“It was her intention to enter your order.”
“She became a novice, Monseigneur, and helped for a while in the hospice.”
“For a while?” The scent of the bruised and fainting herbs was borne on him overpoweringly.
“She took the smallpox, Monseigneur, within a few days of you. She died, I think, a month ago. We had only one other death from the plague.”
“Thank you, my sister,” answered Luc gravely.
The sister passed on, and Luc stood silent in the sunny courtyard.
Dead! In what faith, in what mood, in what repentance, remorse, or fear? Dead without consolation, or love, among strangers—young and beautiful, and, he knew, without fear.
For a moment he was shaken by a wild revulsion, a desperate revolt against his own renewed triumphant exaltation and proud freedom. In that moment he would have put on all the shackles of her creed in return for the certain hope of seeing her again; he would have embraced any faith that had promised him that they should meet once more—even for a few minutes. A little while before and he had been prepared to believe that he would never see her again—prepared even not to think of her. Now he would have paid any price just to see her tired face and listen to her low, precise voice. He went back to the gardener’s cottage, and his eyes sought the little cheap plaster image of St. Joseph in the corner. If one could believe. He shook off the temptation, the delusion—she was gone. When he had seen her pass the white wall of the hospice she had left him for ever—and he had known it even then.
“I—suppose—I—loved—her,” he said to himself; but he had no understanding of any emotion outside confusion and loneliness. He did not see the room or the sunshine, but a white, sparkling expanse of snow, a great silver fir, and a woman on a white horse who leant from the saddle and looked at him.
He found his father standing where she had stood when he had seen her for the last time.