'What am I to say?' I replied. 'If you were carried from this
country, for which you seem so wholly suited, where the very rains
and winds seem to become you like ornaments, would you regret, do
you think? We must surely all regret! the son to his mother, the
man to his country; these are native feelings.'
'You have a mother?' she asked.
'In heaven, mademoiselle,' I answered. 'She, and my father also,
went by the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and
brave: they followed their queen upon the scaffold. So, you see,
I am not so much to be pitied in my prison,' I continued: 'there
are none to wait for me; I am alone in the world. 'Tis a different
case, for instance, with yon poor fellow in the cloth cap. His bed
is next to mine, and in the night I hear him sobbing to himself.
He has a tender character, full of tender and pretty sentiments;
and in the dark at night, and sometimes by day when he can get me
apart with him, he laments a mother and a sweetheart. Do you know
what made him take me for a confidant?'
She parted her lips with a look, but did not speak. The look
burned all through me with a sudden vital heat.
'Because I had once seen, in marching by, the belfry of his
village!' I continued. 'The circumstance is quaint enough. It
seems to bind up into one the whole bundle of those human instincts
that make life beautiful, and people and places dear--and from
which it would seem I am cut off!'
I rested my chin on my knee and looked before me on the ground.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25