Part 26 (1/2)

The gipsy woman laughed with bitter harshness as she echoed back the one word ”h.e.l.l!”--and afterwards she added with a wail: ”Yes, they're dead! and there won't be never no meeting.”

And Paul went on--but her face haunted him.

Was there the same hard change in himself, he wondered? Was he, too, brutalised and branded with the five years of h.e.l.l? Surely if so he had gone on a lower road than his darling would have had him travel.

Then out of the mist of the dying day came the memory of her n.o.ble face as it had been in that happy hour when they had floated out to the lagoon, and she had told him--her eyes alight with the _feu sacre_--her wishes for his future.

But what had he done to carry them out--those lofty wishes? Surely nothing. For, obsessed with his own selfish anguish, he had lived on with no single worthy aim, with no aim at all except to forget and deaden his suffering.

Forget! Ah G.o.d! that could never be. For had she not said there was an eternal marriage of their souls--in life or in death they could never be parted?

And he had tried to break this sacred tender bond, when he should have cherished every memory to comfort his deep pain with its sweetness. What had he done? Let sorrow sink him to the level of the poor gipsy girl, instead of trying to do some fine thing as a tribute to his lady's n.o.ble teaching.

He strode on in the dusk towards his home, his thoughts las.h.i.+ng him with shame and remorse.

And that night, when he and Pike were alone in his own panelled room, he broke the seal of those beautiful letters which, with directions for them to be buried with his body at his death, had lain in a packet hidden away from sight all these years, freighted with agonised memory.

He read them over carefully, from the first brief note to the last long cry of love which Dmitry had brought him to Paris. Then he lay back in his chair, while his strong frame shook with sobs, and his eyes were blinded by scorching, bitter tears.

But suddenly it seemed as if his lady's spirit stood beside him in the firelight's flickering gleam, whispering words of hope, pleading to come back from the cold grave to his heart, there to abide and comfort him.

He heard her golden voice once more, and it fell like soft, healing rain, so that he stretched out his arms, and cried aloud: