IV
The lovelorn boy had left. Eva seemed to have forgotten him, and there was no shadow upon the brunette pallor of her face. She sat down again, and after a brief exchange of questions she told him of an experience that she had had.
The reason for her telling the story seemed to inhere in thoughts which she did not express. Her glance rested calmly in the illimitable. Her eyes knew no walls in their vision; no one could assert that she looked at him. She merely gazed.
Susan Rappard sat by the tile-oven, resting her chin upon her arm, while her fingers, gliding past the furrowed cheeks, clung amid her greyish hair.
At Arles in Provence a young monk named Brother Leotade had often visited Eva. He was not over twenty-five, vigorous, a typical Frenchman of the South, though rather taciturn.
He loved the land and knew the old castles. Once he spoke to her of a tower that stood on a cliff, a mile from the city; he described the view from the top of the tower in words that made Eva long to enjoy it. He offered to be her guide, and they agreed on the hour and the day.
The tower had an iron gate which was kept locked, and the key was in the keeping of a certain vintner. It was late afternoon when they set out, but on the unshaded road it was still hot. They meant to be back before night fall, and so they walked quickly; but when they reached the tower the sun had already disappeared behind the hills.
Brother Leotade opened the iron gate and they saw a narrow spiral staircase of stone. They climbed a few stairs. Then the monk turned suddenly, locked the door from within, and slipped the key into the pocket of his cowl. Eva asked his reason. He replied that it was safer so.
It was dim in the vaulted tower, and Eva saw a menacing gleam in the monk’s eyes. She let him precede her, but on a landing he turned and grasped her. She was silent, although she felt the pressure of his fingers. Still silent, she glided from his grasp, and ran up as swiftly as she could. She heard no steps behind her in the darkness, and the stairs seemed endless. Still she climbed until her breath gave out, and she panted for the light. Suddenly the greenish bell of the sky gleamed into the shaft; and as she mounted, the circle of her vision widened to the scarlet of the West, and when she stood on the last step and on the platform, having emerged from the mustiness of the old walls into the balsamic coolness and the multiform and tinted beauty of earth and air, the danger seemed wholly past.
She waited and watched the dark hole from which she had come. The monk did not appear. His treacherous concealment strained her nerves to the uttermost. The brief twilight faded; evening turned into night; there was no sound, no tread. Not until late did it occur to her that she could call for help. She cried out into the land, but she saw that it was a desolate region in which no one dwelled. And when her feeble cry had died away, the shape of Brother Leotade appeared at the head of the stairs.
The expression on his face filled her now with an even greater horror. He murmured something and stretched out his arms after her. She bounded backward, groping behind her with her hands. He followed her, and she leaped upon the parapet, crouched near the pinnacle, hard by the outer rim of the wall, her head and shoulders over the abyss. The wind caught the veil that had been wound about her head and it streamed forth like a flag. The monk stood still, bound to the spot by her eyes. His own were fixed relentlessly upon her, but he dared not move, for he saw the determination in her face: if he moved toward her, she would leap to her death.
And yet a rage of desire kept flaring in his eyes.
The hours passed. The monk stood there as though cast of bronze, while she crouched on the parapet, motionless but for her fluttering veil, and held him with her eye as one holds a wolf. Stars gathered in the sky; from time to time she glanced for a second at the firmament. Never had she been so near to the eternal flame. She seemed to hear the melody of a million worlds singing in their orbits; her unmoving limbs seemed to vibrate; the hands with which she clung to the harsh wall seemed to upbear the adamantine roof of the cosmos, while below her was the created thing, blind and wracked by passion and sworn to a God whom it belied.
Gradually the rim of heaven grew bright and the birds began to flutter upward. Then Brother Leotade threw himself upon his face and began to pray aloud. And as the East grew brighter he lifted up more resonantly the voice of his prayer. He crept toward the stairs. Then he arose and disappeared.
She saw him issue from the gate below and disappear in the dawn among the vineyards. Eva lay long in the grass below, worn and dull, before she could walk back to the city.
“It may be,” she said at the end of her story, “that some one looked on from Sirius, some one who will come soon and perhaps be my friend.” She smiled.
“From Sirius?” The voice of Susan was heard. “Where will he get pearls and diadems? What crowns will he offer you, and what provinces? Let us have no dealings with beggars, even though they come from the sky.”
“Keep quiet, you Sancho Panza!” Eva said. “All that I ask is that he can laugh, laugh marvellously—laugh like that young muleteer at Cordova! Do you remember him? I want him to laugh so that I can forget my ambitions.”
Hers is a virtue that hardly begs for pennies, thought Crammon, and determined to be on his guard and seek security while there was time. For in his breast he felt a new, unknown, and melancholy burning, and he knew well that he could not laugh like that young Cordovan muleteer and make an ambitious woman forget her striving.