But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented itself to him on the instant—a little heart within the heart—a poor decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child.
He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in heaven! it was a child—not sleeping, but dead and mummified!
A sound—something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been winded by a blow—fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it, staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing—gazing, but at him no longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had shuddered from her cheeks.
Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily expressed terror of her neighbourhood.
“I did not kill him,” she whispered.
“It is Baptiste, then?”
He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something namelessly hideous.
Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him, imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and believe her.
“Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill him!”
He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake—for his sake! Was he so vile as this, then—he who had dared in dreams to mate with a purity like an angel’s—that the incense of any noisome sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh.