It is a dangerous place on which to stand, that topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, with no parapet and a sheer drop to the street below. Almost against his will, Rivière mounted there.
But there was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of the ghostly past.
Twice she looked towards him as though she must speak out the thoughts conjured up by this splendid scene. It wanted only some tiny excuse of convention to bridge over the silence between them, but Rivière on his side would not seek it, and the woman hesitated to ask him to take up the thread that lay waiting to his hand.
A cold wind sprang up, and she descended and made her way to her hotel on the Place du Forum.
At dinner in the deserted dining-room of his hotel, Rivière found himself seated at the next table to her. There are only two hotels worthy of the name in Arles, and the coincidence of meeting again was of the very slightest. Yet somehow he felt subconsciously that the arm of Fate was bringing their two lives together, and he resented it.
The silence between them remained unbroken.
In the evening he wrapped himself in a cloak against the bitter wind rushing down the valley of the Rhone and spreading itself as an invisible fan across the delta, and wandered about the dark alleys of the town, twisting like rabbit-burrows, lighted only here and there with a stray lamp socketed to a stone wall. Now he had left the big-thoughted age of the Romans, and was carried forward to the crafty, treacherous Middle Ages. In such an alley as this, bravos had lurked with daggers ready to thrust between the shoulder-blades of their victims. Now he was in a wider lane through which an army had swept pell-mell to slay and sack, while from the overhanging windows above desperate men and women shot wildly in fruitless resistance. Now he was in another of the lightless rabbit-burrows....
A sudden sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness. A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Rivière made swiftly to the aid of that woman who cried out in fear.
Stumbling round a corner of the twisting alley, he came to where a gleam from a shuttered window showed a slatted glimpse of a woman struggling in the arms of a lean, wiry peasant of the Camargue. Rivière seized him by the collar and shook him off as one shakes a dog from the midst of a fray. The man loosed his grip of the woman, and snarling like a dog, writhed himself free of Rivière. Then, whipping out a knife from his belt, he struck again and again. Rivière tried to ward with his left arm, but one blow of the knife went past the guard and ripped his cheek from forehead to jawbone.
At that moment a shutter thrown open shot as it were a search-light into the blackness of the alley, full on to the man with the knife, and Rivière, putting his whole strength into the blow, sent a smashing right-hander straight into the face of his adversary. Thrown back against the alley-wall, the man rebounded forward, and fell, a huddled, nerveless mass, on the ground.