“Why did you want to know?”
“The scene of your praiseworthy labours? What a question to ask of an admiring brother!”
“Iwillknow, Felix.” She stopped and stamped her foot, then, warned perhaps by my face, checked herself, and resumed, with a strained attempt at a more conciliatory tone: “You might have consideration for others, if you have no apprehensions for yourself. You don’t seem to realise what a difficult tortuous part I am having to play.”
“Naturally, when I know nothing about it.”
She glanced at me, and away.
“Please come on, Felix. Will you not tell me what brought you?”
“That is better. Call it partly idleness, partly curiosity, partly the absence of any reason why I should not do exactly as I pleased.”
“Is there no reason? Can you really say so?”
“None whatever that I know. It was made no condition of an extraordinary situation forced upon me that my absolute liberty of action was to be restricted. I should not have accepted the situation if it had been.”
“I am not talking of your rights but of your good feelings.”
“Ah? Well, what about those?”
“Are you really so indifferent as to the safeguarding of a trust that you, after all,didaccept?”
“Be a little more explicit.”
“Supposing by any chance Monseigneur himself had happened to be looking from a window just now. Would not his suspicions have been aroused?”
“By the fact of a casual stranger wishing to identify the residence of a family of such importance? What if I had had a Baedeker in my hand?”
“You had not, you know.”
“It would only have coloured the moral. I might have had it in my pocket. Anyhow I am sure the great man would have thought nothing unusual about such an everyday occurrence as a sightseer out hero-worshipping.”
“You don’t know him in the least; you don’t comprehend the situation. But of course you are only talking, after your way, for talking’s sake.”
“Isthat my way? I should have thought I was a rather silent person as a rule. Do you know, Marion, I could almost imagine from your manner that you were not pleased to see me.”
My step-sister jerked up her elbows, uttering a hopeless exclamation. I think she could have thrown me into the pond with the fiercest satisfaction.
“You are quite welcome to imagine it,” she said. “Your turning up here is the very last thing I desired.”
I laughed.
“Well, it was your own choice, you know, to come and join me. I neither expected nor invited you; and it appears to me that whatever suspicion my movements may have aroused in an august bosom will hardly have been allayed by that rash step on your part.”
“I hope to heaven we were both unobserved; but to see you made me desperate. I thought something had happened; that you were bent on some folly which might betray the whole plot. Has anything occurred to disturb you, Felix? I think, seeing my distress, you might be candid with me.”
“To be sure I will, Marion, now you ask. Do you realise that three weeks and more have passed since I undertook a certain charge?”
“I know, Felix. I cannot help it.”
“And that during all that time I have received no word, no hint from you as to——”
“Yes, I know. I cannot help it, I say.” She looked away, as if momentarily disturbed or embarrassed, then faced me resolutely: “Do you want to get rid of her?”
I should have answered, “yes,” unequivocally. What motive for delicacy or hesitation could I have? Wisdom and policy alike clamoured for release from a position which, impossibly heroic at its outset, was daily growing more and more compromising in the sentiments it inevitably engendered. My professional interests, my personal honour were both concerned in the response; and how did I vindicate them? I stumbled a moment; and then temporised:—
“I want a term stated, that is all. I have no objection to the young lady, or any fault to find with her. We get on very well together on the whole. But don’t you think you are taking rather an unfair advantage of mygood-nature, not to speak of my—of my not too impeccablehumanone?”
Rather to my surprise the challenge evoked no opprobrious response, nor indeed any response at all for a little. A student of physiognomy might even have fancied he detected in Marion’s expression a certain shiftiness, a desire to avoid straight issues.
“I think,” she said presently, “that, as to that, you will be guided by your own sense of fitness and propriety. I trusted to it at the first, Felix, and I trust to it now.”
“That is all very well, my good sister; but I never understood that the compact was to be an indefinite one.”
“It is not to be, of course; only—I tell you this candidly, Felix—the predicament which forced it upon us is not yet safely resolved.”
“Does the Marquis know that his daughter has fled from him, and is in hiding somewhere?”
“There is no reason why you should not be told that. Yes, he does.”
“And why does he not visit the knowledge upon you, her confidante and abettor?”
“I did not say he did not. But leave me out of the question; I can look after myself. It may be that he respects in me a certain force of character, which is not to be debarred from its duty by threats and bribery; it may be that heaven has granted me a certain power of exorcism over demons; it may be, as I told you before, that he sees in me the only possible clue to the secret of his child’s disappearance. That clue will remain safe, so long—so long as you are faithful, Felix.”
“H’mph!” I pondered the thing awhile, not satisfied, nor, it must be admitted, wholly discontent. “Then it seems,” I said, “that I have no choice in the matter.”
“I promise you, as I promised you before,” said Marion, “that I will communicate with you the very moment that a present difficulty has resolved itself. Only, for mercy’s sake, don’t again risk disaster through this sort of collusion. It will be bad for you, for us all, if his suspicions are once aroused. Felix, I will tell you one thing—it is for your companion’s sake. He knows—I have ascertained it—that we alighted near the Mont de Piété that night. That is enough to put his agents on the scent; and you must keep her close, if you would not imperil her safety. If she were once traced, and found to be——” She checked herself, gulped, and went on—“you would not like to have her innocent blood on your head, I am sure?”
I stared. It was not her persistent reassertion of that wild fable which surprised me; it was the curiously detached manner of her reference to my “companion.” Was it really Fifine’s salvation or her father’s which formed my sister’s leading consideration in this matter? The question was a novel and startling one. Really, if it had not been Marion, I should have suspected here some interest more than exorcismal in the morphiomaniac.
“By no means,” I answered—“nor the miscarriage of your plans either. Which means, I suppose, that I must resign myself to the inevitable.”
“If you will only have patience, Felix. It will not be for long now, I hope.”
“And in the meantime—h’m!” I stood considering. Then suddenly a whimsical thought occurred to me; and I uttered it, more for the humour of the shocked protest it would evoke, than from any least expectation of a favourable response.
“I suppose you wouldn’t at all approve of our going a trip together?”
“A trip!” She was obviously and naturally startled; but her tone, I thought, betrayed no particular moral alarm.
“She was born, she tells me, in Provence,” I said, “and her journey thence to Paris sums up her travelling experience. It is odd; but I suppose these exotics of thepur sangmust be kept under cover. Anyhow it struck me that it might not only interest her to visit her birthplace, but that it would be a way for us both out of the killing confinement and monotony of our present existence.”
Marion was listening to me; yet I could see that some reflection beyond that engendered by my proposal was exercising her mind.
“She told you that, did she?” she said, staring me suddenly in the eyes.
“What is the matter?” I answered. “Yes, she told it me, but not with any reference to my suggestion, though I made that to her—quite in the elder-brotherly spirit, of course, and with an eye to Plato’s moral philosophy for our literary ballast. She might not consent to go, after all; I think that likely enough; only, supposing by any chance the venture appealed to her, would it have your sanction?”
We were strolling leisurely on, and Marion did not at once answer.
“It just occurred to me,” I continued, “as a possible resource, no more. It would take us, anyhow for the time being, out of the arena of contention, and if we did it cleverly, vanishing ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision,’ it might prove more baffling to the chase than our continuing to lie and sulk here under cover. You see, being hidden somewhere in Paris, as they would suppose us still to be——”
Marion interrupted me: “How long would you propose to stay away?”
“How long would you advise?” I said, my eyes beginning to open.
“I don’t think it matters.”
“Then you have no objection?”
“No; none at all.”
She fairly took my breath away. This astonishing acquiescence, where I had expected only obloquy and castigation! Yet I received, in appearance, the thunderbolt nonchalantly.
“Very well, then,” I said—“if the questionshouldarise.”
“You will observe the last secrecy, in that event,” she said, “in the manner of your going? I can trust to you for that.” And then she went on, putting the case to herself, it seemed, rather than to me: “In the question of scandal, things would rest as they rest now, in neither better nor worse odour. It is for you a matter of conscience, and for her a period of self-obliteration, from which she will emerge, when she does, a restored individuality, having no responsibility to the interval—just, as it were, as if one had crossed from hill to hill by way of a deep sunless ravine.”
I did not answer—though that poetical flight from Marion was sufficiently startling—and we walked on for some little distance in silence—a fairly pregnant one on my part. “Certainly,” I was saying to myself, “herconcern is for the morphiomaniac.” The idea promised to become an obsession with me. It might be held to explain some things hitherto inexplicable; it certainly, if true, made obscure the probable limits of my guardianship. That was a reflection carrying with it a sense not so much of mortification as of uneasiness. But, in the midst, the thought of that “furlough” so astonishingly conceded rose to encourage and exhilarate me. The free road would dissipate effectively all those drugging fumes generated by confinement. We could be frank comrades, once in the open air, unfettered by convention, responsible to ourselves alone, accountable to no man or woman for a definition of the right which found us wayfaring in company. The prospect pleased me; I foresaw only a single objection to it.
“One thing I must mention,” I said, “if there is to be any talk with your young Countess of this expedition. It is, to put it bluntly, funds.”
“Funds!” said Marion. She stopped, in some surprise.
“I should never get her to consent,” I continued, “unless on terms of sharing expenses. I may as well state the fact. She is out of cash, and already, in some inconsiderable measure, indebted to me. I refer to it only in the connexion of her natural pride—not from any personal motive. She has not confessed the fact to me, nor authorised me in any way to make her position known to you. It was revealed to me quite accidentally.”
For one moment I did hesitate as to the advisability of mentioning my suspicions anent the mysterious stranger; but the thought of some possible treachery towards Fifine implied thereby stayed me, and I resolved to keep my own counsel. Marion, after some frowning meditation, spoke plainly:—
“I am a little perplexed,” she said, “to understand how, under the circumstances, a fairly ample supply of money can already have exhausted itself. But of course you must not be allowed to suffer by her extravagances. Say nothing about it, and I will write to her in a day or two, enclosing a further remittance. Is that all?”
“That is all.”
She seemed to accept my assurance with a sigh of relief: and forthwith, with an air of unconstrained curiosity, put some questions to me about the manner of our life, its domestic incidents, the young lady’s demands upon my time and resources, and more especially my opinion of her and my feelings towards her—to all of which inquisition I responded as truth or policy dictated.
“She is a good girl,” she said at the end; “a trustworthy girl. Deal finely with her, Felix Dane—and with yourself.” She held out her hand. “Good-bye, now, and trust to my promise to release you at the first available moment. Only don’t again, for heaven’s sake, risk appearances by seeming to force my hand like this.”
Begging me to stay where I was, she left me—profoundly cogitative, you may be sure. That obsession had entered my mind to stay. It was gratifying to contemplate the trust of me implied in that leave to travel; and yet, and yet—I could have thought she had no more delusions about me than I had about myself. Really it almost seemed as if Fifine’s fate was to her a matter of quite secondary importance; she was willing to confide it to such fortuitous happenings.
I went a long walk into the country that day, tramping by way of Sèvres and Bas Chaville to the little Trianon, with its atmosphere of ghosts and piteous things sighing and whispering among the yellowing leaves. Returning to Paris, late and somewhat exhausted, I dined, cheaply but delectably, at a little Café in the Rue Vivienne, and thence, according to my promise to myself of a late evening, made my way to the Opera-House, where I paid my three francs for a fauteuil de quatrième amphithéâtre (and a very good one) to hear Romeo and Juliet sung.
Now I was scanning the audience from my lofty eyrie, when, my glance roving to the orchestra, whose members were at that moment tuning their instruments, I positively started and sat transfixed. For there, seated behind a violoncello, along whose strings his white fingers hopped and scampered like white mice, was my old plaintive macaroni of the Rue de Fleurus. He had no chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole now; but I knew him at once; my eyes, sufficiently penetrating at all times, could not be mistaken.
Well, for what he was worth he was identified; and what was he worth? Even were I to take the trouble to ascertain his name, how indeed would it bring me nearer a solution of the mystery of Fifine’s indebtedness to him? Besides, it was no affair of mine.
Fifine had gone obediently to bed when I returned home that night.
Fifinereceived her letter, containing a bulky enclosure, from Marion. I was present when she opened it, and I made no comment, preferring to leave to her the questioning which I foresaw, and which was indeed inevitable. She did not speak for a little, but sat with her velvety eyes fixed on my face, while I dipped, with what show of unconcern I could master, my petit-pain into my cup of coffee. Suddenly she thrust under my very nose a little rouleau of banknotes.
“They are to the value of two thousand francs,” she said. “I want you to keep them for me, to draw upon as occasion requires.”
“Good,” I said. “Behold your conscientious banker. It was unnecessary; but I ask no questions.”
“You have no need to,” she said; “nor to pretend ignorance of whence they have come and why.”
“From my step-sister, I make bold to guess; though how she is able to draw to this extent upon the baronial coffers, without exciting any suspicion as to her motive, puzzles me.”
“She has great influence with him,” said Fifine; “though I think it likely she has advanced this from her own store, intending to recoup herself from his at a more favourable time.”
“Great influence, has she?” said I, looking up.
“Yes, I think so,” said Fifine; and she went on rather hastily, as if to avoid the subject: “You will liquidate my debt to you out of it; and then we will go on as before.”
“Shall we?” said I. “Then Marion has not mentioned to you——”
“O!” said she. “Then you knew it was from her; and what she was to say besides?”
“I guessed.”
“How wonderfully clever of you. Now, Felix, why will you not be frank with me?”
“Let me know first. Whatdoesshe say?”
“Just this: that if we are inclined to take a trip together, she has no obstacle to put in our way. Now, I want to ask you, How did you dare?”
“Hear me out, Fury. Ididmeet Marion: she saw me looking at the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and followed and accosted me; Ididask her what would she have to say to our taking a country jaunt together, and when, to my astonishment, she had nothing to express but approval, Ididassert that you would never agree to such a proposal unless a replenished purse should enable you to take your share in the expenses. But I assured her explicitly that I spoke without your authority, that I did not even know if you would go if permitted, and that, as to the mention of money, it was made entirely on my own responsibility, and from inferences which you had had no intentional part in exciting. You must know, at least, that my only personal motive was to secure your consent to this trip—or, if you don’t, you should. I would much rather not be recouped for my little power of hospitality to one who repays me a thousandfold for it through the mere fact of her company.”
I got up as I spoke, and went and stood the other side of the table, so as to face her. She did not answer for awhile, nor look at me; but presently she raised her lids with a little smile, and, as it were, a flush of “rosy pudency.”
“I never thought you were really serious about this going away together,” she said. “It—it seems such a strange thing to do.”
There and then I destroyed my boats. I could not look at her longer, in her morning freshness, and play the sagacious self-critic. The burning feminine in her, the ready intelligence, the mental and the æsthetic qualifications, all proclaiming her a comrade of comrades for romantic venturings, ended my scruples in a sort of brain intoxication. Besides, where was the projected harm? Exercise and the liberal air would blow all that accumulated stuff of durance to the winds.
“Why?” I said. “Is gossip rifer under the open sky than in a closed room? We shall be safer from tongues, safer from possible hurt to reputation, to body, than we are here. We will be brother and sister, m’amie; you shall take my name—if you will condescend—and my conscience, and we will journey merrily in company, as witless of criticism as of guile. We will go South, even into the desolations of the Camargue, where no one would think of hunting for us, and, when you will, return leisurely by way of Orange and Fifine’s nest to Paris. Say it is settled.”
But, womanlike, she would not yield at once. She was full of tremors and scruples—fears of our being discovered and followed, alarm for the unconventionality of the proceeding. I was even exasperated on one occasion into twitting her with her “piano-tuner.” “There is no danger,” I said, “comparable with that invited by you yourself when you chose to entertain, unknown to me, and in spite of your solemn undertaking, a venerable stranger with a chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole.”
She turned a little pale, I thought, at that, and, looking away, murmured indistinctly: “Madame Crussol allowed him to come up.”
“You mean it was not your doing. But he was admitted by you, was he not?”
Then she turned upon me, and broke out impulsively:—
“I would rather not say. Don’t ask me, Felix. If it was wrong, it shall not happen again.”
“How can I say if it was wrong? But if you have secrets from me, I will have none from you. I saw your mysterieux at the Opera-House the other night, Fifine. He was in the orchestra, and playing a violoncello.”
She looked positively scared for a moment; then her face changed, and she laughed, but tremulously.
“It is not my secret,” she said, “or I would tell you; I would indeed. Don’t be angry with me, Felix.”
“Angry, my dear child!” I protested. “I only wanted to impress upon you the comparative unreasonableness of your present scruples. Believe me, if you will, the risk entailed in our leaving Paris is nothing to that courted by you in remaining on and remaining subject to chance intrusions like that.”
“Yes,” she said, very submissively; “I daresay you are right.” But nevertheless it took days to coax and persuade her—until I gave it up in despair. And then she suddenly surrendered.
“So it is finally decided you will not come with me?” I said to her one morning.
“Yes, finally,” she answered.
“Then that will do, and I have no more to say.”
“O!” says Fifine, “I don’t want to prevent you talking about it, if it amuses you.”
“It doesn’t in the least. I am so sick of the subject that it has no longer the smallest interest for me.”
“Yet it is rather an attractive subject.”
“You don’t seem to find it so.”
“I should miss it, perhaps, being gone.”
“Fifine, will you come?”
“You remember what I said?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Not really? Are you sure?”
“On my—h’m!”
“It was ‘yes, finally,’ wasn’t it?”
“To what question?”
“Somehow I can’t remember further back than your last.”
“That was ‘will you come?’ Yes, finally, to that, then.” I rose instantly. “You will want a travelling dress of some sort. Give me a hint.”
“I never consented, Felix. You can’t dare to say I did. Something simple but chic—dark blue or stone-colour, would be the best, I think; but I can trust you with the choice.”
The choice put me to some pleasant pains, nevertheless; but I need not have disturbed myself. There are angles and angels; there are also women who adorn everything they put on, and those whom nothing adorns. With the memory of Marion fresh upon me, I could only bask in serene contemplation of Fifine’s management of material no better and no more effective than that so injuriously misused by my step-sister. It was just a question of self-valuing versus self-spiting femininity. One would be a woman in accordance with, the other, in defiance of, the masculine ideal. Marion scorned sartorial recommendations; Fifine did not. Which is the vainer, do you think, the woman who believes she needs style and embellishment to make her attractive, or the woman who believes in her own perfect sufficiency without either? Even with the hat, it was less a question of what was worn than how. I would have backed my Provençale to make quite an endearing feature of the amorphous basin with which Marion had elected to bonnet herself.
However, if Marion was an angle, Fifine was certainly no angel. She was just a Parisian jeune personne—however she may have been born in Orange—with a natural faculty for making the best of an agreeable face and figure. And she was notdifficilein the matter of “changes.” She was going forth to acquit herself sensibly as the road-mate of a vagabond, and she was merciful as regarded that beast of burden. For I proposed for my reasonable shoulders nothing less and nothing more than a single rücksack, such as I had commonly used in my trampings, which strapped under my armpits and was of proportions elastic enough to accommodate sufficient, and an ounce or two over, for our needs.
And how in the end did we plan our escape? Why, by planning nothing at all, and simply walking out one quiet evening and making our way on foot to the Gare de Lyon. We locked the door of the flat behind us, locking in some pleasant and odd memories, and leaving the key with Madame Crussol, the sagacious and diplomatic, sallied into the street temerarious and tripped upon our way. I neither looked for nor encountered the least interference with our movements, and we reached the station in safety, where I took us second-class tickets for Nîmes. Then, having each of us gulped down a mazagran, hot and black, I bought a bottle of Sauterne and some long sandwiches, and we took our places in the train, only then, perhaps, a little nervous in inaction, and anxious for the whine of the horn that should dismiss us on our adventurous journey. It sounded at last, and we drew away into the night.
Whatis happiness? Psychologically, I suppose, it is a state of mind, contingent on some pleasing expectation and unhampered by physical disabilities. One cannot be happywiththe toothache, orwithoutthe ache of hope in pleasurable forthcomings. Fond anticipation, clear or nebulous, is of its very essence; the fruitful idea is a condition of its being. It must build to exist, like the reef-constructing serpulæ of the Pacific; and when it can build no longer, it ceases with its own productive capacity. It dies upon content, as the chosen companion of the queen-bee’s love-flight dies. Yet happiness is not content, though it may achieve it, as labour achieves sleep and life death. It is a thing of subtler texture, of more ardent constitution. One may feel content after a good meal eaten, thirst assuaged, a handsome deed accomplished, anxiety or physical pain relieved, or on rest following fatigue. But that is not happiness: happiness is to be experienced only through the creative and constructive processes of the mind. Following an idea, it may foresee its goal as a bright lodestar; but its essence lies in the pursuit rather than in the attainment of that end.
The happiest souls alive are little children at play. Watch them—oblivious to all material calls; recognising thirst and hunger only when reminded of them—intent upon the pursuit of an idea, which is not travestied by them in their adaptation of incongruous means to certain visualised ends, but is simply imaginatively rendered through the medium of such arbitrary “properties” as are at their service. Cannot onethinka locomotive out of those little circling cranks of arms, stamping feet, steam-spouting lips? If one cannot, then the unhappier dullard he; a thing not superior to childhood, but its spiritual outcast. There, before those sparkling engine-lamps of eyes, run the gleaming lines, on and on to Waterloo or Euston: the imp’s imagination is moving all things to his will, as sure as ever Orpheus drew with his golden lyre the Argo to the sea. He is happy conceiving, and developing his conception to its ultimate fruition. And, lo, then! his purpose fulfilled and the zest consummated, into chairs and tables resolve themselves once more the ships and castles and rolling-stock of that creative dreamland, and he is a little human boy again, sated with play, and with cravings in his tummy that call for just material content.
Yes, children know happiness; and so may the man know it, only in less irresponsible degree. He cannot feel the mortal and play the Robin Goodfellow; but he can read mysteries into Robin’s fen-candle enough to lure him on to ecstasy. In this alone is he the child’s spiritual inferior—that his imagination is less the master than the slave of his bodily condition. Only physically well people can feel happy, because it is impossible to associate sickness with the idea of achievement. On the other hand happiness is for the dying, because they are about to achieve death; and always for the loving, because they look to achieve life.
For my part—an impregnable constitution aiding—I have had my plenteous share of happiness in my time; but I have never yet recognised its title to itself save in the sense of happy productiveness. In pleasant idleness, in genial sterility, in drowsy blinkings at the sun, I have spent long periods of ease and satisfaction; but they were negative conditions, not to be quoted in the context of happiness. Happiness is an emotion and essentially procreative.
If, during these weeks I am now opening upon, happiness, supremer than any I had yet experienced, fell to my lot, it was in spite of any early consciousness on my part of a definite lodestar to my imagination. I do not say the star was not there: its light had not penetrated to me, that was all. It shone upon me, when it did, unforeseen and unexpected; and if at the last I had no strength to reject the gift it proffered, I must still plead that the use I came to make of it was wholly unpremeditated. Whatever of its nature at the outset I sought and pursued, lay in the prospect of introducing a fresh and appreciative mind to scenes and influences with which I myself was familiar, and of the new savour to be extracted from them through that rejuvenating medium. I wish to justify myself so far, and with only the one—perhaps eccentric—purpose already hinted at. For, after all, is it not absurd to credit the manumitted, the hyperphysical intelligence with no better than our own cramped and morbid understanding?
Do most people know, I wonder, that less-considered route from Paris, which takes one, by way of Nevers and Clermont-Ferrand, alongside the great hills of Auvergne and the Cevennes straight into the heart of the South? There are two reasons for preferring it before the more popular track on the left bank of the Rhone—the trains are far less crowded, and the view from their windows is generally superb. There is also a reason against; but that is conditional. You may find yourself hung up, at midnight, say, or worse, at some wayside station, with hours, maybe, to elapse before you can effect another stage of your journey. For a brief month or two of the year, however, a through train to Nîmes—supposing you cryptographist enough to discover it in theGuide Officiel des Voyageurs—stands at your service in the Gare de Lyon, timed to start at twenty or thereabouts of the clock. It was this train in which Fifine and I took our places, and by a signal stroke of good-fortune—for, as it happened, it was the very last night of the year on which it was to run.
We actually had two compartments of a corridor carriage to ourselves. Think of that, ye crowded cattle of the Lyon-Marseille route! The obliging Chef de train, tenderly and properly susceptible to the claims of beauty, put them, if rather superfluously, at our disposal, and without—I will believe it—an ulterior motive. Thereafter we travelled, as it were, in a two-roomed cottage.
At the beginning Fifine was a little shy of me. She sat aloof and monosyllabic in her corner, as we threaded the shining maze of lines through the City and its environs, and the great sheds and bridges leapt past, and we ran up the scattered outposts of lights until, gradually attenuating, they ceased in gulfs of windy darkness. But as the train increased its speed, whirling behind from its iron tyres the last dust of the town, a corresponding exhilaration seemed to wake in her, and, putting away all fearfulness and constraint, she sat up and clasped her hands.
“It is real, then,” she said; “and I have actually done it. How wicked I feel; and how happy!”
“Do you, Fifine?” I said. “That is a fine vindication of my insistence, and a good augury for the fruits of it. And I feel happy too. Supposing we feast our felicity—pile Pelion on Olympus, as it were, and so make transport of our bodily content?”
I produced the provender. As I was uncorking the bottle, I noticed that Fifine’s eyes were fixed upon me, with an odd look in them that made mine dilate. I stopped half-way in my task. “What is it?” I said.
She bent forward, and just rested her fingers a moment on my knee.
“Felix,” she said, “you—you are going to be my good elder brother, are you not?”
There was a shadow of emotion in her voice—almost like entreaty.
“Why do you ask?” I said. “Is some devil suddenly revealed in me, with this” (I lifted the bottle) “for his insidiousprocureur? I will throw it out of the window, if you like, here and now.”
“No,” she said, with a smile a little wistful—“don’t. Only—” she sat back, with a sigh—“I think—perhaps—I will not drink any wine.”
I rose very soberly, put the bottle in the rack overhead, and sat down again.
“There it is,” I said. “The Comtesse de Beaurepaire was quite right in suggesting that reflection to me. There is something demoralising to common natures in the mere thought of alcohol.”
“Don’t—please!” said Fifine distressfully. She leaned forward once more, with a little appealing motion of her hands.
“Don’t what?” said I.
“Call me that—attribute such motives to me. I—I did not mean you; but——”
“If you did not mean me, that is enough, then. There are only we two together here, Fifine, and I have no intention, I can assure you, of hunting through the corridor for a pot-companion.”
“No,” she said. “Please get down the wine again.”
“But——”
“I am tired and thirsty! I don’t think I can eat my supper without.Please, brother Felix!”
We made, after all, a merry meal of it, as the train, crashing past the sentry lights of the last suburban stations, sped shrieking into the black and unknown vasts beyond.
“It is like being put, with one’s billet,” said Fifine, “into one of those rolling balls you see in shops; and at Nîmes we shall stop, and the cashier will take us out.”
“Our ball will have a window in it before then,” I answered; “and we shall see things as we roll.”
She came and sat by me presently—for convenience’ sake, she said. It was easier so to make a common cause of our feasting. By and by, her speech began to drowse a little, and she caught herself back, more and more, from declining upon my shoulder. At last I said, resolutely: “This is good-night, m’amie. You will lie down here, now, and I will go and smoke in the next compartment. When daylight comes I will call to you.”
She let me make her comfortable, with the rücksack under her head, and our one rug over her for warmth. Then, like a rosy sleepy child, she smiled up at me.
“Good-night, dear brother.”
“Good-night, little sister.”
She made an indistinct movement with her lips, sighed, turned her head on one side, and closed her eyes.
I do not know how long I sat at my window in the empty neighbouring compartment, smoking, and looking with vacant gaze on the rush of impalpable things without. Gradually, as I stared, the gliding telegraph wires, sleekly gleaming past in modulations of high and low, resolved themselves in my brain into an endless stave of music, with posts for bars and insulators for notes, the gathered consonance of which, entering into the rhythmic clack of the wheels, seemed to leap into a wild chorus at each recurrent bar-line, and thence to subside and rise again to vault the next. Weariful to madness grew that rocking chaunt, with its flapping regular punctuations, and the stunning prospect of my being doomed to an eternity of it was already beginning to settle hideously on my soul, when of a sudden the strain tailed off into a hollow drum of thunder, which I recognised curiously for the wash and fall of far-away breakers. Walking towards those, and always to hear them receding, I tripped, stumbled, and sank at once into oblivion. And thereafter consciousness was mine but at long intervals, when the grinding of brakes, jarring into the booming rhythm of things, spoke of stoppages at provincial stations, and one’s lids were lifted to a heavy knowledge of shooting lights, and shadowy forms drifting, and a pallid fog of steam condensing in the cold air, and one’s ears resentfully awakened to a sound of voices, hooting sometimes, or singing, and potential of disgusting intrusions on one’s privacy. Yet nobody disturbed us; and in the end I slept so soundly that I came, after all, to be the laggard.
It was Fifine’s soft voice calling to me that roused me at length from my stupor. It was clear daylight, and she was standing, glad and fresh, in the outer corridor, looking on the gracious panorama of hills and streams which unwound itself before her. Her hat was off; the rug was wrapped about her shoulders; a strand of hair hung over her slumberous eyes. She made a very picture of dear disorder.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, in a low satisfied voice. “O, I’m glad we came!”
We had awakened, no doubt, to the cream of it all—those long passages of the mountains after the monotonous flats were spent. The sun had no power as yet to dissipate the ponds of mist which lay in the hollows and choked the deep ravines; but that was only to have our strange land half lapped in enchantment, and to try to penetrate with delight the mysteries of its gleaming floors. They were shy and sly, those mysteries—here, an up-reaching shadow just seen and snatched away; there, white things that moved and vanished; everywhere sparkles of frosty green, and over all, billowing remotely, or frowning imminent, the slopes and scarps of mighty hills. High up in the air we ran, through thundering gorges and over wideflung valleys, and always to perpetual change and perpetual beauty. The railway took the line of least resistance, following the conformations of the range; and yet with such obstacles had Nature striven to thwart its builders, we were hardly ever out of one tunnel before we were into another. All the way, for scores of miles, they pierced the vast and rocky buttresses, and once, when within a given time we tried to strike an average, we gave up impatiently, having counted into the third dozen, and dismissed the silly effort. The line of the hundred tunnels we called it; and indeed I believe that number is but a fraction short of the truth.
Now, as the sun gained strength, the scene, fired by it, grew out to us like a writing on white paper in invisible ink. Soft iridescences were resolved and identified for flowering pastures or fruiting trees; hanging woods detached themselves from clouds; tiny farms, and steadings, and little foreshortened churches were confessed, each in its green place, for what they were; and the cattle, black, or white, or dappled like half-ripe chestnuts, walked on visible hoofs. Sometimes turbulent floods were seen crashing far beneath us; sometimes placid pools mirrored the blue; but most beautiful were the shallow bends of streams, where, tumbling garrulously over white stones and silt, the little broken waters took on the most heavenly hues of lazulite and aquamarine, streaked with transparent green.
Fifine was enraptured with it all. She had first risen, it appeared, about the time of Prades St. Julien, and had feasted her eyes on that old picturesque monastery-crowned scarp, with its calvary and flower-pot tiled buildings, with the delighted relish of an unspoiled appetite. And thence had followed a very procession of enchantments—mediæval strongholds set high on lonely crags, and appearing above the ground-fog like islands in a quiet sea; quaint church-towers, surmounted by bells in wrought-iron cages; turret-gated farms; mystic townlets, seen through the gaps of hills, hanging pearly and opalescent in an amber haze; and everywhere, for foreground, rock and forest and river and mountain, always changing, always unfolding new beauties, spied from a giddy altitude. Twenty times had she been moved to wake me to share in her innocent delight, and twenty times refrained, from timidity or pity for my weariness.
Well, I felt rewarded now. Her enthusiasm was so whole, so fresh, so lovely infectious, it justified, I thought, my happiest predictions. It seemed a golden interval that stretched between now and our return.
At Langogne we got out to drink coffee at the extempore buffet—and thereby hangs a tale. It had chanced that, pacing the corridor of our carriage once or twice during the earlier hours of my waking, I had spied an uncouth figure rolled up on the seat of an adjacent compartment. There was nothing remarkable in that, nor in the fact that this stranger, by evidence of a knapsack resting in the rack above his head, was a foot-wayfarer like myself. The peculiarity—for there was one—lay, as presently revealed to us, in the creature’s appearance alone. For, as we approached Langogne, we heard him bestirring and uncoiling himself, with a sound of vast stretchings and yawnings; and suddenly he was in the doorway. I had a glimpse of him, wild-haired and red-eyed; and then, as we alighted for our twelve-minutes’ respite, he followed us out. We encountered again at the buffet, and he drank his coffee quite close to us, his lips protruded abstractedly, his eyes staring inflammatory over the rim of his glass at Fifine. Observing which, I took note of him.
He was rather a short man, with a suspicion of a rounded paunch; and he was dressed in a grey waistcoat, going very high under the throat, loose grey trousers, inclining to the pegtop, and a baggy alpaca coat with brass buttons. A weeping bow of black silk, knotted into what we should call an Oxford collar, not over-clean, dropped five inches down his chest, and his head for the moment was hatless, displaying a huge crop of ginger-brown hair, rather wild than long. An untidy chin-beard, or Napoleon, and a free moustache, raked up a l’Henri Quatre, both of the same hue, somewhat over-clothed a small face a little poodle-like in suggestion; but the utter self-complacency of the creature’s bearing was a thing to marvel over and worship. He strutted, he straddled—though displaying thereby some weakness of knee; he preened his coffee-damped moustache: “Look at me,” he seemed to be saying; “make the most of this accident, which gives you henceforth the claim to boast to your friends of having once in your life rubbed shoulders with the renowned, the incomparable Carabas Cabarus!”
For that, as we came to learn presently, was his name—theCabarus, the latter-day Provençal songbird, the poet of “native woodnotes wild,” the gallant, the amorous, the very last of the troubadours. His eyes—large, watery, prominent, of a pale blue, and really expressive of some mystic melancholy—had already, over the brink of his glass, marked down, and made a provisional capture of, Fifine. Henceforth he walked, pegtops and all, “in aureate dawns of ecstasy, his rhythmic heart one lyric.”
Fifine happily so far was unconscious of her conquest, unconscious even of her privilege. Lapped in scenic wonders, I think she had no eyes for human. Back in our carriage, with hardly a glance vouchsafed to the stranger, she withdrew to reorder her ruffled plumes, while I returned to my post of observation in the corridor. But never suppose for one instant that, emotion once wakened in him, Carabas was the sort of man to suffer its incontinent stifling. Obstacles were but as zests to this ardent soul, so confident in his equipments, both physical and mental. Without a moment’s hesitation he took his place beside me at the window.
“A satisfying prospect, Monsieur,” he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, as though he himself were responsible for the scenery.
“Entirely so,” I answered.
“Monsieur’s first visit, perhaps, to this part of the country?”
“By no means.”
“But to Madame, Monsieur’s nouvelle mariée, it is new?”
“I have no wife.”
“Ah? To Monsieur’s sister, perhaps?”
“To my sister, as you say. Yes, it is new to her.”
“Bon! I give myself credit for my penetration.”
But not for your amazing impudence, I thought. Yet the wonder amused me. Turning to peer unblushingly into our compartment, he caught sight of the rücksack.
“Voilà!” he said. “The snail’s pack, containing all his equipment.”
“Equipment for two,” said I, inwardly tickled.
“So?” he commented; and gave the Gallic shrug. “It is to double the burden and halve the loneliness. I, too, Monsieur, carry my all upon my back like the snail; but, hélas! with me it is the one burden and the undivided loneliness. Monsieur is a happy man.”
He did not look unhappy, himself; I think he was pleased with his own representation of his solitariness; but he thought well to sigh, and immediately thereon to check that ebullition of secret grief, as if to hide it from me.
“You travel together?” he said. “By what itinerary?”
“To Nîmes,” I said shortly; “thence possibly to Arles.”
“By a wonder,” he answered, “that is my own destined route. Without doubt this is a providence to bring us better acquainted.”
It had not been his route, I could have sworn, until that moment; and at that moment Fifine joined us, unseen by the stranger, whose eyes were suddenly riveted upon a man issuing from a woodside with a gun on his arm.
“Sacré chien!” he growled, in a vibrant undertone: “behold the assassin, bent on his cursed mission to still God’s music!”
“Monsieur is no sportsman?” asked Fifine’s soft voice behind us. A child of the fraternal Republic, she had no thought of that reserve with strangers which marks our insular prejudices; yet, I confess, regarding her social traditions, this unaffected bonhomie of hers surprised me a little. Monsieur whipped round with a start and his eyes alight. He bowed, posed, stuck one arm akimbo and flourished the other.
“As Apollo was a sportsman, Mademoiselle,” he said, “so am I—to capture music as it flies, not, like that murdering caitiff, to destroy it for the indulgence of a base material appetite. Alas, the pretty, pretty becs-fins! See them marshalled on a dish, each corpse a rapturous song, to be lost in the stifling entrails of some pampered glutton. Think next, Monsieur, when you eat a lark, what melody has perished in you.”
“It sings in me, Monsieur; I know that,” I said. “I will take what comfort I can of the thought.”
He turned his shoulder to me, with a disdainful “pouf.” “Mademoiselle,” he said, “will comprehend.”
“Is Monsieur a bird-catcher?” said Fifine.
I thought he would have exploded. He rose on his toes, smacked his chest once, turned, walked away, and came back again.
“I,” he said, stabbing his diaphragm with his forefinger, “am Carabas Cabarus!”
A rather painful silence ensued, during which he scanned our embarrassed faces for rapture; even for intelligence. Then, failing the expected response, he condescended, with an audible sigh, to a patient repudiation of the slander.
“No, Mademoiselle, I amnota bird-catcher. You will hear of me—perhaps—where you are going; you will hear of me—possibly. The ideal I follow has no material form—at least so it has seemed to me until this moment.” (Fifine might here accept the obvious inference which his eyes expressed.) “It descends to me from voices in the clouds; it rises in the scent of flowers; I see far away, against a sky of milky agate, a low moon hung under a branch, pale and yellow as a citron fruit, and, as I advance to seize it, it eludes me, rising like a golden bubble. Sometimes it is the song of birds; sometimes the fall of water; sometimes I see it browsing on inaccessible shelves of rock, the shining goat, the chêvre d’or of our old, old haunted land. But, whence or wherever, it is not for me—that illusive ideal, that spirit of abstract beauty, which, pursuing for ever, I shall find at last only in the grave.”
His voice broke a little. Adding—“Unless I am for once mistaken, how divinely, as to the human inaccessibility of my goal!” he put an artistic period to his rhapsody, and, bowing to Fifine, turned away and vanished into his compartment, from which he did not again issue.
Fifine and I looked at one another; her lips quivered and her eyelids; she put a hand to my mouth, and hurried me out of sight, where she caught at the breast of my coat, and buried her face and her laughter in it.
“Is he mad?” she whispered. “I thought at first he might be a spy, who had followed us all the way.”
She could not be defrauded of her view, however; and soon we were at the corridor window again. I think it was near Chamborigaud that we passed, perhaps, the most impressive stage of our journey, looking down from a stupendous viaduct that swept the confines of a mighty valley. Thence we quickly ran out of the mountains, and at Alais—that town of commerce and briquettes, the dirty tabloids with which they feed and befoul the French locomotives—we were fairly in the plains. The run thence to Nîmes, which we reached at some half hour after midday, was scenically tame by comparison, though it initiated Fifine in some characteristic aspects of the South. For here, extending for leagues without the city, are low vineyards in profusion, and countless olive gardens, and cypresses, and wastes of tamarisk and juniper all dotted with little red-roofed villas—a country more Roman than Rome.
Well, we walked with our knapsack to the Hôtel de l’Europe—an old building huddled away in a corner of the town, into whose angle is fitted a small public garden which contains a statue of Daudet and some plane-trees, the upper branches of which, dry and mosquito-infested, almost brushed the windows of our bedrooms. And so was accomplished the first chapter of our adventure.
ThroughoutProvence and Languedoc there are accredited songsters, severally honoured in the districts which gave them birth. They may be tillers of the soil or owners of it; propriétaires or ploughboys—it is no matter: they are expected and accepted quite simply and seriously, much as our own village folk-lorists are accepted as the legitimate inheritors of an age-long tradition. They continue a succession never broken since the days of de Borneil, Daniel, Riquier, and those other glorious primitives who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, exalted the dialect of Romance to a metrical art. Yet, though they wear the shoes of their lyrical forefathers, these latter-day minstrels are to be likened for the most part rather to the jongleurs, or hired singing-men, who were used to voice their masters’ productions, than to the producers themselves, the genuine troubadours who originated the songs. They play, or at best do little more than ring new changes on, antique themes. Still, now and again, a solitary figure, on whom the Paraclete of ancient inspiration would appear in some light measure to have laid hands, will stand out from the rest, and to that extent that his fame will presently enlarge from the purely local to the departmental; and, proportionately, perhaps, his vanity. They are “throw-backs,” in the true poetic sense.
Such, I take it, had been the case with this Carabas Cabarus. He was quite a natural bard, individual in his way, and with a real gift for extempore. To do him that justice is right, for all, I think, the admission redounds to my credit; for the man came to be an entire nuisance to me. His skin was as thick as his vanity was sensitive. He seemed to have a congenital incapacity for diffidence, as regarded both himself and his wares. It never occurred to him that he could possibly bede tropanywhere.
Well, Fifine and I, having viewed our bedrooms and hurried through a necessary toilette, descended hunger-sharp to the midday meal. Joyful in the novelty of all things, Fifine was prepared to find ambrosia in the thin broth with a sop of toast in it, and the divine savour of the chèvre d’or himself in tough and smoky cutlets. But even she could not idealise the “vin compris.” Throughout Provence that way lies disenchantment, and the traveller who would keep glowing in his breast the comfortable lamp of romance should by no means drink the wine, the red in particular, which is invariably provided free of charge. It has a peculiar rankness in it which penetrates through all the acidity, and a single glassful is enough to quench the hottest visionary ardour. I laughed, seeing the face my comrade pulled, and called for the carte-des-vins. One has to pay in these matters nothing or a good deal; but the extravagance is a necessary one, and I had come prepared against it.
After déjeuner we sallied forth at ease to see the amphitheatre and the Maison Carrée. It was opening October—perhaps, saving June, the ideal Provençal month—and one could bask in the sunshine without a thought of enervation.
“Where are you going to take me to first?” said Fifine.
“To the chemist’s,” I answered, “for a box of pastilles-moustiques. You must burn one by your bedside, Fifine, if you do not want to come down to-morrow with a face like a plum-pudding. And you must shut your window before turning up the light. I marked those trees close outside, and I tell you what I know.”
It was a necessary precaution; and we had just effected it, and were issuing from the shop, when we saw an open fly coming down the street towards us. I don’t know what moved me to the irrelevant reflection, but I said suddenly: “I wonder what has become of Carabas Cabarus. Thank the powers at least we have givenhimthe slip.”
The carriage came on, drawn by a horse with a most curious action. He advanced down the incline towards us, flinging his legs inwards with a sort of jolly buccaneering roll which was quite captivating—a free nonchalant big-boned hack, who took the world swaggeringly, though conscious of bowling at his tail no better than a mouldy voiture-de-place. And as the thing approached us, there was Carabas seated inside it.
He was the same, and yet not the same—he had a hat on. Now, taking him all in all, his raiment and his pose, I should have expected here the right Mistral finish, the typical head-gear of the Provençal peasant, limp black felt, and very slightly raked. Instead, to my exhilaration was exhibited a mottled straw hat with an absurdly narrow brim, and a little tail of black ribbon waggling aft of it in the breeze. It was flattened down upon the abundant mane, and I will not swear was not kept in place by an elastic under the chin.
He recognised us, and waved his hand—even with a suggestion of a kiss blown to Fifine. It needed a Frenchman at once to wear that hat and blow that kiss. If you ask why, you have missed one side of the Frenchman—his innocence. I laughed out as I turned away.
“What are you laughing at?” said Fifine.
“The hat,” said I.
“What was the matter with it?” she asked.
I laughed again.
“Nothing was the matter with it, of course. It was a charming hat. You might have worn it yourself.”
She looked puzzled.
“Well,” she said. “But it was funny, wasn’t it, his appearing just at that moment. ‘Talk of the wolf, and you’ll see the tip of his tail.’”
“I did,” said I, “and it wagged. But, Fifine, bear what I say in mind. We have not seen the last of Carabas. He has been hunting us through all the Hôtels and restaurants of Nîmes, and he is about to run us to earth.”
“Well, it is something to be so sought after for our young attractions,” was all she answered, and we continued our way to the amphitheatre.
In the grip of that vast relic a spirit of glowing abstraction seemed to settle upon my comrade. As we sat high up among the shattered tiers, her eyes were the only utterers of the dreams that moved her. I watched them for some time in silence.
“What are you thinking of, Fifine?” I said at last.
She sighed and turned to me.
“What did he mean by that golden goat?” she asked irrelevantly.
“He? Who?” I exclaimed. “That Cabarus? It seems you have made a conquest of him to some purpose. Why, child, he meant nothing more than an old Provençal superstition, which you will fine related in Daudet’sLettres de mon Moulin, in theLegendesof Charles-Roux, and elsewhere. The goat is merely the symbol of that unquenchable something in us which refuses to be satisfied with the material and the finite. However high or far we may reach, there is always something vague and elusive to be sought higher or further. We find that mysterious object typified in the marsh candle which Jacques Bonhomme follows through the mire; in the jewelled cup buried at the foot of the rainbow; in the sangreal, and in a host of other fanciful forms. We all follow it, one way or the other.”
“Yes,” said Fifine. Her chin was propped upon her hand; her eyes looked across the gleaming spaces of sunlight; she rested content with that monosyllable.
“If appearances are to be trusted,” said I, “you may flatter yourself that, for the moment at least,youare M. Cabarus’s golden goat.”
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little impatient “allons donc!” then turned suddenly and looked at me.
“And what is yours, Felix?”
“My what? My present ideal?”
“Yes.”
“Bouille-abaisse,” I answered promptly.
“What is that?” she demanded.
“It is a Provençal dish. I came here to eat it.”
“Will you not be serious, please?”
“It is perfectly true, Fifine. I shall not be happy till you have tasted it.”
“O! So your ideal is to gratify me. That is something, then.”
“It is everything, I think. And now it is your turn to confess your ideal.”
She looked at me very steadily. “It is to see you realise yours.”
“Bouille-abaisse?”
“Something,” she said, ignoring my comment—“some dream which you and that man, however much you may laugh at and despise him, may share in common. I cannot say what it is, but I can trace your pursuit of it through all of your works that I have seen. You are shy and proud, mon ami; you affect to laugh at the heroic in yourself; you meet the rebuffs of the world with a pretence of their being justified towards incompetence. But all the time you know the world is wrong, though the great in you will not condescend to parly with it as to your merits. Better, you think, to give up the struggle, to cease your pursuit of the inaccessible, and, falling into line with your detractors, hunt for bouille-abaisse, as the sort of perfection we can all understand and attain. I would sooner be a dog and sniff for truffles.”
I sat silent for awhile, a little surprised, a little amused; then answered quietly:—
“The inaccessible is the inaccessible, Fifine. Perhaps it takes a grown man to find that out.”
“You might as well say,” she replied, “that the stars are not to be searched because they are beyond our reach.”
“Well, what has astronomy done for us?”
“It has made astronomers.”
“A musty lot.”
“I think they are the finest people in the world—spirits almost more than men. Think of their uplifted vigils, night after night, while we are sleeping earthbound.”
“Shall I be an astronomer, then, to please you?”
“You will please me by being yourself, by following your own particular star. You know, Felix—yes, you do, that the real ecstasy is in the pursuit, into whatever pains and difficulties it may lead you. I want to see you great, and greatness is all in endeavour, because there can never be achievement.”
“M’amie,” I said very gravely, “what have I done to bring upon myself this lecture?”
“You have done nothing.”
“Ah! I see—that is it. You think me idle.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, perhaps I am. And so you take this accident of Carabas Cabarus, with his goats and golden bubbles, to belabour me for my sins.”
“He set me thinking, Felix; I admit it. And there is something in this place, too, that makes me think.”
“A ruin is a poor illustration of the value of endeavour.”
“I think it is the very best. It shows how greatness would not be debarred itself although it wrought with perishable things in a perishable world.”
I sat silent again; then turned suddenly upon her.
“So that isyourideal,” I said—“to see me passionate in the pursuit of what you think ismine—or should be. Have you none, then, for yourself?”
She looked down and away, tracing a pattern with her fingers in the crumbled stone.
“I do not quite say that,” she said, in a low voice.
“But you are willing to sacrifice it for the other? That is very unselfish of you.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is very unselfish of me.”
There was something so strange in her tone that I looked at her in surprise. What was her meaning? What was that mysterious aspiration of hers which she would so gladly forego, provided my self-realisation were contingent on its sacrifice? And then, still looking away, she said a stranger thing.
“Do you think men of genius ought to marry?”
“How can I speak for them?” I answered.
“I say you can and shall.”
“Very well, then,” I replied. “I think, if you ask me, that they should not. A man’s imagination is his mistress. He cannot keep his mistress in the same house with his wife. They would be sure to quarrel, and naturally the mistress, having no orthodox title to remain, would be the one to go.”
“But—but, supposing it no question of a wife?”
“Then, it is no question at all. Love makes no contracts and is bound by none. It is worldly policy that does all that part. Do you think I would debar my man of genius that best stimulus to his imagination—an unfettered passion? It is all the difference between the golden goat and the poor Billy tethered to a stake in the backyard.”
She sat quiet for a long time after that, her face still averted, her fingers playing with the stones. Then suddenly she stirred, and, with a sigh, rose to her feet.
“Are we not wasting our time?” she said. “I feel that there is so much to see. And yet it is so beautiful here.”
We were quite alone in the vast amphitheatre. As she stood up, the picture she made—her face, half in glow half in shadow, the vivid life of her contrasting with the golden ruins of the walls—wrought with such ardour upon my imagination, that I felt that, if I failed in that moment to take advantage of the creative impulse its beauty awoke in me, I deserved to be writ down for ever more the emasculate cypher of her strictures. So very quietly I got out the block, pencils, and a handful of coloured crayons which I made it my constant practice to carry about with me.
“Fifine,” I said, “don’t move: stand just as you are. I am going to immortalise you.”
She gave a little start; just glanced at me; then, neither stirring nor posing, obeyed. I was in happy pin: mood, model and place were all in one luminous harmony, and the thing came out as I had conceived it, automatically, almost without effort. It took me but a few minutes.
“There,” I exclaimed. “Nemausea of the golden amphitheatre! What do you think of yourself?”
Her face flushed up as she looked.
“You have made a pagan of me,” she said—“or the stones have. Perhaps they shall hold you excused for the little freedoms you have taken. But how clever you are, mon ami; and—and how forgiving to me!”
There was a queer little sound in her voice, and she turned away rather hurriedly. I said nothing; but when, having disposed and repocketed my effects, I got up and joined her, the signs of some emotion were still visible on her face.
“Are all the ruins about here of this lovely colour?” she asked, though with an effort, I could see.
“Throughout Provence,” I answered. “The sunset of dead Rome lingers upon them all. They stand up in its afterglow, very old and very quiet, the last great witnesses to the glory of its past.”
“The glory!” she murmured, rather awfully. “But think of the things that were done here! O, how could they! To build it—this, for just a human shambles, and make it beautiful—one huge great torture chamber, and open to the sky—and God!”
“No, that it was not,” I said. “There are the sockets for its awning-poles still existing. Come, and I will show them to you.”
“I should not like to stand here in the moonlight,” she said, not noticing me. “It makes me think of the Towers of Silence. Felix, have you ever seen, or read about them?”
“No. What are they?”
“I once came across a description of them. They are the charnel houses of the Parsees, the sun-worshippers—great lonely buildings, on the tops of which they lay their dead to be eaten by vultures. So in this Tower of Silence here the human vultures once sat and gloated, feasting on the carnage. And they, too, worshipped the sun.”
“Very far from being a tower of silence sometimes,” I answered. “You should see it in high festival, Fifine, when they have bull-fights—the real thing, you know—à la mort. No need, then, to reconstruct the past, as you are doing; it stands in sanguinary evidence before you. But these are morbid dreams, young lady. Rome was not all circuses, nor is Nîmes allCourses de Taureaux. I shall have to confine you to the boulevards Gambetta and Victor Hugo and their like if you take to this sort of thing.”
Fifine laughed, and we made our way again into the streets, on exploration bent. Most that was to be seen we saw, and near dusk rested in the beautiful gardens of the Fountain, and drank iced grenadine through straws under the broken shadows of the Temple of Diana. Then we returned to the hôtel in time for the seven o’clock dinner.
As usual in these coffee-rooms, there was the one long table and the many smaller supernumerary. We secured a minor affair in a corner, from which we could command a view of the company. That was fairly numerous—commercial gents mostly—and I confess that the obvious admiration it betrayed for my companion was a source of some secret gratification to me. True, my own interest in her was not a vested one, so to speak; but it is always agreeable to command, even in the abstract, the control of a covetable thing. It had perhaps never occurred to me to regard her so much in that light as now when I recognised myself for the subject of general masculine envy. Fifine, as an admired personal possession, went up fifty per cent. in my estimation—that was only human nature.
We had reached to the chicken and salad course, when Carabas came in. We both saw him at once, and I turned to my comrade, with a snigger.
“Quand je vous le disais, Mam’selle?”
“Hush!” she said: “Don’t attract his attention.”
But he could not very well have imposed himself on our narrow quarters. In point of fact he did not see us directly, but established himself, with something of an air, at the opposite end of the long table. Then, as, tucking with protruded jaw his napkin under his chin, his eyes wandered abroad, he suddenly spied us, and instantly posed for his part. He invited Fifine quite obviously to observe the deference with which the waiters hurried to attend him, and the hauteur with which he accepted or waved aside their ministrations. “Witness,” he said in effect, “the honour in which I am held, and realise, in shame and humiliation, the outrage you perpetrated on a famed child of genius in likening him to a bird-catcher!”
Thenceforth, if he did not eat nicely, he ate consciously, not so much with an eye to Fifine as with a two-fold stare. He appeared oblivious of my presence; he actually, in mute pantomime, drank to her in a glass of that execrable vin de table; though I regarded him with cool amused eyes, he ignored me as entirely as though I were a mere indifferent intruder on the private understanding established between them. And, when we got up to go, he lifted his glass again, and ogled her hideously over the rim of it.