"They are an excellent couple. As between them, the wits are with Lucien, who will doubtless rise in his profession. He has been through temptation, as you shall hear. For Jeanne, she is un coeur simple, as again you will discover; not clever at all—oh, by no means!—yet one of the best of my children. It is really to Jeanne that we owe it all.…I have said so to Lucien, and just at the moment Lucien was trying to say it to me.
"They were betrothed, you understand. Lucien was nineteen, and Jeanne maybe a year younger. From the beginning, it had been an understood thing: to this extent understood, that Lucien, instead of sailing to the fishery (whither go most of the young men of Ile Lezan and the coast hereabouts) was destined from the first to enter the lighthouse service under Government. The letters I have written to Government on his behalf!…I am not one of those who quarrel with the Republic. Still—a priest, and in this out-of-the-way spot—what is he?
"However, Lucien got his appointment. The pay? Enough to marry on, for a free couple. But the families were poor on both sides—long families, too. Folk live long on Ile Lezan—women-folk especially; accidents at the fishery keep down the men. Still, and allowing for that, the average is high. Lucien had even a great-grandmother alive—a most worthy soul—and on Jeanne's side the grandparents survived on both sides. Where there are grandparents they must be maintained.
"No one builds on Ile Lezan. Luden and Jeanne—on either side their families crowded to the very windows. If only the smallest hovel might fall vacant!…For a week or two it seemed that a cottage might drop in their way; but it happened to be what you call picturesque, and a rich man snapped it up. He was a stranger from Paris, and called himself an artist; but in truth he painted little, and that poorly—as even I could see. He was fonder of planning what he would have, and what not, to indulge his mood when it should be in the key for painting. Happening here just when the cottage fell empty, he offered a price for it far beyond anything Lucien could afford, and bought it. For a month or two he played with this new toy, adding a studio and a veranda, and getting over many large crates of furniture from the mainland. Then by and by a restlessness overtook him—that restlessness which is the disease of the rich—and he left us, yet professing that it delighted him always to keep his little pied-a-terre in Ile Lezan. He has never been at pains to visit us since.
"But meanwhile Lucien and Jeanne had no room to marry and set up house. It was a heavy time for them. They had some talk together of crossing over and finding a house on the mainland; but it came to nothing. The parents on both sides would not hear of it, and in truth Jeanne would have found it lonely on the mainland, away from her friends and kin; for Lucien, you see, must in any case spend half his time on the lighthouse on Ile Ouessant. So many weeks on duty, so many weeks ashore—thus it works, and even so the loneliness wears them; though our Bretons, being silent men by nature, endure it better than the rest.
"Lucien and Jeanne must wait—wait for somebody to die. In plain words it came to that. Ah, monsieur! I have heard well-to-do folk talk of our poor as unfeeling. That is an untruth. But suppose it were true. Where would the blame lie in such a story as this? Like will to like, and young blood is hot.…Lucien and Jeanne, however, were always well conducted.…Yes, yes, my story? Six months passed, and then came word that our rich artist desired to sell his little pied-a-terre; but he demanded the price he had given for it, and, moreover, what he called compensation for the buildings he had added. Also he would only sell or let it with the furniture; he wished, in short, to disencumber himself of his purchase, and without loss. This meant that Lucien less than ever could afford to buy; and there are no money-lenders on Ile Lezan. The letter came as he was on the point of departing for another six weeks on Ile Ouessant: and that evening the lovers' feet took them to the nest they had so often dreamed of furnishing. There is no prettier cottage on the island—I will show it to you on our way back. Very disconsolately they looked at it, but there was no cure. Lucien left early next morning.
"That was last autumn, a little before the wreck of your great English steamship the Rougemont Castle. Days after, the tides carried some of the bodies even here, to Ile Lezan; but not many— four or five at the most—and we, cut off from shore around this corner of the coast, were long in hearing the terrible news. Even the lighthouse-keepers on Ile Ouessant knew nothing of it until morning, for she struck in the night, you remember, attempting to run through the Inner Passage and save her time.
"I believe—but on this point will not be certain—that the alarm first came to Lucien, and in the way I shall tell you. At any rate he was walking alone in the early morning, and somewhere along the shore to the south of the lighthouse, when he came on a body lying on the seaweed in a gully of the rocks.
"It was the body of a woman, clad only in a nightdress. As he stooped over her, Lucien saw that she was exceeding beautiful; yet not a girl, but a well-developed woman of thirty or thereabouts, with heavy coils of dark hair, well-rounded shoulders, and (as he described it to me later on) a magnificent throat.
"He had reason enough to remark her throat, for as he turned the body over—it lay on its right side—to place a hand over the heart, if perchance some life lingered, the nightdress, open at the throat, disclosed one, two, three superb necklaces of diamonds. There were rings of diamonds on her fingers, too, and afterwards many fine gems were found sewn within a short vest or camisole of silk she wore under her nightdress. But Lucien's eyes were fastened on the three necklaces.