Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/552

544 "He said he thought the music did him good," acknowledged Adolphus.

"May-be it was the same as with Saul when David played for him. But he does not look like a bad man, papa. He looks grander than any of our officers. And he has fought battles, they say. He is very brave."

Both Adolphus and Pauline Montier looked at their daughter with the most profound surprise when she spoke thus. Not merely her words, but her manner of speaking, caused this not agreeable perplexity. Her emotion was not only too obvious, it was too deep for their understanding. The mother was the first to speak.

"How did you hear all this, child? I never heard him talked of in this way. They don't talk about him at all,—do they, Adolphus?"

"No," he answered; but he spoke the word very mildly. The tone did not indicate a want of sympathy in the compassion of his daughter.

Elizabeth looked from her mother to her father. What friends had she, if these were not her friends?

"The jailer told Sandy, and Sandy told me," she said. "But they never talk to any other person. Oh! I was afraid to hear about it; but now I have heard, I was afraid not to speak. Would it be so dreadful for you to live here, when we could always have music and the garden? And these woods seem pleasant, when you get acquainted. Day or night I can't get him out of my mind. It is just as if you were shut up that way, papa. I am afraid to be happy when any one is so wretched."

The result was, that Elizabeth's words, and not so much her words as the state of things she contrived to make apparent by them, brought Adolphus Montier to a clear, resistless sense of the prisoner's fate. Over the features of that fate he was for days brooding. Now and then a word that indicated the direction of his thinking would escape him in his wife's hearing. Silently Pauline followed Adolphus to the end of all this thinking. Once she walked alone along the unfrequented road that ran between the prison and the wood, down to the sea; and she looked at the gloomy fortress, and tried to think about it as she should, if certain that within its walls her lot would soon be cast.

And more than once Montier walked home that way; and if it chanced that he had his horn or his drum with him, he marched at quickstep, and played the liveliest tunes, and emerged from the shadows of the wood with a spirit undaunted. He had played for the prisoner, whom he had never yet seen,—but not more for him than for himself.

One Sunday, when the little family walked out together, Adolphus and his wife fell into a pleasant train of thought,—and when they were together, thought and speech were generally simultaneous. As they passed the prison,—for Adolphus had led the way to this path,—Laval was standing in the door. They stopped to speak with him; whereat he invited them into his quarters.

In this walk, Elizabeth had fallen behind her parents. When she saw them going into the prison, she quickened her pace, for her father beckoned to her. But she was in no earnest haste to follow, as became sufficiently manifest when she was left alone.

They had not gone far in their talk, however, when she came to the doorway. Laval, in all his speech, was a deliberate man, and neither Adolphus nor his wife showed any eagerness in the conduct of the conversation now begun. The contrast between the gloom of the apartment and the light and cheerfulness of their own home was apparent to all of them. Elizabeth felt the oppression under which each of the little party seemed to labor, the instant she joined her parents. Susceptible as they all were to the influences of Nature, her sunshine and her shadow, this gloom which fell upon them was nothing more than might have been anticipated.

Jailer Laval was homesick, and innocent of a suspicion of what was passing