A month later Père Bourron sold out a cartful of calves at the market at Bonville. It was late at night when he closed his last bargain over a final glass, climbed up on his big two-wheeled cart, and with a face of dull crimson and a glazed eye, gathered up the reins and started swaying in his seat for home. A boy carrying milk found him at daylight the next morning lying face down in the track of his cart, dead, with a fractured skull. Before another month had passed, the Mère Bourron had sold the farm and gone to live with her sister—a lean woman who took in sewing.
Yvonne was free.
Free to work and to be married, and she did work with silent ferocity from dawn until dark, washing the heavy coarse linen for a farm, and scrubbing the milk-pans bright until often long after midnight—and saved. Jean worked too, but mostly when he pleased, and had his hair cut on fête days, most of which he spent in the café and saw Yvonne during the odd moments when she was free.
Life over the blacksmith's shop, where she had taken a room, went merrily for a while. Six months later—it is such an old story that it is hardly worth the telling—but it was long after dark when she got back from work and she found it lying on the table in her rough clean little room—a scrap of paper beside some tiny worsted things she had been knitting for weeks.
"I am not coming back," she read in an illiterate hand.
She would have screamed, but she could not breathe. She turned again, staring at the paper and gripping the edge of the table with both hands—then the ugly little room that smelt of singed hoofs rocked and swam before her.
When she awoke she lay on the floor. The flame of the candle was sputtering in its socket. After a while she crawled to her knees in the dark; then, somehow, she got to her feet and groped her way to the door, and down the narrow stairs out to the road. She felt the need of a mother and turned toward Pont du Sable, keeping to the path at the side of the wood like a homeless dog, not wishing to be observed. Every little while, she was seized with violent trembling so that she was obliged to stop—her whole body ached as if she had been beaten.
A sharp wind was whistling in from the sea and the night was so black that the road bed was barely visible.
It was some time before she reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, and turned down a forgotten path that ran back of the village by the marsh. A light gleamed ahead—the lantern of a fishing-boat moored far out on the slimy mud. She pushed on toward it, mistaking its position, in her agony, for the hut of Marianne. Before she knew it, she was well out on the treacherous mud, slipping and sinking. She had no longer the strength now to pull her tired feet out. Twice she sank in the slime above her knees. She tried to go back but the mud had become ooze—she was sinking—she screamed—she was gone and she knew it. Then she slipped and fell on her face in a glaze of water from the incoming tide. At this instant some one shouted back, but she did not hear.