And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger, as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant, he was in the grip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant. Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp the Marseillaise, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, and tudieu! his own were wet!
These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested, not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past—but upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose up, and confronted him with its ruthless dénouement. And if he were not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have played an ignoble trick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette—on one memorable occasion. He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by. Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found elsewhere.
‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing. ‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’
But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon her charms that night.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
WHILE the young men were still sitting over their coffee and rolls in uncheerful converse, Dr. Vermont stole upstairs—not to see Gabrielle, but to talk to Henriette. His thoughts had been with her all night, and he was eager for sight of her by day.
When he entered, a spot of insufferable radiance burnt into the hollow of her thin cheek; but this confession was counteracted by the extreme sadness of her greeting. She, too, had thought during the night, and thought had cruelly struck at her life-long idol. For had he not forgotten Adèle? and was Adèle’s child anything more than his by name? To have found him indifferent to her because of the dead! But to find him indifferent to both! There was the point of pain, and with it the wrench of a wounded faith, which could never more uphold her in her solitude.
She looked at him anxiously, to see if a night spent in the blue room had stamped his cynical, handsome face with a trace of suffering, of revived feeling. The poor lady could not be expected to interpret any such sign except as homage to her dead sister. So she lifted up her heart in honest gratitude for the touch of humanity in his manner as he held Gabrielle to his knee, and stroked her brown hair gently. Such is the guileness and simplicity to be found on a forsaken island, where gossip is not, and society revelations are unknown.
‘And you have lived here the old quiet life, Henriette, with no thought of marriage or change,’ the Doctor said musingly, and noted with pleasure the charming habit of blushing she had retained, like a very young girl.
‘Surely, François, you would have expected to be apprised of my marriage, or of any other change?’