An open verdict

by M. E. Braddon

It was foolish, perhaps, he thought afterwards, to be so easily diverted from his path; but then the fact was that he had no path to take—he was fairly at a standstill. He could do no good by perambulating the streets of St. Malo. Dol was a place to explore—the chances against finding Beatrix there were as ninety-nine in a hundred perhaps—but it would be one town checked off the map of Europe, and he might be able to find out something about his mysterious sick nurse. So Cyril mounted to the seat beside the driver, where he had the shelter of an ancient leather hood to protect him from the wind, and where he felt very easy in his mind about the lady in the gray mantle. She could not escape him on the road.

He questioned the driver about his passenger, but the man could tell him nothing except that the lady lived at Dol, and that she came into St. Malo once a week to make her purchases. He could not say how long she had lived there, as he had been only driving the diligence for a month.

They drove through lanes and past fields and orchards which were entirely Devonian in their aspect, halted at a village which was quainter and more picturesque, and, sooth to say, a little dirtier than a Devonshire village, and finally arrived, as the shades of evening were falling, at Dol, which impressed Cyril at first sight as the dullest town he had ever beheld. He knew Sandwich in Kent, he had visited Stamford in Lincolnshire, he had even seen Southend out of the Cockney season, but Dol had a more utterly deserted look than any of these. There were some fine mediæval buildings, there was a grand cathedral with two towers, one of which had been left unfinished in the Middle Ages. There were interesting courts and crannies and corners—but Melancholy had claimed Dol for her own. The country round looked flat and depressing—the outskirts of the town were arid and dusty—the modern houses had that intensely new and unfinished aspect peculiar to French architecture; and all ambitious attempts at improvement looked as if they had been nipped in the bud.

There was one rather pretty-looking house, in a small walled garden, and before the door of this garden the diligence stopped, and the lady in the gray mantle alighted. A French maid-servant opened the gate and ran out to take the traveller’s parcels, and then mistress and maid went in at the door, and the walled garden swallowed them up.

The diligence deposited Cyril at an old inn in a small square not far from the cathedral, a good old house enough, where all things were cleanly and comfortable, and where he found a good-natured landlady, who was quite ready to answer his questions while he waited for the table d’hôte dinner.

He described the white house in the walled garden just outside the town, and asked if she could tell him anything about its inmates.

It was a house which let itself garnished, she told him, the owner being a merchant at Rennes, who only came to Dol occasionally, because it was his birthplace. Of its present inmates Madame knew nothing. She did not even know that it was let. It had been long unoccupied. She excused herself for this ignorance on the ground that she went out so seldom. The house, and then the kitchen occupied all her time, not to speak of her two little angels, who were exacting, like all children.

Of the two little angels, one was then squalling lustily in the adjoining kitchen, while the other hung to its mother’s gown and scowled at the stranger.

‘Have you had many English visitors this season?’ Cyril inquired.

‘Oh yes, Monsieur, a crowd. The English love so much our Brittany—and Dol is the first town in Brittany. It is interesting to the traveller were it only for that reason.’