"She means to marry her brother to Bathilde and leave her fortune to their children."
"Rogron won't have any."
"Yes he will," replied Vinet. "But I promise to find you some young and agreeable woman with a hundred and fifty thousand francs? Don't be a fool; how can you and I afford to quarrel? Things have gone against you in spite of all my care; but you don't understand me."
"Then we must understand each other," said the colonel. "Get me a wife with a hundred and fifty thousand francs before the elections; if not --look out for yourself! I don't like unpleasant bed-fellows, and you've pulled the blankets all over to your side. Good-evening."
"You shall see," said Vinet, grasping the colonel's hand affectionately.
*****
About one o'clock that night three clear, sharp cries of an owl, wonderfully well imitated, echoed through the square. Pierrette heard them in her feverish sleep; she jumped up, moist with perspiration, opened her window, saw Brigaut, and flung down a ball of silk, to which he fastened a letter. Sylvie, agitated by the events of the day and her own indecision of mind, was not asleep; she heard the owl.
"Ah, bird of ill-omen!" she thought. "Why, Pierrette is getting up!
What is she after?"
Hearing the attic window open softly, Sylvie rushed to her own window and heard the rustle of paper against her blinds. She fastened the strings of her bed-gown and went quickly upstairs to Pierrette's room, where she found the poor girl unwinding the silk and freeing the letter.
"Ha! I've caught you!" cried the old woman, rushing to the window, from which she saw Jacques running at full speed. "Give me that letter."
"No, cousin," said Pierrette, who, by one of those strong inspirations of youth sustained by her own soul, rose to a grandeur of resistance such as we admire in the history of certain peoples reduced to despair.
"Ha! you will not?" cried Sylvie, advancing upon the girl with a face full of hatred and fury.
Pierrette fell back to get time to put her letter in her hand, which she clenched with unnatural force. Seeing this manoeuvre Sylvie grasped the delicate white hand of the girl in her lobster claws and tried to open it. It was a frightful struggle, an infamous struggle; it was more than a physical struggle; it assailed the mind, the sole treasure of the human being, the thought, which God has placed beyond all earthly power and guards as the secret way between the sufferer and Himself. The two women, one dying, the other in the vigor of health, looked at each other fixedly. Pierrette's eyes darted on her executioner the look the famous Templar on the rack cast upon Philippe le Bel, who could not bear it and fled thunderstricken. Sylvie, a woman and a jealous woman, answered that magnetic look with malignant flashes. A dreadful silence reigned. The clenched hand of the Breton girl resisted her cousin's efforts like a block of steel. Sylvie twisted Pierrette's arm, she tried to force the fingers open; unable to do so she stuck her nails into the flesh. At last, in her madness, she set her teeth into the wrist, trying to conquer the girl by pain.
Pierrette defied her still, with that same terrible glance of innocence. The anger of the old maid grew to such a pitch that it became blind fury. She seized Pierrette's arm and struck the closed fist upon the window-sill, and then upon the marble of the mantelpiece, as we crack a nut to get the kernel.
"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, "they are murdering me!"
"Ha! you may well scream, when I catch you with a lover in the dead of night."
And she beat the hand pitilessly.
"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, the blood flowing.
At that instant, loud knocks were heard at the front door. Exhausted, the two women paused a moment.
Rogron, awakened and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got up, gone to his sister's room, and not finding her was frightened.
Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom.
At this moment Sylvie's eyes chanced to fall on Pierrette's corset, and she remembered the papers. Releasing the girl's wrist she sprang upon the corset like a tiger on its prey, and showed it to Pierrette with a smile,--the smile of an Iroquois over his victim before he scalps him.
"I am dying," said Pierrette, falling on her knees, "oh, who will save me?"
"I!" said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which two gray eyes glittered.
"Ah! grandmother, you have come too late," cried the poor child, bursting into tears.
Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle.
The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child, and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom she cast one glance of majestic accusation.
The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth), accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death.
She slowly went down the stairs, listened to the front door closing behind them, and came face to face with her brother, who exclaimed:
"Then they haven't killed you?"
"Go to bed," said Sylvie. "To-morrow we will see what we must do."
She went back to her own bed, ripped open the corset, and read Brigaut's two letters, which confounded her. She went to sleep in the greatest perplexity,--not imagining the terrible results to which her conduct was to lead.
*****