“Here!” he called to his companion. She withdrew her hand from his; he guessed that she was still carrying the child. There was a little pause, then he heard her cast herself on the ground.
“O God, believe that I am tired, tired!” she cried out.
Luc leant against the tree-trunk, gazing across the blackness. For the second time they were alone together in the cold and dark with a dead child between them; it seemed to him a symbol of what separated them and yet what brought them together: death and sorrow—but endeavour and exaltation. The enigma that had seemed to have poorly solved itself in the house of M. de Richelieu was now suddenly again unsolvable. Was she not brave and kind?—what she had appeared in Bohemia—had not all his estimates been utterly wrong? And what was the meaning of this constant crossing of their lives—connected always with death?
He put his hand wearily to his forehead; her voice came up from the ground, near his feet.
“These fields are not new to me, Monsieur de Vauvenargues. I have slept under these trees before. I used to watch the sheep here when I was a little ragged child. Sometimes I used to go to Aix with milk, and see you, Monsieur le Marquis, riding with your brother. Then I had another name—it was before I went to Paris.”
“So you are from Provence?” he murmured.
“Yes. Here I was born, homeless, nameless; and here I shall die, homeless, nameless also. I have done what I wished to, and I regret nothing.”
Luc could not speak; that their lives should have been so twisted together strangely troubled him.
She seemed to divine his silence.
“I could not help this. For Mademoiselle de Séguy’s sake, I would have done anything it had not happened.”