“As certified? Good! I am getting quite buoyant. Why, what are the eyes opening so tragic about? You soft, foolish, sensitive, covetable goose, when are you going to trust to my passion as something a little stabler and more enduring than a summer’s day. Come, we are devoted lovers; it only remains for us to be unreserved friends.”
That night—so beautiful—such a perfect consummation! That pause, our journey ended, and the radiant serenity of the stars above, and, beneath, the black unseen gulf, plunging from our feet! I can hardly bear to dwell upon its loveliness, its poignancy. We sat till late, quietly talking together. All that was not Marion’s—and of what value to me in the prized context was that brief parenthesis?—was made mine—the story of her young innocuous days. She had been good; she had been chaste, and in circumstances well calculated to trip by the feet one less scrupulous in her self-respect, less cleanly intelligent, less precociously worldly, perhaps, since her self-education had been pursued in sometimes slippery places. For they had been poor; and indeed I gathered so far that the money consideration had been an incentive to this part she had consented to play in an unknown plot. What issue she had conceived of it, as regarded my inclusion in the conspiracy? Why, she had had no time to think: it had all been decided in a moment; and at least she knew that I was of the Marion stock (which I was not, by the way), and, as such, must pass for morally trustworthy. Besides, she had regarded the movement as of only a temporary character; and besides, besides, the actual fun of the adventure had something tickled her young humour—the prospect of experiencing, for however brief a time, the joys of social adulation in her feigned part. That was natural and delicious; but what she could not foresee was the sympathetic nature of the environments to which she was committing herself. She had her own fine aspirations, her own ideals: the danger came when they were allured into interest in a subject who could be coaxed and petted into giving them practical expression. And so grew in her the subordination of flesh to soul. She would consent to surrender the lesser to the greater, to buy our mutual self-realisation at the fullest price I asked.
And so at last I knew my Fifine wholly; the little story of her loves and her perplexities lay bared before me. Ah, why had I not accepted that confidence earlier? When she had hesitated that day on the brink of revelation, what mad perversity had made me reject her? Likely, then, the air cleared, we should have long lingered out our return, until—but that does not bear thinking of.
Presently we took to recalling softly, happily, the golden secrets of our wanderings together. And, so murmuring, she fell asleep in my arms.
CHAPTER XXIII
There are those who pet their own misery, who derive pleasure from dwelling upon it; there are those who gather comfort from putting off an inevitable evil day; there are those who can borrow even a brief agonised solace from delaying their own execution. I am not of such. If a tooth worries me I have it out; if a painful thing has to be done, I like to get it over as quickly and as shortly as possible. I do not propose to myself to linger over this last chapter of Fifine’s story: all that is essential to its elucidation is soon told.
There was the perfect night; and, then, the dawn! It opened, as I would have had it open, dismally, ominously. A grey drizzle soaked the streets; the shimmering of the silver night was all alloyed into a leaden ruin; a sodden curtain hung over the whole city.
I was bound on an early visit to M. Fréron. He lived, I had learned—he? they, when they were together—in a little dingy suite of rooms above a curio-dealer’s shop in the Rue de Seine. We kissed, she and I—I am terse, you see—and I left her standing and looking after me—such eyes, my God. Down in the street I shivered; a doleful epilogue this to the sunny story of Provence.
M. Fréron was not at home. He had stated that he would be back, in case anybody should call, at three o’clock or thereabouts. In case any one should call? Whom could he expect, then, this timid, invertebrate old nobody; unless, indeed, it were some one on whom he depended for his little extras, luxuries; some one for whom his love, perhaps, figured a trifle cupboardly. Well, he should not suffer for me.
It was no matter. I would return about that time on the chance of finding him. I had a plenty of small commissions to fill up the interval; and, in fact, I did not return to the Rue de Seine until near four o’clock.