CHAPTER X
Fifine received her letter, containing a bulky enclosure, from Marion. I was present when she opened it, and I made no comment, preferring to leave to her the questioning which I foresaw, and which was indeed inevitable. She did not speak for a little, but sat with her velvety eyes fixed on my face, while I dipped, with what show of unconcern I could master, my petit-pain into my cup of coffee. Suddenly she thrust under my very nose a little rouleau of banknotes.
“They are to the value of two thousand francs,” she said. “I want you to keep them for me, to draw upon as occasion requires.”
“Good,” I said. “Behold your conscientious banker. It was unnecessary; but I ask no questions.”
“You have no need to,” she said; “nor to pretend ignorance of whence they have come and why.”
“From my step-sister, I make bold to guess; though how she is able to draw to this extent upon the baronial coffers, without exciting any suspicion as to her motive, puzzles me.”
“She has great influence with him,” said Fifine; “though I think it likely she has advanced this from her own store, intending to recoup herself from his at a more favourable time.”
“Great influence, has she?” said I, looking up.
“Yes, I think so,” said Fifine; and she went on rather hastily, as if to avoid the subject: “You will liquidate my debt to you out of it; and then we will go on as before.”
“Shall we?” said I. “Then Marion has not mentioned to you——”
“O!” said she. “Then you knew it was from her; and what she was to say besides?”
“I guessed.”
“How wonderfully clever of you. Now, Felix, why will you not be frank with me?”
“Let me know first. What does she say?”
“Just this: that if we are inclined to take a trip together, she has no obstacle to put in our way. Now, I want to ask you, How did you dare?”
“Hear me out, Fury. I did meet Marion: she saw me looking at the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and followed and accosted me; I did ask her what would she have to say to our taking a country jaunt together, and when, to my astonishment, she had nothing to express but approval, I did assert that you would never agree to such a proposal unless a replenished purse should enable you to take your share in the expenses. But I assured her explicitly that I spoke without your authority, that I did not even know if you would go if permitted, and that, as to the mention of money, it was made entirely on my own responsibility, and from inferences which you had had no intentional part in exciting. You must know, at least, that my only personal motive was to secure your consent to this trip—or, if you don’t, you should. I would much rather not be recouped for my little power of hospitality to one who repays me a thousandfold for it through the mere fact of her company.”
I got up as I spoke, and went and stood the other side of the table, so as to face her. She did not answer for awhile, nor look at me; but presently she raised her lids with a little smile, and, as it were, a flush of “rosy pudency.”
“I never thought you were really serious about this going away together,” she said. “It—it seems such a strange thing to do.”
There and then I destroyed my boats. I could not look at her longer, in her morning freshness, and play the sagacious self-critic. The burning feminine in her, the ready intelligence, the mental and the æsthetic qualifications, all proclaiming her a comrade of comrades for romantic venturings, ended my scruples in a sort of brain intoxication. Besides, where was the projected harm? Exercise and the liberal air would blow all that accumulated stuff of durance to the winds.
“Why?” I said. “Is gossip rifer under the open sky than in a closed room? We shall be safer from tongues, safer from possible hurt to reputation, to body, than we are here. We will be brother and sister, m’amie; you shall take my name—if you will condescend—and my conscience, and we will journey merrily in company, as witless of criticism as of guile. We will go South, even into the desolations of the Camargue, where no one would think of hunting for us, and, when you will, return leisurely by way of Orange and Fifine’s nest to Paris. Say it is settled.”
But, womanlike, she would not yield at once. She was full of tremors and scruples—fears of our being discovered and followed, alarm for the unconventionality of the proceeding. I was even exasperated on one occasion into twitting her with her “piano-tuner.” “There is no danger,” I said, “comparable with that invited by you yourself when you chose to entertain, unknown to me, and in spite of your solemn undertaking, a venerable stranger with a chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole.”
She turned a little pale, I thought, at that, and, looking away, murmured indistinctly: “Madame Crussol allowed him to come up.”
“You mean it was not your doing. But he was admitted by you, was he not?”
Then she turned upon me, and broke out impulsively:—
“I would rather not say. Don’t ask me, Felix. If it was wrong, it shall not happen again.”
“How can I say if it was wrong? But if you have secrets from me, I will have none from you. I saw your mysterieux at the Opera-House the other night, Fifine. He was in the orchestra, and playing a violoncello.”
She looked positively scared for a moment; then her face changed, and she laughed, but tremulously.
“It is not my secret,” she said, “or I would tell you; I would indeed. Don’t be angry with me, Felix.”
“Angry, my dear child!” I protested. “I only wanted to impress upon you the comparative unreasonableness of your present scruples. Believe me, if you will, the risk entailed in our leaving Paris is nothing to that courted by you in remaining on and remaining subject to chance intrusions like that.”
“Yes,” she said, very submissively; “I daresay you are right.” But nevertheless it took days to coax and persuade her—until I gave it up in despair. And then she suddenly surrendered.
“So it is finally decided you will not come with me?” I said to her one morning.
“Yes, finally,” she answered.
“Then that will do, and I have no more to say.”
“O!” says Fifine, “I don’t want to prevent you talking about it, if it amuses you.”
“It doesn’t in the least. I am so sick of the subject that it has no longer the smallest interest for me.”
“Yet it is rather an attractive subject.”
“You don’t seem to find it so.”
“I should miss it, perhaps, being gone.”
“Fifine, will you come?”
“You remember what I said?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Not really? Are you sure?”
“On my—h’m!”
“It was ‘yes, finally,’ wasn’t it?”
“To what question?”
“Somehow I can’t remember further back than your last.”
“That was ‘will you come?’ Yes, finally, to that, then.” I rose instantly. “You will want a travelling dress of some sort. Give me a hint.”
“I never consented, Felix. You can’t dare to say I did. Something simple but chic—dark blue or stone-colour, would be the best, I think; but I can trust you with the choice.”
The choice put me to some pleasant pains, nevertheless; but I need not have disturbed myself. There are angles and angels; there are also women who adorn everything they put on, and those whom nothing adorns. With the memory of Marion fresh upon me, I could only bask in serene contemplation of Fifine’s management of material no better and no more effective than that so injuriously misused by my step-sister. It was just a question of self-valuing versus self-spiting femininity. One would be a woman in accordance with, the other, in defiance of, the masculine ideal. Marion scorned sartorial recommendations; Fifine did not. Which is the vainer, do you think, the woman who believes she needs style and embellishment to make her attractive, or the woman who believes in her own perfect sufficiency without either? Even with the hat, it was less a question of what was worn than how. I would have backed my Provençale to make quite an endearing feature of the amorphous basin with which Marion had elected to bonnet herself.
However, if Marion was an angle, Fifine was certainly no angel. She was just a Parisian jeune personne—however she may have been born in Orange—with a natural faculty for making the best of an agreeable face and figure. And she was not difficile in the matter of “changes.” She was going forth to acquit herself sensibly as the road-mate of a vagabond, and she was merciful as regarded that beast of burden. For I proposed for my reasonable shoulders nothing less and nothing more than a single rücksack, such as I had commonly used in my trampings, which strapped under my armpits and was of proportions elastic enough to accommodate sufficient, and an ounce or two over, for our needs.
And how in the end did we plan our escape? Why, by planning nothing at all, and simply walking out one quiet evening and making our way on foot to the Gare de Lyon. We locked the door of the flat behind us, locking in some pleasant and odd memories, and leaving the key with Madame Crussol, the sagacious and diplomatic, sallied into the street temerarious and tripped upon our way. I neither looked for nor encountered the least interference with our movements, and we reached the station in safety, where I took us second-class tickets for Nîmes. Then, having each of us gulped down a mazagran, hot and black, I bought a bottle of Sauterne and some long sandwiches, and we took our places in the train, only then, perhaps, a little nervous in inaction, and anxious for the whine of the horn that should dismiss us on our adventurous journey. It sounded at last, and we drew away into the night.