"I love you to tell me, please, Valérie."
"I was terribly unhappy," Valérie went on, "when I thought it was only he who would die. I knew, the moment I realized it was gunpowder smoke, that he was going to be killed. I knew that the smoke would lift for me when the moment came, and that then I should see him die."
"Valérie, oh, Valérie!"
"But you need not be sad for me, Nanette, because there is a thing I know that makes it all quite beautiful and right." She lifted herself up from the pillows, still holding Nanette's hand; the two heavy gold braids of her hair fell over her shoulders. "You see, we never could have been happy together, he and I," she said, "there would have been nothing but unhappiness for us both, always. I must tell you what I saw. I must have some one know, and you seem to understand things. You will not speak of it, till afterwards. And now, as I am telling you, you will not interrupt me, will you? You will not say any of the things most people would say, to break into my peace?" She stopped and waited, looking at Nanette intensely.
Nanette could not speak at all.
But Valérie must have understood, for she told it. She told it always quietly, as if she had passed beyond any shock or grief or sense of its strangeness: "The smoke was all about him, and about them; he and they had to fight blindly. They fought with bayonets. It was in the street of a village; I saw the cobbles under his feet, and a broken doorstep. He fought and fought. It seemed very long; he was quite alone to fight against so many of them. There were blue heaps behind him on the cobbles; I could make out just vaguely through the smoke. I think they were his comrades, wounded and dead. The others, the grey ones, were too many. I saw their grey shapes and their bayonets, and his wounds. I saw his face, just as he went down. His face was all alight, as it was the last time I saw him." Her own eyes were shining when she stopped, and her voice was like a singing.
In the quiet of the room Nanette waited, as if there were some spell she was afraid to break.
Valérie told her: "The last time I saw him was when he went out, nearly two years ago. I knew the station he would be passing through, with just some minutes there; and I went, and waited for him. I did not care if people knew. I ran to him in the crowd, and he saw me, and he said, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!' as if there were a miracle. In my vision, his face was just as it had been then. There was no sound at all in my vision, but from his face, as he died, I knew he was saying, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!'" Her warm, live hand held Nanette's hand steadily. "I know that I shall go to meet him, that I shall be waiting for him when he dies; I know, Nanette. I know because of the look there was in his face. I shall be waiting there, and he shall see me. And so I have no grief or fear." She was patting Nanette's hand to comfort her. "Is not it strange, Nanette; to-day I have a letter from him, a sad letter. And I have written him a happy one, and he will not understand why at all. He does not know how soon we will be together. I cannot tell him. And I am lonely waiting, now I know. Nanette, I am so glad that it is I who will go first."
Perhaps, when she is older, Nanette will have to wonder if there was something she might have done.