“You have told it famously, gossip,” I said; “and M. Cabarus may congratulate himself on the most faithful and attentive of pupils. You have reproduced his very accents, I will swear, and touched them with Fifine’s for music. Yet I think it a finer end than they deserved; for both, after all, were deceivers.”
“Why she?” said Fifine.
“She should have declared at once who she suspected him to be, if her pride was all she pretended, and not have risked that temporising with a serpent. Deceit of any sort between man and woman is a dangerous weapon to trifle with; it may at any moment recoil upon the deceiver.”
“Yes,” said Fifine, in a thoughtful voice, her fingers crumbling her bread; “I suppose it is. You wouldn’t like to think I could deceive you, would you, Felix?”
“No,” I said. “Candidly I shouldn’t like it. But then you couldn’t, you know.”
“Couldn’t I? Why not?”
“Because I am a seer, Fifine, with a gift for second-sight. Now, if you are ready, let us go and take a stroll in the town.”
I went out on the steps to light my pipe, while Fifine ran upstairs to fetch her cloak. I was feeling in an odd mood. It was satisfying to know that my comrade and I were on good terms again, yet somehow I found that sense of relief tempered with a certain gravity which was novel enough in its character to set me thinking. Indispensability—the word seemed involuntarily to shape itself in my mind like a spectre only newly realised out of subconsciousness. Yet what possible association could it have with such a transitory connexion as ours? In a brief space of time that would have become for both of us the merest memory, whimsical, a little tender perhaps, perhaps a little pathetic, and there an end. There could be claimed for it nothing of that spirit of inseparability which discovers a mutual unhappiness in even a temporary severance. Yet had I not come to be conscious in myself of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, when Fifine was not with me? I must suppose so; or why should I object to her consorting as freely as she chose with chance acquaintances; and, worse, exhibit, as she herself had hinted, the temper of a jealous woman when I fancied myself and my first importance to be ever so little slighted by her? It was not enough for me to tell myself that I simply objected to being called upon to play second fiddle to a précieux ridicule like Carabas; I knew that the truth of my small secret resentment that afternoon had lain in the realisation that under any circumstances, and however temporarily, my comrade could dispense with my company. If it was jealousy, it was jealousy not of that absurd little grimacier, but for the integrity of our partnership; and what was the moral of that?
But that was not, perhaps, the most serious side of the matter. The truth was that my own small revolt had served to reveal an almost reciprocal state of mind on the other side—a state of mind which, as now regarded, appeared the inevitable consequence of certain late drifts and tendencies, which, seeming unimportant in themselves, had become a danger in their cumulative result. So that, it seemed, if the word Indispensability was to be ruled out between us, now was the time when the situation should be faced, and readjusted to its most commonsensible effect.
This all came to me as I stood and pondered; and, seeing things thus in a clearer and steadier light, I said to myself that this would hardly do, that there was a threat of my becoming involved in a complication altogether outside my original purpose, and that both reason and good-feeling forbade my disregarding a warning when once it was known and analysed. Not that I would admit to myself even now that I was under bond to any moral compact whatsoever; I had expressly stated that I would not be; only there was Fifine’s own happiness to consider. I had engaged myself to be her protector, using the word in its purer sense; and if herself proved one, and not the weakest, of her enemies, I was not the less called upon on that account to stand by and defend her.