“My God!” he cried, “I could not have believed it possible.”
At this she burst out crying.
The general put his arm round her. “Come away, my daughter,” he said. “For once in my life I am ashamed of you.”
“I must first say good-bye to M. de Charruel,” she said through her tears, holding out her hand—the left hand, on which the ruby glowed like a drop of blood.
The convict raised it slowly to his lips. Their eyes met for the last time.
“Good-bye,” he said.
The next day, from a rocky cliff above his house, de Charruel saw the yacht hoist her white sails and steal out to sea. He watched her as long as she remained in sight, and when at last she sank over the horizon, he threw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of despair. For an hour he lay in a sort of stupor, rising only at the insistent whistle from the mine. This told him that it was twelve o’clock, and brought him back to the realities and obligations of life. Descending to the farm, he once more took up the threads of his existence, for the habits of twelve years are not to be lightly disregarded. But it was with difficulty that he brought himself to perform his usual tasks. His heart seemed dead within his breast. He wondered miserably at his former patience and industry as he saw on every side the exemplification of both. How could he ever have found contentment in such drudgery, in such pitiful digging and toiling in the dirt! What a way for a man to pass his days—an earth-stained peasant, ignobly sweating among his cabbages! Oh, the intolerable loneliness of those years! How grim they seemed as he looked back at them, those tragic, wasted years!
Tortured by the stillness and emptiness of his hut, he spent the night at Fitzroy’s, lying on the bare verandah boards till daylight. But he returned home before the household was astir, lest he should be invited to breakfast and be expected to talk. He shrank from the thought of meeting any one, and for days afterwards kept close within the limits of his little farm, shunning every human being near him. Every convict has such phases, such mutinies of the soul. The malady runs its course like a fever, and if it does not kill or impair the victim’s reason, it leaves him at last too often a hopeless sot. But, fortunately for himself, it was work, not cognac, that cured Paul de Charruel. He came to himself one day in his garden, as he was digging potatoes. He stood up, drew his hand across his face, and realised that the brain-sickness had left him. He went into the house and looked at himself in the glass, shuddering at the scarecrow he saw reflected there. He examined his clothes, his rooms, his calloused hands, with a strange, new curiosity, studying them all with the same speculation, the same surprise. He stood off, as it were, and looked at himself from a distance. He walked about his tangled, weedy farm, and wondered what had come over him these past weeks. He had been starving, he said to himself many times over—starving for companionship.
He sought out Fitzroy at the mine. It was good again to hear the Irishman’s honest laugh, to clasp his honest hand, to think there was one person, at least, that cared for him. He hung about Fitzroy all that day, as though it would be death to lose sight of him—Fitzroy, his friend. He repeated that last word a dozen times. His friend! He talked wildly and extravagantly for the mere pleasure of hearing himself speak. He was convulsed with laughter when an accident happened to a truck, and could scarcely contain himself when Fitzroy had a mock altercation with the engineer. No one could be more humourous than Fitzroy, and the engineer was a man of admirable wit! What a fool he had been to sulk these weeks on his farm. His farm! It made him tremble to think of it, so unendurably lonely and silent it had become. It was horrible that he must return to it,—his green prison,—with its ghosts and memories.