I turned and left him, I say; and he went a swift course, and I a
slow one; yet in the end the race was to the tortoise. I had no least
intention of making it one at the time; I was quite sincere in my
purpose to obliterate myself temporarily, and leave the situation to
resolve itself independently of me. For, in truth, for all its comical
side, it was becoming intolerable. We could not for ever keep company
on these terms; something definite must be decided one way or the
other. I did not, I told myself, care what was the upshot of their
meeting; I wanted only to know where I stood, and to adjust our plans
accordingly. If the absurd thing actually came to pass--and it seemed
to me too preposterous for belief--then a rapid return journey with my
charge to Paris must be made, to deliver me from any further
responsibility as regarded her actions. In the meantime I had no legal
authority whatever over those, either to oppose or encourage. My
impulsive undertaking had brought us into a position which I was only
to realise at too late an hour to command. If she chose to be wilful,
I was helpless.
So much for the impersonal side; and how about the personal? Why, the
result did not concern me, save from a purely practical point of view.
Have I not said it; and is it not a jealous man’s first instinctive
defence to lie to himself? He is like a savage with a blow-pipe, who,
inhaling a great breath to expel a poisoned dart, draws the barb back
into his own throat. And that I had done, and, for all my affected
nonchalance, it rankled venomously.
And yet I could not have declared even then what I desired. Flattering
relief from unflattering dubiety was perhaps nearest it--since, to
speak truth, the idea of this Carabas as a rival was positively
insupportable to me. And afterwards, supposing that reassurance
granted? I could not be blind to a certain anterior tendency in
things--at least as it had affected myself--nor to the inevitable
consequences, had not that tendency been violently checked. Did I want
it resumed, then, simply in order to deny it? Unlikely, at least; and
if not----?
I was in fact an irresolute, uncommendable jackass, if with some
lingering instincts yet for rectitude and disinterestedness. And, on
the strength of those survivals, I sought weakly to justify myself,
saying, If I have been full of inconsistencies in my moods, so has
Fifine been in her contributions to them, at one moment seeming to
imply what at the next she would seem to refute, whereby I was
provoked into an attitude of loverliness, which, though fictitious,
was demoralising in itself. If she had only stood resolute to our
compact, I should never have thought of her but as the good gossip and
reasonable comrade.
And straightway I cursed myself for my meanness. That I should seek to
shift the blame for my irresolution to those shoulders upon which no
burden but love should ever be laid. She inconsistent--Fifine
inconsistent? Yes, by the sweet testimony of her womanliness, without
which she would have been as little Fifine as the companion of my
choice.
The thought brought an instant pang with it. To touch upon her womanly
side was to feel the sharp sense of loss of all which that might imply
in possession. And yet how could one talk of losing what was never
his? A paradox, for lovers to answer through their dreams. I leave the
explanation to them; and there is one.
I would not yet, you see, confess myself of their kin; but I held
myself as it were detached, prepared to advance or retreat as
circumstances suggested. Our days, Fifine’s and mine, had been full of
perversities and contradictions, but we had reached a point at last
when our sentiments must confess their true inner properties, and
declare for either attraction or repulsion. Then we should see.
After parting from the Frenchman, I went down the hill at a long
slant, striking again the road, by which Fifine and I had come, at
some half-mile below the village. I had no very definite plan in my
head, save that of a politic absenteeism; at the same time I had no
intention to let my emotions get the better of my enjoyment of a
perfect day. My correspondence with Hénault suggested to me the idea
of a closer examination of the Neocomian limestone of the opposite
range, together with an exploration of the ground about what was known
as the Roman Camp, where it was possible I might alight on fragments
of metal or pottery of an interesting description. That would do as
well as anything to give a savour to exercise; the only question was
food. I did not relish a return to les Baux, with the possibilities it
entailed of a most inexpedient encounter; yet where else was I to
procure what I needed? After a moment’s reflection, I set off with a
determination to walk back to Paradou. It was but three miles, and,
quit of the rücksack, I could easily take it into the itinerary I
proposed for myself.
It was past midday when I reached the Grand Café Bellin. The
household greeted my prompt return with astonishment, attributing it
to some fatality, but were reassured and diverted on my putting it
down to the accident of a lost letter, which I fancied I might have
dropped in my bedroom. Was there such a letter? Was there in fact the
least necessity for my inventing any such excuse for my reappearance?
No; _but I wanted to go up and sentimentalise over the empty room_.
The feeling, the pretext, had seized me in a moment, and irresistibly.
I went--but not into my individual cubicle--and I stood there a
minute, humouring, half pathetically, half jestingly, my own folly.
Then I bent, and just touched with my lips the place where her head
had lain; and looked round and saw the centipede lying where it had
fallen; and smiled, and shook my silly noddle, and went downstairs
again. No doubt, the good inn folks regarded me as a lunatic for
putting myself to all this trouble and exertion on behalf of a
trumpery letter: my sanity would have been much more in evidence to
them had I confessed the sentimental truth. So are they built; and so
are we not. That was the irony of it: they thought me a fool for doing
the very thing that I did to avoid being thought a fool.
“No, it is not there,” I said; “but no matter. One may waste time less
profitably, I find, than in renewing one’s acquaintance with Monsieur
and Madame Bellin.”
They were pleased at that--blarney is a recognised currency in
France--and paid me with a generous measure of the bread and figs,
which, with a bottle of wine, was all I took from them for my al
fresco meal. Then, my pockets comfortably loaded, I bade adieu to the
inn for the second time, and started on my roundabout way back.
It was a lovely quiet noon, but with a brooding stillness in the air
which brought Carabas’s warning into my mind. Still, at the worst, I
had before me long hours of unobscured sunshine, enough and to spare
for all the use I wanted to make of it. At the sign-post, turning off
from the road, I struck straight across the valley, and was soon among
the lower intricacies of the opposite hills. And there I sat down
among the rocks, and, for a good beginning, got out my provender.
There was nothing in it inimical to a sober and temperate view of
things; indeed the wine was rather a febrifuge than a stimulant;
wherefore it was, perhaps, that I soon found myself excusing my late
ebullition of feeling to myself on the score that it had been conceded
to a purely abstract idea--the thought of a pleasant comradeship
ended, or about to end--and that I should never have dreamed of so
committing myself to that demonstration unless I had been sure that
the tender sentiment it embodied was predestined to unfulfilment.
Nobody was compromised by it--least of all myself, in whose
independent soul it had figured for the mere indulgence of a whimsical
fancy.
All of which was quite sensible and satisfactory. And then I bethought
myself, with a gleeful chuckle, that I possessed, in the shape of a
flask of right cognac in my breast pocket, a jocund corrective to the
dismal stuff I had been swilling; and out it came, to change, in a few
moments, the whole complexion of my mind.
So do great conclusions hang upon little means. It was a fly that once
made the throne of St. Peter vacant, a gnat that, entering the ear of
the arrogant King who thought to storm heaven with his flying
chariots, hurled all that vast expedition to the ground. A few drops
of Prussic acid will suffice to poison the whole stream, with its
thousand tributaries, of the living ichor; a thimbleful of liqueur
runs the same course in stimulating fire. Now, as I sat, without
yielding my title to a spiritual independence I did certainly begin to
consider it from the point of view of its losses rather than its
gains. Or, rather, my mood lapsed entirely from the critical to the
sentimental, and not my sacrifice, but the constitution of what I
sacrificed, came to absorb me.
She had a hundred pretty ways--now I studied her thus impersonally, as
one might a figure in a book--yet not one but was a sincere expression
of her feelings, and without conscious art. I always loved the quality
of her voice; it was slander that could call its leisured music
apathy. One thought of her as one did of sleep--the “swooning to
death” of Keats, and in as sweet a connexion. Because sleep has more
and dearer discoveries than waking, a deeper understanding, mysteries
of the subconscious spirit too shy to face the light, but confessing
themselves dearly out of the darkness. So she seemed to me, a thing of
daylight reserves, enough to obscure but not to kill the promise of
the lovelier soul that hid within. And, with such potentialities, how
rich a possession might she not prove to the man who won her.
What were she and Carabas doing at that moment? I got up suddenly on
the thought, and began to move off among the rocks, turning my face
instinctively homewards. But as suddenly I swerved to the left, with a
little testy laugh, and addressed myself resolutely to my business of
exploration.
For some time I went at random, fairly involving myself in the huddle
of low hills and slades into which the mountains here ran down,
suggesting, as it were, the subsiding waters of a cataract. They were
pretty intricately confused, and tessellated everywhere with patches
of bush and waste ground, with occasionally a cultivated field of
olive or almond set amidst. My purpose being on the whole to kill
time, I took little thought as to my bearings, only noting in a
general way the trend of the hills, and the position of that
particular one which I intended presently to climb. It remained a dead
calm, sultry, and with little incitement in it to exertion; but the
haze was palpably thickening; and presently I came to realise that,
did I wish to attain the Roman Camp, the sooner I set about making for
it the better.
I was by then well to the south-west, in a wild hill-tossed country,
of the particular height which I understood to be my goal, and since I
was virtually lost it seemed that my plain course was to take as much
as possible a bee-line for it--which was what any Roman himself would
have done. Wherefore I set off--only to find that what meant a
bee-line for a bee might mean a scarce passable switchback for a human
being. Plunging through thickets; ploughing along clayey bottoms;
struggling over boulder-strewn slopes, only to discover that they were
isolated mounds I might have skirted; threading my way through
thronged groves of olive and mulberry, to lose my direction and be
aggravating minutes in refinding it; most often painfully forcing a
passage through massed bushes of juniper or tamarisk, and never once
crossing a friendly track or lane that would have helped me over a
difficulty, slowly I toiled on towards release and reassurance. And
when at last, after hours of labour as it seemed, I _did_ break into
the open, and saw what I conceived to be the hill of the camp towering
mistily in its full height before me, I threw myself with a groan down
on the rocks, and set to cursing all bee-lines literally up hill and
down dale.
So I had not attained my goal yet; I was not in the way to attain
goals, it seemed, however fair and desirable. Fate, on the whole, was
treating me pretty scurvily. And I had done nothing, absolutely
nothing, to merit the curse of Tantalus--or to merit that form of it,
since I had not coveted the grapes for myself, which was implied in
the sight of another man’s enjoyment. Soft, bloomy, delicious things!
Damn the fellow, with his globular paunch and thick relishing lips!
How women could let their beauty be so profaned! I had often dwelt on
her profile seen against a background of silvery light or purple
drapery, and loved its infinite childishness--the smooth rounded
cheek, the short rather insolent nose, the upper lip projecting but
the tiniest fraction of an inch over the lower, an endearing feature.
And she could value them all at no better than material for that
fulsome traffic!
I jumped up, and began to ascend the hill. The sun, during the half
hour I had lain resting and brooding, was already sloping deep into
the west, and there was a chill heaviness in the air which portended
evil. I was conscious of it, even while the fire in my brain drove me
on, reckless of consequences. What did it matter, even though I had to
spend the night on the mountains? I had only myself to consider; there
was no one else affected by my obstinacy. I had said I would explore
the Roman Camp, and I meant to do it. I would show that my will could
be resolute, even though to a foolish end. I meant to paint a picture
presently that should give all my slanderers the lie; and then there
would be a finish to this talk about my idle futility, and the charge
that had been brought should be regretted, and bitterly regretted, and
in vain.
So the callow calf-lover solaces his injured heart with dreams of
stern qualities in himself realised too late by the unappreciative, of
silent rebuke, and noble retort in the shape of self-sacrificing
heroisms by fire and water, ending possibly in a quiet grave much
bedewed by the tears of aching, hopeless self-reproach. I did not
perhaps project my imagination to those extremes; but certainly I
indulged it to the extent of shaming my sober years, so that in a
minute, overtaken by the humour of the thing, I burst into a laugh and
was myself again.
“I am going to hunt for broken pottery,” I said aloud--“nothing more
nor less; and if in the process I get benighted on the mountain, well,
it will be my own fault, and there’s an end of it.”
Up, then, I toiled, and the fog crept about me, drifting sluggishly
down from the Camargue. It was thin as yet, and not more than enough
to give an air of indefiniteness to the rocks above. Presently I came
to a great bramble-grown bluff, twenty feet in height, up which I had
the greatest difficulty in finding a way; but I achieved it at last,
and, topping the ridge, found myself on the main plateau of the hill,
an apparently limitless waste of dense bush.
Here, though I did not realise it, was the actual site of the Roman
Camp, whence ordinarily a magnificent view of the valley and of the
Château-crowned heights opposite was obtainable. Now I stood isolated
in a little world of mist-encompassed green, littered all over with
prone boulders, of differing, but mostly huge, dimensions.
Ploughing through the bush, I worked my way slowly on. It was a
tedious process, but I could not venture to hurry it, as twilight was
momentarily deepening the obscurity like mud disturbed on a river
bottom, and any rash step on my part risked a wrench and sprain in one
of the innumerable hidden fissures with which the whole surface of the
under-rock was sewn. Many times, in spite of my caution, I slipped and
half-lost my footing; many times trod suddenly on air, when I had
thought firm ground was beneath me. And then, with a shock, I had
started back, and was standing gaping. Right before me dropped a
precipice, going down into unknown depths, and another step would have
carried me clean over it.
It was only then that a sense of my rather impossible position began
to penetrate me. But I was not going to give up without a struggle.
Evidently I was on the wrong tack, and must bear away in a different
direction. Gingerly I proceeded--only to be brought up in a few
minutes on a like experience. Then I stood still and reflected. I had
hopelessly lost my bearings; I did not know on what part of the hill I
stood at that moment, and there was no distinguishing feature to guide
me--only a tumbled confusion of rock and juniper heaving itself on all
sides into swift obliteration. At the best, I knew, the descent on the
north side was a long and a difficult one; under these circumstances,
even if I could find and trace its course, it must prove hazardous
beyond the worth of risking. I could see nothing for it but to camp
beside some rock, and there await, as patiently as I might, the
shifting of the mist, with or before the return of daylight.
No great hardship, after all, for a toughened vagabond, and no very
new experience. I had slept on a hillside before now; I had run into a
ditch, bicycling in the dark, and had slumbered where I had fallen
from pure exhaustion. Here, save for the slight chill of the crawling
vapour, all was cosy and secure--no wind, plentiful cover, and litter
for one’s bedding ad infinitum. It was imperative only that I should
bestow myself in comfort and safety while yet I could distinguish
between air and matter. Very warily, turning from my latest peril, I
trod a cautious path to where a massive boulder heaved itself out of
the green, and, dropping under its friendly shelter, prepared to abide
my destiny.
I had tried a shout or two first; but that, I knew, was a pretty
forlorn hope. What other fool but myself would likely be abroad on the
hills on such a night as this? Then, very surely as I sat, the gloom
came in about me, until to have dared a step in that blinding
investment would have been madness.
So there was nothing for it at last but to face the facts, and make
the best I could of them. If I was conscious of any qualm on Fifine’s
account, I quickly dismissed it as, if not unreasonable, immaterial. I
was not the less in the hands of Fate because she knew nothing of my
predicament; while, at the best or worst, my welfare had ceased to be
a leading consideration with her. Carabas, no doubt, would find means
to assuage her anxiety, if any such she felt on my behalf.
It was odd sitting there at freedom on the open hill, and yet feeling
oneself as securely caged as though fettered to a stone shaft, like
Bonivard, in a subterranean dungeon. After a time I got out the
handful of figs remaining to me, with the flask, still two-thirds
full, of brandy; and, having discussed that simple meal at leisure,
lit my pipe, and lay smoking and sipping with an ample serenity. It
was perfectly still; even the mist, born of the sun-baked levels,
seemed to have a quality of warm steam in it, and flattered rather
than discomforted. Gradually, after I know not how long an interval,
drowsiness overcame me, and, sinking comfortably into my cosy eyrie, I
slept.
* * * * * * *
Something or somebody was calling to me, and by name. My subauditory
senses had been conscious of the fact long, it seemed, before any
association of it with reality occurred to startle them. But now, and
more acutely, the sound penetrated, cutting through the web of sleep;
and the next moment I had leapt wide awake, and was sitting up
listening.
“Dane, Dane, Dane! Holà, Monsieur! Holà, Monsieur Dane! Do you hear?
Answer, then! Dane, Dane, Dane!”
“Here!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet, and facing in the direction
of the voice. The mist had thinned somewhat, and was penetrated,
moreover, with a white diffused light, in the shine of which all
immediate details of the surrounding plateau were faintly visible. I
thought at first that day had dawned upon me as I lay, but in a moment
recognised the silvery radiance for that of the full moon, which
appeared to hang in the heavens right above the banks of vapour. And
not fifty yards away from me stood a solitary figure, ghostly and
motionless on a rock, and looking like a half-gilded statue in the
glow from a lantern it carried in its hand.
For an instant my drugged wits failed to respond to the vision; then,
with a laugh, I began to stumble forward--and stopped.
“Hullo!” I shouted. “Shall I come to you? Is it safe?”
Though I repeated the cry, never a syllable answered me. It seemed
strange. Surely, the hallooing, whose echoes still rang in my brain,
could have come from no direction but this. I dwelt puzzled a moment;
then, deciding to take silence for assent, continued to advance. I
went stupidly, still fuddled in my mind, lifting and putting down my
feet mechanically, and hardly looking where I trod. The figure, never
moving or uttering sound, began to take to me near shape and
substance. I was already within speaking distance of it, when it
appeared to move, and a cry came from its lungs, sudden and furious:--
“Halt!”
I had wit, or instinct enough to stop on the instant--and lucky for me
I had. That moment returns to me now in a black shock of memory. As I
stood, vaguely wondering, the figure came down from its stone;
approached me; halted abruptly within six yards of where I stood--and
it was Carabas. In the sick shine of the lantern he carried his face
looked livid and contorted. He stood a moment; then leaned down the
lantern, and swung it to and fro.
“Voilà ce que c’est!” he said, in a thick scornful voice. “Another
step, and you would have been in.”
I stood like a half-sobered drunkard, staring down. There, in the very
heart of the bush, gaped between us a damnable black pit, man-hewn,
obviously the shaft or ventilator to some quarry, and sunk to God knew
what terrific depths. There was no fence about it; even by day one
might have stumbled into it without any great accusation of
carelessness.
“Did I not warn you of the perils of the hills?” said the Frenchman,
in the same thick, sneering tones. “A word to the wise, grand Dieu!”
At the sound of him my wits returned to me, and in a clap of fury.
“Why, in the devil’s name,” I bawled across the gulf, “didn’t you
direct me sooner? You saw I was coming straight for it.”
“I thought of course, you knew.”
“You thought?--My God!” The truth sprung upon me in an instant. “You
_meant_ me to go down--on my own initiative, so as to quit your lying
conscience; only you turned craven at the last. Own up, you infernal
dog!”
His eyes looked across at me, ghastly; but, to my surprise, skirting
the edge of the opening, he came round and dared me face to face.
“Ananias!” he said. “What right was mine to cross God’s judgment on a
liar?”
I regarded him for a little without answering, searching in my mind
for some explanation of this extraordinary behaviour, and finding
none. I was by now quite cool and self-possessed, and conscious of a
full command of the situation.
“If that is to imply,” I said, “that you have sacrificed your
conscience to your humanity, it is to imply no motive for it that I
can understand. Why did you want to kill me?”
“I did not want to kill you.”
“But you saw me walking to my death--fortuitously, perhaps--and lifted
no finger, until the last moment, to interfere. What would that have
been, at the worst, but moral murder?”
“No matter. It did not happen.”
“Clearly through the interposition of Providence, working
automatically on a coward’s fears. But, supposing it to work as
automatically on his intended victim’s resentment, and that a
sacrifice of some sort was demanded? I have twenty times your strength
and will, and a thousand times your provocation. What is to prevent me
from sending you where you proposed sending me, and leaving it to be
inferred, as no doubt you had designed it should be inferred about me,
that you had blundered to your doom in the fog?”
Involuntarily he had started back at my words. The lantern clattered
in his hand. If he could be, like Falstaff, a lion on compulsion, it
was plain also that he could be a coward on instinct.
“I saved your life!” he cried hoarsely. I walked towards him. As I
approached, he put out his arms, lantern and all, as if to ward me
off. “Monsieur, Monsieur; let us be reasonable; let us talk together.
Before God, I came to risk the night perils of these hills in order to
find, if possible, and rescue you. I knew you were coming here; and I
knew, if you did not, of these quarry openings. Was I not calling you,
here, there, everywhere--and did that look like premeditation? And
when at last you answered and appeared, it was mere accident which
interposed that temptation between us. And I resisted it, Monsieur--I
resisted it.”
I laughed shortly, halting before him.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “you are not qualified, it is obvious, for the
heroic part you set yourself. But rest content: I am not going to kill
you. After all, you did, as you assert, save my life in a way; though
why you should ever have wanted it ended beats me.”
He sat down on a stone, quite overcome, and, putting the lantern
beside him, buried his face in his hands.
“But for you she might listen to me,” he half sobbed, from that
covert.
I heard, astonished.
“She? Who?” I demanded.
“O, Monsieur!” he said, “why equivocate? She who you informed me was
your sister, or your step-sister, and who is in fact nothing of the
kind.”
Answer of any sort for the moment failed me. Then, “She told you
that?” I asked quietly.
“She told me.”
“What provoked her to it?”
“I--I!” He uplifted both his face and hands despairingly,
apostrophising the moonlit heavens; then dropped them in dejection. “I
taunted her with you, and she answered in a fury. For myself, I had
never but half believed in that story; and, in the bitterness of my
rejected vanity, I goaded her to the admission--alas, to what result!”
I stood canvassing the forlorn creature, even with some contemptuous
pity in my heart.
“Rejected?” I said. “Then I am to understand you have tried and
failed?”
“Failed,” he repeated, in a voice of grief.
“Now, listen to me, M. Cabarus,” I said. “It is, I acknowledge, no
question of a sister or a step-sister; but it _is_ a question of an
honourable trust, which I may not specify, but which to this moment I
have maintained. When I bid you this morning to the test, I bid you,
as one totally disinterested for himself, to a venture which would
have honoured any man in its achievement. You understand me? It was to
achieve an unsullied name. But I never professed the least authority
over any one’s tastes or predilections. That anyone was free to do as
she liked, to accept or reject as she liked. If you chose to presume
absurdly, and arrogantly I must say, on a brief acquaintance, that was
your business. I should not have stood in her way: I did not stand in
yours.”
“Ah!” He looked up at me, with a strange woeful expression: “But
unconsciously, Monsieur--unconsciously, we will say.”
He rose, with a profound sigh, and lifted the lantern.
“Judge you, Monsieur,” he said, “if, for all my vanity, my soul is
small. This morning she spoke to me--words of bitter scorn and
upbraiding, difficult to forget. She was angry to see me appear
without you; she received my proposals with amazement, heaping insults
on my head. Sweet poisonous flowers they were, dropping from those
incomparable lips. Yet, mark; when anxiety rose and grew over your
failure to return, it was to me she came to appeal, to my wounded soul
she addressed her suit. I was responsible, she said, for your absence,
for letting you go to wander among the darkening hills alone. And when
they whispered of mist and pitfalls, her fears grew wildly clamorous,
and she entreated me, yes me, to imperil my own safety, to issue forth
and seek for you among the clouds, careless of what befell me so not a
hair of your head should be injured. And I came, Monsieur; unable at
the last to witness unconcerned the agony of mind of her who had so
abused me, I counselled my own heart to nobility, and came to seek
you.”
He turned from me. “Follow,” he said; “and I will lead you down into
safety. So I requite my defamer. Only let me entreat you, Monsieur, to
humour in me by the way a silence which indeed my heart is too full to
relieve with words.”
How could I answer but by acquiescing. It was a strange descent, that
from my rocky prison--in the white ghast light, following the bright
spark of the swinging lantern, while vast shapes and shadows seemed to
bend and look at us as we passed. It needed a sure knowledge to
accomplish it without mishap; but at last it was done, and we stood at
the head of the valley, where the road branched upwards to La Reine
Jeanne. A clock struck eleven as we paused; I turned and held out my
hand to my rescuer.
“I am sorry,” I said. I felt that it did not become me to utter more.
But he could not bring himself to accept the proffered advance.
“Your way is now clear to you, Monsieur,” he answered frigidly,
backing a little from me. “You will need my services no longer.”
“But what are you going to do with yourself?”
He made a comprehensive gesture, expressive of the saddest
renunciation.
“What does it matter? Who cares? It is only another illusion
vanished----”
And he turned and left me, drooping through the mist, and bent on what
lamentable vigil only the spirit of desolation might know.
Well, I at least could be held in no sense responsible for the event.
As I rapidly mounted the slope to the inn, I thought I could perceive
two forms standing on the steps overlooking the street. I shouted a
word of cheery reassurance, which was as jocundly answered; but, when
I reached the place, only the relieved young landlord stood there to
greet me. He was, of course, full of concern, enquiry, eager
congratulation. As to Carabas, he assuaged my apprehensions with an
easy optimism. It was not the first time he would have elected to
spend the night abroad. When the inspired fit was on him, there was no
holding him within conventional bounds; and doubtless the events of
the evening had tended to set alight in him the ever-smouldering spark
of genius. I need not disturb myself about him. As to any other
possible provocation, if he knew or suspected such, he was discreetly
silent on the subject; and I, for my part, felt curiously shy of any
reference to Mademoiselle, or to the part her anxiety had played in
the questions of my non-appearance and late return. I had a glad
recuperative “nightcap” with the good fellow; then, loth to keep him
longer from his delayed repose, took my candle in hand, and mounted
softly to my bedroom.
Once shut in there, my boots left outside, I tiptoed softly, fearful
over the least noise I made, hardly daring to breathe. Not a sound
came from the next room; not a word, not a murmur. She was asleep,
then; and that was well. And yet she was not asleep, and I knew it.
Only a few minutes before she had been out there on the steps, waiting
and listening in an agony of mind. But she was reassured now; she
could rest. It would be wise to leave all explanation to the morrow.
And yet that resolve had hardly been made when I knew that I was
powerless to keep it. The thought of the long hours to pass in that
dead-locked silence between us was already insupportable. I could not
suffer it, and hope for forgetfulness. I must speak, if only a
word--to say good-night. And yet, God help us, I must not speak. I
fought against the longing while fight was possible to me; I set my
teeth and endured and resisted. But the moment came when I could
endure no longer.
“Fifine,” I said softly.
There was no answer; and I waited a minute, and spoke again.
“Fifine; it is all right; I have come back. I am so sorry, Fifine.”
Something answered me then--a little sound, but enough to send a flood
of wild emotion surging through my veins. I rose, I went to the door.
“Fifine,” I whispered; “shall I come in?”
No response; and I turned the handle noiselessly and stole in. She was
lying fully dressed upon her bed, her face turned from me, her whole
body shaken with suppressed sobbing.
I stood remorsefully looking down for a moment; then--I could not help
it. I went and knelt by her, and slid my arm under her neck, and took
the soft troubled body to myself.
“Fifine!” I whispered. “It is no good our trying to resist it, is it?
It has to be. It is no good, is it, Fifine?”
And she whispered back, with a long quivering sigh, “No----” and her
arms caught and held me convulsively.