Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered 'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock, Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of the two-year-old English bébé. By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back—father and mother and trailing child—past the hotels on the plage, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French bonne to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the déjeuner waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comédie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.
Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the Collège de France, as good as any at Étretat, a tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among them, more suo, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new acquaintances.
But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all round them—the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.
One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.
Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks.
'Did you hear it, Robert?'
He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her always smote him to the heart.
'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for myself, but——'
For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?—of youth, of hope, of memory?