[CHAPTER XXVIII]
THE WALLED-UP DOORS
Marion Lascelles had hoped, had prayed that this moment would come at last; that at some future day Laure's husband would stand face to face with his wife again; that he would seek her out and find her even though, to do so, he had to follow La Châine to the New World.
But now--now that what she had hoped for had come to pass, there almost swept a revulsion of feeling over her. Standing before that husband of the woman whom she had tended and nurtured, she smothered within her bosom something that was akin to a groan. For his coming brought, would bring, in an hour, in half-an-hour, in a few moments, the joy unspeakable to Laure for which she had so much craved, while to her--to Marion--the outcast, it brought also separation from the only thing in all the wide world that she loved or could ever love again. She had been racked by her love for men who had treated her badly and on whom she had taken swift, unerring vengeance for their infidelity; yet that was passed. Her heart had died, or, if not dead, had steeled itself against all other love of a like nature (since the condemned man whom she had married in the prison had been only accepted as a husband because, in the distant land to which they had been going together, such a union would be a matter of convenience and profit, as well as, perhaps, safety). Yet into that heart had crept another love, pure, unselfish, almost holy. Her love for Laure. And now--now it would be worthless, valueless, of no esteem. At what price would her fostering, her sister's love be valued when set off against the love of husband?
Had she been a bad woman instead of an erring one only, a woman resolved to attach to her for ever the one creature with whose existence her own was, as she had vainly dreamed, inseparably bound up; had she been the Marion Lascelles of ten, five, perhaps one year ago, it may be--she feared it must have been--that she would have lied to Walter Clarges standing there before her, his sad face irradiated now, since she had not lied, with joy extreme. She would perhaps have denied Laure's existence, have said that she had long since fallen dead upon one of the roads along which she and the other women had plodded weary and footsore; she would have done anything to have kept the girl to herself. But not now. Not now. Not even though her heart broke within her. Never! She loved Laure. Perish, therefore, all her own feelings, her hopes of happy days to come and to be passed by the other's side. She loved her; it was not by falsehood and treachery and selfishness that that love must be testified.
"I cannot leave this work to which I am put," she said, speaking to him as these thoughts continued to flow through her mind. "I have to earn remission of the remainder of my sentence. Pardon for--for myself. Yet, if you would see her now, she is to be found in the Rue de la Bourse. The number is 3. Upon the first floor in the front room you will find her."
She spoke calmly, almost hardly, Walter Clarges thought, and, thus thinking, deemed her a cold-hearted, selfish woman, studying nought but her own release and the swiftest method of obtaining it. Wherefore he said:
"You know her. You must have marched in the same cordon with her."
"Yes, I know her."
"How can she have borne the terrors of the journey? How? How?"