Sometimes she was seized with the thought of a ship
appearing suddenly upon the horizon; the Leopoldine
hastening home. Then she would suddenly make
an irreflected movement to rise, and rush to look out
at the ocean, to see whether it were true.
But she would fall back. Alas! where was this
Leopoldine now? Where could she be?
Out afar, at that awful distance of Iceland, forsaken,
crushed, and lost.
All ended by a never-fading vision appearing to her—an
empty, sea-tossed wreck, slowly and gently rocked
by the silent gray and rose-streaked sea; almost with
soft mockery, in the midst of the vast calm of deadened
waters.
Two o’clock in the morning.
It was at night, especially, that she kept attentive
to approaching footsteps; at the slightest rumour
or unaccustomed noise her temples vibrated; by dint
of being strained to outward things, they had become
fearfully sensitive.
Two o’clock in the morning. On this night
as on others, with her hands clasped and her eyes
wide open in the dark, she listened to the wind, sweeping
in never-ending tumult over the heath.
Suddenly a man’s footsteps hurried along the
path! At this hour who would pass now? She
drew herself up, stirred to the very soul, her heart
ceasing to beat.
Some one stopped before the door, and came up the
small stone steps.
He!—O God!—he! Some one
had knocked—it could be no other than he!
She was up now, barefooted; she, so feeble for the
last few days, had sprung up as nimbly as a kitten,
with her arms outstretched to wind round her darling.
Of course the Leopoldine had arrived at night,
and anchored in Pors-Even Bay, and he had rushed home;
she arranged all this in her mind with the swiftness
of lightning. She tore the flesh off her fingers
in her excitement to draw the bolt, which had stuck.
“Eh?”
She slowly moved backward, as if crushed, her head
falling on her bosom. Her beautiful insane dream
was over. She just could grasp that it was not
her husband, her Yann, and that nothing of him, substantial
or spiritual, had passed through the air; she felt
plunged again into her deep abyss, to the lowest depths
of her terrible despair.
Poor Fantec, for it was he, stammered many excuses,
his wife was very ill, and their child was stifling
in its cot, suddenly attacked with a malignant sore
throat; so he had run over to beg for assistance on
the road to fetch the doctor from Paimpol.
What did all this matter to her? She had gone
mad in her own distress, and could give no thoughts
to the troubles of others. Huddled on a bench,
she remained before him with fixed, glazed eyes, like
a dead woman’s; without listening to him or
even answering at random or looking at him. What
to her was the speech the man was making?
He understood it all; and guessed why the door had
been opened so quickly to him, and feeling pity for
the pain he had unwittingly caused, he stammered out
an excuse.
