Milly left the Gilberts at Morlaix. They were bound for Paris, and judging from Roy Gilbert's remarks they would shortly be on their way back to America and "some decent living." Four months of Europe and strange beds was all he could endure at a stretch. Milly laughed at his complaints. The way the rich spent their money had always seemed to her a little stupid. If she and Jack had the Gilberts' money! She mused of all the exciting freedom they could get out of it, while the little one-horse trap she had hired at the station rattled her over the hard road towards Klerac.
She had enjoyed her trip greatly, yet after the five days' absence she was eager to get back and see her child. She even looked forward to the noisy Hotel du Passage, with its cluttered table of talkative artists and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts, going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their multitudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps that was what clever folk meant by being bourgeois. If so, she hoped that she should never be bourgeois to the extent the Gilberts were.
Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.
X
THE PAINTED FACE
There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so the patronne informed her, had taken the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.
Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference, more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well, "très, très bien, Madame." Bébé, it seemed, had slept and eaten as a celestial bébé should. They were looking for Madame yesterday, but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before the dépêche arrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame's manoir.
After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their little squares of canvases. To Milly this ceaseless effort to comment on nature had something of the ridiculous,—perhaps supererogatory would be a better word. It was so much pleasanter to look at the landscape, and easier! Offshore the dun-colored sails of the fishing fleet dipped and fluttered where the sturdy men of Douarnenez were engaged in their task of getting the herring from the sea. That seemed to Milly more real and important in a world of fact. Such a view betrayed the bourgeois in her, she suspected, but according to the Hawaiian all women were bourgeois at heart.
After a time her feet turned into one of the lanes, and she followed unconsciously the well-known path until the gray wall of the ruined manoir came in sight. She paused for a moment—she had not meant to go there—then impulsively went forward, crossed the empty courtyard, and finding the garden door ajar pushed it open. The drowsy midsummer silence seemed to possess both house and garden. The place was deserted. In the corner stood the painter's large canvas on the easel, with the brushes and palette on the bench by its side, as if just abandoned, and one of Madame Saratoff's large hats of coarse straw.