“Do you find consolation in that, Madame?” he asked gently.
She looked up; then, seeing he was holding the horses, rose, slipping the rosary back into the bosom of her gown.
“If not there, where else?” she asked, very sadly. “God is the only kind person I know.”
She came towards her horse, and he helped her to mount. When she was in the saddle he gave her his cloak, and she took it now, without a word, and shivered into it. The dawn seemed colder than the night.
“Do you remember the story of Madame de Montespan and the pigs?” she asked, leaning a little towards Luc.
He stared at her.
“She was very beautiful and very great,” continued Carola, “and when King Louis loved her there were no flowers in France considered worthy to lie on her breast. Then when she fell into disgrace she left the Court and died—still beautiful. And they took her heart to bury it at a certain convent; and the peasant who carried it became weary of the journey, and cast the heart into a ditch, and turned back—and no one cared. And some pigs nosing in the ditch ate the heart of the beautiful Marquise, and lay down that night in their sty with the proudest blood in France staining their jaws—and no one cared except God!” Her eyes flashed. “I think He remembered it against King Louis.”
“Why do you tell me this?” asked Luc, with a shudder.
“Because I have been thrown to the ditch and the swine,” she answered; “and out of the dirt I ask God to remember that I have paid for some of my sins—here on earth.”
He did not understand her, but her speech held him. With his hand on his bridle, he looked up at her, his haggard, resolute, and beautiful face clear in the light of the rising sun.