"To know if you have seen a young man pass, fifteen years of age, mounted on a chestnut horse and followed by a groom?"
"The Viscount de Bragelonne?
"Just so."
"Then you are called Monsieur Grimaud?"
The traveler made a sign of assent.
"Well, then," said the host, "your young master was here a quarter of an hour ago; he will dine at Mazingarbe and sleep at Cambrin."
"How far is Mazingarbe?"
"Two miles and a half."
"Thank you."
Grimaud was drinking his wine silently and had just placed his glass on the table to be filled a second time, when a terrific scream resounded from the room occupied by the monk and the dying man. Grimaud sprang up.
"What is that?" said he; "whence comes that cry?"
"From the wounded man's room," replied the host.
"What wounded man?"
"The former executioner of Bethune, who has just been brought in here, assassinated by Spaniards, and who is now being confessed by an Augustine friar."
"The old executioner of Bethune," muttered Grimaud; "a man between fifty-five and sixty, tall, strong, swarthy, black hair and beard?"
"That is he, except that his beard has turned gray and his hair is white; do you know him?" asked the host.
"I have seen him once," replied Grimaud, a cloud darkening his countenance at the picture so suddenly summoned to the bar of recollection.
At this instant a second cry, less piercing than the first, but followed by prolonged groaning, was heard.
The three listeners looked at one another in alarm.
"We must see what it is," said Grimaud.
"It sounds like the cry of one who is being murdered," murmured the host.
"Mon Dieu!" said the woman, crossing herself.
If Grimaud was slow in speaking, we know that he was quick to act; he sprang to the door and shook it violently, but it was bolted on the other side.
"Open the door!" cried the host; "open it instantly, sir monk!"
No reply.
"Unfasten it, or I will break it in!" said Grimaud.
The same silence, and then, ere the host could oppose his design, Grimaud seized a pair of pincers he perceived in a corner and forced the bolt. The room was inundated with blood, dripping from the mattresses upon which lay the wounded man, speechless; the monk had disappeared.
"The monk!" cried the host; "where is the monk?"
Grimaud sprang toward an open window which looked into the courtyard.
"He has escaped by this means," exclaimed he.
"Do you think so?" said the host, bewildered; "boy, see if the mule belonging to the monk is still in the stable."
"There is no mule," cried he to whom this question was addressed.
The host clasped his hands and looked around him suspiciously, whilst Grimaud knit his brows and approached the wounded man, whose worn, hard features awoke in his mind such awful recollections of the past.
"There can be no longer any doubt but that it is himself," said he.
"Does he still live?" inquired the innkeeper.
Making no reply, Grimaud opened the poor man's jacket to feel if the heart beat, whilst the host approached in his turn; but in a moment they both fell back, the host uttering a cry of horror and Grimaud becoming pallid. The blade of a dagger was buried up to the hilt in the left side of the executioner.
"Run! run for help!" cried Grimaud, "and I will remain beside him here."
The host quitted the room in agitation, and as for his wife, she had fled at the sound of her husband's cries.