“I must see this folly out,” he thought. “Perhaps they will want a witness.”
The chapel of Le Marais hung in the clouds. Its stone walls streamed with rain. The sop and suck of it were the only sounds which broke the silence of the hillside. Cartouche stepped softly to the door and looked in.
It was just a dovecot, of a size for these two pious pigeons. They knelt side by side before the little gimcrack altar. The girl had been waiting there for the other to join her. A picture of the sacred heart transfixed hung on the wall above her head. It was thence she had sought to gather strength for the cruel thing she had to say.
Cartouche, standing without, looked through the crack of the door. He could not see Yolande’s face, for it was hidden in her hands. But presently, with a quivering sigh, she raised it, and, seeing her lover still bowed down in prayer, turned towards the entrance as if seeking light. So the young virgin of Nazareth might have turned, in great doubt and loveliness, following with her eyes the dimming messenger of heaven. And then she herself went to prayer again.
We have likened Yolande once before to Dorothea the Martyr, she who, when condemned to death for loving Christ, promised that she would send to Theophilus, the young advocate who had bantered her, a posy from the garden of her desires. Now, like that Theophilus, when a child-angel stood before him offering to his hand a spray of unearthly roses, Cartouche felt his heart suddenly constrict and, rallying, choke his veins with fire. Stepping softly back, he tiptoed round the end of the chapel, and gained the tiny presbytery which stood in a clearing above. The little house was deserted, it seemed, both of father and sacristan. No one answered to his low tapping. As he stood undecided, the voices of the lovers approaching from the chapel reached him. The door of the presbytery was on the latch. He opened it, entered, and stood hidden just within. He had no wish to eavesdrop; his heart was in a strange panic, that was all. He felt as Actaeon must have felt as he backed into the thickets.
The two came close up to his hiding-place; and then they stopped, and uttered for his shameful ears the tragedy of their lives. In the first of their meeting, amazed as yet, and unrealising the abyss which was fast gaping between them, they spoke in the soft romance, the old love-language of Savoy; but soon a woefuller cry wrung itself from the torture of their hearts.
“Garden of my soul! as the rose clings to the wall, so art thou mine.”
“I have clung to thee, Louis.”
“The sun hath welded us into one. Thy perfume is in me, as my strength upholds thy beauty. We cannot be torn apart but we perish.”
“I have climbed heavenwards resting on thy heart. My cheek hath glowed to thee by day, and at night, when thou sleptst, I have put my lips to the moon kisses on thy face.”