Chapter 2

The same night Valentin came. Laure went out into the antechamber to meet him, and each stood and looked at the other with pale face and anguished eyes. Valentin's eyes were hollow and sunken as if with some great sorrow, and his large awkward frame seemed wasted. But there was no reproach mingled with the indescribable sadness of his gaze.

"Your note came to me," he said. "Our mother "--

"She is in there," said Laure in a low, hurried, shaken voice, and she pointed to the _salon_. "She has come to embrace me,--to make sure that I am happy. Ah, my God!" and she covered her deathly face with her hands.

Valentin did not approach her. He could only stand still and look on. One thought filled his mind.

"We have no time to weep, Laure," he said gently. "We must go on as we have begun. Give me your hand."

This was all, and then the two went in together, Laure's hand upon her brother's arm.

It was a marvelous life Mère Giraud lived during the next few days. Certainly she could not complain that she was not treated with deference and affection. She wore the silk dress every day; she sat at the wonderful table, and a liveried servant stood behind her chair; she drove here and there in a luxurious carriage; she herself, in fact, lived the life of an aristocrat and a great lady. Better than all the rest, she found her Laure as gracious and dutiful as her fond heart could have wished. She spent every hour with her; she showed her all her grandeurs of jewelry and _toilette_; she was not ashamed of her mother, untutored and simple as she might be.

"Only she is very pale and quiet," she remarked to Valentin once; "even paler and more quiet than I should have expected. But then we know that the rich and aristocratic are always somewhat reserved. It is only the peasantry and provincials who are talkative and florid. It is natural that Laure should have gained the manner of the great world."

But her happiness, poor soul, did not last long, and yet the blow God sent was a kindly one.

One morning as they went out to their carriage Laure stopped to speak to a woman who crouched upon the edge of the pavement with a child in her arms. She bent down and touched the little one with her hand, and Mère Giraud, looking on, thought of pictures she had seen of the Blessed Virgin, and of lovely saints healing the sick.

"What is the matter?" asked Laure.

The woman looked down at the child and shivered.

"I do not know," she answered hoarsely. "Only we are ill, and God has forsaken us. We have not tasted food for two days."

Laure took something from her purse and laid it silently in the child's small, fevered hand. The woman burst into tears.

"Madame," she said, "it is a twenty-franc piece."

"Yes," said Laure gently. "When it is spent come to me again," and she went to her carriage.

"My child," said Mère Giraud, "it is you who are a saint. The good God did wisely in showering blessings upon you."

A few days longer she was happy, and then she awakened from her sleep one night, and found Laure standing at her bedside looking down at her and shuddering. She started up with an exclamation of terror.

"_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "What is it?"

She was answered in a voice she had never heard before,--Laure's, but hoarse and shaken. Laure had fallen upon her knees, and grasped the bedclothes, hiding her face in the folds.

"I am ill," she answered in this strange, changed tone. "I am--I am cold and burning--I am--dying."

In an instant Mère Giraud stood upon the floor holding her already insensible form in her arm'. She was obliged to lay her upon the floor while she rang the bell to alarm the servants. She sent for Valentin and a doctor. The doctor, arriving, regarded the beautiful face with manifest surprise and alarm. It was no longer pale, but darkly flushed, and the stamp of terrible pain was upon it.

"She has been exposed to infection," he said. "This is surely the case. It is a malignant fever."

Then Mère Giraud thought of the poor mother and child.

"O my God!" she prayed, "do not let her die a martyr."

But the next day there was not a servant left in the house; but Valentin was there, and there had come a Sister of Mercy. When she came, Valentin met her, and led her into the _salon_. They remained together for half an hour, and then came out and went to the sick-room, and there were traces of tears upon the Sister's face. She was a patient, tender creature, who did her work well, and she listened with untiring gentleness to Mère Giraud's passionate plaints.

"So beautiful, so young, so beloved," cried the poor mother; "and Monsieur absent in Normandy, though it is impossible to say where! And if death should come before his return, who could confront him with the truth? So beautiful, so happy, so adored!"

And Laure lay upon the bed, sometimes wildly delirious, sometimes a dreadful statue of stone,--unhearing, unseeing, unmoving,--death without death's rest,--life in death's bonds of iron.

But while Mère Giraud wept, Valentin had no tears. He was faithful, untiring, but silent even at the worst.

"One would think he had no heart," said Mère Giraud; "but men are often so,--ready to work, but cold and dumb. Ah! it is only a mother who bears the deepest grief."

She fought passionately enough for a hope at first, but it was forced from her grasp in the end. Death had entered the house and spoken to her in the changed voice which had summoned her from her sleep.

"Madame," said the doctor one evening as they stood over the bed while the sun went down, "I have done all that is possible. She will not see the sun set again. She may not see it rise."

Mère Giraud fell upon her knees beside the bed, crossing herself and weeping.

"She will die," she said, "a blessed martyr. She will die the death of a saint."

That very night--only a few hours later--there came to them a friend,--one they had not for one moment even hoped to see,--a gentle, grave old man, in a thin, well-worn black robe,--the _Curé_ of St. Croix.

Him Valentin met also, and when the two saw each other, there were barriers that fell away in their first interchange of looks.

"My son," said the old man, holding out his hands, "tell me the truth."

Then Valentin fell into a chair and hid his face

"She is dying," he said, "and I cannot ask that she should live."

"What was my life"--he cried passionately, speaking again--"what was my life to me that I should not have given it to save her,--to save her to her beauty and honor, and her mother's love! I would have given it cheerfully,--a thousand times,--a thousand times again and again. But it was not to be; and, in spite of my prayers, I lost her. O my God!" with a sob of agony, "if to-night she were in St. Croix and I could hear the neighbors call her again as they used, 'Mère Giraud's little daughter!'"

The eyes of the _Curé_ had tears in them also.

"Yesterday I returned to St. Croix and found your mother absent," he said. "I have had terrible fears for months, and when I found her house closed, they caused me to set out upon my journey at once."

He did not ask any questions. He remembered too well the man of whom Valentin had written; the son who was "past his youth, and had evidently seen the world;" the pale aristocrat, who had exclaimed "_Mon Dieu!_" at the sight of Laure's wondrous beauty.

"When the worst came to the worst," said Valentin, "I vowed myself to the labor of sparing our mother. I have worked early and late to sustain myself in the part I played. It was not from Laure the money came. My God! Do you think I would have permitted my mother's hand to have touched a gift of hers? She wrote the letters, but the money I had earned honestly. Heaven will justify me for my falsehood since I have suffered so much."

"Yes," responded the _Curé_, looking at his bent form with gentle, pitying eyes, "Heaven will justify you, my son."

They watched by Laure until the morning, but she did not see them; she saw nothing; to-night it was the statue of marble which lay before them. But in the early morning, when the sky was dappled with pink and gold, and the air was fresh and cool, and a silence, even more complete than that of the night, seemed to reign, there came a change. The eyes they had seen closed for so many hours were opened, and the soft voice broke in upon the perfect stillness of the room:--

"The lilies in the garden are in bloom to-day. They were never so tall, and white, and fair before. I will gather them--for the altar--to give to the Virgin--at my confession. _Mea culpa--Mea_"--and all was over, and Mère Giraud fell upon her knees again, crying, as she had cried before, amid a passion of sobs and tears:--

"She has died, my child, the death of a blessed martyr."

It was rather strange, the villagers said, that Madame Legrand should have been buried in the little graveyard at St. Croix instead of in some fine tomb at _Père la Chaise_; but--it was terribly sad!--her husband was away, they knew not where, and it was Valentin's wish, and Mère Giraud's heart yearned so over her beloved one. So she was laid there, and a marble cross was placed at her head--a tall, beautiful cross--by Monsieur Legrand, of course. Only it was singular that he never came, though perhaps that is the way of the great--not to mourn long or deeply even for those who have been most lovely, and whom they have most tenderly loved.