her warm and sympathetic nature and frank and winning ways, had
made her everybody’s pet. She had been a hot patriot all this time,
and sometimes the war news had sobered her spirits and wrung her
heart and made her acquainted with tears, but always when these
interruptions had run their course her spirits rose and she was her
old self again.
But now for a whole year and a half she had been mainly grave;
not melancholy, but given to thought, abstraction, dreams. She was
carrying France upon her heart, and she found the burden not light.
I knew that this was her trouble, but others attributed her
abstraction to religious ecstasy, for she did not share her thinkings
with the village at large, yet gave me glimpses of them, and so I
knew, better than the rest, what was absorbing her interest. Many a
time the idea crossed my mind that she had a secret–a secret
which she was keeping wholly to herself, as well from me as from
the others. This idea had come to me because several times she
had cut a sentence in two and changed the subject when apparently
she was on the verge of a revelation of some sort. I was to find this
secret out, but not just yet.
The day after the conversation which I have been reporting we
were together in the pastures and fell to talking about France, as
usual. For her sake I had always talked hopefully before, but that
was mere lying, for really there was not anything to hang a rag of
hope for France upon. Now it was such a pain to lie to her, and
cost me such shame to offer this treachery to one so snow-pure
from lying and treachery, and even from suspicion of such
baseness in others, as she was, that I was resolved to face about
now and begin over again, and never insult her more with
deception. I started on the new policy by sayingq1qstill opening up
with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung
out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a
time:
“Joan, I have been thinking the thing all over last night, and have
concluded that we have been in the wrong all this time; that the
case of France is desperate; that it has been desperate ever since
Agincourt; and that to-day it is more than desperate, it is hopeless.”
I did not look her in the face while I was saying it; it could not be
expected of a person. To break her heart, to crush her hope with a
so frankly brutal speech as that, without one charitable soft place
in it–it seemed a shameful thing, and it was. But when it was out,
the weight gone, and my conscience rising to the surface, I glanced
at her face to see the result.
There was none to see. At least none that I was expecting. There
was a barely perceptible suggestion of wonder in her serious eyes,
but that was all; and she said, in her simple and placid way:
“The case of France hopeless? Why should you think that? Tell
me.”
It is a most pleasant thing to find that what you thought would
inflict a hurt upon one whom you honor, has not done it. I was
relieved now, and could say all my say without any furtivenesses
and without embarrassment. So I began:
“Let us put sentiment and patriotic illusions aside, and look at the
facts in the face. What do they say? They speak as plainly as the
figures in a merchant’s account-book. One has only to add the two
columns up to see that the French house is bankrupt, that one-half
of its property is already in the English sheriff’s hands and the
other half in nobody’s–except those of irresponsible raiders and
robbers confessing allegiance to nobody. Our King is shut up with
his favorites and fools in inglorious idleness and poverty in a
narrow little patch of the kingdom–a sort of back lot, as one may
say–and has no authority there or anywhere else, hasn’t a farthing