CHAPTER XXII
It was not very much, after all: just this. Paris, it appeared, was suffering, had been suffering for some weeks, from one of those epidemics of panic which will occasionally seize on an entire populace—especially if of the excitable and impressionable Latin race—and we happened to have alighted on it at the psychologic moment. You will remember, perhaps, that brief plague of motor-dacoitage which for a time kept the whole city in a state of nervous ferment, until it came to culminate in a siege and massacre which were very much a replica of the London Sidney Street affair? Well, that was the occasion; and, according to Madame Crussol, a general condition of terror prevailed; good citizens walking furtively, with looks askance at every petrol-driven vehicle, and bad searching their consciences for past oppressions in any possible way provocative of reprisals. No one knew whose turn it would be next with these murderous miscreants, whom a persistent baffling of the police and long immunity from arrest had rendered absolutely reckless.
The story had left Fifine and me, I may say, virtually unconcerned. Fresh from the sun and the south, serenely ensconced in the impregnable citadel of our love, we felt no tremors but such as arose from the thought of the social reckoning we should have to pay at last, and the possible difficulties in the way of an accommodation. All the trepidations of the outside world were as nothing to us in the shadow of that problem; I do not think that, after we had entered my rooms and shut ourselves in, we once again referred to the subject of the panic, or to Madame Crussol’s excited enlarging on it for our benefit.
As I turned up the light and closed the door, Fifine stood and looked around her, with a smile upon her lips. And then she sighed, and turned to me wistfully.
“What am I to call it, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
“Home, Fifine,” I answered.
She sighed again, like a very happy thing, and went about the room, renewing her acquaintance with its objects, touching this one lovingly, that reprovingly for its untidiness; and presently, coming to her portrait on the wall, she bent and kissed it—“not for your own sake,” she said severely to the beauty, “but for the sake of the hand that flattered you.”
It was very touching to me, this sense of sure possession, as illustrated in her pretty joys and confidences. A dimness always comes to my eyes in recalling that night—the last we were ever to spend together. For the cup was nearly drained, and the scroll written—Fifine’s whole story, as a woman reads such things; and yet but a paragraph in mine, one brief glowing passage lost in a waste of platitude. Sometimes I wonder how men, having once known a perfect confidence in love, can bear to cloud its memory with later fancies. Gross and imperfect, our souls, I suppose, are not meet for the sublime; but, having gathered and eaten fruit from heaven, we must be for taking the taste of its intolerable sweetness out of our mouths with some coarser earthlier savour. Yet I think I may say that I have that of myself put away, locked into secrecy, jealously excluded from knowledge, which no woman but one has ever shared or shall share. It is hers, and, by so much as it is hers alone, the worthless residue of me lies to what flattering uses the interested can extract from it.
There was store of potted things in the flat, and we had bought some rolls and butter by the way, which, with a bottle of good wine from the cupboard, made us an ample meal. I ate and drank a thought gravely myself, preoccupied with the consideration of something that was inevitable to follow; and Fifine, conscious of herself as of my mood, was little more inclined to talk. She made but a half-hearted meal; and, when we rose at last, I was struck all at once, seeing the breathless parting of her lips and her poor cheek’s whiteness, with a realisation of the strain which that long suspense must have been putting upon her. However, it had to be gone through with, and the sooner the more merciful to her.
Without a word I led her into the studio, where, under the light, I took her face between my hands and turned it up so as to look at me.
“Fifine,” I said.
She closed her eyes; I could see her lips trembling; but she made no answer.
“Fifine,” I said again, very quietly: “You know what it is I have to say; what cannot any longer be evaded, now we are returned. In all this—in this question between us—where does the Marquis de Beaurepaire come in?”
I felt a quiver go through her; and something like the faintest of moans swelled like a pulse in her throat. Overcome with love and pity, I put my lips to hers, and fondled her soft hair, and murmured words of passionate reassurance into her ear.
“Come,” I said. “This is no judgment, dear love, but a confession and an absolution. Come and sit with me, and hide your face if you will, and lose all your fear in something I am going to ask you.”
I sat down, and she slipped to my feet, where she leaned, her right arm flung over my knees, her cheek resting upon it, so that her face was turned from me.
“I asked you,” I said, “where, in this question between us, the Marquis de Beaurepaire came in. Shall I answer, then, for you, Fifine? He does not come in anywhere, does he? If any one’s formal consent to our marriage is needed, it is not his, I am sure.”
She raised her head quickly.
“Marriage, Felix!” she whispered, in an amazed voice.
“I have thought it all out,” I said. “What does the ‘guinea stamp’ matter one way or the other. Love, we know, is the only bond, by whatever name we call it. Throw this sop to the priests, if, by satisfying them, it secures us our idyll in peace. It makes no difference to the understanding between us. There is only one thing that can tie us, or that we should ever wish to tie. Were it to fray and snap—I think I know you, Fifine—that thread of convention would count for nothing in our severance. Even our knowledge of its existence would count for nothing—only the liberty to be ourselves unchallenged.”
“But, what you once said!” she answered, still in the same amazed tone.
“You mean in response to your query about men of genius, and their use for wives?”
“Yes.”
“I am not a man of genius, Fifine. Perhaps that is it.”
“But I say you are.”
“Then, for love of me, you would rather remain my mistress, which is to say my imagination, than become my wife, at the risk of turning my imagination out of doors?”
“I should not do that,” she said. “But, whatever I were called, I should stay if you told me, and go if you told me.”
“And that is just what I say. The ‘stamp’ is immaterial any way; at its best a sort of social diploma, entitling one to legal protection in one’s daily practice of the virtues. Will you marry me, Fifine?”
“Yes, if you wish it, Felix.”
“And do not you wish it?”
“It is only that I am frightened to think of ‘the poor Billy tethered to his stake in the backyard.’”
I smiled, recalling my own words so faithfully remembered.
“I promise you I will never submit to the tethering,” I said. “Rather, for your sake, I will emulate the golden one, leaping from rock to rock, and always, though pursued, unattainable.”
“If you would—ah, I could be so happy in following you,” said Fifine, “though my knees were bleeding all the way, and my nails torn from their fingers.”
“Poor little fingers! Well, in that case, counting me your assured ideal, what are your prejudices in favour of—the existing or the potential?”
“Then—I am only a woman, Felix—I should, I should like my love for you to be given a name—in case——”
She did not end her sentence; but I stooped and gathered her to my heart, and whispered:—
“Perhaps that is the ideal, Fifine. O, my sweet, how I am lost in love of you! But here comes in the question—what is immaterial to the bond we know, but there is something material to it, Fifine—the truth.”
She stole her arms about my neck; then leaned her head back, and looked at me steadily, passionately.
“Yes, Felix. How did you learn?”
“That Brooking girl, as it happened, had once given lessons in drawing to the Countess Josephine. She did not recognise in you her former pupil?”
“And you enlightened her?”
“Of course I did not. I finessed in the most admirable way.”
“So you have known it all the time; and ever since you have been looking upon me as a liar and impostor?”
“No, indeed, my girl. I knew you were bound by a secret not your own; that you were trying to be loyal to a trust.”
“Felix—it was that, but not only that. I dreaded horribly that the truth might repel you.”
“You thought me no better than a snob, in fact?”
“O, no, no! I thought only that you would despise one who could so lie to you! And then—your own origin—I used to cry to myself over your scorn of the people. Felix——!” her arms tightened, a desperate pain came into her eyes—“I am a child of the people myself.” She paused an instant—“Doesn’t it make you hate me?”
“That is foolish, Fifine,” I said gravely; “and very wrong to our understanding. What have I ever said to justify such an assumption in you?”
“O, forgive me, Felix, forgive me, forgive me! You don’t know what my mind has suffered.”
“I do not scorn the people, child; and, if I did, what has love to do with social differences? And, if there are any such between us here, the credit for the best is yours. I love every individual part of you; your wit, your intelligence, and your manners, as well as your pretty body. Now, what may I ask you and what may I not?”
“Ask, please, Felix.”
“Very well. Your particular confidences with my step-sister shall be sacred from me. If you reveal them, you shall reveal them in your own good time.”
“When she lets me—if I may.”
“But, in this matter of our marriage—well, you know your own laws of fiançailles? If there is a father, his consent must be obtained. Shall I hazard a guess? The violoncellist——?”
“I was always afraid you might suspect.”
“Why should you be afraid? Has he been a good father to you, Fifine?”
She sighed a little.
“Pauvre petit! He was not born ever to fight a difficult world. But he is a great musician, Felix.”
“That time he came and went—you had been lending him money, I suppose?”
“He is always so poor.”
“How did he learn the way to you?”
“He was in the secret, to a certain extent; he had to be. But he should not have come; it was against the agreement.”
“And your mother, Fifine?”
“She is long dead. She was an actress. She was in the company of the Comédie Française when they played in that Roman Theatre at Orange the year I was born. A Provençale by birth, my papa had brought her south to prepare for the two events, first the domestic and later the professional. We stayed on in Orange for three years: I don’t know how we lived or where; and then one day she ran away from Papa and from me. I think it killed his heart. He could never bear to speak of that time; and so it is all a shadow to me. But it was so strange sitting up there in the theatre, and thinking what it meant to me, both first and last.”
“Not the least poetic of the dramas played in it, I’ll go bail. Now tell me, Fifine: how is your father called?”
“Fréron, Felix.”
“And your yourself?”
“It is truly my own name—mine as well as hers. I am Josephine Fréron.”
“So? That is something saved from the wreck—just a plank or a spar as I was going under. You haven’t another remnant for me to cling to, I suppose—your age, for instance?”
“I am nineteen.”
“As certified? Good! I am getting quite buoyant. Why, what are the eyes opening so tragic about? You soft, foolish, sensitive, covetable goose, when are you going to trust to my passion as something a little stabler and more enduring than a summer’s day. Come, we are devoted lovers; it only remains for us to be unreserved friends.”
That night—so beautiful—such a perfect consummation! That pause, our journey ended, and the radiant serenity of the stars above, and, beneath, the black unseen gulf, plunging from our feet! I can hardly bear to dwell upon its loveliness, its poignancy. We sat till late, quietly talking together. All that was not Marion’s—and of what value to me in the prized context was that brief parenthesis?—was made mine—the story of her young innocuous days. She had been good; she had been chaste, and in circumstances well calculated to trip by the feet one less scrupulous in her self-respect, less cleanly intelligent, less precociously worldly, perhaps, since her self-education had been pursued in sometimes slippery places. For they had been poor; and indeed I gathered so far that the money consideration had been an incentive to this part she had consented to play in an unknown plot. What issue she had conceived of it, as regarded my inclusion in the conspiracy? Why, she had had no time to think: it had all been decided in a moment; and at least she knew that I was of the Marion stock (which I was not, by the way), and, as such, must pass for morally trustworthy. Besides, she had regarded the movement as of only a temporary character; and besides, besides, the actual fun of the adventure had something tickled her young humour—the prospect of experiencing, for however brief a time, the joys of social adulation in her feigned part. That was natural and delicious; but what she could not foresee was the sympathetic nature of the environments to which she was committing herself. She had her own fine aspirations, her own ideals: the danger came when they were allured into interest in a subject who could be coaxed and petted into giving them practical expression. And so grew in her the subordination of flesh to soul. She would consent to surrender the lesser to the greater, to buy our mutual self-realisation at the fullest price I asked.
And so at last I knew my Fifine wholly; the little story of her loves and her perplexities lay bared before me. Ah, why had I not accepted that confidence earlier? When she had hesitated that day on the brink of revelation, what mad perversity had made me reject her? Likely, then, the air cleared, we should have long lingered out our return, until—but that does not bear thinking of.
Presently we took to recalling softly, happily, the golden secrets of our wanderings together. And, so murmuring, she fell asleep in my arms.