For two summers past it
had been expecting the young lovers.
"Is it here?" asked the one-eyed man.
Silvere looked in front of him. He had reached the end of the path. His
eyes fell on the tombstone, and he started. Miette was right, that stone
was for her. _"Here lieth . . . Marie . . . died . . . "_ She was
dead, that slab had fallen over her. His strength failing him, he leant
against the frozen stone. How warm it had been when they sat in that
nook, chatting for many a long evening! She had always come that way,
and the pressure of her foot, as she alighted from the wall, had worn
away the stone's surface in one corner. The mark seemed instinct with
something of her lissom figure. And to Silvere it appeared as if some
fatalism attached to all these objects--as if the stone were there
precisely in order that he might come to die beside it, there where he
had loved.
The one-eyed man cocked his pistols.
Death! death! the thought fascinated Silvere. It was to this spot,
then, that they had led him, by the long white road which descends from
Sainte-Roure to Plassans. If he had known it, he would have hastened on
yet more quickly in order to die on that stone, at the end of the
narrow path, in the atmosphere where he could still detect the scent of
Miette's breath! Never had he hoped for such consolation in his grief.
Heaven was merciful. He waited, a vague smile playing on is face.
Mourgue, meantime, had caught sight of the pistols.
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