Chapter II

On that first morning,--the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal, and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other in the forest,--he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to Granjolaye. He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion. His mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to nurse. To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would itself be romantic. In a little while he would come to the park gates, and could look up the long, straight avenue to the château,--there where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one of those strange, inarticulate passions that almost every childhood knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.

And then he heard the rhythm of a horse's hoofs; and looking forward, down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady cantering towards him.

In an instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image--which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a _toque_, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a face intensely white--a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.

It was not much, certainly, but it persisted. The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion. It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background. Anyhow, it pursued him. He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Hélène, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now: but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration. The emotion he had looked for did not come. An essential part of him was elsewhere,--following the pale lady in the black riding-habit, trying to get a clearer vision of her face, blaming him for his inattention when she had been palpable before him, wondering who she was.

'If she should prove to be a neighbour, I shan't bore myself so dreadfully down here after all,' he thought. 'I wonder if I shall meet her again as I go home.' She would very likely be returning the way she had gone. But, though he loitered, he did not meet her again. He met nobody. It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.