THIS was still the most marked flavor in his self-consciousness the
next morning, and when he rode to the wharf, when he entered the cabin
decked with flowers as if for a funeral, even when they steamed out
to sea, the bitter aftertaste of folly did not leave him. He was in
the mid-Atlantic before his self-communings began to be mitigated
by his sense of humor. Truly there had been no need to consider
quite so nicely his duties to Miss Thomas. He had thought himself
too far involved to retreat gracefully without a proposal. He had
felt compelled to precipitate matters. He had feared to wound her
deeply otherwise, though conscious, at the time, that his offer was
rather magnanimous than passionate. He had had a continual fear of
compromising her, too old-fashioned a reverence for woman, too European
a sense of honor. He had done her too much honor. Apparently she had
not considered him in so serious a light, this American.
That he had been a most unconscionable ass Vane knew very well. This
conviction, however, is a sentiment we can easily bear while it is
unshared by others, and, fortunately, none of Vane's friends were so
clearly convinced of it. None of his friends knew much about this
affair.
After all, he had almost given a sigh of relief when the welcome words
of freedom came to her lips. He was well out of it. It had been a very
sharp little skirmish, and he was not sorry that he had escaped in
good order, heart and honor whole. At this point Vane again appeared
to himself as an ass, but he only smiled at the apparition. Fortunate
affairs those, which vanish with a laugh! So he dismissed the matter
from his mind.
When Vane landed at Havre the whole thing seemed like a dream. There
was the familiar chalk cliff and the wide estuary, and the people
seated on little, iron, painted chairs, in the cafés, reading _Figaro_,
just as he had left them, with nothing changed but the date in the
newspaper. A certain flippancy lurks in the sky of France, or was the
flippancy _là-bas_ in America? Vane was not quite sure.
He had had no letter from the doctor since that first one received
in New York. Indeed there had been no way for one to have reached
him before his arrival in Havre, and he was not sure that the doctor
knew in which steamer he was crossing. But Vane was anxious to get to
Rennes. Instead of going up one side of the river and down the other
by rail, he decided to make a cut across the country, so he took the
ferry for Trouville. The place was full of people--people such as you
find anywhere, people such as you might see in Newport or New York--and
Vane hastened to leave it. He found a diligence driven by an old man
in a blue blouse, that took the country people and their eggs and
chickens to and from the market at Trouville, and retained a seat on
the outside. They left the watering-place at sunset, and, after driving
a few miles along the beach--the fashionable drive--by the painted
pavilions and villas, they struck inland through the grass uplands
still fragrant with the hay.
I do not want to make anything tragic of Vane's arrival at Rennes. It
was hardly that to him. He had taken the midnight mail from Caen after
a six hours' journey in the sweet July evening; and when he arrived in
Rennes in the morning his mother was dead and had been buried, and the
priests in the great cathedral, even then, were saying masses for her
soul. The old physician, like few physicians, but like all old Bretons,
was an ardent Catholic, and had sought to secure to his patient one
surreptitious chance of salvation before his heretic friend arrived.
"Yes, my son," said he, "at the last she died, _tout doucement_, it is
now three weeks. She never recovered herself, though I had the abbé
with her and the Presence by her side. She never knew you or me, thou
dost remember, and at the end she died silently, and spoke not at all.
Ah! mon pauvre ami, quelle sainte femme!" cried the doctor, forgetting
that he had never known Mrs. Vane in her right mind.
The masses, thought Vane, would do no harm, and he stayed two or three
weeks with Dr. Kérouec in his old house near Rennes.
The doctor, though growing old, was very busy. He had numberless
charitable meetings in the afternoons, and his practice took up the
mornings. His evenings were usually passed with Vane and the abbé over
tric-trac and boston. The doctor was the head of many benevolent clubs,
"Sociétés de Consommation," and such like. He knew to a unit how many
poor people had consumed the society's soup, for each of the past forty
years, in Rennes, and seemed to derive much satisfaction from these
figures and their annual increase. He never spoke again to Vane of the
young lady with the dot, and it turned out that she had married M. le
Vicomte's son.
Meantime Vane wandered through the rosy lanes, and the country came to
him with a sense of rest. Life's silent woods are so near its highways,
after all! And Vane had been a boy in this country, and it had a
glamour for him; and, truly, it is a sweet corner in the world. He had
gone out of it into all that was great and new, and now he came back to
it, like a foot-worn pilgrim, with nothing but his staff and scrip. And
as he thought this, he was passing a great army of the peasantry, not
all peasantry, for many a lady, too, was walking amid the wooden shoes.
Before the long procession, among the crucifixes, was carried the
ermine banner of Queen Anne. It was the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes.
He looked after them curiously, so earnestly they marched, chanting
their simple aves and their litanies to St. Anne of Auray. But they
did not walk to Gascony, but only to the railway, whence they went by
special train.
Vane did not feel deeply his mother's death. Indeed it hardly seemed
that she could have died so lately; it was rather as if she had
been dead many years. All the old seemed to have faded away out of
his life, and everything new was rather unreal. As for Baby Thomas,
she was either forgotten completely or dismissed with a slighting
half-memory. The older love was as much in his mind and its ghost
was as real a figure as this memory of yesterday. He walked over to
Monrepos one afternoon when the doctor had a meeting at his house.
The place was rented by an English family, and some stout girls were
playing lawn tennis, while a comely youth, lying lazily on the grass,
looked on critically over a short pipe. Vane sat on the walk and
began to poke pebbles with his stick again. He had succeeded; and the
result was emptiness. Why could not this poor sordid success have come
sooner,--and his father, and so his mother, might have been alive
to-day.