The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment

by James Branch Cabell

But that fretted him. He knew so well why Marie-Claire had shrugged....

No, he had never, really, expected the rapture of the mountain-top to be permanent. Besides, he need not expect permanency of Melior. It was sad, of course, that when she had borne him a child, the child must be disposed of, and the mother must vanish, in accordance with Florian’s agreement with Janicot. But there was always some such condition attached to marriage between a mortal and any of the Léshy, or some abstention set like a trap whereinto the unwary mortal was sure to flounder, and so lose the more than mortal helpmate. The union must always, in one way or another, prove transitory, as was shown by the sad history of the matrimonial ventures of Melior’s own sister, and of the knight Helias, and by many other honorable old precedents.

And Florian now began to see that if the Melior whom he had adored since boyhood were thus lost to him in the fulltide of their love and happiness,—for these were still at fulltide, he here assured himself,—then he would retain only pleasant and heart-breaking and highly desirable memories. A great love such as his for his present wife ought, by all the dictates of good taste, to end tragically: to have it dwindle out into the mutual toleration of what people called a happy marriage would be anti-climax, it would be as if one were to botch a sublime and mellifluous sonnet with a sestet in prose.

Melior, so long as she stayed unattainable, had provided him with an ideal: and Melior, once lost to him, once he could never hear another word of that continuous half-witted jabbering,—or, rather, he emended, of this bright light creature’s very diverting chat,—then his high misery would afford him even surer ground for a superior dissatisfaction with the simple catering of nature. So the company of his disenchanted princess, her company just for the present, could be endured with a composure not wholly saddened by that dreadful and permanent bereavement which impended.

He reasoned thus, and was in everything considerate and loving. His devotion was so ardent and unremittent, indeed, that, when Florian left Bellegarde, Melior was forehandedly stitching and trimming baby-clothes. This was at the opening of December, and he was going to court in answer to a summons from the great Duke of Orléans.

“It is rather odd,” observed Florian, “that it is at Philippe’s expressed desire I go to him. Eh, but one knows that shrewd old saying as to the gods’ preliminary treatment of those whom they wish to destroy.”

“Still, if you ask me,” observed his wife,—not looking at him, but at her sewing,—“I think it is much better not to talk about the gods any more than is necessary, and certainly not in that exact tone of voice—” The break in speech was for the purpose of biting a thread.

You saw, as she bent over this thread, the top of her frilly little lace cap efflorescent with tiny pink ribbons. You saw, as she looked up, that Melior was especially lovely to-day in this flowing pink robe à la Watteau over a white petticoat and a corsage of white ribbons arranged in a sort of ladder-work. There was now about her nothing whatever of the mediæval or the outré: from the boudoir cap upon her head to the pink satin mules upon her feet, this Melior belonged to the modern world of 1723: and the whiteness and the pinkness of her made you think of desserts and confectionery.

“But what exact tone of voice,” asked Florian, smiling with lenient pride in his really very pretty duchess, “does my darling find injudicious?”

“Why, I mean, as if you were looking at something a great way off, and smelled something you were not quite certain you liked. To be sure, now that we are both good Christians, we know that the other gods are either devils or else illusions that never existed at all—Father Joseph has the nicest possible manners, and just the smile and the way of talking that very often reminds me of Hoprig, and qualifies him to teach any religion in the world, even without stroking both your hands all the time, but in spite of that, as I told him only last Saturday, he will not ever speak out quite plainly about them—”