Fifine received her letter, containing a bulky enclosure, from
Marion. I was present when she opened it, and I made no comment,
preferring to leave to her the questioning which I foresaw, and which
was indeed inevitable. She did not speak for a little, but sat with
her velvety eyes fixed on my face, while I dipped, with what show of
unconcern I could master, my petit-pain into my cup of coffee.
Suddenly she thrust under my very nose a little rouleau of banknotes.
“They are to the value of two thousand francs,” she said. “I want you
to keep them for me, to draw upon as occasion requires.”
“Good,” I said. “Behold your conscientious banker. It was unnecessary;
but I ask no questions.”
“You have no need to,” she said; “nor to pretend ignorance of whence
they have come and why.”
“From my step-sister, I make bold to guess; though how she is able to
draw to this extent upon the baronial coffers, without exciting any
suspicion as to her motive, puzzles me.”
“She has great influence with him,” said Fifine; “though I think it
likely she has advanced this from her own store, intending to recoup
herself from his at a more favourable time.”
“Great influence, has she?” said I, looking up.
“Yes, I think so,” said Fifine; and she went on rather hastily, as if
to avoid the subject: “You will liquidate my debt to you out of it;
and then we will go on as before.”
“Shall we?” said I. “Then Marion has not mentioned to you----”
“O!” said she. “Then you knew it was from her; and what she was to say
besides?”
“I guessed.”
“How wonderfully clever of you. Now, Felix, why will you not be frank
with me?”
“Let me know first. What _does_ she say?”
“Just this: that if we are inclined to take a trip together, she has
no obstacle to put in our way. Now, I want to ask you, How did you
dare?”
“Hear me out, Fury. I _did_ meet Marion: she saw me looking at the
Hôtel Beaurepaire, and followed and accosted me; I _did_ ask her what
would she have to say to our taking a country jaunt together, and
when, to my astonishment, she had nothing to express but approval, I
_did_ assert that you would never agree to such a proposal unless a
replenished purse should enable you to take your share in the
expenses. But I assured her explicitly that I spoke without your
authority, that I did not even know if you would go if permitted, and
that, as to the mention of money, it was made entirely on my own
responsibility, and from inferences which you had had no intentional
part in exciting. You must know, at least, that my only personal
motive was to secure your consent to this trip--or, if you don’t, you
should. I would much rather not be recouped for my little power of
hospitality to one who repays me a thousandfold for it through the
mere fact of her company.”
I got up as I spoke, and went and stood the other side of the table,
so as to face her. She did not answer for awhile, nor look at me; but
presently she raised her lids with a little smile, and, as it were, a
flush of “rosy pudency.”
“I never thought you were really serious about this going away
together,” she said. “It--it seems such a strange thing to do.”
There and then I destroyed my boats. I could not look at her longer,
in her morning freshness, and play the sagacious self-critic. The
burning feminine in her, the ready intelligence, the mental and the
æsthetic qualifications, all proclaiming her a comrade of comrades
for romantic venturings, ended my scruples in a sort of brain
intoxication. Besides, where was the projected harm? Exercise and the
liberal air would blow all that accumulated stuff of durance to the
winds.
“Why?” I said. “Is gossip rifer under the open sky than in a closed
room? We shall be safer from tongues, safer from possible hurt to
reputation, to body, than we are here. We will be brother and sister,
m’amie; you shall take my name--if you will condescend--and my
conscience, and we will journey merrily in company, as witless of
criticism as of guile. We will go South, even into the desolations of
the Camargue, where no one would think of hunting for us, and, when
you will, return leisurely by way of Orange and Fifine’s nest to
Paris. Say it is settled.”
But, womanlike, she would not yield at once. She was full of tremors
and scruples--fears of our being discovered and followed, alarm for
the unconventionality of the proceeding. I was even exasperated on one
occasion into twitting her with her “piano-tuner.” “There is no
danger,” I said, “comparable with that invited by you yourself when
you chose to entertain, unknown to me, and in spite of your solemn
undertaking, a venerable stranger with a chrysanthemum bud in his
buttonhole.”
She turned a little pale, I thought, at that, and, looking away,
murmured indistinctly: “Madame Crussol allowed him to come up.”
“You mean it was not your doing. But he was admitted by you, was he
not?”
Then she turned upon me, and broke out impulsively:--
“I would rather not say. Don’t ask me, Felix. If it was wrong, it
shall not happen again.”
“How can I say if it was wrong? But if you have secrets from me, I
will have none from you. I saw your mysterieux at the Opera-House the
other night, Fifine. He was in the orchestra, and playing a
violoncello.”
She looked positively scared for a moment; then her face changed, and
she laughed, but tremulously.
“It is not my secret,” she said, “or I would tell you; I would indeed.
Don’t be angry with me, Felix.”
“Angry, my dear child!” I protested. “I only wanted to impress upon
you the comparative unreasonableness of your present scruples. Believe
me, if you will, the risk entailed in our leaving Paris is nothing to
that courted by you in remaining on and remaining subject to chance
intrusions like that.”
“Yes,” she said, very submissively; “I daresay you are right.” But
nevertheless it took days to coax and persuade her--until I gave it up
in despair. And then she suddenly surrendered.
“So it is finally decided you will not come with me?” I said to her
one morning.
“Yes, finally,” she answered.
“Then that will do, and I have no more to say.”
“O!” says Fifine, “I don’t want to prevent you talking about it, if it
amuses you.”
“It doesn’t in the least. I am so sick of the subject that it has no
longer the smallest interest for me.”
“Yet it is rather an attractive subject.”
“You don’t seem to find it so.”
“I should miss it, perhaps, being gone.”
“Fifine, will you come?”
“You remember what I said?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Not really? Are you sure?”
“On my--h’m!”
“It was ‘yes, finally,’ wasn’t it?”
“To what question?”
“Somehow I can’t remember further back than your last.”
“That was ‘will you come?’ Yes, finally, to that, then.” I rose
instantly. “You will want a travelling dress of some sort. Give me a
hint.”
“I never consented, Felix. You can’t dare to say I did. Something
simple but chic--dark blue or stone-colour, would be the best, I
think; but I can trust you with the choice.”
The choice put me to some pleasant pains, nevertheless; but I need not
have disturbed myself. There are angles and angels; there are also
women who adorn everything they put on, and those whom nothing adorns.
With the memory of Marion fresh upon me, I could only bask in serene
contemplation of Fifine’s management of material no better and no more
effective than that so injuriously misused by my step-sister. It was
just a question of self-valuing versus self-spiting femininity. One
would be a woman in accordance with, the other, in defiance of, the
masculine ideal. Marion scorned sartorial recommendations; Fifine did
not. Which is the vainer, do you think, the woman who believes she
needs style and embellishment to make her attractive, or the woman who
believes in her own perfect sufficiency without either? Even with the
hat, it was less a question of what was worn than how. I would have
backed my Provençale to make quite an endearing feature of the
amorphous basin with which Marion had elected to bonnet herself.
However, if Marion was an angle, Fifine was certainly no angel. She
was just a Parisian jeune personne--however she may have been born in
Orange--with a natural faculty for making the best of an agreeable
face and figure. And she was not _difficile_ in the matter of
“changes.” She was going forth to acquit herself sensibly as the
road-mate of a vagabond, and she was merciful as regarded that beast
of burden. For I proposed for my reasonable shoulders nothing less and
nothing more than a single rücksack, such as I had commonly used in
my trampings, which strapped under my armpits and was of proportions
elastic enough to accommodate sufficient, and an ounce or two over,
for our needs.
And how in the end did we plan our escape? Why, by planning nothing at
all, and simply walking out one quiet evening and making our way on
foot to the Gare de Lyon. We locked the door of the flat behind us,
locking in some pleasant and odd memories, and leaving the key with
Madame Crussol, the sagacious and diplomatic, sallied into the street
temerarious and tripped upon our way. I neither looked for nor
encountered the least interference with our movements, and we reached
the station in safety, where I took us second-class tickets for
Nîmes. Then, having each of us gulped down a mazagran, hot and black,
I bought a bottle of Sauterne and some long sandwiches, and we took
our places in the train, only then, perhaps, a little nervous in
inaction, and anxious for the whine of the horn that should dismiss us
on our adventurous journey. It sounded at last, and we drew away into
the night.