FLOWER OF LIGHT
When they passed through Morne Rouge the last rays of sunset were
flaming up the streets of St. Pierre and the light of the moon in her
first quarter was beginning to flood the world. They had still some
miles to go and now their shadow lay before them, dimly sketched on
the road by the strengthening moonlight. At the approach of night the
air had become filled with sound. The woods were beginning to awake.
The _cabritt bois_, the great beetles that boom amidst the tamarinds,
the thousand insects of the night were tuning up, the fireflies were
drifting in clouds above the grenadilla blossoms and, now, as though a
door had been suddenly shut, night filled the world and the stars the
sky. When they reached the turn of the road leading down to St. Pierre
Gaspard paused.
Beneath them lay the city sprayed with lights, the bay touched with
starlight, and beyond the shadow of the mountains the sea in the light
of the moon.
“Tell me,” said he, “I must meet you again to-morrow—where shall I
meet you, and when?”
She stood for a moment without answering. To-morrow she would have to
go to Calabasse far away towards Pelée and beyond Morne Rouge. The
eternal labour to which Fate had condemned her gave little time for
lovers’ meetings. Not for a moment did she think of breaking with her
work and taking a holiday; it had become a part of her life; to cease
working, to give up a day just for her own pleasure never occurred to
her.
“Here,” said she, at last, “an hour before sunset. I will then have
returned from Calabasse.”
“You will surely be here?”
“Ah!”
The word was less a word than a sigh.
Surely be there?—nothing but death would stop her from being there,
mornes, and mountains, endless roads to be travelled by her little
feet, heat of day, or storm, nothing overcomable by human heart and
will could stop her from being there, and she said it all in that sigh
which was half a word.
He took her hand and held it to his lips for a moment. It was their
first kiss. Then side by side they began to descend the steep way to
the city. It was late for St. Pierre where people went to bed shortly
after sundown, the moon was just lifting above the mountains and the
sound of the sea came up from the bay, breathing through the empty
streets and mixing with the rippling and tinkling of the fountains and
water courses.
The Street of the Precipice was filled with moonlight. The old street,
to-night, was Romance itself made visible. The heavy-shuttered houses,
the coigns of shadow, the causeway of moonlight leading the eye
downward to the ghost of a silver sea.
At the entrance to the street she turned and gave him her hand. She did
not wish him to come further, Man’m Charles would be sitting up to let
her in. She had never been so late before and though she felt no qualms
at all at the cause of her lateness she did not wish her aunt to hear
her saying good-bye to Gaspard, that would mean explanations. All that
day, its blueness, its fragrance, its mystery; the sunlight, and the
hills, the distant ocean, the twilight in which her soul had met and
touched the soul that had come to find her from far across the sea, all
that seemed like some mysterious flower coloured with the colours of
earth but immortal as the light of the stars.
Finotte, Florine, Lys, wandering in the fields of youth had plucked
roses, lilies, flowers of a moment. She wandering alone, had found this
flower of light, deathless, and indestructible. Let the world pass, let
the man she loved betray her, let come what might, her flower would
never fade.
He watched her as she passed away down the Street of the Precipice,
she, whose grace Theocritus might have sung in the warmth of some
Sicilian night, and as he watched her, just for a moment, there came
upon him, untutored as he was, a breath from long ago. It was as though
doors had been flung open to all the songs, the perfumes, and the
starlight of all the nights of the past, nights by the Sicilian sea
before Taormina had become a desolation, love songs blown across the
roses, roses casting their fragrance to the sea and stars.
He saw the little figure, now, away down the street pausing before a
house on the right hand side, then it vanished, leaving the Street of
the Precipice deserted. He turned homewards, walking slowly; it was
still early as Europeans reckon earliness, yet St. Pierre was already
asleep. In a French town at this hour the cafés would be still blazing,
the streets filled, theatres not yet empty; but St. Pierre, like a
child, went to sleep with the dark; hushed by the murmur of the sea
below and the woods above, and lit by the fireflies and the stars.