TABLE of CONTENTS

BOOK IV—EARLY SUMMER.

CHAPTER I—THE LAST DAT OF MAY.

CHAPTER II—SUNSET.

CHAPTER IV—A LONG DAY—AFTERNOON.

CHAPTER V—A LONG DAY—EVENING.

BOOK V—DEATH IN LIFE.

CHAPTER I—MÈRE VICHÉTTE.

CHAPTER II—LE COLOMBIER.

CHAPTER III—PATIENCE.

CHAPTER IV—TORTURE.

CHAPTER V—PREPARATION.

BOOK VI—LIFE IN DEATH.

CHAPTER I—“IT IS HE.”

CHAPTER II—RENEWAL OF DOUBT.

CHAPTER III—“IT IS NOT HE!”

CHAPTER IV—COLOMBE’S STORY.

CHAPTER V—A CHANGED CRY.

CHAPTER VI—“NI ARBRE, NI OMBRE, NI AME.”

CHAPTER VII—SEARCH.

CHAPTER VII—REST.

BOOK IV

EARLY SUMMER.

CHAPTER I

THE LAST DAT OF MAY.

The fig-trees no longer showed as gaunt skeletons standing here and there among evergreen luxuriance, serving the use of the death’s head at a banquet; they were, rather, various-shaped candelabra, lighting from the broad flame of the sunshine a myriad minor flames: the vines were no longer black hieroglyphics, ancient runes, scrawled over the sides of the hills, spring had read their riddle, life ran down their lines: the olives had cast something of their hoariness, renewing their youth with tender-toned new shoots: the mulberries glistened and gloried in the peculiar green of foliage of which any day now they might be stripped. The quince-trees were just passing out of their fair flowering-time,’ and the cherry-trees were already gay with reddening fruit: the orange wore its fullest bridal-dress and flooded the whole country with fragrance, luscious to bewilderment—intoxication. Over the whole length and breadth of that glorious land summer was a-glow in its unsheathed brightness.

It was the end of May.

They felt it difficult to believe—Gonda and her husband—that such bliss, such beauty, such rich happiness as that in which they lived and moved, had ever before been experienced by man and woman.

And it is not true that theirs was“the Common lot”—just that and no more!

Let those who like to bring all things to one level, and who, doing so, would bring heaven down to earth rather than raise earth to heaven, pretend that Love is just Love, the same in one as in another, differing neither in degree nor glory, the same whether to its use and service are brought soul, intellect, spiritual grace, power, purity, and beauty, or—none of these things. Let those who will believe this. But—they are deeply to be pitied.

Yet for all this difference (which I hold there is) between Love and Love, the distribution of the gifts of life, its joys and pains, its delights and agonies may, nevertheless, be not unequal. And those who grasp the gift of such a love as that of Gonda and her husband well may tremble, asking,“What is Thy servant, 0 Lord, that he should be thus blessed?” well may supplement such asking by the praying,“Thou who hast given, if it should please Thee to withdraw that which is mortal of Thy blessed gift, 0, let it also please Thee to strengthen Thy poor servant to endure Thy will.”

No!—It was not Mérely the“common lot” of all who live, love, and possess, that had fallen upon these two. Both gifted with temperaments to enjoy (and suffer) exquisitely, all the circumstances of their lives, inward and outward, past and present, combined to concentrate the present joy, and make, for them, the bliss of love supreme.

In the very early days of her married life it had seemed strange to Gonda to see the work of the world go on, peasants plodding to their labour, women toiling in the fields, while such Elysian delight was hers. A general féte, a universal holiday in honour of the eminent loveliness of this year’s spring would have seemed less strange.

If work had seemed strange to her in this Sabbath of her life, how.much more strange had seemed wickedness: all wrong and cruelly, abuse of strength, misuse of beauty, all sins of hatred and defect of love, all blasphemy and profanity whether of thought, or word, or deed.

To be in harmony with her, all the world should have been new-born, all creatures innocent and pure, holding virtue only fair, only good desirable.

For her pure things alone seemed true and real: all sin was as a dark dream. Heaven was about her and God palpably above her.

Life, Mére life, was ecstasy and beauty. It was May-time verging into June. It was the hour to which to cry“Verweile doch! du bist so schon.” Does every life hold such an hour? As a flower its seed, a fruit its stone, a nut its kernel, does every life hold its supreme hour? Or are there flowers bearing no seed, fruits enclosing no stone, nuts holding no kernel? Lives, scantily nourished in a barren soil, that, in this world, neither blossom nor bear fruit?

Once more let me say, and in few words now rather than in many, how it was with this young husband and wife. They were pure, they were true, they were full of faith—faith in God as a God of Love, and faith in each other—they were enthusiasts, idealists, and they loved.

Their last May-day—that day they had been three months married—they spent in the woods and on the hills, he with his sketch-book, she as content to be idle all day sitting by him, as if this were the first day they had spent so and was to be the last. So he told her. She smiled, laid her cheek against his shoulder. Afterwards, saying that he had reproved her idleness, for a little while she read to him from the book lying on her lap, the lovely Proven9al poem“Mir&io.” But it was only a few pages she read, and then she stopped to ask him some question about what she had read—and they talked and talked and read no more.

When it was time to go home, the sketch being finished, she closed the book, marking the place by a flower placed between the leaves. As she did so, she said,“We are very idle! we have not read more than half our poem. Beautiful as it is, the life outside its covers is so much more beautiful. We shall never finish it.”

“Why do some words echo so hauntingly?” she asked, presently.“‘We shall never finish it P I go on saying that to myself. And just now, after you had said that I was as content to do nothing hut just sit beside you as if this was our first day, and was to be the last, I kept on saying to myself the last.’”

He looked up quickly from the pencils and brushes he was putting away.

“You are pale, love! You look cold!! We have stayed out too late, perhaps. Come! I am ready. We will hasten home.”

In the narrow lane, not far from the house, meeting a large flock of sheep and goats, they stood aside to let them pass. Some of the tame creatures tried to nibble at the flowers in Gonda’s hand. Laughing, she held them above her head, out of reach: her husband had gathered them, therefore they were precious, more than precious—sacred, as for her was all he touched.

Standing so, leaning on her husband’s arm, holding her flowers above her head, the evening sunlight slanting down the lane, falling on her fair and noble face, and glorifying her bright hair to a halo, Gronda was a picture of the higher and more ideal type of happiness in love.

The old herdsman who was driving the flock paused before the two; leaning upon his stick, holding his cap (which, like all the rest of his clothing, was of the same rich sun-warmed brown as the wool of his sheep) in his hand, he looked full into Gronda’s face, and said,—

“II fait bon vivre aujourd’hui—n’est ce pas, ma belle dame?”

“Ah oui!” answered Gonda with a smile, and dropped a silver coin, which her husband had slipped into the hand upon his arm, into the. old man’s extended cap.

He saw it, but returned no thanks.

“Ah oui,” he repeated, then went on,“When one is young, when one is strong, when it is spring, then one feels every day that it is good to live; but when all that is changed-”

His face grew gloomy and threatening as if, describing how all things with him were the reverse of what they were with the two before him, he envied them their happiness with a grudging envy that was almost hatred. From speaking of himself he passed to general moralizing of a gloomy nature on human affairs.

He had fallen into his own patois, but of this Gronda now understood enough to gather his meaning, and, by and by, he bade her, just because now life was sweet and her heaven cloudless (as he spoke he pointed first to her husband then to the glorious sky), expect storm and trouble, the bitterness of separation and death.

The old man’s eyes gleamed with half crazy light: encouraged, perhaps, by the patience of his listeners, he began to pour out a flood of half prophetic, half poetic lamentation, of which they did not wait to hear the end. Gonda had shivered, her husband had felt that shiver; he drew her closer,, and they went their way. Old Raimon, shaking his wild white locks in the reddening sunshine, called after them, but they did not stop or look back.

They had met the old man before: he had received silver from them before—always without thanks; he had never till now, in any way, addressed them. From Marie they had learnt his name, and that he enjoyed, among the more superstitious people of the district, the reputation of a soothsayer whose words had never failed to he fulfilled. Marie had also told them a strange pathetic story that had made him deeply an object of their compassion.

The artist, by and by, paused and turned to look once more before they should be out of sight at the flock, followed by the ancient herdsman, winding leisurely along the lane in the rich evening light.

By her absent answer to his remarks, her husband became aware that Gonda was not, as usual, seeing with his eyes, and perceiving with his senses; again he felt her shiver.

“Wifie, what hast thou?” he asked, looking down into her face.

“Nothing, husband, that I can understand.” As she answered she clasped his arm, closer and more closely, with both her hands, and pressed her heart against it.

“What is it, my darling? Tell me—let me see if I can understand.”

She smiled, replying—

“You will not, for it is Mére foolishness.”

“Try me—I may not, your foolishness being at times wisdom beyond me, but try me.”

“Laugh at me, that will be the best cure. That strange old man, with his gloomy looks and words, seems to have chilled all the sunshine out of me.”

“Heaven grant, my love, it is not I, with my carelessness, have chilled the sunshine out of you—keeping you too long and too late under the shadow of those cork-trees.”

“Indeed, no—it is not that. Till the last few minutes I was warm and well. Indeed, it is nothing, husband —a passing fancy; perhaps I am a little tired: not tired by anything we have done to-day, hut yesterday tired me: going to Bosangon always does—the air there, perhaps, does not suit me.”

“Let me see the form of the passing fancy —let me try and dispel the phantom.”

“Must I confess?”

“I have never yet needed to say ‘you must.’”

“Nor shall you now. While that old man spoke, a curious visionary feeling came over me. I seemed aware of the dark cloud of which he talked. I seemed to see it come down upon me, shutting out the sunshine, —shutting me from you. And now a dread remains that we are too happy for our happiness to last. Why, think, dear husband, in all this ‘world of trouble,’ what is there troubles us? In all this vale of tears,’ what sorrow have we to weep over? None—not one! Am I wrong for this reason to feel afraid, husband? Do my fears wrong the infinite goodness of God ?”

“Not necessarily, love. For if God were to lay what we felt to be infinite sorrow upon us, we ought to be able, through our suffering, to trust as blindly in His infinite goodness as we now sunnily feel and see that goodness in our infinite happiness. But surely it is more beautiful to ‘praise Him with a joyful mind’ in our present joy than to search the future with forecasting fears, or to give way to fanciful forebodings. Do you not think so, wifie?”

She looked up into his face wistfully,“Yes, yes, husband. You are always right. Smile on me, husband, and hold me very close, then all will soon be well with me again.”

He smiled upon her, and her upturned face drank in the smile: then he said—

“I talk to you wisely, my love, as if I had ever been free from forebodings. Yet you are a treasure so precious that a man may well hold you with trembling.”

“Precious or not precious in myself, I know that I am precious to you, husband, and I know that you cannot lose me,” she said.“I feel this, and that I cannot lose you! If you were drawn away from me, in a little while I should be drawn after you. I do not believe in separation, so what, after all, is there left to dread? Indeed are we one now and inseparable—one life, one soul! I cannot believe in living without you any more than in living without my soul. So what, after all, is there left to dread?”

She smiled up into his face—her own now bright and shadowless: his eyes only answered her just then, but she was content.

CHAPTER II

SUNSET.

As they walked up the first cypress avenue—the long one leading from the gate to the steps that mounted to the tiled court of the ruined fountain and the blighted orange-trees, which were now, late, just opening a few sickly blossoms—they saw Maitre Siccand shambling down it towards them.

He stood aside, bare-headed, to let them pass, with a mockery of extreme deference. Monsieur de Triancourt did not notice him by word or look. Gonda bade him“Good evening.” After they had passed, he still stood, bare-headed, looking after them, and his evil face expressed a concentration of envy, malice, hatred, and all vileness.

“Did you not see the old man, Henri? Why did you not wish him good evening?”

“I spoke to him this morning,” Monsieur de Triancourt said sternly,“and that was the last time that I shall use towards him only words. I think, however, that I shall not need to speak again—that he is, at last, convinced that my patience really is utterly exhausted, and that I am no longer to be tampered with.”

“I cannot help being sorry for him; I should be sorry for a dog turned out of the kennel it had been accustomed to, and much more sorry for a dog that had displeased you.”

“I would never have turned out a dog in this manner: I would have borne with it or have destroyed it. No dog could so displease me; human intelligence is needed for such wickedness as his; such wickedness as I would not have named in your hearing.”

“How did he behave to you this morning?” asked Gonda, timidly, after a little pause.

“His curses were deep rather than loud, I fancy.”

“Marie thinks it very imprudent of us to have made him an enemy; but, of course, I know, love, that you are right—that you could not pretend to be deaf and blind, as she would have had you.”

“With all its beauty, this country is accursed, deeply and bitterly accursed—groaning in vile bondage. Marie is a wonderful person, morally, considering the circumstances of her life and condition; still she is not free from the corrupting influences of a coward policy that would lead men, rather than risk making an enemy, to keep on good terms with the devil himself—cet bon Monsieur le Diable, as I, with my own ears, once heard him called by some poor wretch who was addressing to him prayers more fervent than one often hears addressed to God. I cannot be sorry for Maitre Siccand, not even on the ground of his age and infirmities, and I cannot help feeling that the sooner the earth is free of such a reptile the better. However, it is not our affair to hasten the death of any creature, so I promised the old wretch the pension as you wished; but I made it a condition that he should not come about the place. And now, I know you think I have been rather hard upon him.”

“No, husband; I am quite sure you were not unrighteously hard, only—a little stem, perhaps—perhaps, I say: I do not know for certain that you were even that.”

“You, love, know little of the creature, compared with what I have learnt. It makes my blood boil to think that all these years you have had to do with him.” ‘

“Marie saved me as much as was possible.”“But that you should have touched papers he had touched and breathed upon!—faugh! —my flesh revolts. This is not a case of Mére brutish degradation; it is worse than that, for this creature is not without education and a devilish sort of keen intelligence. We will speak of him no more. He leaves at daylight to-morrow. I shall arrange for his pension to be paid him regularly, and I hope he will not any more cross our path.”

“If we continue here,” said Gonda presently, when they had .crossed his court and were in the garden avenue of cypresses,“shall we not brave Marie’s superstitions, and cut down at least half these gloomy trees?”

“‘If we continue here?’ Wifie, you are getting England-sick; you think we shall not continue here!”

“Not long,” she answered;“I have been thinking a good deal about it lately; and now I feel sure, love, that as Enid felt her ‘no true wife,’ keeping her lord from what was then the man’s work, ‘striking great blows at caitiffs and at wrongers of the world,’ so I, like Enid, should be ‘no true wife’ if, for my own delight, I tried to keep you here out of the world, all to myself. ‘I cannot love my lord and not his name.’ I am all yours, only yours always; but knowing you, I have come to understand how, with a man, it is different. All your heart will be, in one sense, only mine always; hut your life belongs to some extent to other men and women. You have work to do in the world that you cannot do by living out of it. I don’t mean definite work, that you can do through your art, hut indefinite, unconscious work, the work of influence.”

“And where has my wife learnt all this wisdom?”

“From her husband! Oh, my husband,” she went on, fervently clasping her two hands round his arm,“when I listen to you, talking sometimes to poor little me, sometimes to that good doctor, from such large thought and knowledge, with the grace given by perfect mastery of mind—and when I feel you, as I do through all my being, in all you do, so noble, so high-minded, so God-fearingly brave —I am proud, so proud! I tremble to have you all to myself; I want all the world to listen and to learn. Then I know, husband, that we must not stay here long, .that you must have a man’s life in the world; not waste yourself on only me.”

“Not waste myself on only you!” he echoed, with an infinitely tender accent.

“Sweet wife! it is you and only you who touch the hidden springs of higher being; it is at your touch the waters of life gush forth, and then you stand by and wonder to see them so full and fair! You most lovely and unconscious worker of miracles! I do not say there is not truth in what you say; I do not say we should live here, and only for each other always; but as to my power of influence, you greatly overrate it. As to any good and pleasure I should have in the intercourse of men, and though you did not speak of that, I know you thought of it, believe me, darling, not many men’s minds spring upwards and forwards in eagerness of recognition of truth and beauty (so drawing one onward with them) as does yours. And I may say, beforehand, and yet from sure knowledge, that there is no one, neither man nor woman, can so delight me—with a warm delight that glows at my heart’s core—as can my noble wife with the perfect simplicity of her mind’s beauty and truth.”

“It is sweeter than I can say to hear you speak thus,” she answered;“but you do not shake me; there can be no exercise for you in the contact with my mind, for do I ever oppose you? Are not your thoughts mine almost before you speak them? If I overrate you, there is a reason the more given me for desiring to see you in the world, for I have heard that it is not good for men to live only with fond women; that they need to be measured men with men—to wrestle men with men—so that the intellectual sinews may stretch and grow strong. My part would be, like Enid’s, I should stand by and glory to see you overcome all who measured themselves with you.”

“But if I were worsted, love, and instead of overcoming, were overcome?”

“Why then,” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation,“I should see you yield with so good a grace as never man before! and I have read somewhere, that to take defeat graciously is far more difficult—requires far more grandeur of mind—than to be gracefully a conqueror. So any way, I should have delight. Were I to persuade you to stay here I should act as the man to whom were intrusted ten talents would have done had he hidden the ten in the earth.”

They were now in range of Marie’s eyes and tongue, as she stood on the terrace, by the house-door, watching for their return. She mingled reproof and welcome in her greeting.“’Twas well they were come at last, for the supper would have been entirely spoiled. And madame, at Rosan9on yesterday, and now such a long day again to-day! She must be tired to death.”

Then she handed her master three letters; two had come by“Monsieur le facteur de la poste” (as she called the postman), the third had been just brought by Maitre Siccand: he would not tell her whence or from whom; at least, when she had questioned him, he had answered her nothing but impudent sottises; she added this with a quick suspicious glance from her master to the letter, then hack to her master.

“The two post letters are English letters,” said Gonda;“they will be about your pictures—to say they are sold!” Leaning against him, she read the contents of those two English letters as he read them.

“I am glad and sorry,” she said, musingly.“Glad and proud that your work is valued; but I am so greedy that I grudge to think of your work hanging in other houses, and before strange people’s eyes!”

“The poor artist’s wife will have to get used to that,” he said.

“I am used to it already, then,” she answered,“for I see in your dear eyes that you are deeply pleased.”

“I am,” he said.“As you say, all the world seems to smile upon us. Now, love, go in and take off your bonnet and get a few moments’ rest. I will follow you when I have read this other letter.” He was turning it about more absently than curiously, studying the address and the seal with apparent interest, but really with eyes that did not see them.“I can tell you about it while we are having supper,” he added.

She went in at once.

Leaning against the house-wall, standing in the last sunshine of the last May-day; he delayed yet a few moments to open that letter. He was, as Gonda had said, deeply pleased by the news those English letters had brought him. The artist friend who wrote one of them prophesied that this was hut the beginning of great things, of fame and wide success.

Many sources of rejoicing mingled in the happy dream into which he fell; their sweet waters flooded his soul: his heart was full, his eyes were moist; he lifted his hat from his brow, and, his gaze fixed on the sinking sun, a few words of fervid gratitude passed his lips. Then, the clattering of dishes from Marie’s kitchen, disturbing him from his meditation, he broke the seal of that letter and read its contents.

At first a flush and a frown came together to his forehead, and an angry light to his eyes.“ Some insolent hoax!” he cried, and called to Marie, wishing to learn from her what Maitre Siccand had said when he left the letter. She was not in hearing.

He read the letter again—this time with grave attention: lines of pain and of sympathy settled upon his face, and deep thoughtfulness. Then, while he still leant there, various expressions followed one another swiftly; now almost of pleasure; and then again he looked hurt—grieved, like one who has received a blow.

“Has madame seen the letter brought by Maitre Siccand?” asked Marie, meanwhile, as she set a dish upon the table.

“No, why do you ask P” Gonda’s tone was one of slight displeasure.

Marie shrugged.“I asked for the sake of asking, pardon if I was too curiousbut this was said defiantly, in anything but a penitent manner.

A few moments after, Gonda, from the window at the far end of the fapade, called to her husband. Folding the letter, he put it into his pocket as he answered her, and went into the house.

“I was obliged to call you,” said Gonda, laughingly.“Marie is all at once so strange and fierce that I feared she might eat me if you did not come in to eat your supper.”

He only passed through the room saying,“I will be with you in a moment but the glance she had had was enough for Gonda. Two pair of eyes noted a change in Monsieur de Triancourt as he sat at supper—one pair soft and wistful, the other keen and inquiring, almost hostile.

“Madame is all pale this evening!” commented Marie, as she waited.“She is much too fatigued, and monsieur is as grave as if something had happened.”

“What should have happened, Marie? I am afraid you are right, and that your mistress is tired, too tired. She says that she got tired yesterday at Rosantjon. To-morrow she must have a day of rest, and you must keep good guard over her.”

A strange excitement flamed up suddenly in Marie’s eyes.“You leave madame tomorrow?” she questioned, and glanced at Gonda, who said nothing, and kept her eyes on her plate, but whose colour changed.

“Probably, for some hours.”

“Tant pis!” muttered Marie: she retreated from the room, and a crash of crockery was heard below a few moments afterwards.

Choosing a comparatively valueless dish—thrifty and conscientious even in her rage—

Marie had dashed it on the tiles of the vestibule. The crash sobered her: when she came up again she was much as usual in manner, but very yellow in face.

“You leave me at home to-morrow and go out alone?” asked Gonda, when Marie was finally gone. Before she went she had found an opportunity of saying to her mistress, unheard by her master,“ Get monsieur to show you the letter Maitre Siccand brought, I entreat you, madame!” and she had received such a look of astonishment and anger that she had hastily retreated.

“I find that I must go to Rougemont.”

“May I not go, too? I have often looked at it from a distance, and thought I should like to go to it. The little town looks so comfortable, seated on the very crest of the round, olive-covered hill. May I not go with you?”

“No, love. Firstly, because the expedition will be too fatiguing for you to-morrow. I have over-tired you to-day; and yesterday, that excursion to Rosançon tired you, you confessed. Secondly, my business there is such that, till I know more, I cannot have my wife, in any way, mixed up with it.”

“Something has disturbed my lord,” said Gonda, after a little pause: she had come behind her husband as he sat, and, pressing his head against her breast, was, with her soft and loving hands, trying to smooth the lines from his brow, now and again letting her lips aid her hands.

“Yes, my darling, something in the letter I read after you came in has deeply disturbed me.”

She went on with her mute caresses and asked no question.

After a pause, he asked,“Would you be better satisfied, my wife, if I showed you die letter, and told you all I know or suspect about a painful subject?”

“You would rather not speak of it?” she said, letting him draw her to his side and looking into his face.

“I had rather not speak of it to-night: tomorrow, after I have been to Rougemont, all may be innocently clear to me. I may have nothing painful to tell you; nay, perhaps, even something so deeply joyful that I hardly dare believe joy is to be so added to joy and happiness to happiness.”

“I had rather not hear what you would rather not speak, then,” she said, and nestled her head down upon his breast; yet by-and-by he became aware that she was softly sobbing.

“My darling wife, my own dear child! What is it? You are pained that I keep anything from you, even for a few hours?”

“No, no, no!” she said,“it is not that. I am only childish, and altogether unreasonable; not distrustful—oh, husband, not distrustful! If before you were so absolutely mine I felt that I could utterly trust your judgment, honour, love, all, in all ways, against all the world, in spite of anything, what sort of wife must I be if I could feel less than this now?”

“What are the tears for, then, my sweet?”

“I don’t quite know, husband; there is a pain at my heart because you are pained, and there seems a weight upon my spirits, to-night; and then, too, I believe that, after all my wise talking just now, I cannot bear to think that to-morrow I shall lose you for some hours. Then I am tired, and, like a spoiled child, let myself cry for the sake of being petted. So you see I will give you plenty of reasons for being unreasonable.”

She was smiling now; but for all that the. tears kept gathering and falling; he sealed the wet wistful eyes with kisses; he pressed the winsome face against his heart. He whispered something in the little pearly ear that quickly brought warmth and colour to her cheek—those rich carnation flushes, at the beauty of which he was beginning to be not altogether glad.

By-and-by, Marie, coming up according to nightly custom to know before she went to bed if anything further were needed, recommended madame to retire early after her long day.

“A long day to-day!” said Gonda.“No, no, no, Marie. The long day for me will be to-morrow!”

“Yes, this will be a long day,” sighed Gonda, almost as if there still echoed in her mind the last words spoken to Marie the night before. She had risen very early, and now, softly, not to wake Marie, for she wished to have all the pleasant trouble herself (indeed she often wished that always she herself could do everything that was done for him), she stole down the stairs and into the kitchen to make coffee for her husband. She had left him sleeping, and knew that all night he had slept but little.

Throwing back the shutters of one of the windows to let in some light, she was unpleasantly startled to find herself face to face with Maitre Siccand. It was with difficulty that she concealed the more than usual loathing with which his evil face that morning filled her, and returned his salutation.

“Pardon, madame,” he said, with doffed cap,“I looked to see the cuisiniete. I come to demand, before I go, if she needs wood.”

“Marie is not yet up; when she needs wood she knows where to find it.”

“True; but one likes to render a last service to a good neighbor.”

“As I said, she is not yet up: you need not wait.”

“Monsieur journeys to-day, is it not so? And madame, the good wife, descends to prepare his breakfast.—Bon.”

The grin that stretched the frightful mouth as he said .this made the old man horrible to look upon. How did he know that her husband was going away anywhere to-day? Gonda wondered.

“Madame is aware that the old bonhomme, the honest Maitre Siccand, is dismissed? chased away?” he asked.“Madame wills that he should go?”

“My husband has spoken and is to be obeyed,” Gonda answered.“He does not dismiss you without reason. He has been very patient with you.”

“Oh, the good wife! Pity she has not a better husband.” Again that ugly grin, and the words spoken in so jeering a tone, that Gonda left the kitchen till he should have gone away from the window: which he did then, pretty quickly, probably imagining she had gone to complain of him to Monsieur de Triancourt.

“I will not tell Henri of this”—mused Gonda, as she waited in the kitchen for the water and the milk to boil, standing before the charcoal heated red-tiled range (such a range as a French lady-cook has declared any lady may cook a dinner by and not soil her skirt, or heat her face, or scorch her hands);“I will not tell Henri, it would so much annoy him; and it cannot happen again, as

Maitre Siccand really is going away now at last.”

Having settled this with herself, this fond woman standing in the great kitchen, her hands folded, and her eyes fixed upon the fire, her fair hair loosely drooping, and her pale blue morning gown, hanging in careless, graceful folds to the floor, began to meditate, not exactly upon the philosophy of language, but something like it, thinking of the inadequacy and imperfection of all language in which that pronoun“he” was made to stand both for“Henri, my husband,” and for such a creature as Maitre Siccand!

“Only five o’clock now. Oh this will be a long day!” said Gonda, by-and-by. She was resting against the side of that old red fauteuil in which she had made her husband sit and be served with his breakfast; one arm twined round his neck, she twisted her fingers in his hair; sometimes, to please him, she drank out of his cup or ate a morsel from his plate.

“Wifie, if you are very good, and rest well to-day—by-the-by, my darling, I should like you not to go out of sight of the house unless Marie or Madame Vauprez, if she should come up to-day, is with you. Will you remember?”

“Yes, husband, T will remember. Madame Vauprez will not come up to-day; have you forgotten that the good doctor told us he and madame proposed to start to-day on a little holiday journey? Now what were you going to promise me?”

“That to-morrow—”

“Why do you pause? I am growing impatient.”

“That to-morrow I will take you to Fairyland.”

“Is Fairy-land fairer than Paradise, husband? I should think not. And there I always am when I am with you. ‘Je vois en toi le paradis pur,’ as Vincent says to Mireille. But, tell me, where then is your fairy-land?”

‘‘It is a tiny bay just this side of that rugged, jagged-looking Cape Sainte Gudule, la petite—over which my. road lies to-day. It is the fairest and flowerest little nook in the world! All the rocks that run down to it are smothered in blossoms, poking out a sharp point just here and there; and when I saw it the sunny blue water was running up to the very feet of the flowers that bedded the shore.”

“I should like to see the pretty bay: but what about that rugged cape; is there a good safe path over it, husband?”

“A perfectly good and safe path, be assured.”

“Monsieur mon mari is so pre-occupied that he does not hear all his wife’s chatter!” she said to him presently.“Oh, my love—my love,” she added, most tenderly, and laying her cheek against his,“it is hard to have you pre-occupied by pain.”

“My darling, I feel hopeful this morning! I can even hope to have nothing but a pleasant story to tell you when I come home this evening. Then I shall feel it worth while to have waited.”

“If only I could pluck out your present pain—could pluck it up by the root and plant it in my heart! It would be no more pain, borne for you; but it would bear pleasant flowers. Does it not seem to you strange that such things can’t be? That we cannot take away the sorrows of those we love, and suffer them for them? Don’t you think, husband, that if in this bit of our lives we learn to love close and well, in another stage such things will he possible? Don’t you think so, husband?”

He turned and clasped her to him; he held her long and close: and then he looked deep down into her eyes. She met the gaze gladly, she felt her heart all loyal in its trust and in its love, and she rejoiced that he should read it.

He looked long, till his own eyes clouded: then he blessed her, in words too fervent and too sacred to be written—save in the heart. Save in the heart. And they were written in her heart, and all that day and for many a day they said themselves over and over. And they proved an ever fresh-springing fountain—of blessedness beyond that of this world—of peace passing this world’s understanding—of hope unfailing, that would have remained unshaken had the foundations of this world tottered to their fall.

Soon afterwards he left the house to start on his long walk. His first act was to go to Maitre Siccand’s cottage. The aspect of things there assured him that the old man, bag and baggage, was really gone. Leaning out of the window over the white-blossomed orange-orchard, leaning into the splendid brightness and the glorious fragrance of the June morning, Honda looked down upon her husband as he by-and-by paused beneath the window: her face, framed in her bright abundant hair, was little less radiant than the morning.

He paused before the fairest orange-tree to pick its fairest branch of blossom: then be threw it up to her at the window. She caught it to her breast, she clasped it there and kept it there: speaking, very low he called her all manner of loving lovely names: and, as she looked down on him, he felt the love of her soul shining on him through her eyes.

“Now go in, my own,” he said, at last.“Take your sweet face away, out of my sight, or I shall never get further on my needful journey. You root me here.”

She obeyed him, but not very quickly, not before he had seen a change come over the bright face; a pleading pain and pathos as she stretched out her hands involuntarily, before she knew it, and before she knew it had cried,“Love, must you go?”

A moment, and he was by her side again, to fold her to him again and once again. And she ^ clung passionately; flinging her arms about him she strained herself against him, crying—

“Oh, husband, how I love you! how I love-you! Oh love, love, love! I love you! I cannot lose you! You must not not leave me! I cannot, cannot let you go!”

Greatly pained, perplexed, and shaken, by this extreme and apparently causeless agitation, he was about to relinquish the thought of that day taking the journey, but, calming herself with a convulsive effort, looking up into his face with penitent self-reproach, she by-and-by urged him, as a sign that he forgave her“foolishness,” to leave her at once.

“It is a long, long way, and I want you home early,” she said.

She went down the stairs with him, to the house-door, along the terrace, and then she smiled into his face and turned from him quickly. She went back into the house, not pausing to look after him.

She would not go to the window till she knew that, by this time, he must be already a good way off. She felt very sad, penitent, and ashamed, because of that weakness which had so pained and grieved him.

When she did go to the window he was pausing; he had reached the crest of one of the olive-hoary slopes that enclosed his home-world, and was pausing to look back before descending the further side of the hill.

He was not yet so far- but that, with hand and handkerchief, they could signal to each other.

They did this: then she withdrew. When she looked again, he was not anywhere in sight.

She continued at the window now: the house within seemed sad and lonely; her heart was strangely oppressed. Without, there was the vital beauty of the growing glowing day to be in some sort a companion.

She heard the clock of Chantreuil strike six: Marie was late this morning for a market morning, she thought, and then, just at that moment, she heard her stirring.

“Monsieur is gone, then?” Marie said, looking in.

“Yes, Marie.”

“And cet vieux bon-homme also, at last. Dieu merci.”

“Do you know where Maitre Siccand has gone, Marie?”

“To his vile compares and comMéres at Chantreuil, for certain. And madame has promised him a pension!”

“We could not turn him out to starve.”

“The sooner he starves the better, I should say. But now, will madame have the complaisance to descend and lock the door after me? Already I shall be much too late at the market.”

Gonda had a moment’s hesitation at the thought of being left this morning two or three hours alone in the lonely house; not that she was afraid, but she thought her husband would, perhaps, nett have liked it.

But Marie this morning did not look a safe person to tamper with: and nothing ever so completely put her out as not being at the mid-week market; besides, if she did not go, •when Henri came home, tired and hungry, there would be little in the house for his supper; neither fish, meat, nor game.

Without any further hesitation Gonda followed Marie down the stairs: she stood at the door, and watched her go down the Cypress Avenue, her empty basket on her head, and her hat,“le petit chapeau a grandes ailles pour defendre des mortelles chaleurs,” which Mireille so fatally forgets in her flight from home, slung over her arm to he worn on her return, when she would be attended and her basket carried by a young berg&re. When Marie had passed out of sight, Gonda secured the lock, drew the bolts (that had been put on the door after the night when Maitre Siccand’s key had admitted the guest of the pretended Soeur Rosalie), and returned to the salon.

She diligently employed herself in one way and another, partly in study, and partly in housework, till nine o’clock—then she began to expect Marie. As she watched at the window for her return, she pondered what it could be that during the last day or two had so changed Marie’s manner towards her master, made it so capricious, at times so disrespectful and so sullenly resentful. She must question and reprove Marie, she thought, and this long day when Henri was away would be a fit day to do so; but it was a task she dreaded; much as she loved and respected Marie she was conscious of something violent and volcanic in her nature that, if roused, would make her dangerous. At length, hut not till a good deal later than usual, Marie and her attendant were in sight. Gonda sauntered down the tiled path between the Cypresses—even there the warm air was fragrant—to meet them.

“It will be terribly hot by noon to-day, I hope he will be resting in the shade by then” —were her first words to Marie.

Marie shrugged her shoulders with vehemence, and her eyes gleamed with something very like ferocity as she muttered that“he, trust him, would take good care of himself and do well enough !”

Gonda did not quite catch this answer, and did not wish to rebuke Marie before the bergére; she therefore took no notice of it—Mérely said—

“You have found it very warm already, you look very tired, dear Marie—sit down and rest, and let Bosina unpack your basket.” Marie, in fact, looked ill, haggard, and overdone, and as yellow as a lemon.“Laissez, —laissez, madame, laissez, moi faire!” She answered, fiercely; a fiery light glowed in her brown eyes, and she gnawed her underlip incessantly.

Gonda, fearing some unseemly outburst, and wishing it deferred till they two were alone, turned from Marie to Bosina, the bergére —a handsome Italian girl from the mountain-pastures on the further slopes of the Maritime Alps. Having set down her basket on the kitchen tiles, the girl was standing hand on hip surveying Gonda; in her short petticoat, and red-laced bodice, twin-cherries stuck coquettishly for ear-rings behind her ear, with her clear dark skin, fine features, and masses of black hair, she would, have made a good study for her painter-husband, Gonda thought.

But in the girl’s face this morning, Gonda found a new expression—one of half-malicious and half-compassionate curiosity. She blushed when Gonda spoke to her, answered bashfully, and took from under her apron (where she had held it to protect it from the sun), to offer as morning gift to madame, a bouquet of gay garden-flowers.

Gonda took it with a kind smile and a few words of praise and thanks: she slipped the double of her usual gratuity into the pocket of the girl’s smart apron, and then with a wondering glance at Marie, who in unpacking her basket was flinging its contents here and there in a random, reckless manner, she went away.

The girl cried to Marie—“So beautiful as she is! like a princess! it cannot be true what the people say!”

“Que le diable les emporte, les gens, the idle liars, and you also for your wide ears,” cried Marie.

“Scusa, Madama!” said the girl, quite frightened.“I only said it could not he true.”

“And one ‘only says’ and another‘only says’ till——may the good God have pity on us!”

And Marie, sitting down upon the floor, gave way to a hurst of hysterical crying; but only for a few moments; then she rose with a hard, darkened face, and began to put things in order.

CHAPTER IV

A LONG DAY—AFTERNOON.

Through all the morning Marie avoided her mistress: it was not till the afternoon that Gonda found the opportunity for which she had been watching with secret dread, of asking for an explanation of her strange behaviour.

She had called Marie up-stairs to give her directions about the evening meal: she told her to have it ready rather earlier than usual, and to be sure and have such dishes as her master liked very carefully prepared: Monsieur would be tired and hungry, she added:—while she spoke she was carefully arranging some early fruits among their leaves, in the valuable old china dishes, to the daily use of which Marie had consented reluctantly, scattering snowy orange-flowers over the ruby-red cherries. She had hardly finished speaking when Marie, tightly twisting her arms in her apron with a defiant air, broke out—

“Monsieur here, and monsieur there—this for monsieur, that for monsieur—this because monsieur likes it, not that because monsieur doesn’t like it. If monsieur were a blessed saint or a holy angel he could not be more considered. And who is this fine monsieur? And what is he? It puts me past my patience, knowing what I know—hearing what the people say, and what the people say will ever have some truth at bottom of it! If monsieur had died that night before he was brought to our door, probably the devil would have had his own, and—r—”

“Marie!” cried Gonda,“stop; before it is too late—before you speak what I can never forgive!”

At that tone, and the look accompanying it, Marie stopped and trembled: Gonda, too, was trembling, not with fear, however, she was past feeling fear, but with indignation and intense excitement.

“Marie,” she went on,“this must end. Such words as I have now heard from you I cannot hear a second time. Dear as you have been to me, you and I must part, Marie, or you must learn to treat my husband with submission, and to speak of him with respect.

“What ails you, Marie, the last day or two, are you ill, or mad?”

Standing very erect, her head thrown slightly back, Gonda looked steadfastly at Marie—who, yellow-cheeked, white-lipped, wild-eyed, was shaking visibly.

“Madame! if you knew the heart of poor Marie!” she began, passionately —“if you knew how the pain there is blackening all her blood, how the anger there is burning and consuming her—you would not wonder if always she cannot contain herself.”

Here she unwound her apron from her arms to throw it over her head.

“My poor Marie!” and Gonda took the woman’s hand and spoke tenderly, pulling the screen from before the convulsed face.

“Why do you keep a great trouble from me?” she asked.“Why have you not come to me for help; or, if help was not possible, for sympathy? Why do you let yourself grow bitter and black silently? But, above all, why should you wreak your anger on my husband? You may scold me, Marie: I give you leave,” she said, smilingly.“And you may break the dishes, if that helps you—even these strange old filings you are so proud of; but, Marie, I cannot, and I will not, suffer disrespect of my husband here she was grave again.“Marie, how can you bear to treat him as you have done several times during the last two or three days? How can you bear to speak of him as you spoke just now? How can you do it, Marie?—so kind, so good, as he always is to you— treating you like what you have been—my good and faithful friend.”

“Madame, you are an angel!”

“He is much nearer being one, Marie. But now, dear Marie, tell me about your trouble. Is anything the matter with your daughter or her lover? Have they quarrelled, or has any misfortune happened to them? Tell me, then.”

“Madame, my trouble is for you—my pain, my anger are for you. If I am learning to hate—yes to hate your husband, it is because he has injured you.”

Gonda dropped the woman’s hand, and, as with those eyes and that voice Marie repeated the word ‘hate,’ drew back from her. Then, sitting down, she fixed her beautiful and quiet eyes on that yellow face and said, with a cold dignity that pushed the person she addressed to an infinite distance—

“You have been hearing and believing some idle and foolish story. I will try and be patient with you while you tell me what it is.”

“May the good God grant that it is only that—only a foolish and idle story! hut—I deny, I defy, I rage, I scold, I call the people foul-mouthed, liars—but-”

“You may speak, Marie, this once. I have told you I will try and be patient. You may lighten your heart by telling me what it is the people say. When you have done .this, you must put all evil thoughts concerning my husband away from.you for ever, or we cannot continue under the same roof.”

“I will do what is possible; hut I fear to speak—I fear madame’s anger.”

“You have had my leave to speak. If you only repeat what you have heard and do not believe, why should my anger fall on you?”

“Bien, it is this, then, if madame will know it; it is this that the people say: they say that madame is no wife —that monsieur had already a wife before ever he pretended to marry madame, and that she is not dead, and that he keeps her now shut up in a small house in the forest near Rougemonfr. Did monsieur show you that letter last night? Non, je le crois bien! That was from her, his other wife: le Vieux coquin Maltre Siccand told me, so. You remember, madame, the day we were at Rosançon,—before your marriage, while monsieur feigned to be en voyage in Italy? That very day—oh, if it had pleased heaven that we should meet him!—he was there, at Rosançon, with his peasant wife, whom they say is lovely as an angel! He was seen of many—among others, by friends of mine—and they have sworn to me that the man they saw then and the man who, the day before yesterday ? was there with you, are, without possibility of doubt, the same.”

“Have you finished, Marie?”

Gonda’s voice was deep and calm; her face had flushed with the swift rich colour that dyed it when she was deeply moved; her eyes were very large and bright.

“Madame, I have finished; —is it not enough?”

“More than enough, Marie —.” Gonda paused, and seemed to struggle with herself.“I bade you speak, so I must try and not hate the lips that uttered such words.” She continued with evident effort, —“But, Marie, remember, I cannot bear about me a heart that harbours such vile abominable suspicions. Put them from you, Marie, or I must put you from me. I could have laughed at these idle stories had I not been so hurt for him: that any one who has known him as you have known him could give an instant’s credit to such calumny —Marie, I am deeply hurt!” Gonda repeated that—

“Marie, I am deeply hurt!”

Suddenly, Marie fell at her mistress’s feet; she kissed her hand and her dress; she clasped her knees, and burst into wild weeping; but Gonda only once more repeated,—“Deeply hurt!”

The afternoon was still and sultry, and all the windows were wide open. As the clock of Chantreuil struck four, each stroke seemed to be preceded as well as to be fol- lowed by perceptible vibrations of the heated air.

Marie might as well have wept at the feet of a statue as at Gonda’s feet: might as well have clasped the knees of a statue as Gonda’s knees.

By-and-by, alarmed by this silence —this absolute irresponsiveness,. Marie, drying her eyes, looked up into her mistress’s face.

The fair head, a little thrown back, leaned against the old red cushions of the fauteuil in which she had sat down to listen to Marie: her face was perfectly white and rigid; her blue eyes, wide open, were fixed and glassy; one hand convulsively clutched at her dress immediately above her heart 5 the other lay ‘just where Marie had dropped it.

She continued thus, for some time, deaf to all Marie’s entreaties that she would move or speak; deaf, blind, and, though open-eyed, senseless, though she had not fainted.

By-and-by, by slow degrees, she regained something of the colour and mobility of life; after a time she moved, looked, and listened.

Marie was imploring her pardon—overwhelming herself with a torrent of reproach.

Gonda spoke to assure her that it was nothing she had said or done had so affected her, and to hid her he comforted. She spoke, at first, feebly and slowly,’ yet when she added—

“But you will remember, Marie, for all the future, that I cannot suffer about me any one who wrongs my husband by word, or deed, or thought-—” Her tone grew animated.

“My husband,” she repeated to herself, and there spread over her face the light of an ineffable smile—such a smile as Marie, surprising on it once, had said to Monsieur de Triancout, made her mistress altogether resemble the pictures of Madame la Sainte Vierge.

“My husband,” she murmured,“whom there is none like—no not one. Who is in all himself what some men are in part—truth, good- ness, love. Why, Marie,” she added, more audibly,“if he said to me—he himself—that such things as you have told me of were true —if he said—My wife! you are not my wife; I have been weak, I have been wicked,

I have wronged you,’—I should not believe him! It would be so far easier to believe that he spoke wildly then, in those few words, —that he was dreaming, that he was mad, that any way he did not know what he said,—than to believe that with all his life, all himself, every look, every word, he has lied all the hours, days, weeks, months, that I have known and loved him.”

Marie caught something of Gonda’s enthusiasm, and, willing to make her peace, cried,

“And I, madame, I said, when they told me that if ever a man seemed like an angel it was monsieur, and that I would never again believe any man to be other than a demon if this were true of monsieur.”

Gonda had not removed that clutching hand from her side—

“I’ve had a blow, I’ve had a blow,” she repeated to herself, when Marie had left her, and passing into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her, she knelt down to pray. The pain did not pass—“I’ve had a blow,” she often repeated to herself.“Something is wrong with my heart —with him who is my heart.”

CHAPTER V

A LONG DAY—EVENING.

The hours dragged: the heavy afternoon hours. Gonda’s face did not recover its natural complexion or expression. The indoor atmosphere seemed oppressive; she took her work and went out-doors; she sat down on the terrace, where she had parted from her husband this morning, on a seat he had made for her there, commanding a view of which he was particularly fond: she was shaded from the westering sun by the last of the line of cypresses.

Its shadow grew longer, longer, longer: she sat facing the olive-covered slope on the crest of which she had seen her husband pause that morning, and having made one stitch in her work, she gazed the time of ten.

In the morning that slope had looked all grey coolness and dewy shadow, now it was ablaze.

Marie wandered in and out: now hovering over her saucepans and pipkins in the kitchen, now, taking her stand behind her mistress, she too would gaze towards the wonderful evening hill that gained a deeper and a richer glory as they gazed.

“Madame is cold—cold as marble,” said Marie, by-and-by, touching one of Gonda’s lifeless-looking hands: the blood seemed to stagnate about her heart, instead of flowing freely in its proper channels.“Come in, now,” continued Marie, coaxingly;“the sun touches upon setting, the dew commences to fall, even in June is the evening cool when the hour of shadow comes.”

“Cool, Marie, it is all a sea of balmy warmth! the dew will not fall for a good while yet. The sun is not really near upon setting, but we lie under the hill, you see, that brings the evening down upon us early. If I am cold it is only that I have sat still so long in this black shadow. I will walk to and fro till he comes. First I will go in, just for a moment, to smooth my hair and to see how well you have set the table; to see if the fruit and the flowers look fresh, and everything is as pretty as possible. He will be heated and weary, Marie,” she went on, as she folded her work together;“ and we will have everything looking cool and fresh and restful. This is a dull, ruinous old house for one like him to live in: we must both of us always do all we can to make it as comfortable as possible, you know, Marie. He ought to have everything about him bright and beautiful, and everybody about him good and Roving and tender.”

So saying, she went in, bidding Marie stand and watch till she returned, and call to her if he should come in sight before she came back. As she went up the stairs her hand involuntarily went to her heart again. Again she said,“I’ve had a blow; I’m wounded. Something is wrong with my heart.” She added passionately,“Oh, husband, husband! come back, come back! return to me quickly! take me to you! hold me and heal me! I am grievously hurt, you only can heal me. God will let you heal me!”

Saying that, she passed into the inner room, and again fell on her knees by the bedside.

“Do you see him yet, Marie? Do you see him yet?” she cried, as soon as she was outside the house door.

“Not yet, madame, not yet.”

No; the hill-side was all solitary, flaming now in the last sunshine.

Gonda put her hand on Marie’s arm and paced slowly up and down the terrace at the east end of the house, using Marie’s eyes to guide her feet, for she did not take her own off that rosy-flushed eastern hill.

“It is strange,” she said softly, and a mist gathered over her lovely eyes, so“that they seemed to take the veiled violet hue of the morning and evening sea in that far-away fair bay on which she so often looked.“It seems to me strange that any one should ever wish to die before the person they love and are loved by most of all—that any loving wife should wish to die before the husband who loves her, rather than he left alone. This seems to me so strange. Yet I have read of wives who have even prayed for this. It seems to me that this is to pray to be spared pain at the cost of those we love. I do not see how a woman who could pray thus can really love her husband as herself or better. And yet, again, I could not pray to God to take him first, my husband, because I know how he would suffer that I was left alone to suffer. How difficult it is to know what is best! How happy it is that we do not need to know what is best—knowing that God knows. To die together—that must be happy, happy, happy! Perhaps, possibly,

God grants that transcendent bliss to those who love very greatly, very closely, who with all their power desire it. But, truly, we must strive not to desire anything but just His will. Just blindly, Mérely and absolutely to submit to His will—taking death or life as He shall send them.”

“What says madame?” broke in Marie.“Death! What is madame saying? Madame who is young and healthy and strong, why does she speak of dying?”

“Why not, Marie? Death is not a dread-fid thing.”

Before long Marie again urged Gonda to go in-doors.

The sUn had now set some time: the olive-covered hill towards which they looked held its little paths hidden in shadow. It had taken first a sickly wanness, and then a livid ‘pallor; its outline seemed to be fading into the pallid sky. It no longer looked substantial and material; but so short a time ago glowing and glorious, it was now a place of shadows, of dimness, of ghostliness, and of mystery.

“He would not like me to be out so late; I will go in now: I can watch from the window,” Gonda said.“When he is away, to take care of myself is the only way I have of taking care of him.”

The west was one deep broad glow of orange light: above the tree-tops one fiery star trembled to its setting. But Marie pushed the old red fauteuil to the eastern window; it was there that Gonda sat down to listen.

To listen for her husband’s footfall, which, late, would come at last.

The whole air was now vibrating with the peculiar metallic-sounding creak, and chirp, and croak, and whirr of the tree-frogs,“singing” against the land-frogs. When Gonda began .to listen this noise troubled her; she felt it to he distracting, almost intolerable: hut after a time it either ceased, or she ceased to hear it.

Twilight was gone. Such night as there would be, moonless but not dark, calm, big-starred, and odorous, was fully come.

Gonda sat with folded hands, absorbed, self-concentrated.

Marie went to and fro, up and down, now out into the night, now back into the house, wringing her thin hands, gnawing her white lips, crying half under her breath—“Ah! que de malheur! que de malheur!”

Gonda paid her no heed, save once: Marie tried to close the window near which her mistress sat, afraid of the night air. Then Gonda roused herself to say,“No, Marie, I will not have it shut! I will not have him shut out!”

When Marie fetched a shawl and wrapped round her mistress, Gonda, sitting passive, let her do it, hut the shawl soon slipped off unheeded: she did not stir a hand to replace it. Later in the night Marie got Monsieur le Triancourt’s fur-lined travelling cloak and laid about her pale mistress: Gonda gathered this close and held it firm.

When the dawn came, Marie, sitting on a stool at Gonda’s feet, wearied with work and watching, had fallen into a profound sleep: her head rested against Gonda’s knees; Gonda had thrown the neglected shawl over her.

So the red flame of the morning, striking upon Marie’s closed eyes and Gonda’s wide and watching, found them.

It was Gonda’s voice that roused Marie: bidding her wake now that the night of pain and peril was past.

“Monsieur is then arrived during the time that I slept?” asked Marie, rubbing her eyes, stretching, and looking into Gonda’s face amazedly.

“Not yet, not yet, Marie; but now it is fully light he will find the path he had lost. He will be here, by-and-by; we must be patient, we must be patient.”

“We shall have a terrible storm before tomorrow night comes,” said Marie, by-and-by, as she looked at the fiery sunrise.

BOOK V

DEATH IN LIFE.

CHAPTER I

MÈRE Vichétte.

“Pleurez, pleurez, madame!” entreated Marie, coming to her mistress’s side, plucking at her mistress’s sleeve.

Marie had stood watching Gonda, as Gonda towards another evening still watched the hill-side, till, no longer able to contain herself, she broke into this passionate entreaty and into passionate crying.

Neither the words, nor the weeping, nor the clutching of her dress seemed to reach Gonda: as she had been watching she continued to watch.

The red sunrise of the morning had fulfilled its threat: a furious summer squall had blown that day and just died out. The hay when, at intervals, as the sheets of rain were drawn aside, it had been visible, had been white with foam: the olives, too, on hill and plain had looked as if lashed into foam by the fury of the wind. But now the evening was falling with tender and penitent serenity—a few clouds in the sky still, a few sobs yet in the air: the snowy blossoms and unripe fruit of the orange-trees scattering the ground, and trailing vine-branches beaten down amidst the prostrate wheat, testified to what had been. But all nature was full of promise that the passion of the time was past.

“Why should I weep? What cause have I for weeping?” asked Gonda, when at length Marie had roused her. Her voice was strangely still and even, hardly seeming to stir the air of the room, sounding unfamiliar to herself, and each word penetrating to

Marie’s heart (as she said afterwards) with a sharp stab of cold pain.

“People weep for little griefs,” she went on;“but I, either I have no cause for grief, but only a little need for patience, or my grief is too great, too wide for tears: a grief too great for me to hold and live, too wide to leave room in me for life.”

“Ah, que de malheur! Que de malheur!”“I have waited in the house to-day, I have been patient,” Gronda went on.“So easily something he could not help might have happened to detain him; he did not wish to have me with him, so I have waited. But tomorrow, if, when the sun rises to-morrow still he is not come, I shall follow him. I shall go to Rougemont the way he went; I shall search the road for signs of him; I shall question the people for news of him. Marie, it was hot yesterday—you yourself said it was terribly hot yesterday. His head is weak still, sometimes, from the injury done by that cruel blow, and the fierce light and sunshine try him. Suppose, Marie, he is lying ill somewhere. Suppose, Marie, that voice”—here she paused a moment as if listening to it, or as if listening for it—“suppose that voice, which went to the core of my heart, the marrow of my being long ago, even when it was the voice of a stranger and called me by a name that was not my own, is calling now for the wife who does not come. And those eyes are seeking and watching for the wife who does not come. Marie!” she cried, and her unnatural quiet changed to passionate agitation,“I will start now, to-night, at once, while there is still light.”

“Still light! What light there is will be gone before you are up there among the olives. You will lose yourself, and kill yourself, and not find monsieur. Suppose, meanwhile, monsieur comes. What would he say to such rash folly?”

Marie, speaking, had gripped her mistress round the waist. She went on,“To-night you shall not go. Neither night nor day can you go the way he went. You could not walk it, there and back, and the ways are too rough and narrow even for a mule. You shall not go that way. Am not I answerable to monsieur for your safety? I will not see you kill yourself!”

“Hush, Marie! be quiet and reasonable. Am I not quite calm? Am I not your mistress? Am I not his wife? Listen now, I tell you. The storm is quite past—see how the west has cleared! You shall go, now, to Chantreuil. Do not look frightened; I give you my word not to leave the house while you are away. You shall go to Chantreuil and tell that man we have had before, to he here with his carriage in the morning at the earliest hour that it is light—two, three, I know not. We will then, you and I, go to Rougemont by the road: afterwards I will return, either by the same way, or step by step the way he went, as I shall then see fit. Remember, Marie, I am mistress.”

Marie submitted: as she went her way she meditated.“The sooner she knows the truth the better,” she thought.“For then grief will not kill her. If the thing I believe is true, grief will turn to hate, and hate does net kill the hater. Yet I doubt if, to such as her, death is not better than a shamed’ life. Oh, if only that good doctor and his wife were not away!” Her meditations ended in imprecations on the man whom she now looked upon, though she dared not in her mistress’s hearing say a word against him, as that mistress’s shameless, heartless, infamous betrayer.

The first few hours of that night Gronda rested in her bed, to gain strength for the morrow’s journey. She even had some snatches of sleep, but her dreams were so terrible, so wicked, she called them, so much worse than her waking thoughts—because they wronged her husband, her own faith in him, all that she held most sacred—that, soon after midnight, she rose and dressed, and sat at her window waiting, through an hour or two of the soft perfumed dusk, for the dawn.

It was still early in the day when Gonda and Marie came in sight of Rougemont, approaching it from the opposite side to that at which ended the track Monsieur de Triancourt had taken two days before. Leaving the carriage at the foot of the hill, under the shade of the olives, they ascended the steep road that, by-and-by, became a street; a street of many-storied, overhanging houses, that seemed to threaten to fall forward one upon another, to crush the passer-by, and block up the narrow way; a street so narrow that if any vehicle traversed it the foot-passenger must range up close against the wall to avoid contact with its wheels; a street unspeakably gloomy, chill, and evil-smelling; but, here and there, offering between gaps in the houses—from which little paths wound down among fruitful orange and lemon orchards —glorious mountain views with glimpses of the Mediterranean.

Marie led Gonda through the whole length of the village to where the road divided, running in one direction—now up, now down —towards alpine pastures; in the other, degenerating to a Mére track, which descended the hill, crossed a wide ravine and the broad bed of a stream, then, ascending, wound round the lower shoulder of a mountain to dip down again, again ascend, and run across the rugged brow of Cape Sainte Gudule la Petite, behind which, though with a wide tract between and a lesser rise and fall, lay Les Cypres and Chantreuil.

Marie’s destination was the cottage of an old acquaintance, whom she designated“une brave femme aussi sotte que bonne,” from whom, she assured Gonda, she did not doubt but that she could gain intelligenpe of monsieur, if anywhere in Rougemont it was to be had.

“La voilk la bonne Mére Vichétte. N’est ce pas qu’elle est bien portante?” she said, pointing out to Gonda, as they came close upon the last habitation in the place, a woman of enormous stoutness, who stood panting in her doorway and looking towards them.

“Let madame rest, here,” said Marie, leading Gonda to the root of a great tree that stood a little back from the road—“Let Marie go in first, alone.”

Gonda sat down silently: just then the heavy beating of her heart made speech impossible.

She sat there for perhaps ten minutes; then she rose and crossed the road to the threshold, into the comparative darkness beyond which both Marie and la Mére Vichétte had disappeared.

The two women, their backs turned to the door, were talking eagerly, both at the same time, one against the other, and neither of them saw Gonda. But a small urchin who stood and listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, seeing her come in, plucked at the skirts of the stout woman’s gown: thereupon she turned to scold him, and Marie, too, turned, and then they both faced Gonda.

Marie’s hand was clenched, her face was yellow, and her lips were white; her brown eyes seemed to be on fire; she had just launched into a torrent of denunciatory invective.

Her excitement was far too great to be subdued by her mistress’s presence now; she turned upon her fiercely, as if she were the sinner rather than the sufferer, and cried,“I have begged you to weep! Now I say you are the poorest-spirited of women if you-shed a tear. Curse him, as I curse him! lift your hands and your eyes to heaven and pray its curse upon him, l’inf^me, l’ingrat! It is true, all true, that the people said—that and more. Curse him, I say, curse him’-”

Gonda lifted her hand, indeed, imperatively, signing Marie to silence: she could not at once speak, but her eyes darted dangerous lightning.

Mére Vichétte, panting at the Mére sound of Marie’s vehemence, approached Gonda, bringing her a chair.

“It is not possible,” she gasped out at intervals, as she stood before Gonda.“There is some mistake! Madame Lanza had always so much fire, so much force! It is not possible! Not possible that one so young, so handsome, so amiable as that monsieur should be so wicked. Not possible that such a lady as madame should be treated so. Nothing of all this is possible. What is not possible cannot be true. It must be all one great mistake.”

“What is all this, Marie?” Gonda asked.“Does this good woman know anything of my husband? Did she see him pass? Did he reach Rougemont in safety.”

Marie not immediately answering, Gonda turned to Mére Vichétte and questioned her.

She panted harder, and looked at her friend Madame Lanza, as she called Marie whose husband had been an Italian, with the helpless expression of some over-fat animal which desires, or finds itself expected, to pass through an aperture too narrow for it.

“Speak, my woman!” cried Marie.“Tell to madame all you have told me. Madame perhaps will hear you and not dart you through with her angry looks. Tell her all. It will be no kindness to spare her. Speak!”

“Have you no pity?” said the kind, fat creature.“Good Madame Lanza, yours must be one great mistake. With a wife so young and so beautiful as madame, what should a gentleman want with a peasant-girl?”

“But,” cried Marie, shrilly,“if the gentle- . man had first the peasant-girl and then desired the lady, how then, my good woman?”

“Marie, I command your silence.” Those words were spoken in a tone Marie dared not disobey. Then turning to the perplexed old Mére Vichéte, Gonda said:“My good woman, speak—tell me all you have to tell. Do not be afraid to tell me everything that you know to be true. Pay no heed to anything you have heard from Marie—from Madame Lanza.

Some accident has happened to my husband, and I am seeking to learn what it is and where it detains him. Have you seen him? That is to say, have you seen any stranger here? And if so what was he like?”

“I will tell madame, nettement et bonnement, in few words, all that I know. It was about noon the day before yesterday, that is to say the first of June—will madame excuse my sitting? I am short of breath—about noon, that is to say, by my clock; but my good neighbour, Jeanne-Marie—Madame Lanza knew the husband of Jeanne-Marie, by name Veran, when he was but a boy—well, my neighbour, Jeanne-Marie, I think it was her, or, now I reflect, was it not her sister-in-law, Marritte, who married, naturally, Jeanne-Marie’s Véran’s brother?—it was one of those two, which of them certainly cannot matter to madame, coming into my house to ask me a little about the picking of her orange-flowers, if I would help her in preparing her l’eau de fleurs d’orange, mine being counted of the first quality—good Madame Lanza, I shall never get on if you flurry me. I have forgotten, oh! about the clock, I was going to say that either Jeanne-Marie or her belle-soeur Marritte, declared my clock was too fast, while Maitre Isoard, who cares for it, maintained it was if anything too slow—mais non, it was, I think, the other way—it was, I think, Maitre Isoard who maintained it was fast; mais, enfin, between them I got puzzled, and therefore cannot now tell madame if it was noon a little past or a little wanting—”

“I made her speak otherwise!” cried Marie.“I pricked her and spurred her with questions, the slow, fat creature!”

“Madame Lanza, now Madame Lanza!” cried Mére Vichétte, in a pathetically appealing, almost tearful voice—“Is that like an old friend? Is that neighbourly? Is that charitable? Is that Christian? to reproach a poor woman with her misfortune? A little fat I may be; but, if it had been the will of le bon Dieu, and if your temper had been like mine, of the quietest, who knows but you yourself, instead of being like a dried-up gourd---”

“A dried-up gourd!” screamed Marie;“and my temper-”

Gonda interposed.“Marie, go outside till she has told me what she has to tell, and you, my good woman, speak plainly and quickly.” Then helping M£re Vichétte to continue her narrative, she said,“About noon the day before yesterday—”

“Justement! madame tells it as if it had been she herself to whom it had all happened, not that there was much happened; indeed I fear to disappoint madame by having so little to tell: what there is to tell I will tell in few words. About noon that day, but because they had perplexed me about my clock, I cannot say whether it was wanting a little of. noon, or was a little past noon—I am easily perplexed, and am sometimes so that if you ask me suddenly where is my head and where my feet, it is most probable I should tell you that my head is on my shoulders, and my feet—no, I would say that my feet are on my shoulders and my head in my shoes, not that it could be in both shoes—though I may be stupid I—yes, yes, madame, I am coming to it. I’ve got to my feet, you see, and I was going to say that I was standing —here she began to shake her fat sides with laughing, but suddenly recollected herself and composed her face—“at my door-porch, as I was standing to-day when madame and good Madame Lanza came in sight, for being now a little aged, having brought up all my children—le petit there, Pierre, is, as doubtless madame has guessed from his age, not my son, but my grandson—having, too, a little sum of money saved, and this cottage and the orchard—a good orchard and fruitful—for my own, I have no need to work, which, perhaps, after all is something of a misfortune, for perhaps if I had needed to work I should not have fattened so-”

“What happened when you were standing at your door?” questioned Gonda, with a tone of heartsick weariness, when Mére Vichétte paused for breath: she was schooling herself to patience in the hope that by letting the course of narrative flow freely, she might glean something that had not been learnt from the answers, whatever they had been, to Marie’s prejudging questions.

“What happened when I was standing at my door? Why it was just that I was about to tell madame. It is not much I have to tell, but what I have I will, as I said, tell to madame in few words, nettement et bonne-ment. Allez! je ne suis pas bavardeuse! I remember I was about to tell madame that a gentleman came to me as I stood. Poor young sir! was he not hot and weary?—it made the sweat start out on me and my heart burn in me to see him. He was not of this country, but he talked well. What was he like? He was brown, he was handsome, he had much dark hair, rather long. I thought it must help to make him hot, for it was all matted over his brow with the sweat he was in! When he lifted his hat—before speaking to me he lifted his hat with a grand air, as if, instead of Mére Vichétte, I had been some great lady! —when he lifted his hat, he pushed his hair back with his hand—he wiped his face with a white handkerchief, very fine, that had letters worked in the comer: his hand was white, and on one finger was a ring—a pretty large diamond held between golden hands; a fine diamond, too, for I am something of a judge, my father’s sister’s husband having been apprenticed to a jeweler. My eyes are good for my age, as you see, madame: in truth all our family—all the Vichéttes that is to say, I was a Vichétte always, both maid and wife—have been notable for their good sight when a little advanced in years. He had a very pleasant smile, that monsieur: his teeth were very white and his eyes were—now, what colour were his eyes? Ah! when I was younger I should have known the colour of eyes that looked at me as his did.

I remember once when I was a girl, and I was not ill-looking as a girl, and was slender as a palm-tree—coming back from the fountain I met a grand gentleman from the chateau, who spoke to me and smiled at me, and I did not forget the colour of his eyes, or the look in them for many a day.”

‘“Speaking to you, what did this gentleman, the gentleman you were describing, ask you ?”

“He asked me where I lived, how old I was, and what was my name; and he told me that I was the prettiest girl he had seen for many a day; and he promised me a ring off his finger if I would meet him that evening in the wood and not tell my mother. But—”

“Oh, my ‘good woman, to-day I cannot listen to long stories about what happened long ago. It is of the gentleman who spoke to you at your doorway two days ago that I want to hear. What did he ask you?”

“He asked me—but, madame, I had not finished describing him. He was tall rather than short, and slight, very slight; and, what Madame Lanza seemed to think important, I have not yet named to madame, that when he pushed back his hair from his forehead, he showed a scar upon one temple—which? Let me see—I standing here, he there,—no, there, just opposite, it was, to my left hand; I would say opposite my left hand.”

“You have described him enough: it was my husband—now what did he ask you?”

“He asked me, but he asked it as if it were asking the greatest favour—he asked me to tell him the nearest way to a little maison de campaign that lies in the wood behind the town —a little house that we and others have always for many years called Le Colombier—long before anyone who lives there now lived in it, we called it- Le Colombier, because—but I forget, that is no story for madame, and madame wants no stories of what happened long ago. Pardon, madame, if a moment I call in Madame Lanza—I have an idea.”

She called, and Marie came.

“I would ask you this, good Madame Lanza,” and her fat-embedded eyes twinkled with good-nature and conscious sagacity as she leant forward, fat hands brought suddenly down on fat knees with an energy that made the fat cheeks tremble, and looked at Marie —“if this gentleman, who, no doubt, was madame’s husband, and the other, who has the pretty wife at Le Colombier, were, as you think, the same, why should this one, if he is the other one, ask the way to a place that he must know better than the other one: no, I mean as well as the other one: not that there is any other one if they two different ones are the same?”

“All the little sense she ever had is smothered up in fat, now!” cried Marie, in a very audible aside, to add with withering contempt,“You told me he asked the nearest way through the forest. Now through the forest there is no regular way. He might well not know the short cut through the forest, and might know the road the other way as well as could be: he has not been used to go from Les Cyprus there. He did not run from one wife to the other constantly.” The last words hardly audible for fear of her mistress.

The woman’s brief exultation died down to dejected conviction of Madame Lanza’s terrible sharpness.

“Plus sotte que bonne,” muttered Marie, as, at an imperious sign from Gonda, she went out-doors again, to resume her interrupted occupation of spitefully barking a young fig-tree, operating upon it much as a cat might do in sharpening its claws.

“My husband asked you the way to the house you speak of?“Well, what more?” questioned Gonda.

“It is what follows that is strange,” resumed M£re Vichétte, after a pause—she was in dashed spirits now and less garrulous.“My little grandson, Pierre, cet petit meehant, was standing by me as he stands now, and when the gentleman asked the way he began to laugh. I gave him a good knock, to teach him manners: he would have got another and a harder blow, for I was angry that he should show himself so loutish before the gentleman: my daughter spoils him rather, I am afraid: Madelon was always so tender-hearted. In that she takes after me, her mother, and in truth my children all turned out well—at least they would have done only they died, and if one may believe the pastor that is turning out well; so I don’t see why I need blame Made-Ion; she is my only child, my only living child, and I had ten.” Here the fat hand tried to dry the moistened eyes, hut hardly reached them in their hollows.“As I was saying, the boy would have got another blow, and a harder, but the gentleman drew him quickly from under my hand, and asked him why he laughed. It was some time before Pierre would answer, for he had turned sullen —he does when he is beaten—but presently he looked up into the gentleman’s face with his big eyes and said, ‘Mais monsieur, better than the old grandmother, must know the way!’ On that the gentleman laid his hand on the boy’s head. When I saw him do so I wished I had washed it that morning as I had had the intention to do. Laying his hand on the boy’s head kindly, looking as gentle and holy as our good monsieur le cure, but rather grave and troubled, he asked Pierre,

‘And do you think, my boy, that you have seen me before? For whom do you take me?’ Pierre spoke up ready enough now, telling him certainly he had seen him before, many a time, and that he knew him to be the gentleman who lived at Le Colombier. Pierre does not live with me always, madame must know; my daughter sends him to me, now and again, when she is very busy, or when she is going to Rosançon on errands for madame (by madame I mean the pretty lady at Le Colombier), and does not desire to leave the lad alone, or that he should be out all day with his father: my daughter and her husband live in a very little house close by Le Colombier: my daughter does the housework there, and her husband does what is needed round about. Bien, the gentleman, when Pierre said that, smiled, but with a grave look on his face, and said something I did not understand—”

“As if I should not know that monsieur,” broke in Pierre,“a gentleman who has given me—let me see! four half-franc pieces and two whole, six sous, and-”

Here he was interrupted by a blow from the grandmother’s hand, and an admonition to be silent when not spoken to.

“Well, madame, I was about to tell that having smiled in that way, and said, as if to himself, something I did not understand, the gentleman said aloud, ‘Whatever your grandson may think about my knowledge of the road, I should be’ glad of a guide to show me the way to Le Colombier—the nearest way, which, I believe, is through the forest. I am pressed for time, and should be sorry to lose myself. Since the little fellow seems to know the place, will you let him guide me?’ I couldn’t say No, but I was loth to lose sight of the boy, who is a boy even more than other boys prone to mischief: so spite of the heat and my stoutness, I took the boy by the hand and told the gentleman we would both set him so far on his way that he should not be able to lose himself. He made me many compliments, regretting to derange me. The way was a rough one, down and then up and along the vineyard walls, and he helped me up and down the walls, and then, in the forest, across the trunks of the trees that had been felled, giving me his hand as if I had been a lady, and young and beautiful, never so much an smiling at my puffiness and awkwardness. Still, for all that, I saw he had reason to be in haste, and that my slowness fretted him; so, as soon as I was well sure he could not lose his way, I took my leave of him, though I would with a good heart have gone further with him. He insisted with so much grace on my accepting, to do him pleasure, a small gold piece, to spend for my grandchildren—though to Pierre he also gave something—that I could not refuse him. For five-and-twenty years I had not walked so much, and when I got back I was nearly dead with heat and fatigue.”

“You saw the gentleman again—on his return?”

“Madame, as I said, on my return I was nearly dead with heat and fatigue. I shut up Pierre with his toys in this room, and I went to my chamber at the back, made it dark, and laid me down to sleep. When I woke it was late in the afternoon and Pierre was crying for his supper.”

“And this is all you have to tell me?”

—the words were simple, the tone was agonised;—“after such long patience, only this.”

“Mon Dieu! but I should have thought madame had heard enough,” cried Marie, who had entered when Mére Vichétte had ceased to speak.

CHAPTER II

LE COLOMBIER.

“Marie,. I am going to this house they speak of, Le Colombier,” said Gonda, rising.

For once amazement and indignation struck Marie speechless. Turning to Mére Vichétte, Gonda asked the distance from her cottage to the house.

“Madame, I cannot rightly tell; never have I been there: it is too far for me to walk, and for three years before she died my poor ass was too weak to carry me.”

“Your grandson may go with me?” .

“Most certainly. In truth, I am desirous to send him back to his mother, and do not like him to go alone.”

But here Marie, having a little recovered herself, burst out into a torrent of indignant remonstrance. That madame should stoop so low! That madame should so demean herself! That madame should dare think of approaching that house! That madame, after all she had learnt, should deign to seek further after that-”

“You poor foolish woman, may God forgive you as I try to do!” said Gonda, who by a gesture had checked the outpouring.

“What I have learnt,” she added,“is simply this—that my husband two days ago spoke with this good woman, asking her the way to a house, to which he had never been before, and to which some business, honourable and charitable, then took him. Having learnt this, and, alas! no more, I as far as I am able will trace my husband’s steps, knowing that only illness or disaster could keep him from me so long.”

Marie dared not reply save by a darkening frown, a shrug when Gronda no longer looked towards her.

“The good and faithful wife!” exclaimed Mére Vichétte, approvingly, as Gonda, having dropped a coin into her hand with a fen? gracious words of apology for having so troubled her, called Pierre, to her side and left the house, leaving Marie to follow her or not as she might choose; of course she followed her, but sullenly, and at first at some distance.

. It was a long, rough, weary walk: but Gonda knew nothing of its roughness or its weariness; she made Pierre show her just where he and his grandmother had parted from her husband, leaving him to pursue his way alone. Certainly he could not after that have lost his way, for it lay straight along a track through the forest—from which no paths branched off to right or left.,

“Our house!” announced Pierre at length, as they came in sight of a small clearance amidst the pines..

Gouda was now leaning on Marie’s arm; it had been silently offered and silently accepted.

No house was in sight: a bright patch of orange-orchard, three rows of mulberry-trees, a very large fig-tree, under which a woman was standing, towards whom Pierre bounded with the cry,“Ma Mére,” was all that, at first, met their eyes.

On going nearer, however, what had looked to be a heap of large stones, proved to be“our house.”

It had three apertures—a door, a window, and a chimney: in that spot“å l’abris de tous les vents,” in that beneficent climate, it was an all-sufficient shelter for those who inhabited it.

Where was Le Colombier? There was no other dwelling in sight.

The woman had been looking farther along the forest track, shading her eyes with her hand, as if watching for somebody: at Pierre’s cry, she turned, and he sprang upon her to hang round her neck.

“Mother I thou hast cried!” shouted Pierre, just as Gonda and Marie came up.

At his words, the woman, Mére Vichétte’s daughter Madelon, cried afresh, and the boy began to howl for sympathy.

“What is to do here?” asked Marie of the woman. She cast a somewhat longing eye upon the wooden table standing beneath the fig-tree, set out with the noon-day meal.

Marie was faint with hunger and very thirsty: the big bottle of red wine, the dark bread, the wooden bowl of salad, and the little plate of raw fish looked to her inviting.

At Gonda’s questions—“Where was Le Colombier? How far? In what direction?” the woman’s grief only grew more violent.

“Sit down, sit down, madame!” said Marie to her mistress, of whose trembling she was conscious. She set her a chair, said a few words in Pierre’s ear that stopped his howling, and then, claiming in Madelon an old acquaintance, drew her on to tell the story of her grief.

“Never, never, never in her life had she so much wept!” she said, wiping her eyes:“and her husband, her Pierre, for whom she was now waiting, had been little less grieved. Le Colombier? It was empty—they would find no one there.

“She had loved the poor young pretty creature as a sister—though she had treated her with respect always, for was she not married to a gentleman?—And now where was she—this creature, so young, so tender, who had been so cared for? and monsieur, where was he?”“What is it that has happened? My good woman, tell us quickly.”

“And have I not told you? Just this, that they are gone. First my young mistress disappears one night when monsieur has been long away—to tell the truth, of late monsieur has been too much away—but she never seemed to be hurt by this, or to have any suspicion of wrong; she seemed always happy.

“He arrives and does not find her: he searches, my Pierre aiding him, till nightfall; then he shuts himself into the empty house.

In the morning—that is, yesterday morning—Pierre finds the house, open, all in confusion, marks of a struggle, and no monsieur—he, too, is. gone: I will believe no harm of him—he was distracted with grief-”

“What was he like—your monsieur?” asked Marie.

Gonda could not, at that moment, speak.

The woman gave, a description that, though not entering into such minute particulars—for instance, mentioning neither the scar, the ring, nor the handkerchief—corresponded with that given by her mother of the gentleman who had asked her the nearest way from Rougemont to Le Colombier.

“But, my good woman,” cried Marie,“surely you know something of the reason why. the pretty bird flew out of the nest? First, why was she kept so secretly? If she was a gentleman’s wife, why did she not live like a lady?”

“She did live like a lady! What could a lady want that she did not have? As to the secrecy in which she was kept—she told me the reason for that when she. came here first; but that is a long story, and one I do not know that I have any right to tell. But this much I can tell you: it was her wish, and not her husband’s, that they should live here quietly, and no one know where they were; she had an enemy whom she feared would injure her husband.”

“Is she really a wife?” asked Marie.“You believe she is really a wife?”

“Monsieur has said to me She is my wife for me that was enough. He is not a gentleman whose word one would doubt.”

“Even if he said of two women in one day, ‘She is my wife,’ I suppose! So easy and so credulous!” muttered Marie;“your mother’s own daughter! Now, tell me, why did this happy wife run away from her home?”

“That I cannot tell you: I know only this, that one day she came back from Rosançon so changed that I hardly knew her—one day when monsieur had for a long while been away—

I remember well what day it was—it was the last but one of May—my little Pierre’s birthday.’’

“Madame! you hear that?” cried Marie, in a fierce aside,“the last day but one of May you, too, were at Rosançon, he with you!”

“Before she went up to the house,” continued Madelon, looking inquiringly from Marie to the pale lady,“she came here to me, and she sat down just where that lady is sitting now, and began to rock herself to and fro. I. said to her that she looked pale and much tired, and told her that, in her state, she should not so much fatigue herself: I asked her had she been disappointed of the letter from monsieur that she had expected to find at the post. All the answer she made me was—‘Madelon, I have death in my heart! I have death in my heart, Madelon!’ She sat So a long time: when I spoke she did not seem to hear. By-and-by she got up, saying to me that I must find some one to take a letter for her to a place a good distance off, and that after she had written it she would bring the letter down to me: she went away. In an hour or so she brought the letter, and then I thought she looked a little less strange: -she told me she was going to bed, and that she should not want me for anything that night: I begged to be allowed to sleep with her, but she would not have me. It wasn’t till the morning I found any one to take her letter; then, as it chanced, an old man from the very place the name of which was written on the letter was hanging, about our place, and promised to deliver it at the very door.

“I went up to the house to tell her it was safely sent. I had been up twice before, and seeing the windows shut, and hearing no sound, I thought she was sleeping late, and I would not disturb her; but this time I got frightened: I went in, I searched the house and could not find her.

“All that day we sought and found no trace, and the next day—Pierre was again on the search, but I was just come back to our place —comes monsieur borne—on the first of June that was.”

“On the first of June, and after a long absence,” said Marie.“What time in the day did your monsieur return?” she asked.

“That I cannot say precisely: it may have been two hours past noon, or it may have been three, or even rather more. Passing here first, stopping to ask news of madame of me, hearing what I had to tell, he did not go to the house at all then, but dashed into the forest like a madman, calling upon Pierre.”

>“Madame, have you now learnt enough?” asked Marie, turning upon Gonda, who, clasping her brow with her hand, sat by, losing no word or gesture. She spoke now—

-“You say your husband and his master searched till nightfall, and then your master-”

“He threw himself on his wife’s bed and commanded. Pierre to leave him. In the morning all was confusion in the little house, and monsieur was gone. Many feet had trampled the flower-border. Nothing had been stolen from the house, however, and through the night we had heard no cries. It is true we were very weary and slept sound.” Here Madelon hurst into fresh weeping and lamentation.

“What is become of my husband? Oh

% where, where is my husband?”

These words, a low wailing cry, now came from Gonda’s white lips—came right up from the depths of her tortured heart.

“What is it to us what has become of him?” cried Marie;“the worse fate the better fit! Madame, you have no husband—forget that you ever thought you had one. Come away with—Marie—let us bury ourselves out of the reach of all the world,—somewhere where our shame will be hidden.”

“Shame, Marie? what shame?” answered Honda.“There is infinite sorrow—inextricable confusion—but no shame.”

“He comes at last, my Pierre!” cried Madelon, as a man, slouching heavily along, with downcast face, came in sight.“My husband, is there any news?” she shrieked.

The man came up, looked with dull, heavyeyed wonder from one of the strangers to the other, and pulled from his pocket a woman’s neckerchief, which he gave to Madelon.

“You found this-where?”

“Caught on to a branch of the old oak-tree: the one that got half uprooted last winter by the heavy rains, and leans across the deep pool below the oil-mill. Is it hers?”“Ah! mon Dieu! it is hers.”

“To-morrow they drag the pool.”

Heavily sullen as the man looked, he could not stand Madelon’s lamentations. Having savagely bid her be quiet, he turned away, turning his face to lean it against a tree. Little Pierre plucked at his sleeve, and pulled his hand, but failed to attract his attention.

Honda had risen to her feet: she stood looking from one to the other:. she was bewildered by the mystery of all this sad story, and pained by the sorrow of it; but what she sought about in her own mind to find was the point at which this story ceased in any way to concern her husband, if, indeed, there were any such point. She went up to the big Pierre at last, and addressed him: fixing her blue eyes on his face—an honest and good face—with the expression of one seeking sentence of death or life, she questioned him closely and rapidly. One question alone elicited anything that threw the slightest light on the mystery. She asked had he, that first day of June, that day on which his master returned, seen any gentleman in the forest who was not his master, but yet was like his master; or had he heard of his master being seen at any spot where he (Pierre) knew he could not, at such a time, have been?

At first Pierre answered stoutly to all this in the negative: but, on reflection, remembered that he had in the afternoon met with a herd-boy, to whom he had talked for some time—questioning him as to who or what he had seen in the forest or neighbourhood on that or the previous day—trying, of course, to get some clue to the fate of his mistress, or the course she had taken. The boy had answered that all was even more solitary than usual: except that he had, an hour or two since, seen Pierre’s own master in a certain part of the forest which he indicated (and which Pierre’s master afterwards said he had not approached); he had met, seen, spoken to, or been spoken to by no person on that or the previous day.

“Even while he spoke,” Pierre said,“monsieur came up to where we stood: the boy stared and looked frightened, and on being asked why, said it seemed to him impossible that, unless aided by the devil, the gentleman he had so short a time before seen there should now be here.”

“My husband did leave the forest and start on his return then,” said Gronda, when she had ascertained that the part of the forest where the hoy had seen, what he now devoutly believed to have been an apparition, was the outskirt of it, lying nearest Cape Sainte Gudule.“I will go to the house before I follow his steps—I may learn something.” Pierre showed her the way. Marie stayed behind with Madelon, who was chiefly occupied in crying over and kissing the handkerchief Pierre had brought.

“All is as we found it,” said Pierre, as he pushed open the unfastened door.

Gronda went into the little house.

On one side the door was the kitchen, on the other a salon, prettily, even elegantly furnished. There were books lying about it; there was woman’s work; there were pictures on the wall, landscapes and figures, the latter chiefly of Italian and Spanish peasants. There was an easel, overturned, in one comer of the room, and a canvas, its face on the floor, beside it. Involuntarily, Gonda, with the loving reverence she would have used had it been her husband’s work, picked up that canvas. It was a portrait—a portrait of ‘Colombe.’ That name so familiar to her on her husband’s lips some months ago was under the portrait—a portrait of that lovely peasant-girl she had seen in the jeweller’s shop at Bosangon on that February day when she had been there with Marie. She gazed at it a long time, forgetting herself in a sort of bewildered dream. When her eyes left it they sought about vaguely. Presently she picked up a handkerchief which lay under the table; on it were the initials H. de T., embroidered by her own hand. Undoubtedly, then, her husband had reached thus far. Next her eyes fell on an envelope, tom in two, lying among the wood ashes on the hearth. On it were the words—

À Madame,

Madame de Triancourt, in her husband’s writing.

She freed the two pieces of paper from dust, and put them, with the handkerchief, in her bosom.

The darkness around her thickened, hut the darker all else grew the brighter shone the one life-star of Faith. She felt as if it were but the weakness of her own brain that made things seem perplexed and difficult.

“If I could but think!” she often repeated.

She went over all the house while Pierre waited outside: in the room above the salon all was confusion, as Pierre had said; furniture overturned and broken; a mirror smashed; everything seeming to indicate that a struggle had taken place there—between whom?

Gonda left the house; she felt herself to he past even the effort to think and understand now—so sick, so sinking, so stunned! Followed by Pierre, she returned to where she had ‘left Marie; Marie and the little Pierre had been busily occupied in satisfying their appetites.

“You told me,” she said to Madelon,“that you did not know your master’s name.”

“It is true. For with us he was always monsieur and she madame: there came no letters here, and they received no visits. On madame’s linen, which I washed, was the name of Colomhe, that only—of monsieur’s nothing was marked. Mais oui, tenez—”

She disappeared into the house and returned with some handkerchiefs.

“They are new,” she said;“while monsieur was away madame bought them and worked them. See what fine broderie, and the letters H. de T.”

Gonda asked nothing more.

Beset by hospitable offers of refreshment—-“If only I could think!” she said to herself, as she broke some morsels of bread and sipped some wine—“if only I could think! There is something, somewhere, that if I could remember would make all clear; but my’head is growing more and more weak and bewildered. And—if everything else even grew clear, where, where is my husband?” By-and-by she spoke to Marie.

“Marie, you are tired already—you shall return in the carriage.”

“And madame?”

“I shall get this good Monsieur Pierre to take me towards Les Cyprus by the way my husband took.”

“If madame desires to kill herself, Marie desires to die also—c’est tout simple.”

That settled it: remonstrance on either side was known to be useless.

Little. Pierre was sent to pay and dismiss the driver: then Gonda took leave of Madelon; who looked upon her, enlightened by Marie as to her errand here, with a mixed feeling of awe and compassion—and accompanied by Pierre the big, and Marie, set out on her return to Les Cypres, now preyed upon by the most sickening and terrible apprehensions. Of these neither then, nor afterwards, did she speak: but they did not wrong the man she called, and was proud to call her husband.

At four o’clock in the afternoon—the heat was heavily oppressive—Gonda suddenly, without having spoken one word of warning or complaint, fainted.

They were then crossing the bare and rugged brow of Cape Sainte Gudule, la petite: the path was a mere goat-track, and overhung the sea. Pierre, walking first, had turned to warn the lady to be careful of her steps; even as he spoke he saw her waver. He saved her life by catching her arm in time to throw her to the left, against the rocky wall of the hill. If she had fallen to the right?—beneath, the sea was beating among jagged ‘rocks.

Pierre held her by that arm; the marks of his strong fingers were plainly to be seen there for days and weeks afterwards. There was no turf on which to lay her, no tree under which to shelter her; all the hill-side was stony, and one glare of heat and light.

All they could do for her was to lay her lengthwise along the narrow path, to shade her with their umbrellas and fan her with her hat, and watch her heedfully; an abrupt return to consciousness, accompanied by a sudden movement, might have endangered her life.

She recovered very slowly: her eyes when they unclosed seemed meaningless and senseless, as if the very life remained at a distance, though she again breathed. Then she looked down at the sea—a giddy depth beneath her —upwards at the craggy hill, rising stonily, pitilessly hot to the blinding sky above her.

She rose to her feet with their help. She looked before and after, into the air, down at the soil at her feet, till Pierre asked,“Has madame lost something?”

She made no answer.

Pierre urged that she should try to go oh; a quarter of a mile and in the bed of a stream there was shelter and coolness where she could rest.

On the side of the sea Pierre and Marie, with the staff Pierre carried, made a sort of railing by which she could guide her weak steps.

Gonda tried to move from the spot, but her feet seemed rooted to the ground. With a piteous face she asked Marie,“Do you feel nothing here, just here, Marie?”

“A mortal heat, madame, that burns my brain,” Marie answered.“Rien de plus et c’est assez.”

Gonda, at last, moved from the spot, often looking behind her as she left it, and stumbling, almost falling, constantly.

When they had once crossed the brow of Cape Sainte Gudule, la petite, Gonda seemed to lose all interest in the road—to care for nothing but reaching Les Cypres quickly.

“She has some new scheme in her poor head,” said Marie.

She had.

Next day, taking a boat from Rosançon, Gonda had herself rowed under the head of Cape Sainte Gudule, la petite. She disembarked, and clambered over dangerous and difficult rocks to where the cliff rose abruptly—to the spot which she believed to be immediately tinder the place where she had fainted yesterday. She spent hours there exposed to all manner of danger and fatigue.

Marie’s horror of“le mal de mer” was . invincible: she sat upon the shore where her mistress had embarked and waited for her return. By-and-by she received Gonda more dead than alive into her arms.

“We must be patient, Marie. We will go home and wait,” were her only words.

CHAPTER III

PATIENCE.

Patient this poor wife was, though, for a long time, not merely passively patient. Not passive; but it would be wearying to dwell upon the unwearying effort, the result of which was one weary monotony of fruitlessness and failure. Patient through days all too long, too bright, too splendid; days on which the sunshine seemed to smite her like a flaming sword; days on which the burning earth seemed to rise towards the brazen sky, the brazen sky to lower over the burning earth, as if they both strove to scorch, to daze, to crush between them this pale patience which they held caged as in a fiery prison.

Patient through days that passionately desired the darkness and coolness of night, and that cessation of minute and aimless action in those about her that fell with the night. Far worse than the nightmare dreams of any night seemed to her the disregarding doing of the days, that went on and on as if they never missed her husband—as if his place on the earth had closed over, and nothing any more in this world wanted him—save her heart.

Patient through those desired nights which when they came were one longing for the dawning of the possibilities of a new day; nights, wide-eyed, unrestful, augustly glorious; nights through which she lay on her bed, or sat at her window, as she was able, and watched the great stars, big with meaning, which they seemed ever .ready to drop and yet retained; and strained to hear that secret which, to her intensified being, they seemed to be telling, and ever telling—a secret, that it grew to seem to her a matter of life and death that she should learn, and which she, ever and ever, by ever so little, failed to catch: straining life and straining reason, ever failing to strain far enough: striving ever towards a further straining of stretched soul and sense: towards a victory ~ that, though she knew it not, would have been death or madness.

But she lived on, to watch heaven and earth, both night and day, and listen in the air for some sign, some sound of him who, as if the earth had opened and swallowed him, seemed to her utterly, absolutely lost.

She lived on, nor was she mad. At times those about her thought her so; that is to say, they thought her mind irrevocably strained and warped; but she was not mad.

Dr. Vauprez and his wife were again guests at Les Cypres: they had vainly tried to induce Gonda to leave it for their house.

“He left me here when he went away, he will expect to find me here when he comes back,” she always answered to all entreaties.

Those about her—Marie, Dr. Vauprez, and his wife, for a long time mistrusted the patience that possessed Gonda: they said,“It cannot last,” and were always waiting for and dreading the time when it would give way. But watching how the blue eyes burnt for themselves ever deepening and yet more transparent caverns, showing how consuming was the inward fire that fed those azure lamps, the doctor by-and-by began to believe that her patience and her life would end together.

To any questions or any expressions of anxiety about her health, Gonda always answered,“ There is no fear for me. While I do not know that he is not still somewhere in this world, God will not take me from it.”

It was only at night that she was ever alone. Marie had entreated to be allowed to sleep in her room, but her entreaties had been refused. All day, in her own house, she was the prisoner of watchful love. She bore this with unmurmuring sweetness; even let them suppose her to be unconscious of it, but it was burdensome to her—a heavy burden laid upon one already burdened: at night, at least, she felt it necessary to be alone and unwatched.

June passed and July—August passed and September.

It seemed absolutely as if the earth had opened and engulfed her husband: no news reached her that threw the slightest glimmering of light for her upon his fate: nor, as she had heard from Pierre, more than a month after she herself had been there, had any tidings reached the forest of the fate of the inhabitants of Le Colombier.

At last it chanced that one afternoon Gonda was left alone.

The good doctor was on his rounds: Marie was absent on some errand at Chantreuil: Madame Vauprez, the person left on guard, had been overtaken in the kitchen, where, after having done Marie’s work, she had sat down for one moment with folded arms to rest, by heavy afternoon and after-dinner slumber.

The house door stood wide open. Gonda was in the salon, sitting in the old red fau-teuil: her needlework was on her knees, such work as all fond women who are mothers would believe might be to her an unfailing source of interest, of hope, and consolation.

Alone, and sitting in that old fauteuil, where he had sat so often during the delicious time of earliest spring and earliest convalescence—where he had sat so often later, when he had grown far dearer—where he had sat last on that last morning—that old fauteuil, in which no one else might now sit, about which clung a thousand tenderest memories and fondest imaginations, against which, when she believed herself unwatched, unseen, this poor wife would press her beating, longing, aching, wounded, always bleeding and always faithful heart, against which she would lean her cheek, upon which she would seal her lips, and strive to fancy—pitiful Heaven, what? Where was the warm, responsive heart-beat, the caressing closeness of another cheek, the tender pressure of other lips, the welcome balm of’ beloved breath? Where was the soothing, healing, indescribable deliciousness of rest?

For these things now longing, with half-delirious longing, she cried,“Oh, heaven, once again! To be held in his arms, to be pressed against his breast, to be sealed with his kisses once again, if only once again! I did not love enough, not half enough, not warm enough, not close enough! Just once again! Just once again! I would press so close, so close—that once again should be for ever!”

So she cried! She dropped her work upon her knees; she raised and clasped her wasted hands; she raised, too, her appealing eyes, her hungry eyes, and saw, standing upon the threshold of the door, one whom, by a wild bound that left her nigh upon swooning, her heart recognised.

It was a man in ordinary dress, not wearing now either a monkish or priestly gown, who stood there, on the threshold, a moment, and then advanced towards the solitary occupant of the room; a man neither old nor young, neither, to a superficial observer, attractive nor repulsive in look; a man whom you might, with equal truth, describe as of a mild and pale countenance, or as of a pitiless and passionate aspect. Not a man to inspire fear or mistrust, unless you caught a misliking gleam from the long and narrow, the handsome and deceitful eyes, and mistrusted the mildness of a face that owned such thin lips and pinched nostrils.

It chanced that Gonda sat where she faced the door, and had the windows behind her. The afternoon was so far advanced that the sun had ceased to shine in at the south windows and their shades were thrown back. The bright light therefore streamed full upon the intruder’s face as he advanced towards her, while of her he could at first distinguish little but the glittering bright hair and the outline of her head. For this reason her look of recognition escaped him, he possibly having no reason to expect recognition. That she should be startled by his sudden appearance was natural, and he hastened, in smooth, reassuring tones, to make courteous apology and to offer plausible explanation.

Gonda had risen; with an inclination ot the head she had acknowledged first his profound reverence, and then his explanation. Leaning on the arm of her chair, her heart beating with a violence that threatened to suffocate her, not with fear, but with consciousness that she was in the presence of one whom she believed to be her husband’s deadly enemy, who might be now what he had attempted to be before—her husband’s murderer —she waited to hear him speak of what it was had brought him to her. As she thus waited her white face looked stony in its intensified calm: the strain of the control she imposed upon herself was strong and terrible.

The man waved her to be seated: he turned back and shut the door, and then came close up to the table by which she had stood.

“For three days I have watched for the opportunity of seeing you alone. It is on a matter of importance—on a matter of secret importance—that I would confer with mademoiselle.”

Before he had added more, indeed he seemed to pause to watch the effect of his last word, Gonda, speaking with a certain august severity of offended matronhood, said—

“The woman to whom you address yourself is a wife, and one who waits the hour when, if it is God’s will, she is to become a mother.” His face as he listened, his gesture when she finished, was meant to be amazedly, significantly compassionate.

“God’s judgment will shortly and sharply fall upon him who sinned against and deceived you,” he said.“The object of my being here is to show that monster to you in his true colours. Listen!”

Then followed, falling in accents of measured mildness from those thin lips, and yet spoken with the deep inner vibration which true and repressed passion, alone give, a story of treacherous wrong-doing, of intrigue, seduction, and double-dyed guilt, which the speaker was pleased to call the story of the last two years of the life of one who called himself De Triancourt—of the man whom the woman he addressed called“husband.”

He spoke at great length—with great exactitude of date and detail; relating a well-compacted and smoothly-finished story. Now and then his voice trembled and his eyes gleamed; but not often.

Quietly Gonda heard him out; so quietly, so patiently, yet with such watchful intentness, that once or twice he paused, perplexed and almost disconcerted by what seemed to him such unnatural absence of all emotion; but what was, in fact, intense absorption in the endeavour to detect truth from falsehood, and to find some hint in all his story that should throw light on the fate of her husband.

“C’est une Anglaise!” he commented to himself, with a mental shrug.“For blood they have ice in their veins, these blonde women. Or—is it possible that I tell her nothing she did not know ?”

When he had finished, she still, for a few moments, kept silence; then, with a glance fixed on him that tried to pierce behind the mask he wore for a face, she Said—

“This man you have been speaking of is not my husband.” She added, in a clear, calm voice,“ To believe this, to help me to find my husband, would help you to find the man who has injured you.”

‘“Best thanks,” he answered,“but I have him safe.”

Her voice was less calm, and her face was agitated as she now asked,“Where is my husband? What has become of my husband?” He replied by another question, almost before one would have thought the sense of hers could have penetrated to his brain, and his face was not now passionless, or his voice mild and measured.

“What is become of my bride? For she of whom I have been speaking, this man’s other victim, was my promised bride. Even as I have now no wife, you, wretched woman, have no husband. He has destroyed you both. She, my Colombe—you start at the name, poor woman! you have heard your husband” (with a withering emphasis upon the word)“mutter it in his sleep, perhaps, and call upon it in his fever dreams—she, his other victim, my pretty Colombe, was not, like you, alone and unfriended; he tempted her forth from a home where she was the darling of aged parents, the apple of their eyes, the light and the flower and the perfume of their lives. Promised to me by their gratitude three years ago, she had resigned herself to the thought of being mine. Now where is she—she who should now be my wife? It is for the murder of his victim—the murder, mark you, of a tender girl—of this tame and gentle Colombe, who answered to his voice and came to his hand, that the man whom you call husband—whether in innocence, or’ with guilty knowledge of his crimes, I know not—lies now in prison, awaiting trial and sentence. Listen, I will tell you more.

“Some few days before the November night that first brought that wretch within these doors, I discovered the infidelity of my bride—discovered, through the treachery of a servant she trusted, a scheme her lover had for carrying her off. After that I watched for this fellow, for this De Triancourt, whom you call husband, with the lynx-eyed watch of jealousy; but he was cunning. I could not find him, or hear of him anywhere in the neighbourhood; but at last, by accident, I came across his distant track, and then I dogged him. An ‘accident’ resulted: that man met flying from the spot was my screen; for the rest, who would suspect of violence a mild-faced priest? for I was disguised as a priest that night. I lingered in this neighbourhood, watching the result of that * accident,’ believing my dove secure while the hawk was disabled; a tool failed me, and I fancied that suspicion was roused; then I returned to claim my bride, armed with the story of her younger lover’s faithlessness with you, and prepared to make good use of her anger and resentment. I found a house of mourning and desolation. She was gone: more than a month she had been gone. She, poor soul! had kept her tryst. She had fled from her home on that very November night when my vengeance fell upon her lover, going out to meet that lover.

“What fate had overtaken her? My disappearance and continued absence had awakened the wildest suspicions in the old people: my reappearance and my ignorance of her flight drove them back upon their first conviction—that to escape from marriage with me (to which, the old foxes had assured me, she had conquered all reluctance!) she had committed suicide. I knew better; but I kept my own counsel.

“Months of uncertainty and watchfulness followed: then, at length, I came upon traces of her; but-it was even ‘then a long while before I successfully followed up the clue. Too late for anything but revenge; revenge I am sure of now, for I have him safe in prison—revenge which the law shall give me, condemning to the guillotine or galleys this man whom you will no longer dare call husband!”

Gonda showed agitation at last; for at last she heard something that might possibly be true. Though this history she had been hearing in nothing concerned her husband, he might possibly be lying under suspicion of another man’s crime.

“My husband lies in prison! My husband will be tried for murder of the poor girl, Colombe!” She wrung her hands in agony now, realizing how this might well be and he, nevertheless, all the while most innocent, might be done to death by false evidence, circumstances of suspicion, mistaken identify. Looking up suddenly into the face watching her, she caught a gleam of triumph from the narrow eyes. It occurred to her to wonder that this man, who had spoken of Colombe with a tone of genuine passion, showed no grief, no horror, in speaking of her murder.

Why was this? she pondered; she fell into deep thought; and what next the accuser spoke she did not even hear.

After a few moments, she said, with a steadfast tone and look—“If the man who lies in prison is my husband, he is guiltless of all wrong done to that poor girl. If the man who lies in prison is the poor girl’s husband—I believe that girl to have been, as I am, a true wife—he is guiltless of all knowledge of her death. And he is not my husband. No; if he has taken my husband’s name, his very form, he cannot have my husband’s soul. He is not my husband. Anyway, if the girl indeed is dead, her death was, I believe, her own rash act; hut I think she lives; I think, moreover, that you know she lives.”

“If there is still faint hope that she yet lives, there is ample proof that she is dead, heavy suspicion that she was murdered, circumstantial evidence that, if murdered, she was murdered by the man you call your husband.”

“Tell me what you want of me?” suddenly demanded Gonda.“Why are you here? What object is this visit to serve?”

“To induce you to see this man, and be convinced that you have called him your husband: to ask you to tell me on what day and hour you saw him last.”

“Will you give me truth for truth?” cried Gonda: her speech became impassioned appeal as she went on.“I entreat you, by anything you have ever held dear, by any manhood in you, by any pity, by any hope of that pardon we all need, by all you hold sacred, by any fear you have of God, by any love of any human thing; perhaps as a boy you loved your mother, perhaps as a youth you knew some other love as pure; if so, by the memory of those loves, I entreat yon to deal truly with me. I ask no mercy from you, I need none; I and mine are guiltless towards you; I ask no mercy, only truth and justice. I ask, do you believe the man who lies in prison to be my husband?”

“Insensee!” he cried.“What would you have from me? In the name of all you appeal to, I solemnly declare that it is the man whom you call husband lies now in prison, charged with bigamy and with the murder of my bride.”

“If this is so,” she answered;“if it is my husband whom you have caused to be imprisoned, you are miserably deceived; you are persecuting the innocent to your own loss and harm; for meanwhile the guilty, the man who has injured you, goes free.”

‘“No, no, no!” he cried;“there is no room for doubt. This is the man; this is the man: by his own confession this is the man.”

“By his own confession—oh, my God!” She bowed her face down into her hands a moment, only for a moment; then, raising it, she said—

“‘By his own confession but of what? He does not say he is my husband. If this man confesses any guilt he does not say he is my husband. You have not said he says he is my husband.”

There was a pause; full, for Gonda, of the most intense effort to maintain her self-control.

CHAPTER IV

TORTURE.

“Once more I ask you to listen,” the torturer began, breaking the brief silence.“I deal truly with you, as you implored me to do. I am* here to-day because in you, a wronged and outraged woman, I find the weapon, ready to my band, that is to help on my vengeance. Hitherto you have baulked my vengeance; but now the time is come when you will help it on.

“Your tender care and Christian charity healed wounds I had meant to be mortal—better would it have been for you, as for me, had they proved so—and the life you had spent yourself to preserve was divided he-tween the objects of deceiving you and of loving another woman. With his first strength he must have sought out Colombe—for it was as early as February that I first heard of their having been seen together.

“I do not wonder you are not easily brought to believe such elaborated dark villainy as that of which you have been the victim; but once convinced of it—and it is to your eyesight I trust to convince you—convinced that you have been robbed of what some women hold dearer than life, honour—you are no woman, if I know anything of women, if you will not help on my vengeance—and your own.”

“And what help,” asked Gonda,“could the miserable and betrayed creature you imagine me to be, give you, herself, or any one?”

“The prisoner has confessed to having lived with Colombe, as a husband with a wife. You must appear in court at the trial, and testify that he is the man who has lived with you in the same relation. Your mere presence will prove one charge, that of bigamy (witnesses to the other marriage are ready to hand). You will prove one charge and give motive for the greater crime. Who, seeing you, would doubt but that the humbly-born peasant Hagar would be sacrificed for such a Sara ?”

Instinctively Gonda shrank further from the speaker. Hateful and odious was the expression of his face at that moment.

“And if I appear only to bear witness that the accused is not my husband?”

He smiled a secure smile that curdled her blood, answering—

“Then you would bear false-witness; that you will not do; you are too proud to lie; too proud to forgive such injury as he has done you.”

. Evidently there was one danger he had not thought of—that she, finding in this accused the man she had called husband, should still love him well enough to deny in order to save him. This danger was not. one that to him, with his experience of human nature, especially of female human nature, seemed possible.

“You are right in not fearing that I should bear false-witness, or deny my husband,” said Gonda, proudly.“My husband’s cause and the cause of truth are one. It is not my husband who has deprived you of your bride. I may he able to help you and him.” She shuddered inwardly at the naming thus together of those two.

“When did you last see your husband? You remember, doubtless, the day, the hour?”

She paused.

Were she to swear that one day later than was the truth she had had her husband with her, would this do anything to break the fatal sequence of the chain of circumstantial evidence which, if this man in prison was indeed her husband, she could so clearly see might lead to his destruction?

She quickly pushed that question from her, and asked herself another.“Would my husband like to owe life or liberty to his wife’s lie?”

Instead of answering the question asked her by her torturer, she cried—

“Again I declare to you—and oh that God would give my words power to pierce you with conviction!—that either the man in prison is not my husband or that there lies in prison a man as innocent of all that is charged against him as is his unborn child. It is your interest as well as mine to find the truth.”

“The evidence against the prisoner is strong—hardly a link is wanting—the date of his being seen at Rougemont corresponding with that of the disappearance of Colombe from the house in the forest where she had been living for some months.”

“No!” breathlessly interrupted Gonda,“he could hardly have left me at the time when Madelon discovered that the poor girl had fled from Le Colombier.”

“Ha! ha! you do not deny that the day was the same, the first of June. For the rest, that the hour does not accord was the result of his cunning artifice. He had appointed that the victim should go towards her death—should meet him on the outer edge of the, forest, near the stream. He had doubtless written to her the day before, addressing his letter, as he always did, to the post-office at Rosançon: the letter has not been found; probably she had it about her.”

The paper in her bosom, kept there-ever since—that tom envelope—the address on which was, beyond all doubt, in her husband’s hand! Gonda remembered this, to rejoice that at least one fragment of evidence which might be condemnatory was safe with her.

As for the letter it had contained and the date when it had been received (it bore no post-mark), what did such little matters of detail signify when there was so threatening and terrible a mystery over everything?

“If any such letter reached the girl, it was not written by my husband,” she said.

“Your husband says the girl did probably receive a letter from him on that last day but one of May—a letter which, he pretends, was written from a distance.”

“Her husband perhaps may say so,” answered Gonda;“mine was with me all that day, and neither wrote nor posted any letter.”

“Was with you all that day you went to Rosançon—the man you call your husband was with you all that day?”

“For half an hour, perhaps, not more, he left me. He left me, I remember now, to rest at the hotel while he attended to some business at the hank.”

“And before that you had been sitting together upon the balcony of that room at the hotel, a balcony overlooking the sea, and underneath which there is a chemist’s shop. The afternoon was perfectly still, and what you said on that balcony was partly audible from’ the door of the shop. It was there, at that shop door, that Colombe stood and heard him, her husband, call you wife: and afterwards, when he left you, she saw him, and in your lover recognized her husband. Doubtless he too saw her and feared what might follow, and so, by that letter beguiling her with the hope of an explanation, tempted her to her death.”

“This is terrible confusion—horrible mystery,” said Gonda, putting back her hair from her moist brow.“What is true with what cannot be true is inextricably mixed. Oh, my God, help me, for I do not doubt my husband!”

“You must see this prisoner, convince yourself he is your husband, and a wretch as infamous as has been permitted to walk this earth. Till then there is no dealing with you; till your senseless, owl-blind, obstinate faith is shaken, you are no use.”

“I will see the prisoner; but if he is a guilty man, guilty of such crimes as those of which you accuse him, I would not believe my eyes if they said he was my husband, my ears if his voice said he was my husband. I do not deceive you, you see. I give you no cause to hope that I shall help the condemnation of my husband. But if I could infect you with my faith; convince you that if the man in prison is my husband, the man who has injured you is free, while an innocent man is suffering for his crime-”

“Your faith is strong, but the evidence of your senses will he stronger,” he interrupted. ‘‘ Your flesh and blood will cry out against him. For not only is the man in prison he you call your husband, but even more surely he calls my Colombo wife. And—you must be prepared for this—I must have your promise not to evade me—your evidence will be used against him.”

“What evidence can I give against him?” asked Gonda, perplexedly.“Either he is my husband, and is innocent, and. you must seek further for the guilty man, or he is not my husband and may be guilty.”

“What are those?” she demanded, as he to the poor wretch you hold in your cruel power, and who I know now is not my husband. My husband lie and deny his wife! No, never! When,” she added with supreme loftiness,“that day comes, then will be the time for the denied and despised wife to despise herself—to say, ‘1 will be a tool in your hands, so do with me what you will.’ But oh, pitiful Father in heaven, where, where is he, my husband?”

That question was a heartrending wail. After it she dropped her face into her hands and wept like a lost, weary, brokenhearted child.

Everything was swallowed up in a sense of universal overwhelming renewed loss. To see him again, even in a dungeon and in danger of death—but innocent; innocent, innocent, innocent—this prospect had opened before her, seeming to give probability and aim to life; and now all hope had died down again, and all was again that fearful vagueness, that utter blank and depth of darkness.

She wept on, and seemed to be weeping her life away.

Perhaps, instead, those tears soothed and eased her brain. By-and-by she looked up: a resolve taken.

It was dear now that this man lying in prison was not her husband; but it was almost as clear to her that Colombe had not been murdered.

She had a double motive for resolving to see this man: some confused fatality bewilderingly associated him with her husband: through him she might gain some knowledge that would throw light upon her husband’s féte; also, by proving that this man was not her husband, she might help to clear him from suspicion of a crime of which she felt he was not guilty. She must see him.

When she looked up she found her torturer still standing before her: apparently he had not stirred hand or foot.

“I must see the prisoner,” she said!

“You must see the prisoner,” he answered.“Then your blinded eyes will be opened—”

“Not to see that it is my husband who has lied and has denied me!—first, before I would believe that, I would tear out these lying eyes!”

These last words were spoken only for herself but he heard them, and answered—

“The raving of a mad woman; and you are not mad. I desire nothing from you now but that which you yourself desire—that you should see this man. Afterwards we will arrange all else together—working in common then—and towards one end.”

“Where, when can I see the prisoner?”

“In his cell, when you can reach him. You must travel towards him—a long journey—two days and a night: over the mountains, and across the burnt plains of Crau. Start to-morrow at sunrise. I will start tonight to be there before you—to have all in readiness, that there may he no delay.”

He gave her, writing them down, full directions for the journey, even advising her at what inns to procure a change of horses: he impressed upon her that no time was to be lost, as the trial was to take place within the next few days: then, at last, he left her, and she was alone.

No! she could not doubt that he believed this prisoner to be her husband; that he believed that she would have to believe this, and that her evidence, whether voluntary or involuntary, would condemn him.

CHAPTER V

PREPARATION.

The intruder let the house door close behind him heavily: at the sound Madame Vauprez woke.

She woke confused and frightened, with a guilty sense of having slept at her post, and a vague fear that some misfortune Had happened.

She rushed up to the salon, and was reassured to find the poor prisoner had not. escaped—to find Gronda sitting in the old red fauteuil, where she had left her.

“It was but the wind, then, slammed to the door!” she said, as she stood panting, with fright’ and the haste with which she had rushed up the stairs.

“I am glad you are come to me, my dear and good madame,” said Honda, with an affectionate smile.“I have much to tell you: but first give me something to make me strong: I have been wearied, and to-morrow I start on a long journey. So I have much to do this evening.”

“You start on a long journey!” echoed madame, with a sinking of the heart—for the thought occurred to her that Gonda spoke of her death.

“Yes—a long journey—two days and a night. That is long for me, is it not, madame?”

Madame Vauprez prepared the restorative draught she was ordered by her husband to give when it was needed. Having seen it taken, she sat down beside Honda; lightly touching her wrist, she questioned her pulse, but asked no other questions.

“You think I have been dreaming feverish dreams, madame,” said Gonda, smiling.“I have not closed my eyes.”

. She leant back in her chair, remaining for a few moments speechless; then she told Madame Vauprez of her visitor, and of what had passed between her and him.

At first the good woman clung to her belief that it was all a dream, or delusion; but gradually Gonda’s calm narrative brought conviction with it. Then she bitterly reproached herself for this that had happened.

“But why, my dear, dear friend, should you reproach yourself?” asked Gonda.“It is far best that I should know. I may be able to save an innocent man, who otherwise would have suffered a frightful sentence—the guillotine or the galleys. And he must be strangely like my husband, for I so for believe this man that I believe he believes him to be my husband. But he is’ not my husband: yet, if he is not my husband (and he is not) where, where, where all this while is my husband?”

So saying, she rose up, for a moment kept her white wasted hand pressed upon her burning eyes, and then set about her preparations.

“A long journey,” she said.“Return from a long journey is always uncertain; for me, return from this journey must be especially uncertain. I must arrange everything as I should like to leave it if I knew I should not return.” Madame Vauprez, secretly believing she would hot be allowed to take this journey, nevertheless knew better than to agitate her further now by useless opposition.

Gonda’s preparations consisted chiefly in collecting together everything belonging to her husband that was scattered about the few inhabited rooms of the house.

It was growing dusk now. Madame Vauprez lighted a lamp, and, with it in her hand, followed Gonda about: not, however, daring to touch anything.

Gonda had not chosen that anything should be moved from the place in which her husband had left it. To- have had things displaced and put away would have been a tacit acknowledgment that she gave up the hope of his return—a hope she lived upon from day to day, It had been her daily occupation to take down and dust and brush and then replace the hats, coats, cloaks, or caps left hanging in the hall; to dust his books, his desk and papers, his sketching-blocks, folios, and easel, and then replace them, too, with scrupulous exactness, just where he had left them. As far as it was possible to prevent it, she suffered no one else to put a finger on anything that was his, explaining this by saying,“It is not because I am better than you others, and so in that way less unworthy to touch what he has touched, but because he loved me better, and I am more himself.” And she herself handled everything with a reverence that made of this homely daily service a sort of worship.

Now this evening she collected all these sacred things together into her sleeping-room, and then petitioned to be left alone.

Poor soul! strong as, alas!—yet not alas! she was in faith, what hope was left her to take hold of? She could not hope in this prisoner to recognize her husband: yet, after all these months, what other hope remained? Sitting on the floor, she held in her lap a coat of her husband’s: she had spread it out, was smoothing it with caressing touches, was about to fold it to put away in the drawer, open before her, when, suddenly, her calm gave way, she broke down utterly. Catching the coat to her breast, she folded it in her arms, straining it to her with convulsive straining: delirious with grief and longing, she talked to it as a human thing, she covered it with tears and kisses, she pressed her face into it, stifled the cries of her mouth against it, and so. sank down upon the floor.

But the storm passed: by-and-by she sat up again, and pursued her task, unfalteringly, till all was done.

When she had ended—before she returned to the salon, where she now heard the voices of Marie and of Madame and Monsieur Vauprez in eager discussion—glad to find herself alone, she sat a good while on her bed, and clasping her brow with her hands, tried hard to think.

But she had to give up the effort: she did s6 with a mournful shake of the head, mourning her own incapacity.

Then she stretched out her right hand, looked at it earnestly, and remembered the time when, standing alone by the grave of the woman she had not loved, she had called it“Nobody’s!”

“It is his now,” she said,“and must be - kept clean and stainless. I move in one horror of great darkness, but there is lights I absolutely believe in God and in my husband: in a God who is infinitely loving. What His love can suffer to befall His creatures, His creatures must be able to suffer for those they love. In one way, through all my misery, I am happier than happy, I am blessed, in this—that I know surely that to do wrong in the eyes of God cannot be to do well in the eyes of my husband. How miserable must be the poor wife who, loving God and loving her husband, cannot feel this surely! I can pity her. Oh! I am far, very far, from being of all women the most miserable. God forgive me if in my madness I have called myself so! Father in heaven, be pitiful of the weakness of this frail child of Thine! Teach me what to pray. Let not my heart break while there is hope that once again it may lean on him. Thy will be done. Teach me to will Thy will utterly. All will yet be well! All will yet be well!”

It was with those words yet upon her lips, and their light over her face, that she went to her Mends: prepared calmly to meet, and determined to overcome, any opposition offered to her journey.

She met with but little, for Doctor Vauprez was wise enough to know that for one constituted as she was, the mind having such power over the body, no physical suffering could be so injurious as the passive, long-protracted endurance of §uch an agony of suspense.

BOOK VI

LIFE IN DEATH.

CHAPTER I

“IT IS HE.”

Very early in the morning, Gonda and the faithful Marie—fiercely faithful she might he called, for trouble seemed to have anything but a softening influence for her—started on their journey. All through the first day, creeping up the sides of the mountains, to be rattled down their further slopes during great part of the moonlight night; on the second day crossing the bare, burnt, stony plain of La Crau, under the glare of a scorching autumn sun. Poor Marie could not refrain from much bitter lamentation and wringing of hands, from many exclamations, both of terror and of suffering.

When, Gonda spoke, it was to address to her companion a few sentences of encouragement and comfort: to these, Marie could not answer in the sense of Benedick’s words—

“Every one can master a grief but he that has it yet these, added to the unbroken calm, the strange sweet smiles, and the uncomplaining endurance .of her mistress, made Marie pronounce, to her own mind, that she was“folle”—hopelessly and irremediably mad.

Gonda had not passed through the night preceding her journey without having been subject to a terrible ordeal

It had seemed to her as if the Evil One had presented to her excited brain, written in characters of fire, every fragment of evidence that could be condemnatory of her husband* or even suggest suspicion of him—making her, herself, his accuser.

Spirit and flesh had, for a brief while, succumbed; she and her faith had together fallen; all sure ground, whether of human or divine, love, had failed from under her feet; the flood had passed over her, overwhelming her, love, hope, faith, all, engulfed in the black waters: she had tasted the very bitterness of death.

It was not thus with her for long.

The hellish blackness cleared off her heaven; her prostrated faith was lifted up: as in a vision she seemed to see and feel the shining on her of her husband’s eyes, pure, loving, pitiful: she lying in the darkness of the deep night-watch was conscious of their shining.

She spoke:“Through life, through death, through all agony of grief, through all fear and hopeless suffering, God helping me, I will trust you, love! Oh, love, my own and only one, I will trust you!”

Soon after uttering those few words, she had fallen upon a sweet sleep, so quiet and soft-breathed, that Marie finding her in it, entering before dawn, bent over her, lamp in hand, and believed, for a moment, that this absolute and smiling rest was death.

Bat as she bent, Gonda’s eyes opened.

She sat up with a radiant face—a face so radiant, that Marie in wonder asked—“What has happened to madame?”

“Happiness, Marie; happiness has come td me in my sleep!”

“La pauvre!” sighed Marie.

Having set down her lamp, that Gonda by its light bright rise and dress, as she went about her work* preparing coffee for the early breakfast, and getting all things ready for departure, she said to herself—

“Happiness! no happiness comes to you on earth, poor soul! It is mad you are becom* ing, more and more mad; it may be so that the good God who knows what is best, takes pity on you.”

And now through the day, through the night, and again the day, as they journeyed on with only such pauses as were absolutely needful, Gonda strove to keep herself from thinking; for when she plunged into the night-mare-like chaos of improbabilities and incomprehensibilities, striving to sift truth from falsehood, it seemed to her that her reason was not firm-seated; that she could feel it totter; that something in her brain got strained to over-tension and, if she could not give it ease and rest, must quite give way.

Sometimes she succeeded in fixing her attention on minute incidents of the journey, and found herself plunging into profound depths of meditation on some trifle.

The greater part of the Way, however, she was just wrapped round by consciousness of love, recalling and living over the three months of complete happiness she had known and the three months of doubt and fear, of hope and deepening interest in life that had preceded them. She recalled every expression of peculiar significance she had seen on her husband’s face—thinking, “that was how he looked when he told me;”—“so he looked when I said:” she recalled, too, well-nigh every word he had spoken in her hearing. In every remembered word and look she found something to confirm her faith in him, in his love, as full and perfect as human love could be, in the purity of his stainless honour, in the true nobility of his heart and mind; and she felt afresh that could she ever again, for the briefest moment, doubt him, she ought to feel ready to tear from her bosom the traitorous heart that doubted against her will.

It was with such thoughts as these that this poor wife was fed and nourished and supported on that weary journey: so much was the mind in the ascendant, tliat she hardly felt that journey to be distressful: her pity was all for her companion, she had none for herself.

On the evening of the second day they passed over the swaying bridge and entered the walled and wave-washed town which was their destination—a town past which, proudly bordered by magnificent white poplars, sweeps —“regrettant le palais d’Avignon, les faran-doles et les symphonies, comme un grand vieillard qui agonize, semblant tout melanco-lique d’aller perdre å la mer et ses eaux et son nom, le Rhone, avec ses ondes fatiguees, dormantes, nxajestueusement tranquilles.”

Just within the walls the man at whose suggestion this journey had been undertaken was waiting: without a word he mounted beside the driver.

As soon as her eyes fell on him, Gronda’s whole aspect, even her attitude, changed.

Instead of reclining among the pillows with which, for her ease, the carriage had been filled, a patient languor over all her face, she now sat upright, her hands tightly clasped over her knees, her eyes glittering and watchful.

The carriage presently stopped before a •heavy arched gateway opening on a gloomy court. The man descended, and when, at a sign from him, Gonda and Marie had done so too, he dismissed the driver, telling him to go to the inn Petraque et Laure, and there wait for further orders.

Gonda, clinging to Marie’s arm, followed the silent guide across that court, through gloomy corridors that seemed to strike a death-like chill, across an inner, weed-grown, and more gloomy court, and under another and more frowning portal.

Sentries let them pass unquestioned, and doors were opened for them without delay: as he had promised, this man had prepared all for the visit.

In a corridor that seemed to Gonda more dismal and deadlier than any other they had traversed, their guide at length paused. Now, for the first time, he spoke to the women who had followed him: he noted the spectral whiteness of Gonda’s face, and the wide and •watchful burning of her blue eyes, and his tone, very smooth and mild, appeared to be one of genuine pity.

“Remember, unhappy woman, that to-night you can only see, not speak with the man whom you call husband—the man who lies in yonder cell. If, when you are convinced he is the man, you still care to have speech of him, I will procure you that to-morrow.”

Gonda answered only with a sign that he should continue to lead the way.

A few yards, and then he paused at a cell-door; he removed the screen from before a small round aperture, used by the jailors, the gens d’armes, or any privileged and inquisitive visitor to the prisons, to spy upon the unfortunate within.

Having looked through this loophole, turning, he signed to Gonda that she should do the same.

The cell was very dim; within its dark and heavy walls the night gathered early. The wild light burning now in Gonda’s own eyes, seemed to blind her; she looked, and for a time saw nothing but a certain space of darkness, in which nothing was distinguishable but one ray of sunset-reddened light that slanted down from a high window.

Continuing to look, she presently became aware that a man was sitting on the edge of a low pallet; his elbows rested on his knees, his hands were buried in the mass of hair, which, falling forward heavily, screened his face. At some slight noise he raised his head a little, and seemed to listen.

Gonda gasped for breath, and clinched Marie’s shoulder: her heart was knocking cruelly against her side.

And now, with a familiar gesture, pushing hack the masses of dark hair, the man turned his face full towards the failing light. As that gleam fell upon a noble brow, and seemed to enter lovingly the deep-set, sunken, most sad eyes, from Gronda there rang forth a heartrending cry, “Henri! husband! It is he! It is he!”

It rang up and down, that agonized, tortured cry—a cry of love, of longing, of despair; it rang up and down, and echoed to and fro, startling all hearts that heard it, and by many it was not soon forgotten.

And the prisoner outside whose cell it was uttered heard it, followed by a wild but feeble beating of the door? An expression of surprise and pity passed over his face: on the impulse of the moment he sprang up as if to rush to the rescue of the suffering creature who had uttered that cry; hut then, remembering his impotence, sank down again. For some moments he maintained an attitude of attention; tut, before the echoes of the footsteps of those who carried the senseless Gonda from the place had died out of the corridor, he had relapsed into the former stupor of dejection or of absorbed thought.

Had months of dull misery, of hopeless suffering, or sick suspense, blotted out love and memory together?

CHAPTER II

RENEWAL OF DOUBT.

Some hours passed before Gonda fully regained consciousness. Then she found herself lying on a bed in a small, downstairs, white and red room of the inn Petraque et Laure, which looks upon the river. Marie, passing an arm under her, had raised her as if she had been a baby, and was holding a cup to her lips. Gonda swallowed its contents in perfect silence, and then again lay motionless.

Though now her brain was actively awake, once more, lying with closed eyes she gave no outward sign of life and sense, till she heard the step and the voice of her husband’s accuser. Then immediately she raised herself; leaning on one arm she listened; the watch-fire kindled in her blue eyes. Poor eyes! they had a wild, strained look, and the white brow above them took lines of torturing intensity of effort.

She heard every word that passed in an outer room between Marie and the intruder. She heard him question Marie as to the state of her mistress’s feelings towards the prisoner now that she was convinced of his being her husband: questions which Marie did not answer. To Marie’s remonstrances at his untimely visit, her protestations that her mistress lay still in a half swoon, and could not see him, was answered that, as the trial was coming on earlier than had been anticipated —was fixed for the next day—if madame wished to see her husband, as she called him, first, there was no time to lose; but for this, he said, he would not to-night have troubled the unhappy woman.

Gonda got off the bed, and, hastily throwing a shawl over her disordered dress, passed into the next room, where she literally fell into the chair Marie pushed towards her.

Poor Marie was quiet with her mistress now; she had left off scolding and chiding her; the truth being that she had but little hope of her life escaping, when the time of her physical agony should come. She treated her now as she would have treated a sick child, doomed to die, for whom nothing more could he done, save to humour every whim.

“The trial is to take place to-morrow,” said Gronda.“You must take me now to see my husband.”

“You still care to see that wretch!”

“I care to see my husband,” answered Gonda, her voice trembling, for she was quivering from head to foot.

“You call him by that name still.”

“I say what I said before, if this poor prisoner is my husband, he is as innocent as his unborn child of alt charged against him. I must speak with him.”

“There is no time to lose, then.”

“I am ready now,” she answered, rising, and standing leaning on the chair.

He took out a paper and spread it on a table which he pushed towards her, bringing her also pen and ink.

“One moment’s delay, and I will conduct you.”

He pointed with his finger.“It is just here you must set your name. The little letters written, you shall at once be taken to the cell, and shall have speech with the prisoner.”

“What is this?” she questioned, pointing to the paper.

In a few words he explained to her that it was merely a declaration that in the prisoner she had recognized her husband.

“And he will be tried to-morrow!” she said, speaking as if out of a dream.“Oh, if I had but kept my senses! Marie, it was cruel of you to let me be dragged away. What did I do? Did I cry out so that he must have heard me? or did I make no noise?”

“You cried with a cry to have wakened the dead,” answered Marie, shuddering.

“And he? did there come no answer?”

“None.”

“Cruel, cruel, cruel to him,” said Gonda.“The cruellest cruel trial for him, for he . must have known my voice.”

“You called him by his name. You cried, ‘Henri!’ and * husband!’”

A sound like a low moan broke from Gonda; she set her teeth and wrung her hands.

“I am thinking of his suffering,” she said to Marie,

“You lengthen it by every moment you lose before signing this paper,” the man reminded her. “No sooner is it signed than vou shall start to see him, if you are able. ‘You shall speak with him alone, and at length.” . Disappointed at not having been able to wake in her a blind rage that should make her his tool; afraid now of what before it had not entered into his mind to fear—that she might even seek to screen and save the prisoner; some words of Marie’s having added yet another dread—that by to-morrow this suffering woman should be past the possibility of his use—he was desperately anxious for the written testimony of her recognition; and to procure it bribed her with a bribe he knew he could not pay.

Gonda was yet some moments before she spoke; when she did it was to say—

“But this prisoner, you told me, denied all knowledge of me. I had forgotten that; if that is true, he is not my husband. I cannot sign your paper, at least not till I have spoken with the prisoner.”

“And you shall not speak with him till you have signed it.” The teeth between which these words were spoken were set savagely.

“Oh, heaven, what perplexity! Oh God! Thou knowest I am sorely tried!” This said to herself and not to him.

“Sign the paper, madame,” urged Marie.“You must see this prisoner: if he is not monsieur, you can, perhaps, learn from him something concerning monsieur. Anyway, it can do no harm to sign this paper.”

“And then, if I find that what this man has said is true, I shall find that this poor prisoner is not my husband. And then when I meet my husband? Do you think I could stand before my husband, when, whether in heaven or on earth, I meet him again, and bear the light of his holy eyes upon my face, with the consciousness of a lie, a shameful lie, a lie, too, that said he lied, in my heart? You think me very brave. I am not brave enough for that”

There was a fever light over her face now, and as she finished speaking, and looked into the accuser’s crafty and baffled countenance, she laughed a low rich laugh of scorn.

“Mad!” muttered Marie.“Quite mad; you waste your time, good friend; you will not move her; you had better be gone.”

The sound of her own laugh struck a dreadful fear to Gonda’s heart too—a fear that she was indeed mad. She sank hack in her chair and covered her face with her hands, at first moaning at intervals. She remained thus some time. When she uncovered her face it was calm; turning to Marie, speaking quietly, she said—

“In our happy days you used to tell us many stories, Marie. Do you remember the days when we dined outdoors, on the west terrace, under the dropping olives, and you, sitting by us, told us such strange, sometimes such terrible tales? Do you remember those days, Marie? The earth was as fair as our fairest dreams of heaven; but, to remind us that it was not heaven, there was the sky, fairer yet, purer and brighter, bending over all.”

She paused; she seemed to have forgotten all the present, and to be rambling off into mere sunny recollections of the past; but, by-and-by, by an effort collecting her thoughts, she reminded Marie of the special story of which she had been thinking.

The story of a wife who, to save the life of her husband, had lied and borne false-witness —a story Marie had told in all genuine admiration of the cleverness and readiness of invention the woman displayed.

“My husband, hearing this story, said”—and now Gonda fixed her eyes upon her husband’s accuser—“that a woman who acted thus acted ignobly, showing her ignorance of the sacred duties and mysteries of true marriage, of the identification of honour and interests. He said that she must have had a blunt and narrow moral sense, or a low moral estimate of her husband; that, in fact, she acted selfishly, considering, poor creature, her own present misery should she lose her husband, not considering his highest interest and good; and ignorantly setting the body above the soul, the perishable above the imperishable. It was thus, almost exactly, that my husband spoke; I do not forget his words.

I am a happy wife to have such words from such a husband to be my guide now. You tell me that the man in prison declares he does not know me; and you ask me to sign a paper to say he is my husband. I say I will not, even if by so doing I could find my husband.”

“What says this poor woman, your mistress?” asked the man of Marie, with a gesture and accent of supreme and contemptuous bewilderment.

“My ears are no better than another’s,” was Marie’s answer.

“You do not care, if I rightly understand your proud, wild speech, to speak to this prisoner ? Yet two hours ago you claimed him as your husband!—two days ago declared him, if your husband, innocent!”

She answered him very faintly, rising to return to the inner room—

“I know nothing, except that I must not do wrong. Everything else is darkness and the deepest perplexity. I trust in God to deliver the innocent, and to bring the guilty and the bearer of false-witness to shame.”

So saying she left him, and, soon after, she heard him leave the house.

Gonda had formed the resolution, when this man was gone, to make Marie accompany her to the prison, and to try what bribes and prayers could do to gain her admission to the prisoner. This she now did; but neither bribes nor entreaties were any use; she must wait for the morning.

CHAPTER III

“it is not he!”

That night Gonda slept quietly. It seemed as if strange power was given her by the strong strain of will to hold physical evil in abeyance till she should feel—“There is no more I can do.”

She woke when the first rosy light reflected from the river, which caught it from the rosy east, shimmered upon her white wall, and she felt rested and wonderfully calm. She had a great hope buoying her up—that out of the trial of to-day the elucidation of mysteries so nearly proving fatal to this prisoner whom she hoped to save, some light would be thrown upon the fate of her husband. It seemed to her that this could hardly fail to be.

Marie, who had been sleeping by her, woke at her first movement. Marie, with her poor face so yellow and haggard, with her head bound in a dingy-coloured handkerchief folded turban-wise (the night head-dress she most affected), offered a strange contrast to her fair mistress, whose noble features seemed not so much to have been wasted and disfigured as to have been worked finer and transfigured by suffering,

“How is madame this morning?” Marie asked, suppressing a powerful yawn.“For me, I am sore and bruised from head to foot; I feel as if every bone in my body was broken.”

“I am, thank G-od! well enough, dear Marie. I have rested well. I am sorry you are so tired. You shall have rest soon, Marie. But now I will begin to dress. We must not be too late.”

“Where, mon Dieu! where is it that madame proposes to go to-day?”

“To the Palais de Justice, Marie.”

Marie, in absolute despair, burst into loud weeping and passionate exclamation; once more, for the last time, she remonstrated.

“Madame will kill herself!—straight out, immediately, on the spot—never return to Les Cypres again!”

Gonda quietly waited for a lull in this storm of southern vehemence; then she said—“Marie, by being present at this trial today, I can perhaps save an innocent man from I know not what sentence: a man who, though not my husband—even if not my husband—how can I—how can I know what jugglery has been practised on me and on him?—is, J know, guiltless of the crimes they accuse him of: for I do not believe that poor girl Colombo is dead; and if he is her husband he is not mine. By hearing all that passes at this trial to-day, Marie, I shall, I know, learn something about my husband.” Without another word, Marie began to assist her mistress; a little later, having brought her and seen her drink a cup of coffee, she went out to get some necessary information about the time.at which the trial would begin, and the means of gaining entrance to the court; but all she did was done under protest, and to humour the madness of“cette pauvreand before she returned to the inn, where Gonda anxiously awaited her, she despatched a message to Chantreuil, by the driver who was returning, to beg Monsieur Vauprez, and, if possible, Madame also, to lose no time in joining them, for she did not believe her mistress would ever reach Les Cyprus alive if she tried to return there. Marie had long ago given up having any. theory at all either as to the character or the fate of her master, feeling that the whole matter was a mystery beyond her: if he was a guilty man, then he was so darkly and deeply wicked as seemed inconceivable; yet, if innocent, what had become of him? But, any way, he had brought grief and trouble upon her adored mistress; therefore he was an enemy. For the same reason, poor Marie, though she did not know it, and would have been shocked to believe it, regarded Providence also as an enemy.

When Gonda, dragging Marie with her rather than leaning on her, by-and-by made her way to the Palais de Justice, a crowd was already before the door. Something in her aspect, in her white face, and in the intense expression of her burning blue eyes, made the people give way before her; a murmur followed her, and questions were asked about her which no one there could answer.

They gained an entrance into the Palais, Marie and Gonda, only to find themselves in one of the outer rooms, crowded with black-robed advocates and other officials, and to be told that the great chamber where the assize-court was being held was full—absolutely full.

Many curious and some impertinent glances were levelled at Gonda: of all she was unconscious; she had only sight and sense for things that affected her object.

“I must get in!—room must be made for me!” she said to an official, who had approached and questioned her as to whether she had evidence to give, or was peculiarly interested in either of the two important trials to come off that day. Answering yes to both questions, her name was then asked.

She gave it in a clear, strained voice, that thrilled through the silence that had fallen on the room, all assembled there having turned to look at her and listen to her,—

“Madame de Triancourt.”

“The wife of the accused then?”

“I can answer no more questions here,” she said.

Whispers, smiles, and gibes now circulated. Somebody said,“Parbleu! toutes les deux sont diablement jolies!”

“You have seen the murdered woman, then?” was asked.

“Her portrait only, painted by the prisoner: it will be produced to-day. The style is different. Apparently, our friend had a taste for variety; but the claims to beauty are equal. C’est simplement affaire du goiit”

The man who had questioned Gonda, and whose manner was grave and courteous, now bade her and Marie follow him: apparently he was a person in authority, for way was made for him respectfully. He led them through this black-thronged room and up a staircase, along the length of a great banqueting chamber, down a narrow private staircase, through an empty ante-room, and then, before opening a door, which he told them would introduce them into the court, he asked Gonda a few questions. His appearance and manner inspired her with confidence; she answered simply. He promised to keep near her, and to watch for her the time when she had best speak, opened the door, which was behind the platform on which the president was seated, and placed a chair for her in the space upon that platform reserved for privileged spectators.

With a word of heartfelt .thanks, she sank down upon the seat, behind which Marie stationed herself. The great sea of human feces was before her: it moved with dizzy, billowlike undulations, or she reeled. She clutched the arm of her chair to hold herself still, and elosed her eyes: she prayed with all power she could gather together for strength to endure’ a little longer.

When they entered the room the proceedings, had not begun; the prisoner had not been placed at the bar; but now, Boon, Marie touched her mistress on the shoulder.

Gonda roused herself: her gaze wandered over the court. Now, as the supposed murderer was introduced, one hum and movement of intense, suppressed excitement.

Presently Gonda’s eyes found and fixed themselves upon the accused. At the felon’s bar, a fettered and guarded prisoner, she saw a slight, tail form, the attitude one of proud patience; the head was at first slightly averted; the masses of tangled hair fell forward, and somewhat hid the face; but how familiar was every outline!

“CTest bien lui!—c’est Monsieur!—c’est bien lui!” hissed Marie, bending to her mistress’s ear.

Gonda leant forward. Her whole soul gathered into one question, she gazed at the prisoner. She was at some distance. Her own eagerness, the intensity of her effort, half blinded her. The force of her gaze, however, had magnetic attraction: it drew the prisoner’s face to face her face: it drew the prisoner’s eyes to meet her eyes. With languid interest and vague wonder, brushing his hair back from his brow, struck and perplexed by the passionateness of her gaze, he for a few moments met and returned it; but soon his dimmed and wearied eyes left Gonda’s face, and sought about among the crowd.

“It is not he!” breathed Gonda;“hut, oh, my God, how like!”

Her hand pressed tightly over her heart, she sank back in her chair utterly exhausted, for the moment stunned.

For the next five or ten minutes she was conscious of nothing that went forward.

The prisoner, with mournful eyes, still searching and seeking, seemed to take little interest in the proceedings.

To the grave man who had brought her to where she sat, who still stood near her, Gonda by-and-by turned to ask how soon the evidence she had to give in favour of the prisoner, while disclaiming all knowledge of him, could be heard.

“I must speak soon,” she said, her hand still pressed upon her heart, and her breath Coming with difficulty,“or I may not be able to speak at all. I am very ill; perhaps I am dying.”

While she was speaking, before he had time to answer, a confused hum and murmur that had begun at the far end of the court spread and deepened to a general clamorous hubbub.

The densely-packed mass of humanity split, opening a way.

The voice of the advocate was drowned: intense excitement prevailed: the prisoner shared it: a cry, a name—the name of the woman for whose murder he was there, escaped his lips:—

“Colombe!”

It was she who made her wild way through the yielding crowd; she approached the prisoner as near as she Was able, and fell upon her knees—her eyes and her clasped hands raised towards him*

From her parted lips no sound escaped, and her eyes were tearless: her gestures and her agonized white face supplicated pardon more forcibly than any words could have done,

A breathless silence had succeeded to the general clamour.

“Colombe! pauvre enfant!” Those words falling from the prisoner, spoken in low accents of intense tenderness, thrilled through the court.

The poor girl kneeling there, struggled convulsively for power of speech; rising, she turned to the president. A momentary appeal with eyes and hands was all she was capable of, then she burst into wild and hysterical weeping.

“Let me go to her!” cried Gonda.

Her grave friend led her round behind the platform to where the girl stood, and then he begged permission to address the president. He began, but could not gain a hearing.

On seeing Gonda, Colombe cried,“It is all true, then! That is she, his other wife!”

Those words were also heard through all the court, and some one cried (and Gonda believed she recognised the voice) that if the prisoner was cleared from the charge of murder, he stood convicted of bigamy by the presence of two wives. Convicted beyond all doubt.

“This lady,” cried Gonda’s friend in a stentorian voice,“denies all knowledge of the prisoner, as, it is known, he has done of her.”

It was impossible that this informal trial, where the murderbd came forward to clear the murderer, should be carried on according to any received order or tradition. Leave was granted to Gonda’s .self-constituted advocate to make his statement and to question the prisoner, Gonda suggesting the questions.

“Why do you take the name de Triancourt?”

“It is my own.”

“Your Christian name?”

“Hubert.”

“Have you a brother?”

“I had: whether I still have I do not know.”

“His name?”

“Henri.”

“When did you see him last?”

“About sixteen years ago.”

Here Colombe fell on her knees again, and clasping Gonda’s hand, wept over it and kissed it.

Gonda’s friend turning to her with some question, the president bade her, in a few words, tell her own story. She did so, and afterwards appealed to him with a passionately, solemn appeal for help to find her husband—appealed to the people in the crowded court. Could no one there among those hundreds give her hope or help to find her husband?

There came no answer.

Intensely she listened.

There came no answer.

With a cry of suppressed anguish, she now turned to Marie and entreated to be taken from this place quickly.

She was carried back to the white and red room of the little inn, Petraque et Laure, with no more knowledge of her husband’s fate than when she left it.

“What is become of my husband? Where, where is my husband?” was now her incessant cry, her heart-rendingly piteous, her conscious and her unconscious cry; the question she addressed to all who approached her. Night and day, day and night, now low, now loud, now a moaning, faint appeal and now an impassioned demand, wrung from her now by physical and now by mental anguish, those words resounded—“Where, where is my husband?”

CHAPTER IV

colombe’s story.

After Gonda had been assisted from the court, and the hum and murmur of compassionate excitement that followed had died away, the poor girl, Colomhe, was subjected to a long and close cross-examination, by which, with more curiosity than pity, the whole story of her life was drawn from her.

She had to relate how she had first come to know her husband by meeting him, now and again, in the neighbourhood of her father’s farm; and how, after they had thus met some few times, he had asked her mother’s permission to make a picture of her. This permission having been granted, had led to his coming often to the house, and the intimacy that resulted had been made closer by his discovering in her the foster-sister and the namesake of a dead sister of his own. Every one had always been proud to receive him, and to make him welcome to the house—every one, except a certain Turquet, a man whom she described as a sort of lawyer and land-agent, to whom, as almost a child, he being old enough to be her father, her parents had promised her, at a time when this man had, in some way, got power over them, which he said, and they believed, would enable him to turn them out of their farm if they thwarted him, denying him their daughter, upon whom he had set his fancy.

From the very first time of his finding the stranger, at the farm, Turquet had seemed full of jealous dislike of him, not shown openly, but betrayed by envious words and actions. Before her portrait was finished, the time drew near when she was to have been married; and the nearer it drew the more unhappy she became, so unhappy, that at last she fell ill; and then, somehow, one day, before she knew what she was doing, she had told all her troubles to Monsieur de Triancourt. He seemed shocked; he had not before known that she was betrothed, but he encouraged her to refuse to marry a man she did not love.

Acting on this encouragement, she made her parents very angry. They began to treat her harshly: they accused her of being in love with a heretic and a foreigner, and set her confessor at her, to talk to her about the crime of it. This accusation made her aware of what she had not suspected before, believing that she regarded Monsieur de Triancourt as too far above her to be the object of her love: but now she found she loved him. It was not long before he found this out, and then he told her that he, too, loved her, and if she would trust him, trust in his honour and his love, he would save her from being forced to marry a man she did not love, and who he believed to be a person of bad character, and would make her bis wife. She had loved him so, she would have been content to be his servant, she said simply; so there was no need to say how happy she was in the thought of being his wife. He had hoped, at first, by proof of Turquet’s bad character to win the parents’ consent to their daughter’s marriage with himself. While he was endeavouring to effect this, however, Turquet, who suspected their attachment, urged on his own marriage, and excited the parents to such tyrannous, almost brutal behaviour, that Colombo could no longer remain at home.

On that very November night—the night of the 21st of November—when Henri de Triancourt had been brought in a dying state to Les Cypres, the elopement had been safely effected, and Colombe escaped to her lover’s arms.

It was clear, beyond possibility of doubt, that it was to the extraordinary likeness borne by one brother to the other that the lovers owed the success of their enterprise, and the peace and security of the few first months that followed their marriage.

“And after our marriage,” cried Colombe, turning to her husband,“he would not surely have had power to hurt us if I had not been a faithless and a wicked wife.”

At this point, Colombe was told to describe Turquet, and when she had done so, a search was made through the densely-crowded court for a man who, by this person and that, had been seen here, there, on this side, on that, dose by, right opposite, a few moments (as each one believed) ago, but who now was nowhere to be found. After some time had been passed in fruitless search, Colombe was bidden to resume her story.

“Had she been happy with her husband? Had he been kind to her?” she was asked.

She repeated these questions instead of answering them; but the face she turned towards her husband, and her clasped hands raised towards him as if praying his forgiveness of the profanation to which, through her, their love was being subjected, were answer enough.

What, then, had led to her conceiving any doubt of him? What had led to her flight from her home? At whose instigation had it been taken?

To this she answered, that during an absence of her husband’s—a longer absence than he had ever before been compelled to take—she had met in Rosançon, where she had gone, hoping to find a letter from him waiting for her at the post-office (and in doing this, in going there alone, she had, she owned, transgressed what would have been his command had he ever needed to use command, for he did not like her to be far from home alone), she had met in Rosançon that day, the last day but one of May, quite suddenly, just in turning the comer of a street, the man Turquet.

Having by his gentleness disarmed her fears, by his pretended pity awakened her wonder, he had induced her, telling her he had news to tell her of her husband, to allow him to walk beside her, not in any private or suspicious place, but just in the public promenade under the acacias: half-screened behind a tree he had made her wait, and presently had shown her, on the opposite side of the broad road, her husband, as she then believed, whom she had imagined to be in England, and with him a lady whose hand was on his arm. She had started from her half-hiding place at the sight, and was about to rush across the road, but Turquet, held her by one arm, detaining her, and just then, her husband (as she had not doubted him to be) had looked across the road and met her eyes and turned from her towards the lovely lady on his arm, giving her no sign of recognition.

This had stunned her like a heavy blow: nothing afterwards had seemed real. Turquet made her follow these two at some distance to the hotel, at one end of the Allees, and then,he took her to a shop beneath a balcony of this hotel, and, detaining her in the doorway, bade her listen to the voices in the balcony above—one of them, as she had then thought, her husband’s, the other that of a lady. The afternoon was very still; the sea was sleeping on the shore; those voices were heard distinctly. When she had listened long enough to hear her call him“husband” and he call her“wife”—she had learnt a little English, and those words and their meaning she knew very well—Turquet had led her to a little distance, where, unseen, she could watch the balcony, that she might be sure the speakers were the two she had seen. She looked then upon the beautiful lady who had called him husband, and, meanwhile, Turquet told her how she had been wronged and ruined, and was, indeed, no wife. He told her who the lady was, and where she lived, and told her everything as if he was grieved to the soul that it was true.

She had, by the suddenness of all this, been stunned into a state of stupidity: she listened to everything he told her, and contradicted nothing, asked no questions. It had all seemed like a very bad dream, from which she was expecting to wake.

She had, after this, done just what this man, who seemed so sorry for her, who was so gentle and kind to her, and who promised to take her to her mother and win forgiveness for her, bade her to do.

Only in one thing had she disobeyed him; in writing and sending to Les Cypres, where he had told her that lady lived, that frantic letter which had been the cause of Henri’s fatal journey. She had not told her secret to Madelon, for he had made her swear to reveal it to none, telling her he had a scheme for the saving of her honour (he had made her believe, what he knew to be false, that this other wife was the first and legal wife—that she had been deceived by a false marriage), and for the legitimization of the child of which she was soon to be the mother.

Here the poor girl interrupted herself in her story, and, bursting into most violent weeping, threw herself down before her husband again, crying—

“Kill me, kill me, husband! You would have loved it so, our little child, and it is dead! and if I did not kill it I am as guilty as if I had. It is all my fault, my fault! If I had believed nothing against you, my husband—if I had waited quietly for your return in the home you had given me, then we had not lost our child!”

It was long before Colomhe could continue her story; when she did, she had only to tell how her flight had been all of Turquet’s contriving, she all the time believing that he would take her home; how he had kept her a close prisoner in a lonely house, under the charge of a woman, over whom he seemed to have absolute power, and who feared him with a deadly fear as she had feared this woman; how she had had a violent fever, during which her baby had been born dead, after which she had continued in a sort of stupor, caring for nothing; how, in the brief absence of her jailoress, the white-haired woman whom she dreaded so, she had heard from another woman, who had waited on her instead, the story of a man, young, handsome, and a gentleman, who lay in prison, awaiting trial, charged with the murder of his peasant wife, and with having committed bigamy, marrying an English lady in the first wife’s lifetime. Hearing this, she had begun vaguely to suspect some plot by which she had been deceived and made the instrument of her husband’s destruction: she had waited and watched her opportunity night and day, three days and nights, and then had at length escaped, only just in time.

That was about all poor Colombe had to tell. She spoke with such tender and penitent grace, and such perfect simplicity, that all hearts were moved in her favour. It was to her husband she turned for judgment.

“I am not fit to be called your wife any more,” she said.“Oh, how I have made you suffer! Can you forgive me? I can hardly even hope to be called your -wife any more.”

She was answered, by the pity of his sunken, mournful eyes, in a way that nearly broke her poor little heart.

CHAPTER V

A CHANGED CRY.

“Little one, where is your father? Baby, my baby, where is your father? Little child, my little child, where is your father?”

Being now a mother, the poor wife’s cry had changed to this. Expressed with an infinite variety of difference the cry, the question, was always the same.

Lying in her bed in the same small room, the whitewashed, red-tiled room of the inn Pètrarque et Laure, gazing at the frail, untimely blossom, the minute and white morsel of humanity lying in her weak arms, or, when they were too weak and weary, upon the pillow beside her, Gonda would murmur those words and words of kindred sense, in as far as they had any sense, great part of the weary day.

“Petite, qu’est devenu votre pere? My little child, where is your father? Your father, my husband, your father? Little daughter, you are not my little daughter if you do not want your father. Little daughter, I think you are my little daughter, for you look pale and wan—you pine for your father.”

So she would go on, ringing changes on such words; the low murmur would rise to a wail, the wail would sink to a murmur: so her voice would rise and fall and rise till Marie often would rush from the room and cry,“She kills me!”

Doctor Vauprez and his wife were in the town. Colombe, the lovely little penitent, the gentlest voiced and eyed and. tenderest-‘handed little woman, was Gronda’s chief nurse. Hubert, immediately on regaining his liberty, had started on a journey, to seek his lost brother, or rather to seek some tidings of him, some hint of his fate, some clue to his disappearance.

To watch with set gaze at morning, and at evening, the glimmering light dancing on the western or the eastern wall, as the low sun, rising or setting, glittered upon the river, for the hours between to gaze upon the child, murmuring, with all possible inflections of weary and yet patient pathos, such words as have been written, and other words at once too sacred and too devoid of any absolute sense to be recorded—this was Gonda’s life for many a day.

Only if any one about her spoke to her in a way that was meant to rouse her to give some sign of sense and reason, as, now and then, first one and then another would do, looking at them fixedly with her greatening eyes that seemed to stretch and strain themselves to take in the meaning of the words she heard, she would breathe the old question —“Qu’est devenu mon mari ?”

L At other times they might come and go in her room, pass to and fro by her bedside, and she would heed them as little as if they had been shadows: in truth, to her they were shadows less real and less substantial than the phantoms of her brain.

She had lain in this state for three weeks, ever since the birth of her child, and it was now the end of October: it yet wanted a few weeks to the expiration of a year since that day when she first saw her husband—and in this year she had lived her life—when Hubert returning from an absolutely fruitless journey to the walled and wave-washed town of his imprisonment, desired to speak to her.

How often, almost at every turn, had he •been baffled by the strong likeness he bore to Henri! and now he clung, as to a last hope, to the vague belief that by closely questioning Honda he might learn some trifling incident—unknown, perhaps, to every one besides—which might serve as a faint clue or guide by which to direct his future search.

Doctor Vauprez shook his head over the futility of any attempt to gain information from the poor wife: but the attempt itself he was willing to sanction. Some change must be made in her stale, some shock given, something done to rouse, her from the apathy, verging on imbecility, through which she was sinking to her grave.

They watched anxiously for the fairest opportunity, and on the afternoon of the second day after Hubert’s return, when Gronda woke from a deeper and calmer sleep than often came to her, and, after taking some nourishment, seemed stronger and more collected than she had yet done since she was carried from the court of justice, Doctor Vauprez told her that her husband’s brother was waiting in the outer room to see her.

Of the words spoken to her, however, she seemed only to catch the one word husband; she began her usual question, but stopped herself, and gazed earnestly in Doctor Yauprez’s face: he repeated his words.

She passed her hand over her forehead, pressed it upon her poor strained eyes, and said, piteously,“Teach me to remember—to keep myself together! I. get all abroad, and am lost in the darkness. You do not know, perhaps, how hard it is to find oneself in such darkness. Who did you say wanted me?”

“Your brother,”

“My brother!—I have no brother. No brother, no sister, no father, no mother, no friend, and no lover,”—she said this in a sort of chant.“But,” she added then,“I had a husband, who was all, and more. Where, where is my husband? I ask in heaven, and I ask on earth—Where, where is my husband? I am just one great question, and I am always listening for my answer. It does not come. Shall I know when I am dead?”

“It is Hubert de Triancourt, the brother of your husband, who wishes to see you. You remember-”

“Remember!” she interrupted, a dull despair clouding her face—“I remember nothing. Do not ask me to remember. Do not try and make me remember.”

Doctor Vauprez turned away. At this moment Hubert entered the room, and came to .the side of the bed where his wife, penitent and patient little Colombe, was standing, the baby upon her bosom. A sad, sweet pleasure was it to. poor Colombe to have another woman’s baby there, pressed against the heart that was still ever weeping for her own.

Gonda, when her eyes fell upon Hubert, uttered a startled cry—a cry that made them all tremble. Then, as she looked into his face, her own grew wonderfully clear, calm, and intelligent.

“Good Doctor Vauprez, I remember,” she said, after a moment turning to him with a smile.“Do not, any more, be in such trouble about me, for I remember it all.”

Then she held out her hand to Hubert: he stooped and kissed the wasted hand, and continued to hold it.

“Sit down,” she said,“that I may see you better.”

Colombe pushed a chair towards him with her foot, her arms holding the baby.

He sat down, and Gonda, with her other hand, with a curiously matronly tenderness in her gesture, pushed back his hair, which, when he stooped, had fallen forward, and with such eyes as made a repressed sob almost choke him, fell to reading his face.

There was perfect silence: only, through the window, which was open to let in the sunny afternoon, came the wash of the river flowing slowly by.

Hubert did not look as much younger than his brother as he was: his face was more —not readable

—not readable— eyes of Gonda’s! bore their gaze till he could no longer —the intensity of their hungry suffer—not readable—to be eating into his soul.

—not readable—his brow upon her hand, and so evaded it. Colombe softly laid her cheek against him —just—not readable—that mute caress expressing her consciousness of his suffering.

Doctor Vauprez had gone away.

Still silence.

He kept his brow bowed down upon her hand till she spoke, saying—“Brother!”

At that word he looked up.

Softly sighing, she said—“Looking at you has done me good. You are like him—you are very like him. It has done me good. It has grown so cool and quiet here” (touching her forehead);“but I fear it may not last, so you will be patient with your brother’s wife. I know you will. I hope I am not mad. Sometimes it is all black darkness with me, and sometimes burning flame, and sometimes it is as if I were washed away by the cool wash of the broad water; but I hope I am not mad. For my husband’s sake I hope I am not mad—for his child’s sake I hope I am not mad.—Brother, you have not kissed your brother’s child.”

Colombe held it to him. ‘

How Gonda watched as he stooped over it and touched its waxen cheek and hands with gentle lips, very sadly: pitifully his little wife’s dark eyes, tear-dimmed, met his: he drew her towards him, and, holding her face between his hands, kissed her on the forehead with a heavy sigh.

“Brother and sister, you will have other children,” said Gonda;“but my little one, will she ever know the touch of her father’s lips? Give me my poor child,” she said to Colombe;“I feel strong enough to hold her.” When it was in her arms she murmured over it—

“It was your father’s brother kissed you, sweet!—your sweet father, sweet!—your dear father, dear! When, when, when will your father kiss you, darling? And your poor mother, darling? It is a weary time, my baby—a weary, weary time!”

So murmuring, laying her cheek against the little head, she closed her eyes, and seemed to have forgotten the presence of Hubert; but presently she raised her head, the blue eyes opened on him, and she said—

“You wanted to speak to me? Speak now, dear brother, I will try to understand, and I know you will be patient with me. I have had trouble and illness, and I am weak and dull, but I know you will be patient.”

“Patient, my poor, poor sister! Yes.”

“You have no hope to give me. I saw that in your face.”

Holding the tiny baby to her with one arm, the other was stretched out to his brother; with more strength than one would have looked for from those wasted fingers they clung round his.

“Alas! I can tell you nothing: I want to question you, and then I start on a fresh search.”

“I will try and answer you,” she said meekly: her fingers tightened round his hand convulsively, as if, by that clutch, she hoped to hold her reason and her memory at command.

“Can yon remember anything, any trifling thing, known only to yourself, that seems to you t6 throw the slightest light on—on anything? My questions must be vague, alas!”

She shook her head: her eyes rested on Colombe.

Henri bade his wife leave them. Then Gonda said—

“You know about the letter. You know why he went, and where. When he came back he would have told me everything; but he did not come back, you see. Qu’est—” she checked herself and added—“ No, I know nothing that you do not know.”

“Alas! why he went, and where, is clear enough, That frantic letter of my poor child’s was the cause of all. She feels it—how she feels it! Yet, to go further back, it is I am the cause of all. My headstrong distrustfulness, my obstinate pride—but I will not now trouble you with this. Why he went, and where, is clear enough. But why did he not return? What happened to him? From nowhere does any light fall on that.”

“Hush!” she cried, snatching her hand from his.“Tell, me nothing if you cannot tell me what has become of my husband. I ask and ask: somewhere in the world there is some one who could answer me: find them, brother, find them, for his sake, for his child’s sake, lest I go mad, quite mad!”

“Poor sister, poor child!” he said, soothingly.“Be calm, be calm! All that a man can do and may do I have vowed to myself to do; I will never rest till I have done. If this word, this simple saying so, is not enough—then on his child’s head-”

“No, no, no!” she said.“Your word, your simple word—I want no more. Are you not his brother ?”

The eyes he bent on her had a fullness of pity and oi love, beneath which she grew calm once more. Her hand sought his again. Seeing this, he ventured to question further.

“Besides that man, Turquet, the man to whom my wife was once betrothed, my enemy, and who, unhappily, cannot be found, had your husband no enemy? Was there no one who had real or fancied cause to hate him?”

“Real cause no man or woman had to hate him—but—” here her hand strayed to her forehead,“ there was one who hated him—an old man, however, decrepit and almost crippled: how could he harm him? No, no, that could not be.”

“Still,” he said, gently,“in,the absence of all other clue I will follow this. Tell me what this old man is like and where to find him.”

He was easily described, and Marie, who for the last few minutes had been listening at the door, told him what Doctor Vauprez had told her, that immediately on her mistress’s leaving Les Cyprus, the old Mãitre Siccand had reappeared, and had re-established himself in his old quarters there, the fermier’s cottage, from which his master had dismissed him.

Gonda did not hear this; her brows knit painfully she seemed lost in thought.

“An old and feeble man,” she murmured,“and my husband was young and very strong. How could that old man harm him?”

Now suddenly a great change came over her; the old depth of rich carnation colour flushed her cheeks for one instant, and then left a deadly pallor; her eyes were wildly terrible. She almost screamed—

“Oh, blind, blind, blind! It is he who did it. It is he who knows. The path overhanging the sea! A child’s hand might have been fatal! Oh, my God! my God! why didst thou send this blindness upon me?”

Her excitement became intense.

They took the child from her, for she seemed to be growing delirious: for a long time she talked wildly, and the most vivid flame was burning in her blue eyes; but it burnt itself out, and she sank back white and exhausted.

Marie wishing to rid her of this new mental torment, reminded her of her search below the spot where the path so dangerously overhung the sea, and declared that what she suspected was impossible. But the idea had taken firm possession of her mind: it was for her now a fact.

The scene presented itself to her with frightful vividness; and with frightful vividness she described it,

Repeating often—“Blind, blind, blind!” she added, by-and-by—

“Forgive me, oh my Father, if I have murmured at Thy mercy, which has made me blind! It was not hidden from Thy eyes. Thou didst look upon his agony. In Thee alone was help and hope.”

But the anguish of her thoughts was too much for her weak flesh, and she lost consciousness.

CHAPTER VI

“NI arbre, ni ombre, ni ame.”

On that first day of June, having past the ridge of the olive-hoary hill—having first paused upon it and turned to gaze back upon the home-world of beauty into which Gonda leaned to look after him, not knowing, though by its quailing before this separation her heart seemed to know, for how long she should have to think of that look as the last which had been granted to her bodily eyes of him who was for her as the essence and concentration of all her world held and her life knew of physical and spiritual beauty, love and good—having past that ridge, Henri de Triancourt passed out of the fruitful land of corn, wine, and oil; of the myrtle, the jasmin, and the rose, the fig-tree, the orange, and the mulberry, and took his way down a comparatively bare and rugged hill-side, across the wide stony bed of a half-dried stream—its borders shaded by stately white poplars, but its waters brown, ill-smelling, and unctuous, polluted by the refuse from many an olive-mill—and then on across arid and stone-strewn country, at the foot of those hills which, morning and evening, take such wonderful rose-reds, rich violets, and delicate and subtle anemone colours; hills whose crests catch the snows early and whose cavernous hollows hold them late.

The last of this range, running into the sea forming the Cape, called by the people Sainte Gudule, la petite, he mounted by a steep .and narrow pathway to about half its height. Then where the level track, crossing its rugged brow, seemed to hang midway between sea and sky, he sat down to rest. The most arduous part of his walk was now accomplished; he dried the moisture from his brow, and turned his face to the light breeze.

A most solitary scene.

The hill-side bare, burnt, stony. The sea, stretching away from beneath his feet, burning blue through the light, white, diaphanous vapours, which were slowly rising from it into the morning air, looking as if“peut-étre, dans les hauteurs immaterielles, quelque sainte du ciel, de son voile de nonne s’fetait-elle allegee en frdlant le soleil”—the sea, which on smoother shores murmured drowsily, here, immediately below, gurgled and splashed among the black sharp teeth of half-hidden rocks with a hollow and ominous sound.

For several hours now Monsieur de Triancourt had pursued his way with relentless haste, and a face that seemed to show that his mind was as sternly exercised as was his body. As he rested here he re-read the letter that had caused this journey, the letter of frenzied farewell written by poor Coiombe, and sent by Madelon, through Maitre Siccand, to Les Cyprus.

There was little doubt in Henri’s mind that in the Hubert to whom this letter of wild % accusation and of anguished despair was addressed, he should find his long-lost young brother who fifteen years ago had broken from his guardianship in anger and jealous displeasure; of whom he had long ago learnt to think as dead, all effort to find him or to hear tidings of him having failed; and he having had the more reason to believe that the poor boy was dead, because the vessel in which he had ascertained that he had sailed for New Zealand had been wrecked, and, with very few exceptions, all on board, both crew and passengers, lost. Now, Henri thought, returning to Europe after a long sojourn abroad, nothing was more natural than that his brother should have been attracted towards this district, where some of the happiest years of his childhood had been spent. It was, therefore, no very strange or wonderful“chance” that had drawn the two brothers so near.

“Cruelly and cowardice cannot be in the character of my father and mother’s boy,” said Henri, as he closed poor Colombo’s letter.“Passionate, imprudent, criminally careless he might be, but neither cowardly nor cruel. If Hubert has grown up as strongly resembling me, as our mother said he would, it is easy to imagine how some painfully complicated mistake may have arisen, and may be the sole cause of this poor woman’s despair.”

Very soon Henri pursued his road: there were not many moments to-day when Gouda’s face of heart-wringing pain was not present to him: he was driven onwards by anxious haste to regain Les Cypres before she should have begun to expect him.

When some hours later he left Rougemont behind him and turned homeward, it was with a lightened but still anxious heart.

The deserted state of the house and cottage —Pierre and Madelon were then searching for some trace of Colombo—baffled him, and, when coupled with the expressions of desperation and despair used by Colombo in her letter, made him fear that she might already have taken some wild step. But he felt well convinced, after what he had heard from Mére Vichétte and her grandson, that the girl was in reality his brother’s wife. He was also convinced that she was their sister’s foster-sister of whom he had long been in search; fox’ he had seen a book which had been a present of his mother’s to that girl’s mother, ranged upon a shelf with others in the little room where he had sat down to wait. He had waited in the house, Le Colombier, till, for Honda’s sake, he could wait no longer: he had written a letter to his unknown sister-in-law, and left it on the table, but afterwards had returned to add something to it—had been dissatisfied with it, and, putting the letter itself in his pocket, had tom up the envelope and .thrown the fragments on the hearth, where Gonda found them.

All his doubts and difficulties as to what to do had at last resolved themselves into a determination to talk the whole matter over with his wife, and to-morrow, by carriage along the road, taking her with him, to go again to Rougemont. Henri had hardly left Le Colombier half an hour when Hubert reached it from an opposite direction.

It was about four in the afternoon when Monsieur de Triancourt approached the spot where he had rested in the morning.

Where he had sat in the morning there now crouched some living thing: it rose, and’ as he drew close he had no difficulty in recognizing Maitre Siccand. The old man stood waiting and gesticulating till Henri was pretty close, then he said,“Marie, who met me in the market-place, sent me to meet you—to tell you that madame, your wife—”

There he paused.

A sudden qualm of fear that some misfortune had happened to Gonda, that she had met with some accident, or that she was taken ill, left no room in Henri’s heart for other thoughts, or he might have been upon his guard.

“Speak,” he cried,“tell me what has happened.”

Maltre Siccand stood close up against the rock. Henri was on the perilous brink: the old man laid his claw on Henri’s arm (a familiarity which from that man Monsieur de Triancourt would not have suffered had he been less pre-occupied), lifted himself up enough to be able to peer into his face, then gathered all his strength together for one effort, and gave a savage yell of triumph as he saw his victim sway, over-balance, disappear.

Maltre Siccand, that push given, threw himself back flat against the rock, lest the falling man should clutch at him. He continued thus for some time, glaring at the spot from which his victim had disappeared.

He was alone: alone on the bare and burning hill-side, where was“ni arbre, ni ombre, ni &me,” only this demon.

He kept still and listened: he heard the loose bits of rock and soil that had given way under Monsieur de Triancourt’s feet, falling and falling. When that was finished—when all was still—crouching down on hands and knees he looked over the brink.

He could see nothing of his victim: the tide was out—the jagged rocks lay bare. He could not doubt of his fearful success, but, as he peered over, he would have liked to see the mangled body, writhing in its last agony, lying beneath. His evil old eyes were dim, and the coast lay too far below. That satisfaction was not his. Nevertheless he could not doubt of complete success. Shaking a clenched hand over the abyss, he fiercely exulted, he screamed out imprecations and blasphemies, and uttered inhuman’ yells of triumph.

“Allez, my fine young sir!” he cried.“Call me again ivrogne, coquin, ruisseau de paroles! You have chased a poor old bonhomme from his home, and what good has it done you? I was not fit to look upon my young mistress! I was to be kicked out of her path! Which of us would she sooner look upon now with her pretty eyes? Which of us would she sooner touch now with her scornful fingers? Faugh! not you. You are but a mass of bloody clay. Oh! the stately young poplar is laid low; and by the twisted, withered, blighted old vine-stock! Oh! the beautiful young sir, the proud young sir, the good young sir! Good—with the two pretty wives! Good!”

So, for a while, he raged and raved, interspersing such words with others of frightful profanity, wagging his horrible old head over the abyss—while his eyes twinkled and glittered and gleamed.

This was his hour: the supreme moment of his life.

By-and-by he looked to right, to left, above, again below, leaning as far over as he dared; no soul, no sound, save the lazy lapping of the quietly-ebbing tide some way out: then rising, he shambled away.

“C’est dommage!” he said, as he plunged his hands into his empty pockets: already his content was on the wane, the first edge taken off his exultation, as he thought that there was doubtless money, possibly much money, on the person of his victim.

“C’est dommage!” he repeated, and began to speculate how far it might be safe to confide his secret to any of his vile intimates, and taking boat at high water to search for and plunder the body. Meanwhile the hill-side told no story. It fell to the blue water and rose to the blue sky: the lizards flashed in and out among the hot stones. No sail was to be seen upon the sea, no soul upon the shore: all was one silent solitude of sunshine, blue water melting in the distance to blue air. And, by-and-by fell twilight, evening, night.

. There are silences and solitudes of nature that speak of . God more eloquently and convincingly than any sound of thunder, earthquake, or tempest, or any voice of man. The soul rebels from the immobility of the material, from the regardless, deaf and blind apathy of matter; stung and scourged into search beneath, above, beyond, for spirit, love, sympathy, it finds God.

CHAPTER VII

SEARCH.

And now, nearly five months after that afternoon, Hubert de Triancourt reached Chantreuil and sought Les Cyprus, with suspicion, almost amounting to certainty, aroused against Maitre Siccand.

Early in the autumn night he stood outside Maitre Siccand’s hovel. A light burnt inside, the door was ajar, and the window uncurtained. .

The old wretch, a cat on either side, crouched over a blazing fire of fir-apples and vine-branches, now stirring some mess cooking in an earthen vessel, and now taking a long draught from a great bottle of the country wine which stood beside him.

Hubert wrapped himself closely in his cloak: raising an arm over which it was folded, so as partially to screen his face, he pushed the door wide open.

Maitre Siccand’s back was to the door, and for some minutes he seemed unconscious: then he grew uneasy, glanced half round, muttered and swore, and, as the chill night air blew in, shivered: presently he turned himself round, stool and all, and faced the door.

Hubert was standing now just within the threshold, his figure dark against a moonlight background, the blazing firelight reflected in the eyes with which he fixed that evil face.

Maitre Siccand screamed shrilly; Hubert neither spoke nor moved.

Maitre Siccand fell forward upon his hands and knees, and, in that position, lifting his face as well as he was able to gaze up at the eyes that seemed to hold him spell-bound, poured out a wonderful mixture of prayers and curses of appalling and yet ludicrous blasphemies —addressing indifferently“le bon Dieu,”“Madame la Vierge, ma bonne maitresse,” and“ce bon Monsieur le Diable.”

Still Hubert continued, motionless and speechless, with eyes fixed upon the writhing criminal.

Maitre Siccand crawled a little nearer, his tone one of abject and fawning appeal.

“What would you with me, oh holy young man?” he cried.“What have you against me, oh youngest of the blessed saints? Did not the angels convey you straight to Paradise? Is it not well with you there in the fine company of the saints? Why do -you come and trouble me? It is not la nuit de Saint Malard! [1] Nor were you drowned: broken and crushed you must have been, but that the angels bore you straight to Paradise: not a drop of your blood was spilled, not a hair of your head was harmed. Do I not know? Did I not’search? Did I not repent? Would I not have succoured you? Oh, pity, pity, pity! Take your eyes off me! I am old and wicked—so wicked that the devil is sure of me. Let me live my time. Then you will ceuvres et les actes de foi qu’ils seMérent, nombreux on rares, a leur passage sur la terre.”

They gather these, which have become flowers, and when they have gleaned sufficient to form a bouquet,“a Dieu ils le montrent avec joie, et vers les portes de Saint Pierre la fleur emporte celui qui l’a cueillie”

Unhappy those“renieurs de Dieu, mangeurs de pauvres, tuers dTionmies,” who seeking“une oeuvre de salut,” find“que grands p6ch6s et crimes, sous forme de cailloux oh bronche leur orteil nu.”

In Brittany (see the poetical description given by Emile Souvestre in“Les demiers Britons,”), a somewhat similar superstition prevails regarding what takes place in the Baie des Tr6pass6s on the jour des Morts. How on that day a“rendezvous annuel,” is granted by God to all who in the body have inhabited“le doux pays,” and have had the deep for sepulchre. How, on that day,“La triste baie retentit de rumeurs plain-tives: les toes de naufrag^s s’elfcvent sur le sommet de chaque vague et on les voit courir a la lame comme une 6cume blancMtre et fugitive.” be avenged. I shall bum, bum, bum! Looking down from your Paradise into hell, as I looked down from the hill, you will be avenged. Only leave me on the earth till my time comes: I will creep into a hole, and not be seen again: if madame returns I will not come into her sight: when I do, then come and fetch me! Till then pity, pity, pity!” he howled.

“Come with me!” were Hubert’s only words.

. With a grasp of iron Hubert seized the wrist he shuddered to touch, and dragged the old wretch out of his den. That grasp did not once relax till Maltre Siccand was safely lodged in the small prison of Chantreuil, and his confession, with full details of the events that had followed his crime, had been taken down before the authorities—a full confession which disclosed a curious fact, and one that gave Hubert some slight hope that his brother might be yet alive. It was this— Maitre Siccand having, with two companions, early in the morning of the day following the murder taken boat and rowed round from Rosançon to the rocks lying at the foot of Cape Sainte Gudule, la petite—his object of course being the plunder of the body supposed to be lying there—had failed to find the corpse of his victim or any trace of it. Yet the spot on which the body must have fallen was above the mark of any but unusually high tides.

Superstitious terror had taken hold upon one of Maitre Siccand’s companions; the other could perhaps have explained the disappearance had he chosen. A dispute arose: somehow, in the consequent struggle, the man who had gone in for miraculous rescue, and whose superstitious credulity made him a dangerous accomplice of crime, fell or was thrown overboard, and was never heard of again. Being a stranger and quite unconnected in Rosanijon or the neighbourhood no inquiries were made about him except by a few of Maitre Siccand’s associates, who were easily satisfied with such explanations as he chose to give.

Hubert determined to explore the coast below Sainte Grudule, la petite.

Next morning he took a boat and four men from Rosançon and was rowed to the spot.

Quick of observation, and with all his faculties now preternaturally sharpened, it did not escape him that when he explained the exact spot to which he wished to be taken, a glance of intelligence was exchanged between two of the boatmen. These same two men afterwards made difficulties about his landing, saying that the tide was running in too strong, that the surf was dangerous, and that the boat would be beaten to pieces.

Hubert was, of course, determined; the other two men overruled their comrades, and Hubert, disembarking, clambered over the bed of jagged rocks, explored pools and crannies, and gained the very foot of the almost perpendicular wall from which his brother had been thrown.

Here he discovered, what certainly Maitre Siccand had not known, and what the poor distracted wife had not observed, that at the very spot on which a body thrown from that height would have fallen there was a deposit of soft and shifting sand into which the feet sank to some distance. Immediately above this spot, hanging from a ledge of rock, there was a large uprooted bush of tamaris, dried and withered by the sun. Hubert summoned to him one of his companions, a man called Le Marras, who was not a stranger to him, whom he knew to be an honest fellow and one of more than ordinary intelligence. He showed him the dead bush of tamaris, which he thought it probable the falling man had caught at and uprooted, and had so broken his fall, and then asked him if he believed it possible that the sand which had made a soft bed to receive the body, might afterwards, in a few hours, have so far yielded, beneath pressure as to close over the insensible form, serving it for shroud and sepulchre. Le

Marras, before answering, plunged a boathook into the sand, and showed how soon the rock was reached.“Such things had been known upon that coast,” he said,“but only where the ‘sable mouvant’ was much deeper than it lay here.”

The two men who had shown reluctance to his landing now began to give signs of impatience: they shouted from the boat that they could not stay there all day; that it was more than they could do to keep the boat off the rocks much longer; that“le temps se gate,” and there was every sign of a coming storm.

Hubert paid little apparent heed to these expostulations: the real effect of them was to incline him to explore the spot on which they reached him even more minutely than he would otherwise have done; and, by-and-by, disturbing some tangles of fringing bushes and drooping weeds, he discovered what these expostulations had prepared him to discover, the mouth of a cave; a cave which, by its contents, proved itself to him to be a smugglers’ haunt: the day was still so young that the low sun striking in at the aperture showed him all it held with tolerable distinctness. He strode hack to the boat.

“You fellows knew of this,” he said to the two remonstrants, who, having watched him from where they sat, with heads laid together, were talking mysteriously. One of them rose when he was close.

“I denounce you as contrabandists and as the accomplices of a murderer, unless you tell me what more you know,” Hubert continued.“What became of my brother’s body—of my brother rather, for I believe he was not dead when some of your gang found him?” Suddenly, the powerful fellow standing in the boat raised the oar he held against the rash speaker; its swinging sweep would inevitably have felled him, but that Le Marras stood behind him; Le Marras’s boathook struck back the oar.

There followed a violent altercation between the four men, carried on in a strange jargon of various patois and of smugglers’ and sailors’ slang. While it lasted, Hubert, without ostentation and yet with sufficient significance, took out and toyed with a brace of pistols. Perhaps these helped the rogues to come to some sort of agreement with the honest men; they made Le Marras their spokesman.

On condition that they should not he denounced they declared themselves willing to tell all they knew of the fate of Maitre Siccand’s victim. It was hut little, only this: that on the night of the first of June some of their gang had found a man lying insensible at the foot of the cliff. He had by their means been so far brought round as to give signs of life. Not exactly knowing what to do with him, suspecting, from his clothes and his general appearance, that he was a person of some importance, and that for the recovery of the body, alive or dead, a reward might be offered, they had used all such means as were in their power for his restoration, and then had taken him with them on board the smuggling craft to which they were about to put out, bound on an expedition from which they had expected to return within three days. The man who had raised the oar against Hubert had assisted to place the body in the boat; he had helped to row his companions and their cargo out to the craft, and had then brought back the boat: he had been one of the two men who accompanied Maitre Siccand on the search for the body; he had gone to prevent any other from going, and had, till now, kept the secret both of Maitre Siccand’s crime and of his companions’ rescue of the victim. That craft had not been heard of since: no news of her had been obtained from any of the smuggling stations along the coast. A short but very furious gale had blown on that second of June; whether she had been lost in the squall, had been captured by pirates or by revenue officers, no one knew.

This was soon told, and for Hubert there now remained nothing to do but to re-enter the boat and row back to Rosançon: yet nothing was further from his thoughts than to relinquish effort and yield to despair. He offered a large reward to any one who should bring him any tidings of the fate of“La Marguerite,” and made his offer well known among all the suspicious characters hanging about the port.

He did not leave the neighbourhood, and before many days had passed a gleam of hope again reached him.

A Portuguese sailor arriving at Rosançon, and being made aware of the reward offered for information regarding the fate of“La Marguerite,” had to tell that, disabled by the storm, she had been captured by a Spanish brig, and many of the crew killed. Almava was the first port at which that brig bad afterwards touched. Without one half-hour’s needless delay Hubert sailed for Almava. The season of storm and wind had just set in: his perils were not small, but at length he reached his destination.

The harbour of Almava is almost landlocked; from many points it looks like a lake. Still as the surface of a lake ordinarily lie its dark-blue waters, in which are mirrored the few houses of the small town, quaintly roofed and turreted—the wonderfully various-coloured lichen-clad rocks, which, for all other vegetation, are clothed with patches of grey aloes and of grotesque cacti—and, towering above all, seated on a barren height, an enormous barrack-like building, the great monastery of San Juan.

It was to this monastery that Hubert climbed.

After diligent inquiry he had learnt that a man, ill of fever and suffering from severe injuries, sick to death as every one imagined, had been put ashore here from a Spanish vessel many weeks ago, and had been taken to the monastery on the hill, which had something of the nature of an hospital, to be nursed.

At the monastery Hubert learnt particulars which left no doubt in his mind that the man who had lain there, often insensible, oftener delirious, for weeks, nay months, was his brother. But he was gone: had left three days before!

The monk who had chiefly waited on and tended Henri being brought to speak with Hubert was greatly struck by his resemblance to his patient, speaking of whom, of his sufferings and his patience, his eyes grew moist. He showed great anxiety, too, about his fate; his recovery had been very imperfect; he was, he said, still so weak in body as to be utterly unfit for any fatigue, and so weak in mind, from the injuries his head had sustained, as to be unfit for the least excitement. It had, however, been impossible to detain him longer, he having, as the good brother had understood him to say, but he spoke Spanish with difficulty, left a wife in the south of France in utter ignorance of his fate.

CHAPTER VII

REST.

One morning, Gonda, waking with a quiet face, her deep eyes, blue and dewy as they used to be, most serenely calm, called Marie to her side.

“I am well this morning,” she began,“quite well, dear Marieher smiling mouth was peace itself, but her voice was faint and low:“I am quite, quite well, and I am going home to-day.”

“Going home!” echoed Marie, in a subdued and awe-struck tone: for she thought that an angel spoke of return to that heaven from which she had been exiled.

“Going home, Marie; home to Les Cypres.

My husband left me there, it is there he will expect to find me. He is going home and so ami.”

“Madame, c’est impossible! Mon ange, mon time, ma fleur,” pleaded Marie.“You cannot support the journey—you who are weak, weak as an infant: you will not reach Les Cypres; you will die upon the road, you and the child, and what will become of Marie? Madame, ce n’est pas possible!”

“Marie, it is possible; I could support twice that fatigue for such an end. I shall reach Les Cyprus, my dear home, Marie. I shall not die upon the road. Courage, dear Marie, good and dear Marie,” she said caressingly.“Do not tire me and excite me by contradiction, by contending my will. It is fixed; I will start to-day, soon. There is no time to lose. I will not keep him waiting. I have had a dream, dear Marie; oh, Marie, such a dream!” Here a pure light of ecstasy shone from and through her face.

“God is good, Marie: He would not send such a dream to a poor wife and mother if it were not more than an empty dream, if it were not a vision—a promise!”

She paused, and softly wrapping her child to her bosom, smiled over it a never-to-be-forgotten smile, and murmured to it of its father.

After a little she continued, again speaking to Marie,

“Yes, Marie, the good God, the tender Father, whom I have so tried to trust for my husband, whose love I have striven to lean on for my husband, whose arm I have tried to feel as round all the world, and so, somewhere, holding safe my husband;—but in whom, sometimes, alas! being so feeble, my faith has almost failed;—the good and infinitely tender God, towards whom on my knees, in my agony, I have striven to creep, towards whom, for hope and help, I have stretched the empty arms of my heart, and whom often, in my darkness, I failed to feel or find—He has been with me always, shadowing me from the noontide heat of fever agony, by His love making all endurance possible, in the darkest hour sending me a sign, laying this dove, this blossom, in my bosom. And now, Marie, He has in this blessed night granted me a vision, a promise. To-day, to-night, and to-morrow we shall be on our journey: before to-morrow night has passed I shall lie in my husband’s arms! I shall fold him in these arms that now fold his child: I shall feel him against my breast as I now feel his child. Oh, that I may not go mad with joy! But I shall not, so good is God, so good, so good! To rest in my husband’s arms again—to rest in your father’s arms—baby, my baby! Oh, it seems too much, too much! But no gift is too much for God to give. Is this to be on the earth? Is it to be in heaven? Is it to be under the earth, or under the sea? No matter. I shall feel the bliss, the rest, the happiness. In my dream to-night, Marie, I saw my husband fighting with the waves of a raging sea. His forehead, white as the sea-foam, rose just above the foam, and his eyes, the dear eyes I have called my stars and yet have kissed, as we cannot kiss the stars of heaven, though perhaps they are the eyes of angels—shone on me.

“In niy dream to-night, Marie, I was standing on a rock and stretching towards him, he struggling on and on towards me. Just when the wave curled above him, ready to fall upon and destroy him, our little baby stretched out its tiny hand. Somehow we reached him, we drew him to us. I felt him, but oh so cold, Marie, so cold, so cold, against my breast! We were in his arms! Was he saved? or were we lost? I do not know, but we were in his arms. What did anything else matter? That was enough, enough for you, my baby, and enough for me.”

Marie took good care not to interrupt her mistress. In all this she saw only the gentle ravings of a harmless delirium, and secretly hoped she would talk herself to exhaustion, and, it being hardly yet day, would fall asleep again and forget this new fancy.

“How much our hearts can hold,” Gonda continued after a pause.“I thought mine was full, quite full of sorrow, yet now it sucks up joy as if it had been empty, squeezed dry like a sponge.

“But now, dear Marie, waste no more time in listening to me. Go and begin your preparations for our journey—let my sister and Madame Vauprez know. Baby will he quite good with me. Won’t you, my little white blossom? Oh, Marie, how frail and pale she is! She is like a cherry-blossom, Marie! And the cherry-blossom, you know, Marie, when it is full of sunshine, shines with opal flames, and changing rosy light against our Provence sky. And my child, when her father’s eyes shine on her, when she has drunk the bliss of his kisses and his blessings—oh happy little child!”

She broke off to kiss it with a passion of gentlest reverence in her tenderness:“Our child then, Marie, will be rosy and full of light and life. Such music as the fairies hear ring from swaying flower-bells we shall find in your laughter, oh happy little child! And then, baby, when your father has kissed you and blessed you, I shall love you more and better a thousand times! And then, husband, if I can love you more—but I hardly think I can—I shall love you more for the love you bear our child. What happy days will come for us, for all three of us, my blossom! Marie, one moment; is it not true she smiles?”

But Marie was no sooner by her than she urged her to go away again, and hasten her preparations saying—

“I am quite strong this morning. Even if she were as heavy as I wish her, poor darling mite, I could hold her a long, long time! And we are happy, both of us: I talk to her of her father and she listens with a smile.”

This child of Gonda’s—always still and patient, as if it had learnt its mother’s patience, •with an unearthly pathos in its unchildish eyes—was more like the exquisitely executed waxen effigy of a tiny baby, or like the body of a lovely infant that has already been for some hours dead, than like that hit of soft and warm humanity a live baby.

They found it was no use to oppose this determination of Gonda’s. Doctor Vauprez, the only person who could have spoken with any authority, had been forced to return to Chantreuil.

Owing to unavoidable delays, it was not till the evening of the third day that the travellers reached Les Cypres: the heavy autumn rains had swollen the river, and in two places had washed away the bridges, compelling the carriage to take a long round.

On the morning of this third day Gonda said very mournfully—

“I fear we are too late. He is there before me: I fear we are too late.”

After this she sank into a state of such extreme exhaustion that they thought her to be past all feeling, either of pain or pleasure. But when the funereal shadows of the familiar cypresses fell across her face, as they waved black against a flaming sunset sky, and nodded and signed significantly at those passing between them up the long avenue, she roused herself.

She was half-led and half-carried by Madame Vauprez and Marie up the steps at the head of the avenue, across the tiled court of the ruined fountain (into which; since she had left, the dejected statue had fallen), through the arched doorway, and between the garden-cypresses to the house, Colombe following with the child.

Hubert de Triancourt was speaking to Doctor Vauprez on the threshold: to him Colombe drew close; her eyes were full of questions, but she was silent. He kissed her forehead, and passed an arm round her, fondly holding her to him lor a moment, but his thoughts now were all for Gonda.

“My husband is here,” she said.

“Thank God you are come! You have missed our messenger, hut no matter since you are here,” answered the doctor.

She rushed past them and began to ascend the stairs, hut soon looked back with a cry for help. Hubert caught her, or she would have fallen. They carried her to the top of the stairs, supported her along the passage and into the salon.

She reached the old red fauteuil, and there, for a moment, she sank down.

Marie preceding them had made her way to the inner room: it was full of the glory of the evening sky, and this, at first, blinded her. But soon she saw what lay upon the bed, and then standing in the doorway, declared her mistress should not enter.

Gonda rose hastily.

“The child, his child!”—she said and took it from Colombe.

She walked steadily to the door of the inner room, pushed Marie aside, signed them all to stand back, and was going in, when she seemed to remember something: she stepped back,

“Yon good dear people!” she said.“Do you think I do not know? I know, and I can bear it. Do not be sorry for me. Colombe,” die continued,“sweet little sister, kiss me! Remember me—you cannot be more happy ihan I am—by being happy. Dear brother, you, too, will kiss me! Remember all who have been good to him: forgive me for saying that, you are his brother.” Then she kissed Marie, clasping her round the neck, and then madame, and the good doctor.

And then, a quiet nurse rising from beside the bed and passing out as she went in, Gouda entered the inner room and closed the door behind her.

“II est la—son mari—mort! bien mort!” shrieked Marie, and fell upon her knees. .

“No,” said the nurse,“he is not dead; but now, after I thought him gone, he opened his eyes, and smiling said, ‘She is come.’”

Colombe was clinging to her husband, clinging to him convulsively, as if she wrestled for him with some invisible power. He loosed her hold, folded her closely to him with one arm, and with the other hand clasped her hands together and held them so, in his, against his breast. Leaning his cheek upon her head, he whispered,“Be still, my child, and pray.”

She was still: tears streaming down her cheeks from under her closed lids, she prayed.

They heard a few words murmured from the next room, and once the baby wailed a little: then all was still.

Gonda was not too late. She laid her child beside its father. She wiped the death-damp from her husband’s brow—already it was clay-cold. She took his head upon her breast, folding it to her with no sorrow and no passion, only the extremest tenderness.

And with the same extreme of gentleness she pressed her lips upon his lids, almost as if she felt him too sacred for her touch. His eyes opened. She drank in their look, and would have suffered all she had suffered, and ten times more, had that been possible, to have earned that look—a look ineffable of pity, love, delight.

His lips parted.

“True wife, Hubert has told me all. All day we have been together, and all day have talked of you. You never doubted me! To you, as to me, poor darling, the comfort of that is infinite.”

He spoke with the drowsy languor of one who composes himself to blissful rest: his head sank more heavily against her breast, and his eyes closed; but, suddenly for a few brief moments, love conquered death: he turned, half rose, encircled her with straining arms, and looking up into her face, said—

“I am proud of you beyond all praise!—I love you beyond all love I have ever known for you—mine, mine, mine, for ever! my true, pure, noble wife!”

“Oh, husband!” she cried, in a sort of agony of ecstasy,“I am happy, happy, happy!”

“Your lips”—he spoke in the former faint tone now, and sank down, helplessly heavy, into her arms again as life ebbed out,—“lay them on mine, love, lay them on mine!”

“Yes, darling husband; but first seal your child to you with one kiss.” She laid him out of her arms upon the pillow, that she might take up his child. She held the baby’s cheek ‘against his lips. She helped him to lift his hand and lay upon its head, then she laid it down beside him.

Again her arms were flung round him; but now in great exhaustion, her head sought rest upon his breast.

I am coming, husband,” she said,“and I do not think our little one will be long away from us. I am coming with you—God, in his dear, dear goodness, has so willed it/’

“I know it, wife,” he answered,“I feel it.” Her dying face was raised. Her lips sought his: the last breath that passed between them she drank.in. She gazed and gazed, and then, gradually, she drooped: her head sank lower and lower—till it rested on his breast. She lay quiet: once she moved a little, stretched out a feeble arm, and drew the baby closer to its father; that being the last and greatest good she could do the poor little one. She lay quiet. How quiet!.

Oh God, what absolute rest must he the sleep with which Thou roundest the lives of Thy beloved!

Next morning the child, which for a few hours had been taken from her, was replaced dead upon its dead mother’s breast.

Colombe, having strewed the bed with sprays of rosemary, lavender, myrtle, and sweet basil, and with such flowers as were fair and fragrant still, her husband mournfully watching her, throwing herself into his arms, sobbing, cried—

“Oh, they are happy! but we—we shall never more be happy. I, because they suffered through my sin, you, because you love me and I am not fit for you to love!”

Happy! On their faces was a peace so profound that to gaze on it was to long to share it. Happy! I can imagine no greater happiness that we can ask for our best-beloved! Happy!, what happiness could he more supreme?

Not to he able to realize the sublimity of such happiness is not to believe in the immortality of pure love—in which, not believing, surely we are of all men most miserable.

In that ineffable expression to be seen on the faces of the pure dead, whom death has found resigned, to whom death has come quietly, with no rending convulsions of physical agony, may we not read a happy assurance that through that portal—which we all, I suppose, more or less fear as we draw near it, however wearily and fondly we have longed to reach it while we yet believed ourselves a great way off—come to dying eyes glimpses of truth, of beauty, of good, of God, which make them recognize the true nature of death, hailing it as the dawn of fuller light and life?

Deader, do you say this story is too sad? I cannot think so. Sad throughout, perhaps, but into its end is crowded the greatest of all imaginable bliss. Does it not finish with the good old-fashioned finish of the fairy-tale—“And they were happy ever after?”

If you prefer to follow with your imagination the fortunes of those counted happy in this world—after the best though imperfect fashion of happiness in this world—think of Hubert and .of Colombo.

They lived together many years, and had many children: they loved each other close and well. No cloud, save that which sometimes rose out of the past, when they remembered, ever came between them.

They lived chiefly in England, and“de Triancourt’s foreign wife,” unrivalled for sweetness, for loveliness, for native, inborn grace and piquante simplicity, and for most, meek devotion to her husband, was sought after and admired in such circles as her husband cared to enter. But she was a woman of quiet tastes: she had her husband, her children, her house: she loved to keep at home. Yet, to please her husband, and not too’ much to separate her life from his, she accompanied him into society. She was not suspected of being deficient in cultivation, nor was she. She was quick of intellect and wonderfully adaptive: her husband’s opinions became really hers; she did not echo them merely, she mastered them and interpreted them.

She never spoke English readily enough to talk for the sake of talking: when she spoke it was that she had something to say—that something was always said so quaintly, so prettily, so perfectly, that a room would be hushed that no word might be lost; men hung on her lips with a sort of enchanted wonder, and women envied her her fascinatingly foreign accent almost as much as her exquisitely chosen toilettes.

Her beauty remained long at its maturity, and then seemed to win from years a tender, mellow, and peculiar grace. Her children grew up to adore their lovely and most loving mother, and her husband’s love seemed to gain depth and strength, and to grow more reverent with years.

They were called happy. Yet those gentle eyes were often sad: that sweet mouth seldom smiled.

They were called happy, and yet there were few harms of which they were not in reach.

Death might snatch their dear ones. Death might divide them, might take the one and leave the other. Surely—

“That life is better life, past fearing death,

Than that which lives to fear.”

Which of us, even among those called happy, prosperous, fortunate, finds any satisfaction, in any full and complete sense of the word, in this life?

Beauty it has, love, good, glory—and of these those who can drink most deeply are those who most overpoweringly feel their inability to drink deep enough to satisfy their souls—those who suffer most from the unquenched and insatiable fever of thirst, which makes this life seem chiefly a restless search for what is never found—a ceaseless craving for that unknown high heritage unto which we are born, to which we come not yet.

Who among us will not say of life

“Happy thou art not,

For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get;

And what thou hast, forget’st”?

Why, then, is it so sad to die?

“Thy best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st

Thy death, which is no more.”

“La mort, ce mot qui te trompe, qu’est ce? Un brouillard qui se dissipe avec les glas de la cloche,—un songe qui eveille a la fin de la nuit.”

And why, when in dying we are hut drawn forth to follow all we love, should death be anything hut supremely blissful?

I would not be understood to think that we any of us too much value life, God’s glorious, great, and good gift, for which each breath we draw should thank Him. But it seems to me that our over-eager, half-frenzied clinging to just this fraction of it which we hold now, upon this known earth, is an eloquent declaration of our atheism as to that doctrine of immortality which most of us more or less fervently profess.

Truly our heart

“Walking by sight dreads the unknown, and clings

Even to familiar sorrow, and loves more

The seen earth than the unseen God.”

TIIE END.

ENDNOTE

Endnote 1: La Nuit de Saint Médabd.

A superstition prevails in the south of France (see the“Mireid” of Monsieur Mistral), that on a certain night in the year, called La Nuit de Saint Mélard,—“Tout malheureux noys, des gouifres aflreux, des tourbillons sombres dans quelques profondeurs que l’eau l’ensevelisse, sur terre, doit evenir,”—seeking along the shores of the Rhône—“les bonnes