Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the
penalty of my unfortunate blow. They held my honour tacitly
pledged to succour them; and it is a sort of stoical refinement
entirely foreign to my nature to set the political obligation above
the personal and private. If France fell in the interval for the
lack of Anne de St.-Yves, fall she must! But I was both surprised
and humiliated to have had so plain a duty bound upon me for so
long--and for so long to have neglected and forgotten it. I think
any brave man will understand me when I say that I went to bed and
to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke again in
the morning with a light heart. The very danger of the enterprise
reassured me: to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to come
to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a
court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell
upon; it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the
easy--only that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had
risked my life for the most immediate.
We resumed the journey with more diligence: thenceforward posted
day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals;
and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of
my cousin Alain. For twopence I could have gone farther and taken
four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the
terrors of an awakened conscience.
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