Dian shook his head. “That I cannot do, Grigge, but if the good God will it, I shall come back again. Remember all I have said and guard my sheep well, for they are dear indeed to me. Hold your courage through the winter. Who knows what good may come by spring!” He touched the boy’s shoulder in farewell and was off down the wide road.
Grigge
Grigge gazed after him, his hands clasped together, a sob catching his throat. It seemed as though all that he knew of kindliness and comradeship was going farther and farther from him down the wind-swept road. He had never known anything in his life but discomfort. He had always been hungry and in winter he had always been cold. He was rough and selfish and sullen and he knew it and most of the time did not care. But as he stood there that night by the low door of his wretched home, Grigge determined to be different! He went inside, and the wind slammed the door behind him before he could catch it. The noise awoke his little sister Letta, who whined, “It is cold; it is cold.”
“You are no colder than the rest of us,” Grigge answered roughly, but, after hesitating a moment, he put the piece of shawl over her and then tumbled down on to his mound of straw by the door.
Dian hardly heeded the weather as he quickly covered the ground. His thoughts were with the lad he had left and the sad lot of the people who lived at the very gates of a great house. He felt sad at heart, but said to himself, as he had often done before, “There is no use in your grieving for them, for that will not help them, and to help them is your dearest wish.” Grigge was only one of thousands of young lads who were made old and bitter by lack of food and the injustice that bound their lives. Dian knew little of the great conflict that was raging in Paris or of the armies massing throughout the land. He knew that the people, who for centuries had been overtaxed and overburdened by the arrogance and indifference of the nobility, had at last risen in revolt, but he did not know that they were being governed by bad, unscrupulous men and that there was no longer either law or order or justice in Paris or in other parts of France. He had thought that it was right for him to go to Paris, having had a feeling, for many days past, that the young Comte Lisle, whom he loved, was in danger. So he had made his simple preparations, telling only Neville, whom he knew to be faithful, where he was going.
The evening on which Dian told the children, in Mother Barbette’s cottage, about the young page in blue and silver was a wintry one in Paris. The snow had begun to fall, slanting mistlike through dreary alleyways. Although it was only a slight scurry and melted almost as soon as it touched the ground, it covered, for a little while, much of the soot and grime, making a fairy tracery about the roofs of the old houses. The sleet blew in a rakish, zigzag way across the alley where Vivi lived and far down the dim street beyond it. Curving northward, it swirled past close-shut shop windows and gaunt, noisy tenements, until it reached the great square in the middle of which stood the guillotine!
Then, in a sort of frenzy, it rioted down a wide avenue, spending itself at last against the windows of a house, close shut behind iron gates, in a quiet corner of Paris.
Lisle Saint Frère and Rosanne de Soigné were spending the evening in the great drawing-room in front of the fire. Rosanne knelt by the dying flames, peering at some nuts which she was roasting in a bed of coals. Her fair hair fell about her shoulders, and she had on the same white frock which she had worn on the night that she and Marie Josephine hid in the balcony. She shivered in spite of the fact that she wore a little velvet jacket over her frock.