“These craft hold six men,” he went on. “They jumped in and took Laura with them, before she had time to cry out or speak. Oh! that’s a thing for which no honest man can console himself when he is the cause of it. It is no use saying so, such a thing cannot be forgotten!... Ah! what weather it is!—What devil urged me to talk about this! When I’m telling it, I never can stop, it has to be finished. It’s a story that intoxicates me like Jurançon wine.—Ah! what weather it is!—My cloak is wet through!
“I was still telling you, I think, about that little Laurette!—Poor woman!—What clumsy people there are in the world! The officer was so stupid as to take the boat ahead of the brig. After that, it is true to say that one cannot foresee everything. I was counting on the night to hide the deed, and didn’t think of the light from twelve guns being fired at once. And, on my life! from the boat she saw her husband fall into the sea, shot dead.
“If there is a God up yonder, he knows how that happened that I’m going to tell you; I don’t know, but it was seen and heard as I see and hear you. At the instant when they fired, she put her hand to her head as if a bullet had struck her brow, and sat still in the boat without fainting, without crying out, without speaking, and came back to the brig when and how they wished. I went to her and talked to her for a long time as well as I could. She seemed to be listening to me and looked me in the face, rubbing her brow. She did not understand, and her brow was red and her face quite pale. She was trembling in every limb as if she was afraid of everybody. That has remained with her. She is still the same, poor little thing! an idiot, or as it were imbecile, or mad, whatever you please. Never has any one got a word out of her, except when she asks for some one to take away what is in her head.
“From that time I became as sad as she, and I felt something within me saying to me: ‛Stay with her to the end of your life, and take care of her’; I have done it. When I returned to France, I asked to be transferred with my rank into the land-troops, having taken a hatred of the sea, because into it I had spilled innocent blood. I sought out Laura’s family. Her mother was dead. Her sisters, to whom I took her mad, didn’t want her, and offered to send her to Charenton. I turned my back on them, and I kept her with me.
“Ah! merciful heavens! if you want to see her, comrade, it rests with you.” “Can it be she inside?” I asked. “Certainly! here! wait. Whoa! mule....”
III
HOW I CONTINUED MY JOURNEY
And he stopped his poor mule, which seemed delighted that I had asked the question. At the same time he lifted the oilcloth from his little cart, as if to arrange the straw which almost filled it, and I saw something very sad. I saw two blue eyes, extraordinarily large, admirably shaped, starting from a head pale, thin and long, and overflowing with quite straight fair hair. I saw nothing, in truth, but those two eyes, for the rest was dead. Her brow was red; her hollow white cheeks were bluish at the cheek-bones; she was cowering in the midst of the straw, so much so that you scarcely saw projecting from it her knees, on which she was playing dominoes all by herself. She looked at us for a minute, trembled a long time, smiled at me a little, and went on playing. It seemed to me that she was labouring to perceive how her right hand would beat her left. “You see, she has been playing that game for a month,” the major said to me; “to-morrow, perhaps it will be another game that will last a long time. It’s strange, eh?”
At the same time he began to replace on his shako the oilcloth, which the rain had slightly disarranged.
“Poor Laurette!” I said, “you have lost, and for ever, truly!”