For here, where Marie used to pause of a morning to drink in the view before her, still lay the view as of old. The volcanic dust that had lain grey on tree and shrub, had been washed away by rains, and the green waving canes, the palms, and wild pines, the tamarinds, and ceibas, the mornes, mountains, and valleys lay stretched before him; who saw nothing of it all, walking like a somnambulist in the dream of thirst.
He had passed Morne Rouge where there was no sign of life, and the Morne d’Avril was showing green, but unseen, before him when the voice of water, liquid, and laughing, broke the silence. It was a way-side fountain. Crystal water spouting from a moss-grown lion-head.
* * * * *
It was like drinking life; the mountains in the distance became mountains again; the wind, the wind; and the sunlight, the sunlight; the world of shadows and semi-delirium through which he had been walking, faded away. Like a good enchantress, the water had washed away the stains of his journey and the thirst from his soul. In that moment, just like one convalescing from a severe illness, he felt newborn. He was seated upon a bank, and above him in the trade wind waved the huge fronds of ferns, and before him lay a field of canes overripe, that had been spared the cane-cutters’ knives.
Half drowsy, still exhausted, but wrapped in the new feeling of well-being, like a man who is recovering from an anaesthetic, he noted his surroundings; and, as his eyes travelled from point to point, they suddenly came to rest on a spot just before him.
On the dust of the road, sheltered by the bank and the ferns from the wind, lay the imprint of a naked foot. A woman’s little foot had pressed the dust of the road but a short time before; the print was warm to the sight and living, one could almost see the fleeting figure swiftly moving as the breeze, and graceful as the bending palm. The print of the heel was far less marked than that of the fore part.
The volcanic dust, though gone from the foliage, still lay upon the road, and on this dust of ruin lay the woman’s foot mark, vivid, triumphant over death. Gaspard gazed at it. He glanced at the fountain beside him singing and laughing beneath the shadow of the ferns, then he remembered. It was here that he had paused that day with Marie; it was here that she had given him the ratifia, it was here—it was here.
He rose to his feet, gazed again at the mark in the road and followed its printing. Farther on he lost it, for the wind had blown the dust across it; further on he found it, very faint, but still discernible.
Then, where a little side path broke off from the road, he found it clearly again.
She had taken the path.