Studies in love and in terror

STUDIES IN LOVE AND IN TERROR BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES (Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes)
Short Story Index Reprint Series
First Published 1913 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
O mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, O mort! Appareillons!
CLAIRE DE WISSANT, wife of Jacques de Wissant, Mayor of Falaise, stood in the morning sunlight, graceful with a proud, instinctive grace of poise and gesture, on a wind-blown path close to the edge of the cliff.
At some little distance to her left rose the sloping, mansard roofs of the Pavillon de Wissant, the charming country house to which her husband had brought her, a seventeen year old bride, ten long years ago.
She was now gazing eagerly out to sea, shielding her grey, heavy-lidded eyes with her right hand. From her left hand hung a steel chain, to which was attached a small key.
A hot haze lay heavily over the great sweep of deep blue waters. It blotted out the low grey line on the horizon which, on the majority of each year's days, reminds the citizens of Falaise how near England is to France.
Jacques de Wissant had rejoiced in the entente cordiale , if only because it brought such a stream of tourists to the old seaport town of which he was now Mayor. But his beautiful wife thought of the English as gallant foes rather than as friends. Was she not great-granddaughter to that admiral who at Trafalgar, when both his legs were shattered by chain-shot, bade his men place him in a barrel of bran that he might go on commanding, in the hour of defeat, to the end?
And yet as Claire stood there, her eyes sweeping the sea for an as yet invisible craft, her heart seemed to beat rhythmically to the last verse of a noble English poem which the governess of her twin daughters had made them recite to her that very morning. How did it run? Aloud she murmured:
Yet this inconstancy is such, As you too shall adore—
and then she stopped, her quivering lips refusing to form the two concluding lines.