“Valmond, O Valmond!” again she cried beseechingly, her clouded eyes straining into the silence.
The cloak dropped from her shoulders, and the loose robe enveloping her fell away from a bosom that throbbed with the passion of a great despair. Nothing but silence.
She moved to the wall like a little child feeling its way, ran her hand vaguely along it, and touched a crucifix. With a moan she pressed her lips to the nailed feet, and came on gropingly to the couch. She reached down towards it, but drew back as if in affright; for a dumb, desolating fear was upon her.
But with that direful courage which is the last gift to the hopeless, she stooped down again, and her fingers touched Valmond’s cold hands.
They ran up his breast, to his neck, to his face, and fondled it, as only life can fondle death, out of that pitiful hunger which never can be satisfied in this world; then they moved with an infinite tenderness to his eyes, now blind like hers, and lingered there in the kinship of eternal loss.
A low, anguished cry broke from her: “Valmond—my love!” and she fell forward upon the breast of her lost Napoleon.
When the people gathered again in the little church upon the hill, Valmond and his adventure had become almost a legend, so soon are men and events lost in the distance of death and ruin.
The Cure preached, as he had always done, with a simple, practical solicitude; but towards the end of his brief sermon he paused, and, with a serious tenderness of voice, said:
“My children, vanity is the bane of mankind; it destroys as many souls as self-sacrifice saves. It is the constant temptation of the human heart. I have ever warned you against it, as I myself have prayed to be kept from its devices—alas! how futilely at times. Vanity leads to imposture, and imposture to the wronging of others. But if a man repent, and yield all he has, to pay the high price of his bitter mistake, he may thereby redeem himself even in this world. If he give his life repenting, and if the giving stays the evil he might have wrought, shall we be less merciful than God?
“My children” (he did not mention Valmond’s name), “his last act was manly; his death was pious; his sin was forgiven. Those rifle bullets that brought him down let out all the evil in his blood.