“She goes into the nunnery to-morrow, they say,” was the reply. “Her marriage is to be set aside by the bishop to-day—in the cathedral. This is her last night to live as such as I—but no, she will be happier so.”
“Madame,” said I, “I am a heretic, but I listened when your husband said, ‘Mon grand homme de Calvaire, bon soir!’ Was the cross less a cross because a heretic put it to his lips? Is a marriage less a marriage because a heretic is the husband? Madame, you loved your Jean; if he were living now, what would you do to keep him. Think, madame, is not love more than all?”
She turned to the dead body. “Mon petit Jean!” she murmured, but made no reply to me, and for many minutes the room was silent. At last she turned, and said, “You must come at once, for soon the priests will be at the church. A little later I will bring you some breakfast, and you must not stir from there till I come to fetch you—no.”
“I wish to see Voban,” said I.
She thought a moment. “I will try to fetch him to you by-and-bye,” she said. She did not speak further, but finished the sentence by pointing to the body.
Presently, hearing footsteps, she drew me into another little room. “It is the grandfather,” she said. “He has forgotten you already, and he must not see you again.”
We saw the old man hobble into the room we had left, carrying in one arm Jean’s coat and hat. He stood still, and nodded at the body and mumbled to himself; then he went over and touched the hands and forehead, nodding wisely; after which he came to his armchair, and, sitting down, spread the coat over his knees, put the cap on it, and gossiped with himself:
“In eild our idle fancies all return,
The mind’s eye cradled by the open grave.”
A moment later, the woman passed from the rear of the house to the vestry door of the cathedral. After a minute, seeing no one near, I followed, came to the front door, entered, and passed up a side aisle towards the choir. There was no one to be seen, but soon the woman came out of the vestry and beckoned to me nervously. I followed her quick movements, and was soon in a narrow stairway, coming, after fifty steps or so, to a sort of cloister, from which we went into a little cubiculum, or cell, with a wooden lattice door which opened on a small gallery. Through the lattices the nave amid choir could be viewed distinctly.
Without a word the woman turned and left me, and I sat down on a little stone bench and waited. I saw the acolytes come and go, and priests move back and forth before the altar; I smelt the grateful incense as it rose when mass was said; I watched the people gather in little clusters at the different shrines, or seek the confessional, or kneel to receive the blessed sacrament. Many who came were familiar—among them Mademoiselle Lucie Lotbiniere. Lucie prayed long before a shrine of the Virgin, and when she rose at last her face bore signs of weeping. Also I noticed her suddenly start as she moved down the aisle, for a figure came forward from seclusion and touched her arm. As he half turned I saw that it was Juste Duvarney. The girl drew back from him, raising her hand as if in protest, and it struck me that her grief and her repulse of him had to do with putting Alixe away into a nunnery.