“Don’t you worry yourself, ma Bonne Demoiselle. I’m here and I’ll look after you and look after your money. Oh, the grocer and the butcher and the rest had best mind what they’re about!... You let me be: you won’t be overcharged any more.... And then Bouquetot is there and my son Antoine: they’re decent fellows both ... and fell in love with you at once ... because ... because there’s something different about you ... something that makes people love you ... in spite of themselves ... with all their hearts....”
III
THE UNKNOWN
Every day, when her household duties were done, Gilberte walked in her garden. This was her hour of recreation. But a sweeter hour followed, which she allotted to dreaming.
High up, on the left, on a jutting promontory, was a clearing where stood the ruins of a little summer-house. The view from here extended, over undulating plains, to the dark heights of Mortain. On the right, the other side of the valley was a wall of red rocks, clad in broom and fir-trees. It was a landscape of illimitable distances and, at the same time, tender and familiar through the homeliness of this little glen, a landscape which had all the wild and rugged poetry of a Breton moor....
The daylight waned early in those winter months. Gilberte waited until the veil of night smothered its last glimmers. Sometimes, the sun’s reflections would linger on the motionless clouds. Then the darkness seemed to come from every side, to rise from the river, to fall from the overcast sky, to ooze from the earth in thick mists. Then Gilberte would go indoors.
But, one evening, at that murky moment of twilight, she saw, on the opposite slope, a human form issuing from a hollow among the rocks and vanishing behind a tree.
She would hardly have paid attention to it, if, on the next day, when her eyes turned in that direction on returning from her walk, she had not perceived, in the same place, the same form as on the day before: a man’s figure, obviously, but so well hidden that it was impossible for her to distinguish the least detail of his face or dress.
On the day after that, he was not there; but he was there on the following day and almost every day afterwards.
Gilberte soon noticed that he slipped through the fir-trees a little before her arrival and went away soon after she was gone.
Then was he there for her? She did not ask herself this question, but, all unwittingly, she was pleased at the fact that some one was there, dreaming doubtless like herself, some one whom she did not know, who was not seeking to know her and of whom she thought only as an invisible companion, a more or less real ghost, a freak of her imagination. She had not the least curiosity concerning others and would never have supposed that any one could have the least curiosity concerning her. He was there for the same reasons that brought her there, because it is good to see night blend with day and because that twilight hour is full of charm and peace.