He thought of the parsonage. A jeering laugh rose to his lips. Helene had shrunk from him when he had approached her with clean hands and a pure heart. What would she do to-day if he came into her presence bearing a curse and an insupportable burden of guilt upon him?

And yet that one spot of earth was sacred to memories of all that had been purest, most peaceful and happy in his blighted life. Ought such a refuge of light to be denied to him, even if a thousand curses had descended upon his head from the outer darkness?

Almost against his will his footsteps took the road to the village. It was reposing peacefully. Only from the windows of the Black Eagle a ruddy glow was cast on the white expanse of snow. The clock in the church tower struck one. He must have been tramping about for five hours, and it seemed like five minutes. Faint moonbeams shone on the sleigh-ruts, which looked like long white ribbons unrolled on the ground, and the ma.s.s of icicles hanging from the church roof spread a delicate silver filigree on the dark, time-stained walls.

He pa.s.sed the church and came to the parsonage garden. There was a light in one of the gable windows. His heart seemed to bound into his throat. He swung himself over the hedge, and strode through the deep snow to the summer-house, which stood at a distance of twenty paces from the gable. In its shadow he took up his position.

A white curtain was drawn across the illuminated cas.e.m.e.nt. On the surface of the chintz a delicate tracery of leaves and stalks was reflected from flower-pots inside. There was her virgin paradise; there she ruled as modestly and sweetly as the Madonna in her rose-garden.

And again the picture in the cathedral rose before his mental eyes, as it always did when he tried to realise the presence of the beloved. Oh!

for one second in which to feast his bodily eye on that dear, forgotten face, so that what time and guilt had deadened in him might revive and live anew!

For a moment the outline of a girl's figure darkened the illuminated window-pane. A corner of the curtain was lifted.

Instinctively he stretched out his arms. The curtain dropped quickly, and a moment afterwards the light within was extinguished.

He waited, hardly daring to draw a breath, for a sign from the darkened spot. But none came. All was motionless and still.

"It is madness to think of it!" he said to himself. "Probably she didn't recognise you. She only saw a man's figure that gave her a fright. Make haste! For the whole house will be roused and turned out to hunt the supposed thief."

So he retraced his steps. In turning into the street he was conscious that his blood was flowing more calmly, and his pulses not throbbing so fiercely. Being in her neighbourhood even for a few minutes had soothed him.

"Where now?" Anywhere in the world, but not home. At the bare thought of that outstretched figure on the floor, his veins began to pulsate again with violence. Oh, she was a fiend, and he hated her!

He took a side path, not knowing where it led. It was divided from the Castle island by stables and carters' huts, and ended in an open field.

On the opposite side, he saw the indigo belt of woods that encircled the flat white plains. The woods drew him towards them again like a magnet. There he would hide, in their majestic depths where the peace of winter reigned and slept its mysterious dreamless slumber.

He trod the pathless field covered with hills and dales of snow which swept away before him like the billows of a boundless ocean of liquid light. His feet crunched through the frozen crust till he sank to his knees, and then it needed all his powers to step forwards once more.

But with strenuous effort he ploughed his way, still taking flight from his own thoughts. There was something almost comforting in this objectless striving. His lungs fought for breath; moisture poured from every pore of his body as he plunged and stumbled on. Here and there the crust was strong enough to bear him, and then he felt as if he had been endowed with wings and floated over the ground, till another crash laid him low, grovelling on his hands and knees.

Now the wall of woods rose higher and darker before him; ... he was only a hundred steps from his goal, when his eye was arrested by something in the shape of a hillock extending a distance of about fifty or sixty feet in the direction of the wood. Coming nearer, he saw it was too regular in form for a hillock, and its corners too sharply defined. A few feet off there was a second mound of the same description, and to the left again, a third. They must be gravel heaps, he thought, that had been dug up in the autumn and left to be removed till after the thaw set in. Why should the peasants not get gravel from his property when there was no one to prevent them?

But what did those crosses mean, that stood out so solemnly and eerily in the night, at the foot of each mound? At first he had not noticed them against the dark background of the woods. They were three in number. Roughly hewn out of fir trunks, they were so firmly planted in the earth, that they did not move a hair's-breadth when he shook them.

They bore no inscription, and if they had, he would not have been able to read it. Inscrutable as memorials of forgotten misfortune, they stood ranged there in the dim moonlight like rugged sentinels.

And then the mystery was solved. He saw what they were. With a loud cry he dropped his face in his hands. He had stumbled on the graves of the men who had fallen on that accursed night in the year '7. Here lay the bones of his father's victims. What evil chance had led him here to-night? Or was it chance? Had not a thousand invisible arms beckoned him cajolingly and irresistibly along this maniacal route, and let him fight his way through snow and ice, till he was ready to faint from exhaustion? It seemed as though fate had kept in reserve the most excruciating lash of her scourge till this hour of his bitterest humiliation; so that he should no longer be in doubt as to there being any salvation in store for him, and to demonstrate once for all that he was doomed to sink for ever under the weight of shame and despair.

"But it is well that I came," he said, conversing with himself; "where better can I convince myself that the old pastor's curse was not unjust--and that what was not a sin, has become one?"

His eyes wandered over the row of flattened graves, and now there seemed no end to them.... How many were buried there? If they had been closely packed, a hundred or more might rest in each grave--or perhaps even double that number. And they had all been brave soldiers who had left their homes gaily, in light-hearted devotion to fight for King and Fatherland.... Through foulest treachery they had been butchered here in cold blood, under cover of night.

He clung to one of the crosses, and held his face so tightly against the rough wood that splints dug into his flesh.

"Arraign him before the whole world!" something cried within him--"him and _her_--and then go with her to perdition."

He gazed at the distant prospect, and sought the outline of the ruins against the horizon. But nothing was visible except the tall trees that crowned the park, which were only dimly discernible. A little behind to the right of them lay the Cats' Bridge.

He could fancy her emerging from those trees with the troop of remorselessly cruel Frenchmen following her, bent on their work of blood. How terrible must the regular echo of their marching feet have sounded in her ears. Deeper and deeper into the wood they must have gone, till they reached that ravine which ran parallel with the thicket, almost in a half-circle. She had never told him the road she had taken, but he saw exactly how it had all happened. Everything was as plain as if he had been there himself and seen it with his own eyes.

He stretched out his arm, and with a trembling finger traced the path against the horizon.

And afterwards when they let her go, and she had made her way home alone, with the wages of her sin in her pocket--how the cracking of bullets, the beating of drums, the clouds of gunpowder, the death-shrieks of the ma.s.sacred, must have followed her, galloping at her heels like an army of furies!

How she had gone on living with those awful sounds ringing in her head, those ghastly pictures floating before her eyes, he could not understand. If he had been in her place he would have sought instant deliverance in the first halter or pond that came handy.

But not she! Visions were no terror to her. Her conscience, instead of tormenting itself, was apparently scarcely conscious of its guilt. She had only the feelings of an animal or a demon. He shuddered. And it was to her, _her_, that he had been on the brink of succ.u.mbing!

Then in his sore distress he flung himself across the grave, face downwards in the snow, folded his hands and stammered forth an incoherent prayer, while tears gushed from his eyes.

The intense cold of his exposed position stung his face, and drove him to stand up again. He patrolled the row of graves, unable to evolve a single rational thought. He felt as if he were caught in a brazen net, that was drawing its meshes tighter and tighter around him.

"G.o.d in Heaven," he cried aloud, "visit not the sins of the fathers on me! Let the dead sleep.... _I_ have not murdered them. Let something happen, a miracle, a sign, that I may be shown that Thou wilt not have me perish in this anguish of despair." He cast his eye round him as if looking for help.

But coldly and unsympathetically the moonlit, lead-coloured sky looked down on him. There was no sign, no miracle.

He laughed. "You are becoming imbecile," he murmured inwardly.

An unspeakable exhaustion overwhelmed him. He reeled, and his feet gave way beneath him. The next moment he was sitting in the cavity which the weight of his prostrate figure had made in the snow. He drew up the collar of his coat, and nearly frozen, brooded on, half sleeping, half waking.

When he rose with cramped limbs, happy to have escaped falling asleep and being frozen to death, one thin purple streak had appeared in the eastern sky. An ague, hot and cold at the same time, like the beginning of fever, shook his frame.

Now there was nothing for it, but to go home. But where was he to find the strength necessary to obliterate for ever from his mind what had happened in the night that was over at last? His tongue instinctively felt for his lip.... The wound left by the impress of her kiss burned there still.

And there had been no sign from Heaven, no miracle. One course only remained that might save him from the worst, and that was death.

Death! The thought came to him like a ray of light in the darkness, yet his brain was too weary, his soul too dispirited for him to grasp it, and it died out as quickly as it had come.

In his own footprints he walked back to the village. No one was stirring out of doors, but here and there a chimney smoked, and a c.o.c.k from his perch crowed a greeting to the new-born day.

As he took the path down to the river, he thought he saw the fleeting shadow of a woman's figure hurrying from the drawbridge. Perhaps it was Regina, who after long waiting and watching had now come to meet him.

But no! Regina was not so slim and dainty. Who in all the village could want to come to the drawbridge at this unearthly hour? His heart beat fast. He had been seen. A soft, squealing sound fell on the air, and the next instant the figure had vanished down a bypath. He did not think of following her. It might possibly be a dairymaid who had been taking a morning dip, and was shy of meeting him; but on coming to the drawbridge he saw footmarks on the freshly fallen h.o.a.rfrost, and these came to an end at the pillar to which the letter-box was fixed.

Who could be his nocturnal correspondent? It was ridiculous, yet a flood of hope suffused his soul.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the little key, that he always carried about with him, from his pocket. The box opened--a letter fell out.

He broke the seal with shaking fingers. Helene's signature! Had G.o.d heard his pet.i.tion? Had He after all sent him fresh strength for the struggle, and deliverance?

The dawn gave him sufficient light to read by, but the lines danced before his eyes. Only here and there he drank in a broken sentence or a single word--"Wait patiently." "The hour when I summon you to come to me." "Longing." "Childhood's days." "Happy."

And one thing that was not written there at all he could read distinctly. The sign that he had prayed for by the grave of the warriors had fallen from Heaven. The miracle had happened!

Renewed confidence in himself possessed him. He was not forsaken; he need not yet despair of his better self. This pure, bright angel, the good genius of his youth, was still faithful, still believed in him.

Her trust should not be abused. Rather die than, through despising himself, bring her to feeling shame at her faith in him.

He turned his face towards the purple morning glow, and, raising his hand solemnly, uttered the following words:--