The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment

by James Branch Cabell

She said pensively: “You were not lonely in my little time of happiness. You would not ever have been lonely with me.”

“Have you divined that also, Marie-Claire? Yes, it has been lonely. I have had many friends and wives and mistresses. Perhaps I have had everything which life has to give—”

Florian sat looking moodily at two queer drawings done in red and black upon the plaster of the wall: one represented a serpent swallowing rods, the other a serpent crucified. Beneath these drawings was a dark shining stone, and in its gleaming he saw figures move.

Florian turned, and said without any apparent emotion: “But I have lived quite alone, with no comprehension of anyone, and with so much distrust of everybody! And now it is too late.”

She considered this: she spread out her hands, smiling without mirth. “Yes, it is too late, even with me. Nothing is left, where all was yours once, Florian. I seem a husk. I do not either love or hate you any longer. Only,”—again that dark blind staring puzzled over him,—“only, it is not you who wait here in this fine black suit.”

That made him too smile, and shrug a little. “It is what remains of me, my dear,—all that remains anywhere to-day. Such is the end of every person’s youth and passion. I sometimes think that we reside in an ill-managed place. For look, Marie-Claire!” He waved toward the window, made up of very small panes of leaded glass, through which you saw the first vaporous green of the low fruit trees and much sunshine. “Look, Marie-Claire! spring is returning now, on every side. That seems so tactless.”

But Marie-Claire replied, with more tolerance: “That is Their notion of humor. I suppose it amuses the poor dears, so let us not complain.”

Then they fell to talking of other matters, and they spoke of shared small happenings in that spring of eighteen years ago, talking quite at random as one trifle reminded them of another. The son of Marie-Claire, young Achille Cazaio, was away from home in the way of business: for at seventeen he had just set up as a brigand, and he was at this time only a hopeful apprentice in the trade through which he was to prosper and to win success and some fame. So they were undisturbed; and Florian that day saw nothing of the stripling bandit, whom gossip declared remarkably to resemble his half-uncle.

And Florian stayed for some while in this neat sparsely furnished room. He was content. At the bottom of his mind had always been the knowledge that by and by he would return to Marie-Claire. Such events as had happened since he left her, and the things that people had said and thought and done because of him, and in particular the responsibilities with which he had been entrusted,—his dukedom, his wives, his order of the Holy Ghost, a whole château to do with whatever he pleased,—were the materials of a joke which he was to share with his sister some day, when the boy that had left her came back after having hoodwinked so many persons into regarding him as mature and efficient and unprincipled and all sorts of other amusing things. Marie-Claire alone knew that this fourth Duke of Puysange was still the boy who had loved her; and her blind gazing seemed always to penetrate the disguise.

Well! he had come back to her, to find that both of them were changed. The fact was sad, because it seemed to him that boy and girl had been rather wonderful. But it did not matter. Probably nothing mattered. Meanwhile he was again with Marie-Claire. It was sufficient to be home again, for the little while which remained before his destruction by that pig-headed and meddlesome Hoprig. And Florian was content....