Louis got to his feet. “That far and further; but I shall frighten her.”
“Joy does not kill,” said the Marquise. There was a little sadness in her tone, but no tears in her eyes.
Louis looked at her a moment, and then, putting a hand into his breast, drew out something wrapped in a piece of discoloured white silk. “I will give you this first,” he said gravely. “It has always been with me . . . and since I am come back again you have the better right to it. The silk was his too, from his scarf. It is scorched a little, because when the peasants cut my uniform off me and burnt it, for safety’s sake, it fell into the fire for a second . . . so they told me. But it was not hurt . . . and it is yours now. . . . Ma mère, he had a soldier’s death, and a hero’s.” He laid the little packet gently in her hand, and the singed wrapping, slipping open, showed a lock of thick black hair.
Afterwards he passed through the open window into the garden—into May and the sun of May, and all the green things of May which he had never thought to see again. And he went rather uncertainly between the high box hedges, past the bowling-green and the stone nymph, the beehives, the apple trees in blossom, out of the garden and across the lane. At the gate of the copse he stopped, breathless and a little dizzy, but not from bodily weakness alone.
The thicket was green, enchantingly green, feathery green, golden green, and the path was strewn with the tassels of the birch. Had the trees been like this last May, when the grass was red? . . . Last May! And on the very threshold of his happiness he paused to breathe a prayer for his cousin’s soul. “Rest eternal . . . light everlasting. . . .” Then he opened the gate and went through.
And a little way off, white against the glory of green, she was standing like one in a vision who sees a vision. A misty pool of hyacinths lay at her feet, but her hands were full of violets.
EPILOGUE
Monsignor Giuseppe Cantagalli, Domestic Prelate to His Holiness Pius VI., to the Duca di San Rocco, at Tivoli.
“Rome, December 9, 1794.