CHAPTER XXXIX

When there has been a shade or promise of evil hanging over our lives, when we have waked each morning with the dread of what the day may bring, and go to bed at night to toss and turn in fear of the morrow, and then, suddenly, we find that the thing we feared has happened, instead of the appalling terror and the horror of its consequences that we anticipated, very often there is a sense of infinite relief, that now no worse can come, for the worst has happened.

So it was with Marie. With the closing and locking of the door on the dead body of Von Pfaffen, a great, numb calmness enveloped her. He was dead. She had killed him. Nothing mattered. There was nothing to matter. The world, for her, was finished. She wondered in a curious subconscious way why she did not care. She had taken a human life, yet she felt no remorse, no fear. All emotion was dead in her heart. She only knew that she was tired, terribly tired. Her knees seemed to give way under her. She stumbled, dragged herself with the help of her icy hands, hanging onto the chairs, groping along the edge of the table. She only knew she must reach the couch, which seemed so far away, where she could rest. Her mouth was dry, her tongue felt swollen. It was an effort to close or raise the heavy lids over her burning eyes. A dreadful sense of dizzy nausea struck her. Suffocating waves of blackness seemed to beat up from her heart and surge across her vision.

With a supreme effort she made a last tottering step toward the haven she was trying to reach, and pitched headlong across the couch, a great darkness wrapping her close.

The day wore on, the cannonading had rumbled off into silence, the frightened birds had come back, and here and there, through the garden, they twittered nervously to one another.

The sky was overcast now, the air had grown heavy with the promise of a storm. Every now and then a little gust of wind, pungent with the smell of powder, blew in along the terrace and through the shattered windows. It shook the curtains, fluttered across the unconscious head of the woman, lifted a lock of disheveled hair, eddied among the papers on the little desk, stirred about the disordered room and died away.

Marie was mercifully shut away from the world, her strained nerves had snapped. She could bear no more.

Outside in the hall, behind the locked door, the dead man lay, staring horribly, a tiny stream of blood staining the marble floor.

* * * *

When Gerome jumped from his dusty, battered motor, late in the afternoon, it was with a heart full of foreboding that he found the great gates open. The terrible havoc wrought by the bursting shell frightened him. He dared not ask himself what he might find.

He hurried up the gravel walk, his head splitting and pounding from a gash across his brows, which had been bound up hastily. His face was grimy, and there were discolored circles about his eyes. He ran along the terrace and past the entrance door, knowing he would find whoever was left in the house here, in the little salon.

At the window he paused, his quick eye took in the disorder, the signs of the struggle, the body of the girl lying inert across the couch, her dress crumpled and torn, her yellow hair, loose from its pins, hanging in a long loop over her shoulder. With a cry he ran across to her and lifted her in his arms.

"Marie," he cried, but her head fell back heavily against his breast.

Gently he laid her down on the cushions, a dreadful fear in his heart that this might mean death. The bowl of water and the bandages that had been brought for Jacques were on the table. Hastily he wet a cloth, and kneeling by the girl's side brushed back the hair from her brow and moistened her closed eyes and lips.

Presently she stirred, her lids fluttered.

"Marie darling!" he said. "Tell me, what is it?"

The girl opened her eyes and looked into his.

"Gerome," she whispered, "is it really you?" Her eyes were devouring him hungrily, lovingly, the man she had never hoped to see again.

Suddenly she became conscious of the bandage around his head.

"Gerome!" she cried, "you are hurt!"

"It's nothing," he hastened to assure her, "only a scratch. I have glorious news! We have won! It's victory for France!"

"Victory!" she repeated dully, then after a moment, "God is good to us!"

He drew her to him tenderly.

"I had word that mother and the servants were safe," he said, "but when I learned that you were not with them, I was mad with fear that you might be injured. I got leave to come and find you, and thank God, I have!"

He had come back to her, but it was too late, her hands were stained with blood. An overwhelming sense of what she had lost swept over her. She turned her face against his sleeve, weeping hopelessly.

"Hush, dearest," he whispered, "luck was with us, don't you hear? We struck just where the enemy's lines were weakest. Our aviators reported them massing their troops at Sains, but the attack there was a complete failure. The town must have been warned!"

Sains had been warned!

That was something to weigh against the heavy burden of sorrow she had to bear!

Holding her close he listened, while she told him of their experience in the château during the battle, and then for a long while they sat silent, their arms about one another, cheek against cheek. Death had been so close to both, might take one of them to-morrow, but he had her now in his arms, warm, palpitating, trembling with the love he knew was for him.

The light began to fade, the silence broken only by the distant muttering of the guns.

"Little Sainte Marie," he whispered, "to me you are symbolic of everything that is good and pure!"

Across Marie's mental vision flashed the picture of Von Pfaffen's body lying out beyond the locked door. He was dead. There was no need that anyone should ever know of her past with him. Everyone else who knew was dead. Her word would be sufficient. She had only to say that she had discovered him to be a spy; that he had come back and, finding her alone, attacked her, and in defense of her honor, she had killed him.

She had sinned, yet she had suffered. Had she not paid the price in full? Must she drain the cup of bitterness to the last dregs? Surely heaven did not expect this sacrifice. Would it not make Gerome more unhappy to know the truth? Would it not, indeed, be wrong of her to confess? It was written, "Let the dead past bury its dead!" Why draw this grisly skeleton into the light of day? She had suffered enough. She wanted happiness, and to tell Gerome meant to crucify that happiness. Surely, other women in the past had erred and then married and lived contentedly, without discovery or confession. She had been so young, so innocent, so unprepared. It was her inexperience that was to blame, not she herself. In heart she had always been pure, her desire had always been to be good. Her conscience acquitted her. Her decision was made. She would not tell.

Gerome's eyes held hers. At all costs she must keep the love she saw shining there. She answered his look with one of passionate adoration.

"Marie," he said softly, "thank God that you are safe. I dare not even imagine what it would have meant to me if I had come back and found anything had happened to you."

There was a long silence.

"How wonderful it is," he said at last, "to have an ideal realized. You are everything I ever dreamed a woman should be. If I should die to-morrow, it would be with the knowledge that the woman I loved had been worthy of my implicit faith."

Faith! The word sank into her heart. It stirred and brought to life again, conscience. What was it to have implicit faith? How did one deserve that?

He looked gravely into her eyes.

"All human happiness is founded on faith!" he said.

He believed in her. Oh, God, the pity of it! He believed in her, and how had she repaid his trust?

She had hidden her past from him, and lived a lie all these days of her marriage, in order to shield herself and keep his faith in her.

To tell him meant to lose his love. But could she go on like this, living a lie? How glorious, how beautiful it would be, what inexpressible joy, if she only were the woman he thought her. If she only had come to him with clean hands. If the exchange had only been equal. But the fact that this was not so, could not be eradicated. She was what she was, what circumstances had made her. She knew that she was cheating him. Again, she brought her soul before the judgment bar of her conscience, and this time the verdict was "Guilty!"

Cost what it may, she must tell him.

The pitiful weakness of her character that had made her drift, postponing the inevitable day of reckoning, had passed. She must flay her very soul, and stand before him as she was.

She became conscious of his voice telling the story of the battle, of his love for her, of their future happiness.

Their future happiness!

"Gerome," she said slowly, her voice vibrant with suppressed emotion, "there is something I must tell you, something I have been too cowardly to let you know before. I'm tired of lying! Tired of hiding! Ashamed of accepting your love, when I know it is undeserved. I am not what you think me!"

He looked at her, startled.

"Marie----" he began.

"No--don't stop me," she said quietly, but firmly, "let me tell you everything. When you married me you thought me a pure young girl, coming to you from the convent, untouched by the world. I wasn't--I--there was another man in Vienna."

He clutched her arm in a grip that made her wince with pain.

"What do you mean?" His voice was hoarse and strange.

She drew away from him.

"I knew you would shrink from me! I knew you would loathe me when you learned the truth. I'm not trying to exonerate myself, not trying to make excuses. I was young, scarcely more than a child. I told you I had never known my mother. When my father died, I was left penniless, without friends, without the knowledge of how to support myself. I was unused to the fight, unequal to it. One day I met a man who singled me out, a smile on his lips, black lies in his heart. He promised me what I longed for, protection, a home, marriage--and I believed him!"

Her words swept over Gerome in a devastating wave, leaving his face