A PROVENCE ROSE.
[Illustration]
“_Cosy Corner Series_”
A PROVENCE ROSE
BY
LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ
(“OUIDA”)
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
BOSTON
JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY
1894
COPYRIGHT, 1893
BY
JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY
[Illustration: ILLVSTRATIONS]
PAGE
“YOU PAINTED THIS, M. RENÉ CLAUDE?” _Frontispiece._
“A YOUNG GIRL HAD FOUND AND RESCUED ME” 7
“IN A VERY NARROW STREET” 13
“HE WAS A PAINTER” 22
“ONE NIGHT ... LILI CAME TO MY SIDE BY THE OPEN LATTICE” 28
“SHE FELL ON HER KNEES BEFORE IT” 39
TAILPIECE, PART I. 42
HEADPIECE, PART II. 43
TAILPIECE, PART II. 75
A PROVENCE ROSE.
PART FIRST.
I was a Provence rose.
A little slender rose, with leaves of shining green and blossoms of
purest white,--a little fragile thing, but fair, they said, growing in
the casement in a chamber in a street.
I remember my birth-country well. A great wild garden, where roses grew
together by millions and tens of millions, all tossing our bright heads
in the light of a southern sun on the edge of an old, old city--old as
Rome--whose ruins were clothed with the wild fig-tree and the scarlet
blossom of the climbing creepers growing tall and free in our glad air
of France.
I remember how the ruined aqueduct went like a dark shadow straight
across the plains; how the green and golden lizards crept in and out
and about amongst the grasses; how the cicala sang her song in the
moist, sultry eves; how the women from the wells came trooping by,
stately as monarchs, with their water-jars upon their heads; how the
hot hush of the burning noons would fall, and all things droop and
sleep except ourselves; how swift amongst us would dart the little
blue-winged birds, and hide their heads in our white breasts and drink
from our hearts the dew, and then hover above us in their gratitude,
with sweet, faint music of their wings, till sunset came.
I remember-- But what is the use? I am only a rose; a thing born for a
day, to bloom and be gathered, and die. So you say: you must know. God
gave you all created things for your pleasure and use. So you say.
There my birth was; there I lived--in the wide south, with its strong,
quivering light, its radiant skies, its purple plains, its fruits of
gourd and vine. I was young; I was happy; I lived: it was enough.
One day a rough hand tore me from my parent stem and took me, bleeding
and drooping, from my birthplace, with a thousand other captives of
my kind. They bound a score of us up together, and made us a cruel
substitute for our cool, glad garden-home with poor leaves, all
wet from their own tears, and mosses torn as we were from their
birth-nests under the great cedars that rose against the radiant native
skies.
Then we were shut in darkness for I know not how long a space; and when
we saw the light of day again we were lying with our dear dead friends,
the leaves, with many flowers of various kinds, and foliage and ferns
and shrubs and creeping plants, in a place quite strange to us,--a
place filled with other roses and with all things that bloom and bear
in the rich days of midsummer,--a place which I heard them call the
market of the Madeleine. And when I heard that name I knew that I was
in Paris.
For many a time, when the dread hand of the reaper had descended upon
us, and we had beheld our fairest and most fragrant relatives borne
away from us to death, a shiver that was not of the wind had run
through all our boughs and blossoms, and all the roses had murmured in
sadness and in terror, “Better the worm or the drought, the blight or
the fly, the whirlwind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout
that levels our proudest with the earth--better any of these than the
long-lingering death by famine and faintness and thirst that awaits
every flower which goes to the Madeleine.”
It was an honor, no doubt, to be so chosen. A rose was the purest, the
sweetest, the haughtiest of all her sisterhood ere she went thither.
But, though honor is well no doubt, yet it surely is better to blow
free in the breeze and to live one’s life out, and to be, if forgotten
by glory, yet also forgotten by pain. Nay, yet: I have known a rose,
even a rose who had but one little short life of a summer day to live
through and to lose, perish glad and triumphant in its prime because it
died on a woman’s breast and of a woman’s kiss. You see there are roses
as weak as men are.
I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long night of travel, with my
kindred beside me in exile, on a flower-stall of the Madeleine.
It was noon--the pretty place was full of people: it was June, and
the day was brilliant. A woman of Picardy sat with us on the board
before her,--a woman with blue eyes and ear-rings of silver, who bound
us together in fifties and hundreds into those sad gatherings of our
pale ghosts which in your human language you have called “bouquets.”
The loveliest and greatest amongst us suffered decapitation, as your
Marie Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes did, and died at once to have their
beautiful, bright heads impaled--a thing of death, a mere mockery of a
flower--on slender spears of wire. I, a little white and fragile thing,
and very young, was in no way eminent enough amongst my kind to find
that martyrdom which as surely awaits the loveliest of our roses as it
awaits the highest fame of your humanity.
I was bound up amongst a score of others with ropes of gardener’s bass
to chain me amidst my fellow-prisoners, and handed over by my jailer
with the silver ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a piece of
gold--whether of great or little value I know not now. None of my own
roses were with me: all were strangers. You never think, of course,
that a little rose can care for its birthplace or its kindred; but you
err.
O fool! Shall we not care for one another?--we who have so divine a
life in common, who together sleep beneath the stars, and together
sport in the summer wind, and together listen to the daybreak singing
of the birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf in slumber--we who know
that we are all of heaven that God, when He called away His angels,
bade them leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now and then
make man remember Him!
You err. We love one another well; and if we may not live in union, we
crave at least in union to droop and die. It is seldom that we have
this boon. Wild flowers can live and die together; so can the poor
amongst you: but we of the cultivated garden needs must part and die
alone.
All the captives with me were strangers: haughty, scentless
pelargoniums; gardenias, arrogant even in their woe; a knot of little,
humble forget-me-nots, ashamed in the grand company of patrician
prisoners; a stephanalis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath was
peace and sweetness; and many sprays of myrtle born in Rome, whose
classic leaves wailed Tasso’s lamentation as they went.
I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest were, for in the
rough, swift motion of the youth who bore us my bonds gave way and I
fell through the silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped
stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.
There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so far as I had
consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise and waft me on his
wings away to some shadow, some rest, some fresh, cool place of
silence.
I was tortured with thirst; I was choked with dust; I was parched with
heat.
The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal; the sun scorched
like flame on the glare of the staring walls; the heavy feet of the
hurrying crowd tramped past me black and ponderous; with every step I
thought my death would come under the crushing weight of those clanging
heels.
It was five seconds, five hours--which I know not. The torture was too
horrible to be measured by time. I must have been already dead, or at
the very gasp of death, when a cool, soft touch was laid on me; I was
gently lifted, raised to tender lips, and fanned with a gentle, cooling
breath,--breath from the lips that had kissed me.
[Illustration]
A young girl had found and rescued me,--a girl of the people, poor
enough to deem a trampled flower a treasure-trove.
She carried me very gently, carefully veiling me from sun and dust as
we went; and when I recovered perception I was floating in a porcelain
bath on the surface of cool, fresh water, from which I drank eagerly as
soon as my sickly sense of faintness passed away.
My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small chamber; it was, I knew
afterward, but a white pan of common earthenware, such as you buy for
two sous and put in your birdcages. But no bath of ivory and pearl and
silver was ever more refreshing to imperial or patrician limbs than was
that little clean and snowy pattypan to me.
Under its reviving influences I became able to lift my head and raise
my leaves and spread myself to the sunlight, and look round me. The
chamber was in the roof, high above the traffic of the passage-way
beneath; it was very poor, very simple, furnished with few and homely
things. True, to all our nation of flowers it matters little, when we
are borne into captivity, whether the prison-house which receives us be
palace or garret. Not to us can it signify whether we perish in Sèvres
vase of royal blue, or in kitchen pipkin of brown ware. Your lordliest
halls can seem but dark, pent, noisome dungeons to creatures born to
live on the wide plain, by the sunlit meadow, in the hedgerow, or the
forest, or the green, leafy garden-way; tossing always in the joyous
winds, and looking always upward to the open sky.
But it is of little use to dwell on this. You think that flowers,
like animals, were only created to be used and abused by you, and
that we, like your horse and dog, should be grateful when you honor
us by slaughter or starvation at your hands. To be brief, this room
was very humble, a mere attic, with one smaller still opening from it;
but I scarcely thought of its size or aspect. I looked at nothing but
the woman who had saved me. She was quite young; not very beautiful,
perhaps, except for wonderful soft azure eyes, and a mouth smiling
and glad, with lovely curves to the lips, and hair dark as a raven’s
wing, which was braided and bound close to her head. She was clad very
poorly, yet with an exquisite neatness and even grace; for she was of
the people no doubt, but of the people of France. Her voice was very
melodious; she had a silver cross on her bosom; and, though her face
was pale, it had health.
She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even when she held me and pierced
me with steel and murmured over me, “They say roses are so hard to rear
so, and you are such a little thing; but do grow to a tree and live
with me. Surely, you can if you try.”
She had wounded me sharply and thrust me into a tomb of baked red clay
filled with black and heavy mould. But I knew that I was pierced to the
heart that I might--though only a little offshoot gathered to die in a
day--strike root of my own and be strong, and carry a crown of fresh
blossoms. For she but dealt with me as your world deals with you, when
your heart aches and your brain burns, and Fate stabs you, and says in
your ear, “O fool! to be great you must suffer.” You to your fate are
thankless, being human; but I, a rose, was not.
I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that little, dull clay cell; I
tried to forget my sweet, glad southern birthplace, and not to sicken
and swoon in the noxious gases of the city air. I did my best not to
shudder in the vapor of the stove, and not to grow pale in the clammy
heats of the street, and not to die of useless lamentation for all
that I had lost--for the noble tawny sunsets, and the sapphire blue
skies, and the winds all fragrant with the almond-tree flowers, and the
sunlight in which the yellow orioles flashed like gold.
I did my best to be content and show my gratitude all through a
parching autumn and a hateful winter; and with the spring a wandering
wind came and wooed me with low, amorous whispers--came from the south,
he said; and I learned that even in exile in an attic window love may
find us out and make for us a country and a home.
So I lived and grew and was happy there against the small, dim garret
panes, and my lover from the south came, still faithful, year by year;
and all the voices round me said that I was fair--pale indeed, and
fragile of strength, as a creature torn from its own land and all its
friends must be, but contented and glad, and grateful to the God who
made me, because I had not lived in vain, but often saw sad eyes, half
blinded with toil and tears, smile at me when they had no other cause
for smiles.
“It is bitter to be mewed in a city,” said once to me an old, old
vine who had been thrust into the stones below and had climbed the
house wall, Heaven knew how, and had lived for half a century jammed
between buildings, catching a gleam of sunshine on his dusty leaves
once perhaps in a whole summer. “It is bitter for us. I would rather
have had the axe at my root and been burned. But perhaps without us
the poorest of people would never remember the look of the fields.
When they see a green leaf they laugh a little, and then weep--some
of them. We, the trees and the flowers, live in the cities as those
souls amongst them whom they call poets live in the world,--exiled from
heaven that by them the world may now and then bethink itself of God.”
And I believe that the vine spoke truly. Surely, he who plants a green
tree in a city way plants a thought of God in many a human heart arid
with the dust of travail and clogged with the greeds of gold. So, with
my lover the wind and my neighbor the vine, I was content and patient,
and gave many hours of pleasure to many hard lives, and brought forth
many a blossom of sweetness in that little nook under the roof.
Had my brothers and sisters done better, I wonder, living in gilded
balconies or dying in jewelled hands?
I cannot say: I can only tell of myself.
[Illustration]
The attic in which I found it my fate to dwell was very high in the
air, set in one of the peaked roofs of the quarter of the Luxembourg,
in a very narrow street, populous, and full of noise, in which people
of all classes, except the rich, were to be found--in a medley of
artists, students, fruit-sellers, workers in bronze and ivory,
seamstresses, obscure actresses, and all the creators, male and female,
of the thousand and one airy arts of elegant nothingness which a world
of pleasure demands as imperatively as a world of labor demands its
bread.
It would have been a street horrible and hideous in any city save Rome
or Paris: in Rome it would have been saved by color and antiquity;
in Paris it was saved by color and grace. Just a flash of a bright
drapery, just a gleam of a gay hue, just some tender pink head of a
hydrangea, just some quaint curl of some gilded woodwork, just the
green glimmer of my friend the vine, just the snowy sparkle of his
neighbor the waterspout,--just these, so little and yet so much, made
the crooked passage a bearable home, and gave it a kinship with the
glimpse of the blue sky above its pent roofs.
O wise and true wisdom! to redeem poverty with the charms of outline
and of color, with the green bough and the song of running water, and
the artistic harmony which is as possible to the rough-hewn pine-wood
as in the polished ebony. “It is of no _use_!” you cry. O fools! Which
gives you perfume--we, the roses, whose rich hues and matchless grace
no human artist can imitate, or the rose-trémière, which mocks us,
standing stiff and gaudy and scentless and erect? Grace and pure color
and cleanliness are the divinities that redeem the foulness and the
ignorance and the slavery of your crushed, coarse lives when you have
sight enough to see that they are divine.
In my little attic, in whose window I have passed my life, they were
known gods and honored; so that, despite the stovepipe, and the
poverty, and the little ill-smelling candle, and the close staircase
without, with the rancid oil in its lamps and its fetid faint odors,
and the refuse, and the gutters, and the gas in the street below, it
was possible for me, though a rose of Provence and a rose of the open
air freeborn, to draw my breath in it and to bear my blossoms, and to
smile when my lover the wind roused me from sleep with each spring, and
said in my ear, “Arise! for a new year is come.” Now, to greet a new
year with a smile, and not a sigh, one must be tranquil, at least, if
not happy.
Well, I and the lattice, and a few homely plants of saxafrage and
musk and balsam who bloomed there with me, and a canary who hung in a
cage amongst us, and a rustic creeper who clung to a few strands of
strained string and climbed to the roof and there talked all day to the
pigeons--we all belonged to the girl with the candid, sweet eyes, and
by name she was called Lili Kerrouel, and for her bread she gilded and
colored those little cheap boxes for sweetmeats that they sell in the
wooden booths at the fairs on the boulevards, while the _mirlitons_
whirl in their giddy go-rounds and the merry horns of the charlatans
challenge the populace. She was a girl of the people: she could read,
but I doubt if she could write. She had been born of peasant parents in
a Breton hamlet, and they had come to Paris to seek work, and had found
it for a while and prospered, and then had fallen sick and lost it, and
struggled for a while, and then died, running the common course of so
many lives amongst you. They had left Lili alone at sixteen, or rather
worse than alone--with an old grandam, deaf and quite blind, who could
do nothing for her own support, but sat all day in a wicker chair by
the lattice or the stove, according as the season was hot or cold, and
mumbled a little inarticulately over her worn wooden beads.
Her employers allowed Lili to bring these boxes to decorate at home,
and she painted at them almost from dawn to night. She swept, she
washed, she stewed, she fried, she dusted; she did all the housework of
her two little rooms; she tended the old woman in all ways; and she
did all these things with such cleanliness and deftness that the attics
were wholesome as a palace; and though her pay was very small, she
yet found means and time to have her linen spotless and make her pots
and pans shine like silver and gold, and to give a grace to all the
place, with the song of a happy bird and the fragrance of flowers that
blossomed their best and their sweetest for her sake, when they would
fain have withered to the root and died in their vain longing for the
pure breath of the fields and the cool of a green woodland world.
It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt,--a life one would have
said scarce worth all the trouble it took to get bread enough to keep
it going,--a hard life, coloring always the same eternal little prints
all day long, no matter how sweet the summer day might be, or how hot
the tired eyes.
A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious, wasteful, splendid life
of the beautiful city around it in so terrible a contrast; with the
roll of the carriages day and night on the stones beneath, and the
pattering of the innumerable feet below, all hurrying to some pleasure,
and every moment some burst of music or some chime of bells or some
ripple of laughter on the air. A hard life, sitting one’s self in a
little dusky garret in the roof, and straining one’s sight for two
sous an hour, and listening to an old woman’s childish mutterings and
reproaches, and having always to shake the head in refusal of the
neighbors’ invitations to a day in the woods or a sail on the river.
A hard life, no doubt, when one is young and a woman, and has soft,
shining eyes and a red, curling mouth.
And yet Lili was content.
Content, because she was a French girl; because she had always been
poor, and thought two sous an hour riches; because she loved the
helpless old creature whose senses had all died while her body lived
on; because she was an artist at heart, and saw beautiful things round
her even when she scoured her brasses and washed down her bare floor.
Content, because with it all she managed to gather a certain “sweetness
and light” into her youth of toil; and when she could give herself a
few hours’ holiday, and could go beyond the barriers, and roam a little
in the wooded places, and come home with a knot of primroses or a plume
of lilac in her hands, she was glad and grateful as though she had been
given gold and gems.
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers,
are but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your
porcelains, your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics,
all your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives
of the poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all
the grace, all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue, that they
possess: often we are all their innocence and all their religion too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless
homes, in those sunless windows?
Now this street of hers was very narrow: it was full of old houses,
that nodded their heads close together as they talked, like your old
crones over their fireside gossip.
I could, from my place in the window, see right into the opposite
garret window. It had nothing of my nation in it, save a poor colorless
stone-wort, who got a dismal living in the gutter of the roof, yet who
too, in his humble way, did good and had his friends, and paid the sun
and the dew for calling him into being. For on that rainpipe the little
dusty, thirsty sparrows would rest and bathe and plume themselves, and
bury their beaks in the pale stone-crop, and twitter with one another
joyfully, and make believe that they were in some green and amber
meadow in the country in the cowslip time.
I did not care much for the stone-crop or the sparrows; but in the
third summer of my captivity there with Lili the garret casement
opposite stood always open, as ours did, and I could watch its tenant
night and day as I chose.
He had an interest for me.
He was handsome, and about thirty years old; with a sad and noble face,
and dark eyes full of dreams, and cheeks terribly hollow, and clothes
terribly threadbare.
He thought no eyes were on him when my lattice looked dark, for his
garret, like ours, was so high that no glance from the street ever
went to it. Indeed, when does a crowd ever pause to look at a garret,
unless by chance a man have hanged himself out of its window? That in
thousands of garrets men may be dying by inches for lack of bread, lack
of hope, lack of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes upward to them
from the pavement.
He thought himself unseen, and I watched him many a long hour of
the summer night when I sighed at my square open pane in the hot,
sulphurous mists of the street, and tried to see the stars and could
not. For, between me and the one small breadth of sky which alone the
innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded
imperial crown as a sign on his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham
gold turning black in the shadow, hung between me and the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with
myself, with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny;
and yet I sighed and sighed and sighed, thinking of the white, pure
stars of Provence throbbing in her violet skies.
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see; neither rose nor poet will
be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of
tinsel swings on high.
Well, not seeing the stars as I strove to do, I took refuge in sorrow
for my neighbor. It is well for your poet when he turns to a like
resource. Too often I hear he takes, instead, to the wine-cellar which
yawns under the crown that he curses.
[Illustration]
My neighbor, I soon saw, was poorer even than we were. He was a
painter, and he painted beautiful things. But his canvases and the
necessaries of his art were nearly all that his empty attic had in it;
and when, after working many hours with a wretched glimmer of oil, he
would come to his lattice and lean out, and try, as I had tried, to
see the stars, and fail, as I had failed, I saw that he was haggard,
pallid, and weary unto death with two dire diseases,--hunger and
ambition.
He could not see the stars because of the crown, but in time, in those
long midsummer nights, he came to see a little glow-worm amongst my
blossoms, which in a manner, perhaps, did nearly as well.
He came to notice Lili at her work. Often she had to sit up half the
night to get enough coloring done to make up the due amount of labor;
and she sat at her little deal table, with her little feeble lamp,
with her beautiful hair coiled up in a great knot and her pretty head
drooping so wearily--as we do in the long days of drought--but never
once looking off, nor giving way to rebellion or fatigue, though from
the whole city without there came one ceaseless sound, like the sound
of an endless sea; which truly it was--the sea of pleasure.
Not for want of coaxings, not for want of tempters, various and subtle,
and dangers often and perilously sweet, did Lili sit there in her
solitude earning two sous an hour with straining sight and aching
nerves that the old paralytic creature within might have bed and board
without alms. Lili had been sore beset in a thousand ways, for she was
very fair to see; but she was proud and she was innocent, and she kept
her courage and her honor; yea, though you smile--though she dwelt
under an attic roof, and that roof a roof of Paris.
My neighbor, in the old gabled window over the way, leaning above his
stone-wort, saw her one night thus at work by her lamp, with the silver
ear-rings, that were her sole heirloom and her sole wealth, drooped
against the soft hues and curves of her graceful throat.
And when he had looked once, he looked every night, and found her
there; and I, who could see straight into his chamber, saw that he went
and made a picture of it all--of me, and the bird in the cage, and
the little old dusky lamp, and Lili with her silver ear-rings and her
pretty, drooping head.
Every day he worked at the picture, and every night he put his light
out and came and sat in the dark square of his lattice, and gazed
across the street through my leaves and my blossoms at my mistress.
Lili knew nothing of this watch which he kept on her; she had put up a
little blind of white network, and she fancied that it kept out every
eye when it was up; and often she took even that away, because she had
not the heart to deprive me of the few faint breezes which the sultry
weather gave us.
She never saw him in his dark hole in the old gable there, and I never
betrayed him--not I. Roses have been the flowers of silence ever since
the world began. Are we not the flowers of love?
“Who is he?” I asked of my gossip the vine. The vine had lived fifty
years in the street, and knew the stories and sorrows of all the human
bees in the hive.
“He is called René Claude,” said the vine. “He is a man of genius. He
is very poor.”
“You use synonyms,” murmured the old balsam, who heard.
“He is an artist,” the vine continued. “He is young. He comes from
the south. His people are guides in the Pyrenees. He is a dreamer of
dreams. He has taught himself many things. He has eloquence too. There
is a little club at the back of the house which I climb over. I throw a
tendril or two in at the crevices and listen. The shutters are closed.
It is forbidden by law for men to meet so. There René speaks by the
hour, superbly. Such a rush of words, such a glance, such a voice,
like the roll of musketry in anger, like the sigh of music in sadness!
Though I am old, it makes the little sap there is left in me thrill
and grow warm. He paints beautiful things too; so the two swallows say
who build under his eaves; but I suppose it is not of much use: no one
believes in him, and he almost starves. He is young yet, and feels the
strength in him, and still strives to do great things for the world
that does not care a jot whether he lives or dies. He will go on so a
little longer. Then he will end like me. I used to try and bring forth
the best grapes I could, though they had shut me away from any sun
to ripen them and any dews to cleanse the dust from them. But no one
cared. No one gave me a drop of water to still my thirst, nor pushed
away a brick to give me a ray more of light. So I ceased to try and
produce for their good; and I only took just so much trouble as would
keep life in me myself. It will be the same with this man.”
I, being young and a rose, the flower loved of the poets, thought the
vine was a cynic, as many of you human creatures grow to be in the
years of your age when the leaves of your life fall sere. I watched
René long and often. He was handsome, he suffered much; and when the
night was far spent he would come to his hole in the gable and gaze
with tender, dreaming eyes past my pale foliage to the face of Lili. I
grew to care for him, and I disbelieved the prophecy of the vine; and I
promised myself that one summer or another, near or far, the swallows,
when they came from the tawny African world to build in the eaves of
the city, would find their old friend flown and living no more in a
garret, but in some art-palace where men knew his fame.
So I dreamed--I, a little white rose, exiled in the passage of a city,
seeing the pale moonlight reflected on the gray walls and the dark
windows, and trying to cheat myself by a thousand fancies into the
faith that I once more blossomed in the old, sweet, leafy garden-ways
in Provence.
One night--the hottest night of the year--Lili came to my side by the
open lattice. It was very late; her work was done for the night. She
stood a moment, with her lips rested softly on me, looking down on the
pavement that glistened like silver in the sleeping rays of the moon.
[Illustration]
For the first time she saw the painter René watching her from his niche
in the gable, with eyes that glowed and yet were dim.
I think women foresee with certain prescience when they will be loved.
She drew the lattice quickly to, and blew the lamp out: she kissed me
in the darkness. Because her heart was glad or sorry? Both, perhaps.
Love makes one selfish. For the first time she left my lattice closed
all through the oppressive hours until daybreak.
“Whenever a woman sees anything out of her window that makes her eager
to look again, she always shuts the shutter. Why, I wonder?” said the
balsam to me.
“That she may peep unsuspected through a chink,” said the vine round
the corner, who could overhear.
It was profane of the vine, and in regard to Lili untrue. She did not
know very well, I dare say, why she withdrew herself on that sudden
impulse, as the pimpernel shuts itself up at the touch of a raindrop.
But she did not stay to look through a crevice; she went straight to
her little narrow bed, and told her beads and prayed, and slept till
the cock crew in a stable near and the summer daybreak came.
She might have been in a chamber all mirror and velvet and azure and
gold in any one of the ten thousand places of pleasure, and been
leaning over gilded balconies under the lime leaves, tossing up little
paper balloons in the air for gay wagers of love and wine and jewels.
Pleasure had asked her more than once to come down from her attic and
go with its crowds; for she was fair of feature and lithe of limb,
though only a work-girl of Paris. And she would not, but slept here
under the eaves, as the swallows did.
“We have not seen enough, little rose, you and I,” she would say to me
with a smile and a sigh. “But it is better to be a little pale, and
live a little in the dark, and be a little cramped in a garret window,
than to live grand in the sun for a moment, and the next to be tossed
away in a gutter. And one can be so happy anyhow--almost anyhow!--when
one is young. If I could only see a very little piece more of the sky,
and get every Sunday out to the dear woods, and live one floor lower,
so that the winters were not quite so cold and the summers not quite
so hot, and find a little more time to go to mass in the cathedral,
and be able to buy a pretty blue-and-white home of porcelain for you, I
should ask nothing more of the blessed Mary--nothing more upon earth.”
She had had the same simple bead-roll of innocent wishes ever since
the first hour that she had raised me from the dust of the street; and
it would, I doubt not, have remained her only one all the years of her
life, till she should have glided down into a serene and cheerful old
age of poverty and labor under that very same roof, without the blessed
Mary ever deigning to harken or answer. Would have done so if the
painter René could have seen the stars, and so had not been driven to
look instead at the glow-worm through my leaves.
But after that night on which she shut to the lattice so suddenly, I
think the bead-roll lengthened--lengthened, though for some time the
addition to it was written on her heart in a mystical language which
she did not try to translate even to herself--I suppose fearing its
meaning.
René made approaches to his neighbor’s friendship soon after that
night. He was but an art student, the son of a poor mountaineer, and
with scarce a thing he could call his own except an easel of deal,
a few plaster casts, and a bed of straw. She was but a working-girl,
born of Breton peasants, and owning as her sole treasures two silver
ear-rings and a white rose.
But for all that, no courtship could have been more reverential on the
one side or fuller of modest grace on the other if the scene of it had
been a palace of princes or a château of the nobles.
He spoke very little.
The vine had said that at the club round the corner he was very
eloquent, with all the impassioned and fierce eloquence common to
men of the south. But with Lili he was almost mute. The vine, who
knew human nature well--as vines always do, since their juices unlock
the secret thoughts of men and bring to daylight their darkest
passions--the vine said that such silence in one by nature eloquent
showed the force of his love and its delicacy.
This may be so: I hardly know. My lover the wind, when he is amorous,
is loud; but then it is true his loves are not often very constant.
René chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He brought her little lovely
wild flowers, for which he ransacked the woods of St. Germains and
Meudon. He carried the billets of her firewood up the seven long,
twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for her with the wicked
old porteress at the door downstairs. He played to her in the gray of
the evening on a quaint, simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the
sad, wild, touching airs of his own southern mountains--played at his
open window while the lamps burned through the dusk, till the people
listened at their doors and casements and gathered in groups in the
passage below, and said to one another, “How clever he is!--and he
starves.”
He did starve very often, or at least he had to teach himself to keep
down hunger with a morsel of black chaff-bread and a stray roll of
tobacco. And yet I could see that he had become happy.
Lili never asked him within her door. All the words they exchanged were
from their open lattices, with the space of the roadway between them.
I heard every syllable they spoke, and they were on the one side most
innocent and on the other most reverential. Ay, though you may not
believe it--you who know the people of Paris from the travesties of
theatres and the slanders of salons.
And all this time secretly he worked on at her portrait. He worked out
of my sight and hers, in the inner part of his garret, but the swallows
saw and told me. There are never any secrets between birds and flowers.
We used to live in Paradise together, and we love one another as exiles
do; and we hold in our cups the raindrops to slake the thirst of the
birds, and the birds in return bring to us from many lands and over
many waters tidings of those lost ones who have been torn from us to
strike the roots of our race in far-off soils and under distant suns.
Late in the summer of the year, one wonderful fête-day, Lili did for
once get out to the woods, the old kindly green woods of Vincennes.
A neighbor on a lower floor, a woman who made poor, scentless,
senseless, miserable imitations of all my race in paper, sat with the
old bedridden grandmother while Lili took her holiday--so rare in her
life, though she was one of the motes in the bright champagne of the
dancing air of Paris. I missed her sorely on each of those few sparse
days of her absence, but for her I rejoiced.
“_Je reste: tu ’t’en vas_,” says the rose to the butterfly in the
poem; and I said so in my thoughts to her.
She went to the broad level grass, to the golden fields of the
sunshine, to the sound of the bees murmuring over the wild purple
thyme, to the sight of the great snowy clouds slowly sailing over the
sweet blue freedom of heaven--to all the things of my birthright and my
deathless remembrance--all that no woman can love as a rose can love
them.
But I was not jealous; nay, not though she had cramped me in a little
earth-bound cell of clay. I envied wistfully indeed, as I envied the
swallows their wings which cleft the air, asking no man’s leave for
their liberty. But I would not have maimed a swallow’s pinion had I had
the power, and I would not have abridged an hour of Lili’s freedom.
Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all
lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasury of fragrance, at the
feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too
abundant sacrifice, you cry, “A yellow, faded thing!--to the dust-hole
with it!” and root us up violently and fling us to rot with the refuse
and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of beauty made
sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odors of a lost
paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do you deal with your
human wonder-flower of genius.
Lili went for her day in the green midsummer world--she and a little
blithe, happy-hearted group of young work-people--and I stayed in the
garret window, hot and thirsty, and drooping and pale, choked by the
dust that drifted up from the pavement, and hearing little all day long
save the quarrels of the sparrows and the whir of the engine wheels in
a baking-house close at hand.
For it was some great day or other, when all Paris was out _en fête_,
and every one was away from his or her home, except such people as the
old bedridden woman and the cripple who watched her. So, at least,
the white roof-pigeons told me, who flew where they listed, and saw
the whole splendid city beneath them--saw all its glistening of arms
and its sheen of palace roofs, all its gilded domes and its white,
wide squares, all its crowds, many-hued as a field of tulips, and its
flashing eagles golden as the sun.
When I had been alone two hours, and whilst the old building was silent
and empty, there came across the street from his own dwelling-place the
artist René, with a parcel beneath his arm.
He came up the stairs with a light, noiseless step, and pushed open the
door of our attic. He paused on the threshold a moment, with the sort
of reverent, hushed look on his face that I had seen on the faces of
one or two swarthy, bearded, scarred soldiers as they paused before the
picinas at the door of the little chapel which stood in my sight on the
other side of our street.
Then he entered, placed that which he carried on a wooden chair
fronting the light, uncovered it, and went quietly out again, without
the women in the inner closet hearing him.
What he had brought was the canvas I had seen grow under his hand, the
painting of me and the lamp and Lili. I do not doubt how he had done
it; it was surely the little attic window, homely and true in likeness,
and yet he had glorified us all, and so framed in my leaves and my
white flowers, the low oil flame and the fair head of my mistress, that
there was that in the little picture which made me tremble and yet be
glad. On a slender slip of paper attached to it there was written, “_Il
n’y a pas de nuit sans étoile._”
Of him I saw no more. The picture kept me silent company all the day.
At evening Lili came. It was late. She brought with her a sweet, cool
perfume of dewy mosses and fresh leaves and strawberry plants--sweet as
honey. She came in with a dark, dreamy brilliance in her eyes and long
coils of foliage in her hands.
She brought to the canary chickweed and a leaf of lettuce. She kissed
me and laid wet mosses on my parching roots, and fanned me with the
breath of her fresh lips. She took to the old women within a huge
cabbage leaf full of cherries, having, I doubt not, gone herself
without in order to bring the ruddy fruit to them.
She had been happy, but she was very quiet. To those who love the
country as she and I did, and, thus loving it, have to dwell in cities,
there is as much of pain, perhaps, as of pleasure in a fleeting glimpse
of the lost heaven.
She was tired, and sat for a while, and did not see the painting, for
it was dusk. She only saw it when she rose and turned to light the
lamp; then, with a little shrill cry, she fell on her knees before it
in her wonder and her awe, and laughed and sobbed a little, and then
was still again, looking at this likeness of herself.
[Illustration]
The written words took her long to spell out, for she could scarcely
read, but when she had mastered them, her head sank on her breast with
a flush and a smile, like the glow of the dawn over Provence, I thought.
She knew whence it came, no doubt, though there were many artists and
students of art in that street.
But then there was only one who had watched her night after night as
men watched the stars of old to read their fates in the heavens.
Lili was only a young _ouvrière_, she was only a girl of the people:
she had quick emotions and innocent impulses; she had led her life
straightly because it was her nature, as it is of the lilies--her
namesakes, my cousins--to grow straight to the light, pure and
spotless. But she was of the populace; she was frank, fearless, and
strong, despite all her dreams. She was glad, and she sought not to
hide it. With a gracious impulse of gratitude she turned to the lattice
and leaned past me, and looked for my neighbor.
He was there in the gloom; he strove not to be seen, but a stray ray
from a lamp at the vintner’s gleamed on his handsome dark face, lean
and pallid and yearning and sad, but full of force and of soul like
a head of Rembrandt’s. Lili stretched her hands to him with a noble,
candid gesture and a sweet, tremulous laugh: “What you have given
me!--it is you?--it _is_ you?”
“Mademoiselle forgives?” he murmured, leaning as far out as the gable
would permit. The street was still deserted, and very quiet. The
theatres were all open to the people that night free, and bursts of
music from many quarters rolled in through the sultry darkness.
Lili colored over all her fair, pale face, even as I have seen my
sisters’ white breasts glow to a wondrous, wavering warmth as the sun
of the west kissed them. She drew her breath with a quick sigh. She
did not answer him in words, but with a sudden movement of exquisite
eloquence she broke from me my fairest and my last-born blossom and
threw it from her lattice into his.
Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice with a swift, trembling
hand, and left the chamber dark, and fled to the little sleeping-closet
where her crucifix and her mother’s rosary hung together above her bed.
As for me, I was left bereaved and bleeding. The dew which waters
the growth of your human love is usually the tears or blood of some
martyred life.
I loved Lili.
I prayed, as my torn stem quivered and my fairest begotten sank to her
death in the night and the silence, that I might be the first and the
last to suffer from the human love born that night.
I, a rose--Love’s flower.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PART SECOND.
Now, before that summer was gone, these two were betrothed to one
another, and my little fair dead daughter, all faded and scentless
though her half-opened leaves were, remained always on René’s heart as
a tender and treasured relic.
They were betrothed, I say--not wedded, for they were so terribly poor.
Many a day he, I think, had not so much as a crust to eat; and there
passed many weeks when the works on his canvas stood unfinished because
he had not wherewithal to buy the oils and the colors to finish them.
René was frightfully poor, indeed; but then, being an artist and a
poet, and the lover of a fair and noble woman, and a dreamer of dreams,
and a man God-gifted, he was no longer wretched. For the life of a
painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves truly, and has
a genius in him stronger than all calamity, and hears a voice in which
he believes say always in his ear: “Fear nothing. Men must believe as
I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile we can wait!” And a painter in
Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can have so much that
is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily pursuits: the
long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the “_réalité de
l’idéal_” around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet, studious
hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone survives;
the trance--half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire and
despair--before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the streets
so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of green
leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the
doors; the glow of color in market-place and peopled square; the quaint
gray piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which
some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green, silent
woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the
forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain;--all
these are his. With these--and youth--who shall dare say he is not
rich--ay, though his board be empty and his cup be dry?
I had not loved Paris--I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay
pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to
love it, hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness
that Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which
could have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also
City of the Poor? for that city, like herself, has remembered the
poor in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest,
the treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her
gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her
divine ideals.
O world! when you let Paris die you will let your last youth die with
her! Your rich will mourn a paradise deserted, but your poor will have
need to weep with tears of blood for the ruin of the sole Eden whose
sunlight sought them in their shadow, whose music found them in their
loneliness, whose glad green ways were open to their tired feet, whose
radiance smiled the sorrow from their aching eyes, and in whose wildest
errors and whose vainest dreams their woes and needs were unforgotten.
Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which grew into being in an attic,
had a tender grace of its own; and I watched it with tenderness, and it
seemed to me fresh as the dews of the morning in the midst of the hot,
stifling world.
They could not marry: he had nothing but famine for his wedding-gift,
and all the little that she made was taken for the food and wine of
the bedridden old grandam in that religious execution of a filial duty
which is so habitual in the French family-life that no one dreams
counting it as a virtue.
But they spent their leisure time together: they passed their rare
holiday hours in each other’s society in the woods which they both
loved or in the public galleries of art; and when the autumn came on
apace, and they could no longer sit at their open casements, he still
watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a pilgrim the light of a shrine,
and she, ere she went to her rest, would push ajar the closed shutter
and put her pretty fair head into the darkling night, and waft him a
gentle good-night, and then go and kneel down by her bed and pray for
him and his future before the cross which had been her dead mother’s.
On that bright summer a hard winter followed. The poor suffered
very much; and I in the closed lattice knew scarcely which was the
worse--the icy, shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or the
close, noxious suffocation of the stove.
I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life during that
bitter cold weather, when the panes of the lattice were all blocked
from week’s end to week’s end with the solid, silvery foliage of the
frost.