It seemed to be a genuine instance of love at first sight, and they were married within three months of what was practically their first meeting; though Ingersoll had seen her as a girl of fourteen several years earlier. This step was not so foolish as it might have been in the case of two young people without means. Ingersoll had an income of three thousand dollars a year, and complete devotion to art in his student days had enabled him to save a small capital, which he spent on an establishment, and particularly on adorning an exceptionally handsome and attractive wife.
It had been far better were they poverty-stricken. Mutual privations and combined effort to improve their lot would have bound them by insoluble ties. As it was the taste for pleasure and excitement crept into Stella Ingersoll's blood. The first tiff between the two was the outcome of some mild protest on Ingersoll's part when his wife wished to increase rather than diminish her personal expenditure after Yvonne's birth. There were tears, and of course the man yielded: only to raise the point again more determinedly when an absurdly expensive dress was ordered for a ball at the opera.
Thenceforth the road to the precipice became ever smoother and steeper; though Ingersoll did not begin to suspect the crash that lay ahead until his wife left him and fled to her relatives in America. Her callous abandonment of the baby girl not yet a year old crushed to the dust the man who loved her. She told him plainly why she had gone. She was "sick to death" of petty economies. Indeed, her letter of farewell was brutally frank.
"I think I have qualities that equip me for a society that you and I together could never enter," she wrote. "Why, then, should I deny myself while I am young, so that I may console vain regrets with copybook maxims when I am old? I see clearly that I would only embitter your life and spoil your career. Be wise, and take time to reflect, and you will come to believe that I am really serving you well by seeking my own liberty. Meanwhile I shall do nothing to bring discredit on your name. I promise that, on my honor!"
Her honor! All his life John Ingersoll had hated cant, either in dogma or phrase, and this ill-judged appeal stung him to the quick. He threw the letter into the fire, left Paris next day, and his wife's strenuous efforts to discover his whereabouts during the subsequent year failed completely.
Then he heard by chance that she had divorced him, and married Walter H. Carmac in her maiden name, and the tragic romance of his life closed with a sigh of relief, because, as he fancied, the curtain had fallen on its last act. He little dreamed that an epilogue would be staged nearly nineteen years later.
He was in such a state of mental distress that at Concarneau he sat a whole hour in a café opposite the station, meaning to return to Pont Aven by the next train. But the man's natural clarity of reasoning came to his aid. He forced himself to think dispassionately. Two vital principles served as rallying points in that time of silent battle,—Yvonne must not be reft with crude violence from the grief-stricken and physically broken woman who claimed a daughter's sympathy, and he himself must avoid meeting this wife risen from the tomb. He had acted right, after all, in seeking refuge with his friend.
Yvonne that same morning found her mother sitting up in bed, sipping a cup of chocolate. The nurse, a woman from the village, hailed the girl's presence gleefully.
"Will you be remaining a few minutes, Mademoiselle she inquired, seeing that invalid and visitor were on terms of intimacy.