When he reached the castle Malouve, he stood still. His brow was dripping. The clock of Bernay parish church struck twelve. At the same time the dogs scented him, and began to bark. The unhappy father prowled round the building, looking up at every window, his every limb shaking with apprehension. Suddenly, from an open casement he heard a cry. He knew the tone of that voice. The cry pierced his heart. He ran to the foot of the building which rose from the sward at this spot, and looked up at the window. An acacia-tree stood at a little distance from the wall, and he proceeded to scramble up it. The trunk was smooth, and presented no foot-hold. He was a clumsy man, and could not mount well; the branches were brittle and broke with him. He heard voices in the chamber whence his daughter’s cry had reached him, he grappled with the tree and worked himself up a little way with his knees. The leaves shook above him as though the acacia responded to every pulsation of his heart. ‘Father! Oh, my father!’ That call to him--it seemed denunciatory, reproachful--burst upon his ear. He tore the money from his belt, and with all his force, he hurled it through the window; then he slid down the tree and fled. He fled, but the cry pursued him; it echoed from every wall of the château. He heard it in the bay of the bloodhounds; it came to him from the dark aisles of the forest, the wind swept it after him; the owl caught it up and towhoo’d it, the night-hawk screamed it. He put his hands to his ears to shut it out. But the cry was within him, and it echoed through and through and through him-- ‘Father! Oh, my father!’ The cry of a child betrayed by its own parent,--the cry of a slave sold by its own father,--the cry of a soul given up to devils by him who had given it being,--the cry of a loving heart against him it had loved, against him for whom the hands had worked gladly, the feet tripped nimbly, the lips smiled sweetly, and the eyes twinkled blithely-- ‘Father! Oh, my father!’ As he sprang over the stile, as he raced to the foot-bridge, as he traversed it, from the white face that glared up at him from the water, from the rustling reeds, from the soughing willows, from his own white and black home as he reached it-- ‘Father! Oh, my father!’ In his horror and despair he threw himself in at the door, and ran towards the ladder. He scrambled up it; and drawing it up after him fastened a rope that lay coiled on his floor to it, and he noosed the other end about his neck, and he crawled to the hole in the floor through which he had mounted and drawn the ladder, and the cry came up to him from below. He leaped towards it, and so sought to silence it. CHAPTER IX.