“I followed Beauty as the shadow of a flying bird across the sward. It seemed to wing and settle; and, lo! as I ran to grasp it, it was but a shadow, the shadow of a song that rose into the sky. Quivering it rose, and the shadow quivered to its ecstasy. And as both wing and voice receded up the heights, so did their shadow pale and die from out the grass. Only the shadow of a shadow remained to vex my heart.
“Like the flowers of the saladelle were my love’s eyes. It was in the chill of winter they gave their blue heaven to my soul. Returning from the long harvest, in summer I resought them, and behold! they were red to me. There is no truth in mortal beauty.
“I followed Beauty in a lonely place; and one, staying me, asked whither. ‘I follow a maid,’ I said. ‘Quick,’ he answered, ‘or you will never find her.’
“O, elusive is that golden quarry! Headlong we rush over the brink of death, and are still pursuing it. I met a sage, who laughed and said, ‘It is the blind side of the eye you set to externals. Will mortals never understand that? The other side it is that sees the truth. Hunt inwards, fool, where Truth and Beauty hide from you secure and unsuspected.’
“Lady, I have never doubted him till now.”
Such was the substance of the song which Bérard, or Carabas, sang to Briande, or Fifine. It was marked by the sort of mystic symbolism characteristic of the old-time cantefable and the rather vague rhapsodies of the early troubadours, and, if really first uttered impromptu, vindicated something of the singer’s claim to a genuine inheritance. At the end I said:—
“That was a fine improvisation, Monsieur. I congratulate myself on the favour bestowed on me.”
“You have perhaps reason to,” answered the poet loftily—and did you ever know the like of that for vanity?
It was to prove the sole favour of its kind, however; for thereafter soon came to pass the creature’s re-establishment in Fifine’s good graces, and my consequent second cold-shouldering by the two. That was to be, I suppose, though without any question of preordination, in which I don’t believe. Chance governs the world, and life is a long chapter of unforeseen accidents. In this case, no doubt, Destiny, bent to a particular purpose, seized on the first instrument at hand to effect it. It is the way of Destiny, whom the vulgar call Haphazard. He hears the hour strike, and straight he catches at any chance weapon—it may be a fly in the milk-jug to choke a Pope withal, an avalanche to crush an infant, a piece of orange-peel cast down to throw a giant. On that supposition, and that supposition alone, could Carabas’s unasked and monstrous intrusion into our privacy be accounted for. It is true he was a blunt instrument; but then, as no particular harm was intended, he served to do his work perhaps better than another and a sharper.
One morning I said to Fifine:—