And so, with much unconscious sentimentality, and the two old market people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, made his forehead fall and the world go up and down and darken.
It was the old woman who shook him from that repose; she only touched him, but her touch was like a lost sense restored. He thrilled and sat stock still, with her withered blue hand on his arm, and heard the pinched lips say, unclosing with a sort of quiver:
"Baby!"
He looked again, and seemed to himself to grow quite old as he looked, and he said,
"Enfant perdu!"
The turban kept its place, the peaked chin kept as peaked; there seemed even more silver in the smooth hair, and the old serge gown drooped as brownly; but the sweet old face grew soft as a widow's looking at the only portrait she guards, and a tear, like a drop of water exhumed, ran to the tip of her nostril.
"Suzette!" he said, "my early sin; do you come back as well with the turning of my hairs? Has the first passion a shadow long as forever? Why have we met?"
"Not of my seeking was this meeting, Ralph. Speak softly, for my husband sleeps, and he is old like thee and me. If my face is an accusation, let my lips be forgiveness. The love of you made my life dutiful; the loss of you saddened my days, but it was the sadness of religion! I sinned no more, and sought my father's fields, and delayed, with my hand purified by his blessing, the residue of his sands of life. I made my years good to my neighbors, the sick, the bereaved. I met the temptations of the young with a truer story than pleasure tells, and when I married it was with the prelude of my lost years related and forgiven. With children's faces the earnestness and beauty of life returned; for this, for more, for all, may your reward be bountiful!"
There is no curse like the dream of old age. Ralph Flare felt, with the sudden whitening of each separate hair, the sudden remembrance of each separate folly; and the moments of grief he had wrung from the little girl of the Quartier Latin revived like one's mean acts seen through others' eyes.
"Pardon you, child, Suzette?" he said; "to me you were more than I hoped, more than I wished. I asked your face only, and you gave me your heart. For the unfaithfulness, for the wrath, for the unmanliness, for the tyranny with which I treated you, my soul upbraids me."