Page:William Le Queux - The Temptress.djvu/18

Rh handsome, but the thick veil concealed her features. The husband's appearance, however, was decidedly unprepossessing. He was undergoing a term of ten years' hard labor and lifelong banishment.

Tall, bronzed, and bearded, with a thin face wrinkled by toil, although still retaining traces of good looks, he remained for a moment motionless, contemplating with loving eyes the woman who was now his wife. His attire was scarcely befitting a bridegroom, for he had no coat, and wore the soiled and ragged gray shirt and trousers of a miner, while the chains that bound his wrists seemed strangely out of place.

Yet the spectators of this odd ceremony were as strikingly incongruous as the principals themselves.

There were but eight persons. Five were fellow-prisoners of the husband, comprising the labor gang in which he worked, while close behind them sat an officer and two sinister-looking warders in faded military uniforms, the butts of their loaded rifles resting on the floor. The convicts were watching the ceremony interestedly, frequently whispering among themselves, and ever and anon, as either stirred, the clanking of their chains formed an ominous accompaniment to the hastily-gabbled formula, as if reminding them of the dismal hopelessness of their situation.

Neither replied. The warder who held the chain to which the five prisoners were manacled stepped forward, and locked it to the bridegroom's fetters.

For a few minutes, while before the altar, the latter had been allowed comparative freedom, but now, the ceremony over, he was compelled to return with his gang to the atrocious tortures and dispiriting gloom of the copper mines—that monotonous, toilsome existence of French convicts ; a life without rest, without