“Run over by a wagon, three summers ago, on the Boulevard,” echoed John Treverton. “Yes, I recollect.”
“What, you knew him?”
“No, but I was in Paris at the time of the accident.”
John Treverton recalled that scene at the Morgue and his wife’s ghastly face when she entreated him to take her away. Yes, that one page which had stood boldly out from the book of memory, with a lurid light upon it, was indeed a page of momentous meaning.
“Tell me all about Jean Kergariou and his wife,” he said to the curé. “It is a matter of vital importance for me to know. You are doing me a service which will make me grateful to you for the rest of my life.”
“Not quite so long, I hope,” retorted the priest, with a sly smile. “A man would be but short-lived if his life were to be measured by the endurance of his gratitude. That is a delightful virtue, but not a lasting one.”
“Try me,” exclaimed John Treverton. “Give me legal proof that Marie Pomellec and the dancer called Chicot were one, and that the man killed on the Boulevard three summers ago was Marie Pomellec’s husband, and you may put me to the hardest proof you choose, but you shall never find me ungrateful.”
“There are noble exceptions, doubtless,” said the priest, shrugging his shoulders, “just as there is now and then a baby born with two heads. As for the story of Marie Pomellec and her marriage, it is simple enough, and common enough, and the proof of it is to be found in the registers at the Mairie, while the fact is known to all the inhabitants of the quay, where Jean’s wife lived. That the man killed in Paris was Jean Kergariou is also certain; he was recognised by a fellow-sailor while he was lying in the Morgue, and the account appeared in several of the Paris newspapers under the heading of Faits divers. The only point open to question might be the identity of the dancer, Mademoiselle Chicot, with Kergariou’s wife, but even that was pretty well known to several people in Auray, who saw the woman dance in Paris, and brought back the news of her success—to say nothing of her photographs, which are unmistakable.”
“How did Marie Kergariou come to leave Auray?”
“Who knows? Not I. What man can explain a woman’s caprice? She lived steadily enough for the first year after her marriage. Kergariou was away the greater part of the time, on board a whaler in Greenland. When he came home he and his pretty wife seemed monstrously fond of each other. But in the second year things were not so pleasant. Kergariou complained to me of his wife’s temper. Marie avoided the confessional, and grew lax in her attendance at the services of the church. The neighbours told me there were quarrels—neighbours will talk of each other, you see, sir, and a priest must not always shut his ears, for the more he knows of his parishioners the better he can help them. I had some serious talk with Marie but found her sadly impenetrable. She complained of her hard life. She had to work as hard as the ugliest woman in Auray. I reminded her that the blessed Virgin, who was portrayed in all our churches as the highest type of human loveliness, had led a humble and toilsome life on earth, before she ascended to be the queen of heaven. Was beauty to give exception from toil and hardship? If she had been feeble and deformed, I told her, she might plead her infirmity as an excuse for idleness; but God had given her health and strength, and she ought to be proud to think that her labour could help to keep a decent home for her husband, whose career was one of continual peril. I might as well have talked to a stone. Marie told me she was very sorry she had married a sailor. If she had waited a little she had no doubt she might have had a rich young farmer for her husband—a man who could have stayed at home and kept her company, and given her fine clothes to wear. When that year was half gone I heard that there had been a desperate quarrel between Kergariou and his wife the night before he left home for his Greenland voyage; and before he had been gone a week Marie disappeared. At first there was an idea that she had made away with herself; and some of the good-natured fisher folk, who had known her from childhood, set to work to drag the river. But when the neighbours came to examine her cottage they found that she had taken all her clothes, and the few trinkets that Jean had given her in his courting days, and soon after that a wagoner told how he had met her on the road to Rennes; and then everyone knew that Kergariou’s wife had run away because she was tired of her toilsome, honest life at Auray. She had let drop many a hint, it seemed, when she was washing linen among her companions down by the river; and it was pretty clear to them all that she had gone to Paris to make her fortune, and that if she could not make it in a good way she would make it in a bad one. She was only nineteen years of age, but as old in perversity as if she had been fifty.”
“When did her husband come back?”
“Not till late in the following year. He had been through all kinds of misfortune in the North Seas, and came back looking like the ghost of the fine handsome young fellow I had married two years before. When he found out what had happened he wanted to set out for Paris in search of his wife; but he fell ill of fever and ague,
