The Troubadour never resisted temptation. He pressed forward between the bushes; slipped an arm round her, murmured a caressing word, had kissed her full on the lips before she was even aware of his movements. With realization, she repelled the man swiftly. Bertram was startled—let her go, a move very much against his principles. The raspberries lay spilt on the earth between them. Scorning to run, she walked by his side, without speaking, back to the house. He was amused, yet slightly indignant, at this unwonted response to his gallantries: “After all, it isn’t as if she were still in her teens!”—and Billy Dawson, observant beggar, would notice the empty plate, and ask sly questions. Aureole, her heart thudding like a drum, and the blood raging at her lips where he had touched them, was wondering how much it all meant to him? What would be the outcome? Furiously angry, all of a sudden, with Oliver, for not being at hand to protect her from this type of outrage; furiously angry at the loss of dignity implied by the bruised stung sensation on her mouth,—mouth which nevertheless would persist in curving dangerously, provocatively, at the corners. ... She laughed aloud, laughed contempt for her husband, defiance at her ‘husband’s friend,’ laughed a welcome to the temperament which had lain too long between lavender.
Encouraged, Bertram kissed her again, quickly, before they quitted the shadows of the orchard and Aureole struck him, for his insolence, but mostly because she wanted to see the hurt pride blaze in his Spanish eyes, and because she hoped he would try and strangle her for the blow. She was avid of sensations this night.
“Oh Lord!” muttered Bertram, rather disconcerted. Then, in tender reproach: “You spill my shillings, Lady Auburn-hair, and you spill the raspberries, and now you spill my blood, which isn’t redder than they—I mean, less red....”
They re-entered the lit hall; Aureole glanced furtively at his mouth, to see if his accusations were justified: an infinitesimal dot of scarlet had welled on the lower lip. But it was she, not he, who had tasted blood....
The next meeting between Aureole and Bertram happened four days later, hot noontide, in one of the declivities of the cliff that sloped so gently to the sea. Bertram did not hesitate an instant at repeating his offence. Sooth to say, he had almost forgotten it was a repetition; had certainly forgotten the reception which had met his previous overtures. He came to Aureole as natural and fresh in gallantry as though she were his first love for the first time seen. That this state of mind could be at all possible, never occurred to the woman, who herself forever playing with emotion, yet most remarkably gave credit to the other party for a fierce, lasting, and genuine passion. Assuming that the man’s interim had been spent in brooding over his dismissal, then what excellent courage, what doggedness of persistence, nay, what true measure of desire he showed in thus returning undaunted to the charge.... Aureole rebelled—continued to rebel—yielded. The Troubadour was surprised by her acquiescence, into fervour keener than he usually displayed in his passing errantry of light love. They met again. And again. Her vanity had been damaged by Stuart’s refusal to ‘come and play.’ If he had responded ever so slightly, ever so harmlessly, instead of viewing her so determinedly in the light of “rather a little fool, but Nigger’s wife, so I s’pose I must do my best for her,”—who knows, she might have kept out of mischief elsewhere; but he had lashed her by his rigid imperturbability to a very demon of defiance. The origin of her severance from Oliver, her initiative in the matter, was for Aureole completely lost in the mists of long-agone; she genuinely viewed herself as a deserted wife, forlorn, neglected, forgotten, her youth wasting to middle-age.... And when a cloaked man, a masked man, comes along, trolling gaily his ballads of love, is one to let him pass for the sake of Oliver, forsooth? or because one is frightened of Stuart Heron?
—“She called you Pierrot, and immediately you were Pierrot!” thus had remarked Bertram’s daughter, Peter, on a certain occasion when he had been endeavouring to explain to her the incident of one Chavvy. Equally, she might now have paraphrased the situation; “She saw you a Troubadour, and immediately you were a Troubadour!” Bertram could no more help responding to suggestion, than mercury to the weather. And he troubadoured most excellently; liked the rôle, with its flavour of ripening vineyards, and southern roads white in the sunshine; snatched intrigues of the court, alternating with the careless give-and-take of wayside kisses. It was picturesque, yet virile; and altogether more suited to his years and girth than had been Pierrot. He basked in Aureole’s admiration; her abstinence from awkward questioning was a divine trait in womankind; she was radiantly attractive in this, her wilful leap towards the sun. Bertram loved her; he was quite sure he did.
And she would not have been Aureole had she not attached all importance to the trappings of her romance: the delicious sense of secrecy and guilt; the elaborate excuses enabling her to retire early to her room; thence to slip out through the low side window, on to the cliff, to the belt of pine trees amidst whose lean and swaying shadows the Troubadour would be waiting to keep tryst, those nights when no performance took place at the Pavilion Gardens. Yet more cunning machinations were required to induce some of the boarding-house party to attend the concerts of the quartette, that she might sit there, among the vague people who had not been held in his arms; and hear him sing for her—yes, for her—his ballads of the tavern and the caravan and the desert.
Once indeed, shattering her sense of his eternal presence, he warbled gaily, as they paced the dark cliff edge:
“Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and south,
But I, fulfilled of my heart’s desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth,
Feed the heart of the night with fire!”
And she cried disappointedly: