occurred to him, and, lo! she was his! Livette, the daughter of the
intendant of the Chateau d'Avignon! she was his fiancee, his
betrothed, his future wife!
He seemed to himself the heir to a throne. In face of the mere thought
of his future, he felt something like the embarrassment a beggar feels
on the threshold of a palace, before the carpets over which he must
pass to enter, with shoes heavy with mud.
She had in his eyes something of the sanctity of the blessed Madonna,
carved from wood, painted blue and gold, and overladen with pearls and
flowers, that he used to see when a child in the church of
Saint-Trophime at Arles.
So it was that he felt a secret amazement at finding himself beloved.
It did not seem to him that it could really be true; and as he must
needs be convinced of the fact every time he spoke to her, his love
constantly appealed to him with all the force of novelty.
He was a little embarrassed, too, in her presence, could not find his
words, contented himself with smiling at her, with yielding submission
to her like a child, with running to fetch this or that for her,
divining her desires from her glance; mistaking now and then, but
rarely; feeling the same pleasure in being the maiden's footman that
is felt by the misshapen court dwarf in love with the king's fair
daughter.
His sobriquet of _The King_ seemed to him a mockery beside her. She
embarrassed him; in her presence he was meek and lowly.
He was surprised, indignant even, in his heart, at the familiar tone
assumed by others with Livette. It seemed strange to him that her
companions should treat her as an equal; that her father and her
grandmother should not have the same respect and consideration for his
fiancee that he himself had.
Frequently, when the grandmother cried to Livette: "Do this or that;
run! be quick!" he would be angry, and would long to say to her: "Why
do you order her about? She was not made to obey! You're a bad
grandmother! Don't you see that she is too delicate and pretty for
such tasks?"
But this was a feeling kept hidden in his heart; he would not have
dared to avow it, for women are made, according to our ancestors, to
be the slaves of man. So he said no word of what he felt. He even
deemed himself a little ridiculous to feel it. He contented himself by
doing in a twinkling, in Livette's stead, the thing she was bidden to
do, if it was something within his power.
Ah! but if any man had ventured to indulge in any ill-sounding
pleasantry with Livette, to take any liberty with her--oh! then, be
sure that he would without reflection have felled him on the spot with
his stout fist!
Why, if any one, man or woman, in the crowd on a fete-day, happened to
make a coarse remark in her hearing,--one of the sort that he himself
knew how to make with great effect upon occasion,--he would be
overcome with rage against that person; it seemed to him that every
one should take notice of Livette's presence, should feel that she was
near, and understand that, before her, they should show some
self-respect.
All this he would have been incapable of explaining, but he felt it
all, confusedly and vaguely, in his heart.
Livette, for her part, was keenly conscious of the drover's adoration.
She revelled in it, without unduly seeming to do so. She saw very
plainly that she had, without effort, tamed a wild beast. She laughed
sometimes, as she looked at him--a frank, ringing laugh, in which
there was, however, a touch of the triumph of the mysterious feminine
witchery, the marvellous invention of nature, which decrees that the
strong man shall be vanquished, rolled in the dust, at the pleasure of
fascinating weakness. This miracle, performed by life, by nature, by
love, she believed to be her own work,--hers, Livette's,--and the
little woman was a bit swollen with pride! More than frequently she
would say to herself: "What have I done? I don't deserve this good
fortune; no, indeed, I don't deserve it!" She saw very clearly that,
in his eyes, she was a being apart: that he did not treat her by any
means as everybody else did: and, greatly astonished as she was, she
was proud of it.
Thereupon, wondering in her sincere heart what she had "more" or
better than another, and finding no answer to the question, it came
about that she deemed her lover a little, just a very little, stupid
to be so dominated by her, and he so strong! And then she would
prettily make fun of him and laugh aloud at him, saying:
"Ah! great booby!"
So it was that the whole essence of Woman, profound, seductive,
existed in this simple, obscure peasant-girl, who could have told
nothing as to her own character.
In time, too, she came to look upon herself as pretty, beautiful, the
prettiest, the loveliest of all, and to admire her own charms. When
such thoughts came to her, and if the truth must be known, none were
more frequent,--ah! then she felt her pride! And she no longer deemed
her lover stupid in the least degree; on the contrary, he seemed to
her very fortunate, too fortunate! and then it was he who hardly
deserved her! At such times, she received his attentions, his
humility, with the air of a princess accustomed to homage.
Then, too, she would wonder why all the others did not do for her what
he did? And, thereupon, she would conceive a sort of gratitude for
him. Such a constant revolution in our hearts of impressions, often
irreconcilable and ever changing, around a fixed idea, is love.--Yes,
in very truth he deserved to be loved simply because he had known
enough to appreciate her! to choose her! The other young men were the
fools, one and all!
Warm was his welcome if he arrived at the farm when that thought was
in her mind. She would give the little cry of a happy bird, and run
to meet her lover.
"Good-morning, Monsieur Jacques!"
"Good-morning, Demoiselle Livette!"
They would shake hands.
"Will you come to the Rhone?"
"With all my heart!"
And often they would go and sit together beside the Rhone, beneath the
great hawthorn--a tree more than a hundred years old and known to
everybody. The hawthorn, like the aspen and the birch, is a familiar
Camarguese tree.
Sometimes, on the way, she would hold out to him a flexible green
twig, broken from a poplar by the roadside, and they would walk along,
united and kept apart at the same time by the short branch, followed
by a swarm of gnats with their tiny iris-hued wings.
She was very fond of this sport of making him walk thus, not too near,
not too far away, holding him without touching him, drawing him nearer
or keeping him at a distance, as her fancy dictated, making of the
leafy wand a whip if he showed signs of rebellion.
She had the feeling that thus she was indeed his mistress, remembering
how she used sometimes to make her horse Blanchet follow her docilely
in the same way by holding out to him a small wisp of flowering
oats;--how she had sometimes, by the same means, led back behind her,
quiet as an ox, a vicious bull that had escaped, wounded, from the
arena, and that she had encountered by the roadside, in a thicket of
thorn-broom, bathing his foaming tongue in the streams of blood that
were flowing from his nostrils.
Arrived at the bank of the Rhone, beneath the great hawthorn with the
gnarled black trunk and smooth white branches, that stretches its
abundant rustling foliage well out over the stream, the lovers would
sit down, side by side, upon the roots protruding from the ground or
upon a bundle of cut reeds.
And they would watch the water flow. The earthy, yellowish water, with
its whirling masses of foam, rushing toward the sea.
They would sit and gaze.
They would not speak. They would live on in silence, listening to the
plashing of the Rhone, the tiny wavelets that came rippling in
obliquely to the bank, to loiter there among the feet of countless
reeds and poplars, while the main current in the centre of the stream
flowed swiftly, hurriedly along, as if in haste to reach the sea, and
there be swallowed up.--There they would sit and dream, not speaking.
They felt that they were living the same life as everything about
them. From time to time, a kingfisher, sky-blue and reddish-brown,
would pass before them, light on a low branch, gazing sidewise at the
water with his beak ready to strike, then, suddenly, fly off across
the Rhone. And, with the sky-blue bird, their thoughts would cross
the river, there to light again upon a branch, bent like a bow, whose
slender point trailed in the water, vibrating in the current, and
surrounded with a mass of foam, dead leaves, and twigs. And suddenly
the bird, like a sorcerer, had disappeared.
"How pretty!" Livette would sometimes say.
And that was all.
He would make no reply. He knew not what to say to her. He was too
happy. He would not call the king his cousin!
In the evening twilight, many little rabbits, young in that month of
May, would run out from the park, through the wild hedges, almost
invisible in their gray coats, and play in the shadow at the foot of
the bushes, their presence betrayed by the rustling of a tuft of grass
or a low-hanging, horizontal branch that barred their path.
To heighten the enjoyment of the lovers, there was the nightingale's
song, at the rising of the moon. Listen to it: 'tis always lovely in
the darkness, is the nightingale's song. It begins with three
distinct, long-drawn-out cries; you would say it was a signal, a
preconcerted call; it enjoins attention. Then the modulations
hesitatingly arise. You would say that it is timid, that it fears its
prayer will not be granted. But soon it takes courage, self-assurance
comes, and the song bursts forth and soars and fills the air with its
melodious uproar. 'Tis love, 'tis youth and love that can no longer
be restrained, that nothing stays, that claim their rights in
life.--His song is done.
His song is done, but still the lovers listen on and on to the bird's
song, echoed in the dark recesses of their own hearts.
At last, it would be time to return. They would rise and walk back
toward the farm, not far away.
The grandmother would be calling from the doorway:
"Livette! Livette!"
Her voice would reach their ears, with a plaintive, caressing accent,
tinged with sadness, from the edge of the vast expanse that rose in
the darkness toward the stars, toward life and love,--a long,
melancholy call. The voice at night upon the moor fills the air and
rises tranquilly, disturbed by no echo, sad to be alone in a too great
solitude.
Around the lovers as they returned to the farm, in the orchards, in
the park, as the darkness increased, the deafening clamor of the frogs
would soon be heard, a mighty noise, the sum total of a multitude of
feeble sounds, a frightful din, composed of many minor croakings of
unequal strength, which, massed together, drowning one another, mount
at last into a rhythmic tumult like the ceaseless roaring of a
cataract.
And amid this formidable everlasting clamor, made by the voices of
myriads of amorous little frogs, accentuated by the cry of a curlew,
or a heron on the watch, and accompanied by the humming of the two
Rhones and the plashing of the sea--the lovers, both deeply moved,
heard nothing save the calm beating of their hearts.
As time went on, their love waxed greater, increased by the memory of
all these hours lived together.
Renaud was no longer simple Renaud in Livette's eyes, but the being by
whom she knew what life was, through whom came to her that
overwhelming consciousness of everything, of the horizons of land and
sea, that sentiment of _being_, that longing for the future, for
growth, that inflow of vague hopes that comes of love and gives a zest
to life.
And now, if any one had sought to wrest Jacques from Livette, she
would have died of it, and he who should try to wrest Livette from
Jacques would have died of it--he would, my friends, even more
certainly.
It is a good and excellent thing that love should be always busied in
making the world younger--and the nightingale, like the frogs, is
never weary of repeating it.
VI
RAMPAL
Rampal, who had borrowed Jacques Renaud's horse, had not returned.
Renaud now rode no other horse than Blanchet.
Rampal was a low rascal, gambler, hanger-on of wine-shops, well-known
at Arles in all the vile haunts scattered along the Rhone.
Dismissed by several masters, a drover without a drove, he passed his
life in these days, riding from town to town, from Aigues-Mortes to
Nimes, from Nimes to Arles, from Arles to Martigues, and in each of
these towns plied some doubtful trade, cheated a little at cards,
winning the means of living a week without doing anything, and
returning, for that week, to the Camargue he loved, where there were,
in two or three farm-houses, women who smiled upon his mysterious,
piratical existence.
For that existence, a horse was essential. Rampal, serving as a drover
on foot, had, in the first place, stolen a horse from a _manade_, but
he broke his tether the second night, left his master, swam the
Rhone, and rejoined his fellows. Then it was that the rascal, having,
in truth, important business on hand, had said to Renaud:
"I have to go to Saintes, I'll take your horse, Cabri."
"Take my horse," Renaud replied.
It did not occur to him that Rampal would not return. Jacques relied
so surely upon his own reputation for strength and courage that he did
not think that any one would venture to arouse his wrath.
And then he had a sort of pity for Rampal, mingled with a little
admiration. He was a bold horseman, was Rampal, and, except for women
and cards, he would have been, with Renaud, or just after him, a king
of the drovers! So that, if Rampal aroused Renaud's compassion, Renaud
aroused Rampal's envy.
However, the vagaries of this _marrias_, this good-for-nothing knave,
were the pranks of a free man. Neither married nor betrothed,
fatherless and motherless, with no one to support or assist, no one
whom he must please, he had a perfect right to live as he pleased! At
least, that is what most people thought.
Moreover, Renaud, although an honest man, had the tastes of a
vagabond. Before his heart was filled with his strange affection for
Livette, by which he felt as if he were bound hand and foot, he had,
in truth, borne a part with Rampal in many curious adventures.
More than once they had galloped along side by side toward the open
moor, each having _en croupe_ a laughing damsel, who, after the close
of a bull-fight at Aigues-Mortes or Arles, had consented to accompany
them for a night.
But on such occasions Renaud had always dealt frankly, never promising
marriage nor any other thing, but simply giving the fair one a
present, a souvenir, a brass ring, or a silk handkerchief--a _fichu_
to pleat after the Arlesian fashion, or a broad velvet ribbon for a
head-dress; while Rampal was treacherous, promised much and did
nothing,--in short, was nothing but _fena_, a good-for-nothing.
So Rampal had borrowed Renaud's horse with the intention of bringing
him back the same evening; but that evening he had heard of a fete at
Martigues and had ridden away thither without worrying about Renaud.
"He'll take a horse out of his _manade_," he said to himself.
Now, Audiffret, Livette's father, had insisted that Renaud should take
Blanchet.
"Take Blanchet," he said. "I don't like to have our girl ride him.
He's a fine horse, but bad-tempered at times. Finish breaking him for
us. I want him to run in the races at Beziers this year. Take him."
Happy to have Blanchet in the hands of "her dear," for so she already
called Renaud in her heart, Livette, who was fond of Blanchet, simply
said:
"Take good care of him."
That was more than six months before.
Rampal, who had caused considerable gossip meanwhile, and of whom
Renaud had heard more than once, had not brought back the horse.
Renaud did not lose his patience. Several times, being informed that
Rampal was in this or that place, he had tried to find him, but had
not succeeded.
"I shall catch him some day!" said Renaud. "He loses nothing by
waiting."
He hoped that the fete at Saintes-Maries would bring the rascal back.
"He will come back with the thieving gipsies!" he said; and he was not
mistaken.
Not for an empire would Rampal have missed making the pilgrimage to
Saintes-Maries. The rascal would have thought himself everlastingly
damned. It had been his habit from childhood to come and ask
forgiveness of his sins from the two Marys and Sara the bondwoman, at
whom he did nothing but laugh in a boastful way, unable to satisfy
himself whether he believed in them or not.
This year, being affiliated with the gipsies in matters of
horse-trading (every one knows that the gipsies, men and
women,--_roms_ and _juwas_, as they say,--have a profound acquaintance
with everything connected with the horse), Rampal had been a fruitful
source of information to them.
By divers methods they had led him to talk about this and that, about
every one and everything. He had no idea himself that he had told so
many things. They had questioned him, sometimes directly, taking him
unawares; sometimes in a slow, roundabout way; when he was drunk, and
when he was asleep. And his replies had been pitilessly registered in
the gipsies' unfailing memory--the wherewithal to astonish all
Camargue.
Rampal had not even been questioned by the gipsy queen, who did not
trust his discretion; she learned the secrets of the province at
second-hand.
Once only had he spoken to her. It was one evening when the beggar
queen began to dance for her own amusement on the high-road, to the
music of her tambourine, which she hardly ever laid aside.
"You are beautiful!" he said to her.
"You are ugly!" she replied, quickly, in a contemptuous tone.
"Give me the ring on your finger," said Rampal, "and I'll give you
another."
She glanced with a gleaming eye at her fantastic ring of hammered
silver, then at the insolent Christian, and said:
"A sound cudgelling about your loins is what I will give you, dog, if
you don't leave me!"
And she spat fiercely at him as if in disgust.
Rampal, somewhat abashed, abandoned the game.
This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted them. You
would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from her eyes. It
penetrated your being, searched your heart, and you were powerless
against it. She fathomed your glance, but you could not fathom
hers--which, on the contrary, repelled you, turned you back like a
solid wall. And, at such moments, she would stand proudly erect, her
head thrown slightly back, her whole body poised, at once so sinuous
and so rigid, that she might have been compared to a horned viper
standing on his tail, fascinating his prey and preparing to spring.
"I can't explain, Jacques, how that woman frightened me," said Livette
to Renaud. "My blood is still running cold!--She threatened me! And
when that crown of thorns fell at my feet--Holy Mother!--I thought I
was going to faint!"
"If I meet her," Renaud replied, "she'll find she has some one to
settle with!"
"Let the heathen alone, Jacques! It isn't well to have aught to do
with the devil."
But the drover loved a fight, and he longed for nothing so much as to
fall in with Rampal and Zinzara, the gambler and the queen of the
cards; "a pair of gipsies, a pair of thieves," thought Renaud.
VII
THE MEETING
The gipsy queen was the first of the two he met.
Renaud, mounted on Blanchet, was riding along the beach toward
Saintes-Maries.
The sea was at his right; at his left, the desert. He was riding
through the sand, and from time to time the waves rolled up under his
horse's feet, surrounding with sportive foam the rosy hoofs rapidly
rising and falling.
Renaud was thinking of Livette.
He looked ahead and saw the tall, straight, battlemented walls of
Saintes-Maries, and wondered whether he would lead his little queen,
dressed in white, and crowned with flowers, to the altar there, or at
Saint-Trophime in Arles.
He looked at the sea and wondered if nothing would come to him from
that source; if his uncle, captain of a merchantman, who sailed on his
last voyage so many years ago, would not come into port some day with
a cargo of vague, marvellous things, a million in priceless stuffs and
precious stones? In the poor, ignorant fellow's imagination, the
thought of a fortune was a vision of legendary treasures, like those
discovered in caverns in the Arabian tales.
For an instant, he seemed to see it with his eyes, to see his vision
realized in the dazzling splendor of the boundless sea, that lay
glistening in the sunlight, with sharp, fitful flashes, like a mirror
broken into narrow, moving fragments of irregular shape. It was an
undulating sheet of diamonds and sapphires. The sun's rays, as he sank
lower and lower toward the horizon, assumed a ruddier hue as they fell
obliquely upon the fast-subsiding waves, and soon the water was like a
sheet of old burnished gold, moving slowly up and down; one would have
said it was a vast melted treasure beneath a polished vitreous
surface! At long intervals, a solitary wave greater than its fellows
fell with a dull roar upon the beach, and ever and anon a cloud passed
overhead; and in the mist flying from the gold-tipped wave, in the
slow-moving shadow of the cloud, the water seemed a deep, dark blue.
The sun sank lower, and broad bright red bands began to overshadow the
bands of ochre, amethyst, light green, pale blue, that rose one above
another on the horizon line. The changing sea was now like a cloak of
royal purple, with fringe of azure, gold, and silver.
On the desert side, the marshes likewise were changed to vast floors
carpeted with gorgeous drapery and rich embroidery. Everything was
ablaze with sparkles--sea, sand, and salt. At intervals, a red
flamingo rose from among the reeds, flew heavily along, seeming to
carry on his side a little of the ruddy hue of sky and sea,--then
lighted on the brink of the gleaming water.
The gulls were like white dream-birds in this enchanted country. They
sat in lines, like brooding doves, on the crests of the waves in the
offing, or on the hot sands, or on the surface of the ponds.
And, down in the northwest, Renaud was looking for the high, square
terrace of the Chateau d'Avignon, for Livette sometimes went up there
to see if she could not spy Blanchet and her dear Renaud's straight
spear somewhere in the plain.
Suddenly Renaud checked his horse and gazed fixedly at a black object
moving on the surface of the water, rising and falling with the motion
of the waves, some two hundred feet from shore.
He thought he could descry a woman's head; a head covered with
dripping black hair and surrounded by a copper circlet, from which
depended glistening Oriental medallions.
The gipsy was swimming, disporting herself in the waves, which, coming
from the deep sea, rose and fell slowly and at long intervals. She
glided through them like a conger-eel, happy in the sensation caused
by the gentle lapping of the salt water caressing her flesh. Her
movements were undulating, like those of the waves themselves; she
writhed and twisted like seaweed tossed about by the surf. Now and
then a heavier, higher wave would come upon her. She would turn and
face it, put her hands together in a point above her lowered head, as
divers do, plunge into the broad wave horizontally, and cleave it
through from front to rear.
From his horse, Renaud watched the dark head emerge on the other side
of the swelling wave, which, as it approached the shore, curled over
with whitening crest, broke upon the beach in snowy foam and spread
out over the sand, beneath and all about him, in shallow, transparent,
overlapping streams, all studded with sparks. He could not see the
swimmer's body distinctly. Its fleeting outlines could scarcely be
made out beneath the clear, transparent water, ere they were blotted
out again by the undulations and reflections.
Suddenly the swimmer turned toward the shore, apparently gained a
footing, and, raising one arm out of the water, motioned to Renaud to
be gone, shouting:
"Go your way!"