THE
STORY OF FIFINE
BY
BERNARD CAPES
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY Ltd.
1914
[IMPRINT]
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Endnotes
THE STORY OF FIFINE
CHAPTER I
I always come back to Paris or to London as to a rich feast after
abstinence. There are the reserves of perfect health to draw upon for
its enjoyment; and I enjoy it while the reserves last. But, on the
first sign of their depletion, I return to my lentils and spring
water, which can stand my happiness in quite as good stead as young
partridges and Montrachet.
So the New Zealand shepherd, come once in a while to town, dissipates
in a week of glorious debauch the accumulated earnings of a year or so
spent in the comfortable solitudes. I don’t blame him: on the
contrary. What is the sense of storing up health and vigour for no
other purpose than, like a miser, to hoard them? I use _my_ physical
energy to serve every ounce of me, brain, nerves and organs. A man in
health is a man in happiness, whether he be dining at Voisin’s, or on
ripe figs on the hot rocks of les Baux. And I am a man in health;
thank my good stars for that.
Of all the great cities, I have sojourned in Paris more than in any
other. I have not, like Byron, shaken the dust of my native land off
my shoes; but I came so early abroad, that English ways have grown
foreign to me. I did not in fact ever fit into their social scheme,
though somewhere in my heart a respect survives for it. But the little
island is too small for me; or I am too big for it. There is not my
peer there in the art of modelling; not a piece of native sculpture
that I should like to acknowledge for my own.
For some years now I have rented a little flat in the Rue de Fleurus.
It is the topmost suite in a high building, and troublesome of access
to short-winded visitors, on whom the interminable succession of bare
stone flights with their iron railings acts as a veritable treadmill.
But the eyrie, once reached, is remote, and the view from its windows
superb, including on the right the fathomless green sea of the
Luxembourg gardens, on the left, like a golden buoy in the transparent
mists, the dome of the Invalides. Here I possess three rooms at no
great rent; and it suits me to retain them, as a conventional refuge,
for use when I make my periodic returns from the wilderness.
I had been in repossession of them but three or four days when the
story of Fifine began for me. It opened with a visit from Marion.
Marion, my step-sister, is the daughter of the Vicar: I am the son of
the Vicar’s second wife, whose first husband was a barrister. In most
tales the step-mother indulges her own offspring at the expense of her
spouse’s; in mine the custom was reversed. Marion had ruled at
Neverston, and Marion continued to rule. She ruled my mother
consecrate, and myself unregenerate, and we both accepted her
finding--with unnatural consequences for me. At the age of twenty-one
I carried my Pariahship abroad for good, and my visits to Neverston
since have been few and unexhilarating.
On one of these I discovered, to my amazement, that Marion herself had
gone to Paris--that actually, without my knowledge, she had been
living there for over a year. She was a woman of really surpassing
energy, which, in course of time, I suppose, had craved a wider scope
than that afforded by the narrow bounds of a country parish. And she
had wanted to improve her French, for Marion was always wanting to
improve something or somebody. So she had accepted a position, au
pair, in the household of a penurious French Marquis--recently made a
widower, and possessing one child, a daughter--where she had
established herself in the true Marionesque spirit, ruling and
dogmatising. I wrote to her, on my next visit to the Capital, and she
came to see me once or twice, and always, as the more experienced
Parisian, with some condescending pity for my easy capacity to be led
astray through my ignorance of the world. _She_ had seen enough in her
short time to qualify her for a very Mentor to the gullible. But it
was not to be supposed that, with my record, I should come to do other
than perish in my own conceit. So she accused and judged me without a
particle of evidence; but I had a small amused liking for her, all the
same. She was so sturdily insular, from her contempt for temperament
to her tailor-made dress, which she persisted in wearing in defiance
of all continental fopperies.
On this September evening in question I had been dining in one of
those exiguous Cafés in the Boulevard S. Michel, which cater largely
for students of the Sorbonne and their little chère-amies. I have
never much to say against the custom of such connexions, save for the
hardship they entail upon certain of the girls--mostly shop or factory
hands--when a necessary period is put to them. In other respects they
serve to solve, and to solve cleanly, a problem which English prudery
cannot bring itself to face. Yet better surely the informal comrade
than the bagnio; and, after all, those who consent accept with their
eyes open, and with a full knowledge of the impermanent nature of the
relations.
I returned to the flat about eight o’clock, to find the wife of the
Concierge already peering for me behind the closed iron gates of the
lodge, which led out of a courtyard reached through an archway.
“Why closed?” I said.
“Ah!” returned Madame Crussol, snapping viciously at the lock: “Why
indeed, but to oblige the laudable sister of a good-for-nothing, who
is never so little to be found as when respectability calls. Likely
this is one of your pranks, for which you are to be taken to task. You
will find Madame upstairs.”
She swung open the gate, and locked it behind me again as I entered. I
accepted the enigma with a laugh, and a little pat on the good wife’s
ample shoulder. I am never eager about solving riddles which left
alone will unravel of themselves. It is a good rule for ensuring
serenity of mind.
As I turned to the stairs, I noticed a figure seated dimly in the
porter’s lodge. It was shrouded and obscure, but I believed it was
that of a young girl, whose white face, picked out by the lamp-light,
blossomed from the shadows with an oddly Rembrandtesque effect. It
seemed, as I passed, to be projected in sudden interest or curiosity,
and then, like a face seen from a train at night, to vanish instantly.
I found, on entering my principal room, the electric light turned on
and the curtains drawn close. Marion, her hands clasped behind her
back, was striding restlessly up and down; but, I observed, with a
stealthy motion, as though she feared the sound of her own footsteps.
She stopped, on the instant of my entrance, and faced on me, her lips
compressed. I thought she looked unusually grim, and that her
constitutionally dead complexion betrayed a livider pallor.
“At last!” she said. “Shut the door, Felix Dane. I want to speak to
you.”
“I have only been dining, Marion. Quite respectably, believe me. Had
you any reason for drawing to the curtains this warm night?”
“I never do anything without a reason. I was afraid of being followed
and the light betraying me.”
Marion the subject of an adventure! I begged her to be seated, with
the urbanity of a doctor introduced to a remarkable case.
“No,” she said: “I cannot keep still.”
She walked, in fact, as she spoke, her gaunt figure jerked by some odd
emotion. She was struggling to meet me on equal terms. Though she was
my senior by two years, you must understand that mine numbered full
thirty-five, and that I had had quite a little experience of the
world. But it would never have done for me to presume on that pretence
with her. Presently she made up her mind, and gave forth, still
tramping:--
“You know my opinion of you, Felix Dane?” She commonly addressed me by
my full name, as if to remind me of my untitled place in the family
connexion.
“Quite,” I answered. “It is summed up in one word--wastrel.”
“Not a very flattering opinion.”
“Not in any way otherwise, Marion. It means merely to be natural.”
“Natural in the irresponsible and squandering sense.”
“Why, of course. That is the very essence of Nature--to show a blind
trust in a bountiful Providence. Look at animals feeding--birds,
beasts and fishes. They take the best of what is offered to them, and
trample or spill abroad the ninety per cent. residue. You kept a
parrot once, and ought to know. I am really, if you look at it
rightly, the more religious of us two!”
She did not answer me, but continued her spasmodic march, while I
observed her curiously. Suddenly she flounced to a stop before me, a
suggestion of queer defiance in her expression.
“I should not have come to you,” she said, “in a very difficult
situation, if I had believed your character really summed up in that
word. Perhaps I can do you more justice than you do yourself, Felix.”
“That I can’t tell, Marion, until I know what it is you ask of me.”
“Courage, Felix Dane,” she answered, looking me straight in the face;
“and self-restraint.”
A short silence ensued. Then, “I am waiting,” I said.
She took yet a quick turn or two, and came back as before.
“You know something of my position here,” she said, “and of its
responsibilities? Well, those have suddenly assumed a very grave and
menacing aspect. There have been discoveries and revelations of late,
more than enough.”
I saw that, for all her self-repression, she was distressed and
agitated, and the man in me, no less, perhaps, than the curiosity, was
moved.
“Well, take my better qualities for granted,” I said.
She squeezed her lips with her hand, still staring at me; then broke
out:--
“I will--I must. I have a claim upon them, after all, and a right to
urge it. Felix, if you will swear to keep my confidence----”
“I will swear to nothing. Tell me or not, as you like.”
She canvassed me a little before deciding. I would not have accused
her of guile, though I fancied I knew something of women. And at last
she spoke:--
“I have got the Comtesse de Beaurepaire hidden away in the
Conciergerie below, and I want you to take charge of her, to conceal
and protect her, until such time as I can redeem her from your hands.”
She gave a gasp, having got it all quickly out, and stepped back, to
observe the effect on me. It was startling enough; but, somehow, I was
tickled rather than prostrated.
“The Comtesse--your young pupil--the little au pair?” I asked. “What
on earth has the bad child been doing?”
“Her father is a madman,” said my step-sister, with more passion than
I should have thought possible to her--“a morphiomaniac, who has
suffered, as I know now, from toxic delirium. Some weeks ago he
discovered, among his dead wife’s papers, compromising documents which
made him doubt his daughter’s legitimacy. Since then he is like a
rabid animal; he has always been an unnatural parent; and now the
girl’s life is not safe in his hands. It came to this at last, that to
rescue her from his brutality, she must be smuggled away into hiding.
Arrangements were made to convey her this day after dark to the school
of Les Loges, which is twelve miles distant. We started, she and I, in
a hired fiacre; but had not reached the barriers, when a note was
thrown into our carriage from an overtaking automobile informing me
that our escape had been discovered, and that emissaries of the
Marquis were even then on the way out to waylay and dispose of us.
Panic seized me: I was in despair. To return would be to submit my
charge, perhaps, to an unspeakable fate; to go on would be to invite
some nameless catastrophe. I ordered the coachman to turn; and in the
act a thought came to me. To forestall the chase, and, by doubling, be
lost to it in the intricacies of the City! It was then the idea of you
occurred to me, and we drove straight for the Rue de Fleurus, alighted
short of it, and hurried the rest of the way on foot. Madame Crussol,
in response to my entreaties, shut the gates upon us, and--there it
stands.”
I sat up stiff, I ruffled my hair, I laughed aloud.
“My dear Marion! This wild melodrama in the midst of modern Paris!
Have you not been testing some of his lordship’s drugs?”
She stood looking at me steadily.
“I should have thought,” she said, “that even for you by this time the
criminal possibilities in a great capital could have no surprises.”
“But the position of the parties--a confessed morphiomaniac--his, as I
understand you, hardly-veiled threats! You had only to go to the
police.”
She regarded me with grey tolerance.
“There is such a thing as scandal; there is such a thing as despotic
influence, even amongst this supposed discredited noblesse. The
Marquis, for all his domestic parsimony, is a man of immense political
power. And he is rich; he can command what instruments he pleases.
Besides, you are not to suppose that he habitually reveals himself in
his conduct. That is not at all the way with such aliénés. He can be
suavity itself--most convincingly, most alluringly. You have much to
learn, Felix Dane.”
“I have, indeed. This is not Paris, but mediæval Rome. Has the young
lady no relatives, great or small, to whom to appeal?”
“Not one, who is not subject in some way to his tyranny or dislike. He
is a strange unnatural character, and greatly feared.”
“Well, I think, if you are not dreaming, that I must be. My
step-sister Marion, from Neverston Vicarage, and implicated in a
transpontine mystery of abduction and murder! The young Countess is
here, you say--in pledge to me until redeemed by you. And what do
_you_ propose doing?”
“I propose going back to the Hôtel Beaurepaire.”
“Going back? To invite the reprisals of that monster?”
“I have no fear of him for myself--if for no other reason than that in
me lives the only clue to this poor unhappy child’s whereabouts.”
Marion had courage. I had never doubted that; but this manifestation
of it, whatever ludicrous fancy it might be based on, surprised while
it interested me. She had never been wont to sentimental attachments.
But I had thought of late that in many ways she was an altered woman,
broader-minded, more humanly worldly than of old.
“You could be trusted not to betray it, I will swear,” I said. “But
how about others? There was the coachman who drove you, for instance.”
“We dropped him near the Mont de Piété, pretending it was our
destination.”
“Admirable strategist! But you say you were warned of pursuit. That
seems to speak some knowledge of your movements.”
“I am afraid so! We can only hope that it will prove knowledge
misled.”
“Afraid so--afraid so!” I got to my feet, more inclined to laugh than
protest, for all my perplexity. “Then I am to take it--provided I
accept this amazing trust--that, if this maniac succeeds in
penetrating our secret, the young lady will be in danger?”
My step-sister, it seemed to me, hesitated momentarily, with a queer
down-glance, before answering my question.
“In the gravest danger, Felix--I am forced to admit it.”
“And--incidentally--I, perhaps?”
Again she appeared to hesitate, before facing me with a bold
challenge:--
“I do you the justice that, for all our differences, I should never
have denied you. You will not take personal peril into account in the
matter of protecting an unhappy young woman against her persecutors.”
“Thank you,” I said shortly.
“It is possible,” continued Marion, “that the place of her retreat
_may_ be discovered. God forbid it should be so; but it may be. In
that case we can only pray that the worst may not happen.”
I crowed. “Well, pray,” I said, “with all your heart; you had better
begin at once. As a Vicar’s daughter you should know the ropes. But
for me this is a very practical matter, it seems.”
She failed to protest, after her custom, over my profanity; and I
paced a turn or two in sheer desperation.
“Well,” I said at last, “you have appealed to our relationship, and to
the knowledge it gives you of me, and, for the sake of my own credit,
I must not be found wanting. I tell you candidly that I believe this
all to be some wild hallucination of your brain; but I am ready to
humour it, if that will satisfy you. Trot up the young victim--but
wait a minute. She is to live, pour le moment, you say, under my
protection. As what?”
She looked at me very oddly.
“You are a gentleman, Felix Dane,” she said.
“I may be the incomparable Bayard himself, Marion; but jealousy has
denied me his reputation.”
“‘As thy days, so shall thy strength be,’ Felix” (it was her only
concession to the old Marion). “For the rest, she must not be known,
of course, for whom she is. Call her simply Fifine.”
“And Madame Crussol and the others?”
“What does it matter? When she leaves you, it will be to resume
herself--to disappear from all imaginary associations.”
This from Marion! I stared in amazement. Surely she had travelled a
long way from Neverston.
“When she leaves me?” I said. “And at what date am I to look for that
happy release?”
“I cannot tell you yet,” answered my step-sister hurriedly. “We must
be guided by events. Only I beg you in the meantime, for your own sake
and hers, to keep her close, to whisper no word about her to your
friends, never to let her leave your chambers, and to make her lock
herself into them when alone.”
“My chambers!” I looked desperately round the ill-furnished room. “I
never thought of that. What accommodation have I for Countesses, what
knowledge of their needs and caprices?”
“You make my task too difficult, Felix,” said Marion fretfully; “and I
want to escape--every moment is important. Even now I may be tracked
and watched for.”
“Heaven forbid! Why not take possession of my rooms, you and she, and
leave me to find another lodging?”
“Impossible--it is impossible. I cannot stop now to explain why. Will
you do it, Felix, or will you not? I am quite at the end of my
resources.”
I stepped aside.
“It is lunar madness--but call her up. You will come again soon? You
will communicate with me, at least?”
“The very moment it is safe.”
She was going, but turned at the door, as if in an afterthought.
“She is only nineteen, Felix--a child. You will bear that in mind?”
“And I am thirty-five, Marion. I had better come down with you now, in
case----”
“No. Well, perhaps, if you like----”
We descended to the Conciergerie. Madame Crussol, severe but curious,
awaited us in the doorway.
“Fifine,” said my step-sister, whispering into the room, “you are to
go upstairs to your cousin’s apartments. He is prepared to grant you
asylum until such time as the right authorities can be found and
appealed to.”
She had run away from school and the religious life: that, I
perceived, was to be the fiction. My cousin! I blushed, if Marion did
not. There was a little rustle in the room, as of some one rising.
Marion begged the porteress to open the gate for her without more ado.
I accompanied her into the street. It appeared empty, and void, of
course, of any lurking shadow of suspicion. Strenuously combating my
offer of escort, Marion bade me back into the glooms, and, herself
turning into the Rue de Luxembourg, disappeared abruptly from sight.
At the gates Madame Crussol met me returning.
“Where is my errant young cousin gone?” I asked.
“Where do you suppose?” said the good lady drily. “She is very
obedient to her instructions, that. She is high up by now. That is a
good school of hers to end in such promotion. But I daresay your
sister knows you better than I do.”
From which I perceived very clearly that my difficult time was
beginning.