“As you think best.” So Godin began, clearing his throat as always in preparation for vocal effort. It was an ordinary enough little history, of a high-spirited, light-hearted girl, full of coquetry, vain perhaps, quick-tempered and jealous and exacting, but all that from thoughtlessness, not from the heart, and with the good qualities of her defects. For Godin made me see, with his simple yet keen analysis of his cousin, that brighter side also, which each one of us has. He made me see a girl who was honest and warm-hearted and large-minded enough to acknowledge herself in the wrong and to do right with a will when she saw it—a woman strong and deep enough to keep the current of love alive like a flowing river on whose surface dead branches and bad things indeed collect and cover the bright rippling for a moment, yet whose rushing stream can sweep such débris easily away. He told me from how little the trouble had begun; how Alixe had imagined slights that Zoëtique had never meant; how the man had tried to be patient at first, and then resented what he could not understand—cavalier treatment which he knew to be undeserved; how each had said things hard to forget; how another man and another girl had come into the breach and made it wider, and how at last the two, who really loved each other still, were so warped from the way of happiness that each was wretched and unnatural with the other, and that all comfort in each other’s presence was gone.
I remembered the proud lift of Zoëtique’s head and his responsive quick smile, and the delicate, close searching of his blue, alert eyes, as Godin told me that he was vif—I understood how the big, strong fellow, with a soul sensitive as a child’s, a heart modest and secretly distrustful of its own power to hold affection—how he might have felt at the end that he had given all that was in him to a woman who did not care, who held him lightly, who played with him as he had seen her play with other men. So it did not surprise me when Godin went on to narrate how, when a letter had come again from Mr. Esmond, Zoëtique had suddenly cut loose from everything and had gone off, with a few curt words to Alixe for all good-by, to find a new way of life in New York.
There had been news from him once or twice, telling of his immediate success, of the astonishing gayeties of a great city, of his own happiness and absorption in them, and how he had already almost forgotten the narrow interests of the Canadian village. It was the letter that a sore and angry man would write, I reflected—hitting blindly as hard as he could, harder than he knew, at the hand that had hurt him.
“Do you believe he is as happy as all that?” I asked, thinking aloud.
Godin shrugged his talkative shoulders.
“’Sais pas,” he said. “My cousin Alixe, she is not happy. One does not know it—the world—but I know, for she has told me. She will never marry—she says it, and she is not a girl to change her mind. It is easy for her to flirt with this man and that—oh, yes! for she is a girl who draws the garçons. But for love—it is another matter. She will not love any but Zoëtique. It is malheur, for she is a good ménagère—a good worker—and she should marry. But it is that she will not do. It was to me she said that she was proud to have loved Zoëtique and proud that he should once have loved her and that she would rather have that pride than marry another. It is not reasonable—but it is Alixe. She goes about her affairs, oh, but certainly. One does not know that she still loves him—but I know it. She will not marry—it is certain. But as to Zoëtique—’sais pas. He gains b’en d’argent. He sees life. He amuses himself well. It is much. When one is light-hearted it is much. Yet when the heart is heavy all that makes nothing. It is a garçon—a fellow—of much heart always. Always he was faithful to his friends, Zoëtique. It seems drôle to me that he can so soon have lost the souvenir of his place and the people to whom he was accustomed. It is drôle that. Yet one cannot tell.” He shrugged his shoulders again as if to slip the whole question off them with the movement. “’Sais pas.”
In late November the days in the Morgans’ camp had become a page of past life, a page illuminated with blue and gold, hazy with romance, bright with adventure, marginally illustrated with the mighty shade of the bull moose I had shot, with the pink and silver vanishing glory of my five-pound trout, with flying pictures of black duck and partridges which had fallen to my gun; a page to be turned to and dreamed over, again and again, yet a page of the past for all that.
On an evening, then, of November, I went out to dinner and to the theatre afterward. It was to a vaudeville which was attracting attention that we were taken. I do not care for vaudeville, and I merely suffered the numbers to pass as civilly as I might, talking between them, during them if I could, to one or two people of the party who were more interesting. The big placard in the glare of the footlights was shifted, read No. 5. I turned my chair sidewise in the back of the box and leaned forward to the woman in front of me.
“Don’t watch this number—talk to me,” I suggested. “It’s an educated pig who does sums.”