When I entered my garden I saw Môme sprawling on the stone doorstep. He
eyed me sideways and flopped his tail.
"Are you not mortified, you idiot dog?" I said, looking about the upper
windows for Lys.
Môme rolled over on his back and raised one deprecating forepaw, as
though to ward off calamity.
"Don't act as though I was in the habit of beating you to death," I
said, disgusted. I had never in my life raised whip to the brute. "But
you are a fool dog," I continued. "No, you needn't come to be babied and
wept over; Lys can do that, if she insists, but I am ashamed of you, and
you can go to the devil."
Môme slunk off into the house, and I followed, mounting directly to my
wife's boudoir. It was empty.
"Where has she gone?" I said, looking hard at Môme, who had followed me.
"Oh! I see you don't know. Don't pretend you do. Come off that lounge!
Do you think Lys wants tan-colored hairs all over her lounge?"
I rang the bell for Catherine and Fine, but they didn't know where
"madame" had gone; so I went into my room, bathed, exchanged my somewhat
grimy shooting clothes for a suit of warm, soft knickerbockers, and,
after lingering some extra moments over my toilet--for I was particular,
now that I had married Lys--I went down to the garden and took a chair
out under the fig-trees.
"Where can she be?" I wondered, Môme came sneaking out to be comforted,
and I forgave him for Lys's sake, whereupon he frisked.
"You bounding cur," said I, "now what on earth started you off across
the moor? If you do it again I'll push you along with a charge of dust
shot."
As yet I had scarcely dared think about the ghastly hallucination of
which I had been a victim, but now I faced it squarely, flushing a
little with mortification at the thought of my hasty retreat from the
gravel pit.
"To think," I said aloud, "that those old woman's tales of Max Fortin
and Le Bihan should have actually made me see what didn't exist at all!
I lost my nerve like a schoolboy in a dark bedroom." For I knew now that
I had mistaken a round stone for a skull each time, and had pushed a
couple of big pebbles into the pit instead of the skull itself.
"By jingo!" said I, "I'm nervous; my liver must be in a devil of a
condition if I see such things when I'm awake! Lys will know what to
give me."
I felt mortified and irritated and sulky, and thought disgustedly of Le
Bihan and Max Fortin.
But after a while I ceased speculating, dismissed the mayor, the
chemist, and the skull from my mind, and smoked pensively, watching the
sun low dipping in the western ocean. As the twilight fell for a moment
over ocean and moorland, a wistful, restless happiness filled my heart,
the happiness that all men know--all men who have loved.
Slowly the purple mist crept out over the sea; the cliffs darkened; the
forest was shrouded.
Suddenly the sky above burned with the afterglow, and the world was
alight again.
Cloud after cloud caught the rose dye; the cliffs were tinted with it;
moor and pasture, heather and forest burned and pulsated with the
gentle flush. I saw the gulls turning and tossing above the sand bar,
their snowy wings tipped with pink; I saw the sea swallows sheering the
surface of the still river, stained to its placid depths with warm
reflections of the clouds. The twitter of drowsy hedge birds broke out
in the stillness; a salmon rolled its shining side above tidewater.
The interminable monotone of the ocean intensified the silence. I sat
motionless, holding my breath as one who listens to the first low rumor
of an organ. All at once the pure whistle of a nightingale cut the
silence, and the first moonbeam silvered the wastes of mist-hung waters.