“You are like me,” he reflected, mopping his brow. “You have seen your companions struck down, and are left alone. But we are condemned. Time is the axe that will soon fell us.”
He had been a little retarded in climbing up the hill, and though the afternoon was not far advanced, the sun was already declining toward the Lepine chain. December days are so short, and the nearness of the mountains cut them shorter still. From the hill he could see the same view almost as from La Vigie: the Signal facing him, and below it the receding valley of the Echelles; on the right, in the background, beyond the plain, the lake of Bourget, the Revard range, and the Nivolet with its regular gradations. The snow made the outlines less distinct, blurring the foreground till the landscape was all soft and uniform. Threats of evening tinted it a delicate rose, spreading over all things the hue of living flesh.
In spite of the clear air, Mr. Roquevillard felt the cold, and buttoned up his overcoat. Now that he was no longer warm from walking he was again conscious of his age and sorrow. Why had he climbed this hill? Its slope seemed to him like a cemetery, with its felled trees scattered over the white ground. Did he come here, opposite the old place abandoned now after the care of so many centuries, to gaze upon its ruin and mourn the death of its hopes? Across the valley he could distinguish the lands and buildings that had been his heritage. The house, which only a year ago had sheltered all the reassembled, joyful family, was closed now: never again should he pass its doors.
Silence and solitude were all round him on this funereal, leafless hillock where he stood. About him, within him, it was Death. And as a vanquished chief calls the roll of his soldiers after battle, he summoned up his sorrows one by one: his wife’s life had been crushed out, borne down by her troubles; his daughter Felicie given up to God, far away over the seas and lost to him; Hubert, his firstborn, his best boy, struck down in full youth, far from France and all that were dear to him; Germaine, leaving her native country; Margaret, vowed to celibacy by her poverty; and finally Maurice, the last of the Roquevillards, on whom the future of the race depended, thrown into prison upon an infamous charge; threatened with conviction even though the paternal lands had been sacrificed to save him. In vain had sixty years been given to the nurture of this family. Decimated, crushed by the fault of a single member, it lay prone now at the foot of La Vigie, like the trunks of these trees half bedded in the snow. To him whose robust force and faith had looked for victory, defeat and shame had been dealt out.
In his discouragement he leant against the oak, his brother in misfortune. He gave a long, despairing groan, the groan of a tree which totters beneath the raining blows of the axe before it falls. The unheeding earth and sky were immobile in their quiet colours; he felt himself abandoned.
Two tears rolled down his cheeks—a man’s tears, the more rare and moving because they are a confession of humility and weakness, falling slowly in the cold air, half frozen on his unwarmed cheeks. He did not dream that he wept. He only realised it upon perceiving a human form slowly climbing the hillside toward him. He dried his eyes, lest he should be surprised in his sorrow. It was the figure of a woman gathering dead wood and faggots. Bending over the white earth, she could not see him; only when she got near the oak she straightened up a little and recognised him.
“Master Francis!” she murmured.
“Mother Fauchois!” he exclaimed.
She came nearer, and put down her burden; searched for the right thing to say, and finding nothing, began to weep, not silently, but with loud sobs.
“Why do you cry?” asked Mr. Roquevillard.