"Brother! what simplicity is yours! A few caresses, a few cajoleries, and your satisfied vanity silences your distrust and disarms your good sense! Did you not know that this young man is the intimate friend of your master?"Then bowing towards Gilbert:
"They thought then that you could make me speak.And you imagined yourself that a coarse artifice and some threatening talk would suffice to tear from me a secret I have guarded for nearly seven years.Presumptuous young man, return to him who sent you, and repeat faithfully what I am about to say to you: One day at Martinique, in a remote house some distance from the outskirts of the town of St.Pierre,--let me speak, my story will be short.--Picture to yourself a great dark hall, with a table in the center.--They shut me in there near noon; the next day at evening I was there still, and for thirty hours I neither ate nor drank.The night came,--they stretched me upon a table,--bound me and tied me down.Then I saw bending over me a face more terrible than thou wilt ever see, even in thy dreams, and a mouth which sneered as the damned must sneer, approached my ear and said to me: 'Father Alexis, I want your secret--I will have it.' I breathed not a word; they tightened the cords with a jack, and I did not speak;they piled weights on my chest, and I spoke not; they put boots upon me which I hope never to see upon thy feet, and I spake not;my bones cracked, and I spake not; I saw my blood gush out, and Idid not speak.At length a supreme anguish seized me, a red cloud passed over my eyes, I felt my heart freezing, and I thought myself dying.Then I spoke and said: 'Count Leminof, thou canst kill me, but thou shalt not tear from me the secrets of the confessional.'"And at these words, the priest stooping, laid bare his right foot and showed Gilbert the bruised and withered flesh, and bones deformed by torture; then covering it again he recoiled, as if from a serpent in his path, and cried in a thundering voice, extending his arms to Heaven: