Edmond Bernardy was in that state of mind when everything joyous is an insult and everything sorrowful an added stab. When the horror had first settled on him he fought it wildly; then succeeded a numbed condition of the nerves, when will and reason lay dormant, and he surrendered himself to instinct—and instinct had brought him to the lonely passes, the snow-enfolded peaks, and the dream-ridden little cities of Provence.
It was in the days before railways were thought of, when gentlemen still did the "grand tour," and did it by post-chaise. Bernardy, whose finances were of the uncertain kind usual with even a successful poet, and whose mood was for the leisurely, preferred, once he had attained the coast of Provence by ship, to strike up inland on foot. In spite of himself, his surroundings began to soothe him, justifying the instinct which led him, and that had its root deeper than he suspected. Bernardy's mother had been a Provençale, and it was in one of the little mountain cities that his English father had met her, and she had only left her birthplace a few weeks before Edmond himself was born. It was owing to her that he possessed a deep love for little cities; though this was the first time that he had ever come to his mother's country.
As a boy he, like all right-minded children, possessed a little city of the imagination where he sat enthroned, king of the be-pennoned turrets and circling walls. With Bernardy the idea of the little city had become an obsession, entering even into his dreams at night, causing him to lead, even more than most children, that curious inner life of which waxing adolescence must so surely lose grip. His peculiar and vivid genius, though technically the joy of his fellow writers, never lost a quality of uncanny vision that sometimes disconcerted an age given over to the flamboyance of Byron, and this quality was the natural outcome of his withdrawal, as a child, into his secret life. That life was a complicated and delicate thing, no mere floating vagueness of dreams, but a fabric deliberately planned and reared, with a wealth of cunning detail to persuade him of reality. He could remember now how convinced he had been that the town his mind had made was as real as any city he and his mother visited in their precarious existence—sometimes he could recall, for a vivid flash, actual streets and houses of his imagination.
Hill cities share with islands the fascination that only aloofness can give, and the thought of the huddled towns cresting the Alpes-Maritimes had tugged at Bernardy's cord of memory, bringing back, not only his mother's stories of her own country, but also the recollections of his dream-city, so like these he was seeing now. They are towns of fluted roofs and mellow walls, of shutters flung wide like wings, of courtyards that are wells of blue shadow, and towers that stand up, golden-white, into the sunshine. Here Bernardy would come to a town perched, eagle-wise upon a crag, with a forest of irregular turrets piercing the sky; there to a little city which fitted over some rounded mountain-top like a cap, the arching outline of its roofs following faithfully the curve of the ground with a fruit-like suavity of contour. Everywhere, away from the cities, lay the olive-slopes, like a great sea, charmed, at the moment of most tumultuous movement, into stillness, the waves of it interfolding in vast hollows that never broke; only now and again a wind tossed the pale undersides of leaves to a semblance of spray.
These valleys, so mysterious at dawn and dusk, and in the day so oddly toy-like with their tiny, red-roofed oil-mills and the striped effect of the olive-terraces; these reticent, though seemingly candid, little townships above them; these mountains that at sunsetting were stained a burning copper filmed with amethyst—all seemed to Bernardy to be under a spell, caught in a web of magic as real, though not as visible, as the web of dappled shadow each olive-tree flung over the ground beside it. Bernardy told himself that here he could pass a long life happily, instead of which he had to prepare for death, for the deliberate blotting out, for him, of all this beauty.
He had never been a gross liver or a gross thinker, yet many a sensualist would now have been in a better case than he—for he had always used his quality of spiritual vision—in him so strong as to be almost an added sense—merely to beat back upon and intensify material things. An unbeliever or a man of happy-go-lucky nature could have extracted all the savour possible out of what remained to him of life, and left what was to come on the knees of the gods—Bernardy was too ardent a devotee of life, and life, as he understood it, was a comprehensive term. It meant the training and enjoyment of every faculty, the critical appreciation of everything he met, the absorption of beauty and the production of it. Also he feared the physical act of death as an animal fears it, with a contraction of the muscles and a chilling of the blood—feared it so that sometimes the sweat would break out over his face and he would bite back a cry.
Looking back on his life Bernardy could say that it had been good, and he saw for how much more the little things had counted than the big. A sunny day, congenial companions, good wine and tobacco, and, above all, the joy of creation—how well worth while they were. Taken as a whole they outweighed the fondest woman in the world, and that though Bernardy had been a fine lover. Yet it was because of a woman that he was to kill himself three weeks from now, and the fantastic nature of the affair made him feel like a man in a dream. It amused him that it should have been the one conventional period of his life—a couple of months in an English rectory, which had hurled him into such an extravagant situation.
The Rector, an avowed eccentric, and strongly influenced by the Byronic wave then at the crest, decided it was his duty to brave society and take notice of his brother's son—especially as the said son was a figure in the literary worlds of Paris and London. The Rector's daughter, Lucy, was sweet and fresh and English, and not in the least clever, and Bernardy, who had never met anyone like her before, fell madly in love. The combination of his passion; of a rival deeply bitten with romanticism and a sense of his own importance and of the high-flown ideas of the period, resulted in a violent quarrel and what was then a favoured species of duel. Bernardy and his rival, telling themselves that they were sparing Lucy the shock of an actual encounter, drew lots to decide which should take his own life. Bernardy had lost, and, leaving the bewildered Lucy to her fantastic roll-collared baronet, retired to spend his two months' grace in his own country of France.