The story of Fifine

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER XV

Those Arlesian days always come back to my memory with a peculiar glow and poignancy all their own. The town itself is one of the very fairest in the Rhone valley, beautiful in its ruins, in its situation, in the stately picturesqueness of its people. I never think of it but I am somehow reminded of Ariel’s song:—

“Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.”

For in truth that very sea-change is there, dating from a time when the city stood, like Venice, in the midst of wide lagoons, which extended so far as the great rock of Montmajour three miles northward, and which have since receded to leave bare the vast lonely delta of the Camargue. Ariel and Arles! there seems even a significance in the imperfect anagram; for does not wild music for ever haunt the place, melodiously sounding the dirge of kings long dead, of knights and fair ladies and courtly revels, whose iridescent dust yet clings about the walls, or flutters in golden flakes and scales over the sunburnt roofs.

“Into something rich and strange.” So it would appear. Its lumber is the accumulation of rich ages—the loveliness of Greece, the pride of Rome, the polychromatic splendour of the renaissance. All have contributed to produce an impression which I can liken only to that conveyed by opal, or mother-of-pearl, or long-buried glass or pottery. I have felt the same mystery of blended colour in the sweep of infinite downs, in the damasked glooms of Chartres cathedral, or when standing before the great west window at Winchester, with its mad inimitable mosaic of broken fragments, starry, kaleidoscopic, translucent, a waste of wild-set jewels, for which I know not what past genius was responsible, but may his perfect inspiration never fall under the curse of the restorer. And Arles is a spectre of that spectrum—at least so it haunts my inner vision—a town over which the sea of ages has flowed, to leave it finally rich in a myriad tints and corals, the infinite jetsam of time.

Perhaps association colours my view. It may very well be, for it stands emblazoned enough in my memory, where, before walls which a thousand years of sunshine have transmuted into gold, flits ever a rainbow crowd of dreams and thoughts and emotions, not to be separated from the living entities who gave them being and hospitality.

Well, I had struck for solitude, and only once more, it seemed, to be outmanœuvred by circumstance. To Arles we were come, and so with gay hearts to make the very best of a good thing.

To Fifine at least it was all au teint frais. She was enraptured with the antiquities, and more, perhaps, with the modernities—the sparkle of life, the jolly little Place in which we were ensconced, the friendly men, the stately women, with their chapelles and cap-ribbons—now, alas, subdued, like Venetia’s gondolas, from hues once double-dyed to sombre black—with the spirit of song and dance which still animated this people out of the old melodious years. Very early we went to see the sun set over the amphitheatre—a vision of transcendent beauty. The Rondpoint was almost deserted: we halted high up on the slope, so that our view could command, over and beyond the vast stone cylinder whose base adapted itself to the fall of the hill, the roofs and towers of the buildings beyond. The sun was down below our level; but those house-tops stood up in its glow, making a vividly intense background to the shadowy blue sweep of the arena. Their walls were primrose, their tiles were burning vermilion; here and there a raw advertisement stood translated into terms of jewelled gold and azure. And overhead, in a sky green as deep water, hung a large bright moon, already swelling to its full. There was no breath of wind to vex the quiet of the lovely scene; and only a voice here and there, sounding strange and unreal through the hollow silences, broke like a ripple on the universal peace. I heard Fifine sigh—a song without words, with which I felt in full concord and content.

I take these impressions, as they arise, without order or sequence. Time for a brief space stood still with us, and there are no milestones to mark his way. St. Trophime, into which one enters through a grey façade flush with its neighbour houses—as it might be only number so-and-so in the row—to find beyond deep caverns of antique craftsmanship, and sombre vaulted glooms spangled with gems, and, still further, long fretted cloisters arching away into the inmost recesses of sunlight: the ruined theatre which, sunk in its green oasis among the houses, gave its pagan bones to prop those very cloisters, and yet, shattered and desolate as it stands, speaks more eloquently of the unconquerable pride of the past than any relic I have known elsewhere: the Aliscamps, that old, old place of Roman-Christian sepulture, so sacred—having been consecrated by Christ Himself in a vision—that to be buried there ensured one salvation, for which reason the unhallowed dead, being set afloat on rafts all up the Rhone, would drift down, the drue de mourtalage in their stiffened fingers, to find redemption at the hands of careful watchers—all these were subjects for our curious inquisition, and many smaller interests.

Mention of the Aliscamps, or Champs Elysées, recalls a minute incident, which has often recurred to me since, and will again. We were loitering down the lane of tombs—a long alley lined with thin shrubs and trees, and before them on either side set ranks of stone sarcophagi—when, stopping awhile to regard some prospect, as I turned to speak to Fifine I found she was gone. She had utterly vanished; the lane stretched both ways devoid of life; there was no trunk large enough for her to have slipped behind to hide herself. I stood astonished; I hunted up and down, stooping and peering; finally I shouted her name. A little laugh answered me, and she rose from a tomb. In a spirit of mischief she had tiptoed from me, and stretched herself flat in a deep sarcophagus. As I brushed the dust and moss from her clothes, I asked her what on earth had induced her to such an insane prank. “I wanted to play at being dead,” she said; “and to wonder how you would feel if I were.”

“A pretty thought,” I said—“only with a moral a little like that of the frogs stoned by the boys in the fable. Don’t play such tricks again, if you love me.”

There was just that in my voice which I could not entirely control. She put an impulsive hand on my arm, looked as if about to answer me in kind, but withdrew it without a word.

One whole morning we devoted to a visit to St. Gilles, that town of one considerable church and fifty considerable smells; another to a trip to Montmajour, tramping the three miles to the latter on foot, for the day was pleasant and we were wayfarers after all. There is a little light railway (of whose vagaries more anon), running over the plain, and we had designed to return by that; but after, having left the ruins, we had discovered the halte—a task of some difficulty, for it consisted of nothing more than a casual bench in a field by the side of the single line track—and had waited there for our train some three quarters of an hour beyond its scheduled time, we decided that we would rather foot it back than risk the loss of lunch, and so started off—only, of course, to espy the abominable thing approaching when we were just too far away to make a successful return run for it. However, the morning was worth its labour.

It is a ruin to remember among the most striking of its kind, that of the vast shattered Abbey crowning its mighty crag, which rises abruptly from the plain, lonely and austere, like an inland Mont St. Michel. It was surrounded by water once, and could be reached only by boat—a meet and mighty sentinel to command the approaches to that great stone-hewn city of the rocks, les Baux, which can just be descried, some nine miles north-east, fretting the low clouds with its hundred jagged splinters. And yet, whatever strategic advantages it might appear to possess, this Montmajour had to wait, it seems, for a soldier of Christ to realise and turn them to account. For it was hither clomb Trophimus—disciple of Paul and first teacher of Christianity in the Roman Prefecture of Arles, or Arelate—to excavate on the height his little chapel of the rocks with its confessional and cell, and there make converts, who, according to tradition, flocked to him in such numbers as to leave him scarce leisure for grace or meat.

It is a curious little burrow that chapel, and yet, with its single cell—the protoplast from which all the vast superincumbent fabric of the Abbey was to develop itself—by far the most impressive corner of the ruins. There still may be seen, shelving upwards from the back of the tiny follicle, the narrow fissure in the rock through which Trophimus scuttled into hiding like a rabbit, what time the Cæsarean soldiers were on his track. We had not the enterprise to climb and slither the way he went; but no doubt, in the deep dead silence of that retreat, we might have distinguished the throb of a Saint’s heart-beats still haunting its dark recesses. The waste pomp and circumstance of the Titanic remains above made no appeal to the imagination like that of the little underground chapel, on whose credit and interest they rested.

So those days return to me, full of the sunshine of both heart and climate. We were lucky in our weather from first to last, never tasting but in fitful spasms the curse of that mistral which dries the kindly marrow in men’s bones. They were days to remember; yet not altogether in the unbroken sequence in which I have recorded them. They came and passed; but there were interludes, while still the sun shone, of a moral atmosphere less satisfying. And again Carabas was the cause.

He had soon reappeared, that most persistent and uncrushable of troubadours. He could not believe in the reality of his cold-shouldering; but, like some other people I have met, seemed to think that it was only one’s imperfect realisation of his attractions which prevented one’s complete enslavement by them. To know him was the one necessity: the rest must ensue thereon. So he haunted us—in the streets, in the hotel vestibule, at our table in the salle-à-manger—which, by the way, looked out straight on a little shop in the Rue de Palais, whose windows, full of bric-à-brac, silver tea-strainers, and old embroidered cap ribbons, were a perpetual apéritif to me. He would interrogate us volubly from his place at the long board, enquiring of our sight-seeing, and condescending thereon from the height of his superior knowledge; sometimes he would come over and talk, but always addressing Fifine through me, with shrewd sidelong glances to note the impression his eloquence was making on her. For myself, I met his advances genially enough; I had no quarrel with the man, and his unshakable self-sufficiency was a pure joy to me. But with Fifine it was different. She was as cold and distant to him as the north. I have known a single awkwardness in a man lose him the wife he coveted—turn the balance of her wavering mind from liking to contempt; so, I supposed, that one little solecism of a too smug self-confidence had dished M. Carabas’s chances for him.

Good sooth, I pitied the creature: he was so patently perplexed, distressed, at a loss to understand what could have so suddenly turned against him this charming stranger, on the strength of whose tender condescension he had been flattering in himself God knows what dreams of romantic achievement. Certainly Fifine was very ungrateful, seeing the use she had allowed herself to make of his sudden infatuation. I told her so one day, and she wanted to know why.

“One ought not to accept gifts,” I said, “and then snub the giver.”

“Gifts!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, certainly,” I answered. “What are his fables, his imagery, his storied eloquence but the highest gifts a genius can bestow on his fellows? They are as much his exclusive property as diamonds would be, and in accepting them you laid yourself under as great an obligation as if you had accepted a costly necklace from him.”

She laughed a little; then looked grave.

“I think, do you know, Felix,” she said, “that you are rather stupid.”

“Very likely I am,” I answered; “but why?”

“Not to see,” she began—and stopped. Then suddenly she went on: “I thought anyhow I was considering you in adopting this attitude.”

“In that case,” I said, “please to consider me a gentleman.”

“And the moral of that is,” she said, “that my treatment of M. Cabarus proves me to be not a lady.”

“I never dreamt of implying such a thing, or of thinking it.”

“Well, anyhow I am not a lady in the sense that you are a gentleman. I accept presents from strangers and then snub them. Very well. I cannot return M. Cabarus his magnificent gifts, but I can at least return him what he, I am sure, thinks much more important—his magnificent attentions. You shall see.”

“Nonsense,” I answered; but she was as good as her word, and thenceforth Carabas, restored to her smiles and graces, was like a soul renewed, strutting in a seventh heaven of confidence and gratified vanity. I had asked Fifine for a breeze, and she had answered womanlike with a gale, with the result that the fellow was blown up to an inordinate figure of pride—of bounce, I might say, in that inflated connection. He assumed a sort of amative proprietorship over my companion, while he tolerated rather than patronised me. And I was the one cold-shouldered now, Fifine seeming to relish that fatuous devotion the more, the more she was besieged by it.

So, I might congratulate myself, were things obligingly accommodating themselves to the exact end I had in view; and, better still, it was now plain to me that my apprehensions as to the state of the young lady’s feelings had been wholly without justification. It was all, in fact, as it should be and as I would have it, I told myself; and, though it might appear characteristically feminine to forget sober services such as mine in the intoxication wrought of a flattering pursuit, I was not going to make a sex squabble of the matter. Woman’s capacity for absorbing flummery was notoriously beyond man’s gauging, and if in that respect quality counted for anything, it was merely the quality which could untiringly repeat itself. And there, I was sure, Carabas was infinitely my superior: his resources in the way of picturesque lip-homage were no doubt inexhaustible. So altogether I resolved to take advantage of the opening the gods had given me to shake free of a possible embarrassment. I would let it appear that I felt not the slightest resentment over the young woman’s behaviour, or assumed to myself the least authority over, or personal concern in, her preferences. And then, of course, I was quite satisfied in my mind and happy.

But, before this state of things came wholly to pass—and it was a matter of some days’ growth—the poor troubadour had to run his gauntlet, erst-mentioned, of bitter snubs and mortifications. I really commiserated him, as I have said, in his dole, which nevertheless he persisted in courting with the most unblenching stoicism. In these sad hours he even showed towards me a certain spirit of propitiation, though never to the extent of seeming to allow me the least of proprietary interests in the object of his adoration. He regarded me rather as the thorn in the wilderness, which, troublesome in itself, had yet acquired a sort of spurious importance through its connexion with the rose of his desire. Once or twice, when Fifine was not by, we exchanged amenities of a sort; and once I was actually bold enough to question him on a detail of his tenderer confidences.

“That was a pretty legend,” I said, “you told Mademoiselle Dane.”

“Which legend, Monsieur?” he answered, pricking up his ears at the name.

“That of Bérard and Briande Sans-fleur.”

“Ah!” he said, “I can charm a skeleton into life; from a little seed I can produce a fruitful vine. That is to be what I am. Into the alembic of this mind one puts a pinch of dust; and, lo! I return it to him, a golden nugget. Mademoiselle was transported?”

“She liked it anyhow, well enough to tell it me again. Only one point she failed over—Bérard’s song.”

“She would fail,” he said; “but not from want of appreciation. It moved her?”

“I daresay it did.”

“Ah! its music sleeps in the whorls and dimples of that little ear, as the voice of old seas haunts the shell; but from the ear to the lips is a journey impossible to most—even to lips so sweetly eloquent as hers. Yet I fain would hear that honeysuckle strive to repeat its lesson of the sun and dew, however brokenly—” he sighed dismally—“but it is not for me.”

“The legend,” I said, “stands therefore incomplete so far as I am concerned. Will you not do me the favour, Monsieur, to supply the broken link?”

“You wish for the song?”

“Assuredly, if you will be so good.”

“It was extempore—but that is nothing.” He looked at me—there is no other word for it but balefully. “You wish, no doubt,” he said, “to snigger in your sleeve over what you will be pleased to call the meretricious rhapsodies of an improvisatore? It will certainly be more sound than sense, you think, taking refuge from reason under a professed imaginativeness. So are some built, impervious to the spirituality underlying all things, blind to what they cannot see, deaf to what they cannot hear. I tell you, Monsieur, that those who are for ever questioning the truth of literature are incapable of understanding the truth of life.”

He seemed almost in a passion. It was positively petrifying.

“I am quite at a loss, Monsieur,” I said, “for the reason of this jeremiad, or to understand how it is justified by anything I said. I am certainly no captious critic of either life or literature, and as to Imagination, I try myself to be her humble minister. But leave the song by all means unrepeated. The loss, being mine, need not trouble you.”

He was really a little ashamed of himself, I think; though he would not admit it.

“No, Monsieur,” he said, gnawing his knuckles—“no. In justice to myself and the completeness of my art I will gratify you. Listen, then: it went somewhat this way.”

He chaunted rather than spoke the lines, lyric interspersed with prose, a song of the fashion called in Provençal “Cansounetto émé parla.” I do not attempt to reproduce the verse, which was quite picturesque and musical. Its sense was more or less as follows:—

“I followed Beauty as the shadow of a flying bird across the sward. It seemed to wing and settle; and, lo! as I ran to grasp it, it was but a shadow, the shadow of a song that rose into the sky. Quivering it rose, and the shadow quivered to its ecstasy. And as both wing and voice receded up the heights, so did their shadow pale and die from out the grass. Only the shadow of a shadow remained to vex my heart.

“Like the flowers of the saladelle were my love’s eyes. It was in the chill of winter they gave their blue heaven to my soul. Returning from the long harvest, in summer I resought them, and behold! they were red to me. There is no truth in mortal beauty.

“I followed Beauty in a lonely place; and one, staying me, asked whither. ‘I follow a maid,’ I said. ‘Quick,’ he answered, ‘or you will never find her.’

“O, elusive is that golden quarry! Headlong we rush over the brink of death, and are still pursuing it. I met a sage, who laughed and said, ‘It is the blind side of the eye you set to externals. Will mortals never understand that? The other side it is that sees the truth. Hunt inwards, fool, where Truth and Beauty hide from you secure and unsuspected.’

“Lady, I have never doubted him till now.”

Such was the substance of the song which Bérard, or Carabas, sang to Briande, or Fifine. It was marked by the sort of mystic symbolism characteristic of the old-time cantefable and the rather vague rhapsodies of the early troubadours, and, if really first uttered impromptu, vindicated something of the singer’s claim to a genuine inheritance. At the end I said:—

“That was a fine improvisation, Monsieur. I congratulate myself on the favour bestowed on me.”

“You have perhaps reason to,” answered the poet loftily—and did you ever know the like of that for vanity?

It was to prove the sole favour of its kind, however; for thereafter soon came to pass the creature’s re-establishment in Fifine’s good graces, and my consequent second cold-shouldering by the two. That was to be, I suppose, though without any question of preordination, in which I don’t believe. Chance governs the world, and life is a long chapter of unforeseen accidents. In this case, no doubt, Destiny, bent to a particular purpose, seized on the first instrument at hand to effect it. It is the way of Destiny, whom the vulgar call Haphazard. He hears the hour strike, and straight he catches at any chance weapon—it may be a fly in the milk-jug to choke a Pope withal, an avalanche to crush an infant, a piece of orange-peel cast down to throw a giant. On that supposition, and that supposition alone, could Carabas’s unasked and monstrous intrusion into our privacy be accounted for. It is true he was a blunt instrument; but then, as no particular harm was intended, he served to do his work perhaps better than another and a sharper.

One morning I said to Fifine:—

“I propose for myself a day at Les Saintes Maries. Do you wish to come?”

“Why not?” she answered quietly.

“Very well,” I said. “Only, from a purely personal point of view, I am bound to make a stipulation—that M. Cabarus does not form one of our party.”

“If he chooses to come,” said Fifine, “how can I possibly prevent him?”

“I must leave that to you, m’amie.”

“But that is unfair, Felix—” She broke off, her face flushed, and she made as if to leave me, but altered her mind and turned again. “I have no right whatever to dictate to him as to his movements. Felix”—she put a hesitating hand on my arm—“you said you would take me there.”

There was a look of hurt in her face, and of something more—an emotion I could not fathom; but it helped me back to instant sanity. The perversity of my attitude struck me all at once as being in the last degree ridiculous, and it behoved me to hasten to amend it if I would not lose all faith in myself as a reasonable and consistent being. How could Fifine, a child sixteen years my junior, be expected to hold herself the exclusive property of a companion so sober and mature, or to waive on my behoof her perfectly natural instincts for coquetry and flirtation? The thing was harmless; and moreover agreeable to my plans. I uttered a clearing laugh.

“What a dog in the manger you must think me!” I said. “Never mind what I stipulated. Ask him to come, if you like.”

“But I never said I did like,” she answered. “Cannot we give him the slip somehow, and get to the station without his knowing?”

And that is what we did; though it meant a pretty panic run in the open, the little Gare de la Camargue lying across the river, with the whole stretch of the iron suspension bridge between. However, we reached it and got off undetected, and were quickly on our way again into the wilderness.

And here, indeed, was the real thing—no case of those half measures we had known on the Aigues-Mortes route, which takes one only along the civilised edge of the Camargue. This hour and a half’s run in the dancing and reeling little train, which winds up its iron thread of leagues across the very mid-loneliness of the delta, is a far wilder experience, more melancholy, more desolate, and at the same time infinitely fuller of the mystery which inhabits desolations. It is common to hear strange voices, to catch glimpses of strange faces, on hills or in wooded solitudes; but the spirits that peer and flit on lonely wastes are no less in certain evidence because we neither see nor hear them. Only we know that beyond this bent or that, peering through the reeds on the pool’s rim, or watching our receding footsteps from behind some bush we have just passed, is something which would not be there if we went to look. Here we learn the story that there is in far horizons: there is no end to its sadness; nor to its sweetness nor hope. And the sky is one vast iridescent dome, like a bubble floating on water, with the flat earth for its floor; and, underneath, what unfathomable secrets!

But I am encroaching on Carabas’s preserves, and must decline from rhapsody to commonplace. The prosaic fact is that the light railway from Arles to Les Saintes Maries bisects, roughly, the Camargue, and that the most of one’s journey by it is made through a monotonous and unpeopled solitude. It is a very impressive solitude, for those who can appreciate the charm of league-wide isolation from an overcrowded world, and its outstanding features are such as we should expect it to display, the natural offspring of primeval incoherence and desolation—the booming bittern; the mournful curlew; flamingoes (though we were too late to see them), silently trailing their lengths, like whisps of rosy sunset, against a pearly sky, and bill-clapping frog-eating cranes. Reeds are its prominent growth, with, everywhere, unending thickets of tamarisk and juniper; and water, in ponds, in pools, in the little irrigating canals which they call roubines, blots the surface eternally. Now and again a clump of silver poplars, or of that most beautiful of its family the umbrella-pine, will rise to trance the austerity with its lovelier mood; but they are rare benedictions. For the most part one seems to travel on the near-barren margin between Life and Death—and so to the symbol and expression of it all, the solitary fortress-church on the edge of the sea.

That is where God and man have closed to try conclusions—power mortal and power immortal locked in one embrace. It is the quaintest, loneliest church in the world—a temple and a stronghold in one. Long, narrow, and crowned with battlements, its crest was lifted to defy what its heart was opened to cherish, the spirit of Christian love and forbearance. There, above, its wardens bristled for the fight, while below slept in eternal peace the bones of those who had inherited direct from the Saviour His lessons of charity and forgiveness. You may see at this day the casket which is said to contain them. It is lowered periodically by machinery, from a chamber above the altar, for the worship of pilgrims. And there is even an odder worship connected with the place—that of Sarah, the Egyptian, who, according to tradition, accompanied the three Marys hither as their servant. She is buried, so it is reported, in the crypt chapel, a deep and darksome cavern excavated underneath the chancel, to which, on a certain day in October, flock from all quarters crowds of gypsies, to pay homage at the shrine of their ancestress.

The whole church is a picture of isolation without and gloom within. It is barely lighted by its few narrow windows; its little lamps are mere glow-worms in a vast concavity; there it stands by the salt sea, solemn and forgotten, like the scapegoat of all religion. It has a village about it, a little village, by now the smallest debris of its past estate. Still it has its great days—and I was thankful we had not alighted on one of them. It was hugely more impressive as it stood.

Fifine was disappointed in it. She could by no means bring herself to associate this forlorn relic with Briande’s tender pilgrimage. And the presbytery, when we found it, did not fit in with the poet’s description at all. It was an illusion laid, I fear, though I did what I could to claim for romantic licence its prerogatives. But the bitterest moment came with the discovery in the good curé himself of the shrewdest of caterers in the matter of picture-postcards, crosses, medals, and other such local baits for the curious or the pious, with which his office was stocked. An original charter of King Réné, which he produced for our benefit, did little to mend the disenchantment, so interminably and so drily did he drawl over it, while we were suffering to escape. The day, I felt, was a failure.

We were no longer good gossips—that, I think, was the truth of it. There had come something between us, which Fifine was too proud, and I too diplomatic, to own. The fact is a grievance cannot be patched, and there was a grievance here unconfessed. It had to be admitted and pulled to pieces before anything could be affected in the way of an understanding. So, though we were nominally on the usual terms, it was really the false coin of comradeship we were interchanging. We pretended sympathetic goodfellowship, and what was only perfectly obvious was the pretence.

We had brought our lunch with us and eaten it in the train. More than an hour remained to us after we had finished with the curé, and it passed slowly, though it had been killed merrily enough under the old circumstances. There was nothing whatever of interest in the place beyond the church, and we loitered aimlessly in the direction of nowhere. I am sure we both sighed our relief when the time came to return to the station.

In the train, while Fifine pretended to sleep, I sat chewing the cud of injurious reflection. “She is comparing her day,” I thought, “with what it might have been had that fulsome yarn-slinging impostor accompanied us. I think, on the whole, and under the circumstances, she might have endured me more benignly. But I suppose it is impossible to woman to yield a point graciously, and without at least some negative nagging in the shape of a self-sacrificial, smiling-martyrdom pose.” And that led me to launch out in mental eulogy of the spacious vision which sees at once when all that it is necessary to say has been said—the broad mind which omits to dwell on little grievances, but can show all forbearance and accept all excuses within the royal compass of its catholicity—until it suddenly occurred to me that, while on the subject, I had better perhaps extend the limits of my own vision. And at that I was able to laugh at myself, if a little ruefully, and to re-utter the now rather mechanic formula that everything was working as it should, and as I had the best of reasons in the world for wishing that it should.

We did not reach our hotel until near seven o’clock, and there, of course, was Carabas, seated smoking a disconsolate cigarette on one of the two benches placed on either side the steps. His hat sat on his head like a penwiper; he was lounging at rest, when, seeing us, he heaved himself forward; but the weight of his poetic bow-window carried him back again, and he had to make a second attempt, which brought him to his feet with a stagger and his hat over one eye. Once on his legs, however, his face assumed a mixed expression of relief and plaintive upbraiding.

“Ah, Mademoiselle!” he said, taking possession of my companion; “but this has been a desolate day for some of us.”

“Et d’autre part,” says Miss, with a naughty smile, “for some of us, a very bright one. You should have come to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, where the sun shone all day in the sky and in our hearts.”

He drooped his head, protruded his lower lip, and regarded her from the top of his eyeballs. It was designed for an expression of despair, and was quite sweetly laughable.

“Les Saintes Maries!” he whispered hoarsely. “There is a stab, Mademoiselle, in your every word. I should have come? Ah, truly! But by what instinct, seeing I was kept uninformed of your intentions? But doubtless that was deliberate, and in order to keep me from interposing my shadow between the sun and your happiness. It is well; then. And yet it is possible my company might have proved not altogether profitless. It is a desert spot, which yet the Magician’s wand can make to flower. Truly, Mademoiselle, I think you did perversely in discarding your most attached cicerone.”

I laughed, and ran up the steps, leaving Fifine to make her peace as she chose with her injured follower.