hen the Count offered to marry her, the Mother Superior
made her think it her duty and heaven's will that she should accept the
high position, where her piety would shine so much further: and having
become his wife, she would die rather than violate a wife's duties by a
hair's breadth. But what is her reward? Not because he loves
her--there's more love in a stone!--but because he can't endure the
thought of any trespass on what is his--because he dreads being made a
jeer of--he goes mad with jealousy and suspicion. He imitates the Prince
of Conde by locking his wife up in a tower."

"But this cannot last forever."

"No, Monsieur, and for a very good reason--the Countess's life cannot
last forever under this treatment--even if the Count, in some wild
imagining of her guilt, conjured up by Captain Ferragant, does not
murder her. It's that thought which makes me shudder. It could be done
so quietly in that lonely cell, and any account of her death could be
given out to avoid scandal."

"Horrible, Mathilde! He would not go to that length."

"Men have done so. You are a stranger, and have not seen the frenzies
into which the Count sometimes works himself, torturing his mind by
imagining actions of infidelity on her part."

"But that disease of his mind will wear itself out; then he will see
matters more sanely."

"Will he grow better, do you think, as he grows older, and drinks more
wine, and falls more under the influence of the red Captain?"

To say truth, I thought as Mathilde did, though I had spoken otherwise
for mere form of reassurance.

"What is her prison like?" I asked.

"A gloomy room no larger that this, with a single small window. There is
no panelling nor tapestry nor plaster--nothing but the bare stones.
There are a bed for Madame, a cot for me, a table, and two chairs:
nothing else to make it look like a human habitation, save our
crucifixes, an image of the Virgin, a trunk, and Madame's book of
Hours."

"A small window, you say. Is it barred?"

"No; but our room is very high up in the tower."

"Still, if one got through the window--is it large enough for that?"

"One might get through; but the moat is beneath--far beneath."

"The window looks toward Montoire, then, if the moat is beneath."

"Yes; we can see the sunset."

"At all events, a person dropping from the window would alight outside
the walls of the chateau?"

"Yes, Monsieur,--in the moat, as I said. It would be a long drop, too.