"Nothing. Well, then, Calyste, send my horses and yours across to Croisic, so that we may drive home by way of Batz. We will breakfast at Croisic, and get home in time for dinner. You must take charge of the boat arrangements. Let us start by half-past eight. You will see some fine sights, Beatrix, and one very strange one; you will see Cambremer, a man who does penance on a rock for having wilfully killed his son. Oh! you are in a primitive land, among a primitive race of people, where men are moved by other sentiments than those of ordinary mortals. Calyste shall tell you the tale; it is a drama of the seashore."She went into her bedroom, for she was stifling. Calyste gave his letter to Beatrix and followed Camille.
"Calyste, you are loved, I think; but you are hiding something from me; you have done some foolish thing.""Loved!" he exclaimed, dropping into a chair.
Camille looked into the next room; Beatrix had disappeared. The fact was odd. Women do not usually leave a room which contains the man they admire, unless they have either the certainty of seeing him again, or something better still. Mademoiselle des Touches said to herself:--"Can he have given her a letter?"
But she thought the innocent Breton incapable of such boldness.
"If you have disobeyed me, all will be lost, through your own fault,"she said to him very gravely. "Go, now, and make your preparations for to-morrow."She made a gesture which Calyste did not venture to resist.
As he walked toward Croisic, to engage the boatmen, fears came into Calyste's mind. Camille's speech foreshadowed something fatal, and he believed in the second sight of her maternal affection. When he returned, four hours later, very tired, and expecting to dine at Les Touches, he found Camille's maid keeping watch over the door, to tell him that neither her mistress nor the marquise could receive him that evening. Calyste, much surprised, wished to question her, but she bade him hastily good-night and closed the door.
Six o'clock was striking on the steeple of Guerande as Calyste entered his own house, where Mariotte gave him his belated dinner; after which, he played /mouche/ in gloomy meditation. These alternations of joy and gloom, happiness and unhappiness, the extinction of hopes succeeding the apparent certainty of being loved, bruised and wounded the young soul which had flown so high on outstretched wings that the fall was dreadful.
"Does anything trouble you, my Calyste?" said his mother.
"Nothing," he replied, looking at her with eyes from which the light of the soul and the fire of love were withdrawn.
It is not hope, but despair, which gives the measure of our ambitions.
The finest poems of hope are sung in secret, but grief appears without a veil.
"Calyste, you are not nice," said Charlotte, after vainly attempting on him those little provincial witcheries which degenerate usually into teasing.
"I am tired," he said, rising, and bidding the company good-night.
"Calyste is much changed," remarked Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.
"We haven't beautiful dresses trimmed with lace; we don't shake our sleeves like this, or twist our bodies like that; we don't know how to give sidelong glances, and turn our eyes," said Charlotte, mimicking the air, and attitude, and glances of the marquise. "/We/ haven't that head voice, nor the interesting little cough, /heu! heu!/ which sounds like the sigh of a spook; /we/ have the misfortune of being healthy and robust, and of loving our friends without coquetry; and when we look at them, we don't pretend to stick a dart into them, or to watch them slyly; /we/ can't bend our heads like a weeping willow, just to look the more interesting when we raise them--this way."Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel could not help laughing at her niece's gesture; but neither the chevalier nor the baron paid any heed to this truly provincial satire against Paris.
"But the Marquise de Rochefide is a very handsome woman," said the old maid.
"My dear," said the baroness to her husband, "I happen to know that she is going over to Croisic to-morrow. Let us walk on the jetty; Ishould like to see her."
While Calyste was racking his brains to imagine what could have closed the doors of Les Touches to him, a scene was passing between Camille and Beatrix which was to have its influence on the events of the morrow.
Calyste's last letter had stirred in Madame de Rochefide's heart emotions hitherto unknown to it. Women are not often the subject of a love so young, guileless, sincere, and unconditional as that of this youth, this child. Beatrix had loved more than she had been loved.
After being all her life a slave, she suddenly felt an inexplicable desire to be a tyrant. But, in the midst of her pleasure, as she read and re-read the letter, she was pierced through and through with a cruel idea.
What were Calyste and Camille doing together ever since Claude Vignon's departure? If, as Calyste said, he did not love Camille, and if Camille knew it, how did they employ their mornings, and why were they alone together? Memory suddenly flashed into her mind, in answer to these questions, certain speeches of Camille; a grinning devil seemed to show her, as in a magic mirror, the portrait of that heroic woman, with certain gestures, certain aspects, which suddenly enlightened her. What! instead of being her equal, was she crushed by Felicite? instead of over-reaching her, was she being over-reached herself? was she only a toy, a pleasure, which Camille was giving to her child, whom she loved with an extraordinary passion that was free from all vulgarity?
