He waved great windmills of arms, and talked loudly in a thick guttural voice, adding strange gestures and stranger oaths. A sort of fascination kept Mademoiselle's eyes riveted upon him, and presently she began to catch words—phrases.
"Dear holy Virgin! what was he saying?—Impossible—impossible, impossible!" And then quite suddenly her shocked brain yielded to the truth. There had been a massacre of the prisoners—this man had been there; he was recounting his exploits, boasting of the number he had killed.
"Mother most merciful, protect! save!—" But the ghastly catalogue ran on. They say that in those days many claimed the murderer's praise who had never acted the murderer's part. Men with hands innocent of blood daubed themselves horribly, and went home boasting of unimaginable horrors, guiltless the while as the children who hung eagerly on the tale. There was a madness abroad,—a fearful, epidemic madness that seized its thousands, and time and again set Paris reeking like a shambles and laughing wantonly in the face of outraged Europe.
Whether Jean Michel were innocent or not, his conversation was equally horrifying. Mlle de Rochambeau listened to it, shaking. The things said were inconceivable, and mercifully some of them passed over her innocence leaving it unbruised, save for a gradually accumulating weight of horror.
Suddenly she caught her cousin's name—"that wanton, the Montargis, damned Austrian spy," the man called her, and added Sélincourt's name to hers with a foul oath.
"I struck them, I! My pike was the first!" he shouted. Then drawing a scrap of reeking linen from his belt he waved it aloft, proclaiming, "This is her blood!" and looked around him for applause.
It was too much. A gasp broke from the girl's rigid lips, a damp dew from her brow. The twilight quivered—turned to darkness—then broke into a million sparks of flame, and a merciful oblivion overtook her.
Jean Michel may be left to the tender mercies of Louison his wife, a little woman and a venomous, having that command over her husband which one sees in the small wives of large men. Having haled him home, she burned his precious trophy, and poured much cold water on his hot and muddled head. Afterwards she gave her tongue free course, and we may consider that Jean Michel had his deserts.
When Mlle de Rochambeau shuddered back again to consciousness, the room was dark. Outside, quiet reigned, and a beautiful blue dusk, just tinged with starlight. She dragged herself up into a half-sitting, half-kneeling position, and looked long and tremblingly into the tranquil depths above. All was peace and a cool purity, after the red horror of the day. The lights of the city looked friendly; they spoke of homes, of children, of decent comfort and ordered lives, and over all brooded the great sapphire glooms of the darkening ether and the lights of the houses of God. A strange calm slid into her soul—the hour held her—life and death were twin points in a fathomless, endless stretch of peace eternal.
The flesh no longer enchained her—weak with shock and fasting, it released its grip, and the freer spirit peered forth into the immensities.