Very dreary was the moaning of the night storm; but it was not
more dreary than the thoughts which now occupied him in his
solitude--thoughts darkened and distorted by the terrible
superstitions of his country and his race. Ever since the period
of his mother's death he had been oppressed by the conviction
that some curse hung over the family. At first they had been
prosperous, they had got money, a little legacy had been left
them. But this good fortune had availed only for a time; disaster
on disaster strangely and suddenly succeeded. Losses,
misfortunes, poverty, want itself had overwhelmed them; his
father's temper had become so soured, that the oldest friends of
Francois Sarzeau declared he was changed beyond recognition. And
now, all this past misfortune--the steady, withering, household
blight of many years--had ended in the last, worst misery of
all--in death. The fate of his father and his brother admitted no
longer of a doubt; he knew it, as he listened to the storm, as he
reflected on his grandfather's words, as he called to mind his
own experience of the perils of the sea. And this double
bereavement had fallen on him just as the time was approaching
for his marriage with Perrine; just when misfortune was most
ominous of evil, just when it was hardest to bear! Forebodings,
which he dared not realize, began now to mingle with the
bitterness of his grief, whenever his thoughts wandered from the
present to the future; and as he sat by the lonely fireside,
murmuring from time to time the Church prayer for the repose of
the dead, he almost involuntarily mingled with it another prayer,
expressed only in his own simple words, for the safety of the
living--for the young girl whose love was his sole earthly
treasure; for the motherless children who must now look for
protection to him alone.
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