I
It was not till the following spring that I plucked up courage to tell
Mrs. Bridgeworth what had happened to me that night at Morgat.
In the first place, Mrs. Bridgeworth was in America; and after the night
in question I lingered on abroad for several months—not for pleasure,
God knows, but because of a nervous collapse supposed to be the result
of having taken up my work again too soon after my touch of fever in
Egypt. But, in any case, if I had been door to door with Grace
Bridgeworth I could not have spoken of the affair before, to her or to
any one else; not till I had been rest-cured and built up again at one
of those wonderful Swiss sanatoria where they clean the cobwebs out of
you. I could not even have written to her—not to save my life. The
happenings of that night had to be overlaid with layer upon layer of
time and forgetfulness before I could tolerate any return to them.
The beginning was idiotically simple; just the sudden reflex of a New
England conscience acting on an enfeebled constitution. I had been
painting in Brittany, in lovely but uncertain autumn weather, one day
all blue and silver, the next shrieking gales or driving fog. There is a
rough little white-washed inn out on the Pointe du Raz, swarmed over by
tourists in summer but a sea-washed solitude in autumn; and there I was
staying and trying to do waves, when some one said: “You ought to go
over to Cape something else, beyond Morgat.”
I went, and had a silver-and-blue day there; and on the way back the
name of Morgat set up an unexpected association of ideas: Morgat—Grace
Bridgeworth—Grace’s sister, Mary Pask—“You know my darling Mary has a
little place now near Morgat; if you ever go to Brittany do go to see
her. She lives such a lonely life—it makes me so unhappy.”
That was the way it came about. I had known Mrs. Bridgeworth well for
years, but had only a hazy intermittent acquaintance with Mary Pask, her
older and unmarried sister. Grace and she were greatly attached to each
other, I knew; it had been Grace’s chief sorrow, when she married my old
friend Horace Bridgeworth, and went to live in New York, that Mary, from
whom she had never before been separated, obstinately lingered on in
Europe, where the two sisters had been travelling since their mother’s
death. I never quite understood why Mary Pask refused to join Grace in
America. Grace said it was because she was “too artistic”—but, knowing
the elder Miss Pask, and the extremely elementary nature of her interest
in art, I wondered whether it were not rather because she disliked
Horace Bridgeworth. There was a third alternative—more conceivable if
one knew Horace—and that was that she may have liked him too much. But
that again became untenable (at least I supposed it did) when one knew
Miss Pask: Miss Pask with her round flushed face, her innocent bulging
eyes, her old-maidish flat decorated with art-tidies, and her vague and
timid philanthropy. Aspire to Horace—!
Well, it was all rather puzzling, or would have been if it had been
interesting enough to be worth puzzling over. But it was not. Mary Pask
was like hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheerful derelicts content
with their innumerable little substitutes for living. Even Grace would
not have interested me particularly if she hadn’t happened to marry one
of my oldest friends, and to be kind to his friends. She was a handsome
capable and rather dull woman, absorbed in her husband and children, and
without an ounce of imagination; and between her attachment to her
sister and Mary Pask’s worship of her there lay the inevitable gulf
between the feelings of the sentimentally unemployed and those whose
affections are satisfied. But a close intimacy had linked the two
sisters before Grace’s marriage, and Grace was one of the sweet
conscientious women who go on using the language of devotion about
people whom they live happily without seeing; so that when she said:
“You know it’s years since Mary and I have been together—not since
little Molly was born. If only she’d come to America! Just think ...
Molly is six, and has never seen her darling auntie ...” when she said
this, and added: “If you go to Brittany promise me you’ll look up my
Mary,” I was moved in that dim depth of one where unnecessary
obligations are contracted.
And so it came about that, on that silver-and-blue afternoon, the idea
“Morgat—Mary Pask—to please Grace” suddenly unlocked the sense of duty
in me. Very well: I would chuck a few things into my bag, do my day’s
painting, go to see Miss Pask when the light faded, and spend the night
at the inn at Morgat. To this end I ordered a rickety one-horse vehicle
to await me at the inn when I got back from my painting, and in it I
started out toward sunset to hunt for Mary Pask....
As suddenly as a pair of hands clapped over one’s eyes, the sea-fog shut
down on us. A minute before we had been driving over a wide bare upland,
our backs turned to a sunset that crimsoned the road ahead; now the
densest night enveloped us. No one had been able to tell me exactly
where Miss Pask lived; but I thought it likely that I should find out at
the fishers’ hamlet toward which we were trying to make our way. And I
was right ... an old man in a doorway said: Yes—over the next rise, and
then down a lane to the left that led to the sea; the American lady who
always used to dress in white. Oh, _he_ knew ... near the _Baie des
Trépassés_.
“Yes; but how can we see to find it? I don’t know the place,” grumbled
the reluctant boy who was driving me.
“You will when we get there,” I remarked.
“Yes—and the horse foundered meantime! I can’t risk it, sir; I’ll get
into trouble with the _patron_.”
Finally an opportune argument induced him to get out and lead the
stumbling horse, and we continued on our way. We seemed to crawl on for
a long time through a wet blackness impenetrable to the glimmer of our
only lamp. But now and then the pall lifted or its folds divided; and
then our feeble light would drag out of the night some perfectly
commonplace object—a white gate, a cow’s staring face, a heap of
roadside stones—made portentous and incredible by being thus detached
from its setting, capriciously thrust at us, and as suddenly withdrawn.
After each of these projections the darkness grew three times as thick;
and the sense I had had for some time of descending a gradual slope now
became that of scrambling down a precipice. I jumped out hurriedly and
joined my young driver at the horse’s head.
“I can’t go on—I won’t, sir!” he whimpered.
“Why, see, there’s a light over there—just ahead!”
The veil swayed aside, and we beheld two faintly illuminated squares in
a low mass that was surely the front of a house.
“Get me as far as that—then you can go back if you like.”
The veil dropped again; but the boy had seen the lights and took heart.
Certainly there was a house ahead of us; and certainly it must be Miss
Pask’s, since there could hardly be two in such a desert. Besides, the
old man in the hamlet had said: “Near the sea”; and those endless
modulations of the ocean’s voice, so familiar in every corner of the
Breton land that one gets to measure distances by them rather than by
visual means, had told me for some time past that we must be making for
the shore. The boy continued to lead the horse on without making any
answer. The fog had shut in more closely than ever, and our lamp merely
showed us the big round drops of wet on the horse’s shaggy quarters.
The boy stopped with a jerk. “There’s no house—we’re going straight down
to the sea.”
“But you saw those lights, didn’t you?”
“I thought I did. But where are they now? The fog’s thinner again.
Look—I can make out trees ahead. But there are no lights any more.”
“Perhaps the people have gone to bed,” I suggested jocosely.
“Then hadn’t we better turn back, sir?”
“What—two yards from the gate?”
The boy was silent: certainly there was a gate ahead, and presumably,
behind the dripping trees, some sort of dwelling. Unless there was just
a field and the sea ... the sea whose hungry voice I heard asking and
asking, close below us. No wonder the place was called the Bay of the
Dead! But what could have induced the rosy benevolent Mary Pask to come
and bury herself there? Of course the boy wouldn’t wait for me.... I
knew that ... the _Baie des Trépassés_ indeed! The sea whined down there
as if it were feeding-time, and the Furies, its keepers, had forgotten
it....
There _was_ the gate! My hand had struck against it. I felt along to the
latch, undid it, and brushed between wet bushes to the house-front. Not
a candle-glint anywhere. If the house were indeed Miss Pask’s, she
certainly kept early hours....