One day I was pacing my room in the restlessness that now seldom
left me, when a knock sounded on my door; and, going irritably to open
it, I saw my step-sister Marion. She looked at me and I at her for a
full minute before either of us spoke; then “May I come in, Felix?”
she said in a low voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You may come or you may go,” I said. “It is
all one to me.”
I turned from her, and she closed the door and followed me. In the
studio she sat down, while I continued my wild-beast pacing.
“You are not looking well,” she said suddenly.
“What does that matter--to you or any one?” I answered, and came to a
quick stop before her. “Did you really call to enquire after my
health?”
“I came to say good-bye.”
“O?”
“I am going back to England.”
“Having satisfactorily completed what you came to do here?”
“Yes, in a way. Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire is about to be married.”
I stared down on her in amazement.
“Upon my word!” I said. “This to my face?”
“What,” she answered, a little frigidly, “is the use of keeping up
that fiction, since you and your affairs have become public property?”
“None, for you, perhaps, in default of what we will call a natural
remorse or shame.”
“I will not have you say that, Felix. Apply it to yourself, rather,
remembering the advantage you took of the trust committed to you.”
“I took no advantage, as you call it, until I learnt that the trust
was a lying one.”
“She told you?”
“She did not. You will be careful, if you are wise, how you deal with
her name here. She was loyal to her betrayers to the end. It was quite
by accident that I learned the truth--the imposture to which we had
both been induced to lend ourselves--unconsciously on my part--by a
clergyman’s moral daughter.”
“You may save your sarcasm, Felix: it does not impress me. I had a
desperate duty to perform, and I took the only means possible at hand
to effect it. It was partly with a view to giving you the explanation
which is certainly your due that I came to-day. If you wish to hear,
you shall.”
I had resumed my tramping, but stopped at that, and faced her.
“O!” I said; “you think it my due, do you? Having robbed and ruined
me, you think it just to supply me with the psychologic reasons for
your act.”
“How can you hold me, directly or indirectly, responsible for this
tragedy? Am _I_ in collusion with these bandits, do you suppose?”
I stood looking at her--no more; but for all her resolution she found
something in that searching inquisition beyond her endurance; and her
eyes fell before it, while a faint spot of colour came to her sallow
cheek.
“Not you, Marion,” I said softly--“no, not you.”
She looked up quickly, with a desperate effort to recover her
self-command.
“Thank you, at least, Felix,” she said, “for that handsome admission.”
“Marion,” I said, still quite quietly confronting her: “how is your
noble employer regarding this desertion of yours?”
“He is not regarding it at all. He has had a paralytic stroke, and if
he recovers, which is improbable, he will never regard anything again,
in reason. A fortnight ago he was removed from the Hôtel Beaurepaire,
and he will not return.”
I nodded my head, my eyes a little wide.
“So? You interest me. Well, we know to whom vengeance belongs. It is a
comfort to think of the settlement being so near.” I went up and down
again, and again stopped. “You may as well tell me,” I said. “Having
it now on my mind, I should be worried, lacking an explanation; and I
want to get it all cleared away, all the wickedness and the
abomination, that the only memory I care about may be left sweet.”
“You speak nearer the truth than you think, Felix. Wickedness and
abomination indeed: you will understand, when you know; and perhaps
then you will take a less merciless view. You remember what I told you
about Monseigneur’s discovery, and his mad fury thereon? It was
necessary to get the girl away, with all despatch, out of his
clutches. That evening things had come to an appalling crisis--and she
was ill. The nervous shock and strain had been too much for her, and
she was in bed--not in her own room, but in one far remote and
secreted--incapable of the least effort--to move her would have been
certainly fatal. I had made all arrangements for her transference to
the school I told you of; but some one--the house was full of his
tools, his panders--had betrayed me. That night the girl Fréron
happened to be there. She was said to have an attractive voice--I am
no judge of such things myself--and she was used to give Josephine
singing lessons. She was quite in the confidence of the Countess, who
was greatly attached to her in her way, and she was more or less
acquainted with the state of affairs. It was to her was due that
sudden inspiration, which did actually save the situation. ‘Why not,’
she said, ‘pretend that I am Mademoiselle, and under her name hurry me
away to the school, where I can pass for her until such time as it is
safe to acknowledge the deception? If we manage cleverly, Monseigneur
will be informed of the escape of his daughter, and will no longer
think of looking for her in the house; so that, on your return, you
will be able, quietly and unsuspected, to nurse her into
convalescence, and thereafter seize your first opportunity to smuggle
her away, and carry her into hiding, whether at the school itself or
elsewhere?’ It was a counsel of desperation; but at least it was a
straw on which to seize in a terrible emergency. I seized on it,
Felix. Dressed in Josephine’s cloak and hat--the two girls were
fortunately much of a figure--Fréron left with me, leaving it to be
inferred, by those interested in my movements, that I had actually put
my plan into execution. It is useless to detail the particulars of our
escape; but at least one thing is certain, that Monseigneur actually
believed his prey to have eluded him, and that he took instant steps,
on the information received, to have us followed and intercepted. In
that sink of abomination, however, there existed one or two unequal to
the strain of villainy imposed upon them; and it was to one of these
we owed the warning which diverted us from our course. You know the
rest.”
Marion ended; and I regarded her in gloomy cynicism.
“No, not by a great deal,” I said. “Why, for instance, did you not
confide the truth to me?”
“I believed it possible, Felix, that, in spite of all our cunning, his
emissaries might track her down.”
“Track whom down? O, I see! And, after disposing of her, report to the
Marquis the fulfilment of his vengeance on an unruly daughter?”
Marion was silent.
“You holy devil!” I said. “You astute unconscionable devil!”
She rose in great agitation.
“You do not understand, Felix.”
“What am I to understand? That this poor unhappy girl was to be
sacrificed to a misapprehension rather than risk the truth which would
have saved her, and that, for the sake of that misapprehension, I, who
might have righted it, was to remain uninformed?”
“It would not have saved her. When he came to hear it, which he did at
last--God knows how!--his fury was implacable against every instrument
in his deception.”
“Poor ruined child! And this was your return to her for her devoted
self-sacrifice? Why did he not kill _you_?”
“I don’t know. I had an influence over him: I dared him to his face;
and for some reason he respected me.”
“I don’t doubt it--he recognised in you his superior; his arch-fiend.
And you dare to accuse me--_me_, of an abuse of trust. Wasn’t that in
the reckoning? Didn’t you know it was? Her virtue, like her life, was
only a pawn in the game you were playing. I can see that clearly
enough now. All, everything must be sacrificed to your damned
emergency--a child of the people rather than a child of the
aristocracy. O, you are the very saint of snobs!”
She was controlling herself. She had made a tremendous effort, and
stood facing me, flushed but resolute.
“You may say what you like, Felix,” she answered. “I make allowances
for your natural grief, however wrong the false interpretation it
drives you to put upon my motives. But you do not understand those, I
say; and I, who do, cannot at this hour believe that I was misdirected
in the course I pursued. It is justified in the result; in an
appalling design frustrated; in a rescue accomplished at last through
much difficulty and danger. You regard it only as an imperilled life
saved.”
“What else?”
“Much more and much worse.”
“What worse?”
“O, Felix Dane! the worse that was actually perpetrated, and on very
much the same provocation, by a mediæval monster called Francesco
Cenci. It was to save her from that fate that I did what I had to do.”
Marion was gone--and in peace. We parted friends; but I hope I may
never see her again. Truly, character is the fruit of circumstance,
rich or insipid according to the climate it inhabits. Transplanted
straight from a humdrum parsonage into the volcanic soil of passion
and insanity, who would have thought that that starchy puritanism
could ever have developed the qualities of resource and imagination it
came to reveal in the face of almost supernatural difficulties and
terrors. She was a great soul, I think—the material of a great
commander, rigid and unswerving in the course which her duty, as she
conceived it, pointed out to her; prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice
the lesser to the greater where the ultimate good demanded an
inexorable decision.
But I turned from her at last to my dreams, with a sigh of
renunciation of all things in the world that were not of them or for
them. I knew at length the whole that was to be known of the story of
Fifine, and, for that knowledge, all of new that blossomed from it was
the piteous added sense of martyrdom. She had suffered, my darling,
that her sister might be spared.
That evening, for the first time since my bereavement, I lifted her
portrait from the place where I had laid it with its face to the wall,
and we sat and talked together, she and I; and, with the tears
dropping unconstrained down my cheeks, I upbraided her tenderly for
that, of all her sweetnesses, she had withheld from me one that I
should have loved among the best.
Now that night, falling asleep and dreaming, I was all at once on the
shining hill-sides of les Baux, climbing and seeking alone, but with a
great rapture in my soul; and a thousand butterflies looped about my
head, and a scent of warm crushed lavender went with me like
incense--only I was alone. But suddenly from amongst the ruins came a
voice to me, singing so sweetly that my heart brimmed over to hear it
in a very ecstasy of joy, and with blinded eyes I stumbled on and
towards the beautiful tones--so strange, yet so familiar. And, lo! my
girl, with yearning smiling eyes, and extended arms--
I have heard it, then--I will never believe but that I have heard it.
Could she bear to withhold from me, even in death, one charm that had
not been mine?
And so ends Fifine’s story. No man in all his life has known a sweeter
love; no man a bitterer desolation.
Finis
_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay_
ENDNOTES
[1] In the Luxembourg.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ chêvre/chèvre, plane-trees/plane
trees, reappeared/re-appeared, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Add TOC.
Convert footnote to endnote.
[Chapter XI]
“Thereafter we travelled, as it were, in a two-roomed cottage” add
period at end of sentence.
“To my sister. as you say. Yes, it is new to” change first period to
comma.
[Chapter XIV]
(that,’ she said. “But go, and never let me see thy face again.’)
change left double quotation mark to left single quotation mark.
[Chapter XVII]
Change “will find the highest happiness who is _satifised_ to yield”
to _satisfied_.
“bottom of the hill we came to a _cross road_” to _crossroad_.
[Chapter XVIII]
“It was a mistake to utter his name--and _ironiccally_.” to
_ironically_.
[Chapter XIX]
“with _occassionally_ a cultivated field of olive or almond” to
_occasionally_.
“the sound penetrated, cutting _though_ the web of sleep” to
_through_.
[Chapter XXI]
“A certain _commerical_ importance attaches, I fancy, to Orange” to
_commercial_.
[End of text]