"Alas!" thought the maid of honor, "my brother will not forgive my past life; only a father's heart is capable of indulgence. Great God! If my sister, my mother, were also to receive me with such disdain—perchance aversion! I would rather die than expose myself to such treatment!"
Antonicq continued to speak with his father in a low voice. Suddenly Odelin seemed to shudder, and hid his face in his hands. Profound silence ensued. Anna Bell, more and more the prey of the shyness and mistrust that conscious guilt inspires in a repentant soul, imagined herself the subject of the mysterious conversation between her father and brother. Odelin's features, lowering and angry, betokened disgust and indignation. The words escaped him: "And yet, despite such revolting horrors, I am bound to him by a sacred bond! Oh, a curse upon the day that brought us together again! A curse upon the fatal discovery! But once I shall have fulfilled that last duty, may heaven ever after deliver me of his hated presence! Listen," added the armorer, and again lowering his voice, he spoke to his son with intense earnestness, closing with the statement: "Such is my plan!"
The conversation was again renewed in undertones between father and son. Anna Bell had caught only fragments of her father's remarks. She was convinced they spoke of her—and yet, only a minute before, Odelin was so lovingly indulgent towards his erring daughter. In vain did the young girl seek to fathom the cause of so sudden a change. What could the fatal discovery be that Antonicq had just imparted to his father, and seemed suddenly to incite his indignation and anger? Did she not lay her past life bare to her father in all sincerity of heart? What could she be accused of that she had not voluntarily confessed? A prey to profound anxiety, the young girl's heart sank within her; her limbs trembled as she saw her father hurriedly take up his sword and casque, and make ready to leave with Antonicq.
The young man stepped to the couch of straw and pulled out of it a long, wide cloak of a brown material with a scarlet hood attached, such as was common among the Rochelois,[71] and helped his father to wrap himself in it over his armor; Odelin then put on his casque, threw the hood over it, and, without either look or word to his daughter, who, trembling and with frightened eyes followed his movements, went out, followed by his son.
Long did Anna Bell weep. When her tears ran dry, the young girl turned her face to the future with sinister resolution. She considered herself an object of disgust and aversion to her brother and father. Forsaken by them, an unbridgeable abyss—honor—separated her forever from Franz of Gerolstein. Nothing was left but to die. Suddenly a flash of joy lightened her eyes, red with recent tears. She rose, stood erect, and looking about said: "Yes, to die. But to die under Franz's eyes—to die for him, like the young page killed this very day by throwing himself in the path of the bullet that was to fell his master. The army is to return to battle. The clothes, the horse of the page who was killed to-day are all here!"
As these thoughts seethed in her mind, Anna Bell's eyes fell upon some sheets of paper, a pen and ink in a broken cup lying on the mantlepiece. The girl took them down with a sigh:
"Oh, father! Oh, brother! Despite your contempt and aversion, my last thoughts will be of you!"
Hervé Lebrenn, the incestuous wretch who raised a matricidal hand against his mother, Fra Hervé, the Cordelier, as he was called in the royal army, deserved but too well the reputation for a fiery preacher and leader of implacable sectarians. His sermons, lighted by a savage style of eloquence, and coupled to acts of ferocity in battle, inspired the Catholics with fanatic admiration. Wounded and made a prisoner in the course of the engagement of that day, he was taken pinioned to St. Yrieix and locked up in a dark cellar. The cellar door opened. The light of a lanthorn partially dispelled the gloom of the subterranean cell. Seated on the ground with his shoulders against the wall, Fra Hervé saw a man enter, wrapped in a brown mantle, the scarlet hood of which, being wholly thrown over his head, concealed the face of the nocturnal visitor. The visitor was Odelin Lebrenn. He closed the door behind him, placed the lanthorn on the floor, and almost convulsed with wracking emotions, silently contemplated his brother, who had not yet recognized him. Odelin saw him now for the first time since the day when, still a lad returning from Italy with Master Raimbaud, the armorer, he involuntarily witnessed the torture and death of his sister Hena and Brother St. Ernest-Martyr. Hervé also attended the solemnity of his sister's execution, in the company of Fra Girard, his evil genius.
Odelin Lebrenn looked with mute horror upon his imprisoned brother. The lanthorn, placed upon the floor, threw upward a bright light streaked with hard, black shadows upon the cadaverous, ascetic and haggard features of Hervé. His large, bald forehead, yellow and dirty, was tied in a blood-stained bandage. The blood had flowed down from his wound, dried up on one of his protruding cheek bones, and coagulated in the hairs of his thick and matted beard. His brown and threadbare coat, patched up in a score of places, was held around his waist by a cord from which hung a chaplet of arquebus balls with a small crucifix of lead. Rusty iron spurs were fastened with leather straps to his muddy feet, shod in sandals. Fra Hervé, unable to distinguish his brother's face, shadowed as it was by the hood of the mantle, turned his head slowly towards the visitor, and kneeling down with an expression of gloomy disdain, said in a hollow voice:
"Is it death? I am ready!"