‘Very. But it distresses me to see him so sad and worried at his age. He appears to have some trouble on his mind,’ said Mademoiselle, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin upon her folded hands.
‘He has fallen in love with you—that’s his trouble, Henriette. I assure you, up in Paris, he is the reverse of sad or worried. He is the life of Lander’s.’
Dr. Vermont achieved his purpose: he made her blush from neck to forehead.
‘You forget, François, that you are talking to a middle-aged woman of a very young man,’ she said, in surprise.
‘Not so middle-aged as that,’ laughed Dr. Vermont, unjoyously. ‘And the others,—do they appear to have any trouble on their minds?’
‘It has not struck me. I should say they are rather futile men, who would probably fail in any undertaking in an abject way,’ she said, dismissing them.
But she did not dismiss Anatole from her mind, and when he came to say ‘Good-night’ to her, she greeted him with so much direct and personal sympathy in her smile, in her glance, and in the slight pressure of her fingers, that I declare the poor fellow was only restrained by the presence of Dr. Vermont from bursting into tears then and there, and confessing all to her. Instead, he choked an inclination to sob, and turned despairingly on his heel.
It rained heavily all next day—the fatal New Year’s Eve. With an instinct for dramatic fitness, Anatole spent the first half in a state of suppressed tearfulness, as an appropriate ending of his young life. He was unrecognisable to himself even, for never before had he dropped into the elegiac mood. With the lyric, with the martial, with the bacchanalian, he was familiar enough. He tried to recover his self-esteem by imagining what his state would be on the battle-field. But the satisfaction he might feel in shooting a German, or bayoneting an insolent Englishman, was wanting to take from the horror of contemplated death; and the candid wretchedness of his face provoked sympathetic misery in the glance of all who beheld him. What would he not give for one more sight of the old fishing town in Normandy, for a chat with the genial honest fishermen who had never heard that accursed phrase, Fin de siècle, and little cared whether they were at the beginning or the end of the century. No, if his mother were alive, he was convinced he never would have entered into that wicked jest upon matter so solemn as death. He would have known better, had he even a sister, like that sweet and noble-looking lady, Mademoiselle Lenormant.
It was too late now, and this was his last day. Thank God it rained! It rained so darkly and so dismally that the regrets of life were mitigated by the mournfulness of nature. It was relieved thereby of much of its attraction and of all its enchantment. Had a single ray of sunlight fallen upon the damp earth, it would have shaken him to the depth of his being. This fact he jealously kept to himself, dreading the sneer of those two superior young men, Julien and Gaston, who thought themselves such very fine fellows because they persisted in their indifference to eternity, and cared not a rush for the poor old world they were going from. But Anatole knew better than to envy them. He held that it requires but a bad heart, or none at all, and feeble brains atrophied by the cheap philosophy of the hour, to reach this stage. So, while they smoked and joked downstairs in dismal hilarity, he sat upstairs with the ladies, and drank tea, and made a gallant effort to play with little Gabrielle. How happy he might be if this were to be permanent reality, and Paris, with its unrest, its bitterness, its noise and glitter, an ugly dream!
Dr. Vermont showed himself neither upstairs nor downstairs. Before lunch he walked to Beaufort, and on his return, he slowly made the tour of the island. It had been mentioned that upon one side of the island, as you stepped from the bridge beyond a broken arch and a dangerous reach of rocks down to the inky waters, there was an old tower. Monsieur Lenormant’s house was lower down on the opposite side, facing the cemetery. This tower had been an ancient fort when the entire isle was the fortified retreat of an illustrious and rebel house. It had sustained sieges, and known the roar of musketry, and it still stood nobly upon its martial memories, albeit a ruin of centuries. All was silence and desolation on this side of the island. No one walked its pavements, and the laundresses wheeling their barrows to town from the lower end, instinctively chose the inhabited quarter to pass.