The Abbess Of Vlaye

by Stanley John Weyman

"Bonne went--in my place," she cried. And clapping her hands to her face in a paroxysm of grief, she leant, weeping, against the post of the door.

They looked at one another and began to understand, and to see. And one had opened his mouth to speak, when a strangled cry drew all eyes to the Abbess. She seemed to be striving to put something from her. Her staring eyes, her round mouth of horror, her waving fingers made up a picture of terror comparable only to one of those masks which the Greeks used in their tragedies of fate. A moment she showed thus, and none of those who turned eye on her doubted that they were looking on a stress of passion beside which the Countess's grief was but a puny thing. The next moment she fell her length in a swoon.

* * * * *

When she came to herself an hour later she lay for a time with eyes open but vacant, eyes which saw but conveyed no image to the ailing brain. The sun was still low. Its shafts darting through the interstices in the wall of the hut were laden with a million dancing motes, which formed a shifting veil of light between her eyes and the roof. She seemed to have been gazing at this a whole æon when the first conscious thought pierced her mind, and she asked herself where she was.

Where? Not in her own lodging, nor alone. This was borne in on her. For on one side of her couch crouched one of her women; on the other knelt the Countess, her face hidden. In the doorway behind the head of the bed, and so beyond the range of her vision, were others; the low drone of voices, her father's, the Duke's, penetrated one by one to her senses still dulled by the shock she had suffered. Something had happened then; something serious to her, or she would not lie thus surrounded with watchers on all sides of her bed. Had she been ill?

She considered this silently, and little by little began to remember: the flight to the camp, the camp life, the Duke's hut in which she had passed most of her time in the camp. Yes, she was in the Duke's hut, and that was his voice. She was lying on his couch. They had been besieged, she remembered. Had she been wounded? From under half-closed lids she scrutinised the two women beside her. The one she knew. The other must be her sister. Yes, her sister would be the first to come, the first to aid her. But it was not her sister. It was----

She knew.

She called on God and lay white and mute, shaking violently, but with closed eyes. The women rose and looked at her, and suggested remedies, and implored her to speak. But she lay cold and dumb, and only from time to time by violent fits of trembling showed that she was alive. What had she done? What had she done?

The women could make nothing of her. Nor when they had tried their utmost could her father, though he came and chid her querulously; his tone the sharper for the remorse he was feeling. He had had an hour to think; and during that hour the obedience which his less cherished daughter had ever paid him, her cheerful care of him, her patience with him, had risen before him; and, alas, with these thoughts, the memory of many an unkind word and act, many a taunt flung at her as lightly as at the dog that cumbered the hearth. To balance the account, and a little perhaps because the way in which Odette took it was an added reproach to him, he spoke harshly to the Abbess--such is human nature! But, for all the effect his words had on her, he might have addressed a stone. That which she had done thundered too loudly in her ears for another's voice to enter.

She had not loved her sister over dearly, and into such love as she had given contempt had entered largely. But she was her sister. She was her sister! Memories of childish days in the garden at Villeneuve, when Bonne had clung to her hand and run beside her, and prattled, and played, and quarrelled, and yielded to her--being always the gentler--rose in her mind; and memories of little words and acts, and of Bonne's face on this occasion and on that! And dry-eyed she shook with horror of the thing she had done. Her sister! She had done her sister to death more cruelly, more foully, more barbarously, than if she had struck her lifeless at her feet.