“Have you, far away there, no feeling for our trouble? Even in the bliss of heaven itself it seems as though one’s heart must be touched by love and grief and pain. You have sacrificed yourself for the country—cannot you help your own in their extremity? Du Chesne—he is your brother, if you can recall the ties of kindred where you are—du Chesne may be grievously wounded; he may even now be lying still in death. Have you ceased to hear, to feel? Does no woman’s heart beat in your breast?”
Did a white face, with deep-sunken, haggard eyes look down upon her from the window—a face more like that of a dead woman than a living one? It seemed to the excited girl, driven to extremities by her own fancy as much as by stress of circumstances, that her cry fell upon a passionless, unseen world which returned no answer. There was a blighting silence, like a conscious death. A heavy, dull despair settled upon her.
“You are all alike, St. Joseph and the saints; you are content with your own goodness, and are dead and deaf and dumb concerning the claims of earth; but we others are only flesh, our hearts throb and bleed and burn; we cannot keep silent. Du Chesne is nothing to me but my old playmate, the companion of my childhood; I have no claim upon him, he owes me no duty—he never even guessed that I cared for him. I merit suffering, I who dealt it out to others, but why should he pay the penalty for my fault? I have been pitiless, though I never meant it; the good God may well be pitiless to me, but not to him, not to him. If I could only tell the Chevalier that I repent; I never thought my coquetry meant suffering, I regarded playing at love as a light jest.” Diane detailed her misdeeds in a voice of anguish. “And Pierre, too, he might have been happy enough with his prayers and his painting had I but let him alone; but it amused me to try my power—the Holy Virgin forgive me!—and this is the end. Du Chesne told me that I did not know the meaning of true love. I have learned too late. Of what use is your perfection, your credit at the court of heaven, your prayers and virtues and mortifications, if you will not help us? And I—I would rather be wicked and be able to aid those I love, or at least to suffer with them.”
For a time after this impassioned outburst she lay hushed in exhaustion, then a new thought aroused her to action.
“There is the mountain cross of M. de Maisonneuve; it is said that great graces have been obtained there. We must lose no time. They might be fighting even now, and this may be the moment of greatest danger.”
“Lydia, Lydia, awaken! We will go to pray at the cross of M. de Maisonneuve.”
The English girl lay sleeping with cheek upon her hand, like an innocent babe. The perfect repose of her position was so strangely childish and trustful that it was hard to realize she was slumbering on the brink of terror and desolation. The incongruity impressed Diane forcibly, but as she knelt beside the couch her face grew soft and womanly. When she felt her friend’s hand laid gently on her shoulder, Lydia started up with a faint cry, rubbing her eyes and her soft flushed cheeks.
“Diane, why have you awakened me? When I am asleep I can at least forget,” she protested, sitting up in bed, and staring at the demoiselle de Monesthrol as if she were not sufficiently awake to realize exactly what the scene meant. Diane’s expression of restrained excitement recalled all; she flung herself down on the pillows, and broke into violent sobbing.
“Something has happened, news has come; I see by your face that it is evil tidings. The savages are upon us, and even if they come here to scalp me, I am too weak to move.”