Where Marion came in? Ah! that was a puzzle indeed. By no conceivable process of symphysis could I make her and Fifine combine; though the knowledge that the latter was what she was, or rather was not what she professed to be, explained to me some things in my step-sister’s attitude towards her and me hitherto inexplicable. It explained nothing else, however; it left me stranded exactly where Miss Clarice Brooking’s ingenuous revelation had deposited me outside the Hôtel du Nord Pinus.
That same Clarice, I confess, was another of my killing baits. Fifine had asked my pardon very humbly for her inexcusable behaviour to my friends. It had been due to extreme jealousy, she very frankly admitted—to a wound even now not quite healed, and whose pain had driven her to reprisals. It was horribly silly, no doubt; but then—my own countrywoman, and the attractions of that delicate pink and white. She had envied her her complexion; she had envied her—this with a hot averted look—her earlier knowledge of me. Was I quite, entirely, absolutely sure—
Yes, I was quite sure, my Fifinette; and quite sure of always drawing you on the subject, and of extracting my ample rewards therefrom. Machiavellian is passion in these matters.
So in the lovely valley the lovely idyll spent itself, until of its very perfection came the sense of inevitable rounding off and closure. Nothing disturbing came near us all the time; but we wandered free spirits of that haunted glen, absorbing into our glowing blood the very atmosphere of its enchantment. The little pavilion of the incomparable Queen Jeanne, with its pretty sculptures and oddly jointed ceiling, snugging into the corner of a grassy paddock in the valley, was a favourite resting-place of ours. But in what antiquities of rock and gorge and crumbled human dwelling did we not steep ourselves, from the eyries of the prehistoric cave-dwellers and the worn stone sarcophagi of the early Christians, to the toppling renaissance fronts and doorways that mingled on the hillside with the wild architecture of the first Seigneurs. All immense, all significant, all spectral despite its ponderous actuality; teeming with the infinite dust and debris of bygone story; ruins like rocks and rocks like ruins, one indistinguishable confusion and torrent of stone. Long ago from the floor of the little church they had unearthed the body of some beautiful unknown châtelaine. She had golden hair, like the maid of Pornic, that stretched down on either side to her feet. It was all that survived from the desecration, and it was deposited in Mistral’s museum at Arles. Fifine had seen it there; and, of course, Carabas. He had promised her a poem on the subject when they should stand together over the pilfered grave. And now was the grave of his own heart robbed of its golden vision. Poor troubadour. It gave me a moment’s melancholy to hear of his intention. Fifine laughed, relating it. Such is the difference between men and women; yet women are infinitely the pitifuller. The elemental riddle of them, of their inconsistencies with themselves, has never seemed to me so well epitomised as in the fable of the Amazonian Queen Thalestris, man-conqueror and man-scorner, travelling alone to give herself to Alexander, that she might become by him the mother of a boy-hero.
One day Fifine, putting a hand on my arm and looking up into my face, spoke to me wistfully of a thought that had come into her mind.
“Felix, we have been very, very happy here, have we not?”
“I answer for myself, m’amie. And how about you?”
“I had never thought there could be such joy anywhere. It has been almost too perfect for believing.”
“You mean something. What is it?”
“Only that—don’t be vexed with me—I think I should like to go, before the edge of the tiniest little cloud comes to peep at us over the horizon.”