The sun was streaming in across my shoulder. Someone had pulled back the curtains. I was stiff and stupid from my cramped position. Despite the morning, the electric-lights were still burning in the room; I blinked down at myself and was astonished to find that I was in evening-dress. As I eased myself up, something dropped to the floor—the gold shoes of Fiesole.
From behind two warm arms fastened themselves about my neck, making me prisoner.
“You’re up early, Dante C. You’re a great, stupid juggins to sit up all night and spoil your temper, just when I want you to be more than ordinarily pleasant.”
“My temper’s not spoilt. Don’t worry.”
“I take your word for it. I’ve got a secret to tell you. I’m going on the spree to-day—going to be immensely happy. I want you to help. If you’ve any of your tiresome scruples left over, you’d best chuck ’em; or I’ll find someone else.”
“Bit early, isn’t it, to tackle a chap? I’m too stupid to know what you mean. But I’m game. How long’s this spree to last?”
“Till it ends.”
“Then it’ll last forever, so long as it’s just you and me.”
She dug the point of her chin into my shoulder. Glancing sideways, I caught the impish sparkle of her eyes and the glow of her cheeks, flushed with health and excitement.
“Perhaps you’d like to kiss me,” she whispered, bringing her demure red lips on a level with my mouth.
“And now, perhaps you’d like to kiss me,” I suggested.
When I attempted to rise, she restrained me. “Not till I’ve made my bargain and you’ve agreed to my terms. I haven’t made up my mind about you, so you needn’t start talking marriage. Don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Dannie. So you’re to come with me wherever I choose till I’m tired—and you’re to ask no questions. Understand?”
“You never will be tired. I’m coming with you always.”
“And you’ll ask no questions?”
“No more than I can help.”
She released me. I stood up and surveyed my crumpled shirt-front; I was so obviously a reveler who had outstayed discretion. She went off into peals of laughter, laughing all over, showing her small white teeth, and clapping her hands. “What have I done to you? You’re a bottle of champagne; I’ve pulled the cork out. I’ll never get you all back.”
I took her hands in mine, folding them together, and drew her to me. “You’ll never get any of me back. You’ve made me love you. That’s what you’ve done, you adorable witch-woman.”
“Oh, la, la! Don’t talk like that.”
“Can’t help it. Don’t want to help it. You’ve made me mad.”
“Poor old Dannie! Horrid of me, wasn’t it?”
A tap at the door; the maid entered, bringing in rolls and coffee. I started away from Fiesole, but she held me. “You can’t shock Marie; she’s hardened; she’s heard all about you, and some pretty bad things she’s heard.”
Over her coffee she grew thoughtful.
“What’s the matter?”
“You are.”
“Already?”
“How can I walk through Paris with a man in evening dress at ten in the morning?”
“How d’you want me dressed?”
“In something gay. Light tweeds, brown shoes, and a gray felt hat.”
“Got ’em all at my hotel. I’ll slip back.”
She slanted her eyes at me. “Slip back to London, perhaps! No, Dannie, I don’t trust you yet. I don’t intend to lose you.”
She rose from the table and vanished into her bedroom. Marie followed. Through the partly closed door the excited titter of their whispered conversation reached me, scraps of nervously spoken French, and the opening and shutting of drawers and cupboards.
When she re-appeared she was clad in a mole-colored suit of corduroy velvet, gathered in at the waist and close-fitting to her modish figure. The tube-skirt hung short to her ankles and was trimmed about with fur. The suède shoes, open-work stockings, and large muff were to match. Nestling close to her auburn hair was a huzzar cap of ermine. She halted in the sunlight, eyeing me with the naughty modesty of a coquette. She looked oddly young and distinguished on this rare spring morning. There never was such a woman for arranging her temperament to suit her dress. Her hectic manner of high spirits was abandoned; she seemed almost shy as she raised her muff to her lips and watched me, while I took in the effect.
“So I meet with your approval?”
Passing down the stairs, she hugged my arm impulsively—a trick which brought memories of Ruthita. “It’s awfully jolly to be loved—don’t you think so?”
Before the door a powerful two-seated car was standing. The chauffeur stepped out; Fiesole took his place at the wheel. As we drove down the boulevards she was recognized; people on the pavements paused to gaze back; men raised their hats and threw glances of inquiry at one another as to the identity of her strangely attired companion. We drew up at my hotel in the Rue St. Honoré.
“I give you fifteen minutes. Is that sufficient? Make yourself gay. Don’t forget, a tweed suit, brown shoes, a gray felt hat—oh, and a red tie if you’ve got one. I couldn’t endure anything black.”
I found her with her eager face turned towards the doorway, watching impatiently for me.
“A good beginning—ready to the second. Jump in. We’re off to somewhere where no one’ll know anything about us. Let’s see if we can’t lose ourselves.”
She swung the car round and away we snorted, through the Place de la Concorde blanched in sunlight, up the Champs Elysées where sunlight spattered against blossoming trees and lay in pools on the turf. The streets were animated with little children, women in bright dresses, dashing cars and carriages. Paris gleamed white and green and golden. Overhead the sky foamed and bubbled, yawning into blue and primrose gulleys, trampled by stampeding clouds.
At the Place de l’Etoile the car drew up sharply and skidded; circled like a hound picking up the scent; then darted swiftly away to the Bois, where fashionables already loitered and acacias trembled murmurously.
Fiesole was radiant with impatience. A goddess of speed, she bent above the wheel, casting her eyes along the road ahead. Did a gap occur in the traffic, she flung the car forward, driving recklessly, yet always with calculated precision. I marveled at her nerve and the silent power that lay hidden in her thin, fine hands.
As we shot the bridge at St. Cloud the pace quickened. It was as though she shook Paris from her skirts and ran panting to meet wider stretches of wind-bleached country. I had one vivid glimpse of the ribbon of blue river, boat-dotted, winding through young green of woodlands; then cities and sophistication, and all things save Fiesole, myself, and the future were at an end.
Soon the white road curved uninterrupted before us, a streak between pollarded trees and blown meadows. Over the horizon came bounding hills and church-spires, villages and rivers; as they came near to us they halted, like shy deer, for a second; when we drew level, they fled. It was as though we were stationary and the world was rushing past us.
The wind of our going brought color to her cheeks and fluttered out her hair. Her eyes were starry, fixed on the distance as she skirted the rim of eternity in her daring. Should an axle break or a tire burst, all this fire of youth would be extinguished forever. I glanced at the speedometer; it quivered from seventy to eighty, to eighty-five kilometers, and there it hovered.
The throb of the engine seemed the throb of my passion. We were traveling too fast for talking. She did not want to talk; she was escaping from something, memories, perhaps—hers and mine. In her modern way she was expressing what I had always felt: the tedium of captivity, sameness, and disappointment—the need for the unwalled garden, where barriers of obedience and duty are broken down.
At Evreux we halted for petrol. I proposed déjeuner, she shook her head naughtily.
“Where are we going?”
“Over there, to the West.”
“Any particular spot in the West?”
“You’ll see presently.”
“How about the theatre?”
“Time enough,” she said.
She spoke breathlessly, remaining at the wheel while the man was filling the tank. Somehow it seemed to me that the town had come between us; we understood one another better when the garden of the world was flying past us.
Before the man was paid, she had turned on the power. As we lunged forward, he jumped aside and I flung the money out. Our wild ride towards the Eden of the forbidden future recommenced.
Presently, without turning her head, she broke the silence. “Slip your arm round me, old boy; my back grows tired.”
I placed my arm about the slender, upright figure and slid my shoulder behind her, so she leant against me.
“What’s the idea, Fiesole? Paolo and Francesca?”
“And Adam and Eve, if you like; and Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell; and Joseph Parker and Jane Cake-bread. Anything, so long as we keep going.”
When I attempted to speak again, she turned on more power and threw me a smile which was a threat.
I clasped her closer. “Little devil! I’ll keep quiet. You needn’t do that.”
But though I kept quiet my heart beat madly. The panorama of change sweeping by, with her face the one thing constant, quickened and emphasized my need of her more than any spoken tenderness. Our thoughts merged and interchanged with a subtlety that speech could never have accomplished. The pressure of her body, the tantalizing joy of her nearness and forbiddenness, the imminence of death, the law of silence—these summed up in a moment’s experience the entire philosophy of love, and of life itself.
I began to understand her meaning, her language; she was temporizing as I had temporized at Venice; but instead of going away from me, she was fleeing with me from circumstance. She was telling me of her woman’s pride—her difficulty to make herself attainable after what had happened. She loved me and she hated me. She drew me to her and she thrust me from her. She could not forget and she dreaded to remember. And she said all this when, in escaping, she took me with her.
Now I saw nothing of the hurrying landscape; I watched her. I wrote all her beauty on the tablets of my mind—nothing should be unremembered: the way her curls crept from under her cap and fluttered about her temples; the clear pallor of her forehead; the firm, broad brows; the quiet challenge of her deep-lashed eyes; how her red mouth pouted and her head leant forward from her frail white neck, like a flower from its stalk, in a kind of listening expectancy. And I observed the tender swelling of her breasts, high and proud, yet humble for maternity; and the pliant strength of her supple body; and her long clean limbs; and the delicately modeled feet and ankles, which shot out from beneath her fur-trimmed skirt—the feet of a dancer, graceful and fragile as violins.
I was mad. I wanted her. No matter how she came to me, I wanted her. I could not bear the thought that we should ever be separated. She was so intensely mine at this present; and yet, though she was mine, I was insanely jealous to preserve her.
With the long fascination of watching her I bent slowly forward. The action was instinctive, uncalculated. How long I took in approaching her, I cannot tell. I was anxious to last out the joy of anticipation; I was not conscious of motion. My lips touched hers. Her hold on the wheel relaxed. Her eyes met mine. The car swerved, hung upon the edge of the road, ran along it balancing; then bounded back into the straight white line.
I was so frenzied that I did not care. She had thought to hold me prisoner by her speed; I would overcome her with defiance. I kissed her again, holding her to me. She kept her eyes on the distance now, but her mouth smiled tenderly.
“That was foolish,” she said.
I raised my voice to reach her above the moaning of the engine. “The whole thing’s foolish.”
She broke into wild laughter. “That’s why I like it, like you, like myself.”
We hovered on the brim of a valley; then commenced to sink as though the earth had given way beneath us. Far below, as far as eye could reach, were orchards smoking with white blossom. Through the heart of the valley a river ran; standing on its puny banks was a gray old town, blinking in the wind and sun like a spectacled grandmother who had nodded to sleep, and wakened bewildered to find spring rioting round her.
“Where is it?”
“Lisieux, unless I’m mistaken.”
“Then you know where we’re going?”
“More or less.”
We pulled up in a drowsy, sun-drenched market-place outside a sleepy café. At tables on the pavement, with hands in their blouses and legs sprawled out, sat a few artisans, eyeing their absinthe. Houses tottered and sagged from extreme old age. Across the way a cathedral, scarred by time and chapped by weather, raised its crumbling sculptured towers against the clouds.
She took my hand as she stepped out. “You nearly did for us just now.”
“Who cares?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “All Paris cares. I’m not anxious to be dead; when I am, I’d like to look pretty.”
When we had seated ourselves, she took out her mirror and commenced tidying her hair and brushing the dust from her brows. There was nothing to be had, the waiter informed us, but pot au feu; déjeuner was over. So I ordered pot au feu, red wine and an omelet.
As she replaced her mirror in her muff, she looked up brilliantly. “You know, Iampretty.”
She was being watched. The dull eyes of the absinthe-drinkers had become alert. Tradesmen had come out of their shops and stared at her across the square. Some of the bolder strolled into the café and seated themselves close to her. They were paying the unabashed homage that a Frenchman always pays to feminine beauty.
I lowered my voice to a whisper; my throat was parched with dust. “This can’t go on.”
She laughed with her eyes. “It can go on as long as there’s any petrol left, and as long as you don’t try to kiss me when I’m speeding.”
“That’s not what I meant; you know it.”
“What then? The same old thing—marriage?”
I ignored her flippancy. “You’ll be turning back directly, and when you get to Paris, you won’t be like you are now. You’ll beLa Fiesoleand to-night you’ll be dancing with them all watching. I can’t bear it.”
“I shan’t.”
I leant eagerly forward, but she drew away from me.
“You’re not going back? You’ve given up the theatre?”
She held me in suspense, letting her eyes wander as though she had not heard. Slowly she turned, with that lazy, taunting smile of hers. “Damn the theatre,” she said quietly; “I’m going on with you to the end.”
“And the end’s marriage?”
“Who can tell? Now don’t be a rotter. You’re spoiling everything. Let’s talk of something else.”
When we climbed into the car, “You drive,” she said.
“But to where?”
“That’s my secret. Straight on. I’ll tell you when to turn.”
We were hardly out of the valley before her eyes had closed and her head was nodding against my shoulder. I drove gently, fearing to disturb her. From time to time I looked down at the white slant of her throat, the shadows beneath her lashes, and the almost childish droop of her mouth. How the self she kept hidden revealed itself! Her face was that of a Madonna, for whom the cross was yet remote and the happiness near at hand—and both were certain. What different versions she gave me of herself! Once a sickening fear shook me like a leaf. I slowed the car to a halt, and listened for her breath. In that moment I suffered all the agony of loss that must some time accompany the actuality. One day, sooner or later, I told myself, this thing I had dreaded would occur. How much time was left to us to find life beautiful between then and now?
On the bare Normandy uplands, between tilled fields and driving clouds, I waited for her to waken. The air was growing chill; I drew my coat round her. I felt again, in a new and better way, that sense of nearness and forbiddenness which had exhilarated me to the point of delirium on the madcap journey down from Paris. I looked ahead into the pale distance, where the notched horizon bound the earth with a silver band... and I wondered where she was taking me, and what lay at the end. She might fight against it—she would fight against it; but the end should be marriage. I would watch over her always as I was watching now.
She stirred; her eye-lids fluttered. She stared up at me for a moment with undisguised affection; then the fear of tenderness returned. She pulled herself together, rubbing her knuckles in her eyes and yawning.
“Gee up, old hoss. This ain’t a bloomin’ cab-stand. You’re not home yet.”
“You fell asleep, my dear, so I waited for you.”
“Well, I shan’t pay you,” she laughed; “it’s not fair. Pray what did you think you were doing?”
“Enjoying myself.”
“There’s the difference; you like to crawl, I like to hurtle. You’re a tortoise; I’m a razzle-dazzle. We’re an ill-matched pair. Living in Pope Lane has made you pontifical. Oh, Dannie, in ten years your tummy’ll be bulgy and your head’ll be bald. Pope Lane’ll have done it. I know what I’ve always missed about you now.”
“Something horrid? Let’s have it.”
“A cowl. You ought to have been a monk in Florence, painting naked angels in impossible meadows.”
“So kind of you. Religion mixed with impropriety! If there was someone to relieve me of my conscience, it wouldn’t be half bad. But I don’t live at Pope Lane any longer. You have the honor of sitting beside Sir Dante Cardover of Woadley Hall, Ransby, of which, you little wretch, you are soon to be mistress.”
“That so? Sorry I spoke. Jump out and crank up the engine. It’s coming on again—you’re going to have the sentimentals, and you’re going to have ’em bad.”
“I’ve known you sentimental, Fiesole.”
Her lips trembled, and her body stiffened. “And you punished me for it.”
“You have a woman’s memory.”
“Odd, seeing I’m a woman. Who’s going to crank that engine? Am I, or are you?”
We swung on through the bare bleak country with masked faces. She sat a little apart from me, her knees crossed and her hands clasped about them. Did I glance at her, she turned petulantly in the opposite direction. I cursed myself. I was almost angry with her. What was her plan? Had she given me the privileges of dearness to her simply that she might thwart and taunt me? How could I teach her to forget? How could I teach myself to forget? At the back of my mind I loved her the more because of her perversity.
We came to a cross-road. She touched me on the arm; we swerved into it. Far down the white stretch I saw a speck, which resolved itself into a man and woman, traveling away from us with their backs towards us. The man wore the blue blouse and wide, baggy trousers of a peasant; his feet were shod in sabots. The woman was clad in a coarse, loose dress, like a sack drawn over her and tied about the middle; it was neutral in tone, being aged by weather. Her figure was shapeless—almost animal in its ponderous patience and breadth. Her hair was flaxen from exposure. They plodded through the bleak expanse with heads bowed, bodies huddled, and arms encircling. Every few paces they halted; we saw the gleam of their faces as they clung lip to lip in hasty ecstasy.
The wind was blowing from them towards us; they were unaware of us. I had my hand on the horn, when Fiesole clutched me.
“Don’t. They’ve nothing in the world but this moment. God knows what lies before them!”
We followed them at a distance. The symbolism of their silent figures awed us: overhead, the soundless battle of high-flying clouds; beneath, the gray vacancy with springtime stirring; around, the dun, unheeding earth; through the bareness the white road sweeping on unhurrying toward the land of sunsets; traveling along it a man and woman, for the time forgetful of their poverty, the focus-point of responsive passion. They had nothing but this moment.
“And what have we?” I questioned.
She crouched beside me; her soft arm stole about my neck. “Dearest, forgive me,” she murmured.
Her eyes were blinded; my lips against her cheek were salt. She clung to me desperately, as though a hand pressed on her shoulder to jerk her from me—Vi’s hand.
Where a rutted lane sloped down to a wooded hollow, the lovers turned. Among pollarded trees we lost them. They would never know that we had watched them. So they vanished out of our lives, walking hand-in-hand toward child-bearing and the inevitable separation of death that lurked for them at some hidden cross-road. We, equally unknowing, to what place of parting were we faring?
I tilted up her face. “I’ve been a selfish fool. I’ll never speak another word about marriage or anything that will pain you. Oh, Fiesole, if you could only love me—love me as I love you—as though there was nothing else left!” She took my hands in her small ones, pressing them to her breast, quoting in a low sing-song, “Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span. Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.”
“I like that—‘the old proud pageant of man.’ I wonder where you got it. But is there to be nothing deeper between us than laughter?”
“If we do the laughing,” she said, “life’s ready to do the rest. But you’re a puritan at heart: you suspect that gladness is somehow unholy. Don’t you know, Mr. Bunyan, that laughter is the language they speak in heaven?”
“I don’t; neither do you. But when you say so laughing, I can almost believe it.”
When we had once again started, she became more frank. It was because my hands were occupied, perhaps. Laying her cheek against my shoulder, “Dante, I’m not a flirt,” she said. “I just can’t make up my mind about you.”
“Maybe, I’ll make it up for you.”
“Maybe. But I want you to understand why I did what I did this morning—speeding like that and behaving as though I was cracked. I was afraid you were going to make love to me every moment—and I didn’t want it.”
“D’you want it now?”
“I don’t know.” She dragged the words out wide-apart. “And yet I do know; but I’ve no right to allow it.”
“You silly child, why on earth not?”
“I’m inconstant; I’m like that now. I should make you happy first and sorry afterwards.”
“I’ll risk it. I made you sorry first and now I’m going to make you happy.”
“Do you think you are?”
“Sure of it.”
The road began to descend, at first gradually. The bare, tilled uplands where winter lingered, were left behind and we ran through a sheltered land of orchards. The air pulsated with the baaing of lambs and the sweet yearning of fecundity. Under blown spray of fruit-trees the little creatures gamboled, halting by fits and starts, calling to their mothers, or kneeling beneath them, their thirsty throats stretched up and their long tails flapping. Surrounded by lean trees, lopped of their lower branches, gray farmhouses rose up, watching like aged shepherds. Slowfooted cattle, heavy-uddered, wandered between the hedges with their great bags swinging. Women with brass jars on their shoulders, which narrowed at the neck like funeral urns, walked through the meadows to the milking.
“Do we turn or go on?”
“Go on.”
“How much farther?”
“A little farther.”
“It’s getting older and older isn’t it, Fiesole?”
“No, younger and younger, stupid. Look at all the lambs.”
Before us the land piled up into a hillock, breaking the level sweep of sky-line and hiding what lay beyond. The road curved about it in a slow descent.
Fiesole leant past me, shutting off the power. “Let her coast,” she said.
At the bend in the road I jammed on the brakes, halting the car. She slipped her hand into mine; we filled our eyes with the sight, saying nothing.
Sheer against the sky rose a jagged rock and perched on its summit, so much a part of it that it seemed to have been carved, stood a ruined castle. Its windows were vacant; its roof had long since fallen; its walls had been bruised and broken by cannon. It tottered above the valley like a Samson blinded, groping on the edge of the precipice, its power shorn. Round the embattled rock, like children who trusted the old protector, gathered mediaeval houses. Some of them, centuries ago, had wandered off into the snowy orchards and stood tiptoe, as though listening, ready to run back should they hear the tramp of an invading army. Through the valley and into the town a narrow stream darted, flashing like an arrow. Behind town and castle, across the horizon, towered a saffron wall of cloud, tipped along the edge with fire and notched in the center where the molten ball of the setting sun rested. From quaint gray streets came up a multitude of small sounds, like the lazy humming of women spinning. And over all, across orchards and roofs of houses, the grim warden on the rock threw his shadow. It was a valley forgotten by the centuries—a garden without barriers.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
“Falaise, my darling. I always promised myself that if ever I should love a man, I would bring him to Falaise to love him. Can’t you feel it—the slow quiet, the sense of the ages watching?”
She was aflame in the light of the sunset. Her face was ivory, intense and ardent with glory. Her waywardness and fondness for disguise were gone; her true self, steady and unafraid, gazed out on me. The havoc of passion was replaced by the contentment of a desire all but satisfied.
“Let’s go to the castle first,” she said. “You remember its story?”
I remembered: how Robert the Devil, Duke of the Normans, had found Arlotta, the tanner’s daughter, washing linen in that same little beck; and had loved her at sight and had carried her off to his castle on the rock, where was born William the Bastard, conqueror of England and greatest of all the Normans.
Leaving the car in the village street, we climbed the rock and gained admittance. As we gazed down from the splintered battlements into the winding streets, Fiesole drew me to her, throwing her arm carelessly about my neck as though we were boy and girl.
“Look,” she whispered, pointing sheer down to the foot of the precipice, “there’s the tannery still standing and the beck running past it. And see, there are girls washing linen; one of them might be Arlotta. In nine hundred years nothing has altered.”
We stole across the threshold of the stone-paved room in which the Conqueror was born. “I’m going to shock you,” she said. “I always think of Falaise as another Bethlehem—the Bethlehem of war. The Bethlehem of peace has crumbled, shattered by war; but here’s Falaise unchanged since the day when Robert the Devil seized Arlotta and galloped up the rock, and bolted his castle door. It sets one thinking——”
“Thinking something dangerous, I’ll warrant.”
She brushed the rebellious curls from her forehead and leant back against the wall laughing. “Thinking all kinds of thoughts: that it pays best in this world to steal what you want.”
“Perhaps—if you steal strongly.”
“But I have stolen strongly; see how I’ve carried you off.”
We discovered a little hotel, the courtyard of which was invaded by a garden and opened out beyond into a misty orchard. At sound of our entrance a white-haired old country-woman came out from the office, holding her knitting in her hands. I made to go towards her, but Fiesole detained me. “You’re my prisoner,” she said; “I’m responsible. You stay here and I’ll tell her what we want.”
The air had grown sharper, but the moments were too precious to be spent indoors. We had our dinner served beneath a fig-tree in the courtyard, where we could see the shadows creeping through the garden and hear the sabots clap along the causeways.
We were almost shy with one another. We had little to say, and that little was spoken with our eyes for the most part. We did not dare to think: for me there was the ghost of Vi; and she also had I knew not what memories. We were restless till the meal was ended; the contact of live hands was the best speech possible. The tremulous dusk had fallen when we wandered out into the narrow climbing streets, traveling directionless under broken archways, past ancient churches—bribes to God for forgiveness for wrongs still more ancient.
We peeped into crouching cottages as we passed. We were glad of their company; they kept us from giving way to the tumult of feeling that ran riot in our hearts. Their small leaded windows were like lanterns set out to guide and not to watch us. We had glimpses through the glowing panes of kindly peasant interiors, with low ceilings and home-made furnishings. Sometimes at a rough table round which wine and bread were passed, the family was gathered, their faces illumined by a solitary candle in the center; looming out of the shadows on the wall was the cross. Sometimes the man was still at work, carving sabots or weaving, while the woman held a child to her breast, or rocked it in a cradle on the stone-paved floor.
One by one the lights were quenched and the doors fastened.
Fiesole leant more heavily against me, her arm encircling me, her head upon my shoulder. Now that the town slept, I could feel the wild clamor of her body and hear the fluttering intake of her breath. The wind, whispering through flowering trees, blew cool and fragrant in our nostrils. For intervals there was no sound save the rustle of falling blossoms and our own stealthy footsteps; from somewhere out in the pale dusk, a lamb would call and its mother would answer. Above us, between steep roofs, as down a beaten pathway, the silver chariot of the moon plunged onward, scattering the clouds before it.
We came again to the hostel; when we entered, we walked apart. Quickly, as though seized with sudden misgiving, Fiesole left me. I heard her footstep mounting the stairs and saw the light spring up in her window. Every other window was in darkness. From where I sat in the courtyard I could see the shadow of her figure groping, and her arms uplifted as she unbound her hair. The light went out. I wondered if she watched me. I listened to hear her stirring; I could hear nothing.
In the dim quiet, shut out from the excitement of her presence, I had leisure to reflect on whither I was going. I drew apart from myself and eyed my doings impartially. It was a whim of curiosity that had brought me to Paris—one of those instinctive decisions which construct a destiny. The sight of her as Lucrezia had stabbed me to remorse, and then to folly. That she had hated me up to last night and that the desire of her wild heart had been to torture me, I did not doubt; but I thought that there were moments in this day when she had loved me with the old uncalculating kindness. What was her intention now?
Unaccountably out of the past, Fiesole had returned—Fiesole, the girl-woman I had loved as a boy before Vi. I felt like a broken gamester who has discovered an overlooked coin in his pocket after having believed himself penniless. So strange was this happening that it could not be fortuitous—we had met because we had been piloted.
All seeming failure of the past would take on an aspect of design and would appear a straight road leading to this moment, were our journeyings to end in marriage. And, though she would not own it, she needed the protection of a man who loved her to guard her against her success and self-reliance.
My thoughts ran on, picturing the home and little children we would have. Children would be walls about our love, making it secure. For these I was hungry—desperately afraid lest the hope of them should be withdrawn. In imagination they seemed already mine, I would speak my heart out: she should understand before it was too late that my need was also hers.
I entered the hostel. In the office the old woman nodded above her knitting. I roused her and asked for my candle.
“Ah, Monsieur,” she said in apology, “I had not thought. For a room so small I supposed that one would be sufficient. I have given Madame the candle. If Monsieur will wait, I will fetch another.”
In my surprise I told her that it did not matter.
I felt my way up the unlit stairs. At the bedroom-door I knocked. Fiesole’s voice just reached me, whispering to me to enter. On the threshold I paused, peering into the darkness. The floor was bare; there was little furniture. In the shadows against the wall, a canopied, high-mattressed bed loomed mountainous. Through the window, reaching almost to my feet, a ray of moonlight slanted; in it, gleaming white, stood Fiesole.
My heart was in my throat. I could not speak. We watched one another; as the silence lengthened, the space between us seemed impassable.
She held out her arms; her hoarse voice spoke, yearning towards me with its lazy sweetness. “Even now, if you want to, you may go, Dannie.”
Ihad been for a saunter through the town. Several times I had returned before I found Fiesole beneath the fig-tree in the courtyard, seated at the table with a paper spread out in front of her. She looked up swiftly at sound of my footstep and threw me a smile, gathering herself in to make room for me beside her. When I stood over her, she lifted up her face with childish eagerness as though we had not kissed already more than once that morning. “Shall I order déjeuner out here?”
She nodded. “Where else, but in the sunshine?” When I came back from giving the order, her red-gold head was bent again above the paper.
“Something interesting?”
“Rather.” She raised her green eyes mischievously. “It’s all up. We’ll be collared within the hour.”
“What’s all up? Who’s got the right to collar us?”
“Paris thinks it has, the whole of France thinks it has, but most particularly Monsieur Georges thinks he has, and so does the theatre-management.”
“Let ’em try. We don’t care.”
“But, old boy, I do care a little. You see, I shouldn’t have been here now if it hadn’t been for Monsieur Georges, Paris, and the rest of them. They gave me my chance; going off like this has left them in the lurch. It isn’t playing the game, as I understand it.”
“If it’s damages for a broken contract they’re after, I’ll settle that for you.”
She smiled mysteriously and, bowing her head above the paper, read me extracts, throwing in, now and then, her own vivacious comments.
It appeared that up to the last moment the theatre-management had expected her and had allowed the audience to assemble. They had delayed matters for half an hour while they sent out messengers to search for her. When the crowd grew restless, they had commenced the performance with an under-study. But the people would have none of her; they rose up in their places stamping and threatening, shouting forLa Fiesole. The curtain had been rung down and Monsieur Georges had come forward, weeping and wringing his hands, saying thatLa Fiesolehad been kidnaped by an admirer that morning. Pandemonium broke loose. The theatre for a time was in danger of being wrecked; but the police were summoned and got the audience out, and the money refunded.
The journalist’s story followed of the unknown Englishman who, a few nights before, had stood up in his box applauding when everyone else had grown silent; and how the same Englishman, one night previously, had created a scene between himself andLa Fiesoleat a café in the Champs Elysées—a scene which had terminated by them going away together.
“Make you out quite a desperate character, don’t they, old darling?” she drawled, looking up into my eyes, laughing.
I did my best to share her levity, but I was secretly annoyed at so much publicity. Taking the paper from her, I patted her on the shoulder. “Come, drink up your coffee, little woman; it’s getting cold. Why waste time over all this nonsense? You’re out of it. It’s all ended.”
“But it isn’t. Paris won’t let it be ended. They’re making more row about me than they did about La Gioconda. They’ve offered a reward of five thousand francs for my recovery.”
“And if they did find us, they couldn’t do anything. Discovery won’t be easy.”
“Won’t it? We were seen yesterday going together towards St. Cloud; they’ve got the number of my car and particulars of my dress from Marie.”
“But didn’t you warn Marie?”
“Silly fellow, how should I? Didn’t know myself what I was going to do when we started—at least I didn’t know positively.”
“Humph!”
“Ripping, isn’t it, for a chap like you as ’as allaws lived decent and ’oped to die respected? Dannie, Dannie, you’re a regular Robert the Devil—only I stole you, and nobody’ll ever believe it.”
“It doesn’t matter what they say about me; it’s your good name that matters.—I promised yesterday never to speak another word about marriage. May I break my promise?”
“You’ve done it. Go on, John Bunyan.”
“Well, here’s my plan: that we motor through to Cherbourg and skip over to Southampton.”
“And then?”
“Get a special license in the shortest time possible. When we’re discovered, you’ll be Lady Cardover.”
“But it isn’t necessary that I should be Lady Cardover. I’m not ashamed of anything. Are you?”
“Perhaps not; but there’s nothing to be gained by dodging the conventions. I ought to know; I’ve been dodging ’em ever since I can remember. I’ve come to see that there’s something grand about conventions; they’re a sort of wall to protect someone you love dearly from attack. We’re man and wife already by everything that’s sacred; but we shall never be securely happy unless we’re married.”
Our meal was finished. We wandered off into the orchard at the back. When we were safe from watching eyes, Fiesole gave me her hand. We came to a place where trees grew closer together; here we rested. She leant against me, her face wistful and troubled; the sun through the branches scattered gold and the blossoms snowflakes in her hair.
Presently she disentangled herself from my arms, and jumped to her feet, smiling gently. “I’ve a surprise for you, my virgin man. I want you to stop here for half an hour and promise not to follow.”
“A long time to be without you.”
“But promise.”
“All right. Very well.”
She stooped over me quietly before she went. I watched her pass swaying across the dappled turf, under the dancing shadows and rain of petals. Just before she entered the courtyard, she turned and waved her hand.
Something in Fiesole’s distant aspect, something of seeming maidenly daintiness, brought to mind another woman—gold and ivory, with poppies for her lips, were the words which had described her. While I had walked Falaise that morning I had striven to banish her from my thoughts. And now Fiesole, from whom I had hoped to obtain forgetfulness, Fiesole herself had unconsciously reminded me.
In the stillness I confronted myself: I was being faithless to the loyalty of years—I had done and was about to do a thing which was traitorous to all my past. Vi’s memory, though in itself sinful, had demanded chastity from me.
Yet my present conduct was not incompatible with my past: it was the result of it. Puppy passions of thought had grown into hounds of action—that was all.
From the first my pagan imagination, at war with my puritan conscience, had lured me on. All my life I had been breaking bounds imaginatively: innocently for Ruthita in my childhood; in appearance for Fiesole at Venice; dangerously for Vi; and at last in fact for Fiesole. Narrower affections I had passed by, not perceiving that their narrowness made for safety and kindness. The unwalled garden of masterless desire had proved a wilderness; its fruit was loneliness.
Last night, sitting in the courtyard, I had told myself that in remaining constant to Vi, I had gambled for the impossible. Was it true? In any case, to have followed up the risk strongly was my only excuse for having gambled at all. By turning back I abandoned the prize, and made the sin of loving a forbidden woman paltry.—Might she not have been waiting for me all these years, as I had been waiting! What an irony if now, when I was destroying both the hope and reward of our sacrifice, she were free and preparing to come to me!
And Fiesole! I had used her to drug my unsatisfied longing. Should I not do her more grievous wrong in marrying her while I loved another woman?—I had been mad. I was appalled.
Could I ever be at peace with her—ever make her happy? Fiesole was so flippant, so casual of all that makes for wifehood. And she was almost right in saying that I had made her what she was—first by my virtue, now by my lack of it. All we could give one another would be passion, swift and self-consuming. Soon would come satiety, the fruit of my doings; after that regret, the fruit of my thoughts. And if we did not marry, I should eat the same fruit, made more bitter by self-scorn.
Marry Fiesole! In marriage lay escape from the penalty of my lifelong lawless curiosity. Walls of children might grow up, responsibilities of domestic affection, giving shelter and security.
This was treachery. Fiesole should never guess I had faltered. The door should be closed on the past——
I had been waiting for, perhaps, half-an-hour, when I heard the chugging of a motor newly started. There were no other travelers staying at the inn; I thought that I recognized the beat of the engine. As I listened, I felt sure that the car was being backed into the road. I expected to hear it stop, and to see Fiesole come from under the archway and signal for me. It did not stop. It began to gather speed. The sound droned fainter and fainter.
Promise or no promise, I could not resist my excited curiosity. I ran across the orchard, through the courtyard, into the sunlit street. Far up the road, I saw a cloud of dust growing smaller, disappearing in the direction of Paris. I watched, confused and dumbfounded, as it dwindled.
The old proprietress approached me shyly and touched me on the arm. “For Monsieur from Madame.”
Snatching the note from her hand, I tore it open with trembling fingers. The writing was hasty and agitated. I read and re-read it, trying to twist its words into another meaning.
The note ran:
My poor Dante, as you said to me, I have a woman’s memory; you’ll remember Potiphar’s wife and Joseph. I have tried to hate you intensely. You see, I’m what you made me: Lucrezia—your handiwork. For years I have promised myself that, if ever I had the chance, I would punish you. It was with this intention that I left Paris yesterday—you know the rest. So now, without me in the years that are to come, you will suffer all that you once made me suffer. And I’m almost sorry; for here, at Falaise, you nearly made me.... It can’t be done.
Raising my eyes, I stood alone, gazing along the gleaming road to Paris. The cloud of dust had vanished.