And so it was arranged. After two days extraordinary travel, advancing from point to point by any train that happened to run, shunted on sidings for interminable periods, in order to allow the unimpeded progress of military trains, waiting weary hours at night in cold, desolate stations, hungry and broken, but her heart aglow with a new and wonderful happiness, she reached Brantôme.
She threw her arms round the neck of an astonished, but ever urbane elderly gentleman in the vestibule of the Hôtel des Grottes and kissed him.
“He’s getting well,” she cried a little hysterically. “He sent me here to wait for him. I’m so happy and I’m just about dead.”
“But yet there’s that spark of life in you, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “which, according to the saying, distinctly justifies hope. Félise and I will see to it that you live.”
It was winter before Bigourdin was well enough to return. By that time Corinna had settled down to her new life wherein she found the making of foie gras an enticing mystery. Also, in a town where every woman had her man—husband, brother, son or lover—either in hourly peril of death, or dead or wounded, there was infinite scope for help and consolation. And when a woman said: “Hélas! Mon pauvre homme. Il est blessé là-bas,” she could reply with a new, thrilling sympathy and a poignant throb of the heart: “And my man too.” For like all the other women there, she had “son homme.” Her man! Corinna tasted the fierce joy of being elemental.
There was much distress in the little town. The municipality did its best. In many cases the wives valiantly carried on the husband’s business. But in the row of cave dwellings where the quarrymen lived no muscular arms hewed the week’s wages from the rocks. Boucabeille, Martin’s Bacchanalian friend, had purged all his offences in heroic battle, and was lying in an unknown grave. Corinna, learning how Martin had carried the child home on his shoulders, brought her to the hotel and cared for her, and obtained work for the mother in the fabrique.
Never before had Corinna had days so full; never before had she awakened in the morning with love in her heart. Félise, grown gentler and happier since the canonisation of her father, gave her unstinted affection.
And then Bigourdin arrived, nominally on sick-leave, but with private intimation that his active services would be required no longer. This gave a touch of sadness to his otherwise joyous home-coming.
“I have not killed half enough Boches,” said he.