When Ingersoll carried the body of an insensible and half-drowned woman into Mère Pitou's there was a rare stir.
By chance the lesser tragedy which took place in the river beneath the line of dwarfed oaks had passed unnoticed by the villagers. Greatly wondering, and wholly at a loss to account for his wife's behavior, the artist had followed her into the main road, and kept her under close observation when she failed to cross the bridge and hurried along the narrow street leading to the harbor.
Once clear of the last mill, he could watch her from a greater distance, because the valley widens with the stream, and the hills are neither so high nor so precipitous. On and on she went, past Madame Maréchale's café, past the triangular grass plot where roundabouts and swings and canvas theaters stand in the summer, past the jolly little Hotel Terminus, and along the picturesque Chemin du Hallage; which is not a carriage road, but a pleasant footpath, bordered on the one hand by pretty villas and on the other by the tidal stream, with here and there beneath the stunted trees a rustic seat overlooking the water.
At such an hour, long after midnight, the last pollard oak marks the Ultima Thule of Pont Aven. The nearest house in front is nearly a mile away, and reached only by a narrow track through the gorse.
Some vague terror caused Ingersoll to quicken his pace, and a few seconds later to break into a run. Perhaps his wife heard him, and, fearing interference, made up her mind to delay the great adventure not a moment longer. Uttering a wailing cry, she threw herself into the water. The tide was falling, and as the main stream travels close to the right bank at that point she was swept away as though some giant hand were waiting to clutch her.
Commending his soul to Heaven, Ingersoll raced ahead to a rocky plateau which, although submerged now, drove a broad and fairly level causeway far into the center of the river. He was just in time. He saw a white face, a hand, whirling in the current. Plunging in, he grasped desperately at the place where he judged the body might be. Then began a fight, a life and death struggle against a relentless, overwhelming force. Yet somehow he conquered, and found himself with a limp body in his arms, wading knee deep in a tract of mud and slime.
Though slightly built and frail looking, and, owing to the worry and confinement of his recent life, rather out of condition, once he had regained his breath he made light of carrying his wife to the cottage.
He could not tell why he brought her there, rather than to the hotel. He remembered afterward giving the matter some thought; but he was either deterred by the sight of so many people in the Place,—brought thither by the affrighting news of murder,—or by the notion that a further scandal might be averted if the unhappy woman were tended by those whom he and she could trust. None of Mère Pitou's guests knew that Mrs. Carmac had been rescued from the estuary. They thought she had mistaken some byway, and fallen into the Aven, a quite possible accident to a stranger on a dark night.
So a second time Yvonne stripped her mother's slender form of its water-soaked garments, while Mère Pitou loudly invoked the aid and commiseration of various saints—but did not forget to fill hot-water bottles and wrap them in flannel before applying them to the unconscious woman's benumbed body and feet. Dr. Garnier came, and shook his head, muttering of "shock," and "derangement of the nervous system," and in the midst of all this turmoil and furtive fear of the worst consequences arrived Celeste, searching for her mistress, and almost incoherent with her story of Rupert Fosdyke's fate. He had arrived in the village by the half-past four train that afternoon, and after a long talk with Madame had dined alone. She was told that he went out shortly before midnight, and met Peridot, and was straightway beaten to death.