The story of Fifine

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER XIV

M. Cabarus accompanied us. We had to change trains at Aimargues, and did not reach Arles until long after sunset. He and Fifine had chatted most of the way together, ostentatiously, on her part, to my exclusion. At Arles, I helped M. Cabarus to shoulder his knapsack, a service for which he returned me a rather frigid acknowledgment.

“Our quarters,” I said to him, “will be at the Hôtel du Nord Pinus. It will afford us much pleasure if you decide to make yours there too.”

He bowed, a little astonished, I thought. But Fifine struck in immediately, in a very cold voice:—

“We have presumed too much already on M. Cabarus’s good-nature. Please leave him, Felix, to make his own arrangements.”

“They are made, Mademoiselle,” said Carabas gallantly, and with a most charming and ingratiatory smile. “Can Mademoiselle doubt it?”

“I am at a loss for your meaning, Monsieur,” said Fifine. “I have no claim upon your confidence, nor any desire to share my own with a stranger—” and she turned icily away from him.

I never saw a man more taken aback. He looked as if he had received a tumbler of cold water in his face. And when, Fifine having touched my arm, she and I moved to leave the station, he followed in our wake like a crestfallen poodle, pondering, no doubt, that same riddle of woman which had already exercised my mind.

We traversed the dusty stretch from the station to the town in almost complete silence, until, mounting the slope by the amphitheatre, Fifine pressed against me with a sudden exclamation:—

“O, Felix! How beautiful!”

“We will come and see it at sunset,” I said. “That is the great time.”

“Yes, we,” she answered, with a meaning emphasis on the pronoun which gave me an inward chuckle, for Carabas was standing close beside.

She ignored him entirely, even until we had entered the Place du Forum, and stood facing the Hôtel, with our backs to Mistral’s statue; and then she turned upon him with the sweetest smile and her hand extended.

“Good-night, Monsieur, and thank you a thousand times for your kindness.”

“But I am myself going to stay here,” answered the troubadour, with an appealing look at her.

She said “O!” and, turning her back on him, walked straight into the hall.

Rooms for Monsieur Dane and Mademoiselle his sister? Assuredly; there were two of the best vacant at the moment on the first floor. The first floor meant first prices; but was not the lady to be entertained a Countess incognito? “Va, Madame!” said I to the distinguished proprietress; and Fifine and I were shown up. I don’t know where M. Cabarus bestowed himself, but in quarters, I expect, less luxurious than ours. We did not see him again that evening; but, once quit of his presence, Fifine’s manner to me recovered something of its severity. For some minutes, after we had rejoined company at the table d’hôte, she answered my remarks in only the coldest of monosyllables.

But presently she thawed. It was when a bottle of Veuve Clicquot I had ordered was placed on the table.

“Champagne!” she said. “That is too-great an extravagance, Felix.”

“Anything,” I responded, “for a summery atmosphere.”

She thought it wise to ignore my remark. “What makes champagne so expensive?” she said: “the insignificance of the crop that produces it?”

“It is made from a small grape,” I answered, “something like our English sweet-water; but that is not it. One of the chief reasons is the number of bottles broken during fermentation—that, and the complex nature of its preparation—” and I launched out into an elaborate disquisition on stopping and fining and sulphuring, on liqueuring and depositing and disgorging, only to find, when in the full flood of eloquence, that Fifine was not paying the slightest attention to me. I stopped; and she said immediately, in the most shameless manner:—

“Why did you invite him to come here?”

“Invite whom?” I asked.

“You know.”

“Well, I thought it would please you.”

“It doesn’t, then.”

“And I thought, after what we owed to him, that as a gentleman I could do no less.”

“A gentleman, indeed! Much sense he showed of recognising one when you helped him on with his knapsack.”

“Still, you know, Fifine——!”

“No, I don’t know. And now you have just got to answer to me.”

“For what?”

“Please don’t pretend.”

“For why I deserted you so basely out there, you mean? I had a wish to vary the entertainment; and I concluded you were quite happy without me.”

“Felix, that is to be like a woman.”

“Like yourself, m’amie?”

“No; when I went with M. Cabarus, I had no thought of punishing any one.”

“Punishing?”

“Do you fancy I enjoyed myself? I was thinking of what had become of you all the time, and I was miserable. I even wondered if you had gone back to Nîmes, and left me to shift for myself.”

“O! that is unkind, Fifine. What a brute you must have thought me!”

“No, that I never did. I only thought, all in a moment, that, though I had had no intention to offend you, I wanted to ask your forgiveness.”

“Fifine, your glass is empty. Drink to me only—eh? and I—you know, or perhaps you don’t know. Look at me, Fifine. I am a fool, and a remorseful fool. Let us be the best of gossips again.”

“It is too ridiculous,” she said, the tiniest of wet sparkles in her eyes. “That absurd little creature, and his airs and pretensions!”

“You did not find him so entertaining as you had expected, then?”

“Yes, I did. To be honest, I found him, when I could forget my anxiety, very entertaining indeed—on his own ground.”

“What is his own ground?”

“Provence, Felix—the Provence of story and poetry. He seems to know everything about it—its history, its legends, its places and people. And he has a really picturesque way of putting things. He told me quite a number of tales—one, very pretty, about a couple called Briande and Bérard.”

“What about them?”

“O! It was quite a simple little story. Really all its charm lay in his wording of it; and I could not reproduce that.”

“Try.”

“I will try to tell the story if you like; but it must be in my own way. It was about a beautiful lady who lived in Aigues-Mortes in the time of the holy King Louis. She was so beautiful that her fame spread far around, bringing innumerable suitors, great lords and warriors among them, to her feet. But she was cold and haughty; and not one of them all was successful in touching her heart. She would never deign to barter that, she said, against rank and power, though it were the Count of Dauphiny himself who should come to woo her; but she would yield it to his meanest henchman did he please her. Briande was her name; and she was called Briande Sans-fleur, for the strange reason that never a flower was to be seen upon her or in her chambers. She hated to have them plucked, and the surest way to her antipathy was for one to woo her with a posy. They thought that sinister and unwomanly; but so great was the force of her loveliness, there was not a gallant among them but would have pledged his soul to her, though she had been proved a witch.

“Well, it happened once that that saying of hers, whether true or false, reached the ears of the Count of Dauphiny, a hard man and a proud; and he laughed, and swore to himself, ‘It was designed for a challenge, and that I should hear it. I will woo her, then, but in such disguise that only she shall penetrate its secret. We shall see then, if, knowing what she knows, she will reject the Count of Dauphiny. And after? Ah, low shall lie the head of this Briande Sans-fleur!’

“So he caused it privately to be whispered in the ears of Briande—by one who, in seeming, betrayed a jealous confidence—that the Count of Dauphiny, stung by her professed disdain, designed to visit her in the guise of a wandering minstrel of humble birth, thus to woo and win her by virtue of his sole sweet persuasion, while she, unguessing the truth, should fall a captive to that dear deception.

“And thus it was done; and when one day a troubadour, coming from Dauphiny, was brought into the lady’s presence, Briande, guessing the Count underneath those trappings, smiled, and said in her heart, ‘He does not win me so.’ But she said aloud, ‘What is thy name?’ And the stranger answered, ‘I am called Bérard the bird-fingered.’ ‘Why so?’ she asked—‘since birds have no fingers.’ Then he held up his hand, the fingers of which were long and white, like the wing pinions of an ibis; and he said, ‘As their feathers harp sweetly on the wind, so do these beat music from the air.’ ‘Sing to me,’ she said; and, unlooping his instrument, he both played and sang to her. And, as she listened, something that had never entered there before stole into Briande’s heart, and her cheeks flushed and then paled. But when he had finished, she strove with herself enough to ask with scorn, ‘What is the station in life of so accomplished a minstrel?’ And he answered, ‘I am the son of Carel the notary.’ And at that she laughed and dismissed him, knowing and contemning the deception.

“Now the next day, meeting him alone in the garden, ‘Here is the nightingale,’ says she, ‘but, it seems, lacking his rose. Prithee pick thyself one, Master Notary, and wear it in thy ear for a grace note.’ But he drew back only, shaking his head. ‘You will not?’ she asked astonished. ‘Why will you not?’ ‘They are the tender offspring of Nature,’ he said. ‘I would as lief kill a child. And these are pretty children, and children always from their birth till death, never changing or growing older till they close their creamy lids and drop asleep to wake in heaven. No flower is ever plucked by me.’ At that, opening wide her eyes, Briande answered him: ‘It is no libertine who speaks here.’ ‘No, by love’s grace,’ he said, ‘but as virgin speaks to virgin.’ Then, very softly she said to him, ‘I have never yet met another until thee who thinks with me in this. For every blossom pulled on earth our heaven will be one fruit the less. Take up thy song.’ Then he sang to her again (words, Felix, that were spoken—I don’t know if he improvised them on the spot); and often afterwards again, until by degrees her proud heart melted to him, and then surrendered, and they were lovers.”

Fifine paused a moment. “Surely that is not the end?” I said.

“O, no!” said she; “but it all seems so bald as I tell it.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “Far from it. Go on.”

“Well,” she continued, “this Briande, at last so humbled in her self-will, awaited the moment when her disguised suitor, having conquered, should reveal himself to her and acclaim his victory. But he never spoke; and so one day, in proud submissiveness, she bowed her head before him and herself confessed. ‘Sweetheart, I have known thee all the time for what thou art—the lord of Dauphiny. I have saved this bird in my bosom until now; but no longer can I stay its singing. Make what thou wilt of thy triumph and of my humiliation.’ Then Bérard looked at her like one who hears his death sentence; and suddenly he was weeping and groaning. ‘It is not so,’ he said; ‘but in very truth I am Bérard, son of Carel the notary. It was the lord of Dauphiny who laid this snare for thy pride’s undoing, sending me to represent him, and in such wise as that thou shouldst think me him disguised. “And so,” says he, “I’ll teach her at what henchman’s rate I value her regard. Take from her, Bérard; and the more thou canst take, before revealing thyself, the better thou wilt please me.” And light of heart I came to do his bidding; and here I stand.’ ‘Thou hast not done it,’ she answered, her lip curling. ‘Why dost thou falter in thy villainy?’ ‘Ah! lady,’ he said, weeping for very shame; ‘how could I think to pluck the flower of all flowers, who never wronged a blossom in my life?’ ‘I spare thee for that,’ she said. ‘But go, and never let me see thy face again.’

“But Bérard being gone left that behind him which he guessed not. And often Briande thought of him, until of her thoughts was born a very passion for the past. ‘As was his love for flowers,’ she sighed, ‘so was his love for me—not to despoil, where perchance the stem was weak.’ And, while her coldness to all others grew to a rigid frost, his memory in her heart became a tender spring, amongst whose blossoms she wandered, for ever full of wistful dreamings. And at last she could bear her pain no more. ‘I must find him,’ she thought; ‘or die. I will go alone across the marshes to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and beg their intercession that my love may be restored to me.’”

“We, too, will go there, Fifine,” I said, as the narrator paused; “and mark the spot of Briande’s pilgrimage. A woeful journey for that gentle lady!”

“So she found it,” said Fifine; “and often on the long desolate way she gave herself up for lost. But at length she reached the little town, and found the church she sought, in whose shrine——”

“Well?” I said, seeing she stopped again.

“I have forgotten,” said Fifine, “whose bones they were.”

“Why whose, but the three Marys’—Magdalene, Bethany, and St. James his mother. But go on; what does it matter?”

“I like to be accurate,” said Fifine: “and every detail in these stories has its point.”

“I don’t see one here—unless it is the Magdalene. But never mind that.”

“Well, after entering and praying, Briande was leaving the church, when at the very door she met him face to face.”

“Bérard?”

“Yes. He was dressed like a priest. Banished by his love, in misery and penitence he had fled thither and, adjuring the world for ever, had given his life to God.”

“And is that the end?”

“No; the prettiest bit is to come. They met thus again; but only to know the tragedy of their love and part. Like soiled armour which, being cleaned, looks richer than when new, so, under the rubs of Fate, was Bérard’s soul to reveal its intrinsic worth. And Briande took a little house next to the Presbytery, between whose garden and hers was a wall both high and frail, and yet to them a barrier of rock which no speciousness might scale or passion overthrow. And there, on either side, they grew their flowers; and that was the sole bond between them. And, like him, she gave her virgin life to God until she died. Very young she died, Felix, and on the same day died Bérard. And because their end had been saintly and their story was known, amongst their flowers by the wall they buried them, he on his side and she on hers. And, when the spring came, from each grave had shot a rose-tree, from hers a white and from his a red, that climbed the wall with eager fingers until the two met above, and there they mingled; and the flowers when they blossomed were not some white, some red; but each was red and white at once—the Provençal love rose. There!”

She ended, breathless, and I applauded with enthusiasm, making cymbals of my thumbnails.

“You have told it famously, gossip,” I said; “and M. Cabarus may congratulate himself on the most faithful and attentive of pupils. You have reproduced his very accents, I will swear, and touched them with Fifine’s for music. Yet I think it a finer end than they deserved; for both, after all, were deceivers.”

“Why she?” said Fifine.

“She should have declared at once who she suspected him to be, if her pride was all she pretended, and not have risked that temporising with a serpent. Deceit of any sort between man and woman is a dangerous weapon to trifle with; it may at any moment recoil upon the deceiver.”

“Yes,” said Fifine, in a thoughtful voice, her fingers crumbling her bread; “I suppose it is. You wouldn’t like to think I could deceive you, would you, Felix?”

“No,” I said. “Candidly I shouldn’t like it. But then you couldn’t, you know.”

“Couldn’t I? Why not?”

“Because I am a seer, Fifine, with a gift for second-sight. Now, if you are ready, let us go and take a stroll in the town.”

I went out on the steps to light my pipe, while Fifine ran upstairs to fetch her cloak. I was feeling in an odd mood. It was satisfying to know that my comrade and I were on good terms again, yet somehow I found that sense of relief tempered with a certain gravity which was novel enough in its character to set me thinking. Indispensability—the word seemed involuntarily to shape itself in my mind like a spectre only newly realised out of subconsciousness. Yet what possible association could it have with such a transitory connexion as ours? In a brief space of time that would have become for both of us the merest memory, whimsical, a little tender perhaps, perhaps a little pathetic, and there an end. There could be claimed for it nothing of that spirit of inseparability which discovers a mutual unhappiness in even a temporary severance. Yet had I not come to be conscious in myself of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, when Fifine was not with me? I must suppose so; or why should I object to her consorting as freely as she chose with chance acquaintances; and, worse, exhibit, as she herself had hinted, the temper of a jealous woman when I fancied myself and my first importance to be ever so little slighted by her? It was not enough for me to tell myself that I simply objected to being called upon to play second fiddle to a précieux ridicule like Carabas; I knew that the truth of my small secret resentment that afternoon had lain in the realisation that under any circumstances, and however temporarily, my comrade could dispense with my company. If it was jealousy, it was jealousy not of that absurd little grimacier, but for the integrity of our partnership; and what was the moral of that?

But that was not, perhaps, the most serious side of the matter. The truth was that my own small revolt had served to reveal an almost reciprocal state of mind on the other side—a state of mind which, as now regarded, appeared the inevitable consequence of certain late drifts and tendencies, which, seeming unimportant in themselves, had become a danger in their cumulative result. So that, it seemed, if the word Indispensability was to be ruled out between us, now was the time when the situation should be faced, and readjusted to its most commonsensible effect.

This all came to me as I stood and pondered; and, seeing things thus in a clearer and steadier light, I said to myself that this would hardly do, that there was a threat of my becoming involved in a complication altogether outside my original purpose, and that both reason and good-feeling forbade my disregarding a warning when once it was known and analysed. Not that I would admit to myself even now that I was under bond to any moral compact whatsoever; I had expressly stated that I would not be; only there was Fifine’s own happiness to consider. I had engaged myself to be her protector, using the word in its purer sense; and if herself proved one, and not the weakest, of her enemies, I was not the less called upon on that account to stand by and defend her.

An heroic resolve—I may claim that for it at least—though destined, like many another of my brightest and best, to an impotent conclusion. In the meanwhile I went so far as to propose to myself an actual tactical encouragement of the ridiculous stranger, with his appeal, whatever it might be, to the romantic in my young comrade’s breast. No harm could possibly come of so detached an interest, while I myself should appear to repudiate the least right of sole authority over her wishes and caprices. My one object should be to make her feel that, for all purposes save that of travel, we were independent of one another. Alas! de sot homme sot songe!

Fifine rejoined me in a moment, and we went down into the little square, gay with lights and vehicles.

“Mistral!” she said, seeing me turn her southwards. “Am I not to worship first at the great man’s shrine?”

“O, the statue!” I answered. “You have only seen its back, of course. For myself I am a little tired of the eternal cult. He is as great a nuisance in his place as the Dairyman’s daughter is in hers, or as Kingsley at Westward Ho, where the very engines carry his name about. Mistral did not create Provence, any more than Stevenson created childhood, as some of his fatuous adorers would have us believe. But, come.”

“All that is Greek to me,” said Fifine, as we sought the front of the statue. “But if it means England——”

“It does.”

“Do you ever wish for your own country again, Felix? You have been a great traveller, have you not?”

“Here and there—and I hope to be again.”

“But not yet?”

“Why not? Likely this pleasant little episode will give me a renewed taste for it, and I shall be off again as soon as returned.”

Thus I seized my opening chance to prepare the way to my resolve. And with what result? Fifine spoke hardly a word during that our preliminary stroll about the lighted town, but early complained of being tired, and went back to bed, after bidding me good-night in a distant voice. And to bed I too retreated shortly afterwards, in a mood between depression and wrath.