When the man on whose shoulders he was borne finally stopped, Picaud estimated that about half an hour had elapsed. Picaud, still wrapped in the cloak, had seen nothing of the road traversed. When he was released, he found himself laid on a truckle-bed with a straw mattress; the atmosphere of the place was thick and heavy; he thought he recognized it as a subterranean passage belonging, to all appearances, to an abandoned quarry.
The almost total darkness of the place, the natural agitation of Picaud, the change that ten years of want and despair had effected in the stranger’s look, did not permit the murderer of Loupian to recognize the individual who had appeared so like a phantom. He examined him in dull silence, waiting for some word to explain the fate he had to expect. Ten minutes thus passed before a single word was uttered.
“Well, Picaud!” he said, “what name do you go by now, – the one your father gave you, or the one you assumed when you quitted Fenes-trelles? Are you the Abbe Baldini or the waiter Prosper? Cannot your ingenuity supply you with a fifth? You think that revenge is a good joke, I suppose; it is a furious madness, which you yourself would hold in horror if you had not sold your soul to the devil. You have sacrificed the ten last years of your life to the pursuit of three wretches whom you ought to have spared. You have perpetrated horrible crimes. You are lost forever; and you have dragged me, too, into the abyss!”
“You! you! Who are you?”
“I am your accomplice, a scoundrel who, for money, sold the life of my friends! Your money was deadly; the cupidity which you kindled in my soul has never been extinguished. The greed of riches made me mad and wicked. I slew the man who deceived me. I and my wife had to fly; she died in our exile, and I, arrested, tried, and condemned to the galleys, have endured the pillory and the branding-iron, and dragged the ball and chain. At length, when in my turn I escaped, I resolved to punish that Abbe Baldini who knew so well how to punish others. I hastened to Naples; no one knew him there. I looked for the grave of Picaud; I heard Picaud was alive. How did I learn that fact? Neither you nor the pope will tear the secret from me. I resumed my pursuit of the feigned dead man; but when I found him, two murders had already marked his vengeance; the children of Loupian were ruined, his house burned, and his fortune destroyed. This evening I was about to address the unhappy man and tell him all; but once more you anticipated me; the devil gave you the start of me, and Lou-pian fell beneath your blows, before that God who was guiding me permitted me to save from death your last victim. What matter, after all? I have you now! I, in my turn, can prove to you that the men of our country have arms as good as their memories! I am Antoine Allut!”
Picaud made no reply, but strange emotions shook his soul. Sustained up to that moment by the giddy drunkenness of revenge, he had forgotten his immense fortune and all the pleasures it placed within his reach. Now, when his vengeance was accomplished, when he was about to plan a future life of wealth, he had fallen into the hands of a man as implacable as he remembered he had been himself. These thoughts flitted through his brain, and a convulsion of rage made him bite the gag that Antoine Allut had had the foresight to use.
“Can I not,” he reflected, “rich as I am, by fine promises, and if necessary, by even a real sacrifice, get rid of this enemy? I gave fifty thousand francs to learn the names of my victims; will not an equal amount, or even twice the amount, free me from the peril I am in?”
But the dense fumes of avarice obscured the clearness of this thought. Although he possessed sixteen millions, he shrank from having to surrender the sum that might be demanded. Love of gold choked the cries of his carnal self that longed to purchase its liberty, yet could plead only feebly. “Oh!” he said in the inmost recesses of his soul, “the poorer I pretend to be, the sooner I shall get out of this prison. No one knows how much I possess; I will feign to be on the verge of beggary; he will let me go for a few crowns, and then, once out of his hands, I will soon get him into mine.”
Such were the absurd imaginations of Picaud, such the mess he made of hopes and mistakes, while Allut was removing the gag.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“No matter! you are in a place where you can expect neither aid nor pity; you are in my power, in mine alone, understand, and are the slave of my will and my caprice.”