“That is my wife. She will die of cold if she stays. Please speak to her gently.”
George saw, as he turned to go back to his work, the poor child’s white frightened face as the warder addressed her. Slowly, with one long straining gaze, as if she would draw her loved one into her arms by the passionate force of her yearning eyes, she turned, and George saw her hurry away down the pier as fast as her chilled limbs would let her: and he felt that the little retreating figure which soon became a mere speck against grey sky, grey sea, grey stone, had carried away the last shred of human hope and human feeling that prison life and failing health had left in his breast.
Next day, which was the last of the work in the harbour, Nouna was not on the pier; but as George took his place with the rest he found, roughly cut with a knife or some other sharp instrument in one of the large stones, the letters filled in with red chalk, these words:
“I have been quite good all the time. Good-bye. N.”
It was his wife’s last message to him. George knelt down and put his lips upon the stone. He had forgotten that he was not alone, but if he had remembered, it would have made no difference. The waves might wear out next tide the feebly scrawled marks which perhaps no eye but his could decipher, or the words might be read by every man, woman and child in the town—it was all the same to him now; they were engraved upon his own heart, a complete, a holy answer to every doubt which had ever troubled him, to every aspiration he had ever had for the young life he had bound to his own. Love and sorrow had sanctified her; there was no danger for his darling now.
The man, on the other hand, had only his worst feelings intensified by misfortune which he could not but look upon as unmerited. George’s love for his wife remained as strong as ever, but it was now the one soft spot in a nature rapidly hardening under the influence of a struggle with fortune in which he had been signally worsted. In the long hours of the night, when his cough kept him awake even though he was tired out by a hard day’s labour, he brooded over the wrongs he had suffered, until the canker of disappointment ate into his heart and bred there a burning, murderous wish for revenge: not upon the French law which had condemned him, as he maintained, unjustly—that was impersonal, intangible, a windmill to fight; not upon the Colonel, who had faltered in his friendship; not upon Chloris, whose mischievous caprice had set in motion the force which had indirectly destroyed him; but a man’s indignant righteous revenge upon the rascal who had tried from his very wedding-day to come between him and his wife. George began to feel that it was even more for the sake of finding Rahas than of meeting Nouna again that he yearned with a sick man’s longing to live until the time of his release, and prayed for strength to drag on an existence which with its hopelessness and its morbid cravings for the savage excitement of vengeance, was an infernal torment which told, by its intensity, on his waning strength.
The prison authorities noticed the change in him, and treated him with what little consideration was possible. The old priest, in particular, stirred by the fact that “number 42” was a heretic into giving him something better than the conventional doses of religious advice which he administered to the devotees of “the true Church,” proved a most kind friend to him, and it was with a manner of sincere and warm sympathy that the good father while paying him his usual visit one day in April, let fall at parting a mysterious whisper about good news and good friends who had not forgotten him. The brooding prisoner hardly heeded him. But next morning he was brought up before the governor, and a paper was formally read out to him, in which he was informed that the Minister of the Interior, on having brought under his notice the case of the Englishman, George Lauriston, now undergoing a sentence of penal servitude at Toulon, had come to the conclusion that the said sentence was unduly severe, and that, as the evidence went to show that the crime was unpremeditated, and committed under strong provocation, a short term of imprisonment would have been adequate punishment, and that, in view of the fact that the said George Lauriston had been already at Toulon working as a convict for nearly four months, the Minister had decided to remit the remainder of the allotted term of imprisonment. George listened, but he hardly understood; the governor, in a few kindly words, then told him that he was a free man, that he could go back to his friends.
“Friends!” echoed George in a dull voice.
“Come, you cannot deny that you have friends; it is to some of them that you owe the good news you have just received,” said the governor. “I understand they are in the town waiting to meet you. Sir Henry—something I do not recollect, is the name of the gentleman; and the lady——”
A light broke over George’s face; he spoke some broken words of thanks in a more human voice.