DE ROQUEMAURE'S WORK.
The weather had changed, the frost was gone, and the night was hot and murky, while rain was falling, as alone, now, alas! St. Georges mounted the summit of a hill that rose close above Troyes on the road to Paris.
He had commenced his journey again.
It was a gruesome spot to which he had arrived on this night—an elevation that surmounted a billowy country, over all of which, in the summer time, the vines and corn grew in rich profusion, but which now looked bare and melancholy as the southwest wind swept the rain clouds over it beneath a watery moon. To the left of him there swung, upon the exact crest of the hill, a corpse in chains, with, perched upon its mouldering head, a crow—looking for the eyes long since pecked out by others of its brood! To the right there rose a little wood, through which the wind moaned and sighed onto his face, bringing with it warm drops of rain.
Involuntarily he glanced up at the thing swinging above his head—heartbroken as he was at having had to leave Troyes with his child still unfound, he could not refrain from doing that!—and wondered who and what the malefactor had been who was thus exalted. And as he lowered his eyes from the ghastly mass of corruption, he saw against the gibbet a thicker, darker thing than the gallows tree itself—a thing surmounted by a white, corpselike face, from which stared a pair of large gray eyes at him—eyes in which, as the clouds scurried by beneath the moon, the moon itself shone dazzlingly, lighting them up and showing their large pupils.
The horse saw them too, and started forward a pace or so until reined in by his master's hand, and then whimpered and quivered all over, while its rider, with his own flesh creeping, bent over his saddle and peered toward the dark form surmounted by the pallid face and glaring eyes.
"Who in Heaven's name are you?" St. Georges whispered, "and why select this ghastly spot to stand in and affright passers-by? What are you, man or woman?" and he leaned still further over his demi-pique to gaze at the figure, though as he did so his right hand stole to his sword hilt.
"A woman," a voice answered. "A woman who comes here to weep her husband's death. He"—and she cast the staring gray eyes upward to the object swinging with each gust of the wind in its chains—"was my husband. Pass on, and leave me with his murdered remains."
"Murdered! Rather, poor soul, say executed. Murderers slay not thus."
Slowly the figure left the foot of the gibbet as he spoke, so that he saw she was a tall young woman of the peasant class, clad in dark, poor clothes, and slowly she advanced the few yards that separated them, whereby he could observe her features and notice more plainly the awful whiteness of her face.