"Oh!" Laure gasped, "if--if I dared to hope that."
"Dared to hope! There is nothing else to be supposed but that. He will be there. Surely, surely, Laure, you will meet your husband in this colony, big as they say it is. All will be well."
"Nay," she said, "nay. It will never be well. He married me to save me from Desparre; he had ceased to love me. Yet--yet, if I could see him once again, only once, I would tell him----"
"What?"
"That I surrendered; that I had come to love him. Yet of what avail would that? He will be a gentleman planter; I--I a released convict, a woman earning her bread by labour. Also, he knows--that--I have no origin."
"He knew it before he married you. And, knowing it, be sure he loved you." And Marion Lascelles, whether she believed the comforting hopes she had endeavoured to raise in the other's breast, or whether she had only uttered them in the desire to put fresh strength into her sad heart, would hear no word of doubt.
But still the chains went on, the men a mile ahead, the women following behind. But ever on, and with the journey growing still more toilsome to these poor creatures worn by this time to skeletons; more toilsome because they were passing through Haute Loire and Ardèche now and the mountains were all around them, and had to be climbed by their bleeding, festering feet. Ascents that had to be made which lasted for hours, followed by descents as wearying to their aching limbs.
In truth, it might have seemed to any who had observed that chain of women that it was a small army of dead women which was passing through the land. An army of dead women who had been burnt black and become mummified, whose bony frames were enveloped in prison garments, foul--even for such things--from rain and the mud they had slept in and the white powdery dust that had blown on to them. Dead women, who, when they halted, fell prostrate and gasping to the earth, or reclined against rocks and trees rigidly, with staring, glassy eyes--eyes that stared, indeed, but saw nothing. Women, in fact, to whose lips the guards and the sergeants of the prisons--themselves burnt black, though not worn to skin and bone by constant walking, since they had their horses and the carts--were forced to hold cups of water, as otherwise the prisoners must have died of thirst, not being able to fetch or lift them for themselves. But still--with now half their number left behind dead, amongst which were two of the women whose children had been taken from them--they went on. Down by where the Rhone swept and swirled; past Beaucaire and Tarascon, past Orgon and Lambèse; past Aix, sacred twenty years before to the slaughter, and the murder, and the mock trials of many Protestants still toiling at the galleys, hopeless and heartbroken. On, on, on, until, beneath a lurid evening sky, the eyes of the guards--but not the sightless eyes of the women--discerned a great city lying upon the shores of a limpid, waveless sea.
Marseilles! It was there before them, before the eyes of those men on horseback and in the carts, only--what was happening, what was doing in it? That, they could not understand.
For, beneath that lurid and gleaming sky, which had succeeded to an awful thunderstorm that had passed over the unhappy chain gang an hour before and drenched them afresh, as they had been drenched so many times in their long march, they saw fires blazing from pinnacles and towers, as well as upon the city walls. They knew, too, that similar fires must be blazing in the streets and market-places and great open spaces--they knew it by another fierce red light that rose up and mingled with the red flames and flecks which the sun cast upon the purple, storm-charged clouds.