possible!”
“What are you looking for, Father?” inquired Catherine.
Billot gazed around him as if completely bewildered.
“Search,—search if you can see it anywhere! But no; not in that chest-of-drawers,—not in that secretary. Besides, it was there,—there; it was I myself who put it there. I saw it there only yesterday. It was not the book they were seeking for,—the wretches!—but the casket!”
“What casket?” asked Catherine.
“Why, you know well enough.”
“What! Doctor Gilbert’s casket?” inquired Madame Billot, who always, in matters of transcendent importance, allowed others to speak and act.
“Yes, Doctor Gilbert’s casket!” cried Billot, plunging his fingers into his thick hair; “that casket which was so precious to him.”
“You terrify me, my dear father,” said Catherine.
“Unfortunate man that I am!” cried Billot, with furious anger; “and I, who had not in the slightest imagined such a thing,—I, who did not even for a moment think of that casket! Oh, what will the doctor say? What will he think of me? That I am a traitor, a coward, a miserable wretch!”
“But, good heaven! what did this casket contain, Father?”
“I do not know; but this I know, that I had engaged, even at the hazard of my life, to keep it safe; and I ought to have allowed myself to be killed in order to defend it.”
And Billot made a gesture of such despair, that his wife and daughter started back with terror.
“Oh God! oh God! are you losing your reason, my poor father ” said Catherine.
And she burst into tears.
“Answer me, then,” she cried; “for the love of Heaven, answer me!”
“Pierre, my friend,” said Madame Billot, “answer your daughter; answer your wife.”
“My horse! my horse!” cried the farmer; “bring out my horse!”
“Where are you going, Father?”
“To let the doctor know. The doctor must be informed of this.”
“But where will you find him?”
“At Paris. Did you not read in the letter he wrote to us that he was going to Paris? He must be there by this time. I will go to Paris. My horse! my horse!”
“And you will leave us thus, my dear father? You will leave us in such a moment as this? You will leave us full of anxiety and anguish?”
“It must be so, my child; it must be so,” said the farmer, taking his daughter’s face between his hands and convulsively fixing his lips upon it. “‘If ever you should lose this casket,’ said the doctor to me, ‘or rather, should it ever be surreptitiously taken from you, the instant you discover the robbery, set off at once, Billot, and inform me of it, wherever I may be. Let nothing stop you, not even the life of a man.'”
“Good Lord! what can this casket contain?”
“Of that I know nothing; all that I know is, that it was placed under my care, and that I have allowed it to be taken from me. Ah, here is my horse! From the son, who is at college, I shall learn where to find the father.”
And kissing his wife and daughter for the last time, the farmer jumped into his saddle, and galloped across the country, in the direction of the high-road to Paris.