And as it toiled, so did we, atoms perspiring in the dust. The little farms, the patches of vine, the olive and the mulberry gardens in the valley below, sunk ever deeper and deeper as we laboured up and on. There was heavy green on the Titan groups across the glen; they were furred with thick pelt of juniper, and spike-lavender, and bushy rosemary. But on our side all appeared near naked rock, clambering by way of scarp and shelf and overhanging boulder to a giddy altitude, where it broke against the sky in a wave of jagged masonry, hardly to be distinguished from the mountain which gave it birth.
There clung the shattered stronghold, a city in itself, still rooted in the rock from which, manured by blood, it first grew rich and lusty. It bred fierce hawks and gladsome swallows once; it breeds them still. The old life contest between the gentle and the cruel is not ended there, but Berald, in the form of a hen-harrier, will still swoop on the little dove-wife Françoiso to drive his cruel beak into her heart. The hill of colossal ruin, like his wood to the melancholy lover in “Maud,” remains “a world of plunder and prey,” though its vivid antique spirits, bad and good, be all harlequinaded in these days into their fairy similitudes. Do you seek Guilhem de Beauvoire, who walled up his own mother for her sins, or Raymond de Seillans, who made his wife eat unknowingly of the heart of her lover? Turn this stone or that, and you will likely find them squatting in the shape of little scorpions underneath. There, in the sanctimonious form of a praying mantis, stands a false priest—rapacious, hypocritical. And as for the frailties—Briande, Béregère, Iseult, Bels, Midons, Etiennette, and what not—are not their very names become butterflies, as pretty and as light, on which the spider and the lizard will feed if they get the chance.
The lovely things came down and looped about our heads as we climbed on—commas, like baroque tortoiseshells, pale clouded yellows, Bath whites for every one of which, if netted in England, a collector would have given a small fortune. They danced before us, like giddy laughing girls, taking us, no doubt, with our pack, for some wandering jongleur and his commère—perhaps Raymond Ferraud himself and the beautiful Alète de Mauleon—and beckoning us on to the appreciative Courts of les Baux. And indeed we were only suffering to attain them, magnificent as the prospect about us was.
However, for myself, I was now on familiar ground, and could calculate the remainder way. It ran up to the valley end, where, above a tumbled sea of boulders, rose a sheer wall of rock, against which it appeared to fling itself and cease. But in reality, short of the cliff it turned on a sharp curve like that of a hairpin, and, mounting thence at a steeper gradient, brought us in brief space to the village eyrie and the comfortable hostelry de la Reine Jeanne.
We were glad and content to have reached our goal at last. It looked an unpretentious house from the outside—painted stone grey, and entered up a little double-sided flight of steps put parallel with its front. But, within, everything, though on a modest scale, was bright and clean, and the slim young landlord as inviting as his surroundings. He saluted us with cheery hospitality (Madame his wife was, alas, indisposed—her first!), and answered our request for rooms with the smiling alacrity of a right host. He could speak some English too, having served his term as waiter in a Marseilles hotel—which seemed rather wonderful in that context of wild rocks and praying mantises—and was altogether rather an admirable Boniface to have alighted on in the wilderness. There was only a single difficulty, he said—which after all was doubtless not insuperable—the difficulty of accommodation. The house, as one might understand, was of limited capacities, and circumstances had further curtailed those. There was but one exclusive bedroom, and that was already bespoken. What remained consisted of two rooms in one—that was to say, as it were, a bedroom, and bed-dressing-room, but with a door between. To leave the second, it was necessary to go through the first. Still, if Monsieur, and—
Monsieur filled up the tentative hiatus in the manner which occurred to him as the most tactical and uncompromising: “And his belle-sœur”—and turned to Fifine:—
“What do you say, m’amie?”
I was just apprehensive that she might flush and look down; but I did her intelligence an injustice.
“Il ne choisit pas qui emprunte,” she said, turning away, with a little laugh. “It is either that, I suppose, or the troglodyte caves” (a number of which I had pointed out to her by the road). “Let us go and see the rooms anyhow.”
She exclaimed with pleasure when shedidsee them—not on account of their really luxurious comfort and cleanliness, but because of the view from their windows. And truly it was magnificent, looking, as we did, from the back of the house over the way we had come, and the whole extended panorama of the valley.
“It must be the little room for me,” said Fifine steadily in a moment.
“As you will,” I answered.
“Obviously,” she said, “as you will arrive later to bed, and leave it earlier than I.”
The landlord was all gratification.
“It is, after all, just a matter of sentiment,” said he; “and there is no particular virtue in a corridor. Still, if Mademoiselle prefers it, M. Cabarus, who announced your forthcoming, would doubtless exchange with Mademoiselle.”
Fifine turned to me.
“Would you like, Felix?”
“No,” I answered shortly. “I don’t fancy a poet for a neighbour. He would talk in his sleep. It will do very well as it stands.”
I left her to her toilette, while I descended with the landlord. There was a small smoking-room off the salle-à-manger, and we sat there and talked together over a bottle of wine. The man was new to me, and, comparatively, to the place; and the one fault I had to find with him was that he was a modern product, and as such anxious to popularise his position. Still, if that ambition spurred him to no worse than he had already effected, it gave one small ground for complaint. Trim comfort and fresh white sheets were by no means regrettable innovations in les Baux.
“This M. Cabarus,” I said presently, “is a great man with you, I suppose?”
He laughed a little—actually. He was not born Provençal, you see; and his reverence for its traditions was a matter of policy.
“He brings custom, Monsieur,” he said. “Yes, he is a very important man to me.”
“Does he often visit here?”
“I should think, Monsieur, there is no one individual more constant. The hills inspire him, it is there he most seeks his beautiful chimeras; he knows every foot of them; he is out on them now. You are familiar with them yourself, perhaps—the Roman Camp, the Val d’Enfer, the Château above us? You should take Mademoiselle up to the Camp opposite. It is there one obtains one’s finest view of the ruins.”
“Ah, yes! I will take her, maybe; but it is a long climb for her, and I do not know the way very well. These chimeras, then—what are they?”
Again the landlord shrugged out a little smile:—
“What are they? I do not know; you do not know; he does not know. The Almighty He produces everything out of nothing: M. Cabarus he produces nothing out of everything, and spends all his life hunting for what does not exist. It is the way with poets. Someday, perhaps, he will walk over a precipice in the fog, and find what he seeks at the bottom. It is certain he will never reach it else.”
But the virtue lay in the chase, I concluded. That was where Fifine would have discovered it. In the meantime, the landlord being called away, I awaited her descent with impatience. We might at least enjoy a last little exploration together, before the chimera-hunter returned to re-sight in her his mystic quarry. And then?—Well, the virtue was in the chase—and the flattery, no doubt, in being chased by the virtue. It must be gratifying to know oneself the provocation to what most became a man—endeavour. And, as for me, I was simply contemptible in my lack of ambition.
I yawned, and dawdled, and fingered some antiquated literature on a side-table. There was a six months old copy of the LondonSpectatoramong it, left probably by some newly-travelled curate in process of cutting his wisdom teeth. Bulwark of orthodox respectability, it seemed curiously out of place in this context of harping troubadours, and wild love-courts, and Nature in her most recklessly disordered mood. One associates theSpectatorsomehow with nothing so much as the British Sabbath—on which day it is mostly read—and its decent conventions of silk hat, black coat and decorous Church parade. It never sins against the established or the social rubric; it is the incorruptible champion of common sense; in Mr. Sparkler’s phrase, it has “No nonsense about it.” Sometimes, even, I have a suspicion that the Creator figures to it as Himself wearing the regulation coat and tall hat on Sundays; whereas my god wears nothing in particular, and is not at all prone to pontifical complacencies in the matter of social law-giving. Les Baux to my eyes seemed a little profaned by this practical-minded interloper, as no doubt the interloper considered itself profaned by les Baux. I felt, for myself, that it was censoring me, in a way that no free-born Briton ought to endure; so I took the liberty of tearing it into quarters, which I dropped into the waste-paper basket. Then I felt as if I were free to do what I liked.
Fifine still delayed to come, and I strolled out to the steps overlooking the street. All above me went heaping up into the blue sky a massive confusion of rock and ruin, so commingled that one had to gaze hard to distinguish shattered wall from shattered scarp. To my left descended the steep road we had mounted—and, rising into view along it, appeared the perspiring form of M. Carabas Cabarus.
He detected me at once, and came on at a quickened pace. His waistcoat was opened, revealing a bosom of grey flannel shirt and braces well bowed over it; in one hand he held his straw hat, in the other a bandana handkerchief, with which he mopped his face incessantly. He made a hurried gesture to me, of recognition, of detention, and fairly ran at last. He was so hoarsely breathed when he reached me, that for a minute he could not speak.
“You have arrived, then, Monsieur,” he laboured out at length.
“We have arrived,” I responded.
“Ah!We!” Confident satisfaction expressed itself in his tone. “Voilà qui est excellent!”
He turned away a moment, fanning his face with his handkerchief, then addressed me again: “Mademoiselle is resting from her fatigue?”
“It would seem so.”
“Bon! The occasion is opportune.” He poked a fat forefinger at me. “Would you favour me, Monsieur, with a few minutes’ private conversation.”
Surprised on the moment, I foresaw the next what was coming.
“Why not?” I answered. “Let us go up the hill, Monsieur. Among the ruins we shall not be interrupted.”
He came, I thought, reluctantly. Perhaps he had had enough of the rocks for one morning. We climbed the irregular street, and, passing by the church, sought the open hill-side above, where, beside a heap of fallen masonry, we rested.
“Now, Monsieur,” said I, “for your communication.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, like one having the advantage of me in his knowledge of a flattering secret. He dwelt on its taste a moment before inviting me to share in it.
“I am waiting, Monsieur,” I said.
He propped one foot on a stone, and his right arm over his bent knee, and standing thus, his handkerchief drooping from the pendent fingers, apostrophised space rather than me:—
“There comes a time in the life of the spiritual enthusiast, the most ardent pursuer of the sublime and the ideal, when, in the presence of some ravishing beauty, not perfect, yet halting only on the threshold of perfection, he must pause and say to himself, ‘The conditions of this life are fatal to my success. Why for ever drop the substance for the shadow?’ This passion for the elusive, the unattainable, has perhaps its closest analogy in human love, by way of which, though we may not reach the stars, we may attain to a nearer view of them. There is the heart, as well as the soul, to consider, and perhaps, aspiring together in unison, they may touch altitudes hitherto inaccessible to the one alone. The chimney-corner knows the worn huntsman, the tired mountaineer comes down from his heights to sit beside his hearth, and, in dreams of wife and child, project his vision into the beyond of his unsatisfied longings. So why should not I? I am weary of the unfulfilled solitudes, and the sense of man returns upon me as I descend. If the grail is not for me, because of that human weakness in my blood, my search for it has at least shewn me the means by which I may yet doubly strive to approach the nearer precincts of its mystery. Though I am not Parsifal, Parsifal may come to call me father.”
He flourished his handkerchief, blew his nose, and gazed into the infinite.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “you have my sympathy in all this, and as much of my understanding as I dare exercise. But I am a practical person myself, and I must really ask you to be more explicit.”
His pale blue eyes slewed themselves slowly round to regard me.
“Precisely,” he said. “It was to be expected.”
“Am I right in assuming that what you are proposing, and reconciling, to yourself, is a descent from your heights upon matrimony?”
“With your permission, Monsieur,” he said.
“What has my permission to do with it?”
He waved his hand airily.
“Much, Monsieur—or nothing, as it may be. I put the proposition to you formally, as to the one who appears to stand in the position of legal custodian to the object of my devotion.”
“You allude to——?”
“Precisely, Monsieur. To your sister.”
“Why do you say ‘appears to stand’?”
He shrugged his shoulders renunciatory.
“Doubtless,” he said, “marked discrepancies will appear between children of the same parents.”
“What! You challenge me on a question of family honour?”
“Monsieur, Monsieur,” he answered hastily: “I do not challenge you at all. The world is too full of problems for one to quarrel on a point of resemblance.”
I laughed.
“What if I were to tell you that Mademoiselle is my step-sister?”
“Then the problem would be no more than one of coincidence.”
“What coincidence?”
“That she bears your name.”
I laughed again, getting out my pipe to fill it.
“Truly, it seems the long arm, Monsieur,” I said. “But, assuming that you are right in approaching me in the matter, your proposition amounts to no more than that you are desirous of marrying my—ward.”
“With all my heart, Monsieur.”
“And is she to have no voice in the matter?”
“I am not so arrogant,” he said, with a sovereign uplifting of himself which belied his words. “It would be false modesty in me, on the other hand, to feign an unconsciousness of the gifts, of the reputation, I could offer her as an equivalent for the priceless gift of herself. Still, for the present, I ask no more than unrestricted permission to make my proposals to that sympathetic paragon of womanhood; and if I assert some confidence as to the result, knowing with what favour she already regards me, I beg you not to attribute it to any conceit of my qualities, but to the sure conviction that Destiny has allotted to us, in conscious affinity, the realisation of the unborn Parsifal.”
“Well, that is enough, Monsieur,” I answered—though with difficulty. “All I can say is, go in and win.”
He looked at me, like a café-chantant monarch, bestowing, by accepting, a favour.
“I have your permission to pay my court?”
“Absolutely. I answer nothing, of course, for the result.”
He waved that remark away, as inconsiderable and not worthy of note.
“More,” I said. “You shall have every opportunity you can desire to do so; and there is no time like the present. Go back to her now; say what you will, and without fear of interruption from me. I want to explore those hills across the valley—particularly the Roman Camp—and I shall probably be absent most of the day. Tell her so; say that I will take food with me, and that she is not to expect me back till I appear. You two can lunch together, walk together, bill and coo together, if it suits you. So au revoir, Monsieur, and bon chance.”
He detained me an instant as I was going from him.
“Do you know the hills?”
“A little; not much.”
“Do not stop on them too late, then. They are full of dangers and pitfalls for the ignorant. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, there will be mist to-night. Take warning, Monsieur.”
“A word to the wise is enough,” said I, and turned and left him.
I turnedand left him, I say; and he went a swift course, and I a slow one; yet in the end the race was to the tortoise. I had no least intention of making it one at the time; I was quite sincere in my purpose to obliterate myself temporarily, and leave the situation to resolve itself independently of me. For, in truth, for all its comical side, it was becoming intolerable. We could not for ever keep company on these terms; something definite must be decided one way or the other. I did not, I told myself, care what was the upshot of their meeting; I wanted only to know where I stood, and to adjust our plans accordingly. If the absurd thing actually came to pass—and it seemed to me too preposterous for belief—then a rapid return journey with my charge to Paris must be made, to deliver me from any further responsibility as regarded her actions. In the meantime I had no legal authority whatever over those, either to oppose or encourage. My impulsive undertaking had brought us into a position which I was only to realise at too late an hour to command. If she chose to be wilful, I was helpless.
So much for the impersonal side; and how about the personal? Why, the result did not concern me, save from a purely practical point of view. Have I not said it; and is it not a jealous man’s first instinctive defence to lie to himself? He is like a savage with a blow-pipe, who, inhaling a great breath to expel a poisoned dart, draws the barb back into his own throat. And that I had done, and, for all my affected nonchalance, it rankled venomously.
And yet I could not have declared even then what I desired. Flattering relief from unflattering dubiety was perhaps nearest it—since, to speak truth, the idea of this Carabas as a rival was positively insupportable to me. And afterwards, supposing that reassurance granted? I could not be blind to a certain anterior tendency in things—at least as it had affected myself—nor to the inevitable consequences, had not that tendency been violently checked. Did I want it resumed, then, simply in order to deny it? Unlikely, at least; and if not——?
I was in fact an irresolute, uncommendable jackass, if with some lingering instincts yet for rectitude and disinterestedness. And, on the strength of those survivals, I sought weakly to justify myself, saying, If I have been full of inconsistencies in my moods, so has Fifine been in her contributions to them, at one moment seeming to imply what at the next she would seem to refute, whereby I was provoked into an attitude of loverliness, which, though fictitious, was demoralising in itself. If she had only stood resolute to our compact, I should never have thought of her but as the good gossip and reasonable comrade.
And straightway I cursed myself for my meanness. That I should seek to shift the blame for my irresolution to those shoulders upon which no burden but love should ever be laid. She inconsistent—Fifine inconsistent? Yes, by the sweet testimony of her womanliness, without which she would have been as little Fifine as the companion of my choice.
The thought brought an instant pang with it. To touch upon her womanly side was to feel the sharp sense of loss of all which that might imply in possession. And yet how could one talk of losing what was never his? A paradox, for lovers to answer through their dreams. I leave the explanation to them; and there is one.
I would not yet, you see, confess myself of their kin; but I held myself as it were detached, prepared to advance or retreat as circumstances suggested. Our days, Fifine’s and mine, had been full of perversities and contradictions, but we had reached a point at last when our sentiments must confess their true inner properties, and declare for either attraction or repulsion. Then we should see.
After parting from the Frenchman, I went down the hill at a long slant, striking again the road, by which Fifine and I had come, at some half-mile below the village. I had no very definite plan in my head, save that of a politic absenteeism; at the same time I had no intention to let my emotions get the better of my enjoyment of a perfect day. My correspondence with Hénault suggested to me the idea of a closer examination of the Neocomian limestone of the opposite range, together with an exploration of the ground about what was known as the Roman Camp, where it was possible I might alight on fragments of metal or pottery of an interesting description. That would do as well as anything to give a savour to exercise; the only question was food. I did not relish a return to les Baux, with the possibilities it entailed of a most inexpedient encounter; yet where else was I to procure what I needed? After a moment’s reflection, I set off with a determination to walk back to Paradou. It was but three miles, and, quit of the rücksack, I could easily take it into the itinerary I proposed for myself.
It was past midday when I reached the Grand Café Bellin. The household greeted my prompt return with astonishment, attributing it to some fatality, but were reassured and diverted on my putting it down to the accident of a lost letter, which I fancied I might have dropped in my bedroom. Was there such a letter? Was there in fact the least necessity for my inventing any such excuse for my reappearance? No;but I wanted to go up and sentimentalise over the empty room. The feeling, the pretext, had seized me in a moment, and irresistibly.
I went—but not into my individual cubicle—and I stood there a minute, humouring, half pathetically, half jestingly, my own folly. Then I bent, and just touched with my lips the place where her head had lain; and looked round and saw the centipede lying where it had fallen; and smiled, and shook my silly noddle, and went downstairs again. No doubt, the good inn folks regarded me as a lunatic for putting myself to all this trouble and exertion on behalf of a trumpery letter: my sanity would have been much more in evidence to them had I confessed the sentimental truth. So are they built; and so are we not. That was the irony of it: they thought me a fool for doing the very thing that I did to avoid being thought a fool.
“No, it is not there,” I said; “but no matter. One may waste time less profitably, I find, than in renewing one’s acquaintance with Monsieur and Madame Bellin.”
They were pleased at that—blarney is a recognised currency in France—and paid me with a generous measure of the bread and figs, which, with a bottle of wine, was all I took from them for my al fresco meal. Then, my pockets comfortably loaded, I bade adieu to the inn for the second time, and started on my roundabout way back.
It was a lovely quiet noon, but with a brooding stillness in the air which brought Carabas’s warning into my mind. Still, at the worst, I had before me long hours of unobscured sunshine, enough and to spare for all the use I wanted to make of it. At the sign-post, turning off from the road, I struck straight across the valley, and was soon among the lower intricacies of the opposite hills. And there I sat down among the rocks, and, for a good beginning, got out my provender.
There was nothing in it inimical to a sober and temperate view of things; indeed the wine was rather a febrifuge than a stimulant; wherefore it was, perhaps, that I soon found myself excusing my late ebullition of feeling to myself on the score that it had been conceded to a purely abstract idea—the thought of a pleasant comradeship ended, or about to end—and that I should never have dreamed of so committing myself to that demonstration unless I had been sure that the tender sentiment it embodied was predestined to unfulfilment. Nobody was compromised by it—least of all myself, in whose independent soul it had figured for the mere indulgence of a whimsical fancy.
All of which was quite sensible and satisfactory. And then I bethought myself, with a gleeful chuckle, that I possessed, in the shape of a flask of right cognac in my breast pocket, a jocund corrective to the dismal stuff I had been swilling; and out it came, to change, in a few moments, the whole complexion of my mind.
So do great conclusions hang upon little means. It was a fly that once made the throne of St. Peter vacant, a gnat that, entering the ear of the arrogant King who thought to storm heaven with his flying chariots, hurled all that vast expedition to the ground. A few drops of Prussic acid will suffice to poison the whole stream, with its thousand tributaries, of the living ichor; a thimbleful of liqueur runs the same course in stimulating fire. Now, as I sat, without yielding my title to a spiritual independence I did certainly begin to consider it from the point of view of its losses rather than its gains. Or, rather, my mood lapsed entirely from the critical to the sentimental, and not my sacrifice, but the constitution of what I sacrificed, came to absorb me.
She had a hundred pretty ways—now I studied her thus impersonally, as one might a figure in a book—yet not one but was a sincere expression of her feelings, and without conscious art. I always loved the quality of her voice; it was slander that could call its leisured music apathy. One thought of her as one did of sleep—the “swooning to death” of Keats, and in as sweet a connexion. Because sleep has more and dearer discoveries than waking, a deeper understanding, mysteries of the subconscious spirit too shy to face the light, but confessing themselves dearly out of the darkness. So she seemed to me, a thing of daylight reserves, enough to obscure but not to kill the promise of the lovelier soul that hid within. And, with such potentialities, how rich a possession might she not prove to the man who won her.
What were she and Carabas doing at that moment? I got up suddenly on the thought, and began to move off among the rocks, turning my face instinctively homewards. But as suddenly I swerved to the left, with a little testy laugh, and addressed myself resolutely to my business of exploration.
For some time I went at random, fairly involving myself in the huddle of low hills and slades into which the mountains here ran down, suggesting, as it were, the subsiding waters of a cataract. They were pretty intricately confused, and tessellated everywhere with patches of bush and waste ground, with occasionally a cultivated field of olive or almond set amidst. My purpose being on the whole to kill time, I took little thought as to my bearings, only noting in a general way the trend of the hills, and the position of that particular one which I intended presently to climb. It remained a dead calm, sultry, and with little incitement in it to exertion; but the haze was palpably thickening; and presently I came to realise that, did I wish to attain the Roman Camp, the sooner I set about making for it the better.
I was by then well to the south-west, in a wild hill-tossed country, of the particular height which I understood to be my goal, and since I was virtually lost it seemed that my plain course was to take as much as possible a bee-line for it—which was what any Roman himself would have done. Wherefore I set off—only to find that what meant a bee-line for a bee might mean a scarce passable switchback for a human being. Plunging through thickets; ploughing along clayey bottoms; struggling over boulder-strewn slopes, only to discover that they were isolated mounds I might have skirted; threading my way through thronged groves of olive and mulberry, to lose my direction and be aggravating minutes in refinding it; most often painfully forcing a passage through massed bushes of juniper or tamarisk, and never once crossing a friendly track or lane that would have helped me over a difficulty, slowly I toiled on towards release and reassurance. And when at last, after hours of labour as it seemed, Ididbreak into the open, and saw what I conceived to be the hill of the camp towering mistily in its full height before me, I threw myself with a groan down on the rocks, and set to cursing all bee-lines literally up hill and down dale.
So I had not attained my goal yet; I was not in the way to attain goals, it seemed, however fair and desirable. Fate, on the whole, was treating me pretty scurvily. And I had done nothing, absolutely nothing, to merit the curse of Tantalus—or to merit that form of it, since I had not coveted the grapes for myself, which was implied in the sight of another man’s enjoyment. Soft, bloomy, delicious things! Damn the fellow, with his globular paunch and thick relishing lips! How women could let their beauty be so profaned! I had often dwelt on her profile seen against a background of silvery light or purple drapery, and loved its infinite childishness—the smooth rounded cheek, the short rather insolent nose, the upper lip projecting but the tiniest fraction of an inch over the lower, an endearing feature. And she could value them all at no better than material for that fulsome traffic!
I jumped up, and began to ascend the hill. The sun, during the half hour I had lain resting and brooding, was already sloping deep into the west, and there was a chill heaviness in the air which portended evil. I was conscious of it, even while the fire in my brain drove me on, reckless of consequences. What did it matter, even though I had to spend the night on the mountains? I had only myself to consider; there was no one else affected by my obstinacy. I had said I would explore the Roman Camp, and I meant to do it. I would show that my will could be resolute, even though to a foolish end. I meant to paint a picture presently that should give all my slanderers the lie; and then there would be a finish to this talk about my idle futility, and the charge that had been brought should be regretted, and bitterly regretted, and in vain.
So the callow calf-lover solaces his injured heart with dreams of stern qualities in himself realised too late by the unappreciative, of silent rebuke, and noble retort in the shape of self-sacrificing heroisms by fire and water, ending possibly in a quiet grave much bedewed by the tears of aching, hopeless self-reproach. I did not perhaps project my imagination to those extremes; but certainly I indulged it to the extent of shaming my sober years, so that in a minute, overtaken by the humour of the thing, I burst into a laugh and was myself again.
“I am going to hunt for broken pottery,” I said aloud—“nothing more nor less; and if in the process I get benighted on the mountain, well, it will be my own fault, and there’s an end of it.”
Up, then, I toiled, and the fog crept about me, drifting sluggishly down from the Camargue. It was thin as yet, and not more than enough to give an air of indefiniteness to the rocks above. Presently I came to a great bramble-grown bluff, twenty feet in height, up which I had the greatest difficulty in finding a way; but I achieved it at last, and, topping the ridge, found myself on the main plateau of the hill, an apparently limitless waste of dense bush.
Here, though I did not realise it, was the actual site of the Roman Camp, whence ordinarily a magnificent view of the valley and of the Château-crowned heights opposite was obtainable. Now I stood isolated in a little world of mist-encompassed green, littered all over with prone boulders, of differing, but mostly huge, dimensions.
Ploughing through the bush, I worked my way slowly on. It was a tedious process, but I could not venture to hurry it, as twilight was momentarily deepening the obscurity like mud disturbed on a river bottom, and any rash step on my part risked a wrench and sprain in one of the innumerable hidden fissures with which the whole surface of the under-rock was sewn. Many times, in spite of my caution, I slipped and half-lost my footing; many times trod suddenly on air, when I had thought firm ground was beneath me. And then, with a shock, I had started back, and was standing gaping. Right before me dropped a precipice, going down into unknown depths, and another step would have carried me clean over it.
It was only then that a sense of my rather impossible position began to penetrate me. But I was not going to give up without a struggle. Evidently I was on the wrong tack, and must bear away in a different direction. Gingerly I proceeded—only to be brought up in a few minutes on a like experience. Then I stood still and reflected. I had hopelessly lost my bearings; I did not know on what part of the hill I stood at that moment, and there was no distinguishing feature to guide me—only a tumbled confusion of rock and juniper heaving itself on all sides into swift obliteration. At the best, I knew, the descent on the north side was a long and a difficult one; under these circumstances, even if I could find and trace its course, it must prove hazardous beyond the worth of risking. I could see nothing for it but to camp beside some rock, and there await, as patiently as I might, the shifting of the mist, with or before the return of daylight.
No great hardship, after all, for a toughened vagabond, and no very new experience. I had slept on a hillside before now; I had run into a ditch, bicycling in the dark, and had slumbered where I had fallen from pure exhaustion. Here, save for the slight chill of the crawling vapour, all was cosy and secure—no wind, plentiful cover, and litter for one’s bedding ad infinitum. It was imperative only that I should bestow myself in comfort and safety while yet I could distinguish between air and matter. Very warily, turning from my latest peril, I trod a cautious path to where a massive boulder heaved itself out of the green, and, dropping under its friendly shelter, prepared to abide my destiny.
I had tried a shout or two first; but that, I knew, was a pretty forlorn hope. What other fool but myself would likely be abroad on the hills on such a night as this? Then, very surely as I sat, the gloom came in about me, until to have dared a step in that blinding investment would have been madness.
So there was nothing for it at last but to face the facts, and make the best I could of them. If I was conscious of any qualm on Fifine’s account, I quickly dismissed it as, if not unreasonable, immaterial. I was not the less in the hands of Fate because she knew nothing of my predicament; while, at the best or worst, my welfare had ceased to be a leading consideration with her. Carabas, no doubt, would find means to assuage her anxiety, if any such she felt on my behalf.
It was odd sitting there at freedom on the open hill, and yet feeling oneself as securely caged as though fettered to a stone shaft, like Bonivard, in a subterranean dungeon. After a time I got out the handful of figs remaining to me, with the flask, still two-thirds full, of brandy; and, having discussed that simple meal at leisure, lit my pipe, and lay smoking and sipping with an ample serenity. It was perfectly still; even the mist, born of the sun-baked levels, seemed to have a quality of warm steam in it, and flattered rather than discomforted. Gradually, after I know not how long an interval, drowsiness overcame me, and, sinking comfortably into my cosy eyrie, I slept.
* * * * * * *
Something or somebody was calling to me, and by name. My subauditory senses had been conscious of the fact long, it seemed, before any association of it with reality occurred to startle them. But now, and more acutely, the sound penetrated, cutting through the web of sleep; and the next moment I had leapt wide awake, and was sitting up listening.
“Dane, Dane, Dane! Holà, Monsieur! Holà, Monsieur Dane! Do you hear? Answer, then! Dane, Dane, Dane!”
“Here!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet, and facing in the direction of the voice. The mist had thinned somewhat, and was penetrated, moreover, with a white diffused light, in the shine of which all immediate details of the surrounding plateau were faintly visible. I thought at first that day had dawned upon me as I lay, but in a moment recognised the silvery radiance for that of the full moon, which appeared to hang in the heavens right above the banks of vapour. And not fifty yards away from me stood a solitary figure, ghostly and motionless on a rock, and looking like a half-gilded statue in the glow from a lantern it carried in its hand.
For an instant my drugged wits failed to respond to the vision; then, with a laugh, I began to stumble forward—and stopped.
“Hullo!” I shouted. “Shall I come to you? Is it safe?”
Though I repeated the cry, never a syllable answered me. It seemed strange. Surely, the hallooing, whose echoes still rang in my brain, could have come from no direction but this. I dwelt puzzled a moment; then, deciding to take silence for assent, continued to advance. I went stupidly, still fuddled in my mind, lifting and putting down my feet mechanically, and hardly looking where I trod. The figure, never moving or uttering sound, began to take to me near shape and substance. I was already within speaking distance of it, when it appeared to move, and a cry came from its lungs, sudden and furious:—
“Halt!”
I had wit, or instinct enough to stop on the instant—and lucky for me I had. That moment returns to me now in a black shock of memory. As I stood, vaguely wondering, the figure came down from its stone; approached me; halted abruptly within six yards of where I stood—and it was Carabas. In the sick shine of the lantern he carried his face looked livid and contorted. He stood a moment; then leaned down the lantern, and swung it to and fro.
“Voilà ce que c’est!” he said, in a thick scornful voice. “Another step, and you would have been in.”
I stood like a half-sobered drunkard, staring down. There, in the very heart of the bush, gaped between us a damnable black pit, man-hewn, obviously the shaft or ventilator to some quarry, and sunk to God knew what terrific depths. There was no fence about it; even by day one might have stumbled into it without any great accusation of carelessness.
“Did I not warn you of the perils of the hills?” said the Frenchman, in the same thick, sneering tones. “A word to the wise, grand Dieu!”
At the sound of him my wits returned to me, and in a clap of fury.
“Why, in the devil’s name,” I bawled across the gulf, “didn’t you direct me sooner? You saw I was coming straight for it.”
“I thought of course, you knew.”
“You thought?—My God!” The truth sprung upon me in an instant. “Youmeantme to go down—on my own initiative, so as to quit your lying conscience; only you turned craven at the last. Own up, you infernal dog!”
His eyes looked across at me, ghastly; but, to my surprise, skirting the edge of the opening, he came round and dared me face to face.
“Ananias!” he said. “What right was mine to cross God’s judgment on a liar?”
I regarded him for a little without answering, searching in my mind for some explanation of this extraordinary behaviour, and finding none. I was by now quite cool and self-possessed, and conscious of a full command of the situation.
“If that is to imply,” I said, “that you have sacrificed your conscience to your humanity, it is to imply no motive for it that I can understand. Why did you want to kill me?”
“I did not want to kill you.”
“But you saw me walking to my death—fortuitously, perhaps—and lifted no finger, until the last moment, to interfere. What would that have been, at the worst, but moral murder?”
“No matter. It did not happen.”
“Clearly through the interposition of Providence, working automatically on a coward’s fears. But, supposing it to work as automatically on his intended victim’s resentment, and that a sacrifice of some sort was demanded? I have twenty times your strength and will, and a thousand times your provocation. What is to prevent me from sending you where you proposed sending me, and leaving it to be inferred, as no doubt you had designed it should be inferred about me, that you had blundered to your doom in the fog?”
Involuntarily he had started back at my words. The lantern clattered in his hand. If he could be, like Falstaff, a lion on compulsion, it was plain also that he could be a coward on instinct.
“I saved your life!” he cried hoarsely. I walked towards him. As I approached, he put out his arms, lantern and all, as if to ward me off. “Monsieur, Monsieur; let us be reasonable; let us talk together. Before God, I came to risk the night perils of these hills in order to find, if possible, and rescue you. I knew you were coming here; and I knew, if you did not, of these quarry openings. Was I not calling you, here, there, everywhere—and did that look like premeditation? And when at last you answered and appeared, it was mere accident which interposed that temptation between us. And I resisted it, Monsieur—I resisted it.”
I laughed shortly, halting before him.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “you are not qualified, it is obvious, for the heroic part you set yourself. But rest content: I am not going to kill you. After all, you did, as you assert, save my life in a way; though why you should ever have wanted it ended beats me.”
He sat down on a stone, quite overcome, and, putting the lantern beside him, buried his face in his hands.
“But for you she might listen to me,” he half sobbed, from that covert.
I heard, astonished.
“She? Who?” I demanded.
“O, Monsieur!” he said, “why equivocate? She who you informed me was your sister, or your step-sister, and who is in fact nothing of the kind.”
Answer of any sort for the moment failed me. Then, “She told you that?” I asked quietly.
“She told me.”
“What provoked her to it?”
“I—I!” He uplifted both his face and hands despairingly, apostrophising the moonlit heavens; then dropped them in dejection. “I taunted her with you, and she answered in a fury. For myself, I had never but half believed in that story; and, in the bitterness of my rejected vanity, I goaded her to the admission—alas, to what result!”
I stood canvassing the forlorn creature, even with some contemptuous pity in my heart.
“Rejected?” I said. “Then I am to understand you have tried and failed?”
“Failed,” he repeated, in a voice of grief.
“Now, listen to me, M. Cabarus,” I said. “It is, I acknowledge, no question of a sister or a step-sister; but itisa question of an honourable trust, which I may not specify, but which to this moment I have maintained. When I bid you this morning to the test, I bid you, as one totally disinterested for himself, to a venture which would have honoured any man in its achievement. You understand me? It was to achieve an unsullied name. But I never professed the least authority over any one’s tastes or predilections. That anyone was free to do as she liked, to accept or reject as she liked. If you chose to presume absurdly, and arrogantly I must say, on a brief acquaintance, that was your business. I should not have stood in her way: I did not stand in yours.”
“Ah!” He looked up at me, with a strange woeful expression: “But unconsciously, Monsieur—unconsciously, we will say.”
He rose, with a profound sigh, and lifted the lantern.
“Judge you, Monsieur,” he said, “if, for all my vanity, my soul is small. This morning she spoke to me—words of bitter scorn and upbraiding, difficult to forget. She was angry to see me appear without you; she received my proposals with amazement, heaping insults on my head. Sweet poisonous flowers they were, dropping from those incomparable lips. Yet, mark; when anxiety rose and grew over your failure to return, it was to me she came to appeal, to my wounded soul she addressed her suit. I was responsible, she said, for your absence, for letting you go to wander among the darkening hills alone. And when they whispered of mist and pitfalls, her fears grew wildly clamorous, and she entreated me, yes me, to imperil my own safety, to issue forth and seek for you among the clouds, careless of what befell me so not a hair of your head should be injured. And I came, Monsieur; unable at the last to witness unconcerned the agony of mind of her who had so abused me, I counselled my own heart to nobility, and came to seek you.”
He turned from me. “Follow,” he said; “and I will lead you down into safety. So I requite my defamer. Only let me entreat you, Monsieur, to humour in me by the way a silence which indeed my heart is too full to relieve with words.”
How could I answer but by acquiescing. It was a strange descent, that from my rocky prison—in the white ghast light, following the bright spark of the swinging lantern, while vast shapes and shadows seemed to bend and look at us as we passed. It needed a sure knowledge to accomplish it without mishap; but at last it was done, and we stood at the head of the valley, where the road branched upwards to La Reine Jeanne. A clock struck eleven as we paused; I turned and held out my hand to my rescuer.
“I am sorry,” I said. I felt that it did not become me to utter more.
But he could not bring himself to accept the proffered advance.
“Your way is now clear to you, Monsieur,” he answered frigidly, backing a little from me. “You will need my services no longer.”
“But what are you going to do with yourself?”
He made a comprehensive gesture, expressive of the saddest renunciation.
“What does it matter? Who cares? It is only another illusion vanished——”
And he turned and left me, drooping through the mist, and bent on what lamentable vigil only the spirit of desolation might know.
Well, I at least could be held in no sense responsible for the event. As I rapidly mounted the slope to the inn, I thought I could perceive two forms standing on the steps overlooking the street. I shouted a word of cheery reassurance, which was as jocundly answered; but, when I reached the place, only the relieved young landlord stood there to greet me. He was, of course, full of concern, enquiry, eager congratulation. As to Carabas, he assuaged my apprehensions with an easy optimism. It was not the first time he would have elected to spend the night abroad. When the inspired fit was on him, there was no holding him within conventional bounds; and doubtless the events of the evening had tended to set alight in him the ever-smouldering spark of genius. I need not disturb myself about him. As to any other possible provocation, if he knew or suspected such, he was discreetly silent on the subject; and I, for my part, felt curiously shy of any reference to Mademoiselle, or to the part her anxiety had played in the questions of my non-appearance and late return. I had a glad recuperative “nightcap” with the good fellow; then, loth to keep him longer from his delayed repose, took my candle in hand, and mounted softly to my bedroom.
Once shut in there, my boots left outside, I tiptoed softly, fearful over the least noise I made, hardly daring to breathe. Not a sound came from the next room; not a word, not a murmur. She was asleep, then; and that was well. And yet she was not asleep, and I knew it. Only a few minutes before she had been out there on the steps, waiting and listening in an agony of mind. But she was reassured now; she could rest. It would be wise to leave all explanation to the morrow. And yet that resolve had hardly been made when I knew that I was powerless to keep it. The thought of the long hours to pass in that dead-locked silence between us was already insupportable. I could not suffer it, and hope for forgetfulness. I must speak, if only a word—to say good-night. And yet, God help us, I must not speak. I fought against the longing while fight was possible to me; I set my teeth and endured and resisted. But the moment came when I could endure no longer.
“Fifine,” I said softly.
There was no answer; and I waited a minute, and spoke again.
“Fifine; it is all right; I have come back. I am so sorry, Fifine.”
Something answered me then—a little sound, but enough to send a flood of wild emotion surging through my veins. I rose, I went to the door.
“Fifine,” I whispered; “shall I come in?”
No response; and I turned the handle noiselessly and stole in. She was lying fully dressed upon her bed, her face turned from me, her whole body shaken with suppressed sobbing.
I stood remorsefully looking down for a moment; then—I could not help it. I went and knelt by her, and slid my arm under her neck, and took the soft troubled body to myself.
“Fifine!” I whispered. “It is no good our trying to resist it, is it? It has to be. It is no good, is it, Fifine?”
And she whispered back, with a long quivering sigh, “No——” and her arms caught and held me convulsively.
Ithad all been such dear egregious folly, that contest of tempers and jealousies and wilful self-misrepresentations. We used to laugh about it together in those after days of perfect concord and understanding. It had been the ferment, we supposed, necessary to the rich wine of love we had come to drink so deeply. All restfullest things are born of unrest: the brawling stream ends in the quiet lake; there is no sky-blue like that that flowers out of storm; life itself is wrung from anguish into infant sleep; through strife and tumult we draw to death, the profoundest peace of all. So now, in proportion with the former riot in our souls was the lovely tranquillity that succeeded it. There was no question of conscience to disturb us; for conscience pricks through sense of guilt, and we knew of no evil in ourselves, but rather an excess of charity and lovingkindness towards all men and things. For the first time in our lives, perhaps, we were in near concord with the Christian concept of Grace. A greater force than convention had pronounced upon us; not we upon ourselves, or either on the other. We had but acquiesced in what was decreed, guiltless, both, of soliciting the issue. All that was over; the storm had been and it had passed, breaking into this heaven-born flower of serenity. Was that God’s punishment on us or God’s commendation? I only know that no thing on all the earth would we have harmed; that our hearts brimmed over with a universal tenderness; that we would have gone to martyrdom for the faith of infinite love that possessed us. It is difficult to think that sin which bears such divine fruit.
But, let that pass, I entreat you. Forget the flaw in our idyll, if such exists for you; take its rhapsodies as authorised—really a minor point—and grant it the full-blown licence accorded to conventionalised bonds. Then I shall be safe to expatiate intimately, if I wish to, on a tenderest subject.
But on the whole, I think, I prefer to treat that subject abstractly. I am not so hardened in gracelessness as to wish to steal their liberties from the sanctioned ministers of Grace; and these matters seem to me, in my sinfulness, rather too holy for discussion. Wherefore, if you please, we will be content with my saying that Fifine made me a sweet friend, stately shy before others, keeping me rosily at a distance in public, but ready with all amends when we walked and talked alone.
Dear God, what a girl—what a woman! And how I loved her—how I loved! I had never known her before, I thought: I had never known myself—of what I was emotionally capable. Then in those days I learnt the unconfessed secrets of my own soul—what it would have meant to me had I lost her. The knowledge gained, I could hardly bear her out of my sight: it was to part with my better self; to wander guilty and bewildered. Only when she rejoined me came reassurance with the contact. She had accepted no evil: I had meant none. She was good, good—in all that goodness means of essential purity. I cannot too much insist on it. It was the self-sacrifice of utter devotion to a pure ideal. Here is what she once said to me—I will reveal so far—her grave eyes loving into mine:—
“Felix, for my sake now you will strive again—will you not?”
“How strive, Fifinette?”
“To achieve; to be your greatest; to realise the very conscious best that is in you.”
“Why not? You have given me new heart.”
“It is so dear to hear you say so. It was for that”—she hesitated; then putting her two hands on my arm, looked up earnestly in my face: “it was for that, Felix, I gave myself to you—soul and body, my own love; that you might—perhaps—justify the sacrifice to me.”
“Was it a sacrifice, Fifine?”
“You should know. But I should never regret it, never for one instant, if it came to be so dearly requited. I want you”—she laid her face down on her hands, where they rested—“so much—so much I want you to see it in that light. I could not bear to have you think that—that I yielded, to no higher emotion than——”
“You can leave it unsaid, Fifine. I am going to do great things, and you shall have the credit for them all.”
She thanked me with an affectionate look. Was she not pure? Could orthodoxy have shewn a better case for love? But let the matter rest there. If stones are to be cast, here am I, blithe to be made their target. I am jealous for her good fame; not a copper farthing for my own.
But, while I insist on that specific truth, I make generally no pretence of drawing the portrait of any Fifine but the one commonly known to me. I would not have her pictured by any means as a self-renunciatory young penitent, or as piously shedding the very qualities and characteristics which made her the desirable thing she was. We contended as much as ever, if now with a novel spirit of delight in the understanding which sweetened direfullest controversy; she showed no sudden increase of diffidence in her attitude towards my work or my opinions, but stated her own views as confidently and dispassionately as she had always done; the bright intelligence, which could seize so readily on the essential in any subject or object, and whose manifestations, owing to our estrangement, had been suffering of late some temporary eclipse, reappeared as active and as fearless as ever. And joyfully I welcomed this rush of sunshine from the withdrawn cloud. It was gay to see her, in the sweet assurance of her power over me, throw off the shackles which had been cramping her, and resume in great gladness the lovable enigma of herself—girlish, ingenuous; yet with that odd suggestion of worldly knowingness and knowledge which was always such a stimulating puzzle to me. If there survived a shadow of a shadow between us, it was this: she had a secret from me; and I had a secret from her—that I knew she had one. Yet mine was in a sense a justification to me of my love; and so the shadow to me was but as a shadow thrown by sunlight. I thought I knew what hers was—the true explanation of that silence, that withholding; and now I know indeed. She was afraid even yet to speak the truth; she dreaded unspeakably the chilling effect it might possibly have on me and my belief in her. Poor child—if she had only understood!
And so, to that extent we lived a lie to one another; yet it was a falsehood of infinite pathos and tenderness. In all else but that we were wholly one and inseparable, in trust, in truth, in perfect confidence.
We had it all out, of course, on the subject of those erst-peevish perversities and misunderstandings. There is no joy like a converted jealousy; quarrels become relishes when they can be discussed impartially. I told Fifine of my savage decision, on the hill that fateful night, to achieve the world-conquering work which was to refute and overwhelm her with a sense of what she had thrown away. She laughed; but, like the dear love she was, immediately stroked me down, in remorse for the pain her apparent insensibility might be giving me.
“Gossip,” she said—for we had resumed that pretty address as being singularly appropriate to our state—“you will come to do for love of me, will you not, what you designed to do for my punishment. My heart will sing then for its very shame.”
And indeed it sang, and sang me on to inspiration. I did my utmost, in those golden days, to vindicate her sacrifice to her through the persistent endeavour that her soul so prized. I schemed, and designed, and made innumerable colour notes, while she glowed beside, my patient, enthusiastic ministrant. Yes, and my prompter too, for she was no despicable critic either as to ends or means. We would make a compromise of our theories, our principles, with even perhaps a slight leaning of the balance towards the traditional; and in the result—well, those were but plans, elevations, as it were. The whole, into which the infinite parts were compacted, exists for any one to see who likes.1It is the only work of mine in which heart and soul and brain made a common cause of it to achieve perfection. It has not achieved it, of course, for Fifine was not perfection. But what approach to it it makes was her doing and hers alone. There is sunshine in it, which they call sunshine. I wonder sometimes if one from the idle multitudes who pass it by ever chances to penetrate the secret of the truth from which it was drawn.
Once we climbed up to the hill-top on which I had been fog-bound, and found the pit into which my stumbling steps had nearly precipitated me. It was a very death-trap, even as regarded by day, sawn clean and square into the bowels of the rock. Ruthless the greed which could thus assert itself, callous of human safety. They had been quarrying everywhere since my former visit, cutting wholesale into the majesty of the hills. But now, though late, the government, we heard, was interfering, with a view to stopping the brutal devastation. Might its powers, we prayed, prove despotic in a free land! We looked over into the black gulf, and could see no bottom. Fifine drew away from it, sick and shuddering; and suddenly she was clinging to me. Yet I had been careful to make light of my escape; and Carabas I had altogether spared in my half-jocose reference to it.
“Sit me down,” my girl whispered: “I shall be all right in a minute.”
We rested on a great stone, and for a time she could only breathe in silence.
“O, Felix!” she panted presently—“O, Felix!”
“My gossip—this is not to be your reasonable self. Here I am, you see.”
“I should have been a murderess.”
“Now, Fifine?”
“I should, I should. It was my perversity drove you up there.”
“Now that it was not. It was Cabarus if it was anybody. You could not know he wanted me to make that opportunity for him.”
It was a tonic reference. She sat up, her bosom still tumultuous, but with a scornful frown lined between her eyebrows.
“Opportunity!” she ejaculated—“that imbecile!”
I laughed—the base comfortable chuckle of the successful suitor.
“For loving you?” I said—“or what?”
“How dared he—the presumption! And when we had known him so short a time!”
“Really, gossip,” I said, “I think he had some excuse.”
“How?”
“You seemed to like him—I want to tread delicately.”
“I liked his imagination—when I could dissociate it from his ridiculous vanity.”
“Fifine; tell me honestly. And that was all? You never even considered him in the light of a—of a possible husband?”
“O, don’t be horrid!”
“Women will, you know, take these incredible fancies.”
“Felix, I could understand myself falling in love with a gorilla——”
“Thank you.”
“But not with a poet. That he could picture himself, think of himself, asyoursuccessful rival! I almost laughed, although I was so angry. To see him return alone—and for that purpose!”
“You did not spare him, I fancy.”
“Indeed I did not. Why should I? I was enraged; and after all I had been hoping from our reconciliation.”
“Well, I am sorry for him.”
“It is generous, and like you. For myself, I think he deserved the worst he got.”
“Don’t forget he saved my life.”
“Nonsense. He did nothing of the sort.”
“I mean he rescued me from a very ticklish position, and at considerable sacrifice to himself.”
“What sacrifice? He knew the hills; he could have walked them blindfold, he said.”
“But to agree to come, after all that had happened—his disappointment, his—his merciless drubbing.”
“Well, he owed me some compensation for having insulted me so.”
“I must sympathise with him, gossip, nevertheless. Don’t I realise what it would mean to lose you.”
She cooed to me over that, like the lovingest of doves. What vanity it is to think to chop logic with a woman. She can see no reason in the world, I think, why, if the lusty adored of her heart be hungry, she should not snatch food out of the hands of a starving beggar to feed him.
“Well,” I said, “I am glad for his sake he thought fit to take himself off; and certainly I am glad for ours. A serpent in one’s Paradise is disturbing; but a wet-blanket is fifty times worse. I would rather chance a burglar than a chill any day—or night.”
And indeed poor Carabas had disappeared the morning after our parting on the road, and we had seen no more of him. Whatever conclusions he had formed as to facts, he had assumed from them, I opined, no hope for himself, and had withdrawn timely from the unendurable spectacle of his own discomfiture as reflected in another’s triumph.
“What made you tell him we were not related?” I asked.
“Did he say so to you?” demanded Fifine contemptuously. “That only shows how unworthy he was to be entrusted with a woman’s confidence. He made me so angry with his innuendoes about our relationship that I simply had to tell him the truth, to vindicate your right to regard me just as you liked; only, I said, your liking happened to be that of an honourable man towards a trust—a thing which he couldn’t understand. And, to prove it, he went and told you, the mean toad.”
“Never mind. And the less said about my devotion to a trust the better, perhaps.”
“Aren’t you devoted to me, Felix? That is all I care about.”
“You would believe it, Fifinette, if you had seen me drivelling over your pillow at Paradou.”
And thereupon—but I am not writing a catalogue of baits for kisses—spoon-baits would be the better term. Every lover is a law unto himself in that respect.
We were three weeks in all at les Baux—a rosary of enchanted days. I should like to linger over that halcyon time, my life’s one long unbroken spell of happiness, were it not for what I must regard it through—years like a dingy window looking out on a jewelled morning landscape. The crown of sorrow—you remember Tennyson’s words? Yet in a way, I think, that was rather a maudlin complaint of the poet’s. Are not the “happier things” always behind us—dropped behind, and following us, perhaps, at their leisure? Maybe when we stop some day, our journey done, they will overtake us. Would not that be beautiful, my Fifine—to turn, and find you, with your dream and your glory? And in the meantime I am not going to mope and snivel because a certain incomparable loveliness in my past cannot be repeated. Perfection never can.
Had she, through all these shining days, a least suspicion that I guessed anything? She must have wondered surely how it was I could inwardly face the prospect of our return to Paris, with the inevitable moral it implied of separation, or of utter catastrophe, and yet could act now as on the apparent assumption that our union was eternal. She had put off conclusions for a time by begging me, by my content in her, to cut the very name of the Capital from our catalogue of references; to live as if it had never existed or was to exist for either of us; not to allow one harsh extraneous thought to enter through the gates of our golden Paradise. Yet she could not have supposed my intelligence hoodwinked by that pretty subterfuge into overlooking a consequence which must have seemed inevitable to me, and which only her own confession was in the way to nullify. But what she guessed or reasoned I never knew; only, poor love, it would have saved her so much self-torment could she have made up her mind to throw herself upon the ordeal, and, in that time of passion, betray the truth.
And in the meanwhile what was my own attitude towards the mystery? Why, emancipated as I was, simply one of love-in-idleness, I think. Fifine was Fifine to me, and that was all sufficient. If I thought lazily beyond that bare fact, tasting even a piquancy in speculation, it was to present myself with the portrait of a young lady of very feminine but independent views, having a knowledge, or at least a cognizance of the Bohemian side of Paris, entertaining seedy violoncellists, and capable of coming to definite conclusions with herself on a variety of subjects, from art and dress to conduct. Comely too, and yet unspoilt, be it said; and, if a worldling, one with the highest capacity for self-sacrifice to an ideal devotion. A fine spirit, but warm and sweet and very human—such was the picture.
Where Marion came in? Ah! that was a puzzle indeed. By no conceivable process of symphysis could I make her and Fifine combine; though the knowledge that the latter was what she was, or rather was not what she professed to be, explained to me some things in my step-sister’s attitude towards her and me hitherto inexplicable. It explained nothing else, however; it left me stranded exactly where Miss Clarice Brooking’s ingenuous revelation had deposited me outside the Hôtel du Nord Pinus.
That same Clarice, I confess, was another of my killing baits. Fifine had asked my pardon very humbly for her inexcusable behaviour to my friends. It had been due to extreme jealousy, she very frankly admitted—to a wound even now not quite healed, and whose pain had driven her to reprisals. It was horribly silly, no doubt; but then—my own countrywoman, and the attractions of that delicate pink and white. She had envied her her complexion; she had envied her—this with a hot averted look—her earlier knowledge of me. Was I quite, entirely, absolutely sure—
Yes, I was quite sure, my Fifinette; and quite sure of always drawing you on the subject, and of extracting my ample rewards therefrom. Machiavellian is passion in these matters.
So in the lovely valley the lovely idyll spent itself, until of its very perfection came the sense of inevitable rounding off and closure. Nothing disturbing came near us all the time; but we wandered free spirits of that haunted glen, absorbing into our glowing blood the very atmosphere of its enchantment. The little pavilion of the incomparable Queen Jeanne, with its pretty sculptures and oddly jointed ceiling, snugging into the corner of a grassy paddock in the valley, was a favourite resting-place of ours. But in what antiquities of rock and gorge and crumbled human dwelling did we not steep ourselves, from the eyries of the prehistoric cave-dwellers and the worn stone sarcophagi of the early Christians, to the toppling renaissance fronts and doorways that mingled on the hillside with the wild architecture of the first Seigneurs. All immense, all significant, all spectral despite its ponderous actuality; teeming with the infinite dust and debris of bygone story; ruins like rocks and rocks like ruins, one indistinguishable confusion and torrent of stone. Long ago from the floor of the little church they had unearthed the body of some beautiful unknown châtelaine. She had golden hair, like the maid of Pornic, that stretched down on either side to her feet. It was all that survived from the desecration, and it was deposited in Mistral’s museum at Arles. Fifine had seen it there; and, of course, Carabas. He had promised her a poem on the subject when they should stand together over the pilfered grave. And now was the grave of his own heart robbed of its golden vision. Poor troubadour. It gave me a moment’s melancholy to hear of his intention. Fifine laughed, relating it. Such is the difference between men and women; yet women are infinitely the pitifuller. The elemental riddle of them, of their inconsistencies with themselves, has never seemed to me so well epitomised as in the fable of the Amazonian Queen Thalestris, man-conqueror and man-scorner, travelling alone to give herself to Alexander, that she might become by him the mother of a boy-hero.
One day Fifine, putting a hand on my arm and looking up into my face, spoke to me wistfully of a thought that had come into her mind.
“Felix, we have been very, very happy here, have we not?”