Marcel Caboff had never been popular, but from this time forth he was branded as a sort of potential malefactor; if M. le Marquis died, Marcel would be his murderer, and Marcel’s life would not be worth an old song in Gondriac. The only people who did the young man justice and had the courage to take his part were Virginie and Alba. Since the night of the storm a friendship had sprung up between Marcel and Alba which had grown to more than friendship on his side. Alba was a lovely maiden now; impulsive, untutored as the waves that her nature seemed attuned to, wild as the sea-birds whose lot she sometimes envied when they beat their wings, rose up from the rocks, and took flight across the sea.
“I wonder you can stay here and live this idle, humdrum life when you might be away seeing the great world,” Alba said to him one day, as they met upon the cliff and walked on together.
“You wish I were away, do you?”
“Oh! no; only I wonder you don’t go. I should, if I were a man.”
“It is harder on me than you think,” said Marcel bitterly. “I did my best to get away; but mother went on her knees and said I would kill her if I went. It was hard to resist that; but it makes me feel angry with her when I think of what has come of it. I know the people hate me and call me a coward. Alba,” he said, turning suddenly round, “you don’t think me a coward, do you?”
“No, Marcel; if you had not been braver than any man in Gondriac, except your father, you would not have come out in the boat that night. How dare they call you a coward when they remember it!”
“They don’t remember it. Everybody has forgotten it but you.”
“M. le Marquis has not forgotten it.”
“I wish he had. That is what has brought all this misery about. If he had not remembered, I should be away with the grande armée now, and should either die a glorious death like my brothers, or come home by and by with the cross, and perhaps a wound or two. Then everybody would know I was a brave man, and mother would have had something to be proud of.”
“Yes,” said Alba dreamily; she was watching a ship that flecked the horizon far away like a great swan, its white sails flapping against the sky, the sea-gulls following in its wake, as it cleaved the wave.