The story of Fifine

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER XVI

Coming out after dinner to enjoy my smoke in the open, I found Fifine and her preux chevalier already ensconced on one of the two seats placed on the pavement against the house front. It was a still and balmy evening, and the rattling illuminated little Place was all one movement and babble of voices. I paused a moment to appreciate the scene, and then, as I descended the steps, somebody addressed me, a little doubtfully, from the second occupied seat:—

“Mr. Dane? It is Mr. Dane—isn’t it?”

“Présent!” I said, without a thought, and wheeled to look at the speaker. It was a young girl, indubitably English, who leaned forward to scrutinise me.

“Ah!” she said, turning merrily to a pleasant, placid-looking woman, who sat beside her—“he doesn’t know me, you see, Mother; I told you he wouldn’t.” And then she faced me again, a very white row of teeth witnessing to her nationality.

“Wait,” I said: “I am not such an insouciant as you think. You are Miss Clarice Brooking.”

I recalled her in that moment. She had been a student in Thirion’s atelier in Paris, where I had guinea-pigged two or three years earlier during the temporary absence through sickness of its master. Not a very promising pupil, if I remembered; but one, if I must confess it, with an inordinate admiration for the work of the teacher-substitute. But I had liked her, her gaiety, her freshness, her perfectly candid and voluble good-nature; and I was glad—for the moment—to meet her again.

She made a little motion, inviting me to sit beside her, and, as I did so, introduced me to her mother.

“And how about Thirion’s?” I said.

“O!” she answered; “that is all over, and you will never be put to the pains again of sparing me the knowledge of the muff I was.”

“You have abandoned art?”

“Now please to drop it, Mr. Dane. It would be mere pretence, you know, to say I abandoned what wasn’t mine—like jilting a man who had never proposed to you and didn’t mean to. But thank goodness the poor creature was saved any further embarrassment on my account by our coming into money. Yes, that is the glorious truth, and Mother and I have been busy for months in visiting all the places we have ever wanted to see and couldn’t—making up for lost time.”

“Thank you for my part in the benediction.”

“O!” She laughed cheerily. “I learned more from you than from any one; but it was all no good; I remained a rapin to the very end. To see you paint always made me despair.”

“You are not alone in that sentiment. It makes some people even use bad language.”

She looked at me questioningly, quizzically.

“I didn’t mean in that way. I simply adored your work. Have you not been successful? People say, you know, that success spells mediocrity.”

“Those are the people, I expect, who would say anything to vindicate their own want of it. Success is a question of some quality in one which finds its affinity in the greatest number.”

“Well, it seems to me, that is the same thing, because the greatest number are perfect idiots in everything but their own business. Are you painting about here?”

“A little.”

“All by yourself?”

“No—I have a companion with me.”

The moment I had said it a sense of the equivocalness of my position flashed upon me, and I wished that I could have warned Fifine before making that impulsive admission. But it was too late now.

“Does he paint too?” asked Miss Brooking.

“It is not a he,” I said.

“O!”

Was there a note of alarm, of instinctive recoil, in that single interjection? I wondered. Mamma, who took but a monosyllabic part in the conversation, smiled continually, like one who could be suavely tolerant of most worldly idiosyncrasies; and Clarice herself had been, after all, a student in Paris. Still, I felt I could not leave the matter at that abrupt round full-stop.

“She is a—a sort of connexion,” I said, with a slight hesitation, “whom I am accompanying back to Paris at the request of my step-sister.”

I spoke somewhat nervously, incapable, on the spur of the moment, of the finessing which was needed at once to betray no secrets and to create no inextricable entanglements. To my surprise the girl responded with alacrity:—

“O, of course! I remember now. Your step-sister is a Miss Herold, is she not?”

I gave a little gasp and murmured an admission, marvelling what was to come.

“You will wonder how I know, perhaps,” said Miss Brooking. “It is rather curious, but it is always funnily occurring, that question of associations. She—your step-sister, I mean—governesses Josephine de Beaurepaire, doesn’t she?”

I answered, “Yes, in a way,” in a voice I strove not to make aghast.

“Well,” said the young lady, “I was engaged myself for a short time to give Josephine drawing lessons—cheek of me, wasn’t it?—and I heard before I left that Miss Herold was coming to be her companion. I can’t remember who it was told me; but somehow I learnt that it was your step-sister who was expected. Is she still there?”

“O, yes!” I sat up with a jerk, in the desperate hope to interpose my body between the speaker and her view of Fifine close by.

“I wonder how she likes it?” questioned the girl.

“Why shouldn’t she?” I asked, hardly remembering of whom it was I was speaking.

“O! I don’t know,” she said. “She may have a different temperament to mine, and of course heaps more wisdom. But I couldn’t, myself, have stood another week of it.”

“Of what? Of the young lady?”

“Of everything. It was a horrible household. And the Marquis himself was, I really think, half demented.”

She was frankly outspoken, you observe. I had turned, facing her, and, watching her eyes, manœuvred to keep their inquisition from escaping beside and beyond me—a quite useless precaution.

“And your young pupil herself?” I asked. “Was she as impossible?”

“Tel père, telle fille,” answered Miss Brooking—“all affability at one moment and fury the next. I think she was neurotic, poor girl; and she led a fearful life of it with that madman. I couldn’t have stood it any longer; it frightened and offended me; and so I cut the connexion. But I hope——” she looked at me in sudden hesitation.

“Not in the least,” I said. “There is no apology called for on behalf of my step-sister. She has twice your years, and I should think twenty times your inflexibility and only a fraction of your sensitiveness. She has done very well, I understand, and has come to be quite an influence for good in the household.”

“I am so glad,” said the girl. “There was room for it, I am sure. And so you are on your way back to Paris—at once?”

“That depends upon my travelling-companion,” I said. “This is all a novelty to her, and she likes to linger over it.”

“Where is she? We should so like to be introduced to her. Will you?”

I rose at once, prompt and desperate to the chance. Under whatever pretext I must get Fifine away, explaining to her while I covered her retreat. Once gone, I might devise some excuse for her; but flight was the first essential.

But when, with a “Certainly, I will,” I turned to seek her, I found her already departed. No doubt she and her cavaliere-servente, seeing me occupied, had seized the opportunity to slip away together. Breathing again, I expressed my regrets to the ladies. “She was sitting there, with a friend,” I said, “but a minute ago.”

“What,” said Miss Brooking—“that very pretty girl? I was admiring her with all my eyes. Was she your relative?”

I stood and heard. On the first shock of those words followed an instant revulsion of feeling in my mind—from startled relief to incredulity, to amazement, to understanding; and so to an irresistible impulse to essay a daring test.

“Did you think her pretty?” I said. “My step-sister always professes to see in her a certain likeness to your former pupil.”

“To Josephine de Beaurepaire?” There was wonder in her tone.

“Yes.”

“She must have changed very much then since I knew her.”

“You don’t see it yourself?”

“O, no! I may have been deceived by the light; but I should never have thought for a moment of connecting them—not for a moment; unless, possibly, their figures might be something alike. But Josephine for one thing was fair—I don’t mean a blonde, but with hair of the neutral sort and palish eyelashes. No, really, I can’t understand it.”

There was no compromise about her. I felt the excitement in my heart as if beating on towards some emotional crisis, but whether fateful for loss or gain I could not foresee.

“O, well!” I said. “It is always a vexed question, that of likenesses. Some people can discover them where for others they simply don’t exist. Haven’t you ever known an infant that to this person was the image of its mother, to that of its father, while bearing to neither the least suggestion of the other parent? I daresay, if I could see Mademoiselle Beaurepaire, I should be as puzzled as you are to find a resemblance. Are you staying here long?”

“Only over to-morrow. We go on to Nîmes the day after. Mr. Dane—” she cooed honeyly—“I suppose you couldn’t—I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for you to—to sacrifice a little of your spare time to two poor outcast fellow-countrywomen? It would be so delightful to have you for a cicerone—if you could.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You will understand me, I am sure, when I say that I am at the mercy of a more exacting will than my own.”

I could not, indeed, give any definite answer at the moment—my thoughts were chaos, with still an instinctive dread in them of that introduction the prospect of which had at first dismayed me. On the other hand I recognised in this chance encounter a means to a certain end of unsentimentalising detachment. And more than that—I was really pleased to have run across this young compatriot of mine again; she carried with her a frank deodorising atmosphere which it was pleasant to breathe after the rather close and thunderous experiences of the last few days. I found myself looking at her very kindly: she was not exactly pretty, but as fresh and wholesome as the primroses of her own countryside; and breathing her, as it were, I seemed to feel, wistfully and faintly, a sense of the long exile which, though voluntarily, had severed me from my birthright. England, after all, smells very sweet across the seas.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Brooking. “She won’t want to be deprived of you for the sake of two strangers.”

But Clarice persisted: “Why shouldn’t she make one of us?”

“I will ask her,” I said. “Don’t think me a boor if I leave it at that. And that reminds me: I must go and look after the young lady, and see that she isn’t getting into any mischief—” and we parted with a cordial good-night, and I went my gait.

With what intention; and whom to seek? I felt in a very queer state of mind—cynical, puzzled, wrathful, and yet oddly elevated. What should I do—what say? Nothing, I resolved, after I had thought it all well out; but just let things take their course. In masterly inactivity lay the solution of most problems of conduct.

Mademoiselle my sister, the landlady informed me, when presently I returned to the Hôtel, had wished me to be informed that she had retired to bed with a slight headache, and did not desire to be disturbed. So? Then she should not be disturbed by me. I was merely the looker-on in a quaint little game of cross-purposes.

Fifine was before me at the breakfast-table the next morning. As I joined her, the two ladies came in, and took their seats, fortunately at some distance from us. We just exchanged bows, cheerily on their part, nervously on mine, for some dread of the unspeakable still haunted me. But it passed in the next moment and I felt troubled no more. I thought Clarice looked very attractive in her clean frock and dewy morning brightness, which contrasted oddly, I will not say flatteringly, with the more exotic charms of my companion.

“I knew her in Paris”—I volunteered the information to Fifine, who was patently, though with cold looks, canvassing my newly-discovered acquaintance of the night before. “She was a pupil of Thirion’s, and under my tuition for some months. She and her mother have come into money, and are travelling. They wanted me to show them the sights for a few hours to-day, and I couldn’t very well refuse. You won’t mind, will you?”

I did not think it necessary to relate the particulars of our conversation or of my apprehensions. It was obvious that the morning light had done nothing to reform that question of identification.

“They think you a connexion of mine, whom I am escorting to Paris at Marion’s request,” I went on. “You have nothing to do but uphold that fiction, and steer clear of all compromising details. Just hold your tongue about yourself, that is all. They go to-morrow.”

“Why should I do anything?” said Fifine. “They are not my friends.”

They were not. I observed her curiously. There was no sign of any recognition in her eyes either.

“But they would like to be,” I answered. “They asked particularly if you would not join us.”

“Then they may ask. I shall not come.”

“Let me introduce you to them at least. I promised to.”

“That is your look out. I don’t want to make their acquaintance.”

“Why not? You put me in a rather awkward position, you know. They will think you very ungracious.”

“I don’t care what any maladroite of an English Miss thinks me. It is hers that is the clumsy bad-taste in interposing herself where she is not wanted. You put yourself in that position, and you may get out of it as you like.”

“Very well. You must behave as you please. Only, if I go, what will you do with yourself in the meantime?”

“O! You needn’t trouble about me. Fortunately there is one upon whom I can depend more confidently for my entertainment.”

“You mean Carabas, of course.”

“Yes, of course. He is not like a butterfly to be led away any moment by a new fancy.”

“Well, you ought to know—such an old friend, and his attachments tendrils of such slow growth.”

I laughed; but Fifine was remote from laughter. She got up in a very few minutes and left the table and the room, her head held high.

I was really placed in an uncomfortable position, and hard put to it, when I joined the ladies, to find excuses for my companion’s rudeness. Of course they must have adjudged her in their minds an ill-bred unpleasant young woman; but their tactful kindness sought only to spare my feelings the knowledge of theirs. I said something lamely about her shyness of strangers—for her refusal to be introduced must have been perfectly obvious to them—and I conveyed from her a fictitious message to the effect that she regretted not being able to come, but that she had already engaged herself to a short expedition with a M. Cabarus, an acquaintance of ours. It was not much, but it was more than she deserved, even though my manner, I am afraid, must have given my invention the lie, for I was plainly embarrassed, and as plainly incensed against the cause of my embarrassment. But the two ladies affected, with a much finer tact, a genuine sympathy with the subject of my excuses.

“It is too bad,” said Mrs. Brooking, “for us to impose ourselves on you like this. You really mustn’t let us, Mr. Dane. Poor girl! I dare say she is wishing us at Jericho; and I can feel with her in her shyness of troublesome interlopers like ourselves. One wants to be free of all social obligations on a holiday. So please don’t consider yourself bound to us in any way. We can manage perfectly well by ourselves—can’t we, daughter?”

“Yes, of course,” said Clarice. “It was only a thoughtless suggestion on my part; and I really hardly expected it to be taken seriously.”

“It was taken,” I said, “not only seriously, but pridefully. You mustn’t deny me that sort of proprietary exaltation which one feels in playing local dragoman to a party of visitors. After exhausting the beauties of Arles, you will leave off with a vague impression that I am somehow to thank for them, simply because my knowledge of them is anterior to yours; and I wouldn’t forego that feeling of self-complacent superiority for anything. Moreover, I have no other engagement—I swear it.”

They laughed, and expostulated; but in the end we went off together, and made a quite pleasant day of it. Both mother and daughter were of that bright intelligence which gives to the reiteration of ancient commonplaces a perpetual new zest. They were interested in everything; they commented inanely on nothing. I enjoyed myself, I confess it; there was something exhilarating in this contact with the fresh clean North in a fervid land, and Clarice, as a fair young Englishwoman, did her country and me, I felt, the most gratifying credit. We went back to lunch at the Hôtel, to recruit against fresh exertions, and started off again without having seen anything of Fifine. That did not disturb me, but rather otherwise; I had had quite enough of her for the time being, and her presence in the room would have been nothing but an embarrassment. No reference to her was made by the ladies, and for that I was thankful. It had occurred to me only too late that she passed in the Hôtel for my sister, and I was struck aghast over the thought of what strategy would be necessary to accommodate that fiction to the asserted facts of my case. But fortunately our supposed relationship had not reached the ears of the two; nor, so far as I know, were they ever called upon to question my statement. I hope not, at least, for, absurd and illogical as it may sound, I would fain keep my credit unimpaired in the breast of that clean-souled young countrywoman of mine.

I dined alone at the end of the day, my friends preferring to be served in their room after their somewhat exhausting experience; and again Fifine was conspicuous by her absence. But I would make no enquiries about her, or allow myself to be disturbed in any way on her account. She had chosen her own course, and was welcome to bring it to whatever conclusion she pleased. After dinner, I strolled about the town for a time, and at near ten o’clock returned to the Hôtel and mounted to my room. I noticed Fifine’s shoes put outside her door as I passed; but I went by without a sign. Nevertheless I was conscious of a slight thrill of relief in the knowledge that she was safely housed.

Our rooms were both of them luxurious—mine little less than the other, a lofty two-bedded apartment, over fine for a vagabond’s accommodation, but I will not say unwelcome for its sheeted cosiness. If there was one thing we were both fastidious about it was our linen, which on every first opportunity was despatched to the laundress, and I was moving with satisfaction from my bed a little pile of freshly-washed clothes, when I heard a knock at the door and cried Entrez! Supposing it was the garcon de chambre, I did not turn for a moment, until the silence that followed the sound of the handle striking me, I looked round and saw Fifine. I just observed her face—mutiny still struggled in it with some softer emotion—and then, with my back to her, renewed my sorting.

“What is it?” I said.

She did not answer for a moment, until, it seemed, she could command her voice; and then she spoke:—

“I—I only wanted to ask you, Felix: have you had a pleasant day?”

“Very pleasant.”

“I think she is pretty—your friend—in the pale English way.”

“I think so too.”

I smiled secretively and grimly, as, my head bent down, I busied myself over the linen. A long pause followed—and then:—

“May I shut the door, Felix?”

“No,” I answered sharply; then, more reasonably: “Think of the misconception it might give rise to if you were seen leaving—there, I know what the fiction is; but fiction must be safeguarded against truth as much as truth against fiction; and ours has been used before now and found not impregnable. You can talk where you are: there is no danger of any one hearing you on this remote landing.”

I thought she would go at once; but to my surprise she did not move.

“What is it you want?” I asked presently, turning to face her, as she did not speak. The look of her, standing so, half disarmed me. She was so patently miserable, with still the proud misery of one who, wishing to atone, struggles against the self-abasement whose first knowledge may be of a place in old affections lost, perhaps irretrievably. Yet I could not keep that harshness from my voice, though I knew she felt it acutely. I had a policy to pursue, no less than a lesson to drive home; and certainly she had given me plentiful provocation for my attitude.

“Nothing,” she said—“only to say good-night.” She moved as if to go; but still lingered; and suddenly the submission came. “I didn’t mean you to be so offended; and—and I suppose it was natural in you to prefer your own countrywoman before a stranger.”

“My dear child,” I answered coolly, “I must point out to you two errors in that little speech: I did not regard you as a stranger, and I was not offended.”

A momentary light of hopefulness came into the eyes turned quickly up to me, but it faded on the instant.

“What were you, then?” she said. “Not anyhow yourself, as I thought I had come to know you.”

“Familiarity, young lady, sometimes breeds contempt. Let me hear this fancy portrait described, before I admit or reject it.”

“Why, philosophically just and forbearing; always ready to make allowances; humorously tolerant of the weaknesses of smaller natures.”

“I acknowledge the soft impeachment with a smirk. And now, how have I falsified your too generous estimate of me? Did I upbraid you for your ill-manners towards my friends, whose only offence lay in wishing to make your undesirable acquaintance? On the contrary, I expressed concern for the situation in which your own obstinacy placed you. Did I not make allowances? Assuredly I did, even to the extent of bearing on your behalf, as some slight amelioration of your discourtesy, an imaginary message from yourself to the ladies. Finally, what humorous tolerance was lacking in my reference to your devoted henchman, whose constancy I acclaim as a thing for admiration, while I cannot, of course, through my baser nature, hope to emulate it? I trust only—to return your kind enquiries—that it proved a source of as great gratification to you to-day as I am bound to confess my inconstancy did to me.”

Though she took unresisting my merciless chastisement, I would not spare her one sting of it. There was something more behind my virulence, you will understand, than mere resentment of a piece of bad-temper, or even of bad taste. But there was yet a stronger incentive: I must be either resolutely brutal, I felt, or irresolutely weak. One concession to the emotional, which fought in me to grant pity and forgiveness to this soft tragic young sinner, and the end for us would come in sure disaster. Yet the tears in her eyes as she gazed at me, with the expression of one who is realising for the first time the truth of a hopelessly alienated affection, were advocates I had a mortal struggle to resist. Let the fact that I did resist them stand at least to my credit.

“I dare say you are justified,” she said, with a brave effort at self-control, “in speaking to me like that. I don’t defend myself, but only my opinion of you, which, being what it was, was the reason perhaps of my venturing to take such spoilt advantage of it. I won’t believe now that you are different from what I thought; I have tried you beyond your patience, that is all. But I think, Felix, you might have spared me all that bitter sarcasm. To use sarcasm, I have heard you say yourself, is to try to play the wit with a fool’s weapon. It hurts but it does not convince. I would much rather you told me straight out that you had had enough of my tempers and moods, and wanted to be rid of me.”

“I could not say that with truth, Fifine.”

“O, Felix! how are we to go on like this? Will it change your feelings to me at all to be told that I have been miserable, deservedly I know, all day?”

“What, in spite of your confident dependence on——”

“I have not been with him—I would not go, though he asked me. Most of the day I have spent in my bedroom.”

“Starving and punishing yourself? I am sorry for that, Fifine.”

“I bought some chocolates. Felix—” she put a light entreating hand on my arm—“take me away from here. O, do, Felix!”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know—only away.”

“Les Baux is the next on our itinerary. Very well. Only we cannot start until to-morrow afternoon.”

“Why not before?”

“Because—” I had a short desperate struggle with myself, and conquered—“I have undertaken to escort my friends to Montmajour, and that will take up the whole morning.”

“To Montmajour—where we went together!” There was a note of stricken wonderment in her voice. “Must you go?”

“Yes. I must go.”

“You will not expect me to come? But I will come, if you wish it.”

“No—if you can manage to amuse yourself somehow in the interval?”

“Yes, Felix.”

“I shall be back in good time. They have to start early for Nîmes.”

“Very well.” She raised her troubled eyes to mine, said “Good-night, Felix,” in a desolate little voice, and disappeared, closing the door behind her.

The instant she was gone I went like a lunatic, up and down, up and down, reviling and cursing myself. Once I paused, with my hand on the door, mad to follow her, to shut myself in with her, and, upbraiding my own cruelty, yield everything to a wild reconciliation. But the intolerable moment spent itself, and left me mercifully sane.