Said the doctor, possessing himself of Yvonne’s wrist and watching her as he counted the pulse-beats as intently as she watched the road:
“They are footsteps of one you know, Mademoiselle?�
She turned on him those startlingly blue and brilliant eyes.
“Surely.... They are his!�
The doctor had often met a tall man muffled in a great country cape of frieze walking on the Paimpol road. They had never exchanged words, scarcely even looks, but the brass buttons in the back of Blandon’s old riding-coat were eyes, and he had observed how the walker turned back before reaching that last bend from which the cottage could be plainly seen.
“His evil conscience keeps him restless—or he loves her still, though he bartered her love for a tavern and a scolding wife,� the Doctor thought, noting, without seeming to do so, the changes time had made in the bold, handsome face and giant frame of Captain Yann Tregnier, late of the Maria au Secours, now landlord of the Chinese Cider Cellars at Ploubazou. “But to set foot in Pors Lanec he will not dare. The men and women would rise up and stone him out of the village.�
And Monsieur Blandon bade Yvonne adieu, and turned up his collar and got upon his shambling old white horse to ride back to Paimpol.
Yvonne sat where he had left her. The early winter evening was closing in. The wind had fallen, and the sea had gone down; only it breathed from time to time like a sleeping monster of the diluvian age. Through the black curtains of the sky some pale stars looked forth, and white spectral clouds, in shapes appalling to the sense, pursued a flying moon. The lovers had not returned, the hearth-fire was dying out. Guessing at this, Yvonne bestirred herself to go within and feed it with fresh branches. The fading flame wakened again; she turned toward the door, and as she did so the step for which she had waited twenty years crashed over the gravel, sounded on the stone plateau before the cottage, and the figure of a man—massive, almost a giant in height and breadth, his great proportions increased in bulk by a heavy cape of the country frieze—filled up the doorway.
It had come—the moment for which she had waited through the years. She did not scream and fall upon his neck; he made no movement toward her. Only he pulled his rough cap from his head with a deference that had awe in it, and fear, and his heavy black curls, grizzled now, fell over the brow that was lined and rugged, and the eyes that were no longer bright with youth and hope, but bleared with a dull, sordid life and much strong drink, and the hopeless outlook on a life that was bare of all joy.
“Yann! My love ... Yann! You have come back to me at last!�