Luc rose. He felt himself straight and strong. He held out his arms towards the rolling golden clouds that entered through the broken walls, towards the procession that crossed the arc of light.
“O God of mine, whom I have laboured not to offend, take me back whence I came!” he cried.
As he spoke, he felt himself drawn into the company with the flags and swords, and with immortal light on his face he set his foot on the end of the dazzling arc.
M. de Voltaire, that evening, found him lying across the floor, with his head on his book, his right hand where his sword should have been, and the silver pieces scattered about him sparkling in the cold spring moonlight that fell through the high, open garret window.
EPILOGUE
A girl in a straight white muslin gown, and a cap with green ribbons, was seated on the brim of a fountain in the garden of a house in Aix, listening dutifully to an old man, who, with the self-absorption of extreme age, was talking of the past in a low, slightly fretful voice. Clémence de Fortia disguised a wandering attention. She had a letter in the bosom of her gown that she wished to read and re-read in private—a letter from a young deputy in Paris, full of the wonders, the scandals, the terrors of these last years of the century and first years of the French Republic.
It was midsummer, and the garden was knee-deep in flowers, all coloured by the sun and shaken by the warm breeze. The old man sat on a wicker chair under the tree that shaded the fountain with a rug about his knees. He must have been over eighty years of age, and he was dressed in the fashion of that period that was now completely over, and in the style of that aristocracy that had lately fallen, terribly and for ever.
“Your grandmother was betrothed to my elder brother once, Mademoiselle Clémence,” he said, taking up his broken talk after a pause.
“Why, I did not know that you ever had a brother, Monsieur,” she answered, interested.