“I answer for myself, m’amie. And how about you?”
“I had never thought there could be such joy anywhere. It has been almost too perfect for believing.”
“You mean something. What is it?”
“Only that—don’t be vexed with me—I think I should like to go, before the edge of the tiniest little cloud comes to peep at us over the horizon.”
“What cloud are you looking for? I see no sign of one.”
“No more do I. That is just it. But my heart seems so full: it cannot hold more without brimming over. And I want to keep this memory, just as it is—so full, so complete; a little immaculate Paradise, and all our own.”
“It is Paradise, as you say, Fifine. If we leave it we shall have to put on aprons perhaps. It is not time yet to talk of clouds—especially since the serpent departed.”
“I don’t care what the world says. I am not ashamed. But I might be, if the cloud appeared. Won’t you, gossip dear—just to spoil me? And there is another reason. Somebody I know will be getting anxious about me. Shall I tell you who it is?”
Why did I not say yes, and so lay for ever that last lingering shadow between us? She was prepared, I knew, in that emotional moment to throw herself upon my love and confess the truth in a breath. But like a fool I would not let her. I was jealous that she could consider any claims above mine.
“No, I don’t want to know,” I said. “If we must go we must; but we will carry with us, if you please, as much of our Paradise as is expressed in a complete isolation from all persons and things unconnected with it. You know we haven’t visited your birthplace yet—which was really our first pretext for this adventuring. You aren’t proposing to go straight home to Paris, anyhow, I hope?”
“O, no!” She gave a little sigh, of part sadness, part relief perhaps, over that baulked impulse. “Only if we might begin journeying that way. And I should love to visit Orange.”
“Very well; we will turn our backs on the Cherubim and the flaming sword, and march out into the wilderness.Adieu paniers! vendanges sont faites!”
“No!” cried Fifine, in a full voice—“then I will not go!”
“Wilful?” said I. “Then that convinces me you were right; for is not this little, little difference between us the first faint warning of a cloud?”
It was with hearts full of emotion that we left the next morning the long valley of our delight, with its golden sunshine, its quiet hospitality, its unforgettable memories. Shall I ever go there again? Maybe when someday my lonely journey ends, and I sit waiting my overtaking by the “happier things” I have left behind. Then, perhaps, but not before. And, in the meantime, on what butterfly wings hovers my beautiful faithful Psyche among those ruined “Courts of Love”?
I amnot going to relate in detail the processes of our homeward journeying. One must necessarily in leaving Paradise put on the common vesture of mortality; and, though the deathless glamour of past days remained to us for all eternity, a sense of the finite conditions of life, of its partings and uncertainties, returned to possess us, like a premonition, the moment we stepped beyond the bounds of our love-haunted Eden. Wherefore, having fully depicted that sovereign realm of delight, it would be a work of rather sad supererogation to dwell at length on our sojournings, as we made our way easily northward, in the subkingdoms of happiness. Beautiful it all was, but with a beauty more of evening than of sunrise. We were drawing to the night that has no voice but that of lonely introspection.
From les Baux we walked over the Alpines, six miles or so, to St. Remy, passing by the way those two famous fragments, tomb and triumphal arch, which are all that remains of a once prosperous Roman town. Standing solitary under the hills, they would seem to have been spared, in their chance juxtaposition, as a symbol and epitome to all future generations of the glory and vanity of the human story: Life’s victory, Death’s victory over Life, and Time, the last and mightiest, the conquerer of both. I might have read into them, had I possessed the seer’s vision, the moral of all idylls in the world, including our own.
From St. Remy the balmy we took, having lunched and wandered an hour or two about the place, the prosaic motor-omnibus to the fruity little town of Châteaurenard, whence we bowled by the long white road, dusty and monotonous with its eternal plantations of esparto grass, into Avignon, reaching that city after dark, and in comfortable time for dinner at the Hôtel du Louvre, where we had elected to pitch our camp. Old house of the Templars (one meals, actually, in the very vaulted refectory of that ancient order), we felt, enjoying its pleasant hospitality, so little remote as yet from the spirit of antique romance, that our ex-Paradisian “fall” was hardly enough to disturb or abash us. We had fallen “soft,” indeed, and, during the three or four days we stayed there, lived in a somewhat renewed glamour of enchantment. The year was now drawing on and in, closing upon the last days of October; but still the season moved in golden accord with our mood, showering peace and quiet sunshine upon our heads. Fifine had of course as a child lifted her trivial skirts and pointed her pretty toes to the “L’on y danse tout en rond,” and nothing now in all the grey old city delighted her so much as the broken bridge, on whose imagined stones the feet of countless generations of infants have danced and pattered. It moved her more than the mighty palace of the Popes, than the Cathedral, than the stupendous ramparts, than the great ruined fort of St. André, looming misty and gigantic on its hill across the river—though there, when we came to visit it, the old baker’s dies for stamping the loaves of bread outside the ovensdidfascinate her almost as much. They impressed her so, she said, with their suggestion of domestic fitness and tidiness.
For Fifine was tidy: have I never remarked upon it? Our difference in that respect was her perpetual lament. She could never be at ease in the presence of casual litter; a piece of paper flung in a grate, a picture hung crooked on a wall, would spoil the whole æsthetic value of a room to her; she folded her clothes at night; her toilette accessories had each its definite place on her dressing table, and any natural disorder was no sooner done with than she must be removing its evidences. Tidying-up was an obsession with her; I used to laugh at her about it, but it was no good.
“What is the use,” I would say, “of sweeping up dust only to resettle, of making clear spaces for the fresh deposits that are sure to follow? It is a purely human monomania that of tidiness; nothing in nature sets us the example.”
“I daresay,” she would answer. “But dogs and cats and birds and trees have no sense of preparing for anything; and I, as a human being, have.”
“What are you preparing for?”
“I don’t know—the next world perhaps. It is just an instinct, like washing your hands.”
“Washing your hands isn’t an instinct, you goose. It is an acquired superstition.”
“Well, so perhaps is tidiness. But anyhow it is a superstition founded on the Bible.”
“How?”
“Isn’t there something in it about keeping your house swept and garnished?”
I hooted. “No, that won’t do. That was the house that proved so attractive to the unclean spirit and his brethren. You are hoist with your own petard, I am afraid, my Fifinette.”
“O!” said Fifine. “Well, anyhow you won’t make me believe that tidiness is a sin.”
“No, it is only a ‘preparation’—for what? fresh untidiness, say I. When you have paid all your bills, and filed the receipts, and checked and balanced your bank book, and swept the hearth clean, and sat down with a satisfied sense of accumulated scores settled, and of being able to start again with a clean slate, what follows? Why, the falling of new ashes into the fender, and the recovering of the slate with the same old fatuous irreconcilabilities between receipt and expenditure.”
“Well, you know at least periodically how you stand, and where,” said Fifine; “and that is a consolation.”
How was it a consolation? How can a coat removed from the floor, say, and hung on a peg make one feel more sure of one’s position? I have often tried to understand, and cannot. Or is there really in the instinct some subtle feeling of the temporary sojourner in a strange land, prepared for eventualities, ready, because unencumbered, to move on at a moment’s notice? Travellers, explorers, are often the tidiest of men, clearing up behind them, as they advance, having its place for every article of their kit, and scrupulous to maintain it. To me, nevertheless, it is no comfort to know how I stand, if the result is to prove every item in the ledger against me. I am interested in my own solvency or insolvency, moral or material, only as regards their practical effects, and those occur automatically without my troubling my head with anticipations, or with manœuvrings for or against them. At the same time I am quite willing to admit an argument in favour of thesuper-natural instinct of tidiness, since Nature herself is atrociously untidy. Those who possess it may be spirits, finer than the common, who bring unconsciously from some other sphere the desire to mend, in their little piecemeal, the lamentable disorder of things mundane. Then human tidinessmaybe, in fact, the surest evidence of immortality; and indeed I hope it is. For if I laughed at it in Fifine, I loved its staid pretty manifestations enough to desire with all my soul to find now in their memory some comfort and assurance.
One entire day we devoted to a visit to the Pont-du-Gard, a super-impressive experience, since, owing to the lateness of the season, we had the whole stupendous mise-en-scène, lovely valley and striding aqueduct, to ourselves. We lunched gaily, sitting on the flat rocks of the river, and then climbed the hill, and walked through the huge artery of the bridge, which, drawing from the heart of Usèz, once flushed with life all the ramifying veins of Nîmes. The conduit is dry now, drained of its living force with the decay and death of the ancient city it supplied; but one still thinks of it somehow as a thing animate, a thing actually organic and sentient in the days when the throbbing of its mighty pulses shook the league-long hills by which it travelled.
That was our last ex-mural expedition; and the next morning, with a sigh of regret for what we were leaving, and of reluctance in the thought of the further stage it meant for usawayfrom Paradise, andtowardsthe uneasy problem of Paris, we shouldered our pack (figuratively) and took the train north to Orange.
This was, however, an event of its kind, since—ostensibly, at least—it stood for the mid-maze of our enterprise. We were travelling, if you remember, with the main purpose to visit Fifine’s birthplace, and I could not but be, secretly, a little curious to learn how she proposed to herself to deal with a rather nervous question. It was hardly to be assumed but that, as the offspring of one of the richest and most powerful nobles in the land, her advent would have occurred amid environments the most notable the town could boast; whereas—but it is true I knew nothing as to the facts of her origin.
However, she resolved the difficulty quite quietly and naturally, and in the most convincing way possible; though I thought a little flush came to her cheek with the explanation. We got in about eleven o’clock of the morning, and were walking up the long avenue that leads from the station to the town, when I said to her:—
“Well, m’amie; how about the site of Fifine’s nest? In what direction are we to seek it?”
“Indeed,” she answered, “I know no more than you.”
“You do not?”
“I was a baby at the time, you see.”
“But not always a baby?”
“Always, as long as I was here. I remember nothing, absolutely nothing—only the oddest, most shadowy little impression, like a dream, of a great thing like a curtain, and a confusion of pots and pans, and dark people moving about among them.”
I laughed. “It is queer, isn’t it, that survival of first impressions—what decides it. Accident, perhaps; the accident of their alighting on a peculiarly sensitive patch of brain-matter. Hullo!”
We had been walking at haphazard, and had emerged suddenly into a broad openPlace, which, dominated by the huge blind façade of the Roman Theatre, suggested somehow, with its scintillating crowds, an operatic stage before the rise of the curtain.
“There is your impression,” said I—“realised to the life!”
It was actually so. Strewed all about the ground, with little alleys of commerce dividing the groups, was an infinite confusion of pottery—jugs, dishes, cooking utensils, and what not; and, pervading it, a number of picturesque figures, swarthy of face, hot-dyed of dress and neckerchief, the whole constituting a sort of gypsies’ fair. Fifine stood as if dumbstricken.
“Perhaps now,” I said, “the clue of memory taken up will lead you back to your birthplace?”
She shook her head. “No. But it—O, mon ami, I feel as if I want to cry!”
“You shall cry, Fifine, when we reach our quarters. Come; we will go to the best I know.”
It was at the Hôtel de la Poste we put up; and I specify the fact for three particular reasons: it was from the window of my bedroom, in the Pension attached to that hotel, that I had had—as I was able now to point out to Fifine—my earlier impression of the plane-trees; it was in its salle-à-manger that I found my first opportunity to introduce to her the delectable mysteries of bouille-abaisse; it was in that room also that occurred—but let me come to it.
This dining-room was not, perhaps, of the cheeriest. It was ill-lighted, far from spacious, and fairly crowded, when we entered it, with a mixed assemblage of farmers, shop-keepers, and bagmen. A certain commercial importance attaches, I fancy, to Orange; and moreover market-day, had, no doubt, contributed its quota to the complement. Anyhow we had some difficulty in securing places at a table in a dark corner; but, once established, we prepared, after our custom, to enjoy ourselves thoroughly. And, lo! the first item on the menu was bouille-abaisse.
I crowed. “Tiens! The goal of our long romantic quest lies revealed to us at last. We are about to achieve our ideal; the spirit of abstract beauty offers to materialise before us. Eat of this ambrosia, my gossip, and count for its sake the toil well vindicated.”
Fifine laughed, rosily, but in her little sedate way.
“Poor M. Cabarus!” she said. “It is a shame so to mock at his ideals. They were not the less fine and sincere because his personality failed to recommend them. It was a great soul, was it not, Felix, in a grotesque setting? But externals ought not to influence us. They mean nothing.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I have known the most abstemious men libelled in their waistcoats.”
She laughed again, with a little protesting “tais-toi”—and the bouille-abaisse was placed before us. I watched her taste that Provençal delicacy, trifle a moment with it, put down her fork and lean back.
“You do not like it?” I asked, grinning.
“I think it is simply horrid,” she said, making a face.
So we had come to Provence for nothing after all. However, for myself, I swallowed my disappointment with relish.
It was towards the end of our meal, when the company was somewhat thinning, that the event occurred. I was conscious of a sudden convulsive pressure of Fifine’s shoulder against mine; looked up—and there was Carabas entering the room. We sat aghast and spellbound, but he did not observe us in our dusk corner. He sat himself down, as usual, at the long table, pulled off his gloves (brown kid gloves, and extensively worn), placed them, with his straw hat, on the chair beside him, examined the menu, looked up from his scrutiny with a full sigh of gratification, and round on his immediate company, self-conscious, challenging, and summoned the waiter with a gesture. That garçon, prompt, deferential, relaid the accessories, swept away contiguous crumbs, retreated, and reappeared—with a dish of veal.
“Bouille-abaisse!” exclaimed Carabas, in a voice that all might hear.
“Ah, pardon, Monsieur,” apologised the waiter. “There is none left.”
“It is on the menu.”
“It is, in fact, as Monsieur says. But it is not in the kitchen.”
“But this is infamous,” said the visitor, very loud and indignant. “It is here, but it is not there, you say?”
“The demand, Monsieur will comprehend, has been excessive. There is not so much as a spoonful remaining.”
“No demand should discover a good landlord unprepared. It is his business to keep faith with his guests. Tell him to come and explain.”
The landlord came, apologised, expressed a thousand regrets. All propitiation was in vain. The disappointed troubadour fumed, refused, with many venomous “Bahs” and sarcastic “Chahs,” every offer of an alternativeplat, expressed his mortification in a growing fury of speech and emphasis, finally snatched up his hat and gloves from the chair beside, and stalked out of the room, followed by the still protesting hôtelier.
And so he disappeared from our lives, never to enter them again. We sat without a word, quiet as mice. Presently I looked at Fifine, my eyes twinkling. She responded, still silent, to the unspoken suggestion, rose, and we went out together.
“Now for the Roman theatre,” I said, in a suppressed voice.
And it was not until we had penetrated into that august ruin, and climbed the tiers of seats, and sat ourselves down on the highest, in commanding view of the mighty proscenium and of the distant slopes of Mont Ventoux, that she permitted herself to give way, and broke into a fit of laughter which presently threatened to become hysterical.
“O—O!” she cried—“his libelled waistcoat! and after all I had said about his ideals!”
“Now, gossip,” said I, putting my arm about her, for we sat there quite alone. “You must be reasonable, if you please.”
She obeyed at once, dear child, and lay panting against me, only crying and laughing together now a little, and whispering words of love and remorse into my ear; and in a very little she was her own sane self once more.
We stayed in Orange only long enough to familiarise ourselves with its two noblest antiquities, the magnificent theatre and the arch that stands on the Lyons road; then went on by Valence to Vienne, where we lay a couple of nights, and visited the fine Cathedral, and the little temple like the Maison Carrée but not near so satisfying, and went to look down on the Rhone from the heights of Pipet—a lovely vision at sunset. Thence another day’s journey, by way of the Côte Rôtie, and through the rich deep heart of the vine country, carried us to Dijon, town of cakes and cassis and mustard, where, in Burgundian streets, with the high-pitched tile-patterned roofs rising loftily above us, we seemed to realise, as never yet, the sense of an alien atmosphere, not unromantic yet not Paradise, and chill with the shadow of approaching change. Passed and gone were the tamarisk, and the rosemary, and the wild sweet aspic; passed were the ruby-fruited pomegranates, the fig-trees hung thick with purple pendents, coldly luscious to the thirsty palate, the great cypress rows, packed close to screen the gardens from the mistral; passed were the little brisk black bulls, the teams of slow white oxen ploughing in the fields, the be-ribboned sheep, the ranks of gourds, orange and ivory and palest blue, ripening in the open. They were not for our eyes again; but in their place, and in place of the luxuriant hills, peaceful pastures, and endless plains, and the interminable poplars of northern France stretching everywhere. The phantom roar of Paris already echoed in our hearts; and presently, impatient over its insistence, uneasy but allured, we came to a decision, and entered upon the final stage of our journey.
Fifine was very quiet during that stage. She sat most of the time in her corner by the window, looking out on the flowing landscape; sometimes, when she thought I did not observe her, letting her eyes rest on my face, mute, questioning, pathetic; occasionally rousing to enthusiasm over some picturesque detail of the paysage—a leafy farm; a town built on a gentle eminence, which just lifted it shapely above the levels; a group of poplars, singularly effective in its place. These poplars paid everywhere a largesse to the late season, scattering their gold over a bereaved land, and so freely, that only their royal crowns remained to them of all their profuse sovereignty. One could read into them a score of dreamy fantasies—here a silver stem bursting high overhead into a sparkling constellation, there a misty coppice, streaming ashy purple, and ridged with a running fire of stars. They thronged the subdued landscape, just emphasising with their soft radiance its autumn melancholy. Nowhere did they figure so beautiful as in the neighbourhood of Sens, which we passed at a short distance at twilight. Mirrored in the placid waters of the Yonne, the old town first appeared to us, lifting the velvet umber of its tower and huddled buildings against a lemon sky. A poplar or two hung above the river for foreground; there was hardly a ripple there to shake the pictured rushes; it was as lovely an impression of antique peace as I have ever encountered. Fifine, after we had passed it all, made a little gesture to me, and I came and sat by her side, when she stole her hand into mine. I thought I knew what was in her heart—something emotional, a little piteous, the sense of a loveliness spent and of doubts to come. I pressed the soft palm in reassurance.
And so at last—Paris. The benediction of the season remained with us to the end. As we turned under the archway in the Rue de Fleurus, we left behind us the memory of a quiet little moon rising over the towers of Notre Dame.
Madame Crussol appeared to greet us as we passed the conciergerie.
“Ah! So you are back,” she said. “It is a time ill-chosen for those who would seek Paris for its comfort and its safety. You had better have remained with your savages in the south.”
Her manner was severe, if her utterance was cryptic. But I was confident in her secret regard for me; and I believe she had always a soft place in her heart for Fifine. Nevertheless I was startled for the moment.
“What is all that?” I said; “and why and with what are we threatened, ma bonne?”
And she told us.
Itwas not very much, after all: just this. Paris, it appeared, was suffering, had been suffering for some weeks, from one of those epidemics of panic which will occasionally seize on an entire populace—especially if of the excitable and impressionable Latin race—and we happened to have alighted on it at the psychologic moment. You will remember, perhaps, that brief plague of motor-dacoitage which for a time kept the whole city in a state of nervous ferment, until it came to culminate in a siege and massacre which were very much a replica of the London Sidney Street affair? Well, that was the occasion; and, according to Madame Crussol, a general condition of terror prevailed; good citizens walking furtively, with looks askance at every petrol-driven vehicle, and bad searching their consciences for past oppressions in any possible way provocative of reprisals. No one knew whose turn it would be next with these murderous miscreants, whom a persistent baffling of the police and long immunity from arrest had rendered absolutely reckless.
The story had left Fifine and me, I may say, virtually unconcerned. Fresh from the sun and the south, serenely ensconced in the impregnable citadel of our love, we felt no tremors but such as arose from the thought of the social reckoning we should have to pay at last, and the possible difficulties in the way of an accommodation. All the trepidations of the outside world were as nothing to us in the shadow of that problem; I do not think that, after we had entered my rooms and shut ourselves in, we once again referred to the subject of the panic, or to Madame Crussol’s excited enlarging on it for our benefit.
As I turned up the light and closed the door, Fifine stood and looked around her, with a smile upon her lips. And then she sighed, and turned to me wistfully.
“What am I to call it, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
“Home, Fifine,” I answered.
She sighed again, like a very happy thing, and went about the room, renewing her acquaintance with its objects, touching this one lovingly, that reprovingly for its untidiness; and presently, coming to her portrait on the wall, she bent and kissed it—“not for your own sake,” she said severely to the beauty, “but for the sake of the hand that flattered you.”
It was very touching to me, this sense of sure possession, as illustrated in her pretty joys and confidences. A dimness always comes to my eyes in recalling that night—the last we were ever to spend together. For the cup was nearly drained, and the scroll written—Fifine’s whole story, as a woman reads such things; and yet but a paragraph in mine, one brief glowing passage lost in a waste of platitude. Sometimes I wonder how men, having once known a perfect confidence in love, can bear to cloud its memory with later fancies. Gross and imperfect, our souls, I suppose, are not meet for the sublime; but, having gathered and eaten fruit from heaven, we must be for taking the taste of its intolerable sweetness out of our mouths with some coarser earthlier savour. Yet I think I may say that I have that of myself put away, locked into secrecy, jealously excluded from knowledge, which no woman but one has ever shared or shall share. It is hers, and, by so much as it is hers alone, the worthless residue of me lies to what flattering uses the interested can extract from it.
There was store of potted things in the flat, and we had bought some rolls and butter by the way, which, with a bottle of good wine from the cupboard, made us an ample meal. I ate and drank a thought gravely myself, preoccupied with the consideration of something that was inevitable to follow; and Fifine, conscious of herself as of my mood, was little more inclined to talk. She made but a half-hearted meal; and, when we rose at last, I was struck all at once, seeing the breathless parting of her lips and her poor cheek’s whiteness, with a realisation of the strain which that long suspense must have been putting upon her. However, it had to be gone through with, and the sooner the more merciful to her.
Without a word I led her into the studio, where, under the light, I took her face between my hands and turned it up so as to look at me.
“Fifine,” I said.
She closed her eyes; I could see her lips trembling; but she made no answer.
“Fifine,” I said again, very quietly: “You know what it is I have to say; what cannot any longer be evaded, now we are returned. In all this—in this question between us—where does the Marquis de Beaurepaire come in?”
I felt a quiver go through her; and something like the faintest of moans swelled like a pulse in her throat. Overcome with love and pity, I put my lips to hers, and fondled her soft hair, and murmured words of passionate reassurance into her ear.
“Come,” I said. “This is no judgment, dear love, but a confession and an absolution. Come and sit with me, and hide your face if you will, and lose all your fear in something I am going to ask you.”
I sat down, and she slipped to my feet, where she leaned, her right arm flung over my knees, her cheek resting upon it, so that her face was turned from me.
“I asked you,” I said, “where, in this question between us, the Marquis de Beaurepaire came in. Shall I answer, then, for you, Fifine? He does not come in anywhere, does he? If any one’s formal consent to our marriage is needed, it is not his, I am sure.”
She raised her head quickly.
“Marriage, Felix!” she whispered, in an amazed voice.
“I have thought it all out,” I said. “What does the ‘guinea stamp’ matter one way or the other. Love, we know, is the only bond, by whatever name we call it. Throw this sop to the priests, if, by satisfying them, it secures us our idyll in peace. It makes no difference to the understanding between us. There is only one thing that can tie us, or that we should ever wish to tie. Were it to fray and snap—I think I know you, Fifine—that thread of convention would count for nothing in our severance. Even our knowledge of its existence would count for nothing—only the liberty to be ourselves unchallenged.”
“But, what you once said!” she answered, still in the same amazed tone.
“You mean in response to your query about men of genius, and their use for wives?”
“Yes.”
“I am not a man of genius, Fifine. Perhaps that is it.”
“But I say you are.”
“Then, for love of me, you would rather remain my mistress, which is to say my imagination, than become my wife, at the risk of turning my imagination out of doors?”
“I should not do that,” she said. “But, whatever I were called, I should stay if you told me, and go if you told me.”
“And that is just what I say. The ‘stamp’ is immaterial any way; at its best a sort of social diploma, entitling one to legal protection in one’s daily practice of the virtues. Will you marry me, Fifine?”
“Yes, if you wish it, Felix.”
“And do not you wish it?”
“It is only that I am frightened to think of ‘the poor Billy tethered to his stake in the backyard.’”
I smiled, recalling my own words so faithfully remembered.
“I promise you I will never submit to the tethering,” I said. “Rather, for your sake, I will emulate the golden one, leaping from rock to rock, and always, though pursued, unattainable.”
“If you would—ah, I could be so happy in following you,” said Fifine, “though my knees were bleeding all the way, and my nails torn from their fingers.”
“Poor little fingers! Well, in that case, counting me your assured ideal, what are your prejudices in favour of—the existing or the potential?”
“Then—I am only a woman, Felix—I should, Ishouldlike my love for you to be given a name—in case——”
She did not end her sentence; but I stooped and gathered her to my heart, and whispered:—
“Perhaps thatisthe ideal, Fifine. O, my sweet, how I am lost in love of you! But here comes in the question—what is immaterial to the bond we know, but there is something material to it, Fifine—the truth.”
She stole her arms about my neck; then leaned her head back, and looked at me steadily, passionately.
“Yes, Felix. How did you learn?”
“That Brooking girl, as it happened, had once given lessons in drawing to the Countess Josephine. She did not recognise in you her former pupil?”
“And you enlightened her?”
“Of course I did not. I finessed in the most admirable way.”
“So you have known it all the time; and ever since you have been looking upon me as a liar and impostor?”
“No, indeed, my girl. I knew you were bound by a secret not your own; that you were trying to be loyal to a trust.”
“Felix—it was that, but not only that. I dreaded horribly that the truth might repel you.”
“You thought me no better than a snob, in fact?”
“O, no, no! I thought only that you would despise one who could so lie to you! And then—your own origin—I used to cry to myself over your scorn of the people. Felix——!” her arms tightened, a desperate pain came into her eyes—“Iam a child of the people myself.” She paused an instant—“Doesn’t it make you hate me?”
“That is foolish, Fifine,” I said gravely; “and very wrong to our understanding. What have I ever said to justify such an assumption in you?”
“O, forgive me, Felix, forgive me, forgive me! You don’t know what my mind has suffered.”
“I do not scorn the people, child; and, if I did, what has love to do with social differences? And, if there are any such between us here, the credit for the best is yours. I love every individual part of you; your wit, your intelligence, and your manners, as well as your pretty body. Now, what may I ask you and what may I not?”
“Ask, please, Felix.”
“Very well. Your particular confidences with my step-sister shall be sacred from me. If you reveal them, you shall reveal them in your own good time.”
“When she lets me—if I may.”
“But, in this matter of our marriage—well, you know your own laws of fiançailles? If there is a father, his consent must be obtained. Shall I hazard a guess? The violoncellist——?”
“I was always afraid you might suspect.”
“Why should you be afraid? Has he been a good father to you, Fifine?”
She sighed a little.
“Pauvre petit! He was not born ever to fight a difficult world. But he is a great musician, Felix.”
“That time he came and went—you had been lending him money, I suppose?”
“He is always so poor.”
“How did he learn the way to you?”
“He was in the secret, to a certain extent; he had to be. But he should not have come; it was against the agreement.”
“And your mother, Fifine?”
“She is long dead. She was an actress. She was in the company of the Comédie Française when they played in that Roman Theatre at Orange the year I was born. A Provençale by birth, my papa had brought her south to prepare for the two events, first the domestic and later the professional. We stayed on in Orange for three years: I don’t know how we lived or where; and then one day she ran away from Papa and from me. I think it killed his heart. He could never bear to speak of that time; and so it is all a shadow to me. But it was so strange sitting up there in the theatre, and thinking what it meant to me, both first and last.”
“Not the least poetic of the dramas played in it, I’ll go bail. Now tell me, Fifine: how is your father called?”
“Fréron, Felix.”
“And your yourself?”
“It is truly my own name—mine as well as hers. I am Josephine Fréron.”
“So? That is something saved from the wreck—just a plank or a spar as I was going under. You haven’t another remnant for me to cling to, I suppose—your age, for instance?”
“I am nineteen.”
“As certified? Good! I am getting quite buoyant. Why, what are the eyes opening so tragic about? You soft, foolish, sensitive, covetable goose, when are you going to trust to my passion as something a little stabler and more enduring than a summer’s day. Come, we are devoted lovers; it only remains for us to be unreserved friends.”
That night—so beautiful—such a perfect consummation! That pause, our journey ended, and the radiant serenity of the stars above, and, beneath, the black unseen gulf, plunging from our feet! I can hardly bear to dwell upon its loveliness, its poignancy. We sat till late, quietly talking together. All that was not Marion’s—and of what value to me in the prized context was that brief parenthesis?—was made mine—the story of her young innocuous days. She had been good; she had been chaste, and in circumstances well calculated to trip by the feet one less scrupulous in her self-respect, less cleanly intelligent, less precociously worldly, perhaps, since her self-education had been pursued in sometimes slippery places. For they had been poor; and indeed I gathered so far that the money consideration had been an incentive to this part she had consented to play in an unknown plot. What issue she had conceived of it, as regarded my inclusion in the conspiracy? Why, she had had no time to think: it had all been decided in a moment; and at least she knew that I was of the Marion stock (which I was not, by the way), and, as such, must pass for morally trustworthy. Besides, she had regarded the movement as of only a temporary character; and besides, besides, the actual fun of the adventure had something tickled her young humour—the prospect of experiencing, for however brief a time, the joys of social adulation in her feigned part. That was natural and delicious; but what she could not foresee was the sympathetic nature of the environments to which she was committing herself. She had her own fine aspirations, her own ideals: the danger came when they were allured into interest in a subject who could be coaxed and petted into giving them practical expression. And so grew in her the subordination of flesh to soul. She would consent to surrender the lesser to the greater, to buy our mutual self-realisation at the fullest price I asked.
And so at last I knew my Fifine wholly; the little story of her loves and her perplexities lay bared before me. Ah, why had I not accepted that confidence earlier? When she had hesitated that day on the brink of revelation, what mad perversity had made me reject her? Likely, then, the air cleared, we should have long lingered out our return, until—but that does not bear thinking of.
Presently we took to recalling softly, happily, the golden secrets of our wanderings together. And, so murmuring, she fell asleep in my arms.
Thereare those who pet their own misery, who derive pleasure from dwelling upon it; there are those who gather comfort from putting off an inevitable evil day; there are those who can borrow even a brief agonised solace from delaying their own execution. I am not of such. If a tooth worries me I have it out; if a painful thing has to be done, I like to get it over as quickly and as shortly as possible. I do not propose to myself to linger over this last chapter of Fifine’s story: all that is essential to its elucidation is soon told.
There was the perfect night; and, then, the dawn! It opened, as I would have had it open, dismally, ominously. A grey drizzle soaked the streets; the shimmering of the silver night was all alloyed into a leaden ruin; a sodden curtain hung over the whole city.
I was bound on an early visit to M. Fréron. He lived, I had learned—he?they, when they were together—in a little dingy suite of rooms above a curio-dealer’s shop in the Rue de Seine. We kissed, she and I—I am terse, you see—and I left her standing and looking after me—such eyes, my God. Down in the street I shivered; a doleful epilogue this to the sunny story of Provence.
M. Fréron was not at home. He had stated that he would be back, in case anybody should call, at three o’clock or thereabouts. In case any one should call? Whom could he expect, then, this timid, invertebrate old nobody; unless, indeed, it were some one on whom he depended for his little extras, luxuries; some one for whom his love, perhaps, figured a trifle cupboardly. Well, he should not suffer for me.
It was no matter. I would return about that time on the chance of finding him. I had a plenty of small commissions to fill up the interval; and, in fact, I did not return to the Rue de Seine until near four o’clock.
M. Fréron, I was told, was again out. Yes, again. He had come back punctual to his appointment, and had been almost immediately fetched away by a sergent de ville. The man had come, and they had left together, in a great hurry. No one knew what was his errand; it was impossible to say how long the musician would be gone. He had departed without a word, but looking certainly very pale and agitated.
Obviously it was no good my remaining; the interview must be postponed. I was not much concerned over that; at the worst it represented no more than a formal necessity, about whose issue I had not the slightest doubt. Fifine was what she was; not what her father had made her. I knew that much. He would not object to a paying son-in-law, on the strength of whatever irregularities provided. He had been known even to comment a little peevishly on the rigidity of his daughter’s code—not rebuking it, but only feebly wondering. The “professional” class is always a little apt to indefiniteness in these matters; and when one is very poor——!
I turned my face for home. That should have been an occasion for joy; yet somehow a dense oppression sat on me. I could not master it; it increased with every step I took. It was the weather, no doubt—or was it that sort of moral dyspepsia, common to those, I had heard, who are realising for the first time their committal to the matrimonial lottery? Were we really wise in throwing this sop to the social Cerberus? And for what? Why, for nothing but that we might penetrate into the dismal regions he guarded. What a fool I had been, maybe! She had given me everything: the law would take away the loveliest part of that gift, its spontaneity. Yet, ifshewished it; if it would make her happier? And, then, the tender thought she had implied—the promise——!
No, she was right, God bless her! Dismiss that as settled. But the oppression would not lift. Damn that sergent de ville! Somehow he had been there all the time, hurrying and hurrying through the background of my brain; I recognised it now—
I recognizedhim, or his like, in the flesh the next moment. He stood at the entrance to the archway in the Rue de Fleurus, officially barring the way to a crowd of people who pressed and gloated to look in. They hovered there, a vulturine swarm, fulsome and unclean in the soaking twilight. What was the matter? What carrion had attracted them? For some instinctive reason they parted to let me through; but the man challenged me. A thought of the tragedy that I had so often mocked at as a stage illusion had caught at my heart like a physical agony, and it was with a thick gasp that I gave my name. He murmured “Continuez,” looking at me curiously, as he moved to let me by, and I went on into the dancing shadows. There were others congregated there—officers, strangers—a confused indefinite group; but only and for all eternity to me the white aghast face of Madame Crussol, hung up in the dim gaslight and staring my way like a stone gargoyle.
“Comment?” I said, with an insane little giggle. “What is all this about; and why do you look at me like that?”
And thereat the gargoyle seemed to detach itself from the wall, and to spring at me with a shriek:—
“Go to her—she is hurt—she is dying—she has called for you!”
Go to her? Where? There was a roaring in my brain: somebody was leading me by the arm: we were in a running cab, and a whirl of mud and water flashed incessantly outside the windows. It was a brief race: the Hospital was somewhere in the Boulevard de Port Royal close by: but if it had extended over hours, I could have found no word to say to my escort—no question to put to him. What was that moment for idle discussion? and he could have nothing essential to tell me that I did not know already. There was a subconscious voice going on in me all the time, whispering of an inviolable hush; a dark soft hand seemed to steal itself over my eyes. I never thought of vengeance. What did the motive or the method concern me? This tragedy was one not of the living hate but of the living love. I thought I kept saying to myself, “But she fell asleep in my arms—but she fell asleep in my arms,” over and over again, in a protesting monotonous amazement; but no doubt I uttered nothing articulate.
In a moment the flash and whirr of the mud had ceased; and a muffled throbbing and drumming succeeded. And then suddenly we were in a dimly-lighted vestibule, and as suddenly moving on by cold clean passages, always cold and always clean, yet intricate and eternal, and a soft-stepped woman went eternally with us. Her soundless upspringing had been quite in keeping with the churchlike atmosphere of the place; she might have been the verger especial to its ghosts and tombs. And presently we passed an open doorway from which exhaled an essence thinly sweet and shuddering, and glancing mechanically in I saw the flitting of dusk shapes, and shadows pierced with gleams, and a vortex of wooden forms, going down in concentric rings to a shining altar. But we went by, and did not stop—not until the end came in the little quiet room with its truckle bed.
Then I knew too well; and knew from the first I had never felt one thrill of hope. They were quite gentle with me. She had survived to consciousness, they said—after that ineffectual attempt to extract the bullets—only long enough to make her brief depositions and to give them her father’s address. But many times she had whispered my name, imploring them to send for me; and she had died with it on her lips. Died with it on her lips—and I, loitering in the rainy street!
Her face was quite peaceful, they told me—quite peaceful and beautiful. But I would not let them show it me. There were the living eyes to remember; and I could not bear it. What hadthisto do with the vital reality, the hot vivid ecstasy of old confidences?
The father was there—aghast, tremulous, helpless. He recognised me, and, rising from his knees, came to me, weeping:—
“You were her friend, Monsieur: you will continue to be mine for her sake?” And then he threw up his hands—“My child, my little one, with that voice of an angel, that sang so sweetly on the earth, and now goes to mingle with the heavenly choirs! Never, never shall I hear thee sing again! And what hadst thou ever done of harm to mark thee down the prey to these cruel miscreants?”
I regarded him stonily.
“She never sang to me,” I said.
He was sobbingly, self-interestedly eager at once to explain and propitiate—
“She would not, indeed, Monsieur, uninvited: she was ever modest as to her own gifts: it was to the realisation of the best there was in those she loved that she devoted her unselfish faculties.”
And his plaintive cry pierced into my heart like a knife.
* * * * * * *
“I was under the archway”—so ran those pitiful faint-spoken depositions—“when I saw an automobile stop quickly at the entrance in the dusk and rain. I moved to retreat; and instantly footsteps came following me, and a voice whispered close behind: ‘Mademoiselle Fréron, I think?’ I turned, and saw a man. His face was masked. I was too frightened to speak. And then suddenly there was a flash and shock, and another flash and shock, and everything went.”
Why was she in the archway at all? She had been nervous and restless because her friend, M. Dane, had not returned from a certain expedition, attested Madame Crussol, and had ventured out in her anxiety to look for him. She herself, ensconced in her logement, had not heard the stranger’s words: it was the sound of the double shot that had brought her hurrying out. Then she had seen the poor innocent’s body prostrate on the stones, and a man walking from it up the yard. He walked, very cool and deliberate, towards a lighted car that stood at the gate. She screamed; whereupon the man had turned, showing a masked face impossible to identify, and had pointed a pistol at her, terrifying her into silence. And in another moment he had jumped into the car and was gone.
But the reason why this girl had been deliberately, as it seemed, marked down for a victim to the prevailing Thuggism? Ah! that did not appear. There was something, said the police, of the nature of a vendetta in the methods of these bandits, and until its complications could be unravelled, its various provocations must be held only problematical. In the meantime all remained confusion and terror and perplexity. For me, I was content to let it rest at that, keeping to myself any theory I might have formulated as to a vengeance wreaked by a half-insane morphiomaniac, through vile emissaries quick to seize on opportunism, on the discovered head of a poor innocent instrument in his outwitting. There had been whispers of suspicious characters seen loafing in the neighbourhood some days before our return; there had been whispers——
But let it all pass. Theories are not evidence; nor was I interested in anything but the staring fact of my own desolation. A new Reign of Terror, and ten thousand decadent aristocrats chopped by the head in the Place de la Concorde, would not mend that inexorable fact. I was suffering only to shake free from all the inquiries, official and magisterial, that ensued—the siftings, the empty evidences, the procès verbals which left things after all precisely where they had started. It was known clearly at the end, and not much more was known, that I had been Mademoiselle Fréron’s friend and protector, and that I had been actually on my way to propose a formal emendation to that understanding, when the catastrophe occurred. The exposure, so to speak, was an acutely painful one to me—not because of its moral aspect, which from first to last to the Parisian was quite en règle, but because the inner holiness of our idyll seemed violated in the publicity it brought. But at last they set me free to go and suffer my utter loneliness unvexed; and with that and my memories I shut myself away.
Oneday I was pacing my room in the restlessness that now seldom left me, when a knock sounded on my door; and, going irritably to open it, I saw my step-sister Marion. She looked at me and I at her for a full minute before either of us spoke; then “May I come in, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You may come or you may go,” I said. “It is all one to me.”
I turned from her, and she closed the door and followed me. In the studio she sat down, while I continued my wild-beast pacing.
“You are not looking well,” she said suddenly.
“What does that matter—to you or any one?” I answered, and came to a quick stop before her. “Did you really call to enquire after my health?”
“I came to say good-bye.”
“O?”
“I am going back to England.”
“Having satisfactorily completed what you came to do here?”
“Yes, in a way. Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire is about to be married.”
I stared down on her in amazement.
“Upon my word!” I said. “This to my face?”
“What,” she answered, a little frigidly, “is the use of keeping up that fiction, since you and your affairs have become public property?”
“None, for you, perhaps, in default of what we will call a natural remorse or shame.”
“I will not have you say that, Felix. Apply it to yourself, rather, remembering the advantage you took of the trust committed to you.”
“I took no advantage, as you call it, until I learnt that the trust was a lying one.”
“She told you?”
“She did not. You will be careful, if you are wise, how you deal with her name here. She was loyal to her betrayers to the end. It was quite by accident that I learned the truth—the imposture to which we had both been induced to lend ourselves—unconsciously on my part—by a clergyman’s moral daughter.”
“You may save your sarcasm, Felix: it does not impress me. I had a desperate duty to perform, and I took the only means possible at hand to effect it. It was partly with a view to giving you the explanation which is certainly your due that I came to-day. If you wish to hear, you shall.”
I had resumed my tramping, but stopped at that, and faced her.
“O!” I said; “you think it my due, do you? Having robbed and ruined me, you think it just to supply me with the psychologic reasons for your act.”
“How can you hold me, directly or indirectly, responsible for this tragedy? AmIin collusion with these bandits, do you suppose?”
I stood looking at her—no more; but for all her resolution she found something in that searching inquisition beyond her endurance; and her eyes fell before it, while a faint spot of colour came to her sallow cheek.
“Not you, Marion,” I said softly—“no, not you.”
She looked up quickly, with a desperate effort to recover her self-command.
“Thank you, at least, Felix,” she said, “for that handsome admission.”
“Marion,” I said, still quite quietly confronting her: “how is your noble employer regarding this desertion of yours?”
“He is not regarding it at all. He has had a paralytic stroke, and if he recovers, which is improbable, he will never regard anything again, in reason. A fortnight ago he was removed from the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and he will not return.”
I nodded my head, my eyes a little wide.
“So? You interest me. Well, we know to whom vengeance belongs. It is a comfort to think of the settlement being so near.” I went up and down again, and again stopped. “You may as well tell me,” I said. “Having it now on my mind, I should be worried, lacking an explanation; and I want to get it all cleared away, all the wickedness and the abomination, that the only memory I care about may be left sweet.”
“You speak nearer the truth than you think, Felix. Wickedness and abomination indeed: you will understand, when you know; and perhaps then you will take a less merciless view. You remember what I told you about Monseigneur’s discovery, and his mad fury thereon? It was necessary to get the girl away, with all despatch, out of his clutches. That evening things had come to an appalling crisis—and she was ill. The nervous shock and strain had been too much for her, and she was in bed—not in her own room, but in one far remote and secreted—incapable of the least effort—to move her would have been certainly fatal. I had made all arrangements for her transference to the school I told you of; but some one—the house was full of his tools, his panders—had betrayed me. That night the girl Fréron happened to be there. She was said to have an attractive voice—I am no judge of such things myself—and she was used to give Josephine singing lessons. She was quite in the confidence of the Countess, who was greatly attached to her in her way, and she was more or less acquainted with the state of affairs. It was to her was due that sudden inspiration, which did actually save the situation. ‘Why not,’ she said, ‘pretend that I am Mademoiselle, and under her name hurry me away to the school, where I can pass for her until such time as it is safe to acknowledge the deception? If we manage cleverly, Monseigneur will be informed of the escape of his daughter, and will no longer think of looking for her in the house; so that, on your return, you will be able, quietly and unsuspected, to nurse her into convalescence, and thereafter seize your first opportunity to smuggle her away, and carry her into hiding, whether at the school itself or elsewhere?’ It was a counsel of desperation; but at least it was a straw on which to seize in a terrible emergency. I seized on it, Felix. Dressed in Josephine’s cloak and hat—the two girls were fortunately much of a figure—Fréron left with me, leaving it to be inferred, by those interested in my movements, that I had actually put my plan into execution. It is useless to detail the particulars of our escape; but at least one thing is certain, that Monseigneur actually believed his prey to have eluded him, and that he took instant steps, on the information received, to have us followed and intercepted. In that sink of abomination, however, there existed one or two unequal to the strain of villainy imposed upon them; and it was to one of these we owed the warning which diverted us from our course. You know the rest.”
Marion ended; and I regarded her in gloomy cynicism.
“No, not by a great deal,” I said. “Why, for instance, did you not confide the truth to me?”
“I believed it possible, Felix, that, in spite of all our cunning, his emissaries might track her down.”
“Track whom down? O, I see! And, after disposing of her, report to the Marquis the fulfilment of his vengeance on an unruly daughter?”
Marion was silent.
“You holy devil!” I said. “You astute unconscionable devil!”
She rose in great agitation.
“You do not understand, Felix.”
“What am I to understand? That this poor unhappy girl was to be sacrificed to a misapprehension rather than risk the truth which would have saved her, and that, for the sake of that misapprehension, I, who might have righted it, was to remain uninformed?”
“It would not have saved her. When he came to hear it, which he did at last—God knows how!—his fury was implacable against every instrument in his deception.”
“Poor ruined child! And this was your return to her for her devoted self-sacrifice? Why did he not killyou?”
“I don’t know. I had an influence over him: I dared him to his face; and for some reason he respected me.”
“I don’t doubt it—he recognised in you his superior; his arch-fiend. And you dare to accuse me—me, of an abuse of trust. Wasn’t that in the reckoning? Didn’t you know it was? Her virtue, like her life, was only a pawn in the game you were playing. I can see that clearly enough now. All, everything must be sacrificed to your damned emergency—a child of the people rather than a child of the aristocracy. O, you are the very saint of snobs!”
She was controlling herself. She had made a tremendous effort, and stood facing me, flushed but resolute.
“You may say what you like, Felix,” she answered. “I make allowances for your natural grief, however wrong the false interpretation it drives you to put upon my motives. But you do not understand those, I say; and I, who do, cannot at this hour believe that I was misdirected in the course I pursued. It is justified in the result; in an appalling design frustrated; in a rescue accomplished at last through much difficulty and danger. You regard it only as an imperilled life saved.”
“What else?”
“Much more and much worse.”
“What worse?”
“O, Felix Dane! the worse that was actually perpetrated, and on very much the same provocation, by a mediæval monster called Francesco Cenci. It was to save her from that fate that I did what I had to do.”
Marion was gone—and in peace. We parted friends; but I hope I may never see her again. Truly, character is the fruit of circumstance, rich or insipid according to the climate it inhabits. Transplanted straight from a humdrum parsonage into the volcanic soil of passion and insanity, who would have thought that that starchy puritanism could ever have developed the qualities of resource and imagination it came to reveal in the face of almost supernatural difficulties and terrors. She was a great soul, I think—the material of a great commander, rigid and unswerving in the course which her duty, as she conceived it, pointed out to her; prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice the lesser to the greater where the ultimate good demanded an inexorable decision.
But I turned from her at last to my dreams, with a sigh of renunciation of all things in the world that were not of them or for them. I knew at length the whole that was to be known of the story of Fifine, and, for that knowledge, all of new that blossomed from it was the piteous added sense of martyrdom. She had suffered, my darling, that her sister might be spared.
That evening, for the first time since my bereavement, I lifted her portrait from the place where I had laid it with its face to the wall, and we sat and talked together, she and I; and, with the tears dropping unconstrained down my cheeks, I upbraided her tenderly for that, of all her sweetnesses, she had withheld from me one that I should have loved among the best.
Now that night, falling asleep and dreaming, I was all at once on the shining hill-sides of les Baux, climbing and seeking alone, but with a great rapture in my soul; and a thousand butterflies looped about my head, and a scent of warm crushed lavender went with me like incense—only I was alone. But suddenly from amongst the ruins came a voice to me, singing so sweetly that my heart brimmed over to hear it in a very ecstasy of joy, and with blinded eyes I stumbled on and towards the beautiful tones—so strange, yet so familiar. And, lo! my girl, with yearning smiling eyes, and extended arms—
I have heard it, then—I will never believe but that I have heard it. Could she bear to withhold from me, even in death, one charm that had not been mine?
And so ends Fifine’s story. No man in all his life has known a sweeter love; no man a bitterer desolation.
Finis
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay