"Hush! Hush! I have been an awful sinner; I have deserved my fate, I have been swayed and mastered by one passion after another--by love, jealousy, hate, revenge. God forgive me! We southern women are all like that! Yet--if I should live----"
"If you live! You shall, you must live! Oh! Marion, my guide, my sister----"
"Ah, your sister! Yes! Say that again. Yet," she cried, springing to her feet, "not now! Now we have to earn the freedom we long so for. I must go; I must do my best and work for both of us. Ah, God! how good it is, how peaceful, to be doing something at last, no matter if danger lurks in it, that is not evil. Let me go, sweet. I shall come back to you at night; therefore sleep well all day. And, see, I will lock you in the house so that no harm may come anigh you. You will not fear?"
"Never; knowing you are coming back to me."
Then they tore themselves apart, Marion taking every opportunity of leaving Laure as comfortable as was possible, which opportunity was not lacking since the room was, as has been said, furnished luxuriously, and nothing was wanting that might make the couch of the wearied girl an easy one. And so, after more embraces between them, Marion went forth once more, falling in with the rest of the women and following the Sheriff and the convict and the "crows," to do the work they might be appointed to perform.
The bravest heart that ever beat--even her own, since there was none braver!--might well be turned almost to stone by that which they had to do; the sights they were forced to witness. And the daylight made those sights even more terrible and more appalling than the night had done, which, if it produced a weird and wizard air of solemnity that spread itself around all the terrors of the pestilence, had; at least, served also as a cloak to much. For now they saw the dead lying in heaps upon each other--with, among them, the dying; they saw the awful chalk-like faces turned up to the bright morning sun in the last agonised glare of a hideous death, and the still whiter eye-balls gleaming hideously. They saw, too--but description of these horrors must cease. Suffice it that these women stood among a hecatomb of victims such as other stricken cities had shown in earlier days, but which none, not even London with its plague, had equalled for more than a hundred years.
Gradually the women of the gang were distributed about in various spots where it was thought they might be of service; to some fell the task of holding cups of broth or of water to the lips of the dying; to some the casting of disinfectants over the already dead; to others the removal of newborn babes from the pestiferous atmosphere in which their mothers lay. And Marion's task, because she was strong and feared nothing, was to assist in the removal of the dead to the carts that were to transport the bodies to the ramparts, in the hollows of which many scores were to be interred in quicklime.
Engaged thus, she observed near her a gentleman--a man clad in black, as one who wore mourning for a relative; a man young, handsome and grave. One, too, whose face was white and careworn as though it had become so through some poignant grief. He was talking to one of the "crows" as her eyes fell on him, and--with an astonishment in her mind which, she noticed, was not all an astonishment, but rather an indistinct feeling that gradually merged itself into something that she seemed to feel, did not partake altogether of the unexpected--she observed that both men were regarding her. They were doing so, she understood, by the glances cast at her by the "crow," and followed by others from the stranger talking of her. Why, she asked herself, why? Yet even as she did so, something within again apprised her, whispered to her, that it was not strange they should be doing so. Then, with the habit of years strong upon her, she cast one penetrating glance at the new-comer from out of her dark eyes, and went on with the loathsome work she was engaged upon.
Presently, however, she felt that the man clad in mourning had drawn near to her--she knew it though she had looked round no more: a moment later she heard him addressing her.
"You will pardon me," he whispered, "for what I have to say. But--but--that unhappy creature with whom I have been conversing has told me that--you--alas! that I must say it--have recently made a journey from Paris. That you are----"