"Another two hours," thought she aloud.
Her mother had no further need of anybody, and henceforth she experienced invincible repugnance to return to the room. It was all over, she had kissed her, and now she could dispose of her own existence and the lives of others. Usually, between the trains, she escaped and disappeared; but on this particular morning a feeling of interest seemed to keep her at her post near the gate on a bench—a simple plank that happened to be beside the line. The sun was ascending on the horizon, a warm shower of gold fell into the pure air; and she did not move, but sat there wrapped in this sweetness, in the midst of the vast country all thrilling with the sap of April.
For a moment she watched Misard in his wooden hut, on the other side of the line. He was visibly agitated, not having had his customary sleep. He went out, went in, worked his apparatus with a nervous hand, casting constant glances towards the house, as if his spirit had remained there and was still searching. Then she forgot him, was unaware even of him being there. She was all expectant, absorbed, her lips speechless, her face rigid, her eyes fixed on the end of the line in the direction of Barentin. And over there, in the gaiety of the sun, a vision must have risen up for her, on which the stubborn savageness of her look obstinately dwelt.
Minutes slipped away, but Flore did not move. At last, at 7.55, when Misard with a couple of blasts from his horn signalled the slow train from Havre on the up-line, she rose, closed the gate, and planted herself before it, her flag in her fist. The train was already fading away in the distance, after sending a tremor through the ground; and it could be heard plunging into the tunnel, where the sound ceased. She had not gone back to the bench, but remained on her feet again counting each minute. If no goods train was signalled within ten minutes, she would run over there beyond the cutting, and remove a rail.
She was very calm, only her chest felt a little tight under the enormous weight of the deed. But, at this moment, the thought that Jacques and Séverine were approaching, that they would pass by again if she did not stop them, sufficed to make her inexorably blind and deaf in her resolution, without even giving the matter any further consideration; it was the irrevocable, the blow from the paw of the she-wolf that breaks the back of the prey on the way. In the egotism of her vengeance, she saw only the two mutilated bodies, without troubling about the crowd, that stream of unknown people who had been filing past before her for years. There would be dead bodies, blood, the sun would perhaps be obscured by them, that sun whose tender gaiety irritated her.
Two minutes more, one minute more, and she would be starting. Indeed, she was starting, when some heavy jolting on the Bécourt road stopped her. A cart, no doubt a stone dray; the carter would ask her to let him through. She would have to open the gate, engage in conversation, and remain there: it would be impossible for her to act, and she would miss her chance. With an enraged gesture of indifference, she ran off, leaving her post, abandoning the carter with his dray to do the best he could. But the lash of a whip cracked in the matutinal air, and a voice cried out gaily:
"Hey! Flore!"
It was Cabuche. She stopped short, in her first spring, before the gate itself.
"What's up?" he continued. "Are you still asleep with this beautiful sun shining? Quick! let me get through before the express!"
She was completely undone. It was all over. The other two would proceed to their happiness without her being able to find any means to crush them here. And as she slowly opened the old, half-rotten gate, whose iron-work grated in its rust, she looked about her furiously for an object, something she could cast across the line; and she was in such despair, that she would have stretched her own self there, had she thought her bones hard enough to send the engine off the metals.