Raoul, bearing the word concerning Clemence, and the later messenger summoning him to Agricola’s bedside, reached Honore within a minute of each other.  His instructions were quickly given, for Raoul to take his horse and ride down to the family mansion, to break gently to his mother the news of Agricola’s disaster, and to say to his kinsmen with imperative emphasis, not to touch the marchande des calas till he should come.  Then he hurried to the rue Royale.

But when Raoul arrived at the mansion he saw at a glance that the news had outrun him.  The family carriage was already coming round the bottom of the front stairs for three Mesdames Grandissime and Madame Martinez.  The children on all sides had dropped their play, and stood about, hushed and staring.  The servants moved with quiet rapidity.  In the hall he was stopped by two beautiful girls.

“Raoul!  Oh, Raoul, how is he now?  Oh!  Raoul, if you could only stop them!  They have taken old Clemence down into the swamp—­as soon as they heard about Agricole—­Oh, Raoul, surely that would be cruel!  She nursed me—­and me—­when we were babies!”

“Where is Agamemnon?”

“Gone to the city.”

“What did he say about it?”

“He said they were doing wrong, that he did not approve their action, and that they would get themselves into trouble:  that he washed his hands of it.”

“Ah-h-h!” exclaimed Raoul, “wash his hands!  Oh, yes, wash his hands?  Suppose we all wash our hands?  But where is Valentine?  Where is Charlie Mandarin?”

“Ah!  Valentine is gone with Agamemnon, saying the same thing, and Charlie Mandarin is down in the swamp, the worst of all of them!”

“But why did you let Agamemnon and Valentine go off that way, you?”

“Ah! listen to Raoul!  What can a woman do?”

“What can a woman—­Well, even if I was a woman, I would do something!”

He hurried from the house, leaped into the saddle and galloped across the fields toward the forest.

Some rods within the edge of the swamp, which, at this season, was quite dry in many places, on a spot where the fallen dead bodies of trees overlay one another and a dense growth of willows and vines and dwarf palmetto shut out the light of the open fields, the younger and some of the harsher senior members of the Grandissime family were sitting or standing about, in an irregular circle whose centre was a big and singularly misshapen water-willow.  At the base of this tree sat Clemence, motionless and silent, a wan, sickly color in her face, and that vacant look in her large, white-balled, brown-veined eyes, with which hope-forsaken cowardice waits for death.  Somewhat apart from the rest, on an old cypress stump, half-stood, half-sat, in whispered consultation, Jean-Baptiste Grandissime and Charlie Mandarin.

“Eh bien, old woman,” said Mandarin, turning, without rising, and speaking sharply in the negro French, “have you any reason to give why you should not be hung to that limb over your head?”