And it was still a dream, and no more than a dream, when Brent fell asleep.
VIII
The cellar of the Café de la Victoire was so snug and warm and Brent so healthily tired after his first long day in Beaucourt that he slept till nine o’clock, twelve sound wholesome hours.
Someone was moving about overhead in the kitchen. A box was overturned, and the clatter woke Brent. He sat up and listened to a sound that was surprising and singular because of its unexpectedness, an unexpectedness that was not without pathos. Brent sat very still, cursing the wire bed because it creaked even when he breathed and creaked most self-assertively. He could hear a woman weeping up above there, weeping her heart out with a passion that broke into little exclamations of anguish and despair: “O my little house!—what a tragedy!—What a ruin! Nothing left, not even a door.”
And Brent understood that Manon Latour had returned. His first sensation was one of puzzled discomfort. He did not know whether to climb the steps and add the embarrassment of an explanation to the tumult of her emotion, or whether he should lie hidden until she had recovered her self-control. Yet it seemed rather a negative piece of poltroonery for him to sit there in the cellar listening to the sound of her weeping. There was a nakedness about her grief that embarrassed Brent. Manon thought herself alone; she had thrown herself upon the bosom of Beaucourt’s solitude, and Brent felt like some Peeping Tom spying upon her nakedness.
In the end he did what the plain man and soldier in him wanted to do. Too much psychology might ruin any love affair; in life it is the emotions that matter. Brent went up the stone steps in his socked feet, walked along the short passage, and stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at Manon Latour.
She was sitting on a box, her hands covering her face as though she were praying, a little figure in black, a figure that was still tremulous with emotion. A bag lay on the floor beside the box. Brent noticed her muddy shoes, her black hat and cloak hung on a nail, and the pretty way her dark hair was wound like a wreath about her head. She had a mass of hair, lustrous as the surface of a freshly broken piece of coal, and its blackness contrasted with the characteristic pallor of her face and throat. Brent’s recollection of a year ago had left him the memory of a brave and very determined little woman with bright, dark eyes, a little woman who had faced him with a sang-froid that had impressed a man who had learnt to respect one thing and one thing only—courage. And now he saw her in tears over this wreck of a house, and her tears touched Brent’s heart. He had a feeling that these were not the tears of a woman who wept easily like an April sky. She was shocked, overwhelmed, discouraged.
“Madame!”
Her hands dropped from her face. She looked at Brent with eyes that accepted him as a Frenchman who had happened to wander in, another homeless soul lost in the ruins of Beaucourt.
“Good day, monsieur. It is a pleasant home-coming, is it not?—Perhaps one expects too much!”