“Arletta is dead.”
“Dead, captain!”
“She stabbed herself. I am going to bury her. Keep the men out of the place.”
He spoke curtly, fiercely, forcing out the words as though each one gave him pain. Guicheaux’s face was a white patch in the shadow—the mouth a black circle, the eyes two dots of light.
“Dead, captain!”
Bertrand looked as though he would have struck the man.
“Yes. The fault was mine. Arletta was jealous; she tried to stab madame, and, when balked, stabbed herself instead.”
Guicheaux said nothing. He stood pulling his peaked beard and frowning at the stones. The thing had shocked him, lewd-mouthed ruffian that he was. Bertrand watched him a moment, and then, turning on his heel, went to one of the out-houses where tools were kept.
The grass in the garden was crisped with fallen leaves and dusted with dew that twinkled, thousand-eyed, under the sheen of the dawn. All the pungent freshness of autumn was in the air. Bertrand chose his ground—a clean stretch of turf close to the steam of a great apple-tree, and far from the mounds the Black Death had built. He set to work with the look of a man who feels his heart helped by physical effort. Sweat ran from his forehead and his breath steamed up into the air, but he never paused till the grave lay finished.
Thrusting the spade into the pile of earth, he went into the court and climbed the tower stair to the room where Arletta lay dead. Bertrand stood and looked at her awhile, dry eyed, moved to the depths, his mouth twitching. Then he lifted her in his arms, feeling the solemn coldness of her body striking to his heart, and carried her down the stair and across the court into the garden. Very tenderly he laid her in the grave, and, kneeling, set her hair in a circle about her face and crossed her hands upon her bosom. Then he stood up and looked at her, the sunlight touching her face, as she lay in her last resting-place, her hands in the shadow that hid the blood-stains on her dress.