“Please be more careful in future.”
The class was indignant, scandalised. For any man to speak to “la petite
mère” in such a fashion! Little Emile, the chanticleer of the class,
protruded a contemptuous tongue behind M. Moreau’s back.
“Cochon!” muttered the infant.
Claire smiled at them all when the schoolmaster had marched out. She had
recovered herself.
“Did none of you see that I was saying my prayers on the blackboard?”
she asked them.
Emile stood up and replied with great solemnity. He was destined to be
an orator.
“The class would never confess that Mademoiselle Vignard could make a
mistake,” he said; “the error was in M. Moreau’s manners.”
Claire’s laughing eyes thanked this sententious little diplomat of
seven.
“Perhaps I shall never make a mistake again, Emile. If I do, the class
shall correct me.”
Tod, too, had touched a season of great sadness. The gods were warning
him that this happy sojourn in Myonville was drawing to a close, for
were not reinforcements arriving, and a temporarily depressed brigadier
showing a new sparkle and a more critical alertness. Some day their
marching orders would arrive with all the blind suddenness of a bolt
from Olympus. And Tod’s heart was in Myonville. He could not help it; it
had just happened so. This green and golden month had been a season of
strange beauty and tenderness, the happiest and yet the saddest month in
all Tod’s life.
He would never see Claire again. He had no right to see her again, and
he knew that he loved as he had never thought to love any woman, as his
father must have loved his mother. It was all so hopeless and so tragic,
and yet there was no bitterness in Tod’s heart; the romance was too
great for that. He was just a big man, profoundly touched, profoundly
sad, not a little afraid of hurting the heart of the woman he loved,
still more sad when he thought of that other woman.
Tod was tempted, but the Quixote in him kept its face in the sunlight.
“If you took the trouble to find out,” said the voice, “you might
discover things that would set you free.”
And Tod refused.
“It can’t be done,” he answered. “I can’t play the spy and the cad to
win her.”
But he wanted to pour out his heart to Claire, to express that love of
his with all the passion and the tenderness that cried out in him like
the joy of the spring. There was such an exultation in loving her as he
did, and yet it was the thought of the afterwards that made him pause
and remain silent. Tod knew that he would suffer most terribly when he
left her, but he would have a man’s work to do, other men to think of,
while Claire—would just have this little village and her children. She
had been contented before his coming, and Tod spent those last days in
wondering whether she cared, whether she cared as he did. He did not
want to suffer; his vanity was not concerned in it, and yet—— What a
memory to carry in his heart, what a splendid tenderness for a man to
die with after all the little meannesses of his marriage!
It was Tod’s last evening but one in Myonville, though he did not know
it then, and he walked over the fields to Gibas where another battalion
was quartered, and had tea with the officers who were billeted in the
château. The colonel was a ragged old ruffian of a Scot, lean, biting,
merciless, but with a heart of gold. He had a peculiar affection for
Tod; in a sense they were rivals. Both battalions swore by their
colonels.
“You will be staying to dinner, Western?”
And Tod refused.
“Sorry, Colonel, but I must get back.”
“Must—must! There’s no must about it! Just a wee French lassie
somewhere, my lad!”
Tod blushed.
“I’m nearly twenty years younger than you are, sir.”
“Ye soft-tongued young scamp, calling me sir! Well, get along with you.”
And Tod went, old Melville walking as far as the red-brick gate-house
with him, eager as some rough-haired terrier over the news that was
coming in.
“We’ll be at them again in ten days, my lad. They say we shall move
north to St. Omer to pick up some more men and spend a week knocking
them into shape.”
“I’m ready,” said Tod with a far-away smile as the old Scot turned back
at the gate, “though I had almost forgotten the war back here.”
“Yes, it has been a brave month, Western. I’m the better for a sight of
the children and those big trees.”
Tod walked back through the deep lanes of Gibas, with the elms and the
beeches meeting above his head and a small stream that had grown tired
of its proper bed winding as it pleased about the sandy road. The blue
sky was almost invisible, so thick was the canopy of leaves, and the
little white houses seemed lost and hidden in this world of green
growth. The road climbed slowly out of these woodland deeps like a snake
crawling out to bask in the sun. Tod had a sweep of fields before him,
sheeted with red sainfoin and wheat full of scarlet poppies. The distant
trees of Myonville cut the deep blue arch of the sky like the misty
towers of a distant town. A great iron crucifix stood on a mound just
where the road left the shadows of the trees.
Tod took a field-track that branched away to the left. It was a
favourite walk of his, a sort of pilgrim’s way that was in no hurry to
get to any particular place, turning aside and loitering when a tree or
a piece of orchard or a row of old trees pleased it. At times it cut
deep into the fields like the sunk bed of a stream. Tod knew that it
would bring him into Myonville close to old Lorellard’s poplar wood,
where he could turn into the meadows and so through the orchard to the
Lorellards’ house. He felt that he wanted to be alone and to escape the
salutes of his men.
Half-way across the fields the track skirted a little grove of aspens,
and sitting on the grass bank under one of these trees Tod saw Claire
Vignard. She was all alone there like some Joan of Arc under the trees
of Domrémy, and so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not see Tod
or hear his footsteps, so that he came on her like a figure that steps
down out of a dream.
Tod had faltered for a moment, swept by a rush of great tenderness. She
looked so much alone with her dear self, a little lost, so unconsciously
sad that his heart misgave him. He wanted to go to her, reach out his
hands and meet the soft light of her grey eyes and utter those words
that haunted him day and night:
“Ma chérie, I love you.”
Yet when he saw her sitting there alone, gazing towards the far horizon
of her dreams, his own tenderness smote him in the mouth. There was
nothing that he might say to her, nothing that he had the right to say.
He moved on again, and suddenly she saw him, the very man of her
thoughts, the mate of her dear desires, but she remained still, still as
a bird whose startled heart beats rapidly. Deep in her eyes shone a soft
inward glow. She felt Tod loved her, and would never speak.
“No school to-day?”
“It is a holiday, monsieur.”
Tod stood looking down at her, the little woman with the sunlight on her
face and hair, her bosom moving with a suggestion of slight
breathlessness under the plain white blouse, her grey eyes shining—yet
faintly clouded, each hand clasping a tuft of grass. Tod trembled on the
edge of that tragic tenderness of his. He wanted her, and she, in her
dreams, had felt herself embraced by him.
“It is so beautiful and peaceful here,” he said.
“Not a leaf moves,” she answered, looking upwards.
“Still as an empty church.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and dreamed. Tod was so near, yet she
knew that he would come no nearer.
“You have been very happy in Myonville?” she asked him suddenly.
“Very happy.”
And then he added:
“I know that I shall never be so happy again.”
Those were the only words he could utter, but in the stillness of the
fields she took them into her heart.
“I am going back now, monsieur,” she said.
“May I walk with you?”
“If you wish it.”
And silence walked with them nearly all the way.