“Well, we must learn to know each other,” replied the Colonel. “Get me a wife with fifty thousand crowns before the elections—otherwise, your servant. I do not like awkward bedfellows, and you have pulled all the blankets to your side. Good night.”
“You will see,” said Vinet, shaking hands affectionately with the Colonel.
At about one in the morning three clear, low hoots, like those of an owl, admirably mimicked, sounded in the Place; Pierrette heard them in her fevered sleep. She got up, quite damp, opened her window, saw Brigaut, and threw out a ball of silk, to which he tied a letter.
Sylvie, excited by the events of the evening and her own deliberations, was not asleep; she was taken in by the owl’s cry.
“Ah! what a bird of ill-omen!—But, hark! Pierrette is out of bed. What does she want?”
On hearing the attic window open, Sylvie rushed to her own window and heard Brigaut’s paper rustle against the shutters. She tied her jacket strings, and nimbly mounted the stairs to Pierrette’s room; she found her untying the silk from round the letter.
“So I have caught you!” cried the old maid, going to the window, whence she saw Brigaut take to his heels. “Give me that letter.”
“No, cousin,” said the girl, who, by one of the stupendous inspirations of youth, and sustained by her spirit, rose to the dignity of resistance which we admire in the history of some nations reduced to desperation.
“What, you will not?” cried Sylvie, advancing on her cousin, and showing her a hideous face full of hatred, and distorted by rage.
Pierrette drew back a step or two to have time to clutch her letter in her hand, which she kept shut with invincible strength. On seeing this, Sylvie seized Pierrette’s delicate white hand in her lobster’s claws, and tried to wrench it open. It was a fearful struggle, an infamous struggle, as everything is that dares to attack thought, the only treasure that God has set beyond the reach of power, and keeps as a secret bond between the wretched and Himself.
The two women, one dying, the other full of vigor, looked steadfastly at each other. Pierrette’s eyes flashed at her torturer such a look as the Templar’s who received on his breast the blows from a mace in the presence of Philippe le Bel. The King could not endure that fearful gleam, and retired appalled by it; Sylvie, a woman, and a jealous woman, answered that magnetic glance by an ominous glare. Awful silence reigned. The Bretonne’s clenched fingers resisted her cousin’s efforts with the tenacity of a steel vice. Sylvie wrung Pierrette’s arm, and tried to open her hand; as this had no effect, she vainly set her nails in the flesh. Finally, madness reinforced her anger; she raised Pierrette’s fist to her teeth to bite her fingers and subdue her by pain. Pierrette still defied her with the terrifying gaze of innocence. The old maid’s fury was roused to such a pitch that she was blind to all else; gripping Pierrette’s arm, she beat the girl’s fist on the windowsill, and on the marble chimneypiece, as we beat a nut to crack it and get at the kernel.
“Help, help!” cried Pierrette; “I am being killed.”
“So you scream, do you, when I find you with a lover in the middle of the night?”
And she hit again and again without mercy.
“Help, help!” cried Pierrette, whose fist was bleeding.
At this moment there were violent blows on the street door. Both equally exhausted, the two women ceased.
Rogron, aroused and anxious, not knowing what was happening, had got out of bed, gone to his sister’s room, and not found her; then he was alarmed, went down and opened the door, and was almost upset by Brigaut, followed by what seemed a phantom.
At the same instant Sylvie’s eyes fell on Pierrette’s stays; she remembered having felt the papers in them; she threw herself on them like a tiger on his prey, twisted the stays round her hand, and held them up with a smile, as an Iroquois smiles at his foe before scalping him.
“I am dying—” said Pierrette, dropping on her knees.
“Who will save me?”
“I will,” cried a woman with white hair, turning on Pierrette an aged, parchment face in which a pair of gray eyes sparkled.
“Ah, grandmother, you have come too late!” cried the poor child, melting into tears.
Pierrette went to fall on her bed, bereft of all her strength, and half killed by the reaction, which in a sick girl was inevitable after such a violent struggle. The tall withered apparition took her in her arms as a nurse takes a child, and went out, followed by Brigaut, without saying a word to Sylvie, at whom, by a tragic glance, she hurled majestic accusation. The sight of this dignified old woman in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coiffe, which is a sort of long cloak made of black cloth, and accompanied by the terrible Brigaut, appalled Sylvie: she felt as if she had seen death.
She went downstairs, heard the door shut, and found herself face to face with her brother, who said to her, “They have not killed you then?”
“Go to bed,” said Sylvie. “Tomorrow morning we will see what is to be done.”
She got into bed again, unpicked the stays, and read Brigaut’s two letters, which utterly confounded her. She went to sleep in the strangest perplexity, never dreaming of the terrible legal action to which her conduct was to give rise.
Brigaut’s letter to the widow Lorrain had found her in the greatest joy, which was chequered when she read it. The poor old woman, now past seventy, had been dying of grief at having to live without Pierrette at her side; she only comforted herself for her loss by the belief that she
