That is how real love first comes, analyse it to its depths, that tremendous wave which strikes all human beings at some time of their life, the crest may be sunlit, joyous,—but the heart is from the great ocean where loneliness is supreme. Lifted on the joyous crest, a man sees the object of his desire, the companion of his soul; if he does not seize her, he will sink into the heart of the wave, the gloom of its loneliness, to be carried to the shore at last without ever seeing the true sunlight again.
After dark, when the stars were out and the voices of the children playing in the streets had ceased, Marie went to her room, a room so poorly furnished that one might almost say it was not furnished at all. Just a mattress on the floor, a chair, a box of cedar wood where she kept her clothes and her few possessions, and on the wall a little shrine to the Virgin, a tiny thing, gaudily painted, and with a little trough to hold flowers.
She had been brought up in the Catholic faith, she placed flowers in the little trough of the shrine and prayed to the Virgin, but I doubt if her faith was more than a fetish worship of the image of the Virgin, or if her religion gave her any comfort in bad times.
Ti Finotte had died and gone away into the darkness, the smiling Virgin in the little shrine could not stop that or say one word of comfort. In her heart of hearts, she felt religion to be an entirely one-sided affair wherein Man did everything from good works to worship and the Deity nothing. But then she was only Marie, a being come from very far away. Her people had given the Caribbean Sea its name, had hunted the wild horses before our Saviour was born, were lost to sight behind centuries of sunlight, and silence, and savagery. How could she see clearly the light, with the dawn of the world still in her eyes?
She went to bed and to the dreamless sleep that comes to the hard worker whose work lies in the open air. Next morning she was up before the stars had paled, for her aunt had set her several tasks to do before breakfast time.
Amongst other things, she had to go to the market to buy provisions, and it was there, you will remember, that she had her second meeting with Gaspard, and his gift of the fleur d’amour.
CHAPTER XXII
THE ROAD TO GRANDE ANSE
Next morning very early Marie made her way to the Rue Victor Hugo, received her tray of goods, and started on her journey. It was a long journey to-day, right away to Grande Anse on the eastern side of the island.