THE
STORY OF FIFINE

I always come back to Paris or to London as to a rich feast after abstinence. There are the reserves of perfect health to draw upon for its enjoyment; and I enjoy it while the reserves last. But, on the first sign of their depletion, I return to my lentils and spring water, which can stand my happiness in quite as good stead as young partridges and Montrachet.

So the New Zealand shepherd, come once in a while to town, dissipates in a week of glorious debauch the accumulated earnings of a year or so spent in the comfortable solitudes. I don’t blame him: on the contrary. What is the sense of storing up health and vigour for no other purpose than, like a miser, to hoard them? I use my physical energy to serve every ounce of me, brain, nerves and organs. A man in health is a man in happiness, whether he be dining at Voisin’s, or on ripe figs on the hot rocks of les Baux. And I am a man in health; thank my good stars for that.

Of all the great cities, I have sojourned in Paris more than in any other. I have not, like Byron, shaken the dust of my native land off my shoes; but I came so early abroad, that English ways have grown foreign to me. I did not in fact ever fit into their social scheme, though somewhere in my heart a respect survives for it. But the little island is too small for me; or I am too big for it. There is not my peer there in the art of modelling; not a piece of native sculpture that I should like to acknowledge for my own.

For some years now I have rented a little flat in the Rue de Fleurus. It is the topmost suite in a high building, and troublesome of access to short-winded visitors, on whom the interminable succession of bare stone flights with their iron railings acts as a veritable treadmill. But the eyrie, once reached, is remote, and the view from its windows superb, including on the right the fathomless green sea of the Luxembourg gardens, on the left, like a golden buoy in the transparent mists, the dome of the Invalides. Here I possess three rooms at no great rent; and it suits me to retain them, as a conventional refuge, for use when I make my periodic returns from the wilderness.

I had been in repossession of them but three or four days when the story of Fifine began for me. It opened with a visit from Marion.

Marion, my step-sister, is the daughter of the Vicar: I am the son of the Vicar’s second wife, whose first husband was a barrister. In most tales the step-mother indulges her own offspring at the expense of her spouse’s; in mine the custom was reversed. Marion had ruled at Neverston, and Marion continued to rule. She ruled my mother consecrate, and myself unregenerate, and we both accepted her finding—with unnatural consequences for me. At the age of twenty-one I carried my Pariahship abroad for good, and my visits to Neverston since have been few and unexhilarating.

On one of these I discovered, to my amazement, that Marion herself had gone to Paris—that actually, without my knowledge, she had been living there for over a year. She was a woman of really surpassing energy, which, in course of time, I suppose, had craved a wider scope than that afforded by the narrow bounds of a country parish. And she had wanted to improve her French, for Marion was always wanting to improve something or somebody. So she had accepted a position, au pair, in the household of a penurious French Marquis—recently made a widower, and possessing one child, a daughter—where she had established herself in the true Marionesque spirit, ruling and dogmatising. I wrote to her, on my next visit to the Capital, and she came to see me once or twice, and always, as the more experienced Parisian, with some condescending pity for my easy capacity to be led astray through my ignorance of the world. She had seen enough in her short time to qualify her for a very Mentor to the gullible. But it was not to be supposed that, with my record, I should come to do other than perish in my own conceit. So she accused and judged me without a particle of evidence; but I had a small amused liking for her, all the same. She was so sturdily insular, from her contempt for temperament to her tailor-made dress, which she persisted in wearing in defiance of all continental fopperies.

On this September evening in question I had been dining in one of those exiguous Cafés in the Boulevard S. Michel, which cater largely for students of the Sorbonne and their little chère-amies. I have never much to say against the custom of such connexions, save for the hardship they entail upon certain of the girls—mostly shop or factory hands—when a necessary period is put to them. In other respects they serve to solve, and to solve cleanly, a problem which English prudery cannot bring itself to face. Yet better surely the informal comrade than the bagnio; and, after all, those who consent accept with their eyes open, and with a full knowledge of the impermanent nature of the relations.

I returned to the flat about eight o’clock, to find the wife of the Concierge already peering for me behind the closed iron gates of the lodge, which led out of a courtyard reached through an archway.

“Why closed?” I said.

“Ah!” returned Madame Crussol, snapping viciously at the lock: “Why indeed, but to oblige the laudable sister of a good-for-nothing, who is never so little to be found as when respectability calls. Likely this is one of your pranks, for which you are to be taken to task. You will find Madame upstairs.”

She swung open the gate, and locked it behind me again as I entered. I accepted the enigma with a laugh, and a little pat on the good wife’s ample shoulder. I am never eager about solving riddles which left alone will unravel of themselves. It is a good rule for ensuring serenity of mind.

As I turned to the stairs, I noticed a figure seated dimly in the porter’s lodge. It was shrouded and obscure, but I believed it was that of a young girl, whose white face, picked out by the lamp-light, blossomed from the shadows with an oddly Rembrandtesque effect. It seemed, as I passed, to be projected in sudden interest or curiosity, and then, like a face seen from a train at night, to vanish instantly.

I found, on entering my principal room, the electric light turned on and the curtains drawn close. Marion, her hands clasped behind her back, was striding restlessly up and down; but, I observed, with a stealthy motion, as though she feared the sound of her own footsteps. She stopped, on the instant of my entrance, and faced on me, her lips compressed. I thought she looked unusually grim, and that her constitutionally dead complexion betrayed a livider pallor.

“At last!” she said. “Shut the door, Felix Dane. I want to speak to you.”

“I have only been dining, Marion. Quite respectably, believe me. Had you any reason for drawing to the curtains this warm night?”

“I never do anything without a reason. I was afraid of being followed and the light betraying me.”

Marion the subject of an adventure! I begged her to be seated, with the urbanity of a doctor introduced to a remarkable case.

“No,” she said: “I cannot keep still.”

She walked, in fact, as she spoke, her gaunt figure jerked by some odd emotion. She was struggling to meet me on equal terms. Though she was my senior by two years, you must understand that mine numbered full thirty-five, and that I had had quite a little experience of the world. But it would never have done for me to presume on that pretence with her. Presently she made up her mind, and gave forth, still tramping:—

“You know my opinion of you, Felix Dane?” She commonly addressed me by my full name, as if to remind me of my untitled place in the family connexion.

“Quite,” I answered. “It is summed up in one word—wastrel.”

“Not a very flattering opinion.”

“Not in any way otherwise, Marion. It means merely to be natural.”

“Natural in the irresponsible and squandering sense.”

“Why, of course. That is the very essence of Nature—to show a blind trust in a bountiful Providence. Look at animals feeding—birds, beasts and fishes. They take the best of what is offered to them, and trample or spill abroad the ninety per cent. residue. You kept a parrot once, and ought to know. I am really, if you look at it rightly, the more religious of us two!”

She did not answer me, but continued her spasmodic march, while I observed her curiously. Suddenly she flounced to a stop before me, a suggestion of queer defiance in her expression.

“I should not have come to you,” she said, “in a very difficult situation, if I had believed your character really summed up in that word. Perhaps I can do you more justice than you do yourself, Felix.”

“That I can’t tell, Marion, until I know what it is you ask of me.”

“Courage, Felix Dane,” she answered, looking me straight in the face; “and self-restraint.”

A short silence ensued. Then, “I am waiting,” I said.

She took yet a quick turn or two, and came back as before.

“You know something of my position here,” she said, “and of its responsibilities? Well, those have suddenly assumed a very grave and menacing aspect. There have been discoveries and revelations of late, more than enough.”

I saw that, for all her self-repression, she was distressed and agitated, and the man in me, no less, perhaps, than the curiosity, was moved.

“Well, take my better qualities for granted,” I said.

She squeezed her lips with her hand, still staring at me; then broke out:—

“I will—I must. I have a claim upon them, after all, and a right to urge it. Felix, if you will swear to keep my confidence——”

“I will swear to nothing. Tell me or not, as you like.”

She canvassed me a little before deciding. I would not have accused her of guile, though I fancied I knew something of women. And at last she spoke:—

“I have got the Comtesse de Beaurepaire hidden away in the Conciergerie below, and I want you to take charge of her, to conceal and protect her, until such time as I can redeem her from your hands.”

She gave a gasp, having got it all quickly out, and stepped back, to observe the effect on me. It was startling enough; but, somehow, I was tickled rather than prostrated.

“The Comtesse—your young pupil—the little au pair?” I asked. “What on earth has the bad child been doing?”

“Her father is a madman,” said my step-sister, with more passion than I should have thought possible to her—“a morphiomaniac, who has suffered, as I know now, from toxic delirium. Some weeks ago he discovered, among his dead wife’s papers, compromising documents which made him doubt his daughter’s legitimacy. Since then he is like a rabid animal; he has always been an unnatural parent; and now the girl’s life is not safe in his hands. It came to this at last, that to rescue her from his brutality, she must be smuggled away into hiding. Arrangements were made to convey her this day after dark to the school of Les Loges, which is twelve miles distant. We started, she and I, in a hired fiacre; but had not reached the barriers, when a note was thrown into our carriage from an overtaking automobile informing me that our escape had been discovered, and that emissaries of the Marquis were even then on the way out to waylay and dispose of us. Panic seized me: I was in despair. To return would be to submit my charge, perhaps, to an unspeakable fate; to go on would be to invite some nameless catastrophe. I ordered the coachman to turn; and in the act a thought came to me. To forestall the chase, and, by doubling, be lost to it in the intricacies of the City! It was then the idea of you occurred to me, and we drove straight for the Rue de Fleurus, alighted short of it, and hurried the rest of the way on foot. Madame Crussol, in response to my entreaties, shut the gates upon us, and—there it stands.”

I sat up stiff, I ruffled my hair, I laughed aloud.

“My dear Marion! This wild melodrama in the midst of modern Paris! Have you not been testing some of his lordship’s drugs?”

She stood looking at me steadily.

“I should have thought,” she said, “that even for you by this time the criminal possibilities in a great capital could have no surprises.”

“But the position of the parties—a confessed morphiomaniac—his, as I understand you, hardly-veiled threats! You had only to go to the police.”

She regarded me with grey tolerance.

“There is such a thing as scandal; there is such a thing as despotic influence, even amongst this supposed discredited noblesse. The Marquis, for all his domestic parsimony, is a man of immense political power. And he is rich; he can command what instruments he pleases. Besides, you are not to suppose that he habitually reveals himself in his conduct. That is not at all the way with such aliénés. He can be suavity itself—most convincingly, most alluringly. You have much to learn, Felix Dane.”

“I have, indeed. This is not Paris, but mediæval Rome. Has the young lady no relatives, great or small, to whom to appeal?”

“Not one, who is not subject in some way to his tyranny or dislike. He is a strange unnatural character, and greatly feared.”

“Well, I think, if you are not dreaming, that I must be. My step-sister Marion, from Neverston Vicarage, and implicated in a transpontine mystery of abduction and murder! The young Countess is here, you say—in pledge to me until redeemed by you. And what do you propose doing?”

“I propose going back to the Hôtel Beaurepaire.”

“Going back? To invite the reprisals of that monster?”

“I have no fear of him for myself—if for no other reason than that in me lives the only clue to this poor unhappy child’s whereabouts.”

Marion had courage. I had never doubted that; but this manifestation of it, whatever ludicrous fancy it might be based on, surprised while it interested me. She had never been wont to sentimental attachments. But I had thought of late that in many ways she was an altered woman, broader-minded, more humanly worldly than of old.

“You could be trusted not to betray it, I will swear,” I said. “But how about others? There was the coachman who drove you, for instance.”

“We dropped him near the Mont de Piété, pretending it was our destination.”

“Admirable strategist! But you say you were warned of pursuit. That seems to speak some knowledge of your movements.”

“I am afraid so! We can only hope that it will prove knowledge misled.”

“Afraid so—afraid so!” I got to my feet, more inclined to laugh than protest, for all my perplexity. “Then I am to take it—provided I accept this amazing trust—that, if this maniac succeeds in penetrating our secret, the young lady will be in danger?”

My step-sister, it seemed to me, hesitated momentarily, with a queer down-glance, before answering my question.

“In the gravest danger, Felix—I am forced to admit it.”

“And—incidentally—I, perhaps?”

Again she appeared to hesitate, before facing me with a bold challenge:—

“I do you the justice that, for all our differences, I should never have denied you. You will not take personal peril into account in the matter of protecting an unhappy young woman against her persecutors.”

“Thank you,” I said shortly.

“It is possible,” continued Marion, “that the place of her retreat may be discovered. God forbid it should be so; but it may be. In that case we can only pray that the worst may not happen.”

I crowed. “Well, pray,” I said, “with all your heart; you had better begin at once. As a Vicar’s daughter you should know the ropes. But for me this is a very practical matter, it seems.”

She failed to protest, after her custom, over my profanity; and I paced a turn or two in sheer desperation.

“Well,” I said at last, “you have appealed to our relationship, and to the knowledge it gives you of me, and, for the sake of my own credit, I must not be found wanting. I tell you candidly that I believe this all to be some wild hallucination of your brain; but I am ready to humour it, if that will satisfy you. Trot up the young victim—but wait a minute. She is to live, pour le moment, you say, under my protection. As what?”

She looked at me very oddly.

“You are a gentleman, Felix Dane,” she said.

“I may be the incomparable Bayard himself, Marion; but jealousy has denied me his reputation.”

“‘As thy days, so shall thy strength be,’ Felix” (it was her only concession to the old Marion). “For the rest, she must not be known, of course, for whom she is. Call her simply Fifine.”

“And Madame Crussol and the others?”

“What does it matter? When she leaves you, it will be to resume herself—to disappear from all imaginary associations.”

This from Marion! I stared in amazement. Surely she had travelled a long way from Neverston.

“When she leaves me?” I said. “And at what date am I to look for that happy release?”

“I cannot tell you yet,” answered my step-sister hurriedly. “We must be guided by events. Only I beg you in the meantime, for your own sake and hers, to keep her close, to whisper no word about her to your friends, never to let her leave your chambers, and to make her lock herself into them when alone.”

“My chambers!” I looked desperately round the ill-furnished room. “I never thought of that. What accommodation have I for Countesses, what knowledge of their needs and caprices?”

“You make my task too difficult, Felix,” said Marion fretfully; “and I want to escape—every moment is important. Even now I may be tracked and watched for.”

“Heaven forbid! Why not take possession of my rooms, you and she, and leave me to find another lodging?”

“Impossible—it is impossible. I cannot stop now to explain why. Will you do it, Felix, or will you not? I am quite at the end of my resources.”

I stepped aside.

“It is lunar madness—but call her up. You will come again soon? You will communicate with me, at least?”

“The very moment it is safe.”

She was going, but turned at the door, as if in an afterthought.

“She is only nineteen, Felix—a child. You will bear that in mind?”

“And I am thirty-five, Marion. I had better come down with you now, in case——”

“No. Well, perhaps, if you like——”

We descended to the Conciergerie. Madame Crussol, severe but curious, awaited us in the doorway.

“Fifine,” said my step-sister, whispering into the room, “you are to go upstairs to your cousin’s apartments. He is prepared to grant you asylum until such time as the right authorities can be found and appealed to.”

She had run away from school and the religious life: that, I perceived, was to be the fiction. My cousin! I blushed, if Marion did not. There was a little rustle in the room, as of some one rising. Marion begged the porteress to open the gate for her without more ado. I accompanied her into the street. It appeared empty, and void, of course, of any lurking shadow of suspicion. Strenuously combating my offer of escort, Marion bade me back into the glooms, and, herself turning into the Rue de Luxembourg, disappeared abruptly from sight.

At the gates Madame Crussol met me returning.

“Where is my errant young cousin gone?” I asked.

“Where do you suppose?” said the good lady drily. “She is very obedient to her instructions, that. She is high up by now. That is a good school of hers to end in such promotion. But I daresay your sister knows you better than I do.”

From which I perceived very clearly that my difficult time was beginning.

CHAPTER II

I compile these notes, these memoirs of a past episode, from what motive? I do not know. From vain unhappiness, perhaps: perhaps from an ineradicable instinct to deliver myself, in some concrete form, of a haunting vision. I do not seek the world’s opinion on them; I should care nothing for it, whichever way pronounced. If anything, they are in the nature of an appeal to the one spirit that could appreciate them, a grave self-analysis, a considered defence, offered to the clear judgment of the disembodied. If there is any moral weakness in them, let me abide by that judgment. I plead nothing in extenuation but sentiment, which in heaven, I think, is still allowed more place than in this modern world of ours, where it has come to be regarded as a contemptible thing, to be rigorously eschewed in art, in education, and, save in its most hypocritically clap-trap form, in the gamble called politics. Yet by sentiment, I think, we humanise, and without it retrograde. When there is no more, we shall have returned to the primal anarchy.

Looks are a powerful influence in the shaping of one’s destiny. The really good-looking man, having the confidence of his parts, finds himself easily equipped for the conquests for which souls less naturally endowed must suffer a severe handicap. He is a laggard if he allows himself to be overtaken; and so I have often found it. My excuse lies—my salvation, perhaps—in my inborn faculty for creating things of beauty far beyond the material reach of the senses. To carve divinity out of stone is ever a higher joy to me than to beget its fleshly image. Wherefore I can assert truly that personal coxcombry is as remote from my nature as the pride of the craftsman is near and holy. That may be believed or not: it may concern others to dispute what it does not concern me to defend.

I put this to myself, and to one other, if not as a justification, as a plea. I have sinned, if I have sinned, not from vanity at all. A thousand times I would rather have suffered that longest handicap than have basely used a favour due to no merit, but merely to inheritance. I did not so use it. It was the traffic of souls, not of bodies, that made the real joy and misery. It would have been the same in the end, though I had possessed the features of a Caliban. And with that I will leave it.

It seems appropriate here to interpolate a note, descriptive of the writer in his late thirties, from the pen of Monsieur C., professor of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and himself a distinguished sculptor—who knew intimately, and was an ardent admirer of, the erratic genius self-portrayed in these pages. Monsieur C. writes:—

“Le Danois is very amusing, very clever, very suffisant. He will be here one moment and nowhere the next; and so with his work, his opinions, his enthusiasms. No one must doubt him, even when to-morrow he advocates the cause or the theory which to-day he denounces. And no one, I am sure, will think of doing so—for the moment: his personal magnetism, his unvexed effrontery see to it. His clothes—a hardy Englishman’s compromise with the French habit—are generally patched and mended: his manners show no bad places at all. He commonly wears what they call a Norfolk suit, but without lapels; knickerbockers, a white handkerchief round his neck in lieu of collar, and white canvas boots with string soles. And in these he will appear unembarrassed in drawing-rooms—to make ladies in love with vagabondism. I think I have never known in another the true gentleman and the true Bohemian so naturally blended. There is not a shadow of pose about him: his belief in himself is too simply unaffected for it. In person he is tall, somewhat lean, and muscular, with the thews of a mountaineer and the eyes of a jay. His hair, thick and brushed forward like a thatch, is coloured a warm brown, and his strong brows, moustache, and short beard au poinçon, are of the same satisfying tone. His face is very agreeably formed, with a look of power and self-confidence in it; and yet he is a disappointed man, one whose expectations have run well ahead of his achievements. He is interested in too many things, that is the fact. In his youth he was bred for the Bar, but soon abandoned its attractions for those of the free life and the pursuit of beauty. An artist, with an irresistible penchant for metaphysics, music, and mechanical science, and an insatiable curiosity about everything, he has never quite succeeded in realising himself or convincing others. Yet some magnificent fragments exist to his credit—a noble head or so, a torso worthy of Praxiteles. I suspect he is too impatient of practice to make perfect. It is a danger, after all, to be too deft with one’s fingers. Things picked up quickly quickly lose their interest; and there are so many fine things in the world to be picked up. Will our friend ever learn to concentrate? I fear. And, by the by, where is he just now? Nobody knows, of course. B. C.”

With a smile for Madame Crussol [continues the narrator], I went up the stairs leisurely. I found my “cousin” standing outside my door, and she turned to look at me as I arrived. I saw question but no embarrassment in her eyes. She held wrapped about her, more for concealment than warmth, I supposed, one of those heavy military capotes of stone blue which have become fashionable with ladies of late; and a black velvet hat, of Tudor shape and with a small white feather, surmounted her head coquettishly.

“You have been a long time coming, Monsieur,” she said; and her voice was soft to sleepiness.

“Ah, true!” I answered. “I have cause for deliberation.”

The door was ajar; I motioned her in and closed it behind us. It shut with a snap, delivering us to complete privacy. Preceding her, I went through the little passage into the salle-à-manger, whence on one side opened the tiny kitchen, on the other my large sitting-room, leading into the single bed-chamber beyond, which together comprised my whole domain. She had followed me, and stopped, as I did, in the main apartment.

“So far so good,” I said. “And now, if you please, what next?”

Her eyes, I could see, were busy with her surroundings, and I took the word from them:—

“Yes, it is all very plain and ungarnished, the quarters of an unstable vagabond quite unused to entertaining countesses. But for what they are worth, they are entirely at your disposition.”

Her eyes came round to me, impassive but wondering.

“You are not to call me that,” she said.

“To call you what? O, yes! I understand. But there is still the question of the moral inference. Am I to defer to what I may not specify—your rank—or to disregard it altogether?”

The eyes seemed to expand momentarily.

“Would there not be danger in the first?” she asked.

“No,” I answered gravely; “I believe not, if we are careful.”

“Then I think I should like it,” she said, with the tiniest sigh as of relief.

I bowed. “The only difficulty lies in my ignorance of the forms, the ceremonial. But I am adaptable, and learn quickly. It occurs to me that, having placed all that I own at your disposal, it is meet for me to retire to the kitchen, while you take stock of the premises. An inventory will not fatigue you. I ask your permission to withdraw.”

I left her standing mute—appraising me, it seemed, with those solemn enigmatic eyes.

“This is petrifying,” I said, apostrophising the saucepan on my little electric stove. There were the cold remains of a curry in it, an excellent curry concocted by myself; but it was not to that I alluded. “I am to be kept in my place, it seems; to esteem at its worth the honour of this condescension, and not to think of presuming upon it. I look for some sign of the stress and tragedy which brought a fugitive to my door. I might as well look for blood in a statue. But it is all very amusing, and I am going thoroughly to enjoy myself.”

It occurred to me that, what with the hour and the exercise, my cousin might be hungry. Anyhow, to prepare and produce a meal would serve to give her time for her exploration, and perhaps to thaw the ice. Wherefore I set to work and cut some sandwiches, knocked up an omelette aux confitures, brewed some chocolate, and, when all was ready, carried in the whole on a tray.

She was standing where, but not as, I had left her. The cloak was doffed and the hat. I saw her clearly for the first time, a placid self-possessed young figure, and with nothing but her rank to signal her out from the majority. Comely if you like: if you like, a thought more Southern in suggestion than Parisian. There was the complexion of warm ivory, deepening to a glow under the eyes, which were of a hot velvet brown; there was the short straight nose, the smooth rather round cheek and ripe babyish mouth. But all was impassive, unperturbed, and seemingly imperturbable. She was dressed in black, very plain and showing the full of the neck, which was certainly a shapely feature. I had seen many girls of her pattern south of Valence, “où le midi commence,” and she was neither better nor worse than the pick of them—just a proud-fleshed young animal.

“Will you?” I said. “After this stress and fatigue you must need refreshment.”

I fancied her eyes glistened a little at the sight. I pulled a small table towards a chair, set out my feast, and asked her to be seated. She glanced at me a little doubtfully before complying.

“I understood that Monsieur’s ménage——”

“Was summed up in Monsieur himself? That is quite right. I am my own portier, my own garçon-de-chambre, my own cook—all of the best character. I do not believe in doing things by halves. What I take up I master. ‘Well meant’ is not enough for me: it must be ‘well done.’”

“I will tell you that,” she said, “when I have eaten.”

The calm insolence of it! I banged the chair down on my own foot, as I set it in place for her. She hesitated a moment before seating herself. There was a perplexed look in her eyes, between condescension and reluctance.

“No, thank you,” I said: “I couldn’t dream of it. I shall have my supper presently among the cinders.”

She ate with evident enjoyment, and in complete self-possession. Indeed I have never known a Frenchwoman, though the cynosure of a score of eyes surrounding her, show embarrassment over a solitary meal. At the end she wiped her lips and her fingers, and, putting down her napkin, leaned back.

“It was very nice,” she said. “I liked it all.”

I came from the background, to which I had considerately withdrawn, pretending to read a book.

“I am reassured,” I answered, preparing to remove the tray. “I hope the rest of my establishment is as much to your taste?”

She glanced up at me, with an indolent question:—

“Where will you sleep yourself?”

Of course: it was a reasonable query, yet it took my breath away.

“O! don’t trouble about me,” I said, “I am a seasoned vagrant. A rug, and the kitchen table, will serve my needs. When we have disposed your baggage——”

“I have no baggage.”

The shock of the retort! And yet I might have foreseen.

“It was all decided in such a hurry,” she said—“and at the last moment. There was no time to prepare anything.”

“Then——” I stood fairly petrified. “It all turns upon the resources of my wardrobe—mine.”

“If you please,” she said. “To-morrow we can arrange things better.”

“You must excuse me,” I answered. “You will understand that you find me as ill-prepared as yourself. If you will take a book—or a cigarette—I will go and see what can be done.”

She took a cigarette, impassively content, and I disappeared into the bedroom. There were her hat and cloak placed on a chair, and it gave me an odd turn to encounter those signs of feminine usurpation.

I could find sheets and linen; I could dispose my other effects, appropriately and with resignation. And then I paused, before producing from a drawer my smartest pair of clean pyjamas. I looked at the length, and shook my head; I turned up the cuffs and the end of each leg, folded and lay the things gently on the pillow, and returned to my visitor.

“I have done my best,” I said. “When it pleases you to retire——”

She rose at once, yawning slightly.

“I am ready, Monsieur. I can hardly, as it is, keep my eyes open”—and she went, and the door was shut between us.

I stood gazing a moment; then switched off the light, turned into the salle-à-manger, closed the door, took a chair, filled and lit my pipe, and sat drawing at it and grinning to myself, like a blissful sucking infant half-hypnotised by the enormous novelty of things. Was it constitutional or “serenical,” in the exalted Highness sense, this impassibility in the face of shocks, this unquestioning acceptance of services as a favour not so much received as bestowed? This girl, this serene infant, had just, if I were to credit my step-sister, passed through a crisis, the consummation of a long ordeal of hate and tyranny, enough to try the stoutest nerves; yet she had shown no more agitation, no more embarrassment over the turn of events than if she had gone out for a drive and been belated in a country inn. The flight by night, the pursuit, the sudden immurement and isolation in strange quarters, appeared to have left her wholly unperturbed. What traditions of command and self-will lay at the back of such assurance, what arrogance of blood and class insolence! and she no more than a grown child, whose contact hitherto with the world must have been of the slightest. It was a new experience for me, this calm overriding of a man’s intelligence and independence by sheer virtue of aristocracy—a new, and I will own, a rather piquant one. I foresaw plentiful amusement for myself in the situation—if I could only accept it on its merits.

I could not, nevertheless, quite do that at once. The thing appeared too wildly fantastical for sober belief. There must be some mystification somewhere, whether unconscious or deliberate, in the story—enough, at least, in my suspicions, to make a farce of my tragic undertaking. Still I had given my word and must play out the farce—conceal what nobody, perhaps, wanted to discover, watch and ward what nobody, perhaps, wanted to injure. Only I hoped devoutly it would not last for long. I was no sybarite, but—

I slept out the night in my chair.

CHAPTER III

The unexpected is the salt of life—enough or too much as the case may be. The Chef who arranges this mortal mess of ours is not always to be trusted in the matter of seasoning—or, indeed, of seasonableness: perhaps he has too many conflicting tastes to consider. Still, one would rather chance encountering the unexpected in excess than be without it altogether. Let me start and shudder in an occasional briny spasm, if saltless insipidity is to be the sole alternative. I would sooner be a man and fear shadows than be a god and command them. Think of the boredom of an existence beyond the reach of thrills!

Toutes choses peut on suffrir qu’aise. Well, the Fates were kind to me as a rule in the respect of too much ease; and here was a rare new instance of their favouritism. I hoped to prove myself worthy of it.

I was up early, getting ready the rolls and coffee. The baker left the former at my door; the latter was my particular province. I had no plans for the day beyond the present plan of breakfast; but I was prepared for anything, in reason or out of it.

I was laying the table leisurely in the salle-à-manger, when, to my surprise, my visitor walked in on me. I had not for a moment supposed her risen, or indeed even aware that such an hour as seven o’clock in the morning existed outside dreams; but it was evident that my estimate of the haute monde needed some readjustment. Perhaps there was a faintest suggestion of shamefacedness on the smooth cheeks, of apology in the eyes.

“I was so hungry,” she said, “and I couldn’t wait any longer.”

So she had waited, implying a yet earlier toilette! I could only assume that the martinet of the Hôtel Beaurepaire, including a deprivation of sleep in his scheme of tortures, had habituated this poor victim of his to a premature wakefulness. Yet the languor that remained to her eyes appeared rather their indelible characteristic than the dust of slumber.

“No need to in the world,” I said. “Your will is my law. If I forgot to mention it, I entreat you to understand now that in placing all that is mine at your disposal I meant to include the least of my possessions, myself.”

“I do not think you mean that,” she said.

“Mean what?”

“To estimate so low such a sum of perfections. What has become of the universal genius who masters all he touches?”

It was uttered quite impassively. I opened my eyes. So the badinage was not to be all mine. There was something here unsuspected, a hint of activities hardly suggested by that soft indolence of look and gesture. Was this to prove a smouldering fire, only damped down, as they say, by circumstance? I was warned, at least, to look out for my fingers.

“He is here all the same,” I said. “Only he counts as his great possessions the work of his own hands. He did not make himself, you see, or he might think better of the result.”

“Well,” she said, “the great work of his hands that concerns me just now is breakfast.”

She sat down at the table, and I served her with an elaborated respect, the pleasant irony of which seemed quite thrown away upon her. She dipped her roll and ate her brioche entirely unembarrassed, and at the end turned to me with calm enquiring eyes.

“We had better talk together now, had we not?”

“I daresay I shall not be the worse for postponing my own breakfast,” I said, with futile sarcasm. “Will you go and make yourself comfortable in the other room. The Matin and the Petit Journal should be on the mat outside. I will get them for you.”

She was ensconced in the only comfortable chair by the window when I returned.

“You have a very sweet view, Monsieur,” she said. “It is like being a sparrow up here among the tree-tops.”

“Or a swallow under the eaves,” I said. “I am of the migratory order, Cousin.”

She lifted her eyebrows a little, at that.

“Pardon me,” I said, leaning back against the piano—for I possessed an indifferent instrument: “but I think we must be consistent. It should be either the whole fiction or none at all. You know I told you I didn’t favour half measures; and if we are to feign familiarity we should use its terms.”

“You said,” she answered, “that there was no danger.”

“I did,” I said frankly; “but that was before I had had an opportunity of studying you.”

“Yes—and now?”—the eyebrows went up again.

“Now—the instincts of class are so strong in you—I think to avoid the risk of self-betrayal, you had better let me appear your cousin in fact.”

“You mean, you are not to defer to me, not to show any knowledge of—of my rank? But, when we are alone——”

“It is the question of the habit. Once acquired, accident might surprise one into a blunder before witnesses.”

“Why should there be any?”

“There shall not be, if I can help it. But it is best to guard against contingencies.”

She yielded the point reluctantly, and with evident disappointment.

“Very well,” she said. “Call me Cousin, if you must.”

“The truth remains to our hearts,” I said. “Subconsciously, you shall still be Countess, and I your faithful commoner. It is really a compromise, if you would know. My step-sister’s directions to me were to call you Fifine.”

She bit at her little round lower lip, as if in a sudden flush of resentment.

“I will not be Fifine to you,” she said. “That is positive.”

“You will be to me what I find in you,” I answered—“just that and no more. It may be anything or nothing; but you will not know, whatever name I call you by. Still, ‘cousin’ is a good workaday title, and we will agree to compromise on that.”

She rounded her eyes at me.

“You are very rude and very peremptory all of a sudden.”

“No. Only wise in my trust, Cousin. When I accepted it, I accepted it on its professed merits. Perhaps you might, if you would, put a different complexion on those. You must remember that until yesterday I had hardly known of your existence, save in an abstract way; and then suddenly this business was exploded on me. I should like, now we have settled down to it, some confirmation of its details from your lips—as, for instance, the fact of your personal peril. Do you really go in fear for your life?”

She had dropped her eyes, and sat silently, sullenly perhaps, wreathing her fingers together.

“I should like an answer,” I said.

She looked up quickly—defiantly, I thought.

“Yes,” she said—“your tone, I know perfectly well, is full of mockery and derision; but he would have me killed if he knew where I was.”

I drew in my breath a little, still, I am afraid, incredulous.

“Very well,” I said. “Whatever my tone may be, your belief shall be my law. But then comes in another question. Any port, we know, in a storm; hence this descent on the Rue de Fleurus. But, now we have had time to breathe and look around——”

She broke out passionately:—

“You are afraid; you want to get rid of me. Very well, I will go.”

Actually she rose; but I stopped her.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere—I do not know—only away from a coward.”

“Now, is that consistent?” I said. “You first accuse me of incredulity, and then of fearing a bogey I don’t believe in. I gave my promise to Marion, to hold you in pledge until redeemed, and I have no intention of breaking my promise. You might know of safer quarters—some friend’s, say—where I could still continue my trust—that was my sole meaning. You do not? Very well. Now sit down again. It is only of your reputation I am thinking. If you are ready to confide it to me——”

Her bosom heaved heavily once or twice. She looked me in the face.

“Why not?” she said.

“That is for you to say,” I answered. “I know no reason, on my honour. Is that enough?”

She seemed to think awhile, frowning and pouting her lips.

“It is enough for me,” she said suddenly, with a resolved challenge in her eyes.

“Bon!” I nodded, and signed to her to be seated, a direction which, after a moment, she obeyed. “Then we have only to think of your temporary needs here.”

“I have plenty of money,” she said. “I do not ask to be your debtor for anything.”

“Then you shall not be,” I responded, “unless, perhaps, for the one thing you cannot help.”

“What is that?”

“Can you not guess? Then it shall remain my secret. And now about the material commodities. Am I to buy them for you—or what?”

She thought awhile, then looked up.

“Can I trust you?”

“With the money?”

“No; with the choice.”

“What is it you require?”

She gave a little deprecating laugh, with a tiny protest of the shoulders.

“Not, at least, what I found on my pillow last night.”

“What—Ah, very true! I was afraid they were too large.”

“They smelt of tobacco—pouf!”—she made a wry face.

“I swear they were clean from the wash.”

“I daresay. But there was a coat where they had lain—an old coat—for I looked.”

“Well, you had carte-blanche. And—now I remember: I had lost that coat, an old, old friend that I valued.”

“He must have died, I think, of senile decay. I would let his memory rest.”

“That is not my way of honouring old friends.”

“What would you, then? Set him up in a field for the crows to reverence? At least remove him from my room.”

My room! But this young woman was beginning to interest me.

“It shall be done,” I said. “In fact I will empty out my whole wardrobe for yours to take its place. If you will only tell me what to get.”

She stood up.

“You know very well for one thing, Monsieur. For its quality, and that of all the rest, you will be guided, if you please, by your knowledge of my position.”

I bowed, with profound gravity.

“It is necessary, I suppose,” I said, “first to take your measurements. I should guess your height at five foot six, and your waist at twenty-two inches.”

She looked surprised. “That is very accurate. How do you know?”

“I am a sculptor, Cousin, and, I pray God, an artist. My eyes have had to train themselves to a nice perception of proportions.”

“C’est la?” She exclaimed it, with the pretty understanding of French lips, and stuck out her foot. “What size for that, then?”

“If I fail to fit it,” I said, “call me an impostor.”

But dismay was in my heart. What did all this suggested elaborate outfit, from shoes to nightgear, portend? Surely something more than a flying visit. “Perhaps you had better write me out a list,” I said weakly.

She frowned a little; then proceeded to comply. It was a shorter list, when finished, than I had dared to hope.

“Now,” I said, with the thing in my hand, “I will pay for these articles, and bring you the bills, and you can settle with me. I shall lock you in, you understand, and leave word with the Concierge that nobody is to be sent up; and if, in spite of that, accident should bring a knock to my door, you are not to answer it—not to respond to any voice, unless by chance it should be my step-sister’s.”

She nodded. “The important thing is, I hope your choice will justify your claim to be thought an artist. But we shall see.”

To be thought an artist! I ran down the stairs like an infuriated lamplighter.

CHAPTER IV

I had Fifine’s figure in my mind’s eye as I made my purchases. The practice of mentally revisualising things once seen left me in no doubt as to its proportions. It was somewhat developed for a girl of nineteen, but I had reason to believe that a certain precosity was not suggested in her shape alone. There was a hint also of mental ripeness beyond her years, oddly irreconcilable with the passive front she maintained—a readiness of retort which I had found exhilarating, and hoped yet to provoke to my greater confusion and diversion.

The young ladies of the Magasin du Louvre made themselves very merry over my commission. I thought it best to confide one section of Fifine’s list to the expert judgment of the lingerie department, with directions only that the articles specified were to be of the best. The dresses, the stockings and the shoes, with some small fanciful accessories, I made it my own business to select. After all, a Frenchman would do these things unabashed, so why should I demur.

A sweet young sylph—libelled, as I have since learned, under the name of “mannequin”—offered, for my behoof, to exhibit on her own jimp and faultless figure the one or two frocks I preferred for consideration. Nothing loth, since I was agent for a Countess, I stood and thrilled to see this vision of grace pose in beauty before me, while I considered her points with all the fastidious brutality of an Oriental slave-buyer. She stood as undisturbed as Fifine herself, a little arch challenge on her lips, and I had to summon up all my resolution in order to resist, in the face of that pretty allurement, the conquest of my individual taste and judgment.

“But is it not perfect!” (this from the showwoman): “Monsieur is very certainly ravished by the divine cunning of a creation at once so simple and so elaborate in its simplicity.”

“Truly, Madame, if I am ravished I cannot help myself. But my transports, I find, do not amount to that. If I might suggest an improvement——”

“But surely, Monsieur, if Monsieur can find the heart.”

Monsieur found the heart, and also the deft fingers, while the warm palpitating little mannequin stood, smiling, to be manipulated. A touch here and there, a call for new and subtler materials in the grace-notes, so to speak, a more statuesque disposition of the lines, and Monsieur stood back satisfied. Madame was in ecstasies.

“It is incredible! Why did not Monsieur confess he was an artist?”

“Truly, Madame, it is the nature of the model which has inspired me. If one could always so light on the soul ready-made for one’s handling! How easy then would be one’s task.”

Madame answered somewhat at random to that; but the mannequin looked at me kindly, with just a little coquetry of the white shoulders, which said plainly, “Would you not like to have the handling of these!”

I decided finally for that costume, and another to be worn by day, the two to be delivered in the course of the afternoon. And then I withdrew in quest of the hosiery department. My task here was simple, if delicate, and I acquitted myself of it with aplomb, as also of my fancy commissions. And then came the question of the shoes.

Here my directions were explicit. Fifine would have none of your Grands Magasins: A la Merveilleuse in the Avenue de l’Opéra, and only à la Merveilleuse, would satisfy her. And so to that resort of fashion I went. I bought her two pairs; and the price was prodigious; but I had my orders, and there was an end of it.

All this had taken time, and it was past mid-day when I returned, laden with parcels, to the Rue de Fleurus. I entered the flat to find it delivered to silence and emptiness. There was no sign of my visitor in the eating- or the sitting-room—no, nor in the bedroom, the door of which stood ajar. My heart gave a somersault; but instantly righted itself with a laugh. If she was gone, for whatever reason, I had attended strictly to my directions, and could not be held to blame. Moreover it meant to me a problem very simply solved. And yet an odd little qualm of chagrin took me momentarily. I felt I should have liked to know Fifine’s opinion on my choice.

And at that instant the sound of a pot crashing in the kitchen made me jump.

So she was there! I bestowed my parcels in the bedroom, and thence hurried to ascertain the cause.

She was standing by the stove, a look between anger and dismay on her face. The fragments of a pipkin lay on the floor.

“I heard you come in,” she said, “and it flustered me. I am furious that it should have, but it did. I was trying to bake some eggs, and there they lie. Do you want me to starve, that you leave me like this?”

She was wrathful in her hunger; all the apathy was gone.

“I have brought some lunch with me,” I said. “You would have had it sooner if your list had been shorter. Go now to the table, and I will serve it with what despatch I may.”

There were oysters—which I knew how to open—little croquettes of chicken, honey-comb in a section, chocolate, and a good bottle of Sauterne. I had them all in a basket, at which Fifine looked wistfully. She went without a word, however; but at the door she hesitated, looking back. “I am sorry I broke the pipkin,” she said, and vanished.

When, in a little after, I brought in the meal and, placing it before her, stood aside like a waiter, she glanced at me doubtfully.

“Do you never eat, yourself, Monsieur?”

“Occasionally,” I answered, “when my betters are satisfied.”

Still she hesitated; but finally set to with an appetite. She had a single glass of wine, which brought a warmth to her cheek and a glow to her eyes. I think it made her generous to me in the matter of leavings, for I made quite a good meal after she had ended and withdrawn, and I finished the bottle of wine. After which I followed her into the sitting-room, where she sat luxuriously smoking one of my cigarettes.

“Now,” I said, “if it pleases you, and when, the bed is inviting for a siesta, the view from the window is benign, and my purchases to your order are all spread out on the counterpane—all, that is to say, save the two costumes, which are to arrive this afternoon.”

She opened her eyes. “Why do you want me gone?”

“I have some tidying-up to do,” I said. “I must dispose my effects more suitably to the entertaining of so distinguished a visitor.”

“I do not want anything touched,” she answered. “I like them best as they are.”

“But the litter, the disorder, the utter absence of method in the arrangement?”

“If that is all, do not alter them for me.”

“It is not all, nevertheless. I have my own bed to prepare.”

“Your own!—Ah, true! I forgot. Well, I will go, and ascertain to what horrors you have committed me.”

That was gracious; but I remained unruffled in my self-confidence. She did not appear again during the whole afternoon, and I amused myself over what makeshifts I could contrive for my personal comfort. There was a settee in the salle-à-manger, tattered but roomy, which, with plentiful rugs, would serve me sufficiently for a bed; and my washing could be done in the kitchen. The costumes were delivered in the course of the afternoon, and I left them at my guest’s door, with a knock, and an intimation that I was going out to buy the dinner. She did not answer, and I concluded that she was asleep.

Asleep, and without a thought of her incredible position, of the hovering danger! I could not believe it humanly possible that any woman, young or old, patrician or plebeian, living in perpetual apprehension of death by secret violence, could conduct herself with such persistent sangfroid. She did not so live in fact; of that I was finally convinced. For some purpose unconfessed Marion had foisted that story upon me, with the sole intention, likely enough, to ensure my closest trust and vigilance. Necessary precautions, no doubt, if one knew the whole truth, but hardly dictated by terror of the worst. By what lesser fear, or policy, it was useless for me to conjecture; nor did the question trouble me. Indeed, from that time, I think, I dismissed the whole puzzle from my mind, being satisfied on the main point, and quite assured that my comrade’s soul was darkened by no more mortal trepidations than my own.

For dinner I contrived quite a delectable little repast, and, when it was laid and ready, I announced the fact at the closed door. It opened, after a brief interval, and a shimmering vision appeared before my dazzled and wonder-stricken eyes.

In fact I had chosen very happily, and faultlessly, it seemed, as to fit. The girl’s face was quite flushed in the consciousness of the picture she presented. It was a picture, indeed—of tinted youth, sensuous and pure in one, in a silken setting. I was reminded somehow of sun-flushed Pomona in her flowering apple orchards, herself symbolic of the lovely half-visionary blossoms and the rosy fruit they promised. So content was I with this fruit of my own visualising.

“Truly, I am proud of myself,” I said.

The smile died on her lips.

“No more than that?” she said. “As if I were a dummy”—and she went past me, while I stood back, ostentatiously withdrawing her skirts. I had never seen a haughtier lady. She appeared so obsessed with her own sacrosanctity, that to look at her uninvited was an offence, to brush her in passing a sacrilege. But a little way on, and she relented, turning to me suddenly with a face between insolence and something strangely like suppressed merriment.

“Really, Cousin, it was very well done of you. Now I can believe what I never should have guessed from your pictures, that you are an artist.”

The audacity of it! It caught my breath like a splash of cold water. But it was just as refreshing.

I crowed: “Well, at least I am promoted, and inclined to presume upon that favour. It would never do for your acknowledged cousin to wait upon you like a garçon-de-salle; and so for the future I shall propose sitting down to table with you.”

She drew herself up, but relaxed almost at once.

“After all you provide the meals, and have a right to share in them.”

“I wonder,” I said, “that that did not occur to me before.”

She began something, broke off, then suddenly just lifted the hem of her skirt and projected a silvery foot.

“You have a right to see,” she said. “I thank you for your choice, Cousin.”

“It has come tripping to me through the moonlight,” I said, “and is all sparkling with dewy gossamer. A fairy’s slipper, and the fairy who wears it to be my guest. Why did you never tell me before that you came of the pretty people?”

“Because I thought you had eyes,” said Fifine, and, dropping her skirt, went on to dinner.

I think I had surpassed myself in that meal. Anyhow I enjoyed it. Fifine turned to me near the beginning with a question:—

“When you feel hungry you go to market? You just take your gun and hunt for a dinner, n’est ce pas? Do you always so live from hand to mouth?”

“Always, Cousin. It is the rare way to the unexpected, believe me. I have my camp-fire up here, and my cooking-pot, and all the intricacies of the neighbourhood to explore for its replenishing. That is the right way. I have dined with a written menu before me, and dined so without a thrill of the surprise which is the true sauce of gastronomy. We vagabonds are the real epicures—and more than that. The light of our festivity sometimes attracts to us strange comrades—creatures of the outer mysteries, bright or sullen, but always for their strangeness worth entertaining. Here, for instance, comes to me from the shadows a gauzy apparition, most welcome, it is true, yet shining very incongruity in this context of pot-luck and rough-and-ready.”

And so indeed it appeared to me; nor otherwise, save by fantasy, could I reconcile this vision of an elaborate evening toilette with its vagrant surroundings. But the fashionable convention, I supposed, when once acquired was ineradicable; and, no doubt, to have dined in undress would have seemed tantamount with Fifine to bathing in public.

But, to my surprise, she took my sarcasm, if sarcasm it was, in good part.

“This apparition is of your own invoking,” she said. “And I did not want to deny you that pride in yourself which you had a right to feel. The strange comrade who has come to you out of the shadows is, after all, only your own lay-figure, Cousin; and—and the dress is very pretty.”

I glanced at her in some astonishment. Her cheeks were flushed, and she trifled with the food on her plate.

“So spake the young rosebud of its sheath,” I said, with a laugh. “Now I am going to fill up your glass.”

She let me do it; she was fond, in moderation, of sweet wine, was Fifine; and somehow I liked to see her lips and the “blushful Hippocrene” meet in small kisses—there was a suggestion of pure Paganism in that contact, of nymphs that thought no sin of tasting the good earth’s love.

We made a passable meal of it, between smalltalk and persiflage, always in the abstract sense. I accepted things as they had come to me, and, save to ascertain that my guest’s privacy had not been interrupted in any way during my absence, asked no leading questions and invited no confidences. That would have been to spoil all the romantic glamour of the situation; and moreover I should not have expected the truth. Since we were reconciled in the matter of social equality, I was prepared, for my comfort, to drift, and suffer or enjoy the charge the gods had put upon me. I came to do both, in fact, but with ever a leaning towards the contented side. And so Fifine and I became comrades.

CHAPTER V

That evening after dinner I deliberately tempted the Providence which had offered me Fifine as a mild mental stimulant. There were several of my paintings hanging on the walls of the sitting-room, and, when I followed her in thither, I found her standing meditatively, cigarette in hand, before one of them. I came and stood behind her.

“Ah!” I said, “that is one of the things in which I successfully hid from you what my choice of your dress revealed.”

She turned and looked me quite frankly and coolly in the face.

“What is it all about?” she said.

“Call it,” I answered, “a psychologic exercise in paint.”

“Then it is not a picture?”

“O! yes it is—or at least I hope so.”

“But—” she shook her head—“I do not understand. A picture is a picture, and a sum is a sum, and a psychologic exercise is a psychologic exercise.”

“You mean they are not assimilable terms. What, then, is your definition of a picture?”

She considered, drawing thoughtfully at her cigarette.

“I think,” she said presently, “it is art—just that.”

“Well, what is art?”

Again she considered, and answered, “Form.”

“Form is an elusive term,” I said, “impossible of hard and fast definition. There is no way of proving that any two of us agree about it—no way of ascertaining that our mental and material optics come to the same conclusion with regard to it.”

“Then why should you expect people to take your view of it, in—in a thing like this?”

“I don’t—in a thing like this. I merely utter my protest in the thing against the accepted conventions of form. It is an impression, conveyed and caught through atmospheric vibration, of what form actually suggested, at that particular moment, in that particular instance, to my individual temperament.”

“I think,” she said calmly, after a pause, “that that is nonsense.”

“What,” I demanded, astonished, “is nonsense?”

“All that talk about impressions and individual temperaments. It is only an excuse for idleness—for trying the short cut to laborious ends. It is so much easier to spend an hour over a picture—over a canvas—than a month. A burglar might claim just the same excuse for stealing a year’s income in a night, instead of earning it in a year. Besides, if your temperament is individual, what is the good of trying to impose it on people who have individual temperaments of their own. You can’t expect them to understand you; so what is the good?”

“None,” I said briefly—and grimly. This “mild mental stimulant” was beginning to reveal itself a headier posset than I had ever dreamed it to be.

“Then,” she answered, “why do you protest? You know you said you did.”

“As a revolutionist, I am bound to,” I replied weakly.

“A revolutionist from what?”

“From stereotype and standards. Standards are for yard measures, and bushel measures, and other such commercial or scientific essentials. They are not for art.”

“Why not?”

“O, Cousin! See to what they have led us—the lifeless petrifactions of the schools and academies.”

“Well, they are art, if they are bad art. And there will always be bad art and bad artists. But you want to lead us away from art altogether—into psychologic exercises—impressions that only you can understand. Do you paint for yourself alone, then? In that case why do you complain of your lack of appreciation?”

“I don’t.”

“O, you do! I know it from Mademoiselle your sister. You are very humorous and philosophical, but you are hurt in your heart that the world will not comprehend you better. I have seen pictures by those who think like you—Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse—and I suppose, if they did not feel like you, that they would hardly exhibit in public galleries impressions which were just peculiar to themselves, and impossible of understanding by others differently constituted.”

Why should she not have seen them, these mutinous ones? Why, on the other hand, had I admitted this viper to my hearth?

“I, too, have exhibited in public galleries,” I said, “and found sympathy and understanding among the elect.”

“Well, who elected them?” she said—“themselves? There are always to be found inconsiderable people to applaud what they don’t understand. A little man blowing a big trumpet gets some of the credit for the noise, you see.”

“But they did understand.”

“They couldn’t, you know, if we all see with different eyes.”

“O, this is puerile!” I cried, with a little shrug and laugh. “You don’t like my pictures, or what I call pictures. Very well, then, you don’t.”

“I think they are stuff and nonsense,” she answered, turning away from the wall. “But I do like your little mother: she is a real darling.”

She was lying in a corner, unfinished—my little clay model of startled yet innocent maternity.

“O! you like that!” I said, a solacing glow about my heart.

“You needn’t sneer,” she answered. “Why didn’t your atmospheric vibrations make a shapeless jelly of her too?”

“That is different. You must allow for the medium.”

“I don’t. There should be only one rule in Art, I am sure. What applies to this applies to all; and it amounts in the end to form. Everyone with the right eyes knows what beauty of form means. You do yourself, you see; and yet you can go and paint those pictures.”

“O, for heaven’s sake leave my pictures alone!”

“You shouldn’t raise your voice. It squeaks and cracks when you do. I’m sure I’ll leave them alone with pleasure.” But she couldn’t. “I’m glad anyhow,” she said, “that I don’t see things, even for a moment, as if they were all made up of one huge nettlerash.”

Poor Pissarro, with his light analyses and colour vibrations! I was bound to feel very small; but I could not help sniggering over the impudent candour of this hussy. She turned, and dropped the butt of her cigarette into a brass pot, and went silently scrutinising the “things” along the walls. Presently she stopped before a little framed piece, an interior with figures, very rich and sombre in tone, but made cloudier than its due by the dirty state of the glass.

“O, I like that!” she said—“I do like that. I think you must be an artist after all. Why do you not always paint in that way?”

“Every producer, you know, has his own best for enemy. What do you find in this to like so much?”

“It is a picture—a little bit of truth and beauty brought into the limits of the eye’s understanding. It seems to satisfy everything—one’s love of colour, one’s sense of form, and—yes, just the little place in one’s emotions the two appeal to. It doesn’t matter a bit about the subject. It is the scheme of colour which is the subject, and the figures are only patterns in it.” She turned on me. “O, you are stupid, to go and paint those other things when you can do like this!”

“Well, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact it is by a friend of mine. It is very good, as you say; but the critics would have none of it.”

“The critics!” she snapped her rosy fingers disdainfully. “They are just the flies on that glass, that have made it all dirty and obscure. But the picture is behind all the time to speak for itself; and some day posterity will clean away the dirt with a wet sponge, and the truth will come out. I should like to know the man who painted it.”

“Sorry,” I said shortly. “He’s dead.”

Something in my tone seemed to strike her. Her eyes were on me, and suddenly a strange light, like wistfulness or pity, came into them.

“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she said. “I did not know—how could I? And I am sure, after seeing that dear little mother, you could paint pictures like this if you would.”

“Would you like me to?” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. This young callow criticism, refreshing as it might be, was hardly worth the most transitory waiving of my principles. Yet oddly there came into my mind the face, hectic and eager, of the boy Ronsin, whose work, and gift to me, the picture had been—and I was jealous. Yes, absurd as it may sound, because she had said she would like to know him, I was jealous. For my art, or what else? Ah, that I cannot tell. Yet at least I could not deny that, whatever the youthfulness of this criticism, it had seen clearly here: the picture was, of its kind, remarkably good.

“Of course I should,” she answered. “You admitted yourself, you know, that it was a fine work.”

“It is a fine work,” I said, “and I am not so dogmatic as to profess that there is only one right theory of art in the world. But every fox looks after his own skin, says the proverb; and dislikes, adds I, the having it flayed from him to adorn a rival.”

And so ended our first disputation—which was by no means our last—on the subject. If I was heckled and browbeaten, it was also agreeably clear to me that I had got no fool for my housemate.

Fifine, come out of her shell of apathy, was a surprise indeed.

CHAPTER VI

Very early I made a strange discovery: Fifine was doing the housework. It did not, perhaps, amount to much, which was likely the reason that the fact was impressed upon me gradually; but, when at length conviction came, I was immensely surprised and interested. The little domestic bienséances, obligatory even in Bohemia, came one by one to be appropriated to meeter hands than mine, so that by and by I was altogether without the occupations which, to speak truth, had served me hitherto as an excuse for much self-malingering in the matter of my professional work.

It began, properly enough, perhaps, with Fifine’s quiet intimation that I was to regard her bedroom as her own exclusive property and care; and it ended by her every day making my bed, sous ce nom-là, as well as her own. That was sufficiently gratifying; and so was it to find her cleaning up the plates and dishes after meals; but, when it came to her offering to take my place at the electric stove, I was inclined to kick a little.

“It would go against my social conscience,” I said, “to accept such a return for the little hospitality I can offer you.”

“But I should like it.”

“But I should not.”

“I know perfectly well what that means,” she said, turning on me with a scornful lip: “not in the least that you are shocked at my demeaning myself, but that you are in terror of my cookery.”

“That is nonsense,” I answered. “How can I fear the unknown?”

“Yet you say you would not like it?”

“Not like your so repaying me, I mean.”

“With bad for good, that is to say. Yet you are not the only one in the world who knows how to cook an omelet.”

“O, for heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “cook what you like! I am equal to anything, if it comes to that. A man who has dined, day in and day out, on ‘arlequins’ at two sous the plate in the Marché St. Germain is not likely to be fastidious.”

She stared at me incredulously.

“Have you really done that?”

“Often enough,” I said, “in my student days.”

She tossed her head, turning away: “I do not want to know about those. Please to leave it to me to perform the proper duties of a woman, while you go to your own, which you have been neglecting too long.”

The proper duties of a woman! Now could she know anything about them in such a connexion? It was just an absorbing new game to her, I supposed, as her hameau, with its laiterie and moulin and ferme, had been to Marie Antoinette. But a wilful woman must have her way; and so, with a laugh and shrug, I went and left her alone.

And now a surprising thing happened: Fifine, at déjeuner, came up to time with a quite well-cooked little repast. How she had managed it I could not tell, bred as she must have been, if not in luxury, in all that prescriptive ineptitude associated with a class wholly untrained in the principles of self-help. Possibly, it occurred to me, the penurious Marquis held unaccustomed views on household economy; and at that I left it. The young lady, meanwhile, hung, I could see, on my verdict.

“You are a wonder, Fifine,” I said.

She started at the term, and drew back.

“Did I not tell you,” she said, “I would not be called that?”

“I am sorry. It slipped out unawares.”

“Well,” she said, relenting in a moment, “it is at least better than the ‘arlequins,’ is it not?”

“As much better as this time is than that.”

She leaned her elbows on the table and her chin on her closed knuckles, and sat regarding me.

“Were you a very bad man in those days?” she said presently.

“Do I give you that impression?” I answered. “How can you look at me and ask?”

Still she conned me with unwinking eyes.

“Used you to go to the cabarets artistiques—Les Noctambules, and de l’Enfer, and the Moulin Rouge, and all those?”

“Not all; but to some, and to some better, in my time. There was the Chat-Noir for instance, to whose collection I had the honour of contributing a trifle of statuary.”

“And to the Elysée Montmartre?”

“O, now and again!”

“To the Bal des Quat’z Arts there?”

I fairly gasped.

“How on earth,” I said, “did you come to hear of all these places?”

She nodded her head once or twice.

“People have spoken of them before me—and always à coin de l’œil.”

“Well, we won’t speak of them, with a leer or otherwise. Shall we have a cigarette, Cousin? I am of an inquisitive nature, and I have been to all sorts of places in quest of information. Once, when I was a young man, I was seized with an idea that it would be well for me to harden myself to the sight of physical mutilation, so I got a professional friend to take me to the operating theatre of a hospital. I didn’t want to go again; and I am content, also, with my one visit to the students’ ball. The impression I brought away from each was something of the same sort—an orgy of crucified human nature.”

Still leaning on one hand, and drawing casually at her cigarette, she came out suddenly with a startling question:—

“Who was your particular petite ouvrière when you were a student? Was she very pretty?”

I actually started to my feet.

“You can assume anything you like,” I said—“my badness, or my goodness, or my utter ordinariness, which would be the normal mean: only bear in mind that it is all assumption.”

She gave the tiniest insolent laugh, wafting a puff of smoke away with her hand.

“I will tell you what I think of you,” she said; “and why, according to your own statement, your present is happier than your past. It is because with your restless, volatile nature you are incapable of developing a lasting attachment, and your age now saves you from any fear of being importuned for your own sake.”

I burst out laughing. “True,” I said; “at my years a man should have come to easy terms with himself as to his own superannuation; and perhaps also he should have learned to look a little deeper than the beauty peu profond for his soul’s satisfaction.”

“O, that is rubbish!” Fifine exclaimed.

“What is?”

“Skin-deep beauty. How can you talk such nonsense and pretend to be an artist? There is no such thing. Just as if the skin could be anything but what the bones and the muscles underneath make it!”

That was not, perhaps, very original; yet a wonder perpetually grew in me over the extraordinary precocity of this young woman of nineteen. Her dictatorialness I could understand: it was just unaffected class assurance. What I could not understand was the positiveness of her views, where her views came in question. As I stood, with nothing to say, she looked up at me.

“What made you come to be an artist at all?” she asked.

“O!” I answered: “I suppose the usual creative itch—the desire to produce beautiful things.”

“Comme ça!” She gave a little shrug implying helplessness. “I should have thought the scalpel was more in your line than the pencil.”

“Why?”

“O, just because you are so inquisitive. Were you obliged to do something for a living?”

“More or less,” I said. “But I haven’t been very successful.”

“Were you born of the people, Monsieur?”

I laughed. “My father was an English avocat, Cousin; my mother one of the noblesse; I myself lay no claim to any sort of distinction but what myself may procure me.”

She stooped over her plate, slowly extinguishing her cigarette. There was a strange little frown between her eyes, an odd look in her face of some emotion I could have likened to disappointment or chagrin. Perhaps she was regretting now her own calm assumption of superiority. Then, without looking up, she said:—

“But you do not hate the people?”

“I don’t know what you mean by the people,” I said, “or where they begin and where they end. If you are out for intelligence, I know no one more interesting than a skilled mechanic of his hands; and if you are out for folly, a lord can provide you as well as a sweep. Knowledge, my cousin, and knowledge alone passes all distinctions—at least it is the one master-key in my opinion.”

She sat silent a little while; and then she sighed deeply, as if eased of some mental oppression, and rose to her feet, with a smile, verily like ingratiation, on her lips.

“Would it please you,” she said, “if, instead of slighting what I don’t understand, I were to ask you to explain the difficult thing to me?”

It was quite touching—so pretty, indeed, that I was surprised into humility.

“Why, I told you I was no positivist,” I said. “I take it that the sincere among us are all seeking Truth, and what do the thousand different ways, long or short, matter, provided they have that purpose in common? Art and religion should be one there; and for my part I have no more quarrel with an Academician than I have with a ‘Futurist,’ with a Bishop than I have with a Parsee. Only please don’t again talk of short cuts that save trouble. There is more than that, I assure you, in my philosophy.”

“Then you are not really idle?” she said, very sweetly, with her eyebrows raised.

“No, really,” I answered—“if an active brain counts for anything. I am thinking all the time.”

“Yes?” she said—and that was all.

“Well,” I retorted, “we think differently, you see; but at least my thoughts are consistent.”

“Aren’t mine?”

“How can you ask it?—at one moment rubbing into me the futility of my producing work that only I can understand; at another implying that I am idle because I don’t endlessly produce futility. Well, I tell you, if I put all my thoughts into the shape I should like, I should want a garde-meuble to store them in. But I spare myself and a suffering world that vain burden.”

There was still a little amused questioning in her eyes, so that I could have thought I read into them the rejoinder ‘The world does not suffer from some furniture being stored, but rather the reverse!’ She forbore all repartee, however, and answered me only, very simply and feelingly:—

“I am quite sure that is a natural attitude under the circumstances. Still you paint, do you not, if only for yourself?”

“Within reason,” I answered; “but my métier is the plastic business. I have plenty of sketches to show you, if you wish to see them.”

“O, yes!” she said—“please. That is what I want. And then you can tell me not why you painted them so, but——”

“But why I didn’t paint them not so? Very well. Marchez!”

We adjourned to the sitting-room, or studio, and I seated her in a good position and, getting out my portfolios, played judicious showman to my own goods—a fragmentary variety, impressions of men, things and places, forming the artistic excerpta of a vagabond and wanderer. She took them from me, one by one, a little mechanically, and I made no comment whatever, simply briefly stating the subjects and localities. Presently, pausing in her task, she looked up.

“Cousin,” she said, “will you give me a plain exposition, in as few and clear words as possible, of your theory of art?”

“The portrayal of all things, animate and inanimate, as we really see them.”

“In passing?”

“Yes, in passing: the momentary impression conveyed to us.”

“Then, to appreciate these sketches properly, one should look at them only for a moment.”

“If you like.”

“No, but it is not as I like but as I must. The impression is gone if I pause—the trick, the mere accident of vision which produced them. I know that if I want to understand the true purple of a shadow, the true blue of water, the true gloom of trees, I must look direct at none of these things, but only somewhere near them, so that while not actually seeing them I never lose the sense that they are there and revealing their inner truth to me.”

“Aha! You are getting near it.”

“Yes, but then I oughtn’t to look at your pictures either in order to understand them; and I think you should say that.”

“Say what?”

“Why, when you exhibit, that your pictures are not meant to be looked at.”

I laughed, though not quite at ease.

“But they are intended to represent what you do see without knowing it,” I said.

“But you don’t see it,” she persisted, “if you look straight at the things.”

I tried another tack:—

“I do,” I said; “and so will you, if you take the trouble to understand. The truth is that we have learned to look at all objects with sophisticated eyes. The schools have wrought that tangle about us, and the tangles within the tangle, until to our bewildered vision nothing appears as it is, but only as hidebound theory presents it. It is the purpose of us primitives to sweep away at one stroke all that accumulated litter of the schools, and to regard things once again with frank unbiassed eyes.”

“But you are not a primitive,” said Fifine; “so what is the good of pretending? You belong to the twentieth century, not the first, and have grown up from being one of the world’s schoolchildren. You might as well say that in education we all ought to go back to our ABCs. Art must grow, I suppose, with knowledge. For my part I am not interested to know what the men thought who scratched figures on bones and things, but what my own men think, the men of my own time, who try to speak to me in the language I understand. You call it confused and sophisticated: all I can say is that it isn’t to me.”

“Then you are satisfied with Art as you find it?”

“I am satisfied with its purpose and with its direction, as steadily pursued from age to age. Fancy thinking Botticelli all wrong, and Velasquez, and da Vinci, and wanting to sweep them away to get back to your bone-scratchers. I couldn’t live with a bone, however cleverly engraved; but I could live with that little picture on the wall there, because I should never tire of the food for thought it gave me. I think that an artist living day by day over his picture penetrates to the soul of things more deeply than any primitive capturing a passing impression. Not that some of yours are not beautiful bits of colour. But I suppose that was accident.”

So she chastised and patronised me. On that subject it was always the same. Call her a frank Philistine, if you like: she had clear views, at least, and she never compromised about them. She was very scornful of my insistence on the free rights of temperament. Art, she said, was the negation of all licence, which had never yet produced any enduring beauty in the world. Look at its decay contemporaneous with the corruption of the ancient monasteries. She had a plenty of information about many things. She called my school (which, by the by, I did not call it) the go-as-you-please school, likening it to a modern fashion of extravaganza in which every performer was at liberty to “gag” as he chose—a mere farrago of unconnected impromptus. She was sarcastic, too, about that deeper beauty I was unlucky enough to say my matured soul had come to crave; she supposed it must mean the bones I was after, to scratch my primitive impressions on.

In fact, I am fain to confess, whether from humour or chagrin, I came to feel out of sorts with my theories, and disinclined for the present to elaborate them. Instead I returned to my clay and made figures.

She was with me there, watchful, mostly silent, yet not without ideas. I owed many a good touch to her sharp intelligence.

And so the days went on—went on as if our compact were for life, and no disturbance to that odd partnership were ever to be apprehended. We kept strictly to the letter of our undertaking with Marion, practising all precautions and inviting no risks. I always locked Fifine in when I went abroad, and I spoke no word to any one as to the change in my ménage. Indeed more and more I came to avoid acquaintances, more and more to limit my issues and returns to the dark hours. A queer attraction was beginning to attach itself to my quarters; I was never long away from them but I wished myself back. There was some lure there in the way of mental stimulant that I found it pleasant not to resist.

As for Fifine herself, confinement and lack of air and exercise seemed in no wise to disturb her. Physically she was of a serene constitution; and her small occupations were enough for what variety she seemed to need. Moreover, on whatever absurd perversion founded, she was sufficiently alive to the supposed danger of her position to endure gladly the inaction and close concealment it entailed upon her. I was aware that her fears, while I believed them wholly unjustified, were entirely genuine, though I had made it my rule to ask no leading questions of her whatever. But her face had become a book to me, in which I found some matter for curious reading.

Our plan of privacy was easily enough maintained, Madame Crussol abetting. I don’t know what the worthy lady thought of it all—but not the best, il va sans dire. However, her sarcasms were for my ears alone; I was a favourite with her, when all is said; and it did not disturb me to hear myself called a vieux garçon, still uncertain of his steps at an age when most men had learned to walk steadily. For the rest, whether through prescriptive sympathy, or on the strength of some unconfessed understanding with my step-sister, the concierge managed to hold all undesired visitors aloof. I was so much a rolling-stone that the task was no more than simple: she had merely to shrug her shoulders and say, “He has locked his door on the outside and taken away the key. God knows when he will return.”

Indeed I wanted no visitors just then: I was fully amused, and fully contented to be left to the world’s oblivion. It was all quite superbly correct—the heart serenely conscious of its own probity, and so forth; what did it matter what gross old door-keepers concluded or suspected? Fifine and I became quite matter-of-fact friends; our rallies were purely intellectual, and not seldom acrimonious; we lived together on a footing of the most dispassionate comradeship. She was seldom haughty to me after a little—save in fits and starts, as if when suddenly remembering a duty, which she would desperately recover, but without conviction on either side. Early she discarded her smart evening dress in favour of others more simple, which she would concoct out of materials I bought for her. She had plenty of money, as she had said, and insisted upon paying her share of the household expenses. She was wonderfully deft with her needle, at which I rather marvelled, until I remembered that I had made a compact with myself to be surprised at nothing. But still on some festive occasions she would play the bedizened sylphid, enrapturing my eyes, and just awakening in me some faintly disturbing tremors. She liked me to design her frocks for her; and in truth I was nothing loth. It was a little thrilling to have a mannequin all of my own, and a very shapely one, on whom to hang my idle fancies. And she repaid my trouble, both by word and effect, though we were always very particular and formal in our relations of costumier and dummy. Never suppose that I forgot my responsibility to my charge, or my tremendous respect for the rank that condescended to me, or that Fifine herself made any motion of unbending in the matter of that mutual understanding. She trusted in me without question, and I never gave her cause to question.

Not that I will pretend the situation found me entirely without qualms of a sort. Nature, it must be admitted, abhors a Platonism, and I was not superior to Nature. Moreover, I could never quite forget Marion’s curiously ambiguous language in delivering my trust to me. It had seemed to take so small account of reputation provided the main issue were not involved. Still, no doubt, that apparent confusion had been due to the stress of the moment. Marion could never be anything but deeply moral and religious.

In any case I was—I had Marion’s word for it—a gentleman, and determined stoutly to justify that election. I had no choice about it, in fact, since I am speaking of emotions, trifling at best, which I felt were entirely unreciprocated. But I want the credit of my conscientiousness.

And so a fortnight passed; and deliverance came not. My sister did not appear, nor did she vouchsafe word or sign. Was the safe moment yet to strike? I did not seem to care at last; and that was a puzzling symptom.

CHAPTER VII

One sopping noon, as I was leaving the yard below on some rather arbitrary commission of Fifine’s, I met an old gentleman just entering it. I observed him, but superficially; and was going on my way without further notice, when an odd thought flashing into my mind brought me to a standstill. It was only this, that the stranger, seeing me, had come to a quick stop, as if suddenly petrified, and had thereafter fallen, rather than backed, against the wall to allow me passage while he stared at me. Just that; and what then? Why, nothing—nothing but a recollection of the absurd fable which would have charged me with the circumvention of a monster diabolically bent on the destruction of an innocent victim to his suspicion or jealousy. I did not believe that story; I have intimated as much; yet I felt in duty bound to act as if I did. Who, in short, was this old fellow, and what was he doing here?

He was no denizen of the block: I knew my neighbours generally by sight, and he was not one of them. But why not a visitor? Again, why not a spy or an assassin? With a laugh for my own idiotcy, I yet did turn in my tracks and just peep into the yard. He had disappeared. Madame Crussol had him in charge, and she was to be trusted. En avant!

Trying to recall this intruder’s appearance, as I continued my way, I could only gather a general impression of bony insignificance, a little white, a little spoiled, a little pathetic, of a damp crow-like figure squatting under a minute umbrella, of two large eyes, like a fledgling’s, peering from that sheltering covert—not an heroic figure, by any means, nor one to be associated with secret agencies and stabs in the dark. A piano-tuner, probably: there had been something indescribably hopeless in his aspect, as of one who had spent all his ineffective life in desperately screwing-up things to a pitch destined not to last. I had forgotten him by the time I reached the Rue de Seine, for which I was bound.

But, as chance would have it, his exit and my return again synchronised. As I wheeled under the archway, there was he stepping from the vestibule, and putting up his umbrella in the act. It was a feminine umbrella, very small and very leaky, and somehow it seemed forlornly appropriate to the spare little nervous figure it only half sheltered. He stopped, seeing me, before spreading his tattered wings to fly; then snapped up the spring in sudden resolution and came on. An odd thing again; and this time I took determined stock of him as he approached. He did not evade my scrutiny, but on the contrary seemed lost in one of his own. Something impelled me, quite unwarrantably, to stop and address him as he came up.

“We have encountered once before, Monsieur. You were not by any chance seeking me?”

A sad, plaintive, timorous old face; a deprecating smile; a little contracted gesture of apology, of repudiation.

“No, no, Monsieur; no, indeed. I have accomplished my little mission, entirely to my satisfaction—O, yes, certainly so!”

He was gazing into my face, hungrily, but with a sort of propitiation. His feet, in their little worn ladies’ boots, shuffled uneasily on the flags; he was dressed in damaged black broadcloth, the waistcoat cut low over a frayed shirt, whose single stud had been reversed to hide the gaping of the buttonhole; and on his white head was a silk hat, mangy and much dinted, but set at a perceptible angle. His limbs were small, his bones protuberant; and the only points of vital colour about him lay in his vivacious brown eyes and the fresh yellow chrysanthemum bud in his coat-lapel. I apologised for my officiousness, and passed on.

Fifine was sitting in the studio when I entered it. She barely glanced up at me and down again. There was a self-conscious look on her face; a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, which I had bought her the day before, stood on a table hard by.

“The piano is certainly sadly out of tune,” I said; “or was, when I last tried it.”

I was certain that her lip twitched—the ghost of an understanding smile.

“Try it again,” she answered. “I like to hear you play.”

I sat down, and shaped out a chord or two. “No,” I said, “it is still as impossible as ever; and that is the mystery.”

She did not comment on the mystery of my calling it one; and I asked no question—I was resolute in my philosophy of silence. But here was certainly an unlooked-for development of a situation already sufficiently cryptic. Did she know that I guessed? I think so, or she would not have passed my innuendo unchallenged. But in that case she must have known that I knew how she had betrayed her own retreat. And to whom—an emissary of Marion, of the Marquis himself, perhaps?

Hardly the first, since, if so, there was nothing to prevent her including me in her confidence. If the second, then I was being made catspaw to some mystery to which the other was only a blind. And that I could not believe: there had never been a suggestion of affectation in her part of fugitive, under whatever moral stimulus she had been brought to play it. She might know nothing as to the true cause of her titular father’s implacable malignity towards her—as I asked no questions I was in no position to judge—or she might know everything. That she genuinely hugged her concealment and dreaded discovery was proof sufficient that she could be in no secret collusion with the supposed terrific power which had made that concealment necessary. No, here was some collateral enigma, about which it really did not concern me to bother myself. If my guest chose to entertain, unknown to me, mysterious visitors, who for some reason regarded me curiously in passing, she had calculated, no doubt, the profits and risks of the game. I was playing my own promised part squarely and loyally; she must do as she liked with hers. I took a book, and sat reading in silence.

I thought Fifine glanced at me once or twice, as if in indecision or compunction; but nothing came of it, and presently she said:—

“You have not heard yet from Mademoiselle Herold?”

“My step-sister? No,” I answered, a little surprised, for this was the first time that any direct reference had been made by either of us to the all-important matter.

She gave a little sigh.

“Do you want me to hear?” I said, putting down my book. “Are you so tired of it all—the confinement, the sense of peril, your company?”

“I do not want to be beholden to my company for anything but itself and its interest.”

“Well, you know you are not. You are a locataire—a paying guest.”

“Yes, that is just it,” she said. “But——”

She hesitated, with a flushed cheek: and I understood. She was running short of cash. Could that be the explanation of the strange visitant? But, then, how could she have applied to him without my knowledge? And who was he? A moneylender? One did not adorn moneylender’s buttonholes with chrysanthemum buds. Or perhaps a money-borrower?

That thought was quite suddenly illuminating. I wondered that it had not occurred to me before. The man, possibly, had been appealing to her bounty—and with success. It was a solution; and yet not a solution. There still remained for elucidation the fact of his claim on her, and the means by which he had found access to her presence. However, as he had traced her somehow, and, presumably, to the effect desired, the moral appeared to lie in the direction of some understanding between them, to which the chrysanthemum bud figured, as it were, for the mystic accent. It was a riddle; but I easily gave it up.

“But,” I echoed, “you are wanting fresh supplies—is not that what you mean?”

“Yes, it is,” she answered, shortly and frankly.

“Cousin,” I said as frankly, “I am really grateful to you for your candour. It clears the air. Now let me propose, what has often been in my mind, that we keep a common purse between us.”

“A common purse!” she said, “into which I put nothing, and from which I take everything!”

“Not in the least: you will put in the account I keep against you for your share, and which you will liquidate at your convenience.”

“Convenience is a very doubtful debtor. Are you really satisfied with that?”

“O, yes! Completely.”

“You do not want to get rid of me, now you know the burden you are undertaking?”

“That is nonsense. We have come to be true comrades, I hope. And so let that close the matter.”

She sat looking down, and purposelessly twining her fingers together. Then suddenly she raised her eyelids, and I thought I detected a moisture on them.

“I think,” she said—“you may—that is to say—will you call me Fifine, Cousin?”

Truly there is no help like pecuniary for expanding the human emotions. No wonder that an unscrupulous man with a purse can make his opportunities.

“On condition that you call me Felix,” I said; and so it was decided.

But though the compact as to those credit notes was made, and scrupulously insisted on by Fifine, I could see, to do her justice, that she was never easy under the compromise. Her pride of family, I opined, rebelled against that indebtedness to a stranger. So one day I said to her point-blank: “Tell me the truth: you are unhappy at not hearing from my sister. Would you like me to go and see her, and tell her of your difficulties?”

She stared at me with open eyes, into which a positive terror grew.

“What do you mean?” she said. “No, not for worlds! Do you in the least realise the risk you would be running—for yourself; for us both? Sometimes I think you hardly take what you were told about me seriously. Either that, or you are really bent on shaking me off by whatever desperate means.”

“I told you I was not.”

“You never said so directly.”

“Well, I implied it clearly enough—just as clearly as you imply, perhaps without meaning it, the real reason for your worrying about Marion.”

“What is that?”

“Why, that the receiving this contemptible accommodation from me is wounding to your patrician pride.”

“Do I seem to imply that?” she said, in a low voice of wonder. Her cheek flushed; a shadowy smile twitched her lips. “It is quite to mistake me—— On the contrary——”

“Well, what?” I asked, as she paused abruptly.

“Nothing,” she said; and I thought she looked at me wistfully. After a moment she went on: “And anyhow it would be absurd, because you too belong to the Noblesse, though you do pretend to think nothing of such connexions. You do, do you not?”

“I wouldn’t affirm such a thing,” I answered. “Pride of family is the most excusable of all prides, because it is impersonal—a leaning upon the support of a genealogical tree for one’s identity. To claim recognition solely through the achievements of one’s ancestry is really a very pretty form of modesty, if looked at rightly. Besides, we owe something to those to whom we owe our own distinguished position, do we not? I admire you for doing that credit to your ancient lineage, I can assure you I do; and should think less of you if you were capable of accepting favours easily, like a commoner soul. Really, Cousin Fifine, you know, your rank is a very attractive part of you to me. Didn’t you ever guess it?”

She was looking down again, frowning and knitting her fingers together. She murmured something inaudible—it might have been protest or assent.

“But for that very reason,” I went on, “there should be no foolish embarrassment between us in such a matter. Your suggesting such seems like a reflection on my own inferior standing. If you want me to feel on the same social plane as yourself, you must regard this question of funds as totally immaterial. I should, believe me, if our positions were reversed; and so, I think, would anybody not a tradesman.”

Still she did not answer; but presently, and quite suddenly, she rose, and, going hastily into her bedroom, shut the door between us.

I was surprised—perhaps; or perhaps I was not. Anyhow, let that pass—and some subsequent days, during which nothing more was said on the subject. In the meantime life went on as before, and I, for my part, found it agreeable. We shared our differences impartially, as we did our amenities; and the money question was shelved.

Early in our acquaintanceship Fifine had cleaned the glass of the little picture by Auguste Ronsin that she so much admired. I don’t know why, but it always piqued me to hear her extravagant eulogies of this piece, which was after all nothing so wonderful, though it was out of the common. One day, when she was in her bedroom, I took the thing off the wall and hid it. She was not long in noticing its disappearance.

“Why have you removed it?” she asked me immediately.

“I want you, for a change, to praise something of mine.”

“Well, I do. Your plats are the most perfect things—models of tasteful cookery.”

“Je veux le croire, Mademoiselle. But I refer to the business of the palette, not of the palate. There comes a limit to welcoming praise of other people at one’s own expense.”

“If I praised a picture of yours it would be in spite of my not understanding it; and what value would my praise have then?”

“O, to perdition with this question of understanding! There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

“No, Felix—no, indeed: I want to have my eyes opened, if you will only believe me. Show me your sketches again.”

I was nothing loth; there can be no question of vanity in proselytism; and I got out a portfolio of colour notes made in Provence. As before, Fifine considered them without emotion, while I confined myself to the simple enumeration of their titles. Presently we came to one before which she paused in a stupefaction so desperate that I was tickled for once into a brief exposition:—

“Imagine yourself waking in bed on a brilliant June morning, and facing a window outside which the plumy tops of a row of plane trees trellised the blue. What would be the impression to your eyes, winking and blinking between dreams and reality? That was painted at Orange.”

Fifine looked up quickly.

“Orange!” she said. “That was where I was born.”

I felt a little surprise; but only for a moment. What was against her being born where she liked? And then she went on, with just a little suggestion of flurry: “How much you must have travelled, judging by all the places you have sketched. And I have never travelled at all.”

“Have you not? Save from Orange to Paris, of course. Do you want to?”

“It would be amusing to see my birthplace again.”

“Well, why not? Let us go together.”

She glanced up, with a quick startled look.

“And run straight,” she said, “into the arms of my enemies.”

“If that is your only objection,” I answered, “I don’t think it need prevent you.”

“Ah!” she said. “You do not believe—I know that.”

“Whether or not, my cousin, makes no difference. To slip out cautiously, and leave the impression, if any such exists, that you were still here, would be to my mind an excellent policy. Think of their watching the empty cage while we were ranging the free earth, unsuspected and without fear.”

She was conning me with eyes in which some astonishment was visible.

“Do you really mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“That about our running away and travelling together?”

“I suggested it quizzically; but really on reflection I don’t know why we shouldn’t. From one particular aspect—that of appearances——”

“You needn’t go on,” she said, interrupting me. “It couldn’t be, of course, and, if I appeared to listen, it was only in jest. Besides, I couldn’t afford it.”

I did not answer to that, because I knew what was in her mind. But the idea which had come into my own remained there to germinate. This hole and corner existence was already figuring as irksome in the light of that wider prospect, and the nomadic instinct in me began immediately to stir and stretch its limbs, like an unswaddled infant laid to kick on its nurse’s lap.

“Very well,” I said: “we will drop the subject for the time being. Are these things making my methods and principles any clearer to you?”

She shook her head forlornly.

“I am very sorry,” she said.

“You want your Ronsin back?”

“Or something in its place. I know you can if you will, Felix. It is only perversity that prevents you. Do, to please me, paint something I can understand.”

“But that I cannot? Well, shall I paint you, Fifine?”

“Like these?”

“No, like that?”

“There!” she cried triumphantly, and in a delighted voice—“I knew it was only theory, and not incapacity at all. O, do, do, Felix!”

“I hope you will appreciate it at its full value—the abnegation of all my most cherished principles. But I declared I was no dogmatist, and this shall go to prove it. Only you must not build too much on the result. You know, after all, I have not young Ronsin’s genius.”

“But you have your own,” she said; “and, try as you will, you have not been able to hide it under that flimsy stuff.”

That portrait of the young woman gave me infinite trouble, but I will admit also infinite satisfaction. As I proceeded, I grew positively enthusiastic over it.

“This shall be something of a revelation,” I said—“perhaps even to yourself. I should recommend any artist, wishing to get at the soul of his subject, to live with it on terms of intimacy for some weeks beforehand. You cannot record a face properly on first acquaintance; and, as to hasty transcripts, one might as well pretend to render the depth and mystery of the moon in a blob of white lead.”

Fifine, who was a very good sitter—perhaps because she was of a sleepy indolent disposition—laughed at that.

“Why?” I demanded.

“O!” she said, “what a jelly you are!”

“A jelly, Madam!”

“Yes; just as dancingly elastic; and such a beautiful coherent shape until something at a touch divides you completely against yourself.”

“You amaze me. Then you do not regard me as consistent?”

“Only in not being so.”

“What a very unamiable characteristic.”

“Well, I don’t think so—or I shouldn’t have said it.”

I glanced up at her in surprise; then continued my work in silence.

CHAPTER VIII

The population of our globe, at any given moment, approximates two thousand millions; the section of Immensity visible from it includes some hundred million worlds, most of which, probably, all, possibly, are proportionately inhabited. How much conceit, per cubic inch of his moral and mental capacity, is deducible from a solitary human unit bent on glorifying his own transitory crumb of existence by way of an autobiographical memoir?

It sounds absurd, in whatever terms of dynamics one explains that unit. There may be a force imprisoned in a grain enough to wreck a continent; but, even then, what is a continent to infinity? The unit is as nothing, though he be as packed with condensed power as a cordite shell: he is one speck of cosmic dust, myriad-accompanied, travelling swiftly across a sunbeam from darkness to extinction: he is vivified into his brief moment of meaningless excitement about nothing, and he ends as meaninglessly. Relatively he is of no more account, points no more original moral, than any other of his microscopic relations. Gladness, hope, disillusionment—so runs the scale with them and him, so it has run, so it will always run. There may be notes beyond the mortal gamut, colours outside the rainbow; for living knowledge, for living guidance they neither exist nor have existed. He just runs up the keys, from bass to treble, runs out at the end—ceases.

And yet he will always be talking about himself—and why? Because, I think, in his conscious indestructibility, he is himself in epitome the whole wonder, tragedy and mystery of Creation. He feels these all in his own soul as an individual possession, and feels that they would be his, though his soul lived in utter solitude apart from its fellows—nay, apart from its body. They are the things to be discussed and recorded, and, because they are him, he must have the conceit of his immortality. He never views them in his heart as ephemeral; they do not cease with his material being. Wherefore it is that we are eternally compelled to regard ourselves, our little passions and our brief histories, as stories not ended but begun; and wherefore it is that, in spite of all our cosmic diminutiveness, Fifine and I shall feel as entitled as any others to talk about ourselves.

And what will it all matter in a few years’ time? I am more reasonable than most rationalists, and I say I don’t know. Nothing may matter; or so much, that any philosophical callousness to which I resolved to discipline my soul now might be found to have worked its own retribution in our eternal severance. I will not risk that, whatever my scepticisms or beliefs; nor could I if I would. Something has suffered in me a “sea-change,” which makes such a mood for ever more unattainable; and, if I appear resigned or indifferent, it is for pride and the world’s sake. There are some feelings we would not share even with a divinely sympathetic archangel.

It is not to be supposed, however, that all this time my intelligent interests were summed up in Fifine and her affairs. Somebody once said of me—wittily as he supposed and as I did not—that I had got too many irons in my fire ever to let it burn properly. He meant, of course, that I was not one of those monomaniacs who cannot pursue one ideal unless they neglect all others. Well, I am not, and, if I lose anything by the fact, it is not interest. Were we made omnivorous, I should like to know, to feed on boiled rice or beans? The man who could “pinch” his own soul of buds, like a prize chrysanthemum, in order to develop one monstrous head, was always a fool to me. I prefer, improving upon Ancient Pistol, to make the world not only mine oyster, but my pepper, my Chablis, my feast of a hundred dishes from hors-d’œuvre to savoury; and so, if you like, the last decanter being drained, to sleep under the table. Most properly, Death is the only drunkard who never wakes with a headache.

Well, Fifine interested me; but Fifine was not my universe. I can recall quite a number of subjects in which I was more or less immersed during those early days of our comradeship: correspondences with Galt, of the English Meteorological Society, on the question of climatological changes in the upper air strata, with some suggestions for an improved recording instrument; with Hénault, of the geological department of the Jardin des Plantes, on the formations of the Rhone delta, especially as regarded the aluminium beds of les Baux, and with others on the same or kindred subjects. Then I was engaged with Gondran, a practical mechanic, in elaborating a design for a bicycle to be part driven by a dynamo-electric screw, the details of which it gave me infinite pleasure to work out; and I was writing a paper for an Art Magazine on Pigments and their Mediums, with a discursus on the genesis and growth of Art, its psychological necessity and devolution.

That last was a subject inviting some minor collaboration; and my treatment of it owed in certain small details to my companion. We used to worry the thing together, and extract a good deal of amusement out of it. Why, given reality, human nature should have come to desire its artificial presentment: the necessity of gathering generalities to a focus for their better understanding and appreciation: emotion epitomised, as spirit is produced by condensation of diffuser liquids: the inexplicable charm of reflected images, originating very possibly the idea of framed pictures: the permanent recording of heroic deeds, leading by a natural process to the appropriation of design to ignobler and less masculine uses—such points, and fifty others, were suggested and discussed between us, until they began to assume an orderly progression in my mind. And presently the article was written, which I am free to confess it would likely have been less promptly without Fifine’s intervention.

Still, for the most part, my interests were continued independently of her; though I will not say they borrowed no additional relish from her neighbourhood. Pursuing them, it was like—to use a base simile—working with a dram at one’s elbow. To “sip” her in the intervals of reflection was to find one’s hand surer, one’s brain brighter. Then one day it occurred to me that I was getting rather to depend on this moral stimulant, and that I might feel somewhat lost when, in the nature of things, it should be withdrawn. That consideration surprised me into an effort to do without it, by affecting more exclusiveness in my labours; but the effort was not a success.

I don’t know why it was (or do I or did I?); but a favourite topic with Fifine was class distinctions. She frequently recurred to it, and always, it seemed, with a desire to enlist my sympathies on the side of the proletariat—with the kindly intention, perhaps, to put me on good terms with my own less distinguished origin. I took, however, rather a mischievous pleasure in bewildering her—and sometimes myself—as to my sentiments on the subject, though mostly I let her suppose my predilections to be for the “classes”—as thus:—

“The people are the people and will remain the people, not because they are wronged and oppressed, but because they are deficient in certain qualities of the superpeople. Not all the efforts of democrats earnest or democrats self-interested will ever close up and obliterate the line of cleavage; no social reform whatever will make the two one except in name. It is a state of mind, not of condition, which separates them; and that, not class tyranny, was the origin of the division. I think the question of education has nothing to do with it; we have all the same opportunities in that respect. But I think the question of happiness has a great deal to do with it. The people, for all the material misery which infects their masses, are nearer Nature, and therefore further from self-consciousness, than the superpeople, and on that account happier. Finally, the people do not aim at being anything higher than themselves: they aim—and that only when worked upon by demagogues—at reducing the superpeople to their own level.”

“Then anyhow you think the people happier than the superpeople?” says Fifine.

“It seems so.”

Her bosom swelled to a little sigh (she was sitting to me at the moment), and the meditative brown eyes seemed to search me for some reassuring sign.

“Then,” said she, “if I were you, I should know, without any question of qualities, where to seek for happiness.”

“Among the people? And you can say that, remembering the happiness I told you I derived from your high-born condescension?”

She sat back, with a little impatient gesture.

“I wish, for once, you would treat me as an intelligent being,” she said, “and not always with that sort of bantering flippancy. It is not in the least funny, and does not in the least take me in. I don’t condescend, and you know I don’t; and, if I did, the only malicious pleasure you would derive from it would be in laughing in your sleeve at my silly vanity. Sometimes, from my lower place, I wonder if you are really as clever as you would like to appear. Are you?”

I could only glance up with a modest expression.

“There was once a great Englishman, Fifine, whose name was Bacon, and he had a pet proverb, ‘The vale best discovereth the hills.’ Am I, you ask? I leave it to you.”

“Then I think you are not.”

“Ah! Then now I grant your intelligence, and I will never banter you again. Sit quiet a little. Do you know I am nearly at the end of my task?”

She did not answer, and I worked on. She had never from the start been permitted to see the portrait: it was to be a surprise to her—and, possibly, a revelation. Absorbed in some final technical detail, I did not look at her again; until presently, putting down my palette and brushes with a grunt of satisfied relinquishment, I leaned back and our eyes met.

“My dear child!” I said: “Fifine, my dear child!”

She rose, as I rose; but I hurried to stop her before she could escape.

“What is it, m’amie? You were not really hurt by my tone? Why I never thought your interest in the question was any but a mildly controversial one. I would not have laughed at you for one moment, Fifine, if I had believed you serious.”

“Yes,” she said, trying resolutely to blink back the drops that would yet collect and fall; “and I wasn’t serious, of course. I don’t know; but perhaps—perhaps this confinement is beginning to tell on me a little; and the long sitting was trying.”

“It is the last,” I answered. “Come and look, Fifine, and speak your mind about it.”

She needed no coaxing; she was the remotest from your weeping woman, obstinate and self-pitying. I took her hand, and she came at once, and stood with me before the picture.

She did not speak for a long time; but at length she turned to me, and I was content in the guerdon of her look.

“Felix,” she said softly, “women are really of coarser fibre than men. You see us not as we are, but as your transcendent imaginations paint us. And we know that well enough; and that is why we will always submit to the judgment of men, rather than to that of our own sex, who know the truth.”

“You are pleased, Fifine?”

“That you can see this in me? I should not be a woman otherwise.”

“But, with the style—the technique?”

“It is all beautiful; only—only you have not yet painted what I can understand.”

“Not?”

“No—how I can look like this—to you, to any one.”

I knew her very well. There was no coquetry, no fishing for a compliment in what she said. Suddenly she turned, and approached her face one instant towards mine—God knows on what emotional impulse. It was checked as soon as felt; a vivid flush overspread her cheek.

“I am very tired,” she murmured. “I think I will go and lie down for a little. Vive le maître!”

“Fifine!” I exclaimed; but she was already at the door of her room.

CHAPTER IX

I had started with the word, but I made no attempt to follow: the momentary impulse to do so was reflex and independent of my will. Resolutely I turned to the clearing away of my paraphernalia, whistling as I moved about—ostentatiously noisy. I was savage over having been betrayed even into that one exclamation, significant solely through its tone. It had been surprised out of me; but the warning it conveyed should be unconditional. That glimmer of a Gorgon head had turned me instantly into stone: adamant I would remain thenceforth.

The next day I put a suddenly formed resolve into execution. Telling Fifine through the door that I probably should not be home till late, and that she had better not sit up for me, I went out very early after breakfast, leaving her still half asleep in bed. I had no very definite purpose in my mind but a judicious absenteeism, which I might turn to the profit, or not, of some provisional reconnoitring; and I wished to be abroad betimes in order to avoid chance meetings with acquaintances.

I am ashamed to confess that I did not even know the exact spot of my step-sister’s ministrations; but a few enquiries guided me easily to a place so considerable. The Hôtel Beaurepaire stood, more or less about where I should have expected to find it, in the Avenue Henri-Martin. The actual building was pointed out to me by a precocious bebloused infant, shouldering, like a miniature Hercules, a club of bread. The Hôtel presented nothing more remarkable to the street than a huge white face of painted stucco, broken by innumerable tall windows having each its little white balcony and white jalousies, the latter mostly closed. In the middle, great wrought-iron gates, white, also, and as jealously shut, gave upon an inner quadrangle like an inn courtyard. A glimpse of enclosing buildings, of a welling fountain-basin, of oranges and oleanders in tubs, was to be caught through the foliated interstices of the gate. There was no sign of life anywhere visible; and if there had been, my concern with it was purely speculative. Yet I could not forbear lingering a minute or two in a sort of abstract curiosity, to consider the occasion which associated this august residence, unconsciously to itself, with my insignificant eyrie in the Rue de Fleurus. The sense of disproportion evoked by the thought tickled me: it was little Jack against all Blunderboreland—a thimbleful of mushroom self-assurance against the impregnable stronghold of ages. Could we conceivably defy to the end the forces represented in this place, hoodwink its astute councils, succeed in making our own terms before surrender? One thing did strike me as grotesque—my brief startled impulse of the evening before. That might seem possible in the Rue de Fleurus connexion; it was an incredible audacity here. And here was Fifine’s natural habitat; from such as this she drew her code, her sentiments, her living colour. It was only a marvel that, by whatever force of fear impelled, she could have adapted herself so easily to those changed conditions. But she had been oppressed and persecuted: I had been told so and must believe it, however monstrous it seemed to me that one so attractive and endearing could have been made the subject of a parent’s unnatural tyranny. Perhaps to be allowed to live herself, though in the humblest circumstances, was compensation enough for all the loss implied by what I looked on. Yet she had not been crushed; did the fact appear in her conduct, her speech, her imperturbable serenity? And what then?

O! leave all problems to mathematicians. With a laugh I turned away. Why had I come at all? I did not quite know, unless it were, in a sudden access of prudence, to learn something about the place and circumstances of the conspiracy in which I was involved. I had a restless impulse on me to jog the situation somehow, since it was getting congested beyond my management; and this had seemed a first vague step in the direction of movement and change.

What should I do with myself, decided as I was to break, anyhow temporarily, the spell of perilous inaction in which I had become entangled? I strolled aimlessly into the Bois de Boulogne, where the sweepers were at work with their long thin brooms, ruffling the untidy grass which Paris never learns to shave and trim. Loitering slowly on, I heard hurried footsteps behind me, and turned to encounter Marion.

She was mottled in the face—agitation always made her so—and she breathed noisily. Even in that surprised moment I could not help mentally criticising the figure she presented, and uttering a secret thanksgiving that she was my sister only by courtesy. A brother in fact had had reason to feel small pride in the connexion, though in this matter of family credit little allowance is usually made for that unnatural creature’s feelings. Yet I thought I could appreciate the hot anguish of gilded youth forced to chaperon, fraternally and shamefully, a figure so aggressively undesirable as this. She had, it is true, conceded to fashion a hat of the feminine swashbuckler type, which blinded one eye and aggravated the inflammatory defiance of the other; but the scornful plainness of her costume and her flat-heeled stride hopelessly discounted any half compromise with custom her head might display. If there is one thing I detest in women it is the long-skirted jacket, and Marion’s was so long that it left a quite inconsiderable fringe of dress between its end and her strong ankles.

“Walk on,” she said, panting for breath: “don’t stop, but walk on.”

We turned towards the lake; there were few people about, and the morning was still and misty. Presently she opened upon me in her authoritative way:—

“What are you doing here, Felix Dane?”

I glanced at her, amused, raising my eyebrows.

“You are not asking that seriously, Marion?”

“Yes,” she said, compressing her lips, “I am.”

“My dear Marion; I am doing nothing, then, but just pleasing myself.”

“I happened to be looking from a window,” she said, “and I saw you asking a boy to point you out the house.”

“My ignorance was inexcusable, I admit.”

“Why did you want to know?”

“The scene of your praiseworthy labours? What a question to ask of an admiring brother!”

“I will know, Felix.” She stopped and stamped her foot, then, warned perhaps by my face, checked herself, and resumed, with a strained attempt at a more conciliatory tone: “You might have consideration for others, if you have no apprehensions for yourself. You don’t seem to realise what a difficult tortuous part I am having to play.”

“Naturally, when I know nothing about it.”

She glanced at me, and away.

“Please come on, Felix. Will you not tell me what brought you?”

“That is better. Call it partly idleness, partly curiosity, partly the absence of any reason why I should not do exactly as I pleased.”

“Is there no reason? Can you really say so?”

“None whatever that I know. It was made no condition of an extraordinary situation forced upon me that my absolute liberty of action was to be restricted. I should not have accepted the situation if it had been.”

“I am not talking of your rights but of your good feelings.”

“Ah? Well, what about those?”

“Are you really so indifferent as to the safeguarding of a trust that you, after all, did accept?”

“Be a little more explicit.”

“Supposing by any chance Monseigneur himself had happened to be looking from a window just now. Would not his suspicions have been aroused?”

“By the fact of a casual stranger wishing to identify the residence of a family of such importance? What if I had had a Baedeker in my hand?”

“You had not, you know.”

“It would only have coloured the moral. I might have had it in my pocket. Anyhow I am sure the great man would have thought nothing unusual about such an everyday occurrence as a sightseer out hero-worshipping.”

“You don’t know him in the least; you don’t comprehend the situation. But of course you are only talking, after your way, for talking’s sake.”

“Is that my way? I should have thought I was a rather silent person as a rule. Do you know, Marion, I could almost imagine from your manner that you were not pleased to see me.”

My step-sister jerked up her elbows, uttering a hopeless exclamation. I think she could have thrown me into the pond with the fiercest satisfaction.

“You are quite welcome to imagine it,” she said. “Your turning up here is the very last thing I desired.”

I laughed.

“Well, it was your own choice, you know, to come and join me. I neither expected nor invited you; and it appears to me that whatever suspicion my movements may have aroused in an august bosom will hardly have been allayed by that rash step on your part.”

“I hope to heaven we were both unobserved; but to see you made me desperate. I thought something had happened; that you were bent on some folly which might betray the whole plot. Has anything occurred to disturb you, Felix? I think, seeing my distress, you might be candid with me.”

“To be sure I will, Marion, now you ask. Do you realise that three weeks and more have passed since I undertook a certain charge?”

“I know, Felix. I cannot help it.”

“And that during all that time I have received no word, no hint from you as to——”

“Yes, I know. I cannot help it, I say.” She looked away, as if momentarily disturbed or embarrassed, then faced me resolutely: “Do you want to get rid of her?”

I should have answered, “yes,” unequivocally. What motive for delicacy or hesitation could I have? Wisdom and policy alike clamoured for release from a position which, impossibly heroic at its outset, was daily growing more and more compromising in the sentiments it inevitably engendered. My professional interests, my personal honour were both concerned in the response; and how did I vindicate them? I stumbled a moment; and then temporised:—

“I want a term stated, that is all. I have no objection to the young lady, or any fault to find with her. We get on very well together on the whole. But don’t you think you are taking rather an unfair advantage of my good-nature, not to speak of my—of my not too impeccable human one?”

Rather to my surprise the challenge evoked no opprobrious response, nor indeed any response at all for a little. A student of physiognomy might even have fancied he detected in Marion’s expression a certain shiftiness, a desire to avoid straight issues.

“I think,” she said presently, “that, as to that, you will be guided by your own sense of fitness and propriety. I trusted to it at the first, Felix, and I trust to it now.”

“That is all very well, my good sister; but I never understood that the compact was to be an indefinite one.”

“It is not to be, of course; only—I tell you this candidly, Felix—the predicament which forced it upon us is not yet safely resolved.”

“Does the Marquis know that his daughter has fled from him, and is in hiding somewhere?”

“There is no reason why you should not be told that. Yes, he does.”

“And why does he not visit the knowledge upon you, her confidante and abettor?”

“I did not say he did not. But leave me out of the question; I can look after myself. It may be that he respects in me a certain force of character, which is not to be debarred from its duty by threats and bribery; it may be that heaven has granted me a certain power of exorcism over demons; it may be, as I told you before, that he sees in me the only possible clue to the secret of his child’s disappearance. That clue will remain safe, so long—so long as you are faithful, Felix.”

“H’mph!” I pondered the thing awhile, not satisfied, nor, it must be admitted, wholly discontent. “Then it seems,” I said, “that I have no choice in the matter.”

“I promise you, as I promised you before,” said Marion, “that I will communicate with you the very moment that a present difficulty has resolved itself. Only, for mercy’s sake, don’t again risk disaster through this sort of collusion. It will be bad for you, for us all, if his suspicions are once aroused. Felix, I will tell you one thing—it is for your companion’s sake. He knows—I have ascertained it—that we alighted near the Mont de Piété that night. That is enough to put his agents on the scent; and you must keep her close, if you would not imperil her safety. If she were once traced, and found to be——” She checked herself, gulped, and went on—“you would not like to have her innocent blood on your head, I am sure?”

I stared. It was not her persistent reassertion of that wild fable which surprised me; it was the curiously detached manner of her reference to my “companion.” Was it really Fifine’s salvation or her father’s which formed my sister’s leading consideration in this matter? The question was a novel and startling one. Really, if it had not been Marion, I should have suspected here some interest more than exorcismal in the morphiomaniac.

“By no means,” I answered—“nor the miscarriage of your plans either. Which means, I suppose, that I must resign myself to the inevitable.”

“If you will only have patience, Felix. It will not be for long now, I hope.”

“And in the meantime—h’m!” I stood considering. Then suddenly a whimsical thought occurred to me; and I uttered it, more for the humour of the shocked protest it would evoke, than from any least expectation of a favourable response.

“I suppose you wouldn’t at all approve of our going a trip together?”

“A trip!” She was obviously and naturally startled; but her tone, I thought, betrayed no particular moral alarm.

“She was born, she tells me, in Provence,” I said, “and her journey thence to Paris sums up her travelling experience. It is odd; but I suppose these exotics of the pur sang must be kept under cover. Anyhow it struck me that it might not only interest her to visit her birthplace, but that it would be a way for us both out of the killing confinement and monotony of our present existence.”

Marion was listening to me; yet I could see that some reflection beyond that engendered by my proposal was exercising her mind.

“She told you that, did she?” she said, staring me suddenly in the eyes.

“What is the matter?” I answered. “Yes, she told it me, but not with any reference to my suggestion, though I made that to her—quite in the elder-brotherly spirit, of course, and with an eye to Plato’s moral philosophy for our literary ballast. She might not consent to go, after all; I think that likely enough; only, supposing by any chance the venture appealed to her, would it have your sanction?”

We were strolling leisurely on, and Marion did not at once answer.

“It just occurred to me,” I continued, “as a possible resource, no more. It would take us, anyhow for the time being, out of the arena of contention, and if we did it cleverly, vanishing ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision,’ it might prove more baffling to the chase than our continuing to lie and sulk here under cover. You see, being hidden somewhere in Paris, as they would suppose us still to be——”

Marion interrupted me: “How long would you propose to stay away?”

“How long would you advise?” I said, my eyes beginning to open.

“I don’t think it matters.”

“Then you have no objection?”

“No; none at all.”

She fairly took my breath away. This astonishing acquiescence, where I had expected only obloquy and castigation! Yet I received, in appearance, the thunderbolt nonchalantly.

“Very well, then,” I said—“if the question should arise.”

“You will observe the last secrecy, in that event,” she said, “in the manner of your going? I can trust to you for that.” And then she went on, putting the case to herself, it seemed, rather than to me: “In the question of scandal, things would rest as they rest now, in neither better nor worse odour. It is for you a matter of conscience, and for her a period of self-obliteration, from which she will emerge, when she does, a restored individuality, having no responsibility to the interval—just, as it were, as if one had crossed from hill to hill by way of a deep sunless ravine.”

I did not answer—though that poetical flight from Marion was sufficiently startling—and we walked on for some little distance in silence—a fairly pregnant one on my part. “Certainly,” I was saying to myself, “her concern is for the morphiomaniac.” The idea promised to become an obsession with me. It might be held to explain some things hitherto inexplicable; it certainly, if true, made obscure the probable limits of my guardianship. That was a reflection carrying with it a sense not so much of mortification as of uneasiness. But, in the midst, the thought of that “furlough” so astonishingly conceded rose to encourage and exhilarate me. The free road would dissipate effectively all those drugging fumes generated by confinement. We could be frank comrades, once in the open air, unfettered by convention, responsible to ourselves alone, accountable to no man or woman for a definition of the right which found us wayfaring in company. The prospect pleased me; I foresaw only a single objection to it.

“One thing I must mention,” I said, “if there is to be any talk with your young Countess of this expedition. It is, to put it bluntly, funds.”

“Funds!” said Marion. She stopped, in some surprise.

“I should never get her to consent,” I continued, “unless on terms of sharing expenses. I may as well state the fact. She is out of cash, and already, in some inconsiderable measure, indebted to me. I refer to it only in the connexion of her natural pride—not from any personal motive. She has not confessed the fact to me, nor authorised me in any way to make her position known to you. It was revealed to me quite accidentally.”

For one moment I did hesitate as to the advisability of mentioning my suspicions anent the mysterious stranger; but the thought of some possible treachery towards Fifine implied thereby stayed me, and I resolved to keep my own counsel. Marion, after some frowning meditation, spoke plainly:—

“I am a little perplexed,” she said, “to understand how, under the circumstances, a fairly ample supply of money can already have exhausted itself. But of course you must not be allowed to suffer by her extravagances. Say nothing about it, and I will write to her in a day or two, enclosing a further remittance. Is that all?”

“That is all.”

She seemed to accept my assurance with a sigh of relief: and forthwith, with an air of unconstrained curiosity, put some questions to me about the manner of our life, its domestic incidents, the young lady’s demands upon my time and resources, and more especially my opinion of her and my feelings towards her—to all of which inquisition I responded as truth or policy dictated.

“She is a good girl,” she said at the end; “a trustworthy girl. Deal finely with her, Felix Dane—and with yourself.” She held out her hand. “Good-bye, now, and trust to my promise to release you at the first available moment. Only don’t again, for heaven’s sake, risk appearances by seeming to force my hand like this.”

Begging me to stay where I was, she left me—profoundly cogitative, you may be sure. That obsession had entered my mind to stay. It was gratifying to contemplate the trust of me implied in that leave to travel; and yet, and yet—I could have thought she had no more delusions about me than I had about myself. Really it almost seemed as if Fifine’s fate was to her a matter of quite secondary importance; she was willing to confide it to such fortuitous happenings.

I went a long walk into the country that day, tramping by way of Sèvres and Bas Chaville to the little Trianon, with its atmosphere of ghosts and piteous things sighing and whispering among the yellowing leaves. Returning to Paris, late and somewhat exhausted, I dined, cheaply but delectably, at a little Café in the Rue Vivienne, and thence, according to my promise to myself of a late evening, made my way to the Opera-House, where I paid my three francs for a fauteuil de quatrième amphithéâtre (and a very good one) to hear Romeo and Juliet sung.

Now I was scanning the audience from my lofty eyrie, when, my glance roving to the orchestra, whose members were at that moment tuning their instruments, I positively started and sat transfixed. For there, seated behind a violoncello, along whose strings his white fingers hopped and scampered like white mice, was my old plaintive macaroni of the Rue de Fleurus. He had no chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole now; but I knew him at once; my eyes, sufficiently penetrating at all times, could not be mistaken.

Well, for what he was worth he was identified; and what was he worth? Even were I to take the trouble to ascertain his name, how indeed would it bring me nearer a solution of the mystery of Fifine’s indebtedness to him? Besides, it was no affair of mine.

Fifine had gone obediently to bed when I returned home that night.

CHAPTER X

Fifine received her letter, containing a bulky enclosure, from Marion. I was present when she opened it, and I made no comment, preferring to leave to her the questioning which I foresaw, and which was indeed inevitable. She did not speak for a little, but sat with her velvety eyes fixed on my face, while I dipped, with what show of unconcern I could master, my petit-pain into my cup of coffee. Suddenly she thrust under my very nose a little rouleau of banknotes.

“They are to the value of two thousand francs,” she said. “I want you to keep them for me, to draw upon as occasion requires.”

“Good,” I said. “Behold your conscientious banker. It was unnecessary; but I ask no questions.”

“You have no need to,” she said; “nor to pretend ignorance of whence they have come and why.”

“From my step-sister, I make bold to guess; though how she is able to draw to this extent upon the baronial coffers, without exciting any suspicion as to her motive, puzzles me.”

“She has great influence with him,” said Fifine; “though I think it likely she has advanced this from her own store, intending to recoup herself from his at a more favourable time.”

“Great influence, has she?” said I, looking up.

“Yes, I think so,” said Fifine; and she went on rather hastily, as if to avoid the subject: “You will liquidate my debt to you out of it; and then we will go on as before.”

“Shall we?” said I. “Then Marion has not mentioned to you——”

“O!” said she. “Then you knew it was from her; and what she was to say besides?”

“I guessed.”

“How wonderfully clever of you. Now, Felix, why will you not be frank with me?”

“Let me know first. What does she say?”

“Just this: that if we are inclined to take a trip together, she has no obstacle to put in our way. Now, I want to ask you, How did you dare?”

“Hear me out, Fury. I did meet Marion: she saw me looking at the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and followed and accosted me; I did ask her what would she have to say to our taking a country jaunt together, and when, to my astonishment, she had nothing to express but approval, I did assert that you would never agree to such a proposal unless a replenished purse should enable you to take your share in the expenses. But I assured her explicitly that I spoke without your authority, that I did not even know if you would go if permitted, and that, as to the mention of money, it was made entirely on my own responsibility, and from inferences which you had had no intentional part in exciting. You must know, at least, that my only personal motive was to secure your consent to this trip—or, if you don’t, you should. I would much rather not be recouped for my little power of hospitality to one who repays me a thousandfold for it through the mere fact of her company.”

I got up as I spoke, and went and stood the other side of the table, so as to face her. She did not answer for awhile, nor look at me; but presently she raised her lids with a little smile, and, as it were, a flush of “rosy pudency.”

“I never thought you were really serious about this going away together,” she said. “It—it seems such a strange thing to do.”

There and then I destroyed my boats. I could not look at her longer, in her morning freshness, and play the sagacious self-critic. The burning feminine in her, the ready intelligence, the mental and the æsthetic qualifications, all proclaiming her a comrade of comrades for romantic venturings, ended my scruples in a sort of brain intoxication. Besides, where was the projected harm? Exercise and the liberal air would blow all that accumulated stuff of durance to the winds.

“Why?” I said. “Is gossip rifer under the open sky than in a closed room? We shall be safer from tongues, safer from possible hurt to reputation, to body, than we are here. We will be brother and sister, m’amie; you shall take my name—if you will condescend—and my conscience, and we will journey merrily in company, as witless of criticism as of guile. We will go South, even into the desolations of the Camargue, where no one would think of hunting for us, and, when you will, return leisurely by way of Orange and Fifine’s nest to Paris. Say it is settled.”

But, womanlike, she would not yield at once. She was full of tremors and scruples—fears of our being discovered and followed, alarm for the unconventionality of the proceeding. I was even exasperated on one occasion into twitting her with her “piano-tuner.” “There is no danger,” I said, “comparable with that invited by you yourself when you chose to entertain, unknown to me, and in spite of your solemn undertaking, a venerable stranger with a chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole.”

She turned a little pale, I thought, at that, and, looking away, murmured indistinctly: “Madame Crussol allowed him to come up.”

“You mean it was not your doing. But he was admitted by you, was he not?”

Then she turned upon me, and broke out impulsively:—

“I would rather not say. Don’t ask me, Felix. If it was wrong, it shall not happen again.”

“How can I say if it was wrong? But if you have secrets from me, I will have none from you. I saw your mysterieux at the Opera-House the other night, Fifine. He was in the orchestra, and playing a violoncello.”

She looked positively scared for a moment; then her face changed, and she laughed, but tremulously.

“It is not my secret,” she said, “or I would tell you; I would indeed. Don’t be angry with me, Felix.”

“Angry, my dear child!” I protested. “I only wanted to impress upon you the comparative unreasonableness of your present scruples. Believe me, if you will, the risk entailed in our leaving Paris is nothing to that courted by you in remaining on and remaining subject to chance intrusions like that.”

“Yes,” she said, very submissively; “I daresay you are right.” But nevertheless it took days to coax and persuade her—until I gave it up in despair. And then she suddenly surrendered.

“So it is finally decided you will not come with me?” I said to her one morning.

“Yes, finally,” she answered.

“Then that will do, and I have no more to say.”

“O!” says Fifine, “I don’t want to prevent you talking about it, if it amuses you.”

“It doesn’t in the least. I am so sick of the subject that it has no longer the smallest interest for me.”

“Yet it is rather an attractive subject.”

“You don’t seem to find it so.”

“I should miss it, perhaps, being gone.”

“Fifine, will you come?”

“You remember what I said?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Not really? Are you sure?”

“On my—h’m!”

“It was ‘yes, finally,’ wasn’t it?”

“To what question?”

“Somehow I can’t remember further back than your last.”

“That was ‘will you come?’ Yes, finally, to that, then.” I rose instantly. “You will want a travelling dress of some sort. Give me a hint.”

“I never consented, Felix. You can’t dare to say I did. Something simple but chic—dark blue or stone-colour, would be the best, I think; but I can trust you with the choice.”

The choice put me to some pleasant pains, nevertheless; but I need not have disturbed myself. There are angles and angels; there are also women who adorn everything they put on, and those whom nothing adorns. With the memory of Marion fresh upon me, I could only bask in serene contemplation of Fifine’s management of material no better and no more effective than that so injuriously misused by my step-sister. It was just a question of self-valuing versus self-spiting femininity. One would be a woman in accordance with, the other, in defiance of, the masculine ideal. Marion scorned sartorial recommendations; Fifine did not. Which is the vainer, do you think, the woman who believes she needs style and embellishment to make her attractive, or the woman who believes in her own perfect sufficiency without either? Even with the hat, it was less a question of what was worn than how. I would have backed my Provençale to make quite an endearing feature of the amorphous basin with which Marion had elected to bonnet herself.

However, if Marion was an angle, Fifine was certainly no angel. She was just a Parisian jeune personne—however she may have been born in Orange—with a natural faculty for making the best of an agreeable face and figure. And she was not difficile in the matter of “changes.” She was going forth to acquit herself sensibly as the road-mate of a vagabond, and she was merciful as regarded that beast of burden. For I proposed for my reasonable shoulders nothing less and nothing more than a single rücksack, such as I had commonly used in my trampings, which strapped under my armpits and was of proportions elastic enough to accommodate sufficient, and an ounce or two over, for our needs.

And how in the end did we plan our escape? Why, by planning nothing at all, and simply walking out one quiet evening and making our way on foot to the Gare de Lyon. We locked the door of the flat behind us, locking in some pleasant and odd memories, and leaving the key with Madame Crussol, the sagacious and diplomatic, sallied into the street temerarious and tripped upon our way. I neither looked for nor encountered the least interference with our movements, and we reached the station in safety, where I took us second-class tickets for Nîmes. Then, having each of us gulped down a mazagran, hot and black, I bought a bottle of Sauterne and some long sandwiches, and we took our places in the train, only then, perhaps, a little nervous in inaction, and anxious for the whine of the horn that should dismiss us on our adventurous journey. It sounded at last, and we drew away into the night.

CHAPTER XI

What is happiness? Psychologically, I suppose, it is a state of mind, contingent on some pleasing expectation and unhampered by physical disabilities. One cannot be happy with the toothache, or without the ache of hope in pleasurable forthcomings. Fond anticipation, clear or nebulous, is of its very essence; the fruitful idea is a condition of its being. It must build to exist, like the reef-constructing serpulæ of the Pacific; and when it can build no longer, it ceases with its own productive capacity. It dies upon content, as the chosen companion of the queen-bee’s love-flight dies. Yet happiness is not content, though it may achieve it, as labour achieves sleep and life death. It is a thing of subtler texture, of more ardent constitution. One may feel content after a good meal eaten, thirst assuaged, a handsome deed accomplished, anxiety or physical pain relieved, or on rest following fatigue. But that is not happiness: happiness is to be experienced only through the creative and constructive processes of the mind. Following an idea, it may foresee its goal as a bright lodestar; but its essence lies in the pursuit rather than in the attainment of that end.

The happiest souls alive are little children at play. Watch them—oblivious to all material calls; recognising thirst and hunger only when reminded of them—intent upon the pursuit of an idea, which is not travestied by them in their adaptation of incongruous means to certain visualised ends, but is simply imaginatively rendered through the medium of such arbitrary “properties” as are at their service. Cannot one think a locomotive out of those little circling cranks of arms, stamping feet, steam-spouting lips? If one cannot, then the unhappier dullard he; a thing not superior to childhood, but its spiritual outcast. There, before those sparkling engine-lamps of eyes, run the gleaming lines, on and on to Waterloo or Euston: the imp’s imagination is moving all things to his will, as sure as ever Orpheus drew with his golden lyre the Argo to the sea. He is happy conceiving, and developing his conception to its ultimate fruition. And, lo, then! his purpose fulfilled and the zest consummated, into chairs and tables resolve themselves once more the ships and castles and rolling-stock of that creative dreamland, and he is a little human boy again, sated with play, and with cravings in his tummy that call for just material content.

Yes, children know happiness; and so may the man know it, only in less irresponsible degree. He cannot feel the mortal and play the Robin Goodfellow; but he can read mysteries into Robin’s fen-candle enough to lure him on to ecstasy. In this alone is he the child’s spiritual inferior—that his imagination is less the master than the slave of his bodily condition. Only physically well people can feel happy, because it is impossible to associate sickness with the idea of achievement. On the other hand happiness is for the dying, because they are about to achieve death; and always for the loving, because they look to achieve life.

For my part—an impregnable constitution aiding—I have had my plenteous share of happiness in my time; but I have never yet recognised its title to itself save in the sense of happy productiveness. In pleasant idleness, in genial sterility, in drowsy blinkings at the sun, I have spent long periods of ease and satisfaction; but they were negative conditions, not to be quoted in the context of happiness. Happiness is an emotion and essentially procreative.

If, during these weeks I am now opening upon, happiness, supremer than any I had yet experienced, fell to my lot, it was in spite of any early consciousness on my part of a definite lodestar to my imagination. I do not say the star was not there: its light had not penetrated to me, that was all. It shone upon me, when it did, unforeseen and unexpected; and if at the last I had no strength to reject the gift it proffered, I must still plead that the use I came to make of it was wholly unpremeditated. Whatever of its nature at the outset I sought and pursued, lay in the prospect of introducing a fresh and appreciative mind to scenes and influences with which I myself was familiar, and of the new savour to be extracted from them through that rejuvenating medium. I wish to justify myself so far, and with only the one—perhaps eccentric—purpose already hinted at. For, after all, is it not absurd to credit the manumitted, the hyperphysical intelligence with no better than our own cramped and morbid understanding?

Do most people know, I wonder, that less-considered route from Paris, which takes one, by way of Nevers and Clermont-Ferrand, alongside the great hills of Auvergne and the Cevennes straight into the heart of the South? There are two reasons for preferring it before the more popular track on the left bank of the Rhone—the trains are far less crowded, and the view from their windows is generally superb. There is also a reason against; but that is conditional. You may find yourself hung up, at midnight, say, or worse, at some wayside station, with hours, maybe, to elapse before you can effect another stage of your journey. For a brief month or two of the year, however, a through train to Nîmes—supposing you cryptographist enough to discover it in the Guide Officiel des Voyageurs—stands at your service in the Gare de Lyon, timed to start at twenty or thereabouts of the clock. It was this train in which Fifine and I took our places, and by a signal stroke of good-fortune—for, as it happened, it was the very last night of the year on which it was to run.

We actually had two compartments of a corridor carriage to ourselves. Think of that, ye crowded cattle of the Lyon-Marseille route! The obliging Chef de train, tenderly and properly susceptible to the claims of beauty, put them, if rather superfluously, at our disposal, and without—I will believe it—an ulterior motive. Thereafter we travelled, as it were, in a two-roomed cottage.

At the beginning Fifine was a little shy of me. She sat aloof and monosyllabic in her corner, as we threaded the shining maze of lines through the City and its environs, and the great sheds and bridges leapt past, and we ran up the scattered outposts of lights until, gradually attenuating, they ceased in gulfs of windy darkness. But as the train increased its speed, whirling behind from its iron tyres the last dust of the town, a corresponding exhilaration seemed to wake in her, and, putting away all fearfulness and constraint, she sat up and clasped her hands.

“It is real, then,” she said; “and I have actually done it. How wicked I feel; and how happy!”

“Do you, Fifine?” I said. “That is a fine vindication of my insistence, and a good augury for the fruits of it. And I feel happy too. Supposing we feast our felicity—pile Pelion on Olympus, as it were, and so make transport of our bodily content?”

I produced the provender. As I was uncorking the bottle, I noticed that Fifine’s eyes were fixed upon me, with an odd look in them that made mine dilate. I stopped half-way in my task. “What is it?” I said.

She bent forward, and just rested her fingers a moment on my knee.

“Felix,” she said, “you—you are going to be my good elder brother, are you not?”

There was a shadow of emotion in her voice—almost like entreaty.

“Why do you ask?” I said. “Is some devil suddenly revealed in me, with this” (I lifted the bottle) “for his insidious procureur? I will throw it out of the window, if you like, here and now.”

“No,” she said, with a smile a little wistful—“don’t. Only—” she sat back, with a sigh—“I think—perhaps—I will not drink any wine.”

I rose very soberly, put the bottle in the rack overhead, and sat down again.

“There it is,” I said. “The Comtesse de Beaurepaire was quite right in suggesting that reflection to me. There is something demoralising to common natures in the mere thought of alcohol.”

“Don’t—please!” said Fifine distressfully. She leaned forward once more, with a little appealing motion of her hands.

“Don’t what?” said I.

“Call me that—attribute such motives to me. I—I did not mean you; but——”

“If you did not mean me, that is enough, then. There are only we two together here, Fifine, and I have no intention, I can assure you, of hunting through the corridor for a pot-companion.”

“No,” she said. “Please get down the wine again.”

“But——”

“I am tired and thirsty! I don’t think I can eat my supper without. Please, brother Felix!”

We made, after all, a merry meal of it, as the train, crashing past the sentry lights of the last suburban stations, sped shrieking into the black and unknown vasts beyond.

“It is like being put, with one’s billet,” said Fifine, “into one of those rolling balls you see in shops; and at Nîmes we shall stop, and the cashier will take us out.”

“Our ball will have a window in it before then,” I answered; “and we shall see things as we roll.”

She came and sat by me presently—for convenience’ sake, she said. It was easier so to make a common cause of our feasting. By and by, her speech began to drowse a little, and she caught herself back, more and more, from declining upon my shoulder. At last I said, resolutely: “This is good-night, m’amie. You will lie down here, now, and I will go and smoke in the next compartment. When daylight comes I will call to you.”

She let me make her comfortable, with the rücksack under her head, and our one rug over her for warmth. Then, like a rosy sleepy child, she smiled up at me.

“Good-night, dear brother.”

“Good-night, little sister.”

She made an indistinct movement with her lips, sighed, turned her head on one side, and closed her eyes.

I do not know how long I sat at my window in the empty neighbouring compartment, smoking, and looking with vacant gaze on the rush of impalpable things without. Gradually, as I stared, the gliding telegraph wires, sleekly gleaming past in modulations of high and low, resolved themselves in my brain into an endless stave of music, with posts for bars and insulators for notes, the gathered consonance of which, entering into the rhythmic clack of the wheels, seemed to leap into a wild chorus at each recurrent bar-line, and thence to subside and rise again to vault the next. Weariful to madness grew that rocking chaunt, with its flapping regular punctuations, and the stunning prospect of my being doomed to an eternity of it was already beginning to settle hideously on my soul, when of a sudden the strain tailed off into a hollow drum of thunder, which I recognised curiously for the wash and fall of far-away breakers. Walking towards those, and always to hear them receding, I tripped, stumbled, and sank at once into oblivion. And thereafter consciousness was mine but at long intervals, when the grinding of brakes, jarring into the booming rhythm of things, spoke of stoppages at provincial stations, and one’s lids were lifted to a heavy knowledge of shooting lights, and shadowy forms drifting, and a pallid fog of steam condensing in the cold air, and one’s ears resentfully awakened to a sound of voices, hooting sometimes, or singing, and potential of disgusting intrusions on one’s privacy. Yet nobody disturbed us; and in the end I slept so soundly that I came, after all, to be the laggard.

It was Fifine’s soft voice calling to me that roused me at length from my stupor. It was clear daylight, and she was standing, glad and fresh, in the outer corridor, looking on the gracious panorama of hills and streams which unwound itself before her. Her hat was off; the rug was wrapped about her shoulders; a strand of hair hung over her slumberous eyes. She made a very picture of dear disorder.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, in a low satisfied voice. “O, I’m glad we came!”

We had awakened, no doubt, to the cream of it all—those long passages of the mountains after the monotonous flats were spent. The sun had no power as yet to dissipate the ponds of mist which lay in the hollows and choked the deep ravines; but that was only to have our strange land half lapped in enchantment, and to try to penetrate with delight the mysteries of its gleaming floors. They were shy and sly, those mysteries—here, an up-reaching shadow just seen and snatched away; there, white things that moved and vanished; everywhere sparkles of frosty green, and over all, billowing remotely, or frowning imminent, the slopes and scarps of mighty hills. High up in the air we ran, through thundering gorges and over wideflung valleys, and always to perpetual change and perpetual beauty. The railway took the line of least resistance, following the conformations of the range; and yet with such obstacles had Nature striven to thwart its builders, we were hardly ever out of one tunnel before we were into another. All the way, for scores of miles, they pierced the vast and rocky buttresses, and once, when within a given time we tried to strike an average, we gave up impatiently, having counted into the third dozen, and dismissed the silly effort. The line of the hundred tunnels we called it; and indeed I believe that number is but a fraction short of the truth.

Now, as the sun gained strength, the scene, fired by it, grew out to us like a writing on white paper in invisible ink. Soft iridescences were resolved and identified for flowering pastures or fruiting trees; hanging woods detached themselves from clouds; tiny farms, and steadings, and little foreshortened churches were confessed, each in its green place, for what they were; and the cattle, black, or white, or dappled like half-ripe chestnuts, walked on visible hoofs. Sometimes turbulent floods were seen crashing far beneath us; sometimes placid pools mirrored the blue; but most beautiful were the shallow bends of streams, where, tumbling garrulously over white stones and silt, the little broken waters took on the most heavenly hues of lazulite and aquamarine, streaked with transparent green.

Fifine was enraptured with it all. She had first risen, it appeared, about the time of Prades St. Julien, and had feasted her eyes on that old picturesque monastery-crowned scarp, with its calvary and flower-pot tiled buildings, with the delighted relish of an unspoiled appetite. And thence had followed a very procession of enchantments—mediæval strongholds set high on lonely crags, and appearing above the ground-fog like islands in a quiet sea; quaint church-towers, surmounted by bells in wrought-iron cages; turret-gated farms; mystic townlets, seen through the gaps of hills, hanging pearly and opalescent in an amber haze; and everywhere, for foreground, rock and forest and river and mountain, always changing, always unfolding new beauties, spied from a giddy altitude. Twenty times had she been moved to wake me to share in her innocent delight, and twenty times refrained, from timidity or pity for my weariness.

Well, I felt rewarded now. Her enthusiasm was so whole, so fresh, so lovely infectious, it justified, I thought, my happiest predictions. It seemed a golden interval that stretched between now and our return.

At Langogne we got out to drink coffee at the extempore buffet—and thereby hangs a tale. It had chanced that, pacing the corridor of our carriage once or twice during the earlier hours of my waking, I had spied an uncouth figure rolled up on the seat of an adjacent compartment. There was nothing remarkable in that, nor in the fact that this stranger, by evidence of a knapsack resting in the rack above his head, was a foot-wayfarer like myself. The peculiarity—for there was one—lay, as presently revealed to us, in the creature’s appearance alone. For, as we approached Langogne, we heard him bestirring and uncoiling himself, with a sound of vast stretchings and yawnings; and suddenly he was in the doorway. I had a glimpse of him, wild-haired and red-eyed; and then, as we alighted for our twelve-minutes’ respite, he followed us out. We encountered again at the buffet, and he drank his coffee quite close to us, his lips protruded abstractedly, his eyes staring inflammatory over the rim of his glass at Fifine. Observing which, I took note of him.

He was rather a short man, with a suspicion of a rounded paunch; and he was dressed in a grey waistcoat, going very high under the throat, loose grey trousers, inclining to the pegtop, and a baggy alpaca coat with brass buttons. A weeping bow of black silk, knotted into what we should call an Oxford collar, not over-clean, dropped five inches down his chest, and his head for the moment was hatless, displaying a huge crop of ginger-brown hair, rather wild than long. An untidy chin-beard, or Napoleon, and a free moustache, raked up a l’Henri Quatre, both of the same hue, somewhat over-clothed a small face a little poodle-like in suggestion; but the utter self-complacency of the creature’s bearing was a thing to marvel over and worship. He strutted, he straddled—though displaying thereby some weakness of knee; he preened his coffee-damped moustache: “Look at me,” he seemed to be saying; “make the most of this accident, which gives you henceforth the claim to boast to your friends of having once in your life rubbed shoulders with the renowned, the incomparable Carabas Cabarus!”

For that, as we came to learn presently, was his name—the Cabarus, the latter-day Provençal songbird, the poet of “native woodnotes wild,” the gallant, the amorous, the very last of the troubadours. His eyes—large, watery, prominent, of a pale blue, and really expressive of some mystic melancholy—had already, over the brink of his glass, marked down, and made a provisional capture of, Fifine. Henceforth he walked, pegtops and all, “in aureate dawns of ecstasy, his rhythmic heart one lyric.”

Fifine happily so far was unconscious of her conquest, unconscious even of her privilege. Lapped in scenic wonders, I think she had no eyes for human. Back in our carriage, with hardly a glance vouchsafed to the stranger, she withdrew to reorder her ruffled plumes, while I returned to my post of observation in the corridor. But never suppose for one instant that, emotion once wakened in him, Carabas was the sort of man to suffer its incontinent stifling. Obstacles were but as zests to this ardent soul, so confident in his equipments, both physical and mental. Without a moment’s hesitation he took his place beside me at the window.

“A satisfying prospect, Monsieur,” he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, as though he himself were responsible for the scenery.

“Entirely so,” I answered.

“Monsieur’s first visit, perhaps, to this part of the country?”

“By no means.”

“But to Madame, Monsieur’s nouvelle mariée, it is new?”

“I have no wife.”

“Ah? To Monsieur’s sister, perhaps?”

“To my sister, as you say. Yes, it is new to her.”

“Bon! I give myself credit for my penetration.”

But not for your amazing impudence, I thought. Yet the wonder amused me. Turning to peer unblushingly into our compartment, he caught sight of the rücksack.

“Voilà!” he said. “The snail’s pack, containing all his equipment.”

“Equipment for two,” said I, inwardly tickled.

“So?” he commented; and gave the Gallic shrug. “It is to double the burden and halve the loneliness. I, too, Monsieur, carry my all upon my back like the snail; but, hélas! with me it is the one burden and the undivided loneliness. Monsieur is a happy man.”

He did not look unhappy, himself; I think he was pleased with his own representation of his solitariness; but he thought well to sigh, and immediately thereon to check that ebullition of secret grief, as if to hide it from me.

“You travel together?” he said. “By what itinerary?”

“To Nîmes,” I said shortly; “thence possibly to Arles.”

“By a wonder,” he answered, “that is my own destined route. Without doubt this is a providence to bring us better acquainted.”

It had not been his route, I could have sworn, until that moment; and at that moment Fifine joined us, unseen by the stranger, whose eyes were suddenly riveted upon a man issuing from a woodside with a gun on his arm.

“Sacré chien!” he growled, in a vibrant undertone: “behold the assassin, bent on his cursed mission to still God’s music!”

“Monsieur is no sportsman?” asked Fifine’s soft voice behind us. A child of the fraternal Republic, she had no thought of that reserve with strangers which marks our insular prejudices; yet, I confess, regarding her social traditions, this unaffected bonhomie of hers surprised me a little. Monsieur whipped round with a start and his eyes alight. He bowed, posed, stuck one arm akimbo and flourished the other.

“As Apollo was a sportsman, Mademoiselle,” he said, “so am I—to capture music as it flies, not, like that murdering caitiff, to destroy it for the indulgence of a base material appetite. Alas, the pretty, pretty becs-fins! See them marshalled on a dish, each corpse a rapturous song, to be lost in the stifling entrails of some pampered glutton. Think next, Monsieur, when you eat a lark, what melody has perished in you.”

“It sings in me, Monsieur; I know that,” I said. “I will take what comfort I can of the thought.”

He turned his shoulder to me, with a disdainful “pouf.” “Mademoiselle,” he said, “will comprehend.”

“Is Monsieur a bird-catcher?” said Fifine.

I thought he would have exploded. He rose on his toes, smacked his chest once, turned, walked away, and came back again.

“I,” he said, stabbing his diaphragm with his forefinger, “am Carabas Cabarus!”

A rather painful silence ensued, during which he scanned our embarrassed faces for rapture; even for intelligence. Then, failing the expected response, he condescended, with an audible sigh, to a patient repudiation of the slander.

“No, Mademoiselle, I am not a bird-catcher. You will hear of me—perhaps—where you are going; you will hear of me—possibly. The ideal I follow has no material form—at least so it has seemed to me until this moment.” (Fifine might here accept the obvious inference which his eyes expressed.) “It descends to me from voices in the clouds; it rises in the scent of flowers; I see far away, against a sky of milky agate, a low moon hung under a branch, pale and yellow as a citron fruit, and, as I advance to seize it, it eludes me, rising like a golden bubble. Sometimes it is the song of birds; sometimes the fall of water; sometimes I see it browsing on inaccessible shelves of rock, the shining goat, the chêvre d’or of our old, old haunted land. But, whence or wherever, it is not for me—that illusive ideal, that spirit of abstract beauty, which, pursuing for ever, I shall find at last only in the grave.”

His voice broke a little. Adding—“Unless I am for once mistaken, how divinely, as to the human inaccessibility of my goal!” he put an artistic period to his rhapsody, and, bowing to Fifine, turned away and vanished into his compartment, from which he did not again issue.

Fifine and I looked at one another; her lips quivered and her eyelids; she put a hand to my mouth, and hurried me out of sight, where she caught at the breast of my coat, and buried her face and her laughter in it.

“Is he mad?” she whispered. “I thought at first he might be a spy, who had followed us all the way.”

She could not be defrauded of her view, however; and soon we were at the corridor window again. I think it was near Chamborigaud that we passed, perhaps, the most impressive stage of our journey, looking down from a stupendous viaduct that swept the confines of a mighty valley. Thence we quickly ran out of the mountains, and at Alais—that town of commerce and briquettes, the dirty tabloids with which they feed and befoul the French locomotives—we were fairly in the plains. The run thence to Nîmes, which we reached at some half hour after midday, was scenically tame by comparison, though it initiated Fifine in some characteristic aspects of the South. For here, extending for leagues without the city, are low vineyards in profusion, and countless olive gardens, and cypresses, and wastes of tamarisk and juniper all dotted with little red-roofed villas—a country more Roman than Rome.

Well, we walked with our knapsack to the Hôtel de l’Europe—an old building huddled away in a corner of the town, into whose angle is fitted a small public garden which contains a statue of Daudet and some plane-trees, the upper branches of which, dry and mosquito-infested, almost brushed the windows of our bedrooms. And so was accomplished the first chapter of our adventure.

CHAPTER XII

Throughout Provence and Languedoc there are accredited songsters, severally honoured in the districts which gave them birth. They may be tillers of the soil or owners of it; propriétaires or ploughboys—it is no matter: they are expected and accepted quite simply and seriously, much as our own village folk-lorists are accepted as the legitimate inheritors of an age-long tradition. They continue a succession never broken since the days of de Borneil, Daniel, Riquier, and those other glorious primitives who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, exalted the dialect of Romance to a metrical art. Yet, though they wear the shoes of their lyrical forefathers, these latter-day minstrels are to be likened for the most part rather to the jongleurs, or hired singing-men, who were used to voice their masters’ productions, than to the producers themselves, the genuine troubadours who originated the songs. They play, or at best do little more than ring new changes on, antique themes. Still, now and again, a solitary figure, on whom the Paraclete of ancient inspiration would appear in some light measure to have laid hands, will stand out from the rest, and to that extent that his fame will presently enlarge from the purely local to the departmental; and, proportionately, perhaps, his vanity. They are “throw-backs,” in the true poetic sense.

Such, I take it, had been the case with this Carabas Cabarus. He was quite a natural bard, individual in his way, and with a real gift for extempore. To do him that justice is right, for all, I think, the admission redounds to my credit; for the man came to be an entire nuisance to me. His skin was as thick as his vanity was sensitive. He seemed to have a congenital incapacity for diffidence, as regarded both himself and his wares. It never occurred to him that he could possibly be de trop anywhere.

Well, Fifine and I, having viewed our bedrooms and hurried through a necessary toilette, descended hunger-sharp to the midday meal. Joyful in the novelty of all things, Fifine was prepared to find ambrosia in the thin broth with a sop of toast in it, and the divine savour of the chèvre d’or himself in tough and smoky cutlets. But even she could not idealise the “vin compris.” Throughout Provence that way lies disenchantment, and the traveller who would keep glowing in his breast the comfortable lamp of romance should by no means drink the wine, the red in particular, which is invariably provided free of charge. It has a peculiar rankness in it which penetrates through all the acidity, and a single glassful is enough to quench the hottest visionary ardour. I laughed, seeing the face my comrade pulled, and called for the carte-des-vins. One has to pay in these matters nothing or a good deal; but the extravagance is a necessary one, and I had come prepared against it.

After déjeuner we sallied forth at ease to see the amphitheatre and the Maison Carrée. It was opening October—perhaps, saving June, the ideal Provençal month—and one could bask in the sunshine without a thought of enervation.

“Where are you going to take me to first?” said Fifine.

“To the chemist’s,” I answered, “for a box of pastilles-moustiques. You must burn one by your bedside, Fifine, if you do not want to come down to-morrow with a face like a plum-pudding. And you must shut your window before turning up the light. I marked those trees close outside, and I tell you what I know.”

It was a necessary precaution; and we had just effected it, and were issuing from the shop, when we saw an open fly coming down the street towards us. I don’t know what moved me to the irrelevant reflection, but I said suddenly: “I wonder what has become of Carabas Cabarus. Thank the powers at least we have given him the slip.”

The carriage came on, drawn by a horse with a most curious action. He advanced down the incline towards us, flinging his legs inwards with a sort of jolly buccaneering roll which was quite captivating—a free nonchalant big-boned hack, who took the world swaggeringly, though conscious of bowling at his tail no better than a mouldy voiture-de-place. And as the thing approached us, there was Carabas seated inside it.

He was the same, and yet not the same—he had a hat on. Now, taking him all in all, his raiment and his pose, I should have expected here the right Mistral finish, the typical head-gear of the Provençal peasant, limp black felt, and very slightly raked. Instead, to my exhilaration was exhibited a mottled straw hat with an absurdly narrow brim, and a little tail of black ribbon waggling aft of it in the breeze. It was flattened down upon the abundant mane, and I will not swear was not kept in place by an elastic under the chin.

He recognised us, and waved his hand—even with a suggestion of a kiss blown to Fifine. It needed a Frenchman at once to wear that hat and blow that kiss. If you ask why, you have missed one side of the Frenchman—his innocence. I laughed out as I turned away.

“What are you laughing at?” said Fifine.

“The hat,” said I.

“What was the matter with it?” she asked.

I laughed again.

“Nothing was the matter with it, of course. It was a charming hat. You might have worn it yourself.”

She looked puzzled.

“Well,” she said. “But it was funny, wasn’t it, his appearing just at that moment. ‘Talk of the wolf, and you’ll see the tip of his tail.’”

“I did,” said I, “and it wagged. But, Fifine, bear what I say in mind. We have not seen the last of Carabas. He has been hunting us through all the Hôtels and restaurants of Nîmes, and he is about to run us to earth.”

“Well, it is something to be so sought after for our young attractions,” was all she answered, and we continued our way to the amphitheatre.

In the grip of that vast relic a spirit of glowing abstraction seemed to settle upon my comrade. As we sat high up among the shattered tiers, her eyes were the only utterers of the dreams that moved her. I watched them for some time in silence.

“What are you thinking of, Fifine?” I said at last.

She sighed and turned to me.

“What did he mean by that golden goat?” she asked irrelevantly.

“He? Who?” I exclaimed. “That Cabarus? It seems you have made a conquest of him to some purpose. Why, child, he meant nothing more than an old Provençal superstition, which you will fine related in Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin, in the Legendes of Charles-Roux, and elsewhere. The goat is merely the symbol of that unquenchable something in us which refuses to be satisfied with the material and the finite. However high or far we may reach, there is always something vague and elusive to be sought higher or further. We find that mysterious object typified in the marsh candle which Jacques Bonhomme follows through the mire; in the jewelled cup buried at the foot of the rainbow; in the sangreal, and in a host of other fanciful forms. We all follow it, one way or the other.”

“Yes,” said Fifine. Her chin was propped upon her hand; her eyes looked across the gleaming spaces of sunlight; she rested content with that monosyllable.

“If appearances are to be trusted,” said I, “you may flatter yourself that, for the moment at least, you are M. Cabarus’s golden goat.”

She shrugged her shoulders, with a little impatient “allons donc!” then turned suddenly and looked at me.

“And what is yours, Felix?”

“My what? My present ideal?”

“Yes.”

“Bouille-abaisse,” I answered promptly.

“What is that?” she demanded.

“It is a Provençal dish. I came here to eat it.”

“Will you not be serious, please?”

“It is perfectly true, Fifine. I shall not be happy till you have tasted it.”

“O! So your ideal is to gratify me. That is something, then.”

“It is everything, I think. And now it is your turn to confess your ideal.”

She looked at me very steadily. “It is to see you realise yours.”

“Bouille-abaisse?”

“Something,” she said, ignoring my comment—“some dream which you and that man, however much you may laugh at and despise him, may share in common. I cannot say what it is, but I can trace your pursuit of it through all of your works that I have seen. You are shy and proud, mon ami; you affect to laugh at the heroic in yourself; you meet the rebuffs of the world with a pretence of their being justified towards incompetence. But all the time you know the world is wrong, though the great in you will not condescend to parly with it as to your merits. Better, you think, to give up the struggle, to cease your pursuit of the inaccessible, and, falling into line with your detractors, hunt for bouille-abaisse, as the sort of perfection we can all understand and attain. I would sooner be a dog and sniff for truffles.”

I sat silent for awhile, a little surprised, a little amused; then answered quietly:—

“The inaccessible is the inaccessible, Fifine. Perhaps it takes a grown man to find that out.”

“You might as well say,” she replied, “that the stars are not to be searched because they are beyond our reach.”

“Well, what has astronomy done for us?”

“It has made astronomers.”

“A musty lot.”

“I think they are the finest people in the world—spirits almost more than men. Think of their uplifted vigils, night after night, while we are sleeping earthbound.”

“Shall I be an astronomer, then, to please you?”

“You will please me by being yourself, by following your own particular star. You know, Felix—yes, you do, that the real ecstasy is in the pursuit, into whatever pains and difficulties it may lead you. I want to see you great, and greatness is all in endeavour, because there can never be achievement.”

“M’amie,” I said very gravely, “what have I done to bring upon myself this lecture?”

“You have done nothing.”

“Ah! I see—that is it. You think me idle.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, perhaps I am. And so you take this accident of Carabas Cabarus, with his goats and golden bubbles, to belabour me for my sins.”

“He set me thinking, Felix; I admit it. And there is something in this place, too, that makes me think.”

“A ruin is a poor illustration of the value of endeavour.”

“I think it is the very best. It shows how greatness would not be debarred itself although it wrought with perishable things in a perishable world.”

I sat silent again; then turned suddenly upon her.

“So that is your ideal,” I said—“to see me passionate in the pursuit of what you think is mine—or should be. Have you none, then, for yourself?”

She looked down and away, tracing a pattern with her fingers in the crumbled stone.

“I do not quite say that,” she said, in a low voice.

“But you are willing to sacrifice it for the other? That is very unselfish of you.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is very unselfish of me.”

There was something so strange in her tone that I looked at her in surprise. What was her meaning? What was that mysterious aspiration of hers which she would so gladly forego, provided my self-realisation were contingent on its sacrifice? And then, still looking away, she said a stranger thing.

“Do you think men of genius ought to marry?”

“How can I speak for them?” I answered.

“I say you can and shall.”

“Very well, then,” I replied. “I think, if you ask me, that they should not. A man’s imagination is his mistress. He cannot keep his mistress in the same house with his wife. They would be sure to quarrel, and naturally the mistress, having no orthodox title to remain, would be the one to go.”

“But—but, supposing it no question of a wife?”

“Then, it is no question at all. Love makes no contracts and is bound by none. It is worldly policy that does all that part. Do you think I would debar my man of genius that best stimulus to his imagination—an unfettered passion? It is all the difference between the golden goat and the poor Billy tethered to a stake in the backyard.”

She sat quiet for a long time after that, her face still averted, her fingers playing with the stones. Then suddenly she stirred, and, with a sigh, rose to her feet.

“Are we not wasting our time?” she said. “I feel that there is so much to see. And yet it is so beautiful here.”

We were quite alone in the vast amphitheatre. As she stood up, the picture she made—her face, half in glow half in shadow, the vivid life of her contrasting with the golden ruins of the walls—wrought with such ardour upon my imagination, that I felt that, if I failed in that moment to take advantage of the creative impulse its beauty awoke in me, I deserved to be writ down for ever more the emasculate cypher of her strictures. So very quietly I got out the block, pencils, and a handful of coloured crayons which I made it my constant practice to carry about with me.

“Fifine,” I said, “don’t move: stand just as you are. I am going to immortalise you.”

She gave a little start; just glanced at me; then, neither stirring nor posing, obeyed. I was in happy pin: mood, model and place were all in one luminous harmony, and the thing came out as I had conceived it, automatically, almost without effort. It took me but a few minutes.

“There,” I exclaimed. “Nemausea of the golden amphitheatre! What do you think of yourself?”

Her face flushed up as she looked.

“You have made a pagan of me,” she said—“or the stones have. Perhaps they shall hold you excused for the little freedoms you have taken. But how clever you are, mon ami; and—and how forgiving to me!”

There was a queer little sound in her voice, and she turned away rather hurriedly. I said nothing; but when, having disposed and repocketed my effects, I got up and joined her, the signs of some emotion were still visible on her face.

“Are all the ruins about here of this lovely colour?” she asked, though with an effort, I could see.

“Throughout Provence,” I answered. “The sunset of dead Rome lingers upon them all. They stand up in its afterglow, very old and very quiet, the last great witnesses to the glory of its past.”

“The glory!” she murmured, rather awfully. “But think of the things that were done here! O, how could they! To build it—this, for just a human shambles, and make it beautiful—one huge great torture chamber, and open to the sky—and God!”

“No, that it was not,” I said. “There are the sockets for its awning-poles still existing. Come, and I will show them to you.”

“I should not like to stand here in the moonlight,” she said, not noticing me. “It makes me think of the Towers of Silence. Felix, have you ever seen, or read about them?”

“No. What are they?”

“I once came across a description of them. They are the charnel houses of the Parsees, the sun-worshippers—great lonely buildings, on the tops of which they lay their dead to be eaten by vultures. So in this Tower of Silence here the human vultures once sat and gloated, feasting on the carnage. And they, too, worshipped the sun.”

“Very far from being a tower of silence sometimes,” I answered. “You should see it in high festival, Fifine, when they have bull-fights—the real thing, you know—à la mort. No need, then, to reconstruct the past, as you are doing; it stands in sanguinary evidence before you. But these are morbid dreams, young lady. Rome was not all circuses, nor is Nîmes all Courses de Taureaux. I shall have to confine you to the boulevards Gambetta and Victor Hugo and their like if you take to this sort of thing.”

Fifine laughed, and we made our way again into the streets, on exploration bent. Most that was to be seen we saw, and near dusk rested in the beautiful gardens of the Fountain, and drank iced grenadine through straws under the broken shadows of the Temple of Diana. Then we returned to the hôtel in time for the seven o’clock dinner.

As usual in these coffee-rooms, there was the one long table and the many smaller supernumerary. We secured a minor affair in a corner, from which we could command a view of the company. That was fairly numerous—commercial gents mostly—and I confess that the obvious admiration it betrayed for my companion was a source of some secret gratification to me. True, my own interest in her was not a vested one, so to speak; but it is always agreeable to command, even in the abstract, the control of a covetable thing. It had perhaps never occurred to me to regard her so much in that light as now when I recognised myself for the subject of general masculine envy. Fifine, as an admired personal possession, went up fifty per cent. in my estimation—that was only human nature.

We had reached to the chicken and salad course, when Carabas came in. We both saw him at once, and I turned to my comrade, with a snigger.

“Quand je vous le disais, Mam’selle?”

“Hush!” she said: “Don’t attract his attention.”

But he could not very well have imposed himself on our narrow quarters. In point of fact he did not see us directly, but established himself, with something of an air, at the opposite end of the long table. Then, as, tucking with protruded jaw his napkin under his chin, his eyes wandered abroad, he suddenly spied us, and instantly posed for his part. He invited Fifine quite obviously to observe the deference with which the waiters hurried to attend him, and the hauteur with which he accepted or waved aside their ministrations. “Witness,” he said in effect, “the honour in which I am held, and realise, in shame and humiliation, the outrage you perpetrated on a famed child of genius in likening him to a bird-catcher!”

Thenceforth, if he did not eat nicely, he ate consciously, not so much with an eye to Fifine as with a two-fold stare. He appeared oblivious of my presence; he actually, in mute pantomime, drank to her in a glass of that execrable vin de table; though I regarded him with cool amused eyes, he ignored me as entirely as though I were a mere indifferent intruder on the private understanding established between them. And, when we got up to go, he lifted his glass again, and ogled her hideously over the rim of it.

In the hall outside, as I waited to light my pipe, I questioned the landlord, who made his sociable appearance, as to M. Carabas Cabarus, mentioning how we had encountered him in the train.

“Ah! truly?” he answered. “He is on his way from Paris, whither he has been to negotiate the publication of his poems. A native of Montpelier, Monsieur, where his father was a coachbuilder. Hence his name, given him, perhaps, in irony, for he was a stupid child. But the race is not always to the swift, nor bread to the wise. He who was slow is the first at the goal, and, being there, is poor.”

“First at the goal? You regard him highly, then?”

“Surely, Monsieur. There is none better of his kind in Provence. He is of the great succession—a minstrel worthy to be compared with Raymond Ferraud, both for his verse and his excessive gallantry.”

Fifine and I went out for a final stroll before bedtime, which in the vagabond’s life comes early.

“That landlord,” I said, “is a well-informed man. I have read of that Raymond—a distinguished rascal, who actually persuaded a lady president of the puissant Court of Love at les Baux to share his melodious wanderings with him. They called one another in these connexions commère—or gossip, as we might say. It is a good thought, Fifine: supposing we adopt it? But, as to this Carabas, the fellow promises to be a nuisance, and I propose that we rid ourselves of him with all possible despatch. I do not intend staying here long: Nîmes is only the antechamber to fruitfuller delights. So to-morrow we will finish with it, and the morning after, very quietly and unostentatiously, slip over to the station with our rücksack, and take train south for Aigues-Mortes and the wilderness. What do you say, gossip?”

“That I am entirely in your hands, gossip,” answered Fifine.

CHAPTER XIII

We carried out our programme to the letter, “finishing” Nîmes the following day, and, as good fortune would have it, without once encountering the objectionable troubadour within doors or abroad. I hoped he had gone on to Montpelier, and that we had seen the last of him—but I had overlooked the knapsack. We did the churches, and the Porte d’Auguste, and we visited again the fountain of the Nymphs with its fair climbing garden, up which we mounted to the old ruined Mausoleum called the Tour de Magne, where Fifine was much more interested in the flying grasshoppers, with their marbled jackets and underwings of crimson or azure, than in the supposititious history of the building itself, to which I tried vainly to get her to attend. But she was in a wilful mood, aggravated, perhaps, by the two or three mosquito bites, which, for all our precautions, she had not escaped. With one exception they were on her fingers; and the exception was quite pretty in effect, forming a sort of beauty mark near her left ear. I told her they looked like little swelling buds on a fair stem, but without reconciling her to the disfigurement or the intolerable itching. Poising an insect on her finger-tip, she would not even look at the tower.

“I will not be interested in it,” she said. “I don’t care a fig whether it was a lighthouse, or a treasury, or a tomb; or whether it is built of ashlar or cream-cheese; or whether it is an octagon or an octopus. If you will paint it for me I will love it; if you won’t, I shall catch grasshoppers.”

“Mayn’t I just sometimes,” I said, “enjoy myself, without making a business transaction of my enjoyment?”

“That’s it,” she answered, watching the thing take flight. “You are exactly like a schoolboy. A book, which you might delight in reading voluntarily, becomes a task if imposed upon you as a duty. I want you to paint this, so you don’t want to paint it. Your attention wanders, just as the schoolboy’s would, to all sorts of extraneous interests that don’t matter. Your art should be your enthusiasm and your obsession, and the difficult thing should be to get you away from a subject, not to attract you to it. I daresay, clever as you are, you might take a lesson in perseverance from many smaller men.”

“Perseverance, Fifine, is a dreadfully plebeian virtue,” said I.

“Well, then,” she retorted, “I like plebeian virtues. I can imagine even your despised M. Cabarus coming up here and refusing to leave until he had turned its poetic inspiration to some account.”

“To the account of scratching his egregious name on the walls, I expect.”

“Yes, you may joke. But anyhow his mastering purpose is to excel in the gift which Nature has bestowed on him.”

I fairly whistled out my astonishment.

“My good gossip, you are talking entirely without book. You know absolutely nothing about his mastering purpose. Why, you have only spoken to him once, like myself; and we have heard what the landlord said. I have just as much right from that to pronounce him a peddling coxcomb, idling away his time between rhyming and philandering. I should define him, if you asked me, as probably an erotic sentimentalist.”

“I don’t ask you. Besides, I like sentimentality—in reason.”

“Well, I don’t; and it is never in reason. I abhor it. It is always a manufactured emotion—like spread chords. The people who use spread chords, in playing, or singing, or talking, are hypocrites and impostors. I should liken them, morally, to procurers. They do not feel, they calculate, emotional effects. I have heard Shelley’s ‘Indian Serenade’ sung by that sort in a way to make one sick. ‘I ara-aise from dreams of thee in the first sweet er-ser-leep of night.’ Bah!”

“Felix!” said Fifine, amazed; “are you off your head?”

“Are you,” I said, “when you chastise me—me with that meretricious little skipjack?”

“But, how do you know he is meretricious? You have seen no more of him than I have.”

“Exactly. My opinion of him has precisely the value of yours; and they are both worth nothing.”

She came and put her hand upon my arm, and looked up in my face.

“I did not mean to hurt you, Felix.”

“With that?” I answered. “My mail is proof against better than pea-shooters, Fifine.”

“You are not offended?”

“God bless you, no, child. I was as much in jest as you were.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned away.

But, as we walked down the hill together, after a long silence she suddenly broke upon me again:—

“How dared I presume to read lessons to you—and after your yesterday’s proof! I think you are the sweetest-tempered man I have ever known, Felix.”

I laughed.

“O, no flattery, gossip!” I said. “The last thing I want is to be exalted to a height I should have the deuce’s own trouble to maintain. And, as to presumption, I am not so confident of myself as to resent criticism of my methods.”

“No,” she said: “I wish—sometimes—for both our sakes—you were.” And leaving me that cryptic pronouncement to digest, she fell silent again.

Well, we got off early, as arranged, the next morning, and without any hint given as to our destination, though the waiter, who brought our coffee and our note to command, was officious in his attentions and enquiries.

“That was because you tipped him too much,” said Fifine, as we walked to the station. “You men are always foolish in that respect. It is stupid, because they have no legal right to demand anything at all.”

“Tipping is a detestable custom,” I answered; “but, when you talk of legality, a waiter has as much right to expect a douceur as any other tradesman. I have heard it said that the real and only definite line of social demarcation lies between the tippable and the untippable; but that is nonsense. We are all open to receive gratuities, in the sense of supercharges on services rendered or goods retailed. The lawyer who attunes his bill to the financial position of his client; the doctor whose fee is this for the poor man and that for the rich; the soldier or the sailor who, through interest, obtains preferment over men, worthier, perhaps, but less fortunate than himself; the politician who uses office as an invitation to bribery; the adulterating shopkeeper; the preacher who rates his eloquence at a pound more or less in the plate; not to speak of the sportsman who accepts his vail in plain terms, and makes no bones about it—what are they all but receivers of tips? It is the bit, little or much, over and above the recognised scale of charges, which constitutes the tip; and the waiter is as much entitled to expect his bonus as any other wage-earner.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” said Fifine. “I said you tipped him too much. But I didn’t mean to start you going. That is the worst of you: you seem to hold contradictory opinions on every subject one may mention.”

“M’amie, my gossip: controversy is the very essence of education.”

“O, don’t! we shall miss our train. It is past seven now.”

THESTORY OF FIFINE

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