The big clock had just finished striking three when Mary entered the
church of the old rock-town on the hill. She could feel the vibration of
the last stroke, as if the heart of the church were beating heavily, in
sympathy with her own.
Coming into the dimness after the golden bath of sunlight outside was
like being plunged into night. For an instant all was dark before Mary's
eyes, as if she had been pushed forward with her face against a black
curtain. The once familiar perfume of incense came pungently to her
nostrils, sweet yet melancholy, like a gentle reproach for neglect. She
seemed to be again in the convent chapel of St. Ursula-of-the-Lake.
Every well-known feature of the place was sharply visible; she saw the
carved screen of black oak; the faces of Reverend Mother and the
sisters, white and ardent in the starlike light of tall wax candles; she
heard the voices of women singing, crystal clear, sweet and sexless as
the song of angels. The old oppression under which she had panted in the
last days of her novitiate fell upon her again, like a weight. She felt
that her soul was in a strait-jacket. Then, as she had often felt--and
prayed not to feel--while the pure voices soared, the sensation of being
shut up in a coffin came back to her. She was nailed into a coffin,
lying straight and still under cool, faintly scented flowers; dead, yet
not dead enough to rest. The terrible longing to burst the coffin lid
and live--live--made her draw a deep, quick breath as of one choking,
just as she had often struggled gaspingly back to realities after this
obsession, while the singing went on in the dim chapel of the convent.
It began, and was all over in a few seconds. By the time her eyes had
grown used to the twilight the impression of old, past things was gone;
and relieved, as if she had waked from a dream of prison, Mary took note
of everything round her: the largeness of the church, the effect of
bareness, the simple decorations of the altar. She dipped her finger in
the holy water, and knelt to pray for a moment, wondering if she had the
right: and when she rose from her knees, the curé stood before her.
"Welcome, my daughter," he said. "I thought you were of the old faith.
Now I am sure. Thank you for coming. I should like to give you my
blessing before you go into the garden."
Presently he pointed to the open door which framed a bright picture of
sky, and flowers growing against a low green and gold background of
orange and lemon trees.
"Go out alone," he told her. "I have to stay here in church a while.
Walk down the path to the wall, and look at the beautiful view. Then to
the left you will see an arbour at the end of the garden. Wait there
for me. I shall follow before you have time to grow impatient."
He said nothing of Vanno, whom she had been brought there to meet, and
to "save." Perhaps the Prince had not cared to come. This seemed very
probable to Mary; yet the thought that he might be avoiding her did not
stab the girl's heart with any sharp pang of shame or pain. A radiant
peace had taken possession of her spirit, stealing into it unaware, as
the perfume of lilies may take possession of the senses, before the
lilies are seen. Though she felt gratitude and something almost like
love for the curé, she was glad that he had sent her into his garden
alone. The flowery knot pinned on the bare breast of mountain seemed
even more to her than the "fairyland" Rose Winter had described.
"Angel-land," she thought, as she saw how secret and hidden the bright
spot was on its high jutting point of rock, with its guardian wall of
towering, ivied ruin on one side, and the tall pale church on another.
She felt that here was a place in which she might find herself again,
the self that had got lost in the dark, somewhere far, far below this
height.
She stood by the low wall which kept the garden from the precipice; and
when she had looked eastward to Italy, and westward where the prostrate
giant of the Tête de Chien mourns over Monaco, she turned toward the
arbour in which the curé had told her to wait. Most of the big gold and
copper grape-leaves had fallen now, but some were left, crisped by
frost until they seemed to have been cut from thin sheets of metal; and
over the mass of knotted branches rained a torrent of freshly opened
roses. They and their foliage made a thick screen, and Mary could not
see the inside of the arbour; but as she reached the entrance Vanno
stood just within, waiting for her, very pale, but with a light on his
face other than the sunlight which streamed over him. Then Mary knew
that something, more intimately herself than was her reasoning mind, had
expected him, and had never believed that he would refuse to come.
He held out both hands, without a word; and without a word she gave him
hers. He lifted them to his lips, and kissed first one, then the other.
Still keeping her hands fast, he drew them down so that her arms were
held straight at her sides. Standing thus, they looked into each other's
eyes, and the glory of the sun reflected back from Vanno's almost
dazzled Mary. Never in her life had she known happiness like this. She
felt that such a moment was worth being born for, even if there were no
after joy in a long gray existence; and the truth of what she had many
times read without believing, pierced to her heart, like a bright beam
from heaven: the truth that love is the one thing on earth which God
meant to last forever.
"Will you forgive me?" Vanno asked, his eyes holding hers.
"Yes," she said. "And will you forgive me, for not forgiving you?"
"How could you forgive me, when you thought of me as you did? But you
know now that you thought wrong."
"Yes. I know. Though I don't know how I know."
"And I know you to be _yourself_. That means everything. I can't say it
in any other way. Because it was your real self I knew at
Marseilles--the self I've known always, and waited for, and am unworthy
of at last."
"Don't call yourself unworthy."
"I won't talk about that part at all--not yet. I love you--love you!
and--God! how I need you."
"And I----"
"You love me?"
He loosed her hands, and catching her up, lifted her off her feet, her
slight body crushed against his, her head pressed back; and so he kissed
her on the mouth, a long, long kiss that did away with any need of
explanation or forgiveness. There was no returning afterward to the old
selves again, they both knew before their lips had parted. It was as if
they two had climbed to the top of a high tower together, and a door had
been shut and locked behind them.
By and by he made her sit on the wooden seat under the rose canopy; and
going down on one knee, he took up a fold of her dress and kissed it. No
man but one of Latin blood could have done this and kept his dignity;
but as he did the thing it was beautiful, even sacred to Mary, as if he
knelt to pour balm on the wound that once he had given her. Though his
lips touched only her dress, the very hem of it, she felt the thrill of
the touch, as she had felt his kiss on her mouth. This was her lover,
and her knight. She half feared, half adored the thought that from this
moment she had granted him rights; that a man loved her, and had kissed
her, and that she had confessed to loving him. It was so different from
anything which she had dreamed could come to her that she could hardly
believe it was happening: for when she had left the convent she was
still a nun in her outlook upon life.
Yet now this bowed dark head, and the rim of brown throat between the
short, thick hair and the stiff white collar, looked somehow familiar,
as if the man who knelt there had always been hers. So dear was the
head, so boyish in its humility, that ridiculous tears rushed smarting
to her eyes. She wanted to laugh and to cry. Where his lips had touched
her dress, she almost expected to see a spark of light clinging, like a
fallen star.
When he looked up and saw the tears, still kneeling he put his arms
around her, and slowly drew her to him. Then her hands stole out to
clasp his neck, her fingers interlacing, and she let her cheek lie
softly against his. His face was hot as if the sun had scorched it, and
she could feel a little pulse beating in his temple. There was a faint
suggestion rather than a fragrance of tobacco smoke about his hair and
his clothes, which made her want to laugh with a delightful, childish
sense of amusement that mingled with the thrill of her love for him.
"You always belonged to me, you know," he said. "What time I have
wasted, not finding you before! But I knew you existed. I knew always
that I should meet you some day. And then I nearly lost you--but we
won't talk of that, because you have forgiven me: and forgiving means
forgetting, doesn't it?"
She answered only by pressing her face more closely against his.
"But there are other things for you to forgive," he went on. "I used to
think I was very strong, not only in my body but in my will. Now I see
that I can be weak. Can you love a man who does things he knows to be
beneath him? I have made a fool of myself in the Casino--a fool like the
rest. I began because I was miserable, but----"
"Was it I who made you miserable?"
"Yes. But that is no excuse for me. I deserved it all and more: I'd hurt
you. And afterward, I went on being a fool, because--it gave me a kind
of pleasure, when I'd lost pleasure in other things. It's the weakness
of it that I hate in myself, not so much the thing I did. A woman should
have a man's strength to lean on, if she is to love him. Weakness is
unpardonable in a man. Yet I'm asking you to forgive it, and let me
begin over again."
"I love you as you are," Mary said. "What am I, to judge? What have I
myself been doing?"
"You are a girl; and you are so young. You knew no better. I knew. You
were led on. I walked into the trap with my eyes open."
"I was warned. My father just before he died wrote me a letter saying
there was 'gambler's blood' in my veins. Those words always run in my
head now. And a friend who loves me begged me not to come to Monte
Carlo."
"It was Fate brought you--to give you to me. Do you regret it?"
"I don't regret anything--if you don't; because what is past--for both
of us--doesn't feel real. This is the only real part. We were brought to
Monte Carlo for this, it seems now."
"It seems, and it is."
They looked with one accord down at the Casino far below, which from the
curé's garden had more than ever the semblance of a large, crouching
animal. Its four horns glittered in the beginning of sunset, as if they
were crusted with jewels of different colours. Its dominance over all
that surrounded it, all that was smaller and less powerful and
impressive than itself, was astonishingly evident from this bird's-eye
point of view; but brightly as the jewels gleamed, they had lost their
allurement for these two. With Vanno's arms around her, Mary wondered
how she could ever have felt that the Casino was a vast magnet
compelling her to come to it in spite of herself, drawing her thoughts
and her money to itself, as an immense magnetic rock might draw the
nails from the sides of a frail little boat. With Mary's fingers warm
and soft as rose-petals against his neck, her cheek on his, Vanno could
have laughed with contemptuous pity at the wretched image of himself
which he seemed to see down below, stupidly hurrying along with an
offering for the Casino. He was not so much shocked at his own yielding
to the attraction as he was surprised that there could have been so
strong an attraction.
"Doesn't it look stupid down there?" Mary asked, almost in a whisper.
"Like a lot of toy houses for children to play with?"
"And the children are tired of playing with them!" Vanno answered. "The
toys there were only worth playing with when there was nothing better to
do."
"That's it!" she echoed. "When there was nothing better to do. I think
that was what the curé must have meant."
"The curé!" Vanno echoed. "I'd forgotten him!"
"So had I. How ungrateful of us. But you have made me forget everything
except--_you_."
She rose slowly, reluctantly, and then pretended to exert her strength
in lifting him up from his knees. "The curé stayed away on purpose," she
said.
"Yes. For he meant this to happen--just as it has."
Mary smiled, half closing her eyes, so that the world swam before her in
a radiant mist. She was less afraid of love and the man who gave and
took it, now. Already it seemed that Vanno and she had always been
lovers, not sad, parted lovers, but happy playmates in a world made for
them. There could not have been a time when they did not understand
each other. Everything before this day had been a dream. "Do you know,"
she said, "why I came here--I mean, why the curé asked me? He told me
that I must come and 'save' you. As if I could! It was I who needed
saving."
[Illustration: "'IT WAS FATE BROUGHT YOU--TO GIVE YOU TO ME. DO YOU
REGRET IT?'"]
"He knew," Vanno answered, speaking more to himself than to her, "that
we should save each other."
As he spoke, a foot ostentatiously rattled the gravel of the path, at a
safe distance. The curé coughed, and coughed again. A serious catching
in the throat he seemed to have, for a man who lived in the fresh air
and laughed at the notion of a "sunset chill."
Vanno took Mary's hand and kept it in his as he led her out of the
arbour.
"This is what your blessing has done, Father," he said.
Then, the curé must have blessed him, too!
The priest smiled his good smile as he came toward them, the sky flaming
behind his black-clad figure, like banners waving.
"I thought. I hoped. No, I knew!" And he smiled contentedly. "The stars
have ceased to desire the moth, a well-known phenomenon which often
upsets the solar system. The moth has lost its attraction. The stars
have found each other."
"We have found each other," Mary said, "and I believe--I believe that we
have found ourselves, our real selves."
"You have found yourselves and each other," echoed the curé, "which
means that you have found God. I have no more fear"--and he waved a hand
toward the towered building down below, set on fire by the sun--"no more
fear of the moth."