“But it was no slaughter of aristocrats.”
She gazed at him dumbly with feverish eyes, then sighed heavily, shook her head, and moved out into the open.
“So you come again to Méricourt?” she said. “You will find it wonderfully changed in these few months. Now we are possessed by a devil, and now we are under the dominion of a saint. There is an idol deposed, and a holy image raised in its place. Will you be walking, monsieur, or shall I go first?”
“We will go together.”
She laughed again with a shrill, mocking sound.
“Mother of God! what an admirable persuasiveness have these aristocrats! I had thought myself beneath his notice, and, behold! he would make me his companion—and in the face of the village, too. Come, then, monsieur. Will you take your paillarde on your arm?”
He listened to her with some compassion (for all her wild speech he thought her heart was choked with accumulated tears), then moved forward and walked along the woodland path by her side. To his few questions she returned but monosyllabic answers. Presently, however—when they were come out within view of the village fountain, where Ned’s first meeting with her had taken place—she stayed him with a hand upon his sleeve.
“‘As she makes her bed, so must she lie on it.’ You see I remember your words, monsieur. And, if she has made her bed as the virtuous disapprove, in England she may yet lie soft on it?”
“Without doubt, in England or elsewhere, so long as she lives only for the present.”
“Ah! little Mother of God! but how natural to these aristocrats comes the preaching-cant.”