And, turning round suddenly and seeing its contortions and its awful maniacal fear, Bertie reeled back across the _calotte_, exclaiming: "My God! Fordingbridge! Face to face at last!" CHAPTER XXIV. BROKEN HEARTS. Yet in that very moment he knew that once more Fordingbridge had escaped his vengeance. He recognised in the creature which had flung itself at his feet and was moving, grimacing, and chattering there, that he was mad--that he could no longer right his wrongs by choking the life out of it. Those wild, misty eyes, extended to their utmost with fear and maniacal frenzy, told only too plainly that the brain behind them was gone for ever, that henceforward he had to do with a thing that lived, it was true, but had no sense nor reason. Yet the maniac recognised him, he observed, was striving in his way to sue for mercy--could he be so mad as to be safe from his revenge? "You know him?" asked the marquis, in his sad, weak voice, he having witnessed the scene with astonishment. "You know him?" "To my bitter cost. Until to-day I thought--so much has he wronged me--that to him also I owed my detention here. Yet that, it seems now, can hardly be. Monsieur, how long has he been your companion?" De Chevagny paused a moment as though endeavouring to count the time since first his companion had been there--his blue eyes gazing out wistfully to the Rue St. Antoine, the roofs of which could plainly be seen from this room--then he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I cannot tell. I do not know. I have lost the power of keeping count. Yet--yet--it must be many weeks. We had no fire when first he came, and--and--the swallows were---- No," he broke off, "I cannot remember." That told Bertie much; told him that it could scarcely have been Fordingbridge who had been the cause, even though indirect, of his being seized and sent here. They must have come in almost at the same time. Who, then, was the strange, mysterious man of power--the friend of the King, of whom the Lieutenant had spoken, the man whose deadly vengeance he had incurred? "Begone!" he said to his old enemy, still grovelling at his feet; "away from me, I say. Heavens!" he exclaimed, "must this companionship be added to my other sufferings? Is the Bastille so small, or are its chambers so crowded, that this wretch and I could not be kept apart? Oh, what an irony of Fate that I who have sought him so long must meet him thus!" "Monsieur," said De Chevagny, while still Fordingbridge knelt at Bertie's feet, wringing his hands and muttering, "monsieur, if his wrongs to you, his evil doings, are not beyond all forgiveness, you may pardon him now, almost pity him. He is doomed to death, I hear; nothing, not even his madness, can save him." "Pity him!" exclaimed Bertie, "pity him! He has ruined, broken my life for ever; how can I pity him? And, even though he be not the cause of my presence here, I curse the hour that he was born, the day that threw him across my path!"