THE COUNTRY OUTING (_end_)

Newcomers drew near almost at once to greet Yvonne de Galais and the two young people found themselves parted. By some wretched accident they were not put together for lunch at the same little table. Yet Meaulnes seemed to have recovered confidence and courage. I was isolated between Delouche and M. de Galais and more than once from this distance I saw my friend wave his hand to me.

It was only towards the end of the evening, after boating on the neighbouring pond, games, bathing, and chatting had started everywhere, that Meaulnes found himself again in the girl’s presence. We were sitting on some garden chairs which we had brought, talking with Delouche, when Mademoiselle de Galais, deliberately leaving a group of young people amongst whom she seemed bored, made her way towards us. I remember that she asked us why we were not boating on The Guelders lake as the others were.

‘We had a few goes this afternoon,’ I replied; ‘but it’s rather dull and we soon tired of it.’

‘Well! why shouldn’t you go on the river?’ she said.

‘The current’s too strong, we might get carried away.’

‘We want a motor-boat,’ said Meaulnes, ‘or that steamboat there used to be.’

‘We no longer have it,’ she said in a rather low voice. ‘We’ve sold it.’

And there was a moment’s awkward silence.

Jasmin seized this opportunity to declare that he was going to join M. de Galais.

‘I shall manage to find him,’ he said.

Strangeness of fate! These two, so completely different, were delighted with each other, and had hardly parted company since the morning. M. de Galais took me aside for a moment, towards evening, to tell me that I had in Delouche a friend full of tact, deference, and fine qualities. He had even perhaps entrusted to him the secret of old Bélisaire’s existence and of the horse’s hiding-place.

I was planning also to withdraw, but I felt the two young people so ill at ease, so worried in each other’s presence, that I thought it prudent to remain.

But all this discretion on Jasmin’s part, all this precaution on mine, served little purpose. These two talked, but invariably, with an obstinacy of which he must have been unaware, Meaulnes always came back to the marvels of the old days. And each time the poor tortured girl had to repeat to him that everything was gone: the old queer and oddly shaped house rased to the ground; the lake drained and filled with earth; and the children in their charming costumes dispersed for ever....

‘Ah!’ Meaulnes would simply say with despair and as if each of these disappearances showed him to be right and the girl or myself wrong....

We were walking side by side.... I vainly tried to create a diversion from the sadness which was coming over all three of us. For again Meaulnes, with one abrupt question, would give way to his haunting idea. He asked information about everything he had seen of old: the little girls, the driver of the old berlin, the ponies of the race.

‘... Are the ponies also sold? So, there are no longer horses on the estate?...’

She replied that there were none. She did not speak of Bélisaire.

Then he conjured up the things in his bedroom; the chandeliers, the tall looking-glass, the old broken lute.... He inquired about all this with unwonted eagerness, as if he wanted to convince himself that nothing survived of his fine adventure, and that the girl would not bring back to him one piece of wreckage which could prove that they had not both lived in a dream--as the diver brings up from the bottom of the sea mere pebbles and seaweeds....

Mademoiselle de Galais and I could not refrain from smiling sadly; then she decided to explain to him:

‘You will never see again the beautiful mansion that M. de Galais and I had arranged for our poor Frantz. We spent our lives doing as he wished us. He was such a strange, charming boy. But everything vanished with him on that evening of the betrothal that never came off. M. de Galais had then already lost his fortune without our knowing. Frantz was in debt and his former friends--getting news of his disappearance--at once brought us their claims. We became poor. Madame de Galais died, and in a few days we lost all our friends. Could Frantz come back--if he is not dead--and find again his friends and his fiancée, and the interrupted wedding take place--then perhaps everything would be as of old! But can the past come to life again?’

‘Who knows?’ said Meaulnes thoughtfully. And he put no more questions.

We were walking, all three of us, without noise on grass that was short and ever so slightly touched with yellow. Augustin had close to him on his right the girl whom he had thought for ever lost. Whenever he asked one of his cruel questions, her charming and troubled face would slowly turn towards him as she answered; and once, while speaking, she gently placed her hand on his arm in a gesture full of trust and surrender. Why was Admiral Meaulnes there like a stranger, like some one who has not found what he was looking for and for whom nothing else has any interest? Three years earlier he might not have been able to bear this happiness without terror, without madness, perhaps. But whence came this emptiness, this remoteness, this powerlessness to be happy which now possessed him?

We were approaching the little wood where M. de Galais had that morning tied up Bélisaire; the sun, now declining, lengthened our shadows upon the grass. On the far end of the lawn we heard the voices of the little girls and others playing games--voices mellowed by distance to a happy buzz; and we remained silent in the marvellous quiet; then we heard some one singing on the other side of the wood, from the direction of The Guelders, the farm by the river. The voice was young and distant, and belonged to some one taking cattle to water: the tune was rhythmic as a dance, but the man sang it with a drawl and dragged it as though it were some old sad ballad:

My shoes are red.... Good-bye, my lover! My shoes are red.... Good-bye for ever!...

Meaulnes had raised his head to listen. It was actually one of the tunes which the belated peasants had sung that last evening of the fête at the nameless manor, when everything had fallen to pieces. Nothing but a memory--the most wretched memory--of those beautiful days which would return no more.

‘Do you hear that?’ said Meaulnes in a subdued voice. ‘Oh! I am going to see who it is.’ And thereupon he dashed into the little wood. Almost at once the voice was silent; one heard for a moment longer the man whistling to his beast still farther away--then nothing more....

I looked at the girl. Pensive and dismayed, she kept her eyes fixed on the copse where Meaulnes had just disappeared. How many times, in later days, was she not to look thus pensively at the gap through which Admiral Meaulnes was vanishing for ever!

She turned towards me.

‘He’s not happy,’ she said sorrowfully.

She added: ‘And perhaps I can’t do anything for him?...’

I hesitated to reply, fearing that Meaulnes, who must have reached the farm in an instant and was now coming back through the wood, might hear what we were saying. I was, however, on the point of encouraging her; of advising her not to mind being rather blunt with the tall boy; that most likely some secret tormented him which he could never confide to her or any one of his own accord--when suddenly a cry came from the other side of the wood; then we heard a thudding, as of a horse furiously pawing the ground, and the noise of wrangling in broken sentences.... I understood at once that an accident had happened to old Bélisaire and I ran towards the place whence the uproar came. Mademoiselle de Galais followed me from afar. At the other end of the lawn our movement must have been noticed, for directly I entered the copse, I heard the shouts of people hurrying to meet us.

Old Bélisaire, tied up too low, had caught one of his forefeet in the halter; he had not moved until M. de Galais and Delouche, in the course of their walk, had come near him; then frightened, upset by the unusual hay given him, he had begun to struggle furiously; the two men had tried to free him, but so clumsily that they had only succeeded in further entangling him, at the risk, too, of dangerous kicks. It was then that Meaulnes, on his way back from The Guelders, had chanced upon the group. Furious at so much bungling, he had pushed the two men aside, almost knocking them into a bush. He had freed Bélisaire cautiously but very deftly. Too late, though; the damage was done; the horse appeared to have strained a tendon or else to have broken something, for he drooped his head dismally and kept one of his legs held up under his belly; he was trembling all over; his saddle, too, was half off his back. Meaulnes was stooping to feel the leg and examine it and said nothing.

When he looked up, nearly every one had gathered around, but he saw no one. He was red with anger.

‘I would like to know,’ he called out, ‘who tied him up like this! And left his saddle on all day! And who dared to saddle so old a horse, scarcely fit for the lightest gig.’

Delouche was about to say something--to take the blame upon himself.

‘Shut up! It’s your fault. I saw you tugging at his halter like a fool to get him loose.’

And bending down again he began rubbing the horse’s leg with the palm of his hand.

M. de Galais, who so far had said nothing, made the mistake of attempting to come out of his reserve. He stammered:

‘Naval officers are accustomed to ... my horse.’

‘Oh! He’s yours, is he?’ said Meaulnes, a little calmer, but very red, turning his head towards the old man.

I thought he was going to change his tone, to apologise. He paused a moment. And then I saw that he took a bitter, despairing pleasure in aggravating the situation, in smashing everything for ever, as he said with insolence:

‘Well, I shouldn’t boast of it, if I were you!’

Some one suggested: ‘Perhaps cold water.... If we bathed it at the ford.’

‘This horse must be taken away at once,’ said Meaulnes, without replying, ‘while he can still walk--and there’s no time to be lost! He should be put in the stable and never taken out again.’

Several young fellows immediately offered themselves. But Mademoiselle de Galais at once thanked them. Her face on fire and ready to burst into tears, she said good-bye to every one and even to Meaulnes, who, utterly abashed, dared not look at her. She took the animal by the reins as one catches hold of somebody’s hand, more to feel close to him than to lead him.... The late summer wind was so mild on the Sand Pit road that it seemed like May, and the leaves in the hedges quivered in the south wind.... We saw her set off thus, her arm partly out of her cloak, and holding in her slim hand the thick leather rein. Her father walked painfully by her side....

Sad end to the evening! Little by little everybody picked up his belongings and the picnic things; chairs were folded, tables taken down; the carriages, loaded with luggage and guests, went away one by one while hats were raised and handkerchiefs waved. We were the last to go with my Uncle Florentin who, like us, was silently brooding over his sad and great disappointment.

Then we drove swiftly off in our well-hung carriage behind our beautiful chestnut. The wheels grated on the sand as we took the corner, and soon Meaulnes and I, who sat at the back, saw the cross-road which old Bélisaire and his owners had taken slowly disappear.

Then my friend, the last person in the world to cry, turned suddenly towards me and his face was twisted by the coming of irresistible tears.

‘Stop, will you?’ he said, placing a hand on Florentin’s shoulder. ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll come back by myself on foot.’

He put a hand on the mud-guard of the carriage and vaulted to the ground at one leap. He turned back, to our consternation, and started running: he ran right back to the lane we had just passed, the lane leading to the Sand Pit. He must have reached the manor by the avenue of firs he had followed in the old days when, like a tramp hiding in the thicket, he had heard the mysterious conversation of the unknown beautiful children.

And this was the evening on which, sobbing, he asked Mademoiselle de Galais to marry him.