CHAPTER XLVII
THE FOOTSTEP IN THE DUST
St. Pierre had passed away and with St. Pierre, Marie, and with Marie his will to live.
The extraordinary and most tragically poetic part of his drama was the manner in which St. Pierre, the lost city, clung to the vision of the woman he loved.
She wore it as a garment; he saw her surrounded by its beauty; dawn lit her in the Street of the Precipice, morn in the music-haunted Place de la Fontaine; evening in the twilit Jardin des Plantes.
The super-mortal tragedy of the city had raised her image to supernal heights. The passion, the agony that lives alone in the highest poetry had mixed itself in this common man’s tragedy. The city obliterated from the world was part of his grief.
As he lay like a man fascinated by a serpent, motionless, scarcely seeming to breathe, with eyes fixed, and pupils dilated, the roar of the anchor-chain through the hawse pipe shook the vessel. He sat up, leaning on his elbow, exactly as a man sits up who has been awakened suddenly from sleep.
A disc of reflected sunlight, liquid and tremulous as the water from which it was reflected, was cast by the porthole upon the wall of the cabin; it trembled and moved to the motion of the vessel as she rocked at her moorings.
He gazed at it, following it with his eyes as it leapt and quivered; then, slipping from the bunk he stood erect on the floor of the cabin.
He was fully dressed and, in the act of stepping from the bunk, his full strength seemed to have returned to him. He opened the door of the cabin and a moment later he was on deck.