“Bonté divine!” monsieur de Maubert laughed suddenly among the vines. “A fountain cannot throw itself into the air repeatedly and remain itself? Spring cannot return to us again and again? It is with our hearts as with nature; a renewal; a discovery of fresh beauty. And since we are all different, with each new love there is the discovery of new beauty.”
“Love to me means nothing—worse than nothing—unless it means dedication; permanence; unity,” said Giles.
“Ah, but then it ceases to be love,” said monsieur de Maubert, “and becomes duty, affection, the joys and cares of the foyer; what the wives—if they are fortunate—may count on. A young man like you is surely aware of the difference between love the passion, and love the affection. We feel the latter for our wives and mothers; we feel something very different for our mistresses.—You will agree to that, I think.”
“I’ve never had a mistress,” said Giles.
“Tiens!” It was an exclamation of blended amusement, astonishment and most courteous respect for a strange idiosyncrasy, and Giles saw monsieur de Maubert in his dappled sunlight opening large eyes.
“What I’d like to ask you, if I may,” said Giles, “is what you feel for mistress number one when mistress number two has deposed her; and what you feel for number two when you are devoting yourself to number three. You can’t feel passion for them all, at the same time, I suppose. The present lady preoccupies you. What of the others, then? Have they ceased to arouse any solicitude or interest?”
“From the fact that they are gone, far less,” monsieur de Maubert owned, shifting himself now in his chair the better to contemplate his companion. “One may think of them with gratitude or regret; with pain or indifference. One may have been abandoned, or one may have found oneself ceasing to desire. A man of honour will do all in his power for the woman who has been dear to him; who may still be dear. Affection and trust may still be there, though passion has burned itself away.”
“That must fill your time,” Giles muttered, “pretty considerably.”
“Ah, it might”—if monsieur de Maubert felt the dryness of the young man’s tone he did not stoop to any retaliation; he was all kindliness—“but charming women are rarely in need of consolation. Is not the fact you will not face, my idealistic young friend, the fact, simply, that passion, the flame, does burn out? That is a law of life. You will not alter it with all your ascetic moralities. And shall we turn from the flame, its ardour and beauty, because it cannot burn for ever? That would be an anchorite’s error. Let us burn with it and rejoice, until it sinks. Unfortunately, the time of renewal passes,” monsieur de Maubert sighed. “Spring goes, and Summer goes, and even of Autumn there is little left. Winter approaches and one grows old.”
Giles sat silent looking out to sea. The things he held to be of infinite value were invisible to monsieur de Maubert. The things monsieur de Maubert held to be of value were clearly visible to him. He saw the beauty of flame and fountain and the old paganism in his human heart echoed to the thought of love the passion. But he saw something else, that underlay them all, not contradicting, as monsieur de Maubert imagined, but completing them. What that something was it would be useless to describe. If one had come to life asking only of each moment what it gave and never what it meant, one became blinded to the meaning.