A little later the three travellers had made some pretence of eating the meal which had been brought up to them, and then, seeing that the two men were restless, Valentine begged them not to consider her but to leave her if they wished; and they, thinking on their side that she perhaps desired to be alone, obeyed.
Valentine did desire to be alone, but it was no solace. It seemed to her that she had touched the lowest depths of human despair. She had never dreamt that Gaston would be gone from Vannes. The word he had sent her was warm in her bosom, but that was not he. She felt that it was only the prospect of seeing him at the end of them, even though it must be as a captive, which had kept life in her these two dreadful days. And what had the Deputy said—that if the sursis had not come . . . O no, no, that was not possible! She would not look at it. . . . But it was true that he was far away, alone, in the hands of his enemies. It was an effort to keep herself from calling his name aloud.
She sat in a chair by the fire, the wind howling outside, the tears dripping through her fingers, and did not hear the door open. Roland stood on the threshold again, looking at her with a great compassion and understanding in his young eyes—for if his heart was broken what must hers be? And half impulsively, half timidly, he went across the little room and knelt down by her.
“Madame, dear Madame!”
Still weeping, she put out her hand to him blindly, and he kissed it, kissed her tears on it. And then she turned wholly to him, and as he, kneeling there, took her tenderly and reverently into his arms, she shook with sobbing on his shoulder. It was really the first time that she had broken down since the arrest. Except that he felt he must comfort her—though he knew not by what means, for what means were there?—the boy would have liked to sob too.
He said something, and through her misery she thought, “His voice is getting like Gaston’s. There will be something of Gaston left in the world after all.”
It was at that moment that the impulse to tell him came to her overwhelmingly. She was so lonely; it would comfort her—if she could keep from thinking of Mme de Céligny. He ought to know now, too.
She mastered her sobs after a while, lifted her head from the boy’s shoulder, dried her eyes and leant back in her chair.
“Stay there, Roland, if you will,” she said, and he sat on the floor beside her chair, silently looking into the fire. What he saw there was always the same—the inn parlour at Hennebont; sometimes with his leader sitting there, as he had last seen him when he went out to the others on that thrice accursed errand of his own making, sometimes disordered and sickeningly empty, as it had appeared at his return. . . .