It seemed to him, as Livette uttered that reproach, that he saw the
gipsy again as he had seen her in the afternoon, standing before him,
near at hand, all naked and so brown! as if she were accustomed to
pass her days naked in the sun, and were tanned from head to foot by
his rays. And how lithe and sinewy the wild creature was! A genuine
animal, a little Arabian mare, of much finer breed than the Camargue
stock. Alas! for too long a time, through fidelity to his fiancee, he
had been as virtuous as a girl, and now the hot-blooded fellow's
continence was taking its revenge upon him, a cruel revenge, arousing
mad, amorous longings that were not for Livette. And so his very
respect for her--poor child!--turned against her!
"Jacques?" said Livette, in the hardly audible tone the sentiment of
love imparts to the lover's voice, a soft, veiled tone, heard by the
heart rather than by the ear.
Renaud did not hear her. He _saw_.--He saw the gipsy as plainly as if
she were there before him, even more plainly. In the darkness of the
night, her body, brown as before, seemed luminous, like an opaque
substance giving forth a pale light. Her naked figure, obscure and
bright at the same time, was standing motionless before his eyes--then
it moved--and he fancied that he saw the gipsy bathing in the
phosphorescent water peculiar to the summer months,--when swimmers
cause a cold, liquid light to dart hither and thither through the dark
water, following and marking the outlines of their forms, from which
it seems to radiate.
"Have I the fever?" he said to himself.
As if in answer to the unspoken question, Livette took his hand. She
felt it from wrist to finger-ends, to see if it were dry and hot.
"Yes," said she, "you must look out; father was right, you have a
touch of fever. Come up and find the medicine."
"Come on," said he, glad of the diversion.
"Come," she repeated, "but move softly: grandma has fallen asleep!"
The old lady was asleep, as she said. She was leaning against the
wall, perfectly motionless. The white handkerchief, tied in the
Arlesian fashion, instead of covering her _chignon_ only, enveloped
almost her whole head, allowing two tufts of coarse, white hair, all
in disorder, to protrude, like mist, on each side of her face.
She was asleep, her mouth partly open, a ray of light shining through
upon her teeth, which were still beautiful.
They left her there.
IX
THE PRAYER
Livette opened the farm-house door, which creaked loudly in the
resonant emptiness of the spacious stone staircase.
She lighted the lamp, which was hanging on a nail, and they went
up-stairs together, she absorbed by thoughts of him, and he of her,
but no longer in their accustomed condition of affectionate
embarrassment.
He held the iron lamp, hanging at the end of its hooked stick; and to
relieve his conscience, to do his duty as a lover, and perhaps in that
way to change the current of his thoughts, perhaps to set at rest the
amorous anxiety with which he was assailed,--to force himself to
return, heart and soul, to Livette, and, who knows?--so hard to fathom
is man with his background of devil!--perhaps, with her and unknown to
her, to satisfy to some extent the passion kindled by the other--for
all these reasons together, more inextricably mingled than the twigs
of the climbing rose-bushes, he said to himself: "I will kiss her!" He
had never done that thing,--except in the presence of the old
people,--but the Renaud of that evening was not the Renaud of other
days, in his feeling for Livette. The powerful leaven of his wild
nature was swelling his veins to bursting. In very truth, he had the
fever,--at all events, a species of fever. All his nerves were
overstrained; in his eyes, even the most indifferent objects wore an
unusual look. And in Livette he saw, in spite of himself, reproaching
himself bitterly therefor, things which ordinarily he refused to see.
And as, being always dressed in the Arlesian fashion, she wore the
_fichu_ of white muslin crossed upon her breast so low as to afford a
glimpse, beneath the gold chain and cross, of the white throat, above
the meeting of the stiff folds, laid neatly one upon another, his
passionate gaze fell upon that spot, amid the modest arrangement of
muslin, prettily called "the chapel."
In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high, and as far
away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and he wound his right
arm about Livette's waist as she placed her hand upon the iron rail.
At every step they climbed, he felt the play of the muscles of his
fiancee's youthful frame, imparting to the arm about her waist a
soothing languor that ran through his whole being,--and yet his heart
did not rejoice thereat; and he realized that, ordinarily, if the end
of the velvet ribbon in Livette's head-dress touched his face, it
caused a sweeter thrill of pleasure in his blood, and more than all
else, a pleasure which there was no mistaking. And, thereupon, he
grew vexed with himself as for a failure of duty, he was oppressed by
a presentiment of disaster, vague but inevitable. And she felt more
and more keenly the rebound of his emotions. She was conscious that
her peace of mind was endangered. Something certainly was against her.
The arm, which had sometimes been about her waist as now, no longer
seemed to be her lover's arm, but a mere ordinary man's. She suffered,
and did not understand. The look she saw in his eyes was a strange
look from him, without affection, without pity even. She knew him
well, honest Renaud, her promised husband, and yet she was afraid of
him as of a stranger!
All these thoughts passed very quickly through their minds, the more
quickly because they were simply conscious of them, and did not stop
to try to analyze them. The all-powerful human electricity, less known
than the other variety, was playing its game, impossible to follow, in
their hearts, with its vast net-work of currents and connections. In
these two creatures of instinct, the ever-recurring prodigy of love,
of natural affinity--of the sympathies and their opposite--was seen
once more, as mysterious, as marvellous, as profound as ever. So far
as nature is concerned, there are two beings: man and woman; there are
no subdivisions. At the basis of humanity, all life is the same, all
passion is the same. The student of the higher races labors
incessantly to perfect his reasoning and his powers of expression,
but there is more overflowing, complicated life in the heart of his
ignorant brother than in the heads of the philosophers, who, by dint
of self-analysis, have lost the faculty of emotion. They who deem
themselves most skilful in discovering the real man in themselves, do
not perceive that they pervert the secret impulses of their hearts by
keeping too close a watch upon them. The light of their miner's lamp
changes the psychological conditions, just as constant light would
modify the physiological condition of human beings and plants. And,
meanwhile, love and death repeat, in the eternal darkness of their
simple hearts, their unwitnessed miracles.
They had reached the landing on the first floor--as large as an
ordinary room. At the last step, Renaud, almost lifting Livette to the
landing, tried to draw her to him, but she was seized with an impulse
to resist, and he with a sudden impulse to resist himself; separately,
the two impulses would have had no effect; but combined, they exerted
sufficient force to place an obstacle between them, as if by mutual
consent. That force was the witchery at work.
As they did not exchange a word, their embarrassment increased.
Hastily, to escape the constraint each imposed upon the other, she ran
to the door at the right and entered. And he, well pleased to be able
to do or say something to bring them nearer together, called out:
"Wait for the light, Livette! I am coming."
But Livette had suddenly remembered the gipsy's threat. "It is fate,"
she said to herself, "I see it now!" And she felt herself grow pale.
Then she had an inspiration.
"Follow me, Renaud."
They passed through rooms where furniture of the time of the Empire
was sleeping beneath its covers, and the long hangings falling from
the ceiling in broad, stiff folds, and withered, as it were, by time;
rooms seldom visited by the master, but kept in order by Livette and
her grandmother.
At last, Renaud and Livette reached an apartment with bare,
whitewashed walls, once used as a chapel.
A wooden altar, entirely devoid of fittings and ornament, stood at one
end of the room. Before the white and gold door of the tabernacle the
sacred stone was missing, leaving a square hole in the wood-work of
the altar.
But Livette opened a broad door flush with the wall. It opened into a
closet in the wall. When the door was thrown wide open, they could
see, below a shelf about level with their heads, chasubles and stoles
hanging straight and stiff--with great crosses in heavy gold
embroidery--suns from which the dove came forth; and mystic triangles,
and _Agnus Deis_. Among all the others were vestments for use in
mourning ceremonies,--black, with bones and executioners' ladders,
hammers and nails, in heavy white embroidery; and--to Livette's
amazement--there, in the centre of a stole, on silk as black as night,
was worked a crown of thorns in silver, which, in the lamplight,
seemed to emit bright rays.
On the shelf, above all these priestly vestments--which were arranged
with the backs outward, hung in such fashion that you seemed to be
looking at the priests standing at the altar--on the shelf, between
the goblet and the pyx, shone the consecrated host, a radiant sun,
mounted upon a pedestal like a candelabrum; and in the centre of its
rays was a gleaming circle of plain glass, which also reflected, in
fantastic guise, the flame of the lamp.
"Kneel, Renaud!" said Livette. "Prayer is the cure for what is
happening to us. Kneel and let us pray!"
The drover obeyed. He understood that Livette's purpose was to
exorcise fate.
She prayed in silence fervently. He, marvelling, unwonted to the
attitude of prayer, and striving to keep himself in countenance,
looked from time to time at the lamp he held in his hand, raised it to
get a better view of the ecclesiastical treasures, and, diverted for
the moment, by constant effort, from the perplexity that weighed upon
his heart, he was the more wretched when his mind suddenly reverted to
Livette.
Thereupon he said to himself that she certainly had guessed the truth;
that there was, in fact, a spell upon him, and, in his heart, he
implored the merciful God of the Cross, the mystic triangle, the
symbolical bird and lamb, to come to his aid.
[Illustration: Chapter IX
_In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high,
and as far away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and
he wound his right arm about Livette's waist as she placed
her hand upon the iron rail._]
"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against
us!" Livette suddenly exclaimed, aloud, thinking of the gipsy.--"O
God," she added, "we promise Thee that on Saintes-Maries Day, which is
near at hand, we will each carry three tapers to their church, and
wait, until they are so far consumed, one after the other, in their
honor, that our finger-tips are burned!"
Then she rose--but before they left the room, they closed the
unpretentious double door upon the objects of a dead cult, left in the
darkness of abandonment--the goblet without wine, the pyx without
bread, and the consecrated host, whose polished metal case held naught
within.
X
THE TERRACE
He was well aware that he needed no fever medicine, and that his fever
did not come from the swamps.
She said no more about the drug, but as they stood on the landing and
he was preparing to descend, she said:
"Suppose we go out on the terrace?"
Livette wished to prolong the tete-a-tete, to ascertain if, after her
prayer, she would find _her_ Renaud in him once more.
He placed his lamp on the floor at the top of the staircase, and,
pushing open the door just above the last step, they both stood on the
terrace that overlooks the whole chateau.
A square terrace, and in the centre the great bell lay upon its side
in its iron cage--the great bell, three feet in diameter, that in the
old days called to work as well as to prayer, and when it rang the
Angelus caused the fever-haunted farm-laborers to fall upon their
knees on the brink of the miasmatic bogs.
Both of them, one after the other, mechanically struck the bell with
their foot, as it lay there on its side. It gave forth a short,
plaintive note, quickly stifled by contact with the flag-stones. It
was like the sigh of a mystery-haunted soul.
With hearts as sad as the bell, they leaned on the stone parapet in
presence of the night.
Livette and Renaud loved each other, but affection was no longer
enough for him. The sap of the spring-time, boiling in his veins in
lustful desire, gave birth, in Livette's heart, to sweet flowers of
reverie.
The swarming of the stars above their heads was beyond comprehension.
They were as many as the gadflies and frogs in the desert, or the
waves of the sea. They seemed to open and half close, like flowers in
a meadow, waved to and fro by a light, quickly-passing breath, like
eyelids making signs.
They seemed to have something to say, to move like lips speaking a
living language, telling of something of great moment that must be
known at once--but no sound coming from them reaches the ears of men,
for human hearing is not keen enough. Nor is the human sight keen
enough to see that the dust of the Milky-Way (pale as the pollen of
flowers) is also made of stars. Though men have seen it with a
different sight, afforded by man's inventive genius, that sight is
powerless to pierce farther and deeper--to learn all there is to know.
Moreover,--and Renaud himself had heard the story from the shepherds
who pass the winter in Camargue and Crau, and spend their nights in
summer counting the stars upon the summits of the Alps,--there are, in
space, beyond the skies visible to our eyes, fires alight so far away
from us, so far away that their light, now on its way toward our
earth, will not reach us for centuries to come. The men who follow us
centuries hence will see twinkling stars that even in our day were
lighted and making signs we could not see. And in those days ideas,
which are already kindled in men's minds, and are seen to-day by none
save those in whom their light is shed, will shine for all, and one of
them will be, for every mortal, the love and pity of the world.
Certain it is, that neither Renaud nor Livette could fathom those
infinite depths; but from the vast expanse of heaven, swarming with
tiny lights, a nameless emotion stole into their hearts, made up of
all their hopes to come.
Future worlds, lovelier than this of ours, were dreaming in them, with
them.
In them, too, because they were young and human, there was a share in
the future. In them, too, was the responsibility for future lives. In
them, too, lurked the mystery of generations to be born, for whom a
single couple, surviving the wreck of the demolished world, would be
enough to bestow upon them the desire to live and the power.
A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of
all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why
the great scholars, who figure like Barreme, know no more of life and
the heart than Livette and Renaud--who knew nothing at all.
They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to
love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the
same moment--but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing.
They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy,
that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose
doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that
creation may be assured by outbursts of passion, and the future of
mankind by the imperious need of pleasure.
What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong
alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate.
Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until
they have been slowly assimilated by the human mind to the matter of
which it is made.
They suffered, they longed for happiness--beneath that mystery-laden
spring sky. They awaited the coming of their joy, they summoned their
every hope, and they gazed at the dark horizon, at the desert, where
the tracts of sand shone like mirrors among the dark reeds, and the
ponds glistening with salt between the black lines of tamarisks. They
gazed upon the boundless expanse in which they seemed lost, and where,
nevertheless, they felt that they alone were an epitome of everything;
they listened, without hearing them, to the unending noises of the
island,--the murmuring of the water, the rustling of the reeds, the
waving foliage, the growling of wandering beasts, the distant roaring
of two rolling rivers and a restless sea;--and this combined voice of
the whole island formed a fitting accompaniment, by reason of the
extent and number of the sounds that composed it, to the silent
twinkling of the stars, that no one hears.
There was in the park, invisible to them at that hour, a foreign tree,
on which the flowers could be seen, by daylight, opening with a slight
noise. They sometimes amused themselves by watching that tree, said to
have come from Syria. A slight report, as if muffled, and a tiny
cloud, of very powerful odor, would issue from the bursting cell. The
tree continued, during the night, to send out its dust of passions in
quest of prey, and its strange perfume was wafted upward to the
lovers.
They trembled with joy at the slightest contact with each other. Ah!
if she could but have given him, on that beautiful May evening, all
the love his lusty youth demanded; if he could but have felt her
clinging lips melt beneath his burning ones, upon that lofty terrace
overlooking the rounded tops of the huge trees in the park, beneath
that dark star-spangled sky, doubtless his little betrothed would
have remained sole mistress of his heart!
But there were too many obstacles between Livette and Renaud; and as
he struggled virtuously to keep away from her, his thoughts flew off
to the other.
And Livette was already conscious of the heartache of the deserted
lover. All the broad expanse of level country that her eyes knew so
well, and that she felt about her in the darkness, suddenly seemed
empty to her, a desert in very truth, and thereby to resemble her own
heart. And softly, silently, she began to weep,--whereupon one of the
great farm dogs, her favorite, who had been seeking her in every
direction, came up to her and licked her hand as it hung at her side.
And down yonder, far down above the dark line of the sea, Renaud,
meanwhile, fancied that he saw a naked woman's form emerge from the
water, and await his coming, suspended in mid-air, or standing on the
surface of the waves.
"Livette! Livette!"
It was the grandmother's voice calling.
They went down without exchanging a word.
"Good-night, Monsieur Jacques," said the maiden.
"Good-night, mademoiselle," Renaud replied.
So they called each other monsieur and mademoiselle that night, and, a
moment after they had parted, Renaud took his horse from the stable in
perfect silence, and rode away.
His heart did not tell him that Livette, at her window, watched him
depart, her eyes filled with tears.
"Where is he going?"
She followed for a moment with her glance the luminous point (the
reflection of a star upon the head of the drover's spear) dancing
about in the darkness among the trees like a will-o'-the-wisp,--and
when that spark went out, she no longer saw the stars.
XI
THE HIDING-PLACE
Whither he was going he had no idea. He rode at random under the spur
of the energy that was rampant within him, demanding to be expended.
Love guided him as he himself guided his horse. He was the rider of
his own steed, and at the same time the accursed steed of the passion
that impelled him, spurred him on, shouted to him: "Forward!" guided
this way and that, without purpose, his mad race across the moor. He,
too, was mounted, harassed, bridled, whipped, bit in mouth, raging and
powerless. And the horse shared the mad humor of his master, who was
under the spell of love, so that Blanchet, wearied though he was by
his day's labor, having had but a very brief rest, was wild with
excitement none the less. Fortunately, he knew all the ditches and
canals and bogs, and, in his rapid flight with the reins lying on his
neck, he chose his own road. Sometimes he would slacken his pace on
approaching a ditch, in order to walk down into it, head first,
compelling his rider to stand in his great stirrups, with his back
touching the croup: sometimes he leaped them at full speed.
Drunken, bareheaded,--his hat having blown away somewhere in the
darkness,--the wind whistling through his hair, Renaud rode, for the
sake of riding, because the violence of his pace corresponded to the
violence of the passions that were raging within him. He tore along as
a beast does in the rutting season, from its mad desire to be alone.
And he said to himself that it was abominable to think of the other,
when he had for his own that flower of beauty, chastity and sweetness;
but he was thirsting for something very different; and he was
conscious of an intensely bitter taste in his mouth, a clinging, dry
saliva, a moisture that made his thirst the more unbearable.
Powerless to devise a means of escape from all the evil impulses in
his heart, he rode on confessing to two longings: either to meet
Rampal and take vengeance upon him for everything, or else to fall
over backward into a ditch and rise no more, thus giving a different
turn to his evil destiny;--and a third longing which he did not admit
even to himself: to meet the gipsy at daybreak, begging at the door of
some farm.--And then?--He did not know!
Suddenly he thought that he heard a beating of hoofs behind him, the
echo of his own gallop; he turned and saw--he saw in very
truth!--pursuing him at full speed, the naked gipsy, sitting firmly
astride her saddle, man-fashion, upon a shadowy horse whose feet did
not touch the ground.
She flew through the air, laughing in mockery as she cried to him:
"Stop, coward!"
He said to himself that it was not real, but he did not say to himself
that it was a vision; he thought: "It is witchcraft!" and fear seized
upon him, fear as powerful as his desire, and he fled from the image
of her he sought.
He turned to look no more; he fled. He heard the double gallop still:
his own and the other's. He rode through the transparent mist that
hovered over the damp, salt sand; and as he cut through those crawling
clouds it seemed to him as if he were riding through the sky, above
the higher clouds. In very truth, his brain was wandering, for love
will be obeyed, and his youthful passion was like insanity.
Suddenly Blanchet's four legs, as he flew over the ground, became
motionless and rigid as stakes, and his shoeless feet began to slide
over an absolutely smooth surface of clay, hard as iron and as
slippery as if it had been soaped. Swiftly the horse slid along,
digging furrows with his hoofs upon the polished surface, and when he
lost his acquired momentum, he stopped, tried to resume his former
pace, raised one foot and fell heavily to the ground, exhausted, his
mouth and nostrils breathing despair.
In an instant, Renaud, leaning on his spear, which he had not let go,
stood at his horse's head, struggling to lift him up, and encouraging
him with his voice. Blanchet, supported by the rein in his master's
hand, regained his feet after two fruitless slides.
Renaud looked about: there was nothing to be seen save darkness, the
desert, the stars,--tatters of pallid mist that strayed hither and
thither, as if clinging to a bush, a tamarisk, a clump of rushes,--and
assumed, from time to time, the shape of fantastic animals.
Renaud mounted Blanchet once more, but he was moved to pity for him.
And the horse, sometimes letting himself slide upon his shoeless feet,
his four legs perfectly stiff, sometimes putting one foot before the
other, testing the ground, which was firm and hard beneath his weight,
but soft beneath his sharp, scaly hoof, carried him at last away from
the clayey tract.