Sir Isumbras at the Ford

by D. K. Broster

His son-in-law sighed too, a sigh of utter weariness and depression. "I wonder what she was to M. de la Vireville," said Mr. Elphinstone, pursuing his train of thought, as he stooped to mend the fire.

René started. He was back suddenly at Quiberon, on the rocks in the sunshine, in his friend's quarters by candlelight. "Bon Dieu!" he murmured to himself. "I have only once—no, twice—heard him speak of a woman," he added aloud. "Surely it cannot have been she!"

CHAPTER XXXIII
The Man she would have Married

(1)

So he was dead—was lying with his comrades in a hasty trench at Auray, or under the bloodstained sand of Quiberon itself. Sometimes—for she had heard that many had been drowned—Raymonde de Guéfontaine had fancied that the sea, out of which he had come to her, had claimed him again, and that his body lay forgotten on some lonely Breton beach, or swayed gently, far down, with the drift of the full Atlantic. It was not so; French soil held him, as she hoped it would hold her some day. Yet, no more than the little boy, should she look on him again.

The October sunshine seemed to hurt her eyes as she went along Oxford Street. These English people too, prosperous and indifferent, who walked the streets of their dull city without a care, with such satisfied faces, such garish-coloured clothes—she hated them! Why had not England done more, lent the full weight of her arm to that doomed enterprise? England had not shed a drop of her blood for it. There were even those who said that she was not sorry to know that so much French blood had flowed, and was glad to have rid herself so cheaply of some of her pensioners. Raymonde de Guéfontaine had too generous a nature herself to lend a ready credence to that rumour, and yet she felt that the country which sheltered her had wounded her too. For someone had told her that, to England, the main significance of the expedition which had meant so much to her and hers was that it had served as a diversion in favour of England's ally, Austria; and seeing how, at the end, it had been hurried forward, she did not wholly disbelieve this.

Mme. de Guéfontaine had come over to London from Guernsey, where her brother Henri was stationed, to visit an old aunt who, unlike most of her compatriots, had succeeded in saving no inconsiderable sum from the wreck of her fortunes, and was now enjoying life and society in an atmosphere perhaps greyer, but certainly less inflammable, than that of Paris. Mme. de Nantillac was fond of her niece, and, being one of those to whom bodily comfort is paramount, was set upon driving Raymonde into giving up the lodging she shared with her brother at St. Peter Port and living with her in comparative affluence in Sloane Street. She had even selected a parti for her, the most eligible of her circle. And for these reasons Mme. de Guéfontaine felt a strong repugnance towards returning immediately to her society. Instead of summoning a hackney coach she would go into this great park, and sit there a little under the trees, alone with the strange guest that had lodged all at once like a bird in her heart—grief.

She should never see him again. Now she realised that all the early summer, when she had been in Guernsey, she had felt that only a few miles of sea sundered them, were he in Brittany or in Jersey, and that perhaps some day he would fulfil his promise, and come to St. Peter Port. And then, on that day, she could try again to convince him that, once that wild moment of fury and pain and vengeance past, she had not even in will betrayed him. For it haunted her sometimes that she had not really persuaded him, though she could point to no look or word of his to prove it.

Then had come Quiberon—yet she had hoped, and hoped . . .

But now she could never plead her cause—now she could never convince him. She could never have again that moonlit vigil at L'Estournel, nor their twilight parting above the little bay. . . . But it was only now that she really knew—only now, in this stinging, choking mist of pain and regret, that two things, the most simple and ordinary and terrible in the world, were made plain to her: that she loved him, and that he was dead.