“Martinique?”
“Yes.”
Then the Captain went forward, leaving Gaspard alone.
He knew they were close to the island, but he had not reckoned that they were so near as that.
To-morrow, he would see Marie to-morrow. To-morrow, he would be walking the pleasant sunlit streets of St. Pierre, he remembered the shops of the Rue Victor Hugo. O, what would he not buy her! He would take her and say, “All St. Pierre is yours—take what you please.”
Then he cast his thoughts abroad, all through St. Pierre, wandering hither and thither, and touching this person, and that, with a loving hand. Man’m Faly, Pierre-Alphonse, the girls who were Marie’s friends. Finotte, Honorine, Lys, they would all share in his jubilee, and there was something grim in the idea that the pleasantest thing he was bringing with him, the thing that would make him most welcome in the coloured city, was the news of Pierre Sagesse’s death.
He went below and turned in, and fell asleep with his mind full of these pleasant imaginings.
This was the season of the most heavy rains and he had been asleep scarcely an hour when the Anne Martin sailed into a rain squall, and the thunder of rain on the deck reached him in dreamland.
The scenery of his dreams at once took the form of the little Place de la Fontaine, where he had first met Marie. He was walking there with her and the sun was shining brightly, the sky was blue. Then, all at once, he lost her. She had vanished amidst the crowd of dream people who were strolling through the Place.
Then, just as on the day he first met her “clash—ripple—clash” came the carillon of the cathedral bells, but they did not bring him to Marie, clouds darkened the sky and the thunder of rain filled the air, and through it all the bells ringing on joyous, triumphant, golden, like the voice of the love that lives beyond disaster and death—Then he awoke.