"In a manner we are so. What control is there over us--over you, especially? You will live in the streets--or, if you prefer it, in any house you choose to enter; have a care, though, that it is one from which the healthy have fled in fear, not one in which the dead lie poisoning the air. At any moment you can hide yourselves away. While for us--well, there will come a night when we shall not return to the galleys. That is all."
"Has," asked Marion, "a chain of male emigrants entered Marseilles but a few hours before us? They should have done so, seeing that they were not more than a day in advance."
"Yes, yes. They have come. Yet their fortune was different; better or worse than yours, according to how one regards it. One of the merchant ships was still in the port--off the port--a league out to sea, and, well, they risked it. They took the human cargo; they are gone for New France. Had you a man amongst them whom you loved, my black beauty?" he asked, gazing into the dark eyes of Marion, those eyes whose splendour not all she had gone through could dull.
"My husband was amongst them," she replied quietly; while, to herself, she added: "Poor wretch! He did little enough good in marrying me. Yet this leaves me free to devote myself to her."
"Your husband," the convict exclaimed with a laugh. "Your husband? Good! he will never claim you. You can take another if you desire--the first one who falls in love with those superb glances."
"Vagabond! be still," she answered, with such a look from the very eyes he had been praising that the man was silent.
They were by now close to the northern gate of Marseilles; and here for a little while they halted, the Sheriff, whose name was Le Vieux--and who is still remembered there for his acts of mercy and goodness to all--addressing some archers who formed a group outside the gate, and bidding them produce food and wine, as well as some vinegar-steeped cloths for the neck of each woman.
"Who are they?" asked another Sheriff, who came up at this moment, while he scanned the worn and emaciated women and ran his eyes over their dusty and weather-stained clothes. "Surely you are not bringing to our charnel house the refugees from other stricken towns? Not from Toulon and Arles?"
"Nay," replied Le Vieux, "not so. But women who may, by God's grace, be yet of some service to those left alive. If there are any!" he added ominously. Then he asked: "What is the count to-day?"
The other shrugged his shoulders ere he replied: