"Jean"—her voice was low again—"it is the bon Dieu last night who has made me understand. I do not know what is in the new world that you are going to, only that you will be one of the greatest and perhaps one of the richest men in France. And I understand you better, Jean, I think, than you understand yourself. This fame and power will mean more to you than anything else, and it will grow and grow and grow, Jean. And, oh, Jean, I am afraid you will forget that it is not you at all who does these great things but that it is the bon Dieu who lets you do them, and that you will grow proud, Jean, and lose all the best out of your life because you will even forget that once those clothes hanging there"—she pointed toward the rough fisherman's suit—"were yours."
It was strange to hear Marie-Louise talking so! He did not entirely understand. Something was bewildering him. She was telling him that he must think no more of her, that it was finished. And there was no scene. And she did not reproach him. And there were no tears. And it did not seem as though it were quite real. He had pictured quite another kind of scene, where there would be passion and angry words. And there was nothing of that—only Marie-Louise, like a grown-up Marie-Louise, like a mother almost, speaking so gravely and anxiously to him of things one would not expect Marie-Louise to know anything about.
She turned from him impulsively; and from the peg took down the cap and the rough suit, and from the floor gathered up the heavy boots with the coarse socks tucked into their tops—and, as he watched her in amazement, she thrust them suddenly into his arms.
"Promise me, Jean," she said in the same low way, "that you will keep these with you always, and that sometimes in your great world you will look at them and remember—that they, too, belong to France"—and then suddenly her voice broke, and she had run from the room.
She was gone. Jean's eyes, from the doorway, shifted to the clothes that cluttered up his arms—and for a long time he did not move. Then one hand lifted slowly, and in a dazed sort of way brushed the hair back from his eyes. It was a strange thing, that—to take these things with him to remember—what was it she had said?—to remember that they, too, belonged to France.
"Mon Dieu!" he whispered—and, with a queer lift of his shoulders, turned mechanically to the trunk beside him. "Mon Dieu!" he whispered again—and now there was a twisted little smile of pain upon his lips as understanding came, and almost reverently he laid the things in the bottom of the trunk.
— XI —
THE PENDULUM
How many miles had they come? Jean did not know. It had been far—but far along a road of golden dreams, where time and distance mattered only because they were so quickly passed.