CHAPTER LXXVII

TOULVEN, _October_, 1881.

Pale Brittany once more in autumn sunshine! Once more the old Breton lanes, the beech trees and the heather! I thought I had said good-bye to this country for many a long day, and coming back to it I am filled with a strange melancholy. My return has been sudden, unexpected, as the returns and the departures of sailors so often are.

A fine October day, a warm sun, a thin white mist spread like a veil over the countryside. All about is that immense peace which is peculiar to the fine days of autumn; in the air a savour of dampness and of fallen leaves, a pervading sense of the dying year. I am in the well-known woods of Trémeulé, on the height overlooking all the region of Toulven. Below me, the lake, motionless under this floating mist, and, in the distance, wooded horizons, as they must have been in the ancient days of Gaul.

And those who are with me, sitting among the thousand little flowerets of the heather, are my Breton friends, my brother Yves and little Pierre, his son.

It has become in some sort my own country, this Toulven. A few short years ago it was unknown to me, and Yves, for all that even then I called him brother, scarcely counted for me. The aspects of life change, things happen, are transformed, and pass.

The heather is so thick that, in the distance, it looks as if the ground were covered with a reddish carpet. The tardy scabious are still in flower, on the top of their long stalks; and the first of the heavy rains have already littered the earth with dead leaves.

It was true, what Yves had written to me; he had become very steady. He had just been taken on board one of the ships in the Brest roadstead, which seemed to assure for him a stay of two years in his native country. Marie, his wife, was installed near him in the suburb of Recouvrance, waiting for the little house at Toulven, which was growing slowly, with very thick and solid walls, in the manner of olden times. She had welcomed my unexpected return as a blessing from heaven; for my presence in Brest, near them, reassured her greatly.

That Yves should have become so steady, and so suddenly, when so far as one could see there was no decisive circumstance to account for the change in him, was a thing scarcely to be believed! And Marie, in confirming her happiness to me, did so very timidly; she spoke of it as one speaks of unstable, fugitive things, with a fear lest their mere expression in words should break the spell and frighten them away.