Francezka Part 43

"Dearest," she cried, in her old, sweet, penetrating voice. "I do not ask why you did not come before. You could not--you could not come until now!"

At that, Regnard stepped forward, and raised his hand to separate the two.

"Wait," he said to Gaston. "She was your wife for one week. She has been my wife nearly two years. She shall remain so. I, too, loved her well, from my boyhood--and was it to be expected that I should let that childish fancy for you stand between her and me, when I thought you dead?"

I think neither Gaston nor Francezka heard him; but suddenly as a bird flies from its perch, so Francezka flew to Gaston and rested her head upon his breast. Not even Regnard dared to lay a sacrilegious hand upon her there.

"I have been the most miserable woman on G.o.d's earth," she said to Gaston, raising her head, and looking him full in the face--"and I can not survive this hour. Do not ask me to live--I can not live. I was thinking, just now, as I sat and played the air we loved so well, that I must, this very night, seek rest in death--for I suspected the truth only a little while ago. But, love, this hour atones for much. You know now how I loved you--how I remembered you. If I was dull of apprehension--if, after seven years, I accepted too quickly the deception practised on me--well, it was because I loved you so well.

But I must depart; there is no place on earth for me."

For answer Gaston kissed her tenderly.

"Would you leave me now?" he asked. "Have not I, too, loved you and sought you? And shall not our happiness swallow up our misfortune, and the crimes committed against us, after those crimes are avenged?"

Then, as calmly as a summer day, he placed Francezka in a chair, and, turning to his brother, said:

"To-night, you or I must die."

"Agreed," replied Regnard.

He opened a cabinet in the room, took out several swords, and, handing them to Gaston, said:

"Choose which one you will die by."

Gaston selected one.

"With this will I kill you," he said.

Neither of them had seen me, although I was in evidence plain enough.

I started forward, however, and grasping Gaston's arm, forced him to look at me.

"Babache," he said, recognizing me instantly. "The world is not big enough for my brother and for me. It is better to end it now and here.

Either let him kill me, or let me kill him; so I pray you, hands off; and if I am the one to die, take care of Francezka."

I thought, too, that the world could not and ought not to hold them both living, and the sooner it was settled which should die that night, the better.

Francezka, meanwhile, sat quite still in the chair where she had been placed. Gaston, turning to her, said, with an air of gentle command:

"Leave. This is no place for you."

"Stay!" cried Regnard violently. "You are to obey my commands, not his."

Francezka, without looking toward Regnard, without a shudder or a tremor, rose. I had thought she could neither rise nor move nor speak, but there was not the least sign of weakness about her. She actually stopped and curtsied toward Gaston as she went out. He bowed ceremoniously in response.

I took her hand and led her out into the vast hall, dimly lighted. She did not speak my name, but she held on to my hand. In the tempest of her soul she instinctively clung to one whom she knew to be true. She walked with me steadily across the great hall, and into the Diana gallery, now dark and cold as a vault. She looked like a specter as her white figure glided past the mirrors on the walls.

She continued to grasp my hands as a drowning man grasps his savior.

We were too far off from the place of combat to hear anything except the dull shuffling of feet upon the floor. I had not the slightest doubt that in five minutes, at most, Regnard would kill Gaston.

In less than five minutes the door of the yellow saloon opened, and a flood of light poured into the great hall, vacant, dark and silent.

Regnard appeared on the threshold.

"Come, Madame," he cried in a loud and triumphant voice. "Come and behold the man you claimed as husband just now!"

Through the open door we could see Gaston, lying huddled in a pool of blood upon the floor of the little room. Blood, too, was on Regnard's face, but he wiped it off with his handkerchief, and laughed to himself.

I turned to where Francezka had sat, but she was gone. At the end of the hall, I heard the great door clang. At once the thought of the lake suggested itself to me and I ran out of doors. The way Francezka usually took to the lake was by way of the Italian garden. I knew this, but a strange confusion fell upon me when I found myself out of doors, under the blue-black starlit sky. I could not recall the way to the Italian garden--nor yet the lake. At last, it came to me. I saw, afar, through the bare trees, the white statues gleaming, the black cedars, the yew trees--black, too, in the white moonlight.

I ran toward this garden, with its pathway to the lake, and thought every moment I should see before me Francezka's flying figure. She was ever fleet of foot, and when I remembered this, the heart within me died.

When I reached the statue of Petrarch under which the poor dog lay buried, I stopped and searched the scene with a glance sharpened by agony. The lake lay before me; I heard its voice in the night--that strange voice to which I had often listened with Francezka. And then from the lonely cedars on the bank, I saw Francezka emerge, and, at the same moment, there was a sound of swift pursuing feet--Regnard, too, had known where to seek her.

Francezka paused one moment on the brink of the lake, and turned her head toward those steadily nearing footsteps. Then she raised her face, raised both arms above her head and clasped them, as if in one last appeal to that Eternal Power, on the bosom of whose mercy she was about to cast herself, not wholly despairing. There was a sound of parting waters--of the black and icy waters--oh, Francezka! Francezka!

How sweet must Death have been to thee!

THE END