"Ill! For how long?"
"That I cannot tell you. You must have care and quiet, absolute quiet."
Pauline said no more. The distress of heart and nerves came on again; she moaned, being exceedingly troubled in spirit and her pallor was great.
"It is clear you must not remain out in the road any longer, mademoiselle. You must be put to bed and have warmth and rest and some kind woman to look after you. Ah! How we would welcome our good Mme. Poussette now, but she has flown, she has flown. So it will be Mme. Archambault perhaps, who knows all about sickness; has she not reared thirteen of her own, or fourteen, I forget which? Come, mademoiselle, we will lift you carefully. The door is open, the manor is hospitable and warm, its kitchen and larder well stocked, its cellars overflowing. Faith—you might do worse, and at Poussette's who would be there to nurse you?"
Pauline was too spent to utter the defiant objections that in health she would have hurled at the speaker. Tragedy indeed had touched her for once too deeply, and she submitted to be helped back into her old home, the house made hateful by a thousand painful associations of an unhappy youth, without uttering a single remonstrance. Some of her native courage knocked timidly at her frightened heart, clamouring to be reassured of days to come, of duties to be taken up, of life to be lived, for over and above her sense of cruel frustration and bereavement she dreaded death, not caring to die. The closing of the episode in which the guide figured so prominently appalled and stupefied her, yet her inherent vitality sprang up, already trying to assert itself.
"What a position is mine!" she thought, when a slight return of strength enabled her, leaning on the doctor's arm, to reach the room so long occupied by her brother. But her lips said nothing. There was no other place to put her; the salon did not contain a sofa, she could not be lodged with Artémise or Angeel, and meanwhile her weakness increased till she asked herself to be put to bed. Maman Archambault was sent for and in a few moments Pauline was lying on the lumpy tattered mattress which had served Henry Clairville for his last couch.
The course of tragic accident had brought her to this, and could she have foreseen the long, long weary time, first of illness, then of convalescence, and finally a physical change so marked as to unfit her for all but a narrow domestic life, it is likely that with her fierce and impatient temper she might have been tempted to end her existence. As one for whom the quest of happiness was ended as far as a prosperous marriage and removal from St. Ignace were involved, she now depended on herself again, and bitterly as she might mourn and lament the disappointment and chagrin which in a moment had permanently saddened her future, her grief and mortification would have been bitterer still could she have foreseen the long nights of half-delirious insomnia, the days of utter apathy and uselessness which stretched blankly before her.
Later that night, when she had tried to compose herself to sleep but without success, she called Maman Archambault into the room.
"Give me a light—for the love of God, a light!" she wailed, sitting up with all her dark hair pouring over the bed. "How dare you leave me without a light and I so ill!"
"But the doctor said——"