"_Que Dieu soit beni!_"

The Catholic and Breton temperament is so finely interwoven that even this sudden overstepping of family restrictions had to her its pious side. She could there and then, in effervescent thankfulness, have knelt to worship all the infinitesimal saintlings of whom her lover had never heard, but who, with her, were active pioneers to mercy. Besides this, love, which, when real, touches the religious string in every breast, had so long played an accompaniment to prayer and worship, that her first action was almost mechanically devotional. Her second, in contrast, was crudely mundane. Valentine, complacency beaming from her triple chins, loomed expansively in the doorway of the tent, so Leonie, slipping the billet in her mouth, sped for protection to the ocean, the only haven where she could be free from company and espionage.

She battled against the waves till she neared the protective raft in deep water where timorous bathers never ventured. Then she hoisted herself up, took the sc.r.a.p of paper from its hiding place, and re-read it, crossing herself devoutly and crying with childish exultation:--

"Oh sea, beloved sea, you have brought him to me at last! Never, never shall he depart but with Leonie!"

As she declaimed, a man's head appeared above the arch of the waves, and on the instant they recognised each other.

He sprang to the raft and deposited himself, radiant and dripping, by her side. They were too far at sea to be minutely observed. The roisterers on the beach could do no more than discern a couple of resting forms, a common sight in the bathing season.

"I arrived a week ago, and have been dodging you ever since," he explained.

"_Mon cheri_," she only said. Love's babyhood learns speech with difficulty.

"I have searched here in the morning when the soldiers parade--I have loafed up and down the St Servan Street till I know all the good people's wardrobes that hang to air--I have sneaked about the forts, and been nearly 'run in' for a spy. I almost despaired of seeing you, but now, at last, we are together."

His tone was dramatic with genuine ecstasy. Since their parting life's fruit for him seemed to have been pared and segmented with a steel knife--at this moment he felt as one who stands free to eat in a luscious raining orchard.

Leonie answered him never a word. She was speechless with stupefied satisfaction. She only laughed, looked down at her dainty sand shoes as she bobbed them in and out of the sparkling water, then, with a caressing glance at his drenched head, laughed again.

The English language sounded beautiful indeed, but her happiness found no sufficiently comprehensive outlet in that scarcely familiar tongue.

"Little one," he said, earnestly, "do you love me enough to be mine, to take me for now and always?"

She nodded only, but her beautiful blue eyes, borrowing intensity from the azure sky, seemed to answer and envelop him with an embrace of adoration.

"You must obey me; you must trust me much, very much," he explained, seriously, seeing the gaiety of her mood.

"To obey--to trust? Of course! Is not all enclosed in love? Have I not said, 'I love you?'"

"Enough to leave everyone, to come----"

"How? Valentine?" she cried, with a sudden look of terror; "she waits----"

"To-day," he admitted, "but to-morrow? You will be here in the same place?" He leapt up and knelt imploringly on the dancing planks.

"Yes," she whispered.

"And from that hour you will give yourself to me?" he insisted.

"To you I gave myself a year ago," she said, with solemnity, her candid Breton eyes beaming like a bluer heaven upon him.

He moved uneasily.

"You will not regret?" he urged, in some anxiety.

"Shall I regret that there is a G.o.d? that when we love He speaks with us?"

He pressed her hands and kissed them. Her faith was vastly simple, yet vastly complete.

That night he wandered about the restricted area of St Malo long after the Curfew--La Noyette, as it is termed--had sounded and the private dwellings were closed. He was distraught with misgivings. Was he a latent blackguard? he asked himself, or had he yet the courage to withdraw, to leave this innocent girl buried in her dungeon, inconsolable and doubting his fidelity?

No, he had not the courage. Fate held out its magnet--he must go whither it should lead. He was not an apostle--merely a man, an atom in the fortuitous system to be swept where destiny should decide. Need he, an artist, be more chivalrous--he put it baldly--more conventional and self-abnegating than other men? Must he, when the delicious moment of love's ripening had arrived, forbear to pluck, to eat? As he had loved this Breton girl a year ago he loved her, despite their severance, to-day. Nay, more, for in this year had he not flung himself headlong into the orgies of his Bohemian life to strangle recollection, and had he not been haunted by memory's unresting ghost, the more exquisite, the more endearing for its intangible, ineffaceable outlines? He recalled some verses of homage to the city he had encountered in an old St Malo record:--

"Quiconque t'a connue aime ton souvenir Et vers toi, tot ou tard, desire revenir."

He had come back to the "Souvenir" and realised how the character of this _Ville d'elite_ so "_douce et pieuse_," so grandly sombre, so exquisitely poetic and n.o.ble, was expressed and summed up in her, his queenly, gracious Leonie. He decided finally that, come what might, she should be won!

The next day he was seated on the raft full half an hour before she appeared. In the lap of the waves he espied a purple-suited nymph, enwound with a sash of Roman red, extending white arms that glistened like newly chiselled marble in the green spray. Her pretty lips laughed as she swam towards him, the sole atom in an immensity of chrysoprase.

That day the usual crowd on the sh.o.r.e was thinned; a market and fair of some kind at St Servan had lured visitors and St Malouians to the other side of the Pont Roulant. The beach was comparatively deserted, and even the boatman who was deputed to row about the bathing course for purposes of rescue, was, with his craft, apparently off duty.

"How well you swim," said her lover, admiringly, as he greeted the young girl and noted enviously the drippings from her disfiguring cap that were privileged to alight upon her dimpled cheeks. He was tempted to put an arm round the pretty panting figure, but resisted.

"It is my one _pa.s.se temps_. I have swam half to Cezambre and back," she exclaimed proudly, indicating, by a glance over her shoulder, an island that reared its rocks some two miles distant.

He flushed slightly.

"It is there that I want you to swim--now, when you have rested."

"Too far," she sighed; "we could never get back."

"We should never come back," he announced with determination.

"Valentine? She will think I drown."

"She would prefer to bury you at La Chaumais?"

Leonie laughed.

"Are you ready?" he said, arresting further objections and crushing a word of endearment that rose to his lips. To be successful he must be matter-of-fact. Everything now depended on promptness and a cool head.

He pulled a knotted string and lifted from the water a cork belt.

"You must run no risk of fatigue," he said, fitting it to her fragile form. "Now, let us start. Valentine will soon be on the _qui vive_."

Without demur she accepted his hand and leapt with him from the far side of the raft.

The sea stretched a sheet of silver under a sky of gauzy opal, shot with flame from the dozing sun; wind and tide were in their favour. Before long they had pa.s.sed from the sight of the sh.o.r.e to the shade of the giant rock, whose railed summit, dedicated to Chateaubriand, seems to commune with and command the elements. Cezambre in the distance was as yet merely an apparent triangle of spikes jutting from mid ocean, but towards it they plied their way valiantly, two moving human dots, on the breast of the vast abyss. Once she laughed uproariously to relieve her happiness, but he checked her.

"We must reserve our forces, my darling, every breath in us. Valentine will give the alarm directly. She will wait and wait, and then there will be a hue and cry. It will be a matter of life and death. Do you understand?"

In the earnestness of his face she read for the first time all that this adventurous swim would mean for them both.

"If they come," she panted, "you will not leave me, you will not give me back to them?"

His jaws clenched hard.