CHAPTER XXIV
One day I was pacing my room in the restlessness that now seldom left me, when a knock sounded on my door; and, going irritably to open it, I saw my step-sister Marion. She looked at me and I at her for a full minute before either of us spoke; then “May I come in, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You may come or you may go,” I said. “It is all one to me.”
I turned from her, and she closed the door and followed me. In the studio she sat down, while I continued my wild-beast pacing.
“You are not looking well,” she said suddenly.
“What does that matter—to you or any one?” I answered, and came to a quick stop before her. “Did you really call to enquire after my health?”
“I came to say good-bye.”
“O?”
“I am going back to England.”
“Having satisfactorily completed what you came to do here?”
“Yes, in a way. Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire is about to be married.”
I stared down on her in amazement.
“Upon my word!” I said. “This to my face?”
“What,” she answered, a little frigidly, “is the use of keeping up that fiction, since you and your affairs have become public property?”
“None, for you, perhaps, in default of what we will call a natural remorse or shame.”
“I will not have you say that, Felix. Apply it to yourself, rather, remembering the advantage you took of the trust committed to you.”
“I took no advantage, as you call it, until I learnt that the trust was a lying one.”
“She told you?”
“She did not. You will be careful, if you are wise, how you deal with her name here. She was loyal to her betrayers to the end. It was quite by accident that I learned the truth—the imposture to which we had both been induced to lend ourselves—unconsciously on my part—by a clergyman’s moral daughter.”
“You may save your sarcasm, Felix: it does not impress me. I had a desperate duty to perform, and I took the only means possible at hand to effect it. It was partly with a view to giving you the explanation which is certainly your due that I came to-day. If you wish to hear, you shall.”
I had resumed my tramping, but stopped at that, and faced her.
“O!” I said; “you think it my due, do you? Having robbed and ruined me, you think it just to supply me with the psychologic reasons for your act.”
“How can you hold me, directly or indirectly, responsible for this tragedy? Am I in collusion with these bandits, do you suppose?”
I stood looking at her—no more; but for all her resolution she found something in that searching inquisition beyond her endurance; and her eyes fell before it, while a faint spot of colour came to her sallow cheek.
“Not you, Marion,” I said softly—“no, not you.”
She looked up quickly, with a desperate effort to recover her self-command.
“Thank you, at least, Felix,” she said, “for that handsome admission.”
“Marion,” I said, still quite quietly confronting her: “how is your noble employer regarding this desertion of yours?”
“He is not regarding it at all. He has had a paralytic stroke, and if he recovers, which is improbable, he will never regard anything again, in reason. A fortnight ago he was removed from the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and he will not return.”
I nodded my head, my eyes a little wide.
“So? You interest me. Well, we know to whom vengeance belongs. It is a comfort to think of the settlement being so near.” I went up and down again, and again stopped. “You may as well tell me,” I said. “Having it now on my mind, I should be worried, lacking an explanation; and I want to get it all cleared away, all the wickedness and the abomination, that the only memory I care about may be left sweet.”
“You speak nearer the truth than you think, Felix. Wickedness and abomination indeed: you will understand, when you know; and perhaps then you will take a less merciless view. You remember what I told you about Monseigneur’s discovery, and his mad fury thereon? It was necessary to get the girl away, with all despatch, out of his clutches. That evening things had come to an appalling crisis—and she was ill. The nervous shock and strain had been too much for her, and she was in bed—not in her own room, but in one far remote and secreted—incapable of the least effort—to move her would have been certainly fatal. I had made all arrangements for her transference to the school I told you of; but some one—the house was full of his tools, his panders—had betrayed me. That night the girl Fréron happened to be there. She was said to have an attractive voice—I am no judge of such things myself—and she was used to give Josephine singing lessons. She was quite in the confidence of the Countess, who was greatly attached to her in her way, and she was more or less acquainted with the state of affairs. It was to her was due that sudden inspiration, which did actually save the situation. ‘Why not,’ she said, ‘pretend that I am Mademoiselle, and under her name hurry me away to the school, where I can pass for her until such time as it is safe to acknowledge the deception? If we manage cleverly, Monseigneur will be informed of the escape of his daughter, and will no longer think of looking for her in the house; so that, on your return, you will be able, quietly and unsuspected, to nurse her into convalescence, and thereafter seize your first opportunity to smuggle her away, and carry her into hiding, whether at the school itself or elsewhere?’ It was a counsel of desperation; but at least it was a straw on which to seize in a terrible emergency. I seized on it, Felix. Dressed in Josephine’s cloak and hat—the two girls were fortunately much of a figure—Fréron left with me, leaving it to be inferred, by those interested in my movements, that I had actually put my plan into execution. It is useless to detail the particulars of our escape; but at least one thing is certain, that Monseigneur actually believed his prey to have eluded him, and that he took instant steps, on the information received, to have us followed and intercepted. In that sink of abomination, however, there existed one or two unequal to the strain of villainy imposed upon them; and it was to one of these we owed the warning which diverted us from our course. You know the rest.”
Marion ended; and I regarded her in gloomy cynicism.
“No, not by a great deal,” I said. “Why, for instance, did you not confide the truth to me?”
“I believed it possible, Felix, that, in spite of all our cunning, his emissaries might track her down.”
“Track whom down? O, I see! And, after disposing of her, report to the Marquis the fulfilment of his vengeance on an unruly daughter?”
Marion was silent.
“You holy devil!” I said. “You astute unconscionable devil!”
She rose in great agitation.
“You do not understand, Felix.”
“What am I to understand? That this poor unhappy girl was to be sacrificed to a misapprehension rather than risk the truth which would have saved her, and that, for the sake of that misapprehension, I, who might have righted it, was to remain uninformed?”
“It would not have saved her. When he came to hear it, which he did at last—God knows how!—his fury was implacable against every instrument in his deception.”
“Poor ruined child! And this was your return to her for her devoted self-sacrifice? Why did he not kill you?”
“I don’t know. I had an influence over him: I dared him to his face; and for some reason he respected me.”
“I don’t doubt it—he recognised in you his superior; his arch-fiend. And you dare to accuse me—me, of an abuse of trust. Wasn’t that in the reckoning? Didn’t you know it was? Her virtue, like her life, was only a pawn in the game you were playing. I can see that clearly enough now. All, everything must be sacrificed to your damned emergency—a child of the people rather than a child of the aristocracy. O, you are the very saint of snobs!”
She was controlling herself. She had made a tremendous effort, and stood facing me, flushed but resolute.
“You may say what you like, Felix,” she answered. “I make allowances for your natural grief, however wrong the false interpretation it drives you to put upon my motives. But you do not understand those, I say; and I, who do, cannot at this hour believe that I was misdirected in the course I pursued. It is justified in the result; in an appalling design frustrated; in a rescue accomplished at last through much difficulty and danger. You regard it only as an imperilled life saved.”
“What else?”
“Much more and much worse.”
“What worse?”
“O, Felix Dane! the worse that was actually perpetrated, and on very much the same provocation, by a mediæval monster called Francesco Cenci. It was to save her from that fate that I did what I had to do.”
Marion was gone—and in peace. We parted friends; but I hope I may never see her again. Truly, character is the fruit of circumstance, rich or insipid according to the climate it inhabits. Transplanted straight from a humdrum parsonage into the volcanic soil of passion and insanity, who would have thought that that starchy puritanism could ever have developed the qualities of resource and imagination it came to reveal in the face of almost supernatural difficulties and terrors. She was a great soul, I think—the material of a great commander, rigid and unswerving in the course which her duty, as she conceived it, pointed out to her; prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice the lesser to the greater where the ultimate good demanded an inexorable decision.
But I turned from her at last to my dreams, with a sigh of renunciation of all things in the world that were not of them or for them. I knew at length the whole that was to be known of the story of Fifine, and, for that knowledge, all of new that blossomed from it was the piteous added sense of martyrdom. She had suffered, my darling, that her sister might be spared.
That evening, for the first time since my bereavement, I lifted her portrait from the place where I had laid it with its face to the wall, and we sat and talked together, she and I; and, with the tears dropping unconstrained down my cheeks, I upbraided her tenderly for that, of all her sweetnesses, she had withheld from me one that I should have loved among the best.
Now that night, falling asleep and dreaming, I was all at once on the shining hill-sides of les Baux, climbing and seeking alone, but with a great rapture in my soul; and a thousand butterflies looped about my head, and a scent of warm crushed lavender went with me like incense—only I was alone. But suddenly from amongst the ruins came a voice to me, singing so sweetly that my heart brimmed over to hear it in a very ecstasy of joy, and with blinded eyes I stumbled on and towards the beautiful tones—so strange, yet so familiar. And, lo! my girl, with yearning smiling eyes, and extended arms—
I have heard it, then—I will never believe but that I have heard it. Could she bear to withhold from me, even in death, one charm that had not been mine?
And so ends Fifine’s story. No man in all his life has known a sweeter love; no man a bitterer desolation.
Finis
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