“You mean Mlle. Favette? She was married just after leaving Grand Isle.”
“No; I mean the one you called Claire—Mamzelle Duvigné—is she well?”
Mother and daughter exclaimed together: “Impossible! You haven’t heard? Why, Tonie,” madame continued, “Mlle. Duvigné died three weeks ago. But that was something sad, I tell you!... Her family heartbroken.... Simply from a cold caught by standing in thin slippers, waiting for her carriage after the opera.... What a warning!”
The two were talking at once. Tonie kept looking from one to the other. He did not know what they were saying, after madame had told him, “Elle est morte.”
As in a dream he finally heard that they said good-by to him, and sent their love to his mother.
He stood still in the middle of the banquette when they had left him, watching them go toward the market. He could not stir. Something had happened to him—he did not know what. He wondered if the news was killing him.
Some women passed by, laughing coarsely. He noticed how they laughed and tossed their heads. A mockingbird was singing in a cage which hung from a window above his head. He had not heard it before.
Just beneath the window was the entrance to a barroom. Tonie turned and plunged through its swinging doors. He asked the bartender for whisky. The man thought he was already drunk, but pushed the bottle toward him nevertheless. Tonie poured a great quantity of the fiery liquor into a glass and swallowed it at a draught. The rest of the day he spent among the fishermen and Barataria oystermen; and that night he slept soundly and peacefully until morning.
He did not know why it was so; he could not understand. But from that day he felt that he began to live again, to be once more a part of the moving world about him. He would ask himself over and over again why it was so, and stay bewildered before this truth that he could not answer or explain, and which he began to accept as a holy mystery.
One day in early spring Tonie sat with his mother upon a piece of drift-wood close to the sea.