And yet what a dear lawless existence! I do not know what termination to it we foresaw. Sooner or later the cold must drive me from my nightly cradle; sooner or later the good fruits of the earth must wither. In the meantime we were grillon and cigale,—we stored not, neither did we labour; but we chatted, and we wandered, and we drew the marrow of every tender berry, and gnawed the rind of every tough, without making faces.
And we quarrelled—mon Dieu! but how we quarrelled! Scarce a day passed without dispute, and this in the end it was that resolved the situation for us. For truly my comrade was as full of moods and whimsies as the wind—one moment a curious sweet woman; the next, and on the prick of confidence, a pillar of salt. Yet, even as such, she herself was ever the savour to the insults she made me swallow.
By then I was a little awakening, I think, to a consciousness that was half fright, half ecstasy. Let me not misrepresent my meaning. I held the honour of Mademoiselle de Lâge in high reverence; yet (and therefore, also, bien entendu) I could not but acknowledge to myself that in the depth of my heart was sprouting a desire for a more particular understanding between us. This very self-confession at last was like a terrifying surrender of independence—of irresponsibility—of all that sweet store of philosophy I had made it my practice to hive against the winter of old age. I saw my tranquillity yielded to a disturbing sense of duty. I felt my feet and my body stung by a thousand thorns as I turned into the narrow road of self-abnegation. No more for me should gleam the rosy garland and the wine-cup exhaling joy; but rather the olive from the branch should stimulate my palate to caudle, and the priest sanctify my salt of life out of all flavour.
Aïe, Aïe! and what then? Why, I was forgetting that as a lady puts the deduction before the argument, and cultivates her intuitive perceptions by reading the dénoûment of a romance after the first chapter, so she will have decided upon the direction of that last gift of herself while pinning her favours upon the coats of a dozen successive hopefuls. I might humour or tease my fancy over the presumptive flavour of that draught of matrimony, while all the time Mademoiselle de Lâge of Pierrettes held my person and my citizenship in frank contempt. Decidedly I was eating my chicken in the egg.
Still, the very fearless susceptibility of the child, her beauty and her wilfulness, were so many flames to feed that fire of passion that the strange nature of our comradeship had first kindled in my breast. And so always before my mind’s eye I kept, or tried to keep, the picture of the Chevalier Bayard and the Spanish ladies of Brescia.
* * * * * * *
One day, in our wanderings, we came out suddenly upon a track of highroad that, sweeping from us round a foreshore of desolate hills, seemed, like a coast-current, to set some gaunt pines at a little distance swaying as if they were the masts of ships. By then, as I gather, we must have travelled as far north as Chalus, and were come into regions that, by reason of their elevation, were somewhat colder and moister than the sunny slopes we had quitted. Perhaps it was this change of atmosphere that chilled our odd but never too ardent relations one with the other; perhaps it was that Carinne, as I, was at length taking alarm over the ambiguity of our position. In any case we fell out and apart, and so followed some harsh experiences to the pair of us.
Now we backed from the public way in fright, and, concealing ourselves once more amongst the trees, sat down, and were for a long space silent. The interval was a pregnant one to me, inasmuch as I was labouring with a resolve that had been forming for days in my breast. And at last I spoke—
“Carinne, we have been much at cross-purposes of late.”
“Have we, M. Thibaut? But perhaps it is in the order of things.”