He pressed her hands and kissed them. Her faith was vastly simple, yet vastly complete.
That night he wandered about the restricted area of St Malo long after the Curfew—La Noyette, as it is termed—had sounded and the private dwellings were closed. He was distraught with misgivings. Was he a latent blackguard? he asked himself, or had he yet the courage to withdraw, to leave this innocent girl buried in her dungeon, inconsolable and doubting his fidelity?
No, he had not the courage. Fate held out its magnet—he must go whither it should lead. He was not an apostle—merely a man, an atom in the fortuitous system to be swept where destiny should decide. Need he, an artist, be more chivalrous—he put it baldly—more conventional and self-abnegating than other men? Must he, when the delicious moment of love's ripening had arrived, forbear to pluck, to eat? As he had loved this Breton girl a year ago he loved her, despite their severance, to-day. Nay, more, for in this year had he not flung himself headlong into the orgies of his Bohemian life to strangle recollection, and had he not been haunted by memory's unresting ghost, the more exquisite, the more endearing for its intangible, ineffaceable outlines? He recalled some verses of homage to the city he had encountered in an old St Malo record:—
"Quiconque t'a connue aime ton souvenir
Et vers toi, tot ou tard, desire revenir."
He had come back to the "Souvenir" and realised how the character of this Ville d'elite so "douce et pieuse," so grandly sombre, so exquisitely poetic and noble, was expressed and summed up in her, his queenly, gracious Leonie. He decided finally that, come what might, she should be won!
The next day he was seated on the raft full half an hour before she appeared. In the lap of the waves he espied a purple-suited nymph, enwound with a sash of Roman red, extending white arms that glistened like newly chiselled marble in the green spray. Her pretty lips laughed as she swam towards him, the sole atom in an immensity of chrysoprase.
That day the usual crowd on the shore was thinned; a market and fair of some kind at St Servan had lured visitors and St Malouians to the other side of the Pont Roulant. The beach was comparatively deserted, and even the boatman who was deputed to row about the bathing course for purposes of rescue, was, with his craft, apparently off duty.
"How well you swim," said her lover, admiringly, as he greeted the young girl and noted enviously the drippings from her disfiguring cap that were privileged to alight upon her dimpled cheeks. He was tempted to put an arm round the pretty panting figure, but resisted.
"It is my one passe temps. I have swam half to Cezambre and back," she exclaimed proudly, indicating, by a glance over her shoulder, an island that reared its rocks some two miles distant.
He flushed slightly.