THIS was still the most marked flavor in his self-consciousness the next morning, and when he rode to the wharf, when he entered the cabin decked with flowers as if for a funeral, even when they steamed out to sea, the bitter aftertaste of folly did not leave him. He was in the mid-Atlantic before his self-communings began to be mitigated by his sense of humor. Truly there had been no need to consider quite so nicely his duties to Miss Thomas. He had thought himself too far involved to retreat gracefully without a proposal. He had felt compelled to precipitate matters. He had feared to wound her deeply otherwise, though conscious, at the time, that his offer was rather magnanimous than passionate. He had had a continual fear of compromising her, too old-fashioned a reverence for woman, too European a sense of honor. He had done her too much honor. Apparently she had not considered him in so serious a light, this American.
That he had been a most unconscionable ass Vane knew very well. This conviction, however, is a sentiment we can easily bear while it is unshared by others, and, fortunately, none of Vane’s friends were so clearly convinced of it. None of his friends knew much about this affair.
After all, he had almost given a sigh of relief when the welcome words of freedom came to her lips. He was well out of it. It had been a very sharp little skirmish, and he was not sorry that he had escaped in good order, heart and honor whole. At this point Vane again appeared to himself as an ass, but he only smiled at the apparition. Fortunate affairs those, which vanish with a laugh! So he dismissed the matter from his mind.
When Vane landed at Havre the whole thing seemed like a dream. There was the familiar chalk cliff and the wide estuary, and the people seated on little, iron, painted chairs, in the cafés, reading Figaro, just as he had left them, with nothing changed but the date in the newspaper. A certain flippancy lurks in the sky of France, or was the flippancy là-bas in America? Vane was not quite sure.
He had had no letter from the doctor since that first one received in New York. Indeed there had been no way for one to have reached him before his arrival in Havre, and he was not sure that the doctor knew in which steamer he was crossing. But Vane was anxious to get to Rennes. Instead of going up one side of the river and down the other by rail, he decided to make a cut across the country, so he took the ferry for Trouville. The place was full of people—people such as you find anywhere, people such as you might see in Newport or New York—and Vane hastened to leave it. He found a diligence driven by an old man in a blue blouse, that took the country people and their eggs and chickens to and from the market at Trouville, and retained a seat on the outside. They left the watering-place at sunset, and, after driving a few miles along the beach—the fashionable drive—by the painted pavilions and villas, they struck inland through the grass uplands still fragrant with the hay.
I do not want to make anything tragic of Vane’s arrival at Rennes. It was hardly that to him. He had taken the midnight mail from Caen after a six hours’ journey in the sweet July evening; and when he arrived in Rennes in the morning his mother was dead and had been buried, and the priests in the great cathedral, even then, were saying masses for her soul. The old physician, like few physicians, but like all old Bretons, was an ardent Catholic, and had sought to secure to his patient one surreptitious chance of salvation before his heretic friend arrived. “Yes, my son,” said he, “at the last she died, tout doucement, it is now three weeks. She never recovered herself, though I had the abbé with her and the Presence by her side. She never knew you or me, thou dost remember, and at the end she died silently, and spoke not at all. Ah! mon pauvre ami, quelle sainte femme!” cried the doctor, forgetting that he had never known Mrs. Vane in her right mind.
The masses, thought Vane, would do no harm, and he stayed two or three weeks with Dr. Kérouec in his old house near Rennes.
The doctor, though growing old, was very busy. He had numberless charitable meetings in the afternoons, and his practice took up the mornings. His evenings were usually passed with Vane and the abbé over tric-trac and boston. The doctor was the head of many benevolent clubs, “Sociétés de Consommation,” and such like. He knew to a unit how many poor people had consumed the society’s soup, for each of the past forty years, in Rennes, and seemed to derive much satisfaction from these figures and their annual increase. He never spoke again to Vane of the young lady with the dot, and it turned out that she had married M. le Vicomte’s son.
Meantime Vane wandered through the rosy lanes, and the country came to him with a sense of rest. Life’s silent woods are so near its highways, after all! And Vane had been a boy in this country, and it had a glamour for him; and, truly, it is a sweet corner in the world. He had gone out of it into all that was great and new, and now he came back to it, like a foot-worn pilgrim, with nothing but his staff and scrip. And as he thought this, he was passing a great army of the peasantry, not all peasantry, for many a lady, too, was walking amid the wooden shoes. Before the long procession, among the crucifixes, was carried the ermine banner of Queen Anne. It was the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. He looked after them curiously, so earnestly they marched, chanting their simple aves and their litanies to St. Anne of Auray. But they did not walk to Gascony, but only to the railway, whence they went by special train.
Vane did not feel deeply his mother’s death. Indeed it hardly seemed that she could have died so lately; it was rather as if she had been dead many years. All the old seemed to have faded away out of his life, and everything new was rather unreal. As for Baby Thomas, she was either forgotten completely or dismissed with a slighting half-memory. The older love was as much in his mind and its ghost was as real a figure as this memory of yesterday. He walked over to Monrepos one afternoon when the doctor had a meeting at his house. The place was rented by an English family, and some stout girls were playing lawn tennis, while a comely youth, lying lazily on the grass, looked on critically over a short pipe. Vane sat on the walk and began to poke pebbles with his stick again. He had succeeded; and the result was emptiness. Why could not this poor sordid success have come sooner,—and his father, and so his mother, might have been alive to-day.