“Yes, mon ami, quite well, only tired and cold.”
She drew her shawl closer round her with a little shudder, and passed him and entered the cottage. Gaston’s heart leaped up as if an adder had stung it, and then sank as suddenly with a horrible faintness. He leaned against the snow-stuffed hedge and felt as if the very life were frozen within him. The blood rushed to his throat; he put his hand to his forehead as if a spasm of pain had stunned him; but soon rousing
himself from his absent attitude, he walked on to the presbytery. But he did not enter it. He did not see it, in fact. He walked on and on like a man in a dream, looking neither to the right nor the left, and when suddenly he remembered where he was, and whither he was bound, he had left the village more than a league behind him, and was standing on the sloping beach of St. Florent, under the shadow of its semicircular hills that look down upon the Loire, where the little islet of —— sits like a brooding swan midway in its waters. The night had fallen, but the moon was not yet up, and the darkness was only lightened by the snowy reflex of the landscape. A bank of cloud hung like a heavy curtain over the hill, and hid away the moon. Somehow Gaston was glad of the darkness. But it was in vain that he strove to make it dark within. No outer darkness could conceal from him the workings of his heart. He saw into its troubled depths as clearly as if a thousand moons had been shining in the purple vault above him. He saw the tempter busy with his fiercest instincts, and he saw what a base and miserable tool he was. Ay, but desperate as well as base. Much must be forgiven to a desperate man. Here was his whole life wrecked. His wife’s affection and trust—he felt it had not yet grown to love—was lost to him; his gold was lost to him—his precious, darling gold, that he had hugged to his heart till it grew to be a part of it, a second wife; and he must give it up just at a moment when he wanted it as he had never done before, and had laid out all his money, and had not a louis to ring on his hearthstone except this gold of François’. A curse upon the hour he took it! François would never ask it back—never accept it, most
likely, Gaston felt. But Marie would never consent to keep it. No, and she would grow to hate him in spite of herself for having come between her and François, and forced her to break her troth to him. His life, that was so bright and rich, how dark and wretched it had become within these last few hours! And was there no rescue from it all? Yes. He had only to speak a word, and he was saved. Let him start off now, before Marie knew of François’s return, and meet les bleus, and they would come quietly to the presbytery, and take him away in the night, and there would be an end of François for ever, and of the misery he was going to cause. Treachery? Bah! His was the treachery to come back after being as good as dead all this time. Was it a crime to have married Marie, when he left her three whole years without a word of love or a sign of existence? She was happy now, but if once she saw François she would never know happiness again. The sight of his misery would fill her heart with remorse, and break it. What right had François to go away at all when he knew that Marie loved him? It was no doing of Gaston’s that; he wanted to go in his stead. Would that he had! But now he was to be a ruined, blighted man to the end of his days. And to what purpose? To save François from being shot a little sooner than he might be; for so surely as he had a head on his shoulders, so surely would he have a bullet through it some day. No one would be the worse of his having it to-morrow instead of a month hence or a year, and two human beings would be considerably the better of it.
Gaston had flung himself on a snow-heap by the side of the river, his face buried in his arms, while he
worked out his wrongs and his despair to this conclusion. François must die. There was no other way out of it. Once he brought his mind to face this alternative and close with it, there was no time to be lost, and it would be dangerous to go over the ground again. He must act at once if he were to act at all. Gaston shook the snow from his arms, and sprang to his feet. But a change had come over the scene, and he could hardly realize that it was the same he had surveyed in the dim white darkness half an hour previously. The heavy bank of cloud had melted away; only one small patch remained, fringed with silvery rays that lighted up the sky like the glory of a tabernacle; all round it myriads of stars were twinkling in the liquid depths of blue, and gazing on their own brightness in the steel-blue mirror of the Loire, that trembled lightly as the golden shafts shot down through it and illuminated its cold, pure bosom like a second heaven. Presently, the moon came out, not “pale for weariness of climbing” the steep sky, but radiant and beautiful, and shone serenely in the clear December heaven, and all the world was bathed in silvery twilight. The solemnity of the scene thrilled through Gaston’s soul, and made his pulse beat with an unknown fear; but it was the ennobling fear with which nature inspires us in her sublimest aspects—the reverent awe that uplifts the soul, not the guilty terror that casts it down, paralyzing and debasing it.
His ghastly project cowered before him like a fiend dragged from outer darkness into the splendor of God’s sunshine. The divine beauty of the world without rebuked and annihilated the foulness of the world within. No base or treacherous thoughts could contemplate the purity
and glory of that starry splendor, and not perish. It drew the earth heavenward, and made all things grand and solemn. The meek, low hills grew mighty and majestic; they stretched their pure white peaks to kiss the stars, soaring high above the haunts of men, as if they scorned the earth, and would have naught in common with the pettiness, the guilt, and the folly that had their dwelling on the plain. The very silence had a voice in it more powerful than thunder. It rang with inarticulate harmonies through Gaston’s soul—mysterious, unuttered whisperings, as of angels hovering to and fro, brushing the crystal twilight with their wings.
And were there not angels near him in his hour of struggle? Did he not hear them pleading at his heart, touching his storm-tossed spirit with their loving, beseeching eyes, weeping, perhaps, over the impending ruin of his God-imaged soul? Surely, if angels ever weep, earth has no misery more worthy of their tears. And were they less powerful than the fallen spirits who were fighting against them for the noble prize, or did they love God’s human creature less than the fiends hate him?
Gaston called to mind the days long ago, when he was an innocent child, and prayed every night to his angel guardian before lying down to sleep, and believed that the beautiful benign spirit stood at the right side of his little cot, watching him while he slept. It was many a day since he had prayed, but now the words came back on him with a strange, impelling power, and played upon his heart like the notes of a long-forgotten melody. They rose to his lips, but he choked them down. He could not let them pass. Whom was he to speak to—an angel? There was a gulf between the Judas that