“Oh, yes,” said he, as if speaking to himself, “he must indeed be dead. The blade entered very deeply. I think I touched his heart with the point. Oh, my very life hung upon that dagger!”
The young girl threw herself upon him like an angry tigress, and pushed him towards the stairs with supernatural strength.
“Begone, monster! begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood of both of us forever stain your brow! Be yours, priest? Never! never! Nothing shall ever unite us,—not even hell! Go, accursed man! never!”
The priest had stumbled to the stairs. He silently freed his feet from the folds of his cassock, took up his lantern, and slowly ascended the steps leading to the door. He reopened the door and went out.
All at once the young girl saw his head reappear; his face wore a frightful expression, and he cried to her with a gasp of rage and despair, — “I tell you he is dead!”
She fell face downwards on the ground, and no sound was heard in the dungeon save the sighing of the drop of water which rippled the water in the darkness.
CHAPTER V
The Mother
I do not think that there is anything in the world more delightful than the ideas aroused in a mother’s heart by the sight of her child’s little shoe, especially if it be a best shoe, a Sunday shoe, a christening shoe, a shoe embroidered down to the very sole, a shoe in which the child has never yet taken a step. That shoe is so dainty, so tiny, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is to the mother as if she saw her child itself. She smiles at it, kisses it, talks to it; she asks it if there can really be so small a foot; and if the child be absent, the pretty shoe is quite enough to bring the sweet and fragile creature before her eyes. She fancies she sees it; she does see it, from head to foot full of life and laughter, with its delicate hands, its round head, its pure lips, its clear eyes, whose very white is blue. If it be winter, it is there; it crawls over the carpet; it laboriously climbs upon a stool, and the mother trembles lest it go too near the fire. If it be summer, it creeps about the courtyard or the garden, pulls up the grass which grows between the paving-stones, gazes innocently and fearlessly at the big dogs and horses, plays with shells and flowers, and makes the gardener scold when he finds sand on his borders and dirt in his paths. All is bright and gay; all is mirth around it like itself, even to the breeze and the sunbeam, which vie with each other in sporting among the light curls of its hair. The shoe shows the mother all this, and makes her heart melt within her like wax before the fire.
But if she has lost her child, these thousand images of bliss, delight, and love which hover around the little shoe become so many horrid visions. The pretty embroidered shoe ceases to be aught but an instrument of torture, forever rending the mother’s heart. The same fiber still vibrates,—the deepest and most sensitive fiber; but instead of being caressed by an angel, it is wrenched by a demon.
One morning, as the May sun was rising in a deep-blue sky, such as Garofolo loved to use for the background of his “Descents from the Cross,” the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard the noise of wheels, horses’ hoofs, and the clink of iron in the Place de Grève. She paid but little heed to it, pulled her hair over her ears to drown it, and again fell to gazing, on her knees, at the inanimate object which she had thus adored for fifteen years. This little shoe, as we have already said, was the entire universe to her. Her every thought was bound up in it, never to be parted until death. The gloomy cavern of the Tour-Roland alone knew how many bitter curses, how many touching lamentations, prayers, and sobs, she had addressed to Heaven on behalf of that dainty pink satin toy. Never was greater despair lavished on a prettier, more graceful object.
On this particular morning it seemed as if her grief burst forth with even greater violence than usual; and those who passed by outside heard her wailing in a loud monotonous tone which pierced their very hearts.
“Oh, my daughter,” she moaned, “my daughter! My poor, dear little child, I shall never see you again, then! It is all over! It always seems to me as if it were but yesterday that it happened! My God, my God, it would have been better never to give her to me, if you meant to snatch her from me so soon! Perhaps you did not know that our children are a part of ourselves, and that a mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God! Ah, wretch that I was, to go out that day! Lord! Lord! to take her from me thus, you could never have seen me with her when I warmed her, all rapture, at my fire; when she laughed at my breast; when I helped her little feet to climb up my bosom to my lips! Oh, if you had seen all this, my God, you would have had pity on my joy; you would not have robbed me of the only love left in my heart! Was I, then, so miserable a creature, Lord, that you could not look upon me before you condemned me? Alas! alas! here is the shoe, but where is the foot; where is the rest; where is the child? My daughter, my daughter! what have they done with you? Lord, restore her to me! My knees have been bruised for fifteen years in praying to you, my God! Will not that suffice? Restore her to me for a day, an hour, a single instant,—one instant only, Lord!—and then cast me to the devil for all eternity! Oh, if I did but know where to find the skirts of your garment, I would cling to them with both hands until you gave me back my child! Have you no mercy, when you see her pretty little shoe, Lord? Can you condemn a poor mother to fifteen years of torment ? Kind Virgin, gracious Lady of Heaven! they have taken away my child-Jesus; they have stolen her; they devoured her flesh upon the heath, they drank her blood, they gnawed her bones! Gracious Virgin, have pity upon me! My daughter! I must have my daughter! What do I care if she is in paradise? I don’t want an angel; I want my child. I am a lioness, roaring for my cub. Oh, I will writhe upon the ground, I will beat my forehead against the stones, and I will be forever damned, and I will curse you, Lord, if you keep my child from me! You see that my arms are all bitten and torn, Lord! Has the good God no compassion? Oh, give me nothing but salt and black bread, but give me back my daughter, and she will warm me like the sun! Alas! God, my Lord, I am but a vile sinner; but my daughter made me pious. I was full of religion from love of her; and I saw you through her smile as through an opening in the heavens. Oh, if I could only once, once more, just once more, put this shoe on her pretty little rosy foot, I would die, kind Virgin, blessing you! Ah! ‘twas fifteen years ago. She would be almost a woman now! Unhappy child! What! then it is indeed true I shall never see her again, not even in heaven, for I shall never go there! Oh, what misery! to think that there is her shoe, and that is all I have left!”