“I’ll see about the little girl’s grave,” said Oldmeadow suddenly. He did not know what had made him think of it. Perhaps something that had gone on echoing in him after she had spoken of her maternity. “I’ll go to Evian to-morrow. It will spare Joséphine the journey and give me something to do. You’ll tell me the name and give me the directions before you go.”
Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him; but they did not fall. They could need no controlling. The springs of weeping must be nearly drained. “Thank you,” she said, and she looked away, seeming to think intently.
It was now too late for the tramways. They had ceased to crash and rattle by, but a sound of belated singing passed along the quais, melancholy in its induced and extravagant mirth.
The horrible sense of human suffering that had beaten in upon him at the hospital, pressed again upon his heart. He saw himself departing next day to find the abandoned grave and he saw himself standing beside her train and measuring along the shining rails the vast distances that were to bear her away for ever.
“That’s the worst,” he said. “You’re suffering too. I must see you go away and know that you are unhappy. I must think of you as unhappy. With a broken heart.”
Her eyes, after she had thanked him, had been fixed in the intent reverie. She, too, perhaps, had been seeing those tides of misery, the sea of which she had spoken, breaking in tragic waves for ever; so unchanged by all the alleviations that love or mercy could bring; and it was perhaps with despair that she saw herself as one with it. Her eyes as she turned them on him were full of distance and of depth and, with sickening grief, he felt that a woman with a broken heart could do nothing more for herself or for him.
But her thought, whatever the voids of darkness it had visited, drew nearer and nearer to his need as she looked at him. Something of her own strong vigilance was in the look, bringing the seagull to his mind. The seagull caught and battered by the waves, with sodden wings, half dragged down, yet summoning its strength to rise from the submerging sea.
“But you can be happy with a broken heart,” she said. Their hands had fallen apart long since. She stretched out hers now and took his in her small, firm grasp.
“Can you?” he asked.
“You mustn’t think of me like this,” she said, and it was as if she read his thoughts and their imagery. “I went down, I know; like drowning. Sometimes the waves break over you and pull you down, and there seems nothing else in all the world but yourself and what you’ve suffered. But it doesn’t last. Something brings you up again.”