For some time the young girl who sat listening had seemed to be a prey to a painful preoccupation; several times she had started impatiently as if anxious to escape from some harrowing thought, and now suddenly interrupting the reading in spite of herself, as it were, she exclaimed:
"That man makes me shudder!"
"And why?" demanded the housekeeper. "This brave sailor seems to me as brave as a lion."
"But what a man of iron!" exclaimed the girl, more and more excitedly. "How violent he is! And to think that any person should dare to excuse and even glorify anger when it is so horrible—so unspeakably horrible!"
The housekeeper, without attaching much importance to the girl's protest, however, replied:
"Nonsense, my child! You say that anger is so terrible. That depends,—for if anger suggested to the captain a way and means of escape from these treacherous Englishmen, he is perfectly right to glorify it, and I, in his place—But good Heavens!" she exclaimed, seeing the girl turn alarmingly pale and close her eyes as if she were about to swoon. "Good Heavens, what is the matter with you? Your lips are quivering. You are crying. You do not answer me,—speak, what is the matter?"
But the words failed to reach the ears of the poor child. With her large eyes distended with terror and bewilderment, she indicated with a gesture some apparition which existed only in her disordered imagination, and murmured, wildly:
"The man in black! Oh, the man in black! There he is now! Don't you see him?"
"Calm yourself! Don't allow yourself to think any more about that, in Heaven's name. Don't you know how hurtful such thoughts are to you?"
"Oh, that man! He was equally terrible in his rage, when—It was years and years ago, and I was little more than a baby, but I can see him yet, in his strange, sombre costume of black and white like the livery of the dead. It was night, and my father was absent from home when this man gained an entrance into our house, I know not how. I had never seen him before. He threatened my mother, who was holding me in her arms. 'At least spare my child!' she sobbed. I remember it well. But he only exclaimed, still advancing threateningly upon my mother, 'Don't you know that I am capable of anything in my anger?' And then he rushed out of the room. Oh, my mother, my mother dead, and I—"