He turned the key twice in the lock, and threw the portals open.  To his great regret, he saw only Gabriel on the steps, between Rodin and Father d’Aigrigny.  The notary, and Bathsheba, who had served them as a guide, waited a little behind the principal group.

Samuel could not repress a sigh, as he stood bowing on the threshold, and said to them:  “All is ready, gentlemen.  You may walk in.”

CHAPTER XXIII.

The testament.

When Gabriel, Rodin, and Father d’Aigrigny entered the Red Room, they were differently affected.  Gabriel, pale and sad, felt a kind of painful impatience.  He was anxious to quit this house, though he had already relieved himself of a great weight, by executing before the notary, secured by every legal formality, a deed making over all his rights of inheritance to Father d’Aigrigny.  Until now it had not occurred to the young priest, that in bestowing the care upon him, which he was about to reward so generously, and in forcing his vocation by a sacrilegious falsehood, the only object of Father d’Aigrigny might have been to secure the success of a dark intrigue.  In acting as he did, Gabriel was not yielding, in his view of the question, to a sentiment of exaggerated delicacy.  He had made this donation freely, many years before.  He would have looked upon it as infamy now to withdraw it.  It was hard enough to be suspected of cowardice:  for nothing in the world would he have incurred the least reproach of cupidity.

The missionary must have been endowed with a very rare and excellent nature, or this flower of scrupulous probity would have withered beneath the deleterious and demoralizing influence of his education; but happily, as cold sometimes preserves from corruption, the icy atmosphere in which he had passed a portion of his childhood and youth had benumbed, but not vitiated, his generous qualities, which had indeed soon revived in the warm air of liberty.  Father d’Aigrigny, much paler and more agitated than Gabriel, strove to excuse and explain his anxiety by attributing it to the sorrow he experienced at the rupture of his dear son with the Order.  Rodin, calm, and perfectly master of himself, saw with secret rage the strong emotion of Father d’Aigrigny, which might have inspired a man less confiding than Gabriel with strange suspicions.  Yet, notwithstanding his apparent indifference, the socius was perhaps still more ardently impatient than his superior for the success of this important affair.  Samuel appeared quite desponding, no other heir but Gabriel having presented himself.  No doubt the old man felt a lively sympathy for the young priest; but then he was a priest, and with him would finish the line of Rennepont; and this immense fortune, accumulated with so much labor, would either be again distributed, or employed otherwise than the testator had desired.  The different actors in this scene were standing around the table.  As they were about to seat themselves, at the invitation of the notary, Samuel pointed to the register bound in black shagreen, and said:  “I was ordered, sir, to deposit here this register.  It is locked.  I will deliver up the key, immediately after the reading of the will.”