III.
It happened to be a day of late spring; and as Gaspard and this strangely wedded bride of his and her parents came out of the castle, both fed and forgiven, it must have seemed to all of them that this was the most auspicious moment of their lives. The old folks, who had partaken freely of the generous wines pressed upon them, had now passed from their trembling terror to a spirit of frolic. Arm in arm, their sabots clogging, they did a rigadoon down the winding road. It was a spirit of tender elation, though, that dominated Gaspard and Susette. They were like two beings distilled complete from the mild and fragrant air, the sweet mistiness of the verdant valley, the purpling solemnity of the Juras.
"What did he mean, his highness?" asked Susette as she pressed the smith's arm closer to her side. "What did he mean that you'd be punished by your own device?"
Gaspard looked down at her, pressed her manacled wrist to his lips, took thought.
"I don't know," he answered gently. "He must be crazy. It's like calling it punishment when a true believer receives the reward of paradise."
"You love me so much as that?"
"Pardi!" he ejaculated. "And thou?"
"So much," she palpitated, "so much that when you looked at the princess like that—I wished you were blind!"
At the bottom of the hill, the old folks, Burgundians to the souls of them, happily bade the young couple to be off about their own affairs. They knew how it was with young married people. The old were obstacles—so they themselves well recalled—albeit that was more than twenty years ago.
Said Gaspard fondly: "This business has put me back in my work; but we'll call this a holiday. Shall we go to my cottage or into the forest? I know of a secret place—"
"Into the forest," whispered Susette. "I don't like the forge. It makes me think—think of that cursed princess—and of the work that almost lost you to me." Her blue eyes filmed as she looked up at him. "Oh, Gaspard, I also have dreamed so much—of love—a life of love with thee!"
There was no one there to see. Some day, perhaps, in the far distant future, this part of the world would be thickly populated. But this was not yet the case. Gaspard brought his bride close to his breast, smiled gravely into her upturned face. He kissed her tears away. Sweet Susette! She was such a child! How little she knew of life!
And yet what was that fragile, fluttering, elusive, tiny suggestion of a regret in the back of his brain? Now he saw it; now it was gone—a silver moth of a thought, yet one, some instinct warned him, was there to gnaw a hole in his happiness.
He said nothing about this to Susette, of course; he chased it from his own joy. And this joy was a beautiful, tumultuous thing.
"It's like the source of the Rhone, which I saw one time—this joy of ours," he said with placid rapture. "All sparkling it was, and wild cataracts, and deep places, clean and full of mystery."
"Ah, I want it to be always like this," said Susette.
Gaspard let himself go in clear-sighted thought. They were seated on a grassy shelf that overhung the great river. The forest hemmed them in on three sides like a wedding-bower fashioned to order; but here they could follow the Rhone for miles—with its drifting barges, its red-sailed shallops, its hamlets, and villages.
"Yes, ever like the Rhone," he said; "but growing, like the Rhone, until it's broad and majestic and strong to carry burdens—"
Susette interrupted him.
"Kiss me," she said. "Kiss me again. No—not like that; like you did a while ago."
And Gaspard, laughing, did as he was bidden. But what was that silver glint of something like a regret, something like a loss, that came fluttering once more across the atmosphere of his thought? Susette, though, kept him diverted. She was forever popping in upon his reflections with innocent, childish questions; and he found this infinitely amusing.
"Did you desire me—more than the princess?"
"Beloved, I have desired you for years."
"Did you think me more beautiful—than she?"
Again Gaspard laughed; but it set him to thinking. He liked to think. He thought at his forge, at his meals, nights when he happened to be awake.
"Love and beauty," he said, "these are created by desire. As a stone-cutter desires what is hidden in the rock, and hews it out and loves the thing he shapes, though it be as ugly as a gargoyle, because of the desire that brought it forth—"
"Do you think that I'm a gargoyle?" queried Susette hastily.
"Certainly not."
"Then, why did you call me one?"
So he had to console her again, and took a certain joy in it, although she protracted the dear, silly dispute by telling him that he had chained her to him simply so that he could torture her, and that he had wanted to spare the princess such suffering, and that therefore it was clear that he loved the princess more.
"Why, no," said Gaspard; "as for that, she's really in love with that young Sieur de Mâcon."
But thereupon Susette wanted to know how he came to be so well informed as to the contents of the lady's heart. So the smith gave over any attempt to reason, except in the silences of his brain; and just confined his outer activities to cooings and caresses, as Susette would have him do.
Yet his thought would persist.
That was the trail of a great truth he had almost stated back there, about the place held by desire in the origins of love and beauty. He had watched a certain Italian named Botticelli do a mural painting in the duke's private chapel. Lord, there was a passion! He had helped in the building of the cathedral at Sens. Lord, what fervor the builders put into their work! They were all like young lovers.
The smith sat up. It was almost as if he had cornered that glinting moth of doubt.
Yes, they had been like young lovers—Sieur Botticelli, in pursuit of the beautiful; the church-builders in pursuit of God. But—and here was the point—what if their desire had been satisfied? The quest would have stopped. The vision of the artist would have faded. The steeple would have fallen down. For desire would have ceased to exist.
"I'm hungry and I'm thirsty," said Susette.
He kissed her pensively. They started home.