CHAPTER XX
It had all been such dear egregious folly, that contest of tempers and jealousies and wilful self-misrepresentations. We used to laugh about it together in those after days of perfect concord and understanding. It had been the ferment, we supposed, necessary to the rich wine of love we had come to drink so deeply. All restfullest things are born of unrest: the brawling stream ends in the quiet lake; there is no sky-blue like that that flowers out of storm; life itself is wrung from anguish into infant sleep; through strife and tumult we draw to death, the profoundest peace of all. So now, in proportion with the former riot in our souls was the lovely tranquillity that succeeded it. There was no question of conscience to disturb us; for conscience pricks through sense of guilt, and we knew of no evil in ourselves, but rather an excess of charity and lovingkindness towards all men and things. For the first time in our lives, perhaps, we were in near concord with the Christian concept of Grace. A greater force than convention had pronounced upon us; not we upon ourselves, or either on the other. We had but acquiesced in what was decreed, guiltless, both, of soliciting the issue. All that was over; the storm had been and it had passed, breaking into this heaven-born flower of serenity. Was that God’s punishment on us or God’s commendation? I only know that no thing on all the earth would we have harmed; that our hearts brimmed over with a universal tenderness; that we would have gone to martyrdom for the faith of infinite love that possessed us. It is difficult to think that sin which bears such divine fruit.
But, let that pass, I entreat you. Forget the flaw in our idyll, if such exists for you; take its rhapsodies as authorised—really a minor point—and grant it the full-blown licence accorded to conventionalised bonds. Then I shall be safe to expatiate intimately, if I wish to, on a tenderest subject.
But on the whole, I think, I prefer to treat that subject abstractly. I am not so hardened in gracelessness as to wish to steal their liberties from the sanctioned ministers of Grace; and these matters seem to me, in my sinfulness, rather too holy for discussion. Wherefore, if you please, we will be content with my saying that Fifine made me a sweet friend, stately shy before others, keeping me rosily at a distance in public, but ready with all amends when we walked and talked alone.
Dear God, what a girl—what a woman! And how I loved her—how I loved! I had never known her before, I thought: I had never known myself—of what I was emotionally capable. Then in those days I learnt the unconfessed secrets of my own soul—what it would have meant to me had I lost her. The knowledge gained, I could hardly bear her out of my sight: it was to part with my better self; to wander guilty and bewildered. Only when she rejoined me came reassurance with the contact. She had accepted no evil: I had meant none. She was good, good—in all that goodness means of essential purity. I cannot too much insist on it. It was the self-sacrifice of utter devotion to a pure ideal. Here is what she once said to me—I will reveal so far—her grave eyes loving into mine:—
“Felix, for my sake now you will strive again—will you not?”
“How strive, Fifinette?”
“To achieve; to be your greatest; to realise the very conscious best that is in you.”
“Why not? You have given me new heart.”
“It is so dear to hear you say so. It was for that”—she hesitated; then putting her two hands on my arm, looked up earnestly in my face: “it was for that, Felix, I gave myself to you—soul and body, my own love; that you might—perhaps—justify the sacrifice to me.”
“Was it a sacrifice, Fifine?”
“You should know. But I should never regret it, never for one instant, if it came to be so dearly requited. I want you”—she laid her face down on her hands, where they rested—“so much—so much I want you to see it in that light. I could not bear to have you think that—that I yielded, to no higher emotion than——”
“You can leave it unsaid, Fifine. I am going to do great things, and you shall have the credit for them all.”
She thanked me with an affectionate look. Was she not pure? Could orthodoxy have shewn a better case for love? But let the matter rest there. If stones are to be cast, here am I, blithe to be made their target. I am jealous for her good fame; not a copper farthing for my own.
But, while I insist on that specific truth, I make generally no pretence of drawing the portrait of any Fifine but the one commonly known to me. I would not have her pictured by any means as a self-renunciatory young penitent, or as piously shedding the very qualities and characteristics which made her the desirable thing she was. We contended as much as ever, if now with a novel spirit of delight in the understanding which sweetened direfullest controversy; she showed no sudden increase of diffidence in her attitude towards my work or my opinions, but stated her own views as confidently and dispassionately as she had always done; the bright intelligence, which could seize so readily on the essential in any subject or object, and whose manifestations, owing to our estrangement, had been suffering of late some temporary eclipse, reappeared as active and as fearless as ever. And joyfully I welcomed this rush of sunshine from the withdrawn cloud. It was gay to see her, in the sweet assurance of her power over me, throw off the shackles which had been cramping her, and resume in great gladness the lovable enigma of herself—girlish, ingenuous; yet with that odd suggestion of worldly knowingness and knowledge which was always such a stimulating puzzle to me. If there survived a shadow of a shadow between us, it was this: she had a secret from me; and I had a secret from her—that I knew she had one. Yet mine was in a sense a justification to me of my love; and so the shadow to me was but as a shadow thrown by sunlight. I thought I knew what hers was—the true explanation of that silence, that withholding; and now I know indeed. She was afraid even yet to speak the truth; she dreaded unspeakably the chilling effect it might possibly have on me and my belief in her. Poor child—if she had only understood!
And so, to that extent we lived a lie to one another; yet it was a falsehood of infinite pathos and tenderness. In all else but that we were wholly one and inseparable, in trust, in truth, in perfect confidence.
We had it all out, of course, on the subject of those erst-peevish perversities and misunderstandings. There is no joy like a converted jealousy; quarrels become relishes when they can be discussed impartially. I told Fifine of my savage decision, on the hill that fateful night, to achieve the world-conquering work which was to refute and overwhelm her with a sense of what she had thrown away. She laughed; but, like the dear love she was, immediately stroked me down, in remorse for the pain her apparent insensibility might be giving me.
“Gossip,” she said—for we had resumed that pretty address as being singularly appropriate to our state—“you will come to do for love of me, will you not, what you designed to do for my punishment. My heart will sing then for its very shame.”
And indeed it sang, and sang me on to inspiration. I did my utmost, in those golden days, to vindicate her sacrifice to her through the persistent endeavour that her soul so prized. I schemed, and designed, and made innumerable colour notes, while she glowed beside, my patient, enthusiastic ministrant. Yes, and my prompter too, for she was no despicable critic either as to ends or means. We would make a compromise of our theories, our principles, with even perhaps a slight leaning of the balance towards the traditional; and in the result—well, those were but plans, elevations, as it were. The whole, into which the infinite parts were compacted, exists for any one to see who likes.[1] It is the only work of mine in which heart and soul and brain made a common cause of it to achieve perfection. It has not achieved it, of course, for Fifine was not perfection. But what approach to it it makes was her doing and hers alone. There is sunshine in it, which they call sunshine. I wonder sometimes if one from the idle multitudes who pass it by ever chances to penetrate the secret of the truth from which it was drawn.
Once we climbed up to the hill-top on which I had been fog-bound, and found the pit into which my stumbling steps had nearly precipitated me. It was a very death-trap, even as regarded by day, sawn clean and square into the bowels of the rock. Ruthless the greed which could thus assert itself, callous of human safety. They had been quarrying everywhere since my former visit, cutting wholesale into the majesty of the hills. But now, though late, the government, we heard, was interfering, with a view to stopping the brutal devastation. Might its powers, we prayed, prove despotic in a free land! We looked over into the black gulf, and could see no bottom. Fifine drew away from it, sick and shuddering; and suddenly she was clinging to me. Yet I had been careful to make light of my escape; and Carabas I had altogether spared in my half-jocose reference to it.
“Sit me down,” my girl whispered: “I shall be all right in a minute.”
We rested on a great stone, and for a time she could only breathe in silence.
“O, Felix!” she panted presently—“O, Felix!”
“My gossip—this is not to be your reasonable self. Here I am, you see.”
“I should have been a murderess.”
“Now, Fifine?”
“I should, I should. It was my perversity drove you up there.”
“Now that it was not. It was Cabarus if it was anybody. You could not know he wanted me to make that opportunity for him.”
It was a tonic reference. She sat up, her bosom still tumultuous, but with a scornful frown lined between her eyebrows.
“Opportunity!” she ejaculated—“that imbecile!”
I laughed—the base comfortable chuckle of the successful suitor.
“For loving you?” I said—“or what?”
“How dared he—the presumption! And when we had known him so short a time!”
“Really, gossip,” I said, “I think he had some excuse.”
“How?”
“You seemed to like him—I want to tread delicately.”
“I liked his imagination—when I could dissociate it from his ridiculous vanity.”
“Fifine; tell me honestly. And that was all? You never even considered him in the light of a—of a possible husband?”
“O, don’t be horrid!”
“Women will, you know, take these incredible fancies.”
“Felix, I could understand myself falling in love with a gorilla——”
“Thank you.”
“But not with a poet. That he could picture himself, think of himself, as your successful rival! I almost laughed, although I was so angry. To see him return alone—and for that purpose!”
“You did not spare him, I fancy.”
“Indeed I did not. Why should I? I was enraged; and after all I had been hoping from our reconciliation.”
“Well, I am sorry for him.”
“It is generous, and like you. For myself, I think he deserved the worst he got.”
“Don’t forget he saved my life.”
“Nonsense. He did nothing of the sort.”
“I mean he rescued me from a very ticklish position, and at considerable sacrifice to himself.”
“What sacrifice? He knew the hills; he could have walked them blindfold, he said.”
“But to agree to come, after all that had happened—his disappointment, his—his merciless drubbing.”
“Well, he owed me some compensation for having insulted me so.”
“I must sympathise with him, gossip, nevertheless. Don’t I realise what it would mean to lose you.”
She cooed to me over that, like the lovingest of doves. What vanity it is to think to chop logic with a woman. She can see no reason in the world, I think, why, if the lusty adored of her heart be hungry, she should not snatch food out of the hands of a starving beggar to feed him.
“Well,” I said, “I am glad for his sake he thought fit to take himself off; and certainly I am glad for ours. A serpent in one’s Paradise is disturbing; but a wet-blanket is fifty times worse. I would rather chance a burglar than a chill any day—or night.”
And indeed poor Carabas had disappeared the morning after our parting on the road, and we had seen no more of him. Whatever conclusions he had formed as to facts, he had assumed from them, I opined, no hope for himself, and had withdrawn timely from the unendurable spectacle of his own discomfiture as reflected in another’s triumph.
“What made you tell him we were not related?” I asked.
“Did he say so to you?” demanded Fifine contemptuously. “That only shows how unworthy he was to be entrusted with a woman’s confidence. He made me so angry with his innuendoes about our relationship that I simply had to tell him the truth, to vindicate your right to regard me just as you liked; only, I said, your liking happened to be that of an honourable man towards a trust—a thing which he couldn’t understand. And, to prove it, he went and told you, the mean toad.”
“Never mind. And the less said about my devotion to a trust the better, perhaps.”
“Aren’t you devoted to me, Felix? That is all I care about.”
“You would believe it, Fifinette, if you had seen me drivelling over your pillow at Paradou.”
And thereupon—but I am not writing a catalogue of baits for kisses—spoon-baits would be the better term. Every lover is a law unto himself in that respect.
We were three weeks in all at les Baux—a rosary of enchanted days. I should like to linger over that halcyon time, my life’s one long unbroken spell of happiness, were it not for what I must regard it through—years like a dingy window looking out on a jewelled morning landscape. The crown of sorrow—you remember Tennyson’s words? Yet in a way, I think, that was rather a maudlin complaint of the poet’s. Are not the “happier things” always behind us—dropped behind, and following us, perhaps, at their leisure? Maybe when we stop some day, our journey done, they will overtake us. Would not that be beautiful, my Fifine—to turn, and find you, with your dream and your glory? And in the meantime I am not going to mope and snivel because a certain incomparable loveliness in my past cannot be repeated. Perfection never can.
Had she, through all these shining days, a least suspicion that I guessed anything? She must have wondered surely how it was I could inwardly face the prospect of our return to Paris, with the inevitable moral it implied of separation, or of utter catastrophe, and yet could act now as on the apparent assumption that our union was eternal. She had put off conclusions for a time by begging me, by my content in her, to cut the very name of the Capital from our catalogue of references; to live as if it had never existed or was to exist for either of us; not to allow one harsh extraneous thought to enter through the gates of our golden Paradise. Yet she could not have supposed my intelligence hoodwinked by that pretty subterfuge into overlooking a consequence which must have seemed inevitable to me, and which only her own confession was in the way to nullify. But what she guessed or reasoned I never knew; only, poor love, it would have saved her so much self-torment could she have made up her mind to throw herself upon the ordeal, and, in that time of passion, betray the truth.
And in the meanwhile what was my own attitude towards the mystery? Why, emancipated as I was, simply one of love-in-idleness, I think. Fifine was Fifine to me, and that was all sufficient. If I thought lazily beyond that bare fact, tasting even a piquancy in speculation, it was to present myself with the portrait of a young lady of very feminine but independent views, having a knowledge, or at least a cognizance of the Bohemian side of Paris, entertaining seedy violoncellists, and capable of coming to definite conclusions with herself on a variety of subjects, from art and dress to conduct. Comely too, and yet unspoilt, be it said; and, if a worldling, one with the highest capacity for self-sacrifice to an ideal devotion. A fine spirit, but warm and sweet and very human—such was the picture.
Where Marion came in? Ah! that was a puzzle indeed. By no conceivable process of symphysis could I make her and Fifine combine; though the knowledge that the latter was what she was, or rather was not what she professed to be, explained to me some things in my step-sister’s attitude towards her and me hitherto inexplicable. It explained nothing else, however; it left me stranded exactly where Miss Clarice Brooking’s ingenuous revelation had deposited me outside the Hôtel du Nord Pinus.
That same Clarice, I confess, was another of my killing baits. Fifine had asked my pardon very humbly for her inexcusable behaviour to my friends. It had been due to extreme jealousy, she very frankly admitted—to a wound even now not quite healed, and whose pain had driven her to reprisals. It was horribly silly, no doubt; but then—my own countrywoman, and the attractions of that delicate pink and white. She had envied her her complexion; she had envied her—this with a hot averted look—her earlier knowledge of me. Was I quite, entirely, absolutely sure—
Yes, I was quite sure, my Fifinette; and quite sure of always drawing you on the subject, and of extracting my ample rewards therefrom. Machiavellian is passion in these matters.
So in the lovely valley the lovely idyll spent itself, until of its very perfection came the sense of inevitable rounding off and closure. Nothing disturbing came near us all the time; but we wandered free spirits of that haunted glen, absorbing into our glowing blood the very atmosphere of its enchantment. The little pavilion of the incomparable Queen Jeanne, with its pretty sculptures and oddly jointed ceiling, snugging into the corner of a grassy paddock in the valley, was a favourite resting-place of ours. But in what antiquities of rock and gorge and crumbled human dwelling did we not steep ourselves, from the eyries of the prehistoric cave-dwellers and the worn stone sarcophagi of the early Christians, to the toppling renaissance fronts and doorways that mingled on the hillside with the wild architecture of the first Seigneurs. All immense, all significant, all spectral despite its ponderous actuality; teeming with the infinite dust and debris of bygone story; ruins like rocks and rocks like ruins, one indistinguishable confusion and torrent of stone. Long ago from the floor of the little church they had unearthed the body of some beautiful unknown châtelaine. She had golden hair, like the maid of Pornic, that stretched down on either side to her feet. It was all that survived from the desecration, and it was deposited in Mistral’s museum at Arles. Fifine had seen it there; and, of course, Carabas. He had promised her a poem on the subject when they should stand together over the pilfered grave. And now was the grave of his own heart robbed of its golden vision. Poor troubadour. It gave me a moment’s melancholy to hear of his intention. Fifine laughed, relating it. Such is the difference between men and women; yet women are infinitely the pitifuller. The elemental riddle of them, of their inconsistencies with themselves, has never seemed to me so well epitomised as in the fable of the Amazonian Queen Thalestris, man-conqueror and man-scorner, travelling alone to give herself to Alexander, that she might become by him the mother of a boy-hero.
One day Fifine, putting a hand on my arm and looking up into my face, spoke to me wistfully of a thought that had come into her mind.
“Felix, we have been very, very happy here, have we not?”
“I answer for myself, m’amie. And how about you?”
“I had never thought there could be such joy anywhere. It has been almost too perfect for believing.”
“You mean something. What is it?”
“Only that—don’t be vexed with me—I think I should like to go, before the edge of the tiniest little cloud comes to peep at us over the horizon.”
“What cloud are you looking for? I see no sign of one.”
“No more do I. That is just it. But my heart seems so full: it cannot hold more without brimming over. And I want to keep this memory, just as it is—so full, so complete; a little immaculate Paradise, and all our own.”
“It is Paradise, as you say, Fifine. If we leave it we shall have to put on aprons perhaps. It is not time yet to talk of clouds—especially since the serpent departed.”
“I don’t care what the world says. I am not ashamed. But I might be, if the cloud appeared. Won’t you, gossip dear—just to spoil me? And there is another reason. Somebody I know will be getting anxious about me. Shall I tell you who it is?”
Why did I not say yes, and so lay for ever that last lingering shadow between us? She was prepared, I knew, in that emotional moment to throw herself upon my love and confess the truth in a breath. But like a fool I would not let her. I was jealous that she could consider any claims above mine.
“No, I don’t want to know,” I said. “If we must go we must; but we will carry with us, if you please, as much of our Paradise as is expressed in a complete isolation from all persons and things unconnected with it. You know we haven’t visited your birthplace yet—which was really our first pretext for this adventuring. You aren’t proposing to go straight home to Paris, anyhow, I hope?”
“O, no!” She gave a little sigh, of part sadness, part relief perhaps, over that baulked impulse. “Only if we might begin journeying that way. And I should love to visit Orange.”
“Very well; we will turn our backs on the Cherubim and the flaming sword, and march out into the wilderness. Adieu paniers! vendanges sont faites!”
“No!” cried Fifine, in a full voice—“then I will not go!”
“Wilful?” said I. “Then that convinces me you were right; for is not this little, little difference between us the first faint warning of a cloud?”
It was with hearts full of emotion that we left the next morning the long valley of our delight, with its golden sunshine, its quiet hospitality, its unforgettable memories. Shall I ever go there again? Maybe when someday my lonely journey ends, and I sit waiting my overtaking by the “happier things” I have left behind. Then, perhaps, but not before. And, in the meantime, on what butterfly wings hovers my beautiful faithful Psyche among those ruined “Courts of Love”?