The priest added in a hollow tone,— “Are you prepared?”
“For what?”
“To die.”
“Oh,” said she, “will it be soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
Her head, which she had lifted with joy, again sank upon her breast.
“That is a very long time yet!” she murmured; “why did they not make it today?”
“Then you are very unhappy?” asked the priest, after a pause.
“I am very cold,” replied she.
She took her feet in her hands,—a common gesture with those wretched people who suffer from cold, and which we have already observed in the recluse of the Tour-Roland,—and her teeth chattered.
The priest seemed to cast his eyes about the cell, from beneath his hood.
“No light! no fire! in the water! It is horrible!”
“Yes,” she answered, with the look of surprise which misfortune had imprinted on her face. “Daylight is for every one. Why is it that they give me nothing but night?”
“Do you know,” resumed the priest, after a fresh pause, “why you are here?”
“I think I did know once,” said she, passing her thin fingers over her brow as if to help her memory, “but I don’t know now.”
All at once she began to cry like a little child.
“I want to get out, sir. I am cold, I am frightened, and there are creatures which crawl all over me.”
“Well, follow me.”
So saying, the priest took her by the arm. The unfortunate creature was frozen to the marrow; but still that hand gave her a sensation of cold.
“Oh,” she murmured, “it is the icy hand of death. Who are you?”
The priest threw back his hood; she looked. It was that evil face which had so long haunted her; that demon head which had appeared to her at the house of La Falourdel above the adored head of her Ph?bus; that eye which she had last seen sparkle beside a dagger.
This apparition, always so fatal to her, and which had thus urged her on from misfortune to misfortune and even to torture, roused her from her torpor. The veil which had clouded her memory seemed rent in twain. Every detail of her mournful adventure, from the night scene at the house of La Falourdel down to her condemnation at the Tournelle, rushed upon her mind at once, not vague and confused as heretofore, but clear, distinct, vivid, living, terrible. The somber figure before her recalled those half-effaced memories almost blotted out by excess of suffering, as the heat of the fire brings back in all their freshness invisible letters traced on white paper with sympathetic ink. She felt as if every wound in her heart were torn open and bled together.
“Ha!” she cried, pressing her hands to her eyes with a convulsive shudder, “it is the priest!”
Then her arms fell listlessly at her side, and she sat with downcast head and eyes, mute and trembling.
The priest gazed at her with the eye of a kite which has long hovered high in the heavens above a poor meadow-lark crouching in the wheat, gradually and silently descending in ever lessening circles, and, suddenly swooping upon his prey like a flash of lightning, grasps it panting in his clutch.
She murmured feebly,—
“Do your work! do your work! strike the last blow!” and her head sank between her shoulders in terror, like that of a lamb awaiting the butcher’s axe.
“You look upon me with horror, then?” he asked at length.
She made no answer.
“Do you look on me with horror?” he repeated.
Her lips moved as if she smiled.
“Yes,” said she, “the executioner jests with the prisoner. For months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I should have been! It is he who hurled me into this gulf of woe! Oh, heavens! it is he who killed,—it is he who killed him, my Ph?bus!”
Here, bursting into sobs and raising her eyes to the priest, she cried,— “Oh, wretch! who are you? What have I done to you? Do you hate me so much? Alas! what have you against me?”
“I love you!” exclaimed the priest.
Her tears ceased suddenly; she stared vacantly at him. He had fallen upon his knees, and devoured her face with eyes of flame.
“Do you hear? I love you!” he again exclaimed.
“What love!” said the miserable girl shuddering.
He replied,—
“The love of a damned man.”
Both were silent for some moments, oppressed by the intensity of their emotions,—he mad, she stunned.
“Listen,” said the priest at last, and a strange calm seemed to have taken possession of him. “You shall know all. I will tell you that which as yet I have hardly ventured to confess to myself, when I secretly questioned my own soul in those dead hours of the night when the darkness is so profound that it seems as if even God could no longer see us. Listen. Before I met you, girl, I was happy.”