It was not very much, after all: just this. Paris, it appeared, was suffering, had been suffering for some weeks, from one of those epidemics of panic which will occasionally seize on an entire populace—especially if of the excitable and impressionable Latin race—and we happened to have alighted on it at the psychologic moment. You will remember, perhaps, that brief plague of motor-dacoitage which for a time kept the whole city in a state of nervous ferment, until it came to culminate in a siege and massacre which were very much a replica of the London Sidney Street affair? Well, that was the occasion; and, according to Madame Crussol, a general condition of terror prevailed; good citizens walking furtively, with looks askance at every petrol-driven vehicle, and bad searching their consciences for past oppressions in any possible way provocative of reprisals. No one knew whose turn it would be next with these murderous miscreants, whom a persistent baffling of the police and long immunity from arrest had rendered absolutely reckless.
The story had left Fifine and me, I may say, virtually unconcerned. Fresh from the sun and the south, serenely ensconced in the impregnable citadel of our love, we felt no tremors but such as arose from the thought of the social reckoning we should have to pay at last, and the possible difficulties in the way of an accommodation. All the trepidations of the outside world were as nothing to us in the shadow of that problem; I do not think that, after we had entered my rooms and shut ourselves in, we once again referred to the subject of the panic, or to Madame Crussol’s excited enlarging on it for our benefit.
As I turned up the light and closed the door, Fifine stood and looked around her, with a smile upon her lips. And then she sighed, and turned to me wistfully.
“What am I to call it, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
“Home, Fifine,” I answered.
She sighed again, like a very happy thing, and went about the room, renewing her acquaintance with its objects, touching this one lovingly, that reprovingly for its untidiness; and presently, coming to her portrait on the wall, she bent and kissed it—“not for your own sake,” she said severely to the beauty, “but for the sake of the hand that flattered you.”
It was very touching to me, this sense of sure possession, as illustrated in her pretty joys and confidences. A dimness always comes to my eyes in recalling that night—the last we were ever to spend together. For the cup was nearly drained, and the scroll written—Fifine’s whole story, as a woman reads such things; and yet but a paragraph in mine, one brief glowing passage lost in a waste of platitude. Sometimes I wonder how men, having once known a perfect confidence in love, can bear to cloud its memory with later fancies. Gross and imperfect, our souls, I suppose, are not meet for the sublime; but, having gathered and eaten fruit from heaven, we must be for taking the taste of its intolerable sweetness out of our mouths with some coarser earthlier savour. Yet I think I may say that I have that of myself put away, locked into secrecy, jealously excluded from knowledge, which no woman but one has ever shared or shall share. It is hers, and, by so much as it is hers alone, the worthless residue of me lies to what flattering uses the interested can extract from it.
There was store of potted things in the flat, and we had bought some rolls and butter by the way, which, with a bottle of good wine from the cupboard, made us an ample meal. I ate and drank a thought gravely myself, preoccupied with the consideration of something that was inevitable to follow; and Fifine, conscious of herself as of my mood, was little more inclined to talk. She made but a half-hearted meal; and, when we rose at last, I was struck all at once, seeing the breathless parting of her lips and her poor cheek’s whiteness, with a realisation of the strain which that long suspense must have been putting upon her. However, it had to be gone through with, and the sooner the more merciful to her.
Without a word I led her into the studio, where, under the light, I took her face between my hands and turned it up so as to look at me.
“Fifine,” I said.