“Yes, there can. She has left you and gone off with Cotterell.”
Ezra threw up his arms and fell backwards. Madame thought for a moment or two that he was dying, for an awful blue-purple look passed over his face as if his heart had stopped beating. He recovered himself and sat up, turned ghastly white, and moved his lips. He was trying to speak, but no sound came. At length he gasped,
“Olive, Olive, where is she?”
“We don’t know. Cotterell took the brown mare, the men turned out and caught him. Olive disappeared, no one knew where, night before last, taking our last horse. There was a sort of lynch-law trial at Union Mills, she appeared in the middle of the proceedings and said she gave him the horse, and then they went off together and have not since been heard of.”
“Olive, Olive, Olive!” Ezra kept moaning as Madame drove him back to his deserted home. He seemed dazed and stupefied.
Surely terrible news was never more crudely broken to a sufferer than was his bereavement to Ezra Weston, and by that tender and sympathetic friend, Madame Morozoff-Smith. Had Uncle David or Brother Green heard her, they would have been shocked beyond measure at having entrusted the painful embassy to such hands. Not one word of hope or comfort or of doubt even, nothing but the bald hideous story in its worst complexion thrown at him.
Olive was gone from him—gone with Cotterell!
Yet after having thus dealt him a death-blow, Madame seemed full of pity and little acts of personal attention. She helped him out of the waggon, brought him into the house, took his hands and washed them, cooled his forehead with a wet towel, offered him food, and in short treated him much as if he had been a suffering child whom she was tending. At last he seemed to recover himself somewhat as she was passing her soft hand across his brow.
“You are very good to me,” he said brokenly, “and if I seem to accept your kindness unheedingly, forgive me. I am not myself to-night. I don’t know what I am doing. Oh, it can’t be!” he suddenly burst out. “She is not gone. I shall see her again. She will come back. How do you know she has gone with him? I don’t believe it.”
“Poor Ezra, love dies hard, I know. Some of the men asked if she was going with him, and she answered distinctly, ‘Yes.’ Then they were sorry, they said, they had not hung him before she came up with them.”