It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon. There was no other to
remember the dead Chasseur; no other beside himself, save an old woman
sitting spinning at her wheel under the low-sloping, shingle roof of a
cottage by the western Biscayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread
flew, looked with anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had
seen his father--the son of her youth--go down beneath the waters.
But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread of her
waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom she watched would
go back to her and to Languedoc.
For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who remember so
well, and yet are forgotten as though already they were amid the dead.
Cecil's hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his thoughts
wandered far from the place where he was. Alone there, in the great
sun-scorched barrack room, the news that he had read, the presence he
had quitted, seemed like a dream.
He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had stood before
the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial eyes the light of other
years seemed to lie; the memories of other worlds seemed to slumber.
These blue, proud, fathomless eyes! Why had they looked on him? He had
grown content with his fate; he had been satisfied to live and to fall a
soldier of France; he had set a seal on that far-off life of his earlier
time, and had grown to forget that it had ever been.
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