Bastide Grammont looked up. Shaking off his stupor, he raised himself slowly and began in a voice all the more affecting by its calmness: "Prison walls do not speak. And yet the time will come when they will find a voice and will proclaim the secret means which have been employed to force all these wretches to make lies a shameful bulwark of their lives. Fualdes was not my enemy, he was only my creditor. If covetousness had misled a man otherwise decent and moderate, if it had armed his hand, I would never, for all that, have raised it against a defenseless old man. If you want a sacrifice, take me; I am ready, but do not mingle my lot with that of this brood. My family, who have always dwelt in the country, and have followed the customs and simple ways of rural life, are disgraced. My mother weeps and is crushed. Judge whether I, who am plunged in this sea of misfortune, can still cherish a love of life. I loved freedom once, I loved animals, the water, the sky, the air, and the fruits of the trees; but now I am dishonored, and if there were a future before me it would be sullied with shame, and the time would have an ill taste. Is it a court of justice before which I have been summoned? No, it is a hunt, the judge has become a hunter and prepares the innocent one to be a tidbit for the rabble. I ask no longer for justice, it is too late to mete out justice to me, too late, were the crown of France itself to be offered to me. I surrender myself to you to destroy me, your conscience will be loaded with that burden. One guilty man makes many, and your children's children will for this flood the living world with disgrace."
A paralyzed silence succeeded these words. But suddenly there burst forth an indescribable tumult. The public and the jurors arose and clenched their fists at Bastide Grammont, screamed and howled in wild confusion, Monsieur d'Enjalran's exhortation dying away unheard. And just as suddenly a deathly silence ensued. A faint, long-drawn cry which arose in the din, and now continued its plaintive note, petrified the faces of the listeners. All eyes tourned toward Clarissa. She felt the glances showering down upon her like the beams in a falling building.
Her heart was aflame with a desire for expiation ...
The speech of the public prosecutor gathered together once more the weapons of hatred which Rumor had forged against its victims; with cunning skill, he painted the night of the murder in such colors that the horror of it seemed to live for the first time, Bastide's advocate, on the other hand, contented himself with high-sounding phrases; he waxed warm, his listeners remained cold. While he was speaking there was a shoving and pushing in the rear of the hall; some of the ladies shrieked, a fair-sized dog ran through an opening in the bar, looked around him with glistening eyes, and, giving a short bark, crouched at Bastide's feet. Deeply moved, he laid his hand on the animal's neck, and motioned the usher, who wanted to remove it, back with a commanding gesture.
When the court retired for consultation, no one dared speak above a whisper. A woman sobbed and she was told to be quiet; it was the Benoit girl, Colard's sweetheart. She had wound her arms about the poor wretch's shoulders and her tear-stained face expressed but one desire—to share his fate. A relative of Bastide approached him in order to speak to him; Bastide shook his head and did not even look at the man. A sort of drowsiness had settled on his countenance—at any rate, words no longer carried any weight in his ears. Yet it happened that he lifted his eyes once more and after coursing through illimitable space they met those of Clarissa. Now the strange woman did not strike him as so strange. He heard, again the sound of her voice when she called him murderer; was it not rather a cry for help than an accusation? and that beseeching look, as if invisible hands were clutching at her throat? and that most delicate form so singularly free from indications of her age, quivering like a young birch in autumn?
Two lonely shipwrecked beings are driven by the currents of the ocean to the same spot, coming from opposite ends of the earth, unable to abandon the plank upon which their life depends, unable even to grasp each other's hands simply driven by the gradually dying wind to unknown depths. There was something weird in their mutual feeling of compassion. Yet Bastide's pained and gloomy astonishment gave way to the dreamy intoxication of fatigue, and the watchful eyes of his dog appeared to him like two reddish stars between black tree-tops. He heard the sentence of death when the court returned; he had risen, and listened to the words of the presiding judge; it sounded like the splashing of raindrops on withered leaves. He heard himself say something, but what it was he hardly knew. He saw many faces turned toward him in the dim light, and they gave him the impression of worm-eaten and decaying apples.
The verdict concerning the other accused persons was not to be announced until the following day. The crowds in the hall, in the entrances, and on the street, dispersed slowly. When Clarissa passed through the corridor every one stepped timidly aside.
She had learned that Bastide was not to be taken back to Rodez, but was to remain in the prison at Alby. She thereupon dismissed the carriage that was waiting for her, betook herself to an inn near by, where she asked for a room, and wrote a letter to her father—a few feverishly agitated sentences: "I know no longer what is truth and what is falsehood; Bastide is innocent, and I have destroyed him, though my desire was to help him; Yes and No are in my breast like two extinguished flames; if I were to return whence I came I should suffer a continual death; for that reason and because people live as they do, I go where I must." It was already past midnight when she asked to speak to the host. She requested him to send the letter in the morning to Château Perrié by a reliable messenger; she then asked the startled man to sell her a small basket of fresh fruit. The host expressed a polite regret that he had nothing more in his storeroom. Passionately urgent, she offered him ten, twentyfold its value and threw a gold piece on the table. "It is for a dying person," she said, "everything depends upon it." The man gazed anxiously at the pallid, gleaming countenance of the distinguished looking woman and pondered, declaring finally that he would rouse his neighbor, and bidding her wait. Left alone, she knelt down by the bedside, buried her face in the pillows and wept. After half an hour the host returned, carrying a basket full of pears, grapes, pomegranates, and peaches. Shaking his head, he followed her with his eyes as she hastened away, and held the sealed letter, which he was to forward, inquisitively up to the light.
The streets were desolate and bathed in shadowy moonlight. The windows of the little houses were blinking drowsily; under a gateway stood the night-watchman with a halberd and mumbled like a drunken man. In front of the low prison building there was an open space; Clarissa seated herself on a stone bench, and, as there was a pump near by and she felt thirsty, drank her fill. The softly swelling outlines of the hills melted almost imperceptibly into the sky, and behind a depression in the landscape a fire-light was glowing; she seemed to hear, too, on listening intently, the ringing of bells. The whole world was not asleep, then, and she could link her anxious heart to human concerns once more. After a time she rose, stepped over to the building, set the basket of fruit on the ground, and knocked with the knocker at the gate. It was a long while before the door-keeper appeared and gruffly demanded what she wanted. "I must speak to Bastide Grammont," she declared. The man made a face as if a demented person had waylaid him, growled in a threatening tone and was about to bang the door in her face. Clarissa clutched his arm with one hand, and tore the diamond brooch from her breast with the other. "There, there, there!" she stammered. The old man raised his lantern and examined the sparkling jeweled ornament on all sides. Clarissa misinterpreted his grinning, anxious joy, thought he was not satisfied, and gave him her purse into the bargain, "What is in the basket?" he inquired respectfully but suspiciously. She showed him what it contained. He contented himself with that, thought she was most likely the mistress of the condemned man, and, upon locking the door, walked on in front of her. They descended a few steps, then crossed a narrow passage. "How long do you wish to stay inside?" asked the keeper, when they had reached an iron door. Clarissa drew a deep breath and replied in a whisper that she would give three knocks on the door. The old man nodded, said he would wait at the head of the stairs, opened the door cautiously, handed the woman his lantern and locked the door behind her.
Inside Clarissa clung to the wall to give her riotous pulses time to subside. The room seemed moderately large and not altogether uninhabitable. Bastide lay on a pallet along the opposite wall, asleep and fully dressed. "What a stillness!" thought Clarissa shuddering, and stole softly to the bedside of the sleeping man. What quiet in that countenance, too, what a beautiful slumber, thought she, and her lips parted in mute sorrow. She placed the lantern on the floor where its light would strike his face, then she knelt down and listened to his steady breathing. Bastide's mouth was firmly closed, his eyelids were motionless, a sign of dreamlessness; his long beard encircled cheeks and chin like brown brushwood, his head was thrown slightly backward, and his hair shone with a moist gleam. Gradually the peace of his countenance passed into Clarissa too; all words, all signs which she had brought with her vanished, she determined to do nothing more than place her gift by his bed and depart. Accordingly she emptied the basket, and started and paused every time she heard but a grain of sand crunch under her feet. When she had laid out all the fruit and passed her hand tenderly over each, she grew more and more peaceful and calm; she felt herself so strangely bound to death that she dismissed the thought of leaving this room with a feeling akin to fear, and prepared to do what possessed her so strongly, with a composed assurance. A desire to kiss him arose within her, and she actually bent down toward him, but a commanding awe arrested her, more even than the fear that he might awake. Her body twisted and turned, she embraced him in spirit and felt as if she were freed from the earth, like a pearl dropped from a ring. She then rose quietly, walked softly to the other side of the room, stretched herself on the floor, took a small penknife and opened the veins in both wrists by deep cuts. Within a quarter of an hour she sighed twice, and the hand of Death sought in vain to wipe the enraptured smile from her pallid lips.