16. All Is Quiet at Sainte-Barbe

TOWARD evening on the day after she had come to Joliet, Lucan sat in her room and sewed, making fast a flounce of her frock which she had torn off in moving the big chest at Sainte-Barbe. Zosine was in bed in the adjoining room. She had fever. From time to time she fell into a short drowse and moaned in her sleep, but when she woke up, she was silent. “It is well,” said Lucan, “that she has realized that she is too weak to travel. But how is her mind to gain back its peace and strength?” Zosine wanted to be left alone. She gazed at Lucan with dark, dumb eyes.

Olympia had lain in a deep, deathlike sleep ever since she had come to Joliet. Lucan herself passed the days in a strange, dreamlike condition of mind, in which she could not quite distinguish between the past and the present. When Madame de Valfonds spoke to her, she found no answer. She did not know what the future might bring, nor how much part she herself had had in the tragedy at Sainte-Barbe. When her mind turned to England, and she bethought herself of what her friends there would think or say, when they heard that she had been examined and judged in France, it became blurred or seemed to shrink from the subject. She could no longer clearly realize, or decide about, her own destiny. She must now leave that to others.

Several times in the course of the day carriages had driven up before Joliet, and people had got out of them. Father Vadier had visited the old lady. Lucan was waiting to hear what had been discussed and decided. While she sat and sewed, Father Vadier came into her room. His face was very still as he saluted her and sat down opposite to her.

“I have something to tell you and your friend,” he said, “in case Mademoiselle Zosine has so far regained her strength as to be able to hear me.” Father Vadier and Madame de Valfonds now knew that Lucan and Zosine were not sisters.

“How can she possibly regain her strength?” Lucan answered sadly. “For so long she has devoted it all to one single cause, as no other girl in the world could have done. And in what horror did it not all end!”

Father Vadier for a time sat still, looking at her. “Mademoiselle Lucan,” he said, “will you recount to me all that has happened to you and your friend in France?”

Lucan grew a little paler. “Yes,” she said.

She folded her hands in her lap. It was a good thing, she thought, that it fell to her, first, to tell of the happenings at Sainte-Barbe. Zosine would have accused herself so violently.

In her report she went back a long way, till her first meeting with Mrs. Pennhallow outside the inn at Staines. Slowly and conscientiously she went through all that had happened to her since then. Even to talk about it was like a dream, and in this dreamlike atmosphere she could relate it all, as if it had happened to some other girl. She could even, with only a faint shiver in her voice, quote the letter which she had found in Mrs. Pennhallow’s drawer, and recount what had happened on her last night at Sainte-Barbe. When she had finished her tale, she looked straight at Father Vadier and waited for his judgment.

Father Vadier remained silent for a long time. At last he said, “It will, all the same, be necessary for me to speak to your friend. I understand that she is suffering now. But there is no other way out for her than to tell the truth to someone. I believe that it is, at this moment, what she wants herself.” They heard Zosine move in the next room. “Go in to her,” said Father Vadier, “and let me know if I can come.”

Lucan went in to Zosine. “Whom did you talk with?” asked Zosine.

“With Father Vadier,” said Lucan. “He has got something to tell us.”

Zosine drew her breath deeply. “It is a good thing that he has come,” she said. Lucan arranged her pillows so that she could sit up, and pulled an armchair up to the bed. It was dark in here; Zosine asked her to light the lamp. As Lucan lifted the globe onto it, she noticed, with a heavy heart, how pale and feeble her friend looked.

“Yes, it is a good thing that you have come, Father Vadier,” said Zosine, “for here they all believe that I can go on living among other people, as before. But that is not possible. For I have driven a human being to death. Time after time, during these last months, I have dreamed that I saw the old man with a rope round his neck. And my dreams have been powerful, Father Vadier! In the end he had to put it there. Listen to me. I will tell you all.”

“You need not tell me what has happened at Sainte-Barbe,” said Father Vadier. “I knew it already before I came here tonight. We will talk together of what you are to do now.”

“Do not think that I repent of what I have done,” said Zosine, and moved her head on her dark hair that was spread over the pillow. “For I would do it again, if once more I came to Sainte-Barbe, and all things were as they were then. The old man deserved to die. It was but just and right that he must die. But do you know, Father Vadier, that justice is a terrible thing? The person who cannot give up the idea of justice in life, and who comes face to face with a human being as evil as the master is himself doomed. He is cast out from the society of innocent, honest people. The innocent, honest people here, Father Vadier, Madame de Valfonds and Lucan, think that I can go on dressing, walking in the garden, sitting by the lamp, sewing with them. But it is impossible, Father Vadier. I might perhaps keep alive in a prison cell. But if I stay here, I shall die!”

“My child,” said Father Vadier, “I came here to tell you something. Listen to me now.

“Early yesterday morning, a letter was brought to Monsieur Tinchebrai in Peyriac. It came from Sainte-Barbe. His housekeeper knew the messenger. When he had read it, Monsieur Tinchebrai told her that he had to go away on matters of im portance, and he did not come back. Nobody has seen him since. But I take it that he went to Sainte-Barbe. When, later in the day, and after I had taken you up here, I myself went to Sainte-Barbe. The door was open, but there was no sign of life at the house. In the long dining-room I found what Monsieur Tinchebrai must have found there. On the two hooks in the ceiling hung your master, Mr. Pennhallow, and the woman who called herself his wife. They had both been dead for several hours. I gather that the woman had come home some time after you yourself had left the house, and that, at the sight of the dead man, she has put an end to her own life. The rope from which he had hanged himself was long enough for the two of them. She had cut it with an axe which lay on the table.

“Alas,” Lucan thought. “Poor unhappy woman! She could not bear to live when he had died. But in his last hour, when he spoke to us, he did not once mention her name.”

“In the house,” Father Vadier continued, “there was ample evidence to prove what had driven those two to death. The judge of Lunel, who showed great consternation and dismay at the discovery, has opened their safes, and there has found proof of a long series of inconceivable misdeeds. Although Mr. Pennhallow’s name was not known to the police of France, they had for a long time been on his track, and if they had got hold of him, the law of the country would inevitably have sentenced him to death, as he has now done himself. From papers and letters found in the house it was also learned that the couple at Sainte-Barbe were not husband and wife, but brother and sister.

“There will be no inquest and no verdict in the case, Mademoiselle Zosine. Madame de Valfonds and I have spoken with Monsieur Belabres. He has come to see the sad case with our eyes. By a singular coincidence he himself has just been informed by the postilion at Peyriac that, on the evening before the tragedy, you and your friend had left Peyriac on the diligence for Les Matelles, where one changes for Marseilles. Without doubt, Monsieur Belabres explained to me, it is your flight from his house which has convinced Mr. Pennhallow that you knew of his crimes. And it is this conviction which has turned the blood-stained hand of the murderer against himself. Baptistine Labarre was no longer at Sainte-Barbe.”

For some time all three were silent.

“And Clon?” whispered Lucan.

“The boy from Sainte-Barbe,” said Father Vadier, “was found in a shed where he had sought shelter on his return from Monsieur Tinchebrai’s house. In his delirium he has told us many things of what happened there last night, and during all the time that he had been in Mr. Pennhallow’s service. He seems to have in some way attached himself to you, Mademoiselle,” he added, turning to Lucan, “but he does not remember your name. He calls you Mademoiselle Rosa. He declares that he would not take part in your murder, but that he was forced by people whom he calls ‘the others.’ When for a long time he had waited in vain for that light in the window, which was the signal upon which he and these others were to enter the house, he went round to the other side of the building, and kept standing there all through the night in the wind and the rain. It is uncertain whether he is going to live. All is quiet at Sainte-Barbe now.”

All was quiet, too, in the room at Joliet, when Father Vadier had finished speaking.

He himself was the first to break the silence. “You ask me, Zosine,” he said, “whether I know that justice is an awful thing. Yes, in our own unworthy hands, it is an awful thing. And revenge will crush the individual who takes upon himself to execute it. To exercise justice the law and the authorities have been empowered to judge the criminal and carry out the judgment, without hatred or vindictiveness, on behalf of the whole human community. It was but just that the evil man must die. But it was sinful arrogance in you to install yourself as his judge.

“But do you not see, Zosine,” he went on, “that God in his mercy, at the last moment, saved you from becoming so? You are not guilty of the death of any human being, and no prison will open its doors to receive you. In the hand of the self-appointed judge, the pistol clicked. It was mercy, in the person of this good girl, which frustrated your rancor and defiance, and which killed the evil man. His dark spirit could not suffer the ray of light of forgiveness. And before the intercession of a young innocent girl, he shrank back, and sank into the abyss.

“Your friend has told me,” he said, “that Mr. Pennhallow’s last horrible cry was, ‘Rosa prays for me!’ Does this not show you, that Rosa, whose cause you have taken on, and whose agony you meant to revenge, was more powerful than you yourself? She asserted a higher and purer justice, at the moment in which she renounced her revenge, and showed mercy!”

He took Lucan’s hand and led her up to Zosine’s bed. “Zosine,” he said, “you are to kiss your friend now, while I look at you.”

Deeply moved and touched, Lucan bent down to Zosine. She felt her cold cheek against her own.

“You are not cast out from the society of innocent and honest people, Zosine,” said Father Vadier. “You are to live among them as before. And, among them, you are to learn to accept, and to show, mercy.”

When Lucan had sat by Zosine’s bed for a while, and had seen her pale stiffened face soften, so that once more she looked like the child who had slept in the bed next to hers, a long time ago at school, she had a sudden impulse. “I will go in and read my letter,” she thought.

In the course of time the people at Joliet learned that late at night a young man had come to the Bishop of Nîmes’ house, and had demanded to see him. Shortly after, the stranger had left the house hurriedly, and as if in confusion and despair. The conversation had deeply shocked and shaken the Bishop. He lay ill for a long time after it. The stranger was not seen again.