Before the winter was more than half through George believed that he was dying. The authorities of the prison thought so too, and out of compassion for the “bel Anglais,” whose athletic form, distinction of movement and manner, and the old thoroughness and absorption with which he did whatever work he had to do, had gained him the same sort of reputation among the lowest of mankind that he had formerly held among the highest, they shortened the preliminary term of confinement within the walls, and put him with the workers in the dockyard, in the hope that the open air, nipping and keen as it was in these winter days, might restore the failing vigour of his frame, and check a hacking cough which made even the warders shrug their shoulders and mutter “pauvre diable!” as they walked up and down the echoing stone corridors in the frosty nights of the early year.
March had come, with bitter winds and no sign of the winter’s breaking, when George Lauriston was sent, as one of a small gang of convicts, to repair a breach in the harbour made during a storm the day before. There was some hard and hazardous work involved, a portion of the structure having been rendered unsafe by the tearing away, by the action of the waves, of the outer piles placed to break their force. Glad of the excitement, however, and of the nearer approach to their kind of the outer world which the walk to and from the harbour afforded, the gang of convicts, picked out of the smartest and best-conducted men, went to this novel work with more alacrity than usual. The weather was still rough; the waves, of a troubled greenish-brown colour, were crested with white, and the wind drove the drizzling sleet straight from the north.
In spite of the fierce gusts of wind, of the clouds of saturating spray which broke up against the wall of the harbour and fell with a patter and a hiss on to the stone, on the first day that the convicts worked there, a small, slender woman, poorly dressed, who fought the wind with difficulty and caught her breath with deep-drawn, struggling sobs as if the exertion hurt her, crept slowly along the outer side of the slippery pier through the dense sea-showers, until she was within a few feet of the warder who walked, with fixed bayonet, up and down, guarding the convicts on the land side. The warder stopped, and asked her rather brusquely what she wanted.
“Nothing; I only want to get as near as I can to the sea. It’s good for me,” she answered fluently, but in a foreigner’s French.
And as she looked ill enough for every breath she drew to be already numbered, and fixed her eyes yearningly on the horizon as if no nearer object was of moment to her, he let her stay. But each time that his back was turned on his walk she was up like a hare, in spite of her evident weakness, eagerly scanning the workers in their coarse grey uniforms, searching, searching, until at last, at her third scrutiny, she discovered the man she wanted. It was George Lauriston. He was working with a will, pickaxe in hand, his feet now in, now out of the water, his back towards her, his arms rising at regular intervals, as he dealt blow after blow at the solid masonry. She did not cry out as she recognised him; she did not even try to attract his attention; but fell back into her former position and retained it unchanged through two or three turns and returns of the warder up and down. The one glance had intoxicated her; she doubted her own powers of self-restraint, that gave her the blessed privilege of seeing him, her own husband, in the flesh, after those long dark months of absence when he had come to her only in dreams.
After a little while she noted, sitting crouched under the wall, out of sight of the convicts, that the blows of the pickaxe had ceased. If for a few moments he was resting, he might, if God would be kind, turn this way, see her, meet her gaze with his, give her one short kiss of the eyes that she might carry home and nurse in her memory through the long nights when she lay awake thinking of him. She waited, scarcely drawing breath, till the warder turned again. She had ten full seconds for her venture. Scudding over the great stones like a lapwing she reached the breach again, and looked over. A cry rose from her heart, but she stifled it as, through spray, rain, mist, the wind-driven rain cutting her tender face like stones, the waves shooting up great geysers of white foam close to her, she met the look that through long weeks of illness she had hungered for.
“Nouna!” cried George, with a hoarse shout that the waves drowned with their thunder.
Finger on lip she sped back in a moment, leaving him dazed, stupefied, half believing, half hoping the figure he had seen was only a vision of his imagination. For could that little pinched, wasted face, in which the great brown eyes stood out weirdly, be the bonny bride whose beauty had seemed to him almost supernatural? He set to work again mechanically, hardly knowing what he did; but when the short day began to draw in, and a veil of inky clouds to bring a shroud-like shadow over the sea, and the warders gave the word to cease work and muster for the march back to the prison, he saw the little weird face again, read the short sad message of unwavering love and weary longing in her great passion-bright eyes, and resisting, with one supreme effort of the old soldierly habit of discipline, the dangerous temptation to risk everything and break the ranks for an embrace, which his failing health told him would certainly be the last, he marched on with the rest, and left her to creep—benumbed with cold and wet to the skin, but feverishly happy in the knowledge that she had seen him again—back to her home to live on the hope of another such meagre meeting.
The next day was wild, stormy, and bitterly cold, with a driving north-east wind, and intermittent snow-showers. But when the convicts were marched down to the harbour, Nouna was already there, crouching—a small, inert bundle of grey waterproof—under the shelter of a pile of huge stones, watching for her husband’s coming with hungry eyes. When the tramp, tramp, upon the flags told her the gang was approaching she peeped out cautiously, and then, afraid lest in her desire to escape the notice of any one but George, she should escape his also, she rose, crept out a few paces from her shelter, and turned her face boldly towards the advancing men. George was in the front rank to-day; in the morning light, which beat full upon his face, she saw him well, saw a terrible change in him; even while he, on his side, noted more fully the transformation in the little fairy princess who had taken his whole nature by storm less than a year ago—from a lovely unthinking child into a sick and desolate woman. How could he think, as he looked at her, that there was anything but loss in a change which rent his very heart, and moved him as no allurement of her beauty, no wile of her sensuous coquetry had ever done? In spite of the educational enthusiasm he had spent upon his sixteen-year-old bride, in spite of his genuine anxiety to surround her with elevating and spiritualising influences, it thus happened that when at last the spirit instead of the senses shone out of her yearning eyes, it gave him no gladness, but rather a deep regret, and instead of thanking heaven for waking the soul he had in vain longed to reach, he cursed his own fate that he had brought about this change in the woman for whom he was at all times ready to die.
He did not pass very near to her, for the little creature was cowed and shy, afraid of bringing some punishment upon him by any sign of intelligence. He tried to speak to her, tried to tell her not to wait there, exposed to the bitter wind and the lightly falling snow; but his voice was hoarse and broken, nothing escaped his lips but guttural sounds, which did not even reach her ears. So that when, after a couple of hours’ work upon the rough stones of the pier, he again came in sight of his wife, crouching in the same place, watching patiently for another brief sight of him, he took, to save her from the risks her fragile frame was running, a resolve, the execution of which cut him like a knife. He went up to the warder and said: