Père Glorieux first, then the two men, side by side, and back of them Bernoline and I; so we went, around the wall, where, I remember, Marianne’s wrinkled face shone wet with tears. There a ghastly thing happened.
The child, startled by our apparition, started to run, stumbled, and lurched against the leg of Von Holwitz. Never shall I forget the look on his face as he looked down!
Bernoline sprang forward, an instinctive movement of motherhood—who knows, perhaps the first—and snatched him up. The child, frightened, began to cry. I took him hurriedly and put him in the arms of the nurse. Bernoline stood, waiting my return, and the tears were standing in her eyes as she looked back.
“God help me to feel as a mother,” she said, staring beyond me. “David, your hand.”
Together, we picked our way across the strewn débris to the chapel.
“Charlotte Corday! Charlotte Corday!” kept running through my mind. Why? I don’t know. An irrelevant suggestion, unless it were the feeling of a martyr in the tumbrils of the Revolution, going to her execution. Yes, I think that was the thought.
I remember little of the mockery of a service. I stood in the shadows, unable to think or pray, hearing from time to time the shriek of a traveling shell, the mumbled, hurried cadences from the altar, and across the shattered walls, from time to time, in the quiet between explosions, the cry of the child; that child who, too, was a human being with an immortal soul, and must work out its destiny of wrath. Once, a stray shell burst several hundred yards away and a flying crumb of masonry fell in the nave and ricocheted a moment. No one moved. De Saint Omer stood like an avenging angel, arms folded, waiting.
* * * * *
It was over. She came to me directly, gave a little sigh, and lay shuddering in my arms.