The girl stood at the end of the little stone jetty, her hair and the
ends of her cheap fur boa and her skirts all fluttering behind her in
the stiff north-east gale. Why anyone should choose to stand on a
jetty on a raw December afternoon with the wind in one's teeth was a
difficult problem for a comfort-loving, elderly man like myself, and I
pondered over it as I descended the slope leading from the village to
the sea. It was nothing, thought I, but youth's animal delight in
physical things. A few steps, however, brought me in view of her face
in half-profile, and I saw that she did not notice wind or spray, but
was staring out to sea with an intolerable wistfulness. A quick turn
in the path made me lose the profile. I crossed the road that ran
along the shore and walked rapidly along the jetty. Arriving within
hailing distance I called her.
"Pauline."
She pivoted round like a weather-cock in a gust and with a sharp cry
leaped forward to meet me. Her face was aflame with great hope and
joy. I have seen to my gladness that expression once before worn by a
woman. But as soon as this one recognised me, the joy vanished, killed
outright.
"Oh, it's you," she said, with a quivering lip.
"I am sorry, my dear," said I, taking her hand. "I can't help it. I
wish from my heart I were somebody else."
She burst into tears. I put my arm around her and drew her to me, and
patted her and said "There, there!" in the blundering masculine way.
Having helped to bring her into the world twenty years before, I could
claim fatherly privileges.
"Oh, Doctor," she sobbed, dabbing her pretty young eyes with a
handkerchief. "Do forgive me. Of course I am glad to see you. It was
the shock. I thought you were a ghost. No one ever comes to Ravetot."
"Never?" I asked mildly.
The tears flowed afresh. I leaned against the parapet of the jetty for
comfort's sake, and looked around me. Ravetot-sur-Mer was not the
place to attract visitors in December. A shingle beach with a few
fishing-boats hauled out of reach of the surf; a miniature casino, like
an impudently large summer-house, shuttered-up, weather-beaten and
desolate; a weather-beaten, desolate, and shuttered-up Hôtel de
l'Univers, and a perky deserted villa or two on the embankment; a cliff
behind them, topped by a little grey church; the road that led up the
gorge losing itself in the turn--and that was all that was visible of
Ravetot-sur-Mer. A projecting cliff bounded the bay at each side, and
in front seethed the grey, angry Channel. It was an Aceldama of a spot
in winter; and only a matter of peculiar urgency had brought me hither.
Pauline and her decrepit rascal of a father were tied to Ravetot by
sheer poverty. He owned a pretty villa half a mile inland, and the
rent he obtained for it during the summer enabled them to live in some
miraculous way the rest of the year. They, the Curé and the
fisher-folk, were the sole winter inhabitants of the place. The
nearest doctor lived at Merville, twenty kilometres away, and there was
not even an educated farmer in the neighbourhood. Yet I could not help
thinking that my little friend's last remark was somewhat disingenuous.
"Are you quite sure, my dear," I said, "that no one ever comes to
Ravetot?"
"Has father told you?" she asked tonelessly.
"No. I guessed it. I have extraordinary powers of divination. And
the Somebody has been making my little girl miserable."
"He has broken my heart," said Pauline.
I pulled the collar of my fur-lined coat above my ears which the
north-east wind was biting. Being elderly and heart-whole I am
sensitive to cold. I proposed that we should walk up and down the
jetty while she told me her troubles, and I hooked her arm in mine.
"Who was he?" I asked. "And what was he doing here?"
"Oh, Doctor! what does it matter?" she answered tearfully. "I never
want to see him again."
"Don't fib," said I. "If the confounded blackguard were here now----"
"But he isn't a blackguard!" she flashed. "If he were I shouldn't be
so miserable. I should forget him. He is good and kind, and noble,
and everything that is right. I couldn't have expected him to act
otherwise--it was awful, horrible--and when you called me by name I
thought it was he----"
"And the contradictious feminine did very much want to see him?" said I.
"I suppose so," she confessed.