BOOK II

I

Through calico curtains, carefully drawn across the two large windows,

a pale white light like that of breaking day filtered into the room. It

was a lofty and spacious room, fitted up with old Louis XV. furniture,

the woodwork painted white, the upholstery showing a pattern of red

flowers on a leafy ground. On the piers above the doors on either side

of the alcove were faded paintings still displaying the rosy flesh

of flying Cupids, whose games it was now impossible to follow. The

wainscoting with oval panels, the folding doors, the rounded ceiling

(once sky-blue and framed with scrolls, medallions, and bows of

flesh-coloured ribbons), had all faded to the softest grey. Opposite the

windows the large alcove opened beneath banks of clouds which plaster

Cupids drew aside, leaning over, and peeping saucily towards the bed.

And like the windows, the alcove was curtained with coarsely hemmed

calico, whose simplicity seemed strange in this room where lingered a

perfume of whilom luxury and voluptuousness.

Seated near a pier table, on which a little kettle bubbled over a

spirit-lamp, Albine intently watched the alcove curtains. She was

gowned in white, her hair gathered up in an old lace kerchief, her hands

drooping wearily, as she kept watch with the serious mien of youthful

womanhood. A faint breathing, like that of a slumbering child, could be

heard in the deep silence. But she grew restless after a few minutes,

and could not restrain herself from stepping lightly towards the alcove

and raising one of the curtains. On the edge of the big bed lay Serge,

apparently asleep, with his head resting on his bent arm. During his

illness his hair had lengthened, and his beard had grown. He looked very

white, with sunken eyes and pallid lips.

Moved by the sight Albine was about to let the curtain fall again. But

Serge faintly murmured, ‘I am not asleep.’

He lay perfectly still with his head on his arm, without stirring even

a finger, as if overwhelmed by delightful weariness. His eyes had slowly

opened, and his breath blew lightly on one of his hands, raising the

golden down on his fair skin.

‘I heard you,’ he murmured again. ‘You were walking very gently.’*

* From this point in the original Serge and Albine thee and thou

one another; but although this _tutoiement_ has some bearing on

the development of the story, it was impossible to preserve it

in an English translation.--ED.

His voice enchanted her. She went up to his bed and crouched beside it

to bring her face on a level with his own. ‘How are you?’ she asked, and

then continued: ‘Oh! you are well now. Do you know, I used to cry the

whole way home when I came back from over yonder with bad news of you.

They told me you were delirious, and that if your dreadful fever did

spare your life, it would destroy your reason. Oh, didn’t I kiss your

uncle Pascal when he brought you here to recruit your health!’

Then she tucked in his bed-clothes like a young mother.

‘Those burnt-up rocks over yonder, you see, were no good to you. You

need trees, and coolness, and quiet. The doctor hasn’t even told a soul

that he was hiding you away here. That’s a secret between himself and

those who love you. He thought you were lost. Nobody will ever disturb

you, you may be sure of that! Uncle Jeanbernat is smoking his pipe by

his lettuce bed. The others will get news of you on the sly. Even the

doctor isn’t coming back any more. I am to be your doctor now. You don’t

want any more physic, it seems. What you now want is to be loved; do you

see?’

He did not seem to hear her, his brain as yet was void. His eyes,

although his head remained motionless, wandered inquiringly round the

room, and it struck her that he was wondering where he might be.

‘This is my room,’ she said. ‘I have given it to you. Isn’t it a pretty

one? I took the finest pieces of furniture out of the lumber attic, and

then I made those calico curtains to prevent the daylight from dazzling

me. And you’re not putting me out a bit. I shall sleep on the second

floor. There are three or four empty rooms there.’

Still he looked anxious.

‘You’re alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes; why do you ask that?’

He made no answer, but muttered wearily: ‘I have been dreaming, I am

always dreaming. I hear bells ringing, and they tire me.’

And after a pause he went on: ‘Go and shut the door, bolt it; I want you

to be alone, quite alone.’

When she came back, bringing a chair with her, and sat down by his

pillow, he looked as gleeful as a child, and kept on saying: ‘Nobody can

come in now. I shall not hear those bells any more. When you are talking

to me, it rests me.’

‘Would you like something to drink?’ she asked.

He made a sign that he was not thirsty. He looked at Albine’s hands as

if so astonished, so delighted to see them, that with a smile she laid

one on the edge of his pillow. Then he let his head glide down, and

rested his cheek against that small, cool hand, saying, with a light

laugh: ‘Ah! it’s as soft as silk. It is just as if it were sending a

cool breeze through my hair. Don’t take it away, please.’

Then came another long spell of silence. They gazed on one another with

loving kindliness--Albine calmly scanning herself in the convalescent’s

eyes, Serge apparently listening to some faint whisper from the small,

cool hand.

‘Your hand is so nice,’ he said once more. ‘You can’t fancy what good it

does me. It seems to steal inside me, and take away all the pain in my

limbs. It’s as if I were being soothed all over, relieved, cured.’

He gently rubbed his cheek against it, with growing animation, as if he

were at last coming back to life.

‘You won’t give me anything nasty to drink, will you? You won’t worry me

with all sorts of physic? Your hand is quite enough for me. I have come

here for you to put it there under my head.’

‘Dear Serge,’ said Albine softly, ‘how you must have suffered.’

‘Suffered! yes, yes; but it’s a long time ago. I slept badly, I had such

frightful dreams. If I could, I would tell you all about it.’

He closed his eyes for a moment and strove hard to remember.

‘I can see nothing but darkness,’ he stammered. ‘It is very odd, I

have just come back from a long journey. I don’t even know now where I

started from. I had fever, I know, a fever that raced through my veins

like a wild beast. That was it--now I remember. The whole time I had a

nightmare, in which I seemed to be crawling along an endless underground

passage; and every now and then I had an attack of intolerable pain, and

then the passage would be suddenly walled up. A shower of stones fell

from overhead, the side walls closed in, and there I stuck, panting,

mad to get on; and then I bored into the obstacle and battered away with

feet and fists, and skull, despairing of ever being able to get through

the ever increasing mound of rubbish. At other times, I only had to

touch it with my finger and it vanished: I could then walk freely along

the widened gallery, weary only from the pangs of my attack.’

Albine tried to lay a hand upon his lips.

‘No,’ said he, ‘it doesn’t tire me to talk. I can whisper to you

here, you see. I feel as if I were thinking and you could hear me. The

queerest point about that underground journey of mine was that I hadn’t

the faintest idea of turning back again; I got obstinate, although I had

the thought before me that it would take me thousands of years to clear

away a single heap of wreckage. It seemed a fated task, which I had to

fulfil under pain of the greatest misfortunes. So, with my knees all

bruised, and my forehead bumping against the hard rock, I set myself

to work with all my might, so that I might get to the end as quickly as

possible. The end? What was it?... Ah! I do not know, I do not know.’

He closed his eyes and pondered dreamily. Then, with a careless pout, he

again sank upon Albine’s hand and said laughing: ‘How silly of me! I am

a child.’

But the girl, to ascertain if he were wholly hers, questioned him and

led him back to the confused recollections he had tried to summon up.

He could remember nothing, however; he was truly in a happy state of

childhood. He fancied that he had been born the day before.

‘Oh! I am not strong enough yet,’ he said. ‘My furthest recollection is

of a bed which burned me all over, my head rolled about on a pillow

like a pan of live coals, and my feet wore away with perpetual rubbing

against each other. I was very bad, I know. It seemed as if I were

having my body changed, as if I were being taken all to pieces, and put

together again like some broken machine.’

He laughed at this simile, and continued: ‘I shall be all new again. My

illness has given me a fine cleaning. But what was it you were asking

me? No, nobody was there. I was suffering all by myself at the bottom

of a black hole. Nobody, nobody. And beyond that, nothing--I can see

nothing.... Let me be your child, will you? You shall teach me to walk.

I can see nothing else but you now. I care for nothing but you.... I

can’t remember, I tell you. I came, you took me, and that is all.’

And restfully, pettingly, he said once more: ‘How warm your hand is now!

it is as nice as the sun. Don’t let us talk any more. It makes me hot.’

A quivering silence fell from the blue ceiling of the large room. The

spirit lamp had just gone out, and from the kettle came a finer and

finer thread of steam. Albine and Serge, their heads side by side upon

the pillow, gazed at the large calico curtains drawn across the windows.

Serge’s eyes, especially, were attracted to them as to the very source

of light, in which he sought to steep himself, as in diluted sunshine

fitted to his weakness. He could tell that the sun lay behind that

yellower gleam upon one corner of the curtain, and that sufficed to make

him feel himself again. Meanwhile a far-off rustle of leaves came upon

his listening ear, and against the right-hand window the clean-cut

greenish shadow of a lofty bough brought him disturbing thoughts of the

forest which he could feel to be near him.

‘Would you like me to open the curtains?’ asked Albine, misunderstanding

his steady gaze.

‘No, no,’ he hastily replied.

‘It’s a fine day; you would see the sunlight and the trees.’

‘No, please don’t.... I don’t want to see anything outside. That bough

there tires me with its waving and its rising, as if it was alive. Leave

your hand here, I will go to sleep. All is white now. It’s so nice.’

And then he calmly fell asleep, while Albine watched beside him and

breathed upon his face to make his slumber cool.

II

The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily.

Serge’s fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes

despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell

dim and ashy grey as in a cellar. He could no longer see a trace of

sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the

shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the

pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest.

Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine

that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country

bewailing the death of the sun. She had to soothe him like a child,

promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that

she would give it to him. But he also grieved for the plants. The seeds,

he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light;

they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an

underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to

reach the sunshine. And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that

winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the

earth, unless the springtide healed them both.

For three days more the weather was truly frightful. The downpour burst

over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river. Gusts

of wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of

enormous waves. Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters. By

lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains,

he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest

chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him.

However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken

arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more

ailing. At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending

trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the

hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to

be passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of

light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once

more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening

paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also

longed for the sun; twenty times a day would she go to the window on the

landing to scan the sky, delighted at the smallest scrap of white that

she espied, but perturbed when she perceived any dusky, copper-tinted,

hail-laden masses, and ever dreading lest some sable cloud should kill

her dear patient. She talked of sending for Doctor Pascal, but Serge

would not have it.

‘To-morrow there will be sunlight on the curtains,’ he said, ‘and then I

shall be well again.’

One evening when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him

her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no

relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the

lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the

nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of

spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath

scant; she no longer knew how to breathe life into him. For hours

together she would roam about the spacious dismal room, and as she

passed before the mirror and saw herself darkening in it, she thought

she had become hideous.

One morning, however, as she raised his pillows, not daring to try again

the broken spell of her hands, she fancied that she once more caught the

first day’s smile on Serge’s lips.

‘Open the shutters,’ he said faintly.

She thought him still delirious, for only an hour previously she had

seen but a gloomy sky on looking out from the landing.

‘Hush, go to sleep,’ she answered sadly; ‘I have promised to wake you at

the very first ray---- Sleep on, there’s no sun out yet.’

‘Yes, I can feel it, its light is there.... Open the shutters.’

III

And there, indeed, the sunlight was. When Albine had opened the

shutters, behind the large curtains, the genial yellow glow once more

warmed a patch of the white calico. But that which impelled Serge to sit

up in bed was the sight of the shadowy bough, the branch that for him

heralded the return of life. All the resuscitated earth, with its wealth

of greenery, its waters, and its belts of hills, was in that greenish

blur that quivered with the faintest breath of air. It no longer

disturbed him; he greedily watched it rocking, and hungered for the

fortified powers of the vivifying sap which to him it symbolised.

Albine, happy once more, exclaimed, as she supported him in her arms:

‘Ah! my dear Serge, the winter is over. Now we are saved.’

He lay down again, his eyes already brighter, and his voice clearer.

‘To-morrow I shall be very strong,’ he said. ‘You shall draw back the

curtains. I want to see everything.’

But on the morrow he was seized with childish fear. He would not hear of

the windows being opened wide. ‘By-and-by,’ he muttered, ‘later on.’ He

was fearful, he dreaded the first beam of light that would flash upon

his eyes. Evening came on, and still he had been unable to make up

his mind to look upon the sun. He remained thus all day long, his face

turned towards the curtains, watching on their transparent tissue the

pallor of morn, the glow of noon, the violet tint of twilight, all

the hues, all the emotions of the sky. There were pictured even the

quiverings of the warm air at the light stroke of a bird’s wing, even

the delight of earth’s odours throbbing in a sunbeam. Behind that veil,

behind that softened phantasm of the mighty life without, he could hear

the rise of spring. He even felt stifled at times when in spite of the

curtains’ barrier the rush of the earth’s new blood came upon him too

strongly.

The following morning he was still asleep when Albine, to hasten his

recovery, cried out to him:

‘Serge! Serge! here’s the sun!’

She swiftly drew back the curtains and threw the windows wide open. He

raised himself and knelt upon his bed, oppressed, swooning, his hands

tightly pressed against his breast to keep his heart from breaking.

Before him stretched the broad sky, all blue, a boundless blue; and

in it he washed away his sufferings, surrendering himself to it, and

drinking from it sweetness and purity and youth. The bough whose shadow

he had noted jutted across the window and alone set against the azure

sea its vigorous growth of green; but even this was too much for his

sickly fastidiousness; it seemed to him that the very swallows flying

past besmeared the purity of the azure. He was being born anew. He

raised little involuntary cries, as he felt himself flooded with light,

assailed by waves of warm air, while a whirling, whelming torrent of

life flowed within him. As last with outstretched hands he sank back

upon his pillow in a swoon of joy.

What a happy, delicious day that was! The sun came in from the right,

far away from the alcove. Throughout the morning Serge watched it

creeping onward. He could see it coming towards him, yellow as gold,

perching here and there on the old furniture, frolicking in corners,

at times gliding along the ground like a strip of ribbon. It was a slow

deliberate march, the approach of a fond mistress stretching her golden

limbs, drawing nigh to the alcove with rhythmic motion, with voluptuous

lingering, which roused intense desire. At length, towards two o’clock,

the sheet of sunlight left the last armchair, climbed along the

coverlet, and spread over the bed like loosened locks of hair. To its

glowing fondling Serge surrendered his wasted hands: with his eyes

half-closed, he could feel fiery kisses thrilling each of his fingers;

he lay in a bath of light, in the embrace of a glowing orb. And when

Albine leaned over smiling, ‘Let me be,’ he stammered, his eyes now

shut; ‘don’t hold me so tightly. How do you manage to hold me like this

in your arms?’

But the sun crept down the bed again and slowly retreated to the left;

and as Serge watched it bend once more and settle on chair after chair,

he bitterly regretted that he had not kept it to his breast. Albine

still sat upon the side of the bed, and the pair of them, an arm round

each other’s neck, watched the slow paling of the sky. At times a mighty

thrill seemed to make it blanch. Serge’s languid eyes now wandered over

it more freely and detected in it exquisite tints of which he had never

dreamed. It was not all blue, but rosy blue, lilac blue, tawny blue,

living flesh, vast and spotless nudity heaving like a woman’s bosom

in the breeze. At every glance into space he found a fresh

surprise--unknown nooks, coy smiles, bewitching rounded outlines, gauzy

veils which were cast over the mighty, glorious forms of goddesses

in the depths of peeping paradises. And with his limbs lightened by

suffering he winged his way amid that shimmering silk, that stainless

down of azure. The sun sank lower and lower, the blue melted into purest

gold, the sky’s living flesh gleamed fairer still, and then was slowly

steeped in all the hues of gloom. Not a cloud--nought but gradual

disappearance, a disrobing which left behind it but a gleam of modesty

on the horizon. And at last the broad sky slumbered.

‘Oh, the dear baby!’ exclaimed Albine, as she looked at Serge, who had

fallen asleep upon her neck at the same time as the heavens.

She laid him down in bed and shut the windows. Next morning, however,

they were opened at break of day. Serge could no longer live without the

sunlight. His strength was growing, he was becoming accustomed to the

gusts of air which sent the alcove curtains flying. Even the azure, the

everlasting azure, began to pall upon him. He grew weary of being white

and swanlike, of ever swimming on heaven’s limpid lake. He came to wish

for a pack of black clouds, some crumbling of the skies, that would

break upon the monotony of all that purity. And as his health returned,

he hungered for keener sensations. He now spent hours in gazing at the

verdant bough: he would have liked to see it grow, expand, and throw

out its branches to his very bed. It no longer satisfied him, but

only roused desires, speaking to him as it did of all the trees whose

deep-sounding call he could hear although their crests were hidden from

his sight. An endless whispering of leaves, a chattering as of running

water, a fluttering as of wings, all blended in one mighty, long-drawn,

quivering voice, resounded in his ears.

‘When you are able to get up,’ said Albine, ‘you shall sit at the

window. You will see the lovely garden!’

He closed his eyes and murmured gently:

‘Oh! I can see it, I hear it; I know where the trees are, where the

water runs, where the violets grow.’

And then he added: ‘But I can’t see it clearly, I see it without any

light. I must be very strong before I shall be able to get as far as the

window.’

At times when Albine thought him asleep, she would vanish for hours. And

on coming in again, she would find him burning with impatience, his eyes

gleaming with curiosity.

‘Where have you been?’ he would call to her, taking hold of her arms,

and feeling her skirts, her bodice, and her cheeks. ‘You smell of all

sorts of nice things. Ah! you have been walking on the grass?’

At this she would laugh and show him her shoes wet with dew.

‘You have been in the garden! you have been in the garden!’ he then

exclaimed delightedly. ‘I knew it. When you came in you seemed like a

large flower. You have brought the whole garden in your skirt.’

He would keep her by him, inhaling her like a nosegay. Sometimes she

came back with briars, leaves, or bits of wood entangled in her clothes.

These he would remove and hide under his pillow like relics. One day she

brought him a bunch of roses. At the sight of them he was so affected

that he wept. He kissed them and went to sleep with them in his arms.

But when they faded, he felt so keenly grieved that he forbade Albine to

gather any more. He preferred her, said he, for she was as fresh and as

balmy; and she never faded, her hands, her hair, her cheeks were always

fragrant. At last he himself would send her into the garden, telling her

not to come back before an hour.

‘In that way,’ he said, ‘I shall get sunlight, fresh air, and roses till

to-morrow.’

Often, when he saw her coming in out of breath, he would cross-examine

her. Which path had she taken? Had she wandered among the trees, or had

she gone round the meadow side? Had she seen any nests? Had she sat down

behind a bush of sweetbriar, or under an oak, or in the shade of a clump

of poplars? But when she answered him and tried to describe the garden

to him, he would put his hand to her lips.

‘No, no,’ he said gently. ‘It is wrong of me. I don’t want to know. I

would rather see it myself.’

Then he would relapse into his favourite dream of all the greenery which

he could feel only a step away. For several days he lived on that

dream alone. At first, he said, he had perceived the garden much more

distinctly. As he gained strength, the surging blood that warmed

his veins seemed to blur his dreamy imaginings. His uncertainties

multiplied. He could no longer tell whether the trees were on the right,

whether the water flowed at the bottom of the garden, or whether some

great rocks were not piled below his windows. He talked softly of all

this to himself. On the slightest indication he would rear wondrous

plans, which the song of a bird, the creaking of a bough, the scent of a

flower, would suddenly make him modify, impelling him to plant a thicket

of lilac in one spot, and in another to place flower-beds where formerly

there had been a lawn. Every hour he designed some new garden, much to

the amusement of Albine, who, whenever she surprised him at it, would

exclaim with a burst of laughter: ‘That’s not it, I assure you. You

can’t have any idea of it. It’s more beautiful than all the beautiful

things you ever saw. So don’t go racking your head about it. The

garden’s mine, and I will give it to you. Be easy, it won’t run away.’

Serge, who had already been so afraid of the light, felt considerable

trepidation when he found himself strong enough to go and rest his

elbows on the window-sill. Every evening he once more repeated,

‘To-morrow,’ and ‘To-morrow.’ He would turn away in his bed with

a shudder when Albine came in, and would cry out that she smelt of

hawthorn, that she had scratched her hands in burrowing a hole through

a hedge to bring him all its odour. One morning, however, she suddenly

took him up in her arms, and almost carrying him to the window, held him

there and forced him to look out and see.

‘What a coward you are!’ she exclaimed with her fine ringing laugh.

And waving one hand all round the landscape, she repeated with an air of

triumph, full of tender promise: ‘The Paradou! The Paradou!’

Serge looked out upon it, speechless.

IV

A sea of verdure, in front, to right, to left, everywhere. A sea rolling

its surging billows of leaves as far as the horizon, unhindered by

house, or screen of wall, or dusty road. A desert, virgin, hallowed

sea, displaying its wild sweetness in the innocence of solitude. The

sun alone came thither, weltering in the meadows in a sheet of gold,

threading the paths with the frolicsome scamper of its beams, letting

its fine-spun, flaming locks droop through the trees, sipping from the

springs with amber lips that thrilled the water. Beneath that flaming

dust the vast garden ran riot like some delighted beast let loose at

the world’s very end, far from everything and free from everything.

So prodigal was the luxuriance of foliage, so overflowing the tide of

herbage, that from end to end it all seemed hidden, flooded, submerged.

Nought could be seen but slopes of green, stems springing up like

fountains, billowy masses, woodland curtains closely drawn, mantles of

creepers trailing over the ground, and flights of giant boughs swooping

down upon every side.

Amidst that tremendous luxuriance of vegetation even lengthy scrutiny

could barely make out the bygone plan of the Paradou. In the foreground,

in a sort of immense amphitheatre, must have lain the flower garden,

whose fountains were now sunken and dry, its stone balustrades

shattered, its flight of steps all warped, and its statues overthrown,

patches of their whiteness gleaming amidst the dusky stretches of turf.

Farther back, behind the blue line of a sheet of water, stretched a maze

of fruit-trees; farther still rose towering woodland, its dusky, violet

depths streaked with bands of light. It was a forest which had regained

virginity, an endless stretch of tree-tops rising one above the other,

tinged with yellowish green and pale green and vivid green, according to

the variety of the species.

On the right, the forest scaled some hills, dotting them with little

clumps of pine-trees, and dying away in straggling brushwood, while a

huge barrier of barren rock, heaped together like the fallen wreckage of

a mountain, shut out all view beyond. Flaming growths there cleaved the

rugged soil, monstrous plants lay motionless in the heat, like drowsing

reptiles; a silvery streak, a foamy splash that glistened in the

distance like a cloud of pearls, revealed the presence of a waterfall,

the source of those tranquil streams that lazily skirted the

flower-garden. Lastly, on the left the river flowed through a vast

stretch of meadowland, where it parted into four streamlets which winded

fitfully beneath the rushes, between the willows, behind the taller

trees. And far away into the distance grassy patches prolonged the

lowland freshness, forming a landscape steeped in bluish haze, where

a gleam of daylight slowly melted into the verdant blue of sunset. The

Paradou--its flower-garden, forest, rocks, streams, and meadows--filled

the whole breadth of sky.

‘The Paradou!’ stammered Serge, stretching out his arms as if to clasp

the entire garden to his breast.

He tottered, and Albine had to seat him in an armchair. There he sat

for two whole hours intently gazing, without opening his lips, his chin

resting on his hands. At times his eyelids fluttered and a flush rose

to his cheeks. Slowly he looked, profoundly amazed. It was all too vast,

too complex, too overpowering.

‘I cannot see, I cannot understand,’ he cried, stretching out his hands

to Albine with a gesture of uttermost weariness.

The girl came and leant over the back of his armchair. Taking his head

between her hands, she compelled him to look again, and softly said:

‘It’s all our own. Nobody will ever come in. When you are well again, we

will go for walks there. We shall have room enough for walking all our

lives. We’ll go wherever you like. Where would you like to go?’

He smiled.

‘Oh! not far,’ he murmured. ‘The first day only two steps or so beyond

the door. I should surely fall---- See, I’ll go over there, under that

tree close to the window.’

But she resumed: ‘Would you like to go into the flower-garden, the

parterre? You shall see the roses--they have over-run everything, even

the old paths are all covered with them. Or would you like the orchard

better? I can only crawl into it on my hands and knees, the boughs are

so bowed down with fruit. But we’ll go even farther if you feel strong

enough. We’ll go as far as the forest, right into the depths of shade,

far, far away; so far that we’ll sleep out there when night steals over

us. Or else, some morning, we can climb up yonder to the summit of

those rocks. You’ll see the plants which make me quake; you’ll see the

springs, such a shower of water! What fun it will be to feel the spray

all over our faces!... But if you prefer to walk along the hedges,

beside a brook, we must go round by the meadows. It is so nice under

the willows in the evening, at sunset. One can lie down on the grass and

watch the little green frogs hopping about on the rushes.’

‘No, no,’ said Serge, ‘you weary me, I don’t want to go so far.... I

will only go a couple of steps, that will be more than enough.’

‘Even I,’ she still continued, ‘even I have not yet been able to go

everywhere. There are many nooks I don’t know. I have walked and walked

in it for years, and still I feel sure there are unknown spots around,

places where the shade must be cooler and the turf softer. Listen, I

have always fancied there must be one especially in which I should like

to live for ever. I know it’s somewhere; I must have passed it by, or

perhaps it’s hidden so far away that I have never even got as far, with

all my rambles. But we’ll look for it together, Serge, won’t we? and

live there.’

‘No, no, be quiet,’ stammered the young man. ‘I don’t understand what

you are saying. You’re killing me.’

For a moment she let him sob in her arms. It troubled and grieved her

that she could find no words to soothe him.

‘Isn’t the Paradou as beautiful, then, as you fancied it?’ she asked at

last.

He raised his face and answered:

‘I don’t know. It was quite little, and now it is ever growing bigger

and bigger---- Take me away, hide me.’

She led him back to bed, soothing him like a child, lulling him with a

fib.

‘There, there! it’s not true, there is no garden. It was only a story

that I told you. Go, sleep in peace.’

V

Every day in this wise she made him sit at the window during the cool

hours of morning. He would now attempt to take a few steps, leaning the

while on the furniture. A rosy tint appeared upon his cheeks, and his

hands began to lose their waxy transparency. But, while he thus regained

health, his senses remained in a state of stupor which reduced him to

the vegetative life of some poor creature born only the day before.

Indeed, he was nothing but a plant; his sole perception was that of

the air which floated round him. He lacked the blood necessary for

the efforts of life, and remained, as it were, clinging to the soil,

imbibing all the sap he could. It was like a slow hatching in the warm

egg of springtide. Albine, remembering certain remarks of Doctor

Pascal, felt terrified at seeing him remain in this state, ‘innocent,’

dull-witted like a little boy. She had heard it said that certain

maladies left insanity behind them. And she spent hours in gazing at him

and trying her utmost, as mothers do, to make him smile. But as yet he

had not laughed. When she passed her hand across his eyes, he never

saw, he never followed the shadow. Even when she spoke to him, he barely

turned his head in the direction whence the sound came. She had but one

consolation: he thrived splendidly, he was quite a handsome child.

For another whole week she lavished the tenderest care on him. She

patiently waited for him to grow. And as she marked various symptoms

of awakening perception, her fears subsided and she began to think

that time might make a man of him. When she touched him now he started

slightly. Another time, one night, he broke into a feeble laugh. On the

morrow, when she had seated him at the window, she went down into the

garden, and ran about in it, calling to him the while. She vanished

under the trees, flitted across the sunny patches, and came back

breathless and clapping her hands. At first his wavering eyes failed

to perceive her. But as she started off again, perpetually playing at

hide-and-seek, reappearing behind every other bush, he was at last

able to follow the white gleam of her skirt; and when she suddenly came

forward and stood with upraised face below his window, he stretched out

his arms and seemed anxious to go down to her. But she came upstairs

again, and embraced him proudly: ‘Ah! you saw me, you saw me!’ she

cried. ‘You would like to come into the garden with me, would you

not?---- If you only knew how wretched you have made me these last few

days, with your stupid ways, never seeing me or hearing me!’

He listened to her, but apparently with some slight sensation of pain

that made him bend his neck in a shrinking way.

‘You are better now, however,’ she went on. ‘Well enough to come down

whenever you like---- Why don’t you say anything? Have you lost your

tongue? Oh, what a baby! Why, I shall have to teach him how to talk!’

And thereupon she really did amuse herself by telling him the names of

the things he touched. He could only stammer, reiterating the syllables,

and failing to utter a single word plainly. However, she began to walk

him about the room, holding him up and leading him from the bed to the

window--quite a long journey. Two or three times he almost fell on the

way, at which she laughed. One day he fairly sat down on the floor, and

she had all the trouble in the world to get him up on his feet again.

Then she made him undertake the round of the room, letting him rest by

the way on the sofa and the chairs--a tour round a little world which

took up a good hour. At last he was able to venture on a few steps

alone. She would stand before him with outstretched hands, and move

backwards, calling him, so that he should cross the room in search of

her supporting arms. If he sulked and refused to walk, she would take

the comb from her hair and hold it out to him like a toy. Then he would

come to her and sit still in a corner for hours, playing with her comb,

and gently scratching his hands with its teeth.

At last one morning she found him up. He had already succeeded in

opening one of the shutters, and was attempting to walk about without

leaning on the furniture.

‘Good gracious, we are active this morning!’ she exclaimed gleefully.

‘Why, he will be jumping out of the window to-morrow if he has his own

way---- So you are quite strong now, eh?’

Serge’s answer was a childish laugh. His limbs were regaining the

strength of adolescence, but more perceptive sensations remained

unroused. He spent whole afternoons in gazing out on the Paradou,

pouting like a child that sees nought but whiteness and hears but the

vibration of sounds. He still retained the ignorance of urchinhood--his

sense of touch as yet so innocent that he failed to tell Albine’s gown

from the covers of the old armchairs. His eyes still stared wonderingly;

his movements still displayed the wavering hesitation of limbs which

scarce knew how to reach their goal; his state was one of incipient,

purely instinctive existence into which entered no knowledge of

surroundings. The man was not yet born within him.

‘That’s right, you’ll act the silly, will you?’ muttered Albine. ‘We’ll

see.’

She took off her comb, and held it out to him.

‘Will you have my comb?’ she said. ‘Come and fetch it.’

When she had got him out of the room, by retreating before him all the

way, she put her arm round his waist and helped him down each stair,

amusing him while she put her comb back, even tickling his neck with

a lock of her hair, so that he remained unaware that he was going

downstairs. But when he was in the hall, he became frightened at the

darkness of the passage.

‘Just look!’ she cried, throwing the door wide open.

It was like a sudden dawn, a curtain of shadow snatched aside, revealing

the joyousness of early day. The park spread out before them verdantly

limpid, freshly cool and deep as a spring. Serge, entranced, lingered

upon the threshold, with a hesitating desire to feel that luminous lake

with his foot.

‘One would think you were afraid of wetting yourself,’ said Albine.

‘Don’t be frightened, the ground is safe enough.’

He had ventured to take one step, and was astonished at encountering the

soft resistance of the gravel. The first touch of the soil gave him a

shock; life seemed to rebound within him and to set him for a moment

erect, with expanding frame, while he drew long breaths.

‘Come now, be brave,’ insisted Albine. ‘You know you promised me to

take five steps. We’ll go as far as the mulberry tree there under the

window---- There you can rest.’

It took him a quarter of an hour to make those five steps. After each

effort he stopped as if he had been obliged to tear up roots that held

him to the ground.

The girl, pushing him along, said with a laugh: ‘You look just like a

walking tree.’

Having placed him with his back leaning against the mulberry tree, in

the rain of sunlight falling from its boughs, she bounded off and left

him, calling out to him that he must not stir. Serge, standing

there with drooping hands, slowly turned his head towards the park.

Terrestrial childhood met his gaze. The pale greenery was steeped in the

very milk of youth, flooded with golden brightness. The trees were still

in infancy, the flowers were as tender-fleshed as babes, the streams

were blue with the artless blue of lovely infantile eyes. Beneath every

leaf was some token of a delightful awakening.

Serge had fixed his eyes upon a yellow breach which a wide path made in

front of him amidst a dense mass of foliage. At the very end, eastward,

some meadows, steeped in gold, looked like the luminous field upon which

the sun would descend, and he waited for the morn to take that path and

flow towards him. He could feel it coming in a warm breeze, so faint

at first that it barely brushed across his skin, but rising little by

little, and growing ever brisker till he was thrilled all over. He could

also taste it coming with a more and more pronounced savour, bringing

the healthful acridity of the open air, holding to his lips a feast of

sugary aromatics, sour fruits, and milky shoots. Further, he could smell

it coming with the perfumes which it culled upon its way--the scent of

earth, the scent of the shady woods, the scent of the warm plants, the

scent of living animals, a whole posy of scents, powerful enough to

bring on dizziness. He could likewise hear it coming with the rapid

flight of a bird skimming over the grass, waking the whole garden from

silence, giving voice to all it touched, and filling his ears with the

music of things and beings. Finally, he could see it coming from the end

of the path, from the meadows steeped in gold--yes, he could see that

rosy air, so bright that it lighted the way it took with a gleaming

smile, no bigger in the distance than a spot of daylight, but in a few

swift bounds transformed into the very splendour of the sun. And the

morn flowed up and beat against the mulberry tree against which Serge

was leaning. And he himself resuscitated amidst the childhood of the

morn.

‘Serge! Serge!’ cried Albine, lost to sight behind the high shrubs of

the flower garden. ‘Don’t be afraid, I am here.’

But Serge no longer felt frightened. He was being born anew in the

sunshine, in that pure bath of light which streamed upon him. He was

being born anew at five-and-twenty, his senses hurriedly unclosing,

enraptured with the mighty sky, the joyful earth, the prodigy of

loveliness spread out around him. This garden, which he knew not only

the day before, now afforded him boundless delight. Everything filled

him with ecstasy, even the blades of grass, the pebbles in the paths,

the invisible puffs of air that flitted over his cheeks. His whole body

entered into possession of this stretch of nature; he embraced it

with his limbs, he drank it in with his lips, he inhaled it with his

nostrils, he carried it in his ears and hid it in the depths of his

eyes. It was his own. The roses of the flower garden, the lofty boughs

of the forest, the resounding rocks of the waterfall, the meadows which

the sun planted with blades of light, were his. Then he closed his eyes

and slowly reopened them that he might enjoy the dazzle of a second

wakening.

‘The birds have eaten all the strawberries,’ said Albine disconsolately,

as she ran up to him. ‘See, I have only been able to find these two!’

But she stopped short a few steps away, heart-struck and gazing at Serge

with rapturous astonishment. ‘How handsome you are!’ she cried.

She drew a little nearer; then stood there, absorbed in her

contemplation, and murmuring: ‘I had never, never seen you before.’

He had certainly grown taller. Clothed in a loose garment, he stood

erect, still somewhat slender, with finely moulded limbs, square chest,

and rounded shoulders. His head, slightly thrown back, was poised upon

a flexible and snowy neck, rimmed with brown behind. Health and strength

and power were on his face. He did not smile, his expression was that of

repose, with grave and tender mouth, firm cheeks, large nose, and grey,

clear, commanding eyes. The long locks that thickly covered his head

fell upon his shoulders in jetty curls; while a slender growth of hair,

through which gleamed his white skin, curled upon his upper lip and

chin.

‘Oh! how handsome, how handsome you are!’ lingeringly repeated Albine,

crouching at his feet and gazing up at him with loving eyes. ‘But why

are you sulking with me? Why don’t you speak to me?’

Still he stood there and made no answer. His eyes were far away; he

never even saw that child at his feet. He spoke to himself in the

sunlight, and said: ‘How good the light is!’

That utterance sounded like a vibration of the sunlight itself. It fell

amid the silence in the faintest of whispers like a musical sigh, a

quiver of warmth and of life. For several days Albine had never heard

his voice, and now, like himself, it had altered. It seemed to her to

course through the park more sweetly than the melody of birds, more

imperiously than the wind that bends the boughs. It reigned, it ruled.

The whole garden heard it, though it had been but a faint and passing

breath, and the whole garden was thrilled with the joyousness it

brought.

‘Speak to me,’ implored Albine. ‘You have never spoken to me like that.

When you were upstairs in your room, when you were not dumb, you talked

the silly prattle of a child. How is it I no longer know your voice?

Just now I thought it had come down from the trees, that it reached me

from every part of the garden, that it was one of those deep sighs that

used to worry me at night before you came. Listen, everything is keeping

silence to hear you speak again.’

But still he failed to recognise her presence. Tenderer grew her tones.

‘No, don’t speak if it tires you. Sit down beside me, and we will

remain here on the grass till the sun wanes. And look, I have found two

strawberries. Such trouble I had too! The birds eat up everything. One’s

for you, both if you like; or we can halve them, and taste each of them.

You’ll thank me, and then I shall hear you.’

But he would not sit down, he refused the strawberries, which Albine

pettishly threw away. She did not open her lips again. She would rather

have seen him ill, as in those earlier days when she had given him her

hand for a pillow, and had felt him coming back to life beneath the

cooling breath she blew upon his face. She cursed the returning health

which now made him stand in the light like a young unheeding god. Would

he be ever thus then, with never a glance for her? Would he never be

further healed, and at last see her and love her? And she dreamed of

once again being his healer, of accomplishing by the sole power of her

little hands the cure of the second childhood in which he remained.

She could clearly see that there was no spark in the depths of his grey

eyes, that his was but a pallid beauty like that of the statues which

had fallen among the nettles of the flower-garden. She rose and clasped

him, breathing on his neck to rouse him. But that morning Serge never

even felt the breath that lifted his silky beard. The sun got low, it

was time to go indoors. On reaching his room, Albine burst into tears.

From that morning forward the invalid took a short walk in the garden

every day. He went past the mulberry tree, as far as the edge of the

terrace, where a wide flight of broken steps descended to the flowery

parterre. He grew accustomed to the open air, each bath of sunlight

brought him fresh vigour. A young chestnut tree, which had sprung from

some fallen nut between two stones of the balustrade, burst the resin

of its buds, and unfolded its leafy fans with far less vigour than he

progressed. One day, indeed, he even attempted to descend the steps,

but in this his strength failed him, and he sat down among the dane-wort

which had grown up between the cracks in the stone flags. Below, to the

left, he could see a small wood of roses. It was thither that he dreamt

of going.

‘Wait a little longer,’ said Albine. ‘The scent of the roses is too

strong for you yet. I have never been able to sit long under the

rose-trees without feeling exhausted, light-headed, with a longing to

cry. Don’t be afraid, I will some day lead you to the rose-trees, and I

shall surely weep among them, for you make me very sad.’

VI

One morning she at last succeeded in helping him to the foot of the

steps, trampling down the grass before him with her feet, and clearing

a way for him through the briars, whose supple arms barred the last few

yards. Then they slowly entered the wood of roses. It was indeed a very

wood, with thickets of tall standard roses throwing out leafy clumps as

big as trees, and enormous rose bushes impenetrable as copses of young

oaks. Here, formerly, there had been a most marvellous collection

of plants. But since the flower garden had been left in abandonment,

everything had run wild, and a virgin forest had arisen, a forest of

roses over-running the paths, crowded with wild offshoots, so mingled,

so blended, that roses of every scent and hue seemed to blossom on the

same stem. Creeping roses formed mossy carpets on the ground, while

climbing roses clung to others like greedy ivy plants, and ascended in

spindles of verdure, letting a shower of their loosened petals fall

at the lightest breeze. Natural paths coursed through the wood--narrow

footways, broad avenues, enchanting covered walks in which one strolled

in the shade and scent. These led to glades and clearings, under bowers

of small red roses, and between walls hung with tiny yellow ones. Some

sunny nooks gleamed like green silken stuff embroidered with bright

patterns; other shadier corners offered the seclusion of alcoves and an

aroma of love, the balmy warmth, as it were, of a posy languishing on a

woman’s bosom. The rose bushes had whispering voices too. And the rose

bushes were full of songbirds’ nests.

‘We must take care not to lose ourselves,’ said Albine, as she entered

the wood. ‘I did lose myself once, and the sun had set before I was

able to free myself from the rose bushes which caught me by the skirt at

every step.’

They had barely walked a few minutes, however, before Serge, worn out

with fatigue, wished to sit down. He stretched himself upon the ground,

and fell into deep slumber. Albine sat musing by his side. They were on

the edge of a glade, near a narrow path which stretched away through the

wood, streaked with flashes of sunlight, and, through a small round blue

gap at its far end, revealed the sky. Other little paths led from the

clearing into leafy recesses. The glade was formed of tall rose bushes

rising one above the other with such a wealth of branches, such a tangle

of thorny shoots, that big patches of foliage were caught aloft, and

hung there tent-like, stretching out from bush to bush. Through the tiny

apertures in the patches of leaves, which were suggestive of fine lace,

the light filtered like impalpable sunny dust. And from the vaulted roof

hung stray branches, chandeliers, as it were, thick clusters suspended

from green thread-like stems, armfuls of flowers that reached to the

ground, athwart some rent in the leafy ceiling, which trailed around

like a tattered curtain.

Albine meanwhile was gazing at Serge asleep. She had never seen him so

utterly prostrated in body as now, his hands lying open on the turf, his

face deathly. So dead indeed he was to her that she thought she could

kiss his face without his even feeling it. And sadly, absently, she

busied her hands with shredding all the roses within her reach. Above

her head drooped an enormous cluster which brushed against her hair, set

roses on her twisted locks, her ears, her neck, and even threw a mantle

of the fragrant flowers across her shoulders. Higher up, under

her fingers, other roses rained down with large and tender petals

exquisitely formed, which in hue suggested the faintly flushing purity

of a maiden’s bosom. Like a living snowfall these roses already hid her

feet in the grass. And they climbed her knees, covered her skirt,

and smothered her to her waist; while three stray petals, which had

fluttered on to her bodice, just above her bosom, there looked like

three glimpses of her bewitching skin.

‘Oh! the lazy fellow!’ she murmured, feeling bored and picking up two

handfuls of roses, which she flung in Serge’s face to wake him.

He did not stir, however, but still lay there with the roses on his eyes

and mouth. This made Albine laugh. She stooped down, and with her whole

heart kissed both his eyes and his mouth, blowing as she kissed to drive

the rose petals away; but they remained upon his lips, and she broke

into still louder laughter, intensely amused at this flowery caressing.

Serge slowly raised himself. He gazed at her with amazement, as if

startled at finding her there.

‘Who are you? where do you come from? what are you doing here beside

me?’ he asked her. And still she smiled, transported with delight

at marking this awakening of his senses. Then he seemed to remember

something, and continued with a gesture of happy confidence:

‘I know, you are my love, flesh of my flesh, you are waiting for me that

we may be one for ever. I was dreaming of you. You were in my breast,

and I gave you my blood, my muscles, my bones. I felt no pain. You took

half my heart so tenderly that I experienced keen inward delight at thus

dividing myself. I sought all that was best and most beautiful within

me to give it to you. You might have carried off everything, and still

I should have thanked you. And I woke when you went out of me. You

left through my eyes and mouth; ay, I felt it. You were all warm, all

fragrant, so sweet that it was the thrill from you that has made me

awake.’

Albine listened to his words with ecstasy. At last he saw her; at last

his birth was accomplished, his cure begun. With outstretched hands she

begged him to go on.

‘How have I managed to live without you?’ he murmured. ‘No, I did not

live, I was like a slumbering animal. And now you are mine! and you are

no one but myself! Listen, you must never leave me; for you are my very

breath, and in leaving me you would rob me of my life. We will remain

within ourselves. You will be mine even as I shall be yours. Should I

ever forsake you, may I be accursed, may my body wither like a useless

and noxious weed!’

He caught hold of her hands, and exclaimed in a voice quivering with

admiration: ‘How beautiful you are!’

In the falling dust of sunshine Albine’s skin looked milky white, scarce

gilded here and there by the sunny sheen. The shower of roses around and

on her steeped her in pinkness.

Her fair hair, loosely held together by her comb, decked her head as

with a setting planet whose last bright sparks shone upon the nape of

her neck. She wore a white gown; her arms, her throat, her stainless

skin bloomed unabashed as a flower, musky with a goodly fragrance. Her

figure was slender, not too tall, but supple as a snake’s, with softly

rounded, voluptuously expanding outlines, in which the freshness of

childhood mingled with womanhood’s nascent charms. Her oval face, with

its narrow brow and rather full mouth, beamed with the tender living

light of her blue eyes. And yet she was grave, too, her cheeks

unruffled, her chin plump--as naturally lovely as are the trees.

‘And how I love you!’ said Serge, drawing her to himself.

They were wholly one another’s now, clasped in each other’s arms! They

did not kiss, but held each other round the waist, cheek to cheek,

united, dumb, delighted with their oneness. Around them bloomed the

roses with a mad, amorous blossoming, full of crimson and rosy and white

laughter. The living, opening flowers seemed to bare their very bosoms.

Yellow roses were there showing the golden skin of barbarian maidens:

straw-coloured roses, lemon-coloured roses, sun-coloured roses--every

shade of the necks which are ambered by glowing skies. Then there was

skin of softer hue: among the tea roses, bewitchingly moist and cool,

one caught glimpses of modest, bashful charms, with skin as fine as silk

tinged faintly with a blue network of veins. Farther on all the smiling

life of the rose expanded: there was the blush white rose, barely

tinged with a dash of carmine, snowy as the foot of a maid dabbling in a

spring; there was the silvery pink, more subdued than even the glow

with which a youthful arm irradiates a wide sleeve; there was the clear,

fresh rose, in which blood seemed to gleam under satin as in the bare

shoulders of a woman bathed in light; and there was the bright pink rose

with its buds like the nipples of virgin bosoms, and its opening flowers

that suggested parted lips, exhaling warm and perfumed breath. And

the climbing roses, the tall cluster roses with their showers of white

flowers, clothed all these others with the lacework of their bunches,

the innocence of their flimsy muslin; while, here and there, roses dark

as the lees of wine, sanguineous, almost black, showed amidst the bridal

purity like passion’s wounds. Verily, it was like a bridal--the bridal

of the fragrant wood, the virginity of May led to the fertility of

July and August; the first unknowing kiss culled like a nosegay on

the wedding morn. Even in the grass, moss roses, clad in close-fitting

garments of green wool, seemed to be awaiting the advent of love.

Flowers rambled all along the sun-streaked path, faces peeped out

everywhere to court the passing breezes. Bright were the smiles under

the spreading tent of the glade. Not a flower that bloomed the same: the

roses differed in the fashion of their wooing. Some, shy and blushing,

would show but a glimpse of bud, while others, panting and wide open,

seemed consumed with infatuation for their persons. There were pert,

gay little things that filed off, cockade in cap; there were huge ones,

bursting with sensuous charms, like portly, fattened-up sultanas; there

were impudent hussies, too, in coquettish disarray, on whose petals the

white traces of the powder-puff could be espied; there were virtuous

maids who had donned low-necked garb like demure _bourgeoises_; and

aristocratic ladies, graceful and original, who contrived attractive

deshabilles. And the cup-like roses offered their perfume as in precious

crystal; the drooping, urn-shaped roses let it drip drop by drop; the

round, cabbage-like roses exhaled it with the even breath of slumbering

flowers; while the budding roses tightly locked their petals and only

sent forth as yet the faint sigh of maidenhood.

‘I love you, I love you,’ softly repeated Serge.

Albine, too, was a large rose, a pallid rose that had opened since the

morning. Her feet were white, her arms were rosy pink, her neck was fair

of skin, her throat bewitchingly veined, pale and exquisite. She was

fragrant, she proffered lips which offered as in a coral cup a perfume

that was yet faint and cool. Serge inhaled that perfume, and pressed her

to his breast. Albine laughed.

The ring of that laugh, which sounded like a bird’s rhythmic notes,

enraptured Serge.

‘What, that lovely song is yours?’ he said. ‘It is the sweetest I ever

heard. You are indeed my joy.’

Then she laughed yet more sonorously, pouring forth rippling scales of

high-pitched, flute-like notes that melted into deeper ones. It was an

endless laugh, a long-drawn cooing, then a burst of triumphant music

celebrating the delight of awakening love. And everything--the roses,

the fragrant wood, the whole of the Paradou--laughed in that laugh of

woman just born to beauty and to love. Till now the vast garden had

lacked one charm--a winning voice which should prove the living mirth

of the trees, the streams, and the sunlight. Now the vast garden was

endowed with that charm of laughter.

‘How old are you?’ asked Albine, when her song had ended in a faint

expiring note.

‘Nearly twenty-six,’ Serge answered.

She was amazed. What! he was twenty-six! He, too, was astonished at

having made that answer so glibly, for it seemed to him that he had not

yet lived a day--an hour.

‘And how old are you?’ he asked in his turn.

‘Oh, I am sixteen.’

Then she broke into laughter again, quivering from head to foot,

repeating and singing her age. She laughed at her sixteen years with a

fine-drawn laugh that flowed on with rhythmic trilling like a streamlet.

Serge scanned her closely, amazed at the laughing life that transfigured

her face. He scarcely knew her now with those dimples in her cheeks,

those bow-shaped lips between which peeped the rosy moistness of her

mouth, and those eyes blue like bits of sky kindling with the rising of

the sun. As she threw back her head, she sent a glow of warmth through

him.

He put out his hand, and fumbled mechanically behind her neck.

‘What do you want?’ she asked. And suddenly remembering, she exclaimed:

‘My comb! my comb! that’s it.’

She gave him her comb, and let fall her heavy tresses. A cloth of gold

suddenly unrolled and clothed her to her hips. Some locks which flowed

down upon her breast gave, as it were a finishing touch to her

regal raiment. At the sight of that sudden blaze, Serge uttered an

exclamation; he kissed each lock, and burned his lips amidst that

sunset-like refulgence.

But Albine now relieved herself of her long silence, and chatted and

questioned unceasingly.

‘Oh, how wretched you made me! You no longer took any notice of me, and

day after day I found myself useless and powerless, worried out of my

wits like a good-for-nothing.... And yet the first few days I had done

you good. You saw me and spoke to me.... Do you remember when you were

lying down, and went to sleep on my shoulder, and murmured that I did

you good?’

‘No!’ said Serge, ‘no, I don’t remember it. I had never seen you before.

I have only just seen you for the first time--lovely, radiant, never to

be forgotten.’

She clapped her hands impatiently, exclaiming: ‘And my comb? You must

remember how I used to give you my comb to keep you quiet when you were

a little child? Why, you were looking for it just now.’

‘No, I don’t remember. Your hair is like fine silk. I have never kissed

your hair before.’

At this, with some vexation, she recounted certain particulars of his

convalescence in the room with the blue ceiling. But he only laughed

at her, and at last closed her lips with his hand, saying with anxious

weariness: ‘No, be quiet, I don’t know; I don’t want to know any

more.... I have only just woke up, and found you there, covered with

roses. That is enough.’

And he drew her once more towards him and held her there, dreaming

aloud, and murmuring: ‘Perhaps I have lived before. It must have been a

long, long time ago.... I loved you in a painful dream. You had the same

blue eyes, the same rather long face, the same youthful mien. But your

hair was carefully hidden under a linen cloth, and I never dared to

remove that cloth, because your locks seemed to me fearsome and

would have made me die. But to-day your hair is the very sweetness of

yourself. It preserves your scent, and when I kiss it, when I bury my

face in it like this, I drink in your very life.’

He kept on passing the long curls through his hands, and pressing them

to his lips, as if to squeeze from them all Albine’s blood. And after

an interval of silence, he continued: ‘It’s strange, before one’s birth,

one dreams of being born.... I was buried somewhere. I was very cold.

I could hear all the life of the world outside buzzing above me. But I

shut my ears despairingly, for I was used to my gloomy den, and enjoyed

some fearful delights in it, so that I never sought to free myself from

all the earth weighing upon my chest. Where could I have been then? Who

was it gave me light?’

He struggled to remember, while Albine now waited in fear and trembling

lest he should really do so. Smiling, she took a handful of her hair and

wound it round the young man’s neck, thus fastening him to herself. This

playful act roused him from his musings.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I am yours, what does the rest matter? It was

you, was it not, who drew me out of the earth? I must have been under

this garden. What I heard were your steps rattling the little pebbles

in the path. You were looking for me, you brought down upon my head the

songs of the birds, the scent of the pinks, the warmth of the sun. I

fancied that you would find me at last. I waited a long time for you.

But I never expected that you would give yourself to me without your

veil, with your hair undone--the terrible hair which has become so

soft.’

He sat her on his lap, placing his face beside hers.

‘Do not let us talk any more. We are alone for ever. We love each

other.’

And thus in all innocence they lingered in each other’s arms; for a

long, long time did they remain there forgetfully. The sun rose higher;

and the dust of light fell hotter from the lofty boughs. The yellow and

white and crimson roses were now only a ray of their delight, a sign

of their smiles to one another. They had certainly caused buds to open

around them. The roses crowned their heads and threw garlands about

their waists. And the scent of the roses became so penetrating, so

strong with amorous emotion, that it seemed to be the scent of their own

breath.

At last Serge put up Albine’s hair. He raised it in handfuls with

delightful awkwardness, and stuck her comb askew in the enormous

knot that he had heaped upon her head. And as it happened she looked

bewitching thus. Then, rising from the ground, he held out his hands to

her, and supported her waist as she got up. They still smiled without

speaking a word, and slowly they went down the path.

VII

Albine and Serge entered the flower garden. She was watching him

with tender anxiety, fearing lest he should overtire himself; but he

reassured her with a light laugh. He felt strong enough indeed to carry

her whithersoever she listed. When he found himself once more in the

full sunlight, he drew a sigh of content. At last he lived; he was no

longer a plant subject to the terrible sufferings of winter. And how he

was moved with loving gratitude! Had it been within his power, he would

have spared Albine’s tiny feet even the roughness of the paths; he

dreamed of carrying her, clinging round his neck, like a child lulled

to sleep by her mother. He already watched over her with a guardian’s

watchful care, thrusting aside the stones and brambles, jealous lest the

breeze should waft a fleeting kiss upon those darling locks which were

his alone. She on her side nestled against his shoulder and serenely

yielded to his guidance.

Thus Albine and Serge strolled on together in the sunlight for the first

time. A balmy fragrance floated in their wake, the very path on which

the sun had unrolled a golden carpet thrilled with delight under their

feet. Between the tall flowering shrubs they passed like a vision of

such wondrous charm that the distant paths seemed to entreat their

presence and hail them with a murmur of admiration, even as crowds hail

long-expected sovereigns. They formed one sole, supremely lovely being.

Albine’s snowy skin was but the whiteness of Serge’s browner skin.

And slowly they passed along clothed with sunlight--nay, they were

themselves the sun--worshipped by the low bending flowers.

A tide of emotion now stirred the Paradou to its depths. The old flower

garden escorted them--that vast field bearing a century’s untrammelled

growth, that nook of Paradise sown by the breeze with the choicest

flowers. The blissful peace of the Paradou, slumbering in the broad

sunlight, prevented the degeneration of species. It could boast of a

temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched

to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour. Its vegetation was

mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths

decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot

of gardeners. Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the

depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint

aside more heartily at each return of spring, indulged in mighty

gambols, delighted in offering herself at all seasons strange nosegays

not meant for any hand to pluck. A rabid fury seemed to impel her to

overthrow whatever the effort of man had created; she rebelliously cast

a straggling multitude of flowers over the paths, attacked the rockeries

with an ever-rising tide of moss, and knotted round the necks of marble

statues the flexible cords of creepers with which she threw them down;

she shattered the stonework of the fountains, steps, and terraces with

shrubs which burst through them; she slowly, creepingly, spread over the

smallest cultivated plots, moulding them to her fancy, and planting on

them, as ensign of rebellion, some wayside spore, some lowly weed which

she transformed into a gigantic growth of verdure. In days gone by the

parterre, tended by a master passionately fond of flowers, had displayed

in its trim beds and borders a wondrous wealth of choice blossoms. And

the same plants could still be found; but perpetuated, grown into such

numberless families, and scampering in such mad fashion throughout the

whole garden, that the place was now all helter-skelter riot to its very

walls, a very den of debauchery, where intoxicated nature had hiccups of

verbena and pinks.

Though to outward seeming Albine had yielded her weaker self to the

guidance of Serge, to whose shoulder she clung, it was she who really

led him. She took him first to the grotto. Deep within a clump of

poplars and willows gaped a cavern, formed by rugged bits of rocks which

had fallen over a basin where tiny rills of water trickled between the

stones. The grotto was completely lost to sight beneath the onslaught of

vegetation. Below, row upon row of hollyhocks seemed to bar all entrance

with a trellis-work of red, yellow, mauve, and white-hued flowers, whose

stems were hidden among colossal bronze-green nettles, which calmly

exuded blistering poison. Above them was a mighty swarm of creepers

which leaped aloft in a few bounds; jasmines starred with balmy flowers;

wistarias with delicate lacelike leaves; dense ivy, dentated and

resembling varnished metal; lithe honeysuckle, laden with pale coral

sprays; amorous clematideae, reaching out arms all tufted with white

aigrettes. And among them twined yet slenderer plants, binding them

more and more closely together, weaving them into a fragrant woof.

Nasturtium, bare and green of skin, showed open mouths of ruddy gold;

scarlet runners, tough as whipcord, kindled here and there a fire of

gleaming sparks; convolvuli opened their heart-shaped leaves, and with

thousands of little bells rang a silent peal of exquisite colours;

sweetpeas, like swarms of settling butterflies, folded tawny or rosy

wings, ready to be borne yet farther away by the first breeze. It

was all a wealth of leafy locks, sprinkled with a shower of flowers,

straying away in wild dishevelment, and suggesting the head of some

giantess thrown back in a spasm of passion, with a streaming of

magnificent hair, which spread into a pool of perfume.

‘I have never dared to venture into all that darkness,’ Albine whispered

to Serge.

He urged her on, carried her over the nettles; and as a great boulder

barred the way into the grotto, he held her up for a moment in his arms

so that she might be able to peer through the opening that yawned at a

few feet from the ground.

‘A marble woman,’ she whispered, ‘has fallen full length into the

stream. The water has eaten her face away.’

Then he, too, in his turn wanted to look, and pulled himself up. A cold

breeze played upon his cheeks. In the pale light that glided through the

hole, he saw the marble woman lying amidst the reeds and the duckweed.

She was naked to the waist. She must have been drowning there for the

last hundred years. Some grief had probably flung her into that spring

where she was slowly committing suicide. The clear water which flowed

over her had worn her face into a smooth expanse of marble, a mere white

surface without a feature; but her breasts, raised out of the water by

what appeared an effort of her neck, were still perfect and lifelike,

throbbing even yet with the joys of some old delight.

‘She isn’t dead yet,’ said Serge, getting down again. ‘One day we will

come and get her out of there.’

But Albine shuddered and led him away. They passed out again into the

sunlight and the rank luxuriance of beds and borders. They wandered

through a field of flowers capriciously, at random. Their feet trod a

carpet of lovely dwarf plants, which had once neatly fringed the walks,

and now spread about in wild profusion. In succession they passed

ankle-deep through the spotted silk of soft rose catchflies, through the

tufted satin of feathered pinks, and the blue velvet of forget-me-nots,

studded with melancholy little eyes. Further on they forced their way

through giant mignonette, which rose to their knees like a bath of

perfume; then they turned through a patch of lilies of the valley in

order that they might spare an expanse of violets, so delicate-looking

that they feared to hurt them. But soon they found themselves surrounded

on all sides by violets, and so with wary, gentle steps they passed over

their fresh fragrance inhaling the very breath of springtide. Beyond the

violets, a mass of lobelias spread out like green wool gemmed with

pale mauve. The softly shaded stars of globularia, the blue cups of

nemophila, the yellow crosses of saponaria, the white and purple ones

of sweet rocket, wove patches of rich tapestry, stretching onward and

onward, a fabric of royal luxury, so that the young couple might enjoy

the delights of that first walk together without fatigue. But the

violets ever reappeared; real seas of violets that rolled all round

them, shedding the sweetest perfumes beneath their feet and wafting in

their wake the breath of their leaf-hidden flowerets.

Albine and Serge quite lost themselves. Thousands of loftier plants

towered up in hedges around them, enclosing narrow paths which they

found it delightful to thread. These paths twisted and turned, wandered

maze-like through dense thickets. There were ageratums with sky-blue

tufts of bloom; woodruffs with soft musky perfume; brazen-throated

mimuluses, blotched with bright vermilion; lofty phloxes, crimson and

violet, throwing up distaffs of flowers for the breezes to spin; red

flax with sprays as fine as hair; chrysanthemums like full golden moons,

casting short faint rays, white and violet and rose, around them. The

young couple surmounted all the obstacles that lay in their path and

continued their way betwixt the walls of verdure. To the right of

them sprang up the slim fraxinella, the centranthus draped with

snowy blossoms, and the greyish hounds-tongue, in each of whose tiny

flowercups gleamed a dewdrop. To their left was a long row of columbines

of every variety; white ones, pale rose ones, and some of deep violet

hues, almost black, that seemed to be in mourning, the blossoms that

drooped from their lofty, branching stems being plaited and goffered

like crape. Then, as they advanced further on, the character of the

hedges changed. Giant larkspurs thrust up their flower-rods, between the

dentated foliage of which gaped the mouths of tawny snapdragons, while

the schizanthus reared its scanty leaves and fluttering blooms, that

looked like butterflies’ wings of sulphur hue splashed with soft lake.

The blue bells of campanulae swayed aloft, some of them even over the

tall asphodels, whose golden stems served as their steeples. In one

corner was a giant fennel that reminded one of a lace-dressed lady

spreading out a sunshade of sea-green satin. Then the pair suddenly

found their way blocked. It was impossible to advance any further;

a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress. Down

below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the

midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and

clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia

of some barbarous order. Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria,

the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty

green bloom contrasted with the glowing colours around it. Towering over

all these growths scarlet foxgloves and blue lupins, rising in slender

columns, formed a sort of oriental rotunda gleaming vividly with crimson

and azure; while at the very summit, like a surmounting dome of dusky

copper, were the ruddy leaves of a colossal castor-bean.

As Serge reached out his hands to try to force a passage, Albine stopped

him and begged him not to injure the flowers. ‘You will break the stems

and crush the leaves,’ she said. ‘Ever since I have been here, I have

always taken care to hurt none of them. Come, and I will show you the

pansies.’

She made him turn and led him from the narrow paths to the centre of the

parterre, where, once upon a time, great basins had been hollowed

out. But these had now fallen into ruin, and were nothing but gigantic

_jardinières_, fringed with stained and cracked marble. In one of the

largest of them, the wind had sown a wonderful basketful of pansies.

The velvety blooms seemed almost like living faces, with bands of violet

hair, yellow eyes, paler tinted mouths, and chins of a delicate flesh

colour.

When I was younger they used to make me quite afraid,’ murmured Albine.

‘Look at them. Wouldn’t you think that they were thousands of little

faces looking up at you from the ground? And they turn, too, all in

the same direction. They might be a lot of buried dolls thrusting their

heads out of the ground.’

She led him still further on. They went the round of all the other

basins. In the next one a number of amaranthuses had sprung up, raising

monstrous crests which Albine had always shrunk from touching, such was

their resemblance to big bleeding caterpillars. Balsams of all colours,

now straw-coloured, now the hue of peach-blossom, now blush-white, now

grey like flax, filled another basin where their seed pods split with

little snaps. Then in the midst of a ruined fountain, there flourished

a colony of splendid carnations. White ones hung over the moss-covered

rims, and flaked ones thrust a bright medley of blossom between the

chinks of the marble; while from the mouth of the lion, whence formerly

the water-jets had spurted, a huge crimson clove now shot out so

vigorously that the decrepit beast seemed to be spouting blood. Near by,

the principal piece of ornamental water, a lake, on whose surface swans

had glided, had now become a thicket of lilacs, beneath whose shade

stocks and verbenas and day-lilies screened their delicate tints, and

dozed away, all redolent of perfume.

‘But we haven’t seen half the flowers yet,’ said Albine, proudly. ‘Over

yonder there are such huge ones that I can quite bury myself amongst

them like a partridge in a corn-field.’

They went thither. They tripped down some broad steps, from whose fallen

urns still flickered the violet fires of the iris. All down the steps

streamed gilliflowers, like liquid gold. The sides were flanked with

thistles, that shot up like candelabra, of green bronze, twisted and

curved into the semblance of birds’ heads, with all the fantastic

elegance of Chinese incense-burners. Between the broken balustrades

drooped tresses of stonecrop, light greenish locks, spotted as with

mouldiness. Then at the foot of the steps another parterre spread out,

dotted over with box-trees that were vigorous as oaks; box-trees which

had once been carefully pruned and clipped into balls and pyramids and

octagonal columns, but which were now revelling in unrestrained freedom

of untidiness, breaking out into ragged masses of greenery, through

which blue patches of sky were visible.

And Albine led Serge straight on to a spot that seemed to be the

graveyard of the flower-garden. There the scabious mourned, and

processions of poppies stretched out in line, with deathly odour,

unfolding heavy blooms of feverish brilliance. Sad anemones clustered in

weary throngs, pallid as if infected by some epidemic. Thick-set daturas

spread out purplish horns, from which insects, weary of life, sucked

fatal poison. Marigolds buried with choking foliage their writhing

starry flowers, that already reeked of putrefaction. And there were

other melancholy flowers also: fleshy ranunculi with rusty tints,

hyacinths and tuberoses that exhaled asphyxia and died from their own

perfume. But the cinerarias were most conspicuous, crowding thickly in

half-mourning robes of violet and white. In the middle of this gloomy

spot a mutilated marble Cupid still remained standing, smiling beneath

the lichens which overspread his youthful nakedness, while the arm with

which he had once held his bow lay low amongst the nettles.

Then Albine and Serge passed on through a rank growth of peonies,

reaching to their waists. The white flowers fell to pieces as they

passed, with a rain of snowy petals which was as refreshing to their

hands as the heavy drops of a thunder shower. And the red ones grinned

with apoplectical faces which perturbed them. Next they passed through

a field of fuchsias, forming dense, vigorous shrubs that delighted them

with their countless bells. Then they went on through fields of purple

veronicas and others of geraniums, blazing with all the fiery tints of

a brasier, which the wind seemed to be ever fanning into fresh heat. And

they forced their way through a jungle of gladioli, tall as reeds, which

threw up spikes of flowers that gleamed in the full daylight with all

the brilliance of burning torches. They lost themselves too in a forest

of sunflowers, with stalks as thick as Albine’s wrist, a forest darkened

by rough leaves large enough to form an infant’s bed, and peopled with

giant starry faces that shone like so many suns. And thence they passed

into another forest, a forest of rhododendrons so teeming with blossom

that the branches and leaves were completely hidden, and nothing but

huge nosegays, masses of soft calyces, could be seen as far as the eye

could reach.

‘Come along; we have not got to the end yet,’ cried Albine. ‘Let us push

on.’

But Serge stopped. They were now in the midst of an old ruined

colonnade. Some of the columns offered inviting seats as they lay

prostrate amongst primroses and periwinkles. Further away, among the

columns that still remained upright, other flowers were growing in

profusion. There were expanses of tulips showing brilliant streaks like

painted china; expanses of calceolarias dotted with crimson and gold;

expanses of zinnias like great daisies; expanses of petunias with petals

like soft cambric through which rosy flesh tints gleamed; and other

fields, with flowers they could not recognise spreading in carpets

beneath the sun, in a motley brilliance that was softened by the green

of their leaves.

‘We shall never be able to see it all,’ said Serge, smiling and waving

his hand. ‘It would be very nice to sit down here, amongst all this

perfume.’

Near them there was a large patch of heliotropes, whose vanilla-like

breath permeated the air with velvety softness. They sat down upon one

of the fallen columns, in the midst of a cluster of magnificent lilies

which had shot up there. They had been walking for more than an hour.

They had wandered on through the flowers from the roses to the lilies.

These offered them a calm, quiet haven after their lovers’ ramble amid

the perfumed solicitations of luscious honeysuckle, musky violets,

verbenas that breathed out the warm scent of kisses, and tuberoses that

panted with voluptuous passion. The lilies, with their tall slim stems,

shot up round them like a white pavilion and sheltered them with snowy

cups, gleaming only with the gold of their slender pistils. And

there they rested, like betrothed children in a tower of purity; an

impregnable ivory tower, where all their love was yet perfect innocence.

Albine and Serge lingered amongst the lilies till evening. They felt

so happy there, and seemed to break out into a new life. Serge felt the

last trace of fever leave his hands, while Albine grew quite white, with

a milky whiteness untinted by any rosy hue. They were unconscious

that their arms and necks and shoulders were bare, and their straying

unconfined hair in nowise troubled them. They laughed merrily one at the

other, with frank open laughter. The expression of their eyes retained

the limpid calmness of clear spring water. When they quitted the lilies,

their feelings were but those of children ten years old; it seemed to

them that they had just met each other in that garden so that they might

be friends for ever and amuse themselves with perpetual play. And as

they returned through the parterre, the very flowers bore themselves

discreetly, as though they were glad to see their childishness, and

would do nothing that might corrupt them. The forests of peonies, the

masses of carnations, the carpets of forget-me-nots, the curtains

of clematis now steeped in the atmosphere of evening, slumbering in

childlike purity akin to their own, no longer spread suggestions of

voluptuousness around them. The pansies looked up at them with their

little candid faces, like playfellows; and the languid mignonette, as

Albine’s white skirt brushed by it, seemed full of compassion, and held

its breath lest it should fan their love prematurely into life.

VIII

At dawn the next day it was Serge who called Albine. She slept in a room

on the upper floor. He looked up at her window and saw her throw open

the shutters just as she had sprung out of bed. They laughed merrily as

their eyes met.

‘You must not go out to-day,’ said Albine, when she came down. ‘We must

stay indoors and rest. To-morrow I will take you a long, long way off,

to a spot where we can have a very jolly time.’

‘But sha’n’t we grow tired of stopping here?’ muttered Serge.

‘Oh, dear no! I will tell you stories.’

They passed a delightful day. The windows were thrown wide open, and all

the beauty of the Paradou came in and rejoiced with them in the room.

Serge now really took possession of that delightful room, where he

imagined he had been born. He insisted upon seeing everything, and upon

having everything explained to him. The plaster Cupids who sported

round the alcove amused him so much that he mounted upon a chair to tie

Albine’s sash round the neck of the smallest of them, a little bit of a

man who was turning somersaults with his head downward. Albine clapped

her hands, and said that he looked like a cockchafer fastened by a

string. Then, as though seized by an access of pity, she said, ‘No, no,

unfasten him. It prevents him from flying.’

But it was the Cupids painted over the doors that more particularly

attracted Serge’s attention. He fidgeted at not being able to make out

what they were playing at, for the paintings had grown very dim. Helped

by Albine, he dragged a table to the wall, and when they both had

climbed upon it, Albine began to explain things to him.

‘Look, now, those are throwing flowers. Under the flowers you can only

see some bare legs. It seems to me that when first I came here I could

make out a lady reposing there. But she has been gone for a long time

now.’

They examined all the panels in turn; but they had faded to such a

degree that little more could be distinguished than the knees and elbows

of infants. The details which had doubtless delighted the eyes of

those whose old-time passion seemed to linger round the alcove, had so

completely disappeared under the influence of the fresh air, that the

room, like the park, seemed restored to pristine virginity beneath the

serene glory of the sun.

‘Oh! they are only some little boys playing,’ said Serge, as he

descended from the table. ‘Do you know how to play at “hot cockles”?’

There was no game that Albine did not know how to play at. But, for

‘hot cockles,’ at least three players are necessary, and that made them

laugh. Serge protested, however, that they got on too well together ever

to desire a third there, and they vowed that they would always remain by

themselves.

‘We are quite alone here; one cannot hear a sound,’ said the young

man, lolling on the couch. ‘And all the furniture has such a pleasant

old-time smell. The place is as snug as a nest. We ought to be very

happy in this room.’

The girl shook her head gravely.

‘If I had been at all timid,’ she murmured, ‘I should have been very

much frightened at first.... That is one of the stories I want to tell

you. The people in the neighbourhood told it to me. Perhaps it isn’t

true, but it will amuse us, at any rate.’

Then she came and sat down by Serge’s side.

‘It is years and years since it all happened. The Paradou belonged to

a rich lord, who came and shut himself up in it with a very beautiful

lady. The gates of the mansion were kept so tightly closed, and the

garden walls were built so very high, that no one ever caught sight even

of the lady’s skirts.’

‘Ah! I know,’ Serge interrupted; ‘the lady was never seen again.’

Then, as Albine looked at him in surprise, somewhat annoyed to find that

he knew her story already, he added in a low voice, apparently a little

astonished himself: ‘You told me the story before, you know.’

She declared that she had never done so; but all at once she seemed to

change her mind, and allowed herself to be convinced. However, that did

not prevent her from finishing her tale in these words: ‘When the lord

went away his hair was quite white. He had all the gates barricaded up,

so that no one might get inside and disturb the lady. It was in this

room that she died.’

‘In this room!’ cried Serge. ‘You never told me that! Are you quite sure

that it was really in this room she died?’

Albine seemed put out. She repeated to him what every one in the

neighbourhood knew. The lord had built the pavilion for the reception of

this unknown lady, who looked like a princess. The servants employed at

the mansion afterwards declared that he spent all his days and nights

there. Often, too, they saw him in one of the walks, guiding the tiny

feet of the mysterious lady towards the densest coppices. But for all

the world they would never have ventured to spy upon the pair, who

sometimes scoured the park for weeks together.

‘And it was here she died?’ repeated Serge, who felt touched with

sorrow. ‘And you have taken her room; you use her furniture, and you

sleep in her bed.’

Albine smiled.

‘Ah! well, you know, I am not timid. Besides, it is so long since it all

happened. You said what a delightful room it was.’

Then they both dropped into silence, and glanced, for a moment, towards

the alcove, the lofty ceiling, and the corners, steeped in grey gloom.

The faded furniture seemed to speak of long past love. A gentle sigh, as

of resignation, passed through the room.

‘No, indeed,’ murmured Serge, ‘one could not feel afraid here. It is too

peaceful.’

But Albine came closer to him and said: ‘There is something else

that only a few people know, and that is that the lord and the lady

discovered in the garden a certain spot where perfect happiness was to

be found, and where they afterwards spent all their time. I have been

told that by a very good authority. It is a cool, shady spot, hidden

away in the midst of an impenetrable jungle, and it is so marvellously

beautiful that anyone who reaches it forgets all else in the world. The

poor lady must have been buried there.’

‘Is it anywhere about the parterre?’ asked Serge curiously.

‘Ah! I cannot tell, I cannot tell,’ said the young girl with an

expression of discouragement. ‘I know nothing about it. I have searched

everywhere, but I have never been able to find the least sign of that

lovely clearing. It is not amongst the roses, nor the lilies, nor the

violets.’

‘Perhaps it is hidden somewhere away amongst those mournful-looking

flowers, where you showed me the figure of a boy standing with his arm

broken off.’

‘No, no, indeed.’

‘Perhaps, then, it is in that grotto, near that clear stream, where the

great marble woman, without a face, is lying.’

‘No, no.’

Albine seemed to reflect for a moment. Then, as though speaking to

herself, she went on: ‘As soon as ever I came here, I began to hunt for

it. I spent whole days in the Paradou, and ferreted about in all the

out-of-the-way green corners, to have the pleasure of sitting for an

hour in that happy spot. What mornings have I not wasted in groping

under the brambles and peeping into the most distant nooks of the park!

Oh! I should have known it at once, that enchanting retreat, with the

mighty tree that must shelter it with a canopy of foliage, with its

carpet of soft silky turf, and its walls of tangled greenery, which the

very birds themselves cannot penetrate.

She raised her voice, and threw one of her arms round Serge’s neck, as

she continued: ‘Tell me, now; shall we search for it together? We shall

surely find it. You, who are strong, will push aside the heavy branches,

while I crawl underneath and search the brakes. When I grow weary, you

can carry me; you can help me to cross the streams; and if we happen

to lose ourselves, you can climb the trees and try to discover our way

again. Ah! and how delightful it will be for us to sit, side by side,

beneath the green canopy in the centre of the clearing! I have been told

that in one minute one may there live the whole of life. Tell me, my

dear Serge, shall we set off to-morrow and scour the park, from bush to

bush, until we have found what we want?’

Serge shrugged his shoulders, and smiled. ‘What would be the use?’ he

said. ‘Is it not pleasant in the parterre? Don’t you think we ought to

remain among the flowers, instead of seeking a greater happiness that

lies so far away?’

‘It is there that the dead lady lies buried,’ murmured Albine, falling

back into her reverie. ‘It was the joy of being there that killed her.

The tree casts a shade, whose charm is deathly.... I would willingly die

so. We would clasp one another there, and we would die, and none would

ever find us again.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ interrupted Serge. ‘You make me feel so unhappy.

I would rather that we should live in the bright sunlight, far away from

that fatal shade. Your words distress me, as though they urged us to

some irreparable misfortune. It must be forbidden to sit beneath a tree

whose shade can thus affect one.’

‘Yes,’ Albine gravely declared, ‘it is forbidden. All the folks of the

countryside have told me that it is forbidden.’

Then silence fell. Serge rose from the couch where he had been lolling,

and laughed, and pretended that he did not care about stories. The sun

was setting, however, before Albine would consent to go into the garden

for even a few minutes. She led Serge to the left, along the enclosing

wall, to a spot strewn with fragments of stone, and woodwork, and

ironwork, bristling too with briars and brambles. It was the site of the

old mansion, still black with traces of the fire which had destroyed

the building. Underneath the briars lay rotting timbers and fire-split

masonry. The spot was like a little ravined, hillocky wilderness of

sterile rocks, draped with rude vegetation, clinging creepers that

twined and twisted through every crevice like green serpents. The young

folks amused themselves by wandering across this chaos, groping about in

the holes, turning over the debris, trying to reconstruct something

of the past out of the ruins before them. They did not confess their

curiosity as they chased one another through the midst of fallen

floorings and overturned partitions; but they were indeed, all the time,

secretly pondering over the legend of those ruins, and of that lady,

lovelier than day, whose silken skirt had rustled down those steps,

where now lizards alone were idly crawling.

Serge ended by climbing the highest of the ruinous masses; and, looking

round at the park which unfolded its vast expanse of greenery, he sought

the grey form of the pavilion through the trees. Albine was standing

silent by his side, serious once more.

‘The pavilion is yonder, to the right,’ she said at last, without

waiting for Serge to ask her. ‘It is the only one of the buildings

that is left. You can see it quite plainly at the end of that grove of

lime-trees.’

They fell into silence again; and then Albine, as though pursuing aloud

the reflections which were passing through their minds, exclaimed: ‘When

he went to see her, he must have gone down yonder path, then past those

big chestnut trees, and then under the limes. It wouldn’t take him a

quarter of an hour.’

Serge made no reply. But as they went home, they took the path which

Albine had pointed out, past the chestnuts and under the limes. It was a

path that love had consecrated. And as they walked over the grass, they

seemed to be seeking footmarks, or a fallen knot of ribbon, or a whiff

of ancient perfume--something that would clearly satisfy them that they

were really travelling along the path that led to the joy of union.

‘Wait out here,’ said Albine, when they once more stood before the

pavilion; ‘don’t come up for three minutes.’

Then she ran off merrily, and shut herself up in the room with the blue

ceiling. And when she had let Serge knock at the door twice, she softly

set it ajar, and received him with an old-fashioned courtesy.

‘Good morrow, my dear lord,’ she said as she embraced him.

This amused them extremely. They played at being lovers with childish

glee. In stammering accents they would have revived the passion which

had once throbbed and died there. But it was like a first effort at

learning a lesson. They knew not how to kiss each other’s lips, but

sought each other’s cheeks, and ended by dancing around each other,

with shrieks of laughter, from ignorance of any other way of showing the

pleasure they experienced from their mutual love.

IX

The next morning Albine was anxious to start at sunrise upon the grand

expedition which she had planned the night before. She tapped her feet

gleefully on the ground, and declared that they would not come back

before nightfall.

‘Where are you going to take me?’ asked Serge.

‘You will see, you will see.’

But he caught her by the hands and looked her very earnestly in the

face. ‘You must not be foolish, you know. I won’t have you hunting for

that glade of yours, or for the tree, or for the grassy couch where one

droops and dies. You know that it is forbidden.’

She blushed slightly, protesting that she had no such idea in her head.

Then she added: ‘But if we should come across them, just by chance, you

know, and without really seeking them, you wouldn’t mind sitting down,

would you? Else you must love me very little.’

They set off, going straight through the parterre without stopping to

watch the awakening of the flowers which were all dripping after their

dewy bath. The morning had a rosy hue, the smile of a beautiful child,

just opening its eyes on its snowy pillow.

‘Where are you taking me?’ repeated Serge.

But Albine only laughed and would not answer. Then, on reaching the

stream which ran through the garden at the end of the flower-beds, she

halted in great distress. The water was swollen with the late rains.

‘We shall never be able to get across,’ she murmured. ‘I can generally

manage it by taking off my shoes and stockings, but, to-day, the water

would reach to our waists.’

They walked for a moment or two along the bank to find some fordable

point; but the girl said it was hopeless; she knew the stream quite

well. Once there had been a bridge across, but it had fallen in, and had

strewn the river bed with great blocks of stone, between which the water

rushed along in foaming eddies.

‘Get on to my back, then,’ said Serge.

‘No, no; I’d rather not. If you were to slip, we should both of us get a

famous wetting. You don’t know how treacherous those stones are.’

‘Get on to my back,’ repeated Serge.

She was tempted to do so. She stepped back for a spring, and then jumped

up, like a boy; but she felt that Serge was tottering; and crying out

that she was not safely seated, she got down again. However, after two

more attempts, she managed to settle herself securely on Serge’s back.

‘When you are quite ready,’ said the young man, laughing, ‘we will

start. Now, hold on tightly. We are off.’

And, with three light strides, he crossed the stream, scarcely wetting

even his toes. Midway, however, Albine thought that he was slipping. She

broke out into a little scream, and hugged him tightly round his neck.

But he sprang forward, and carried her at a gallop over the fine sand on

the other side.

‘Gee up!’ she cried, quite calm again, and delighted with this novel

game.

He ran along with her for some distance, she clucking her tongue, and

guiding him to right or left by some locks of his hair.

‘Here--here we are,’ she said at last, tapping him gently on the cheeks.

Then she jumped to the ground; while he, hot and perspiring, leaned

against a tree to draw breath. Albine thereupon began to scold him, and

threatened that she would not nurse him if he made himself ill again.

‘Stuff!’ he cried, ‘it’s done me good. When I have grown quite strong

again, I will carry you about all day. But where are you taking me?’

‘Here,’ she said, as she seated herself beneath a huge pear-tree.

They were in the old orchard of the park. A hawthorn hedge, a real wall

of greenery with here and there a gap, separated it from everything

else. There was quite a forest of fruit trees, which no pruning knife

had touched for a century past. Some of the trees had been strangely

warped and twisted by the storms which had raged over them; while

others, bossed all over with huge knots and full of deep holes, seemed

only to hold on to the soil with their bark. The high branches, bent

each year by weight of fruit, stretched out like big rackets; and each

tree helped to keep its fellows erect. The trunks were like twisted

pillars supporting a roof of greenery; and sometimes narrow cloisters,

sometimes light halls were formed, while now and again the verdure swept

almost to the ground and left scarcely room to pass. Round each colossus

a crowd of wild and self-sown saplings had grown up, thicket-like with

the entanglement of their young shoots. In the greenish light which

filtered like tinted water through the foliage, in the deep silence

of the mossy soil, one only heard the dull thud of the fruit as it was

culled by the wind.

And there were patriarchal apricot trees that bore their great age

quite bravely. Though decayed on one side, where they showed a perfect

scaffolding of dead wood, they were so youthful, so full of life, that,

on the other, young shoots were ever bursting through their rough bark.

There were cherry trees, that formed complete towns with houses of

several stories, that threw out staircases and floors of branches, big

enough for half a score of families. Then there were the apple trees,

with their limbs twisted like old cripples, with bark gnarled and

knotted, and all stained with lichen-growth. There were also smooth pear

trees, that shot up mast-like with long slender spars. And there were

rosy-blossomed peach-trees that won a place amid this teeming growth as

pretty maids do amidst a human crowd by dint of bright smiles and gentle

persistence. Some had been formerly trained as espaliers, but they had

broken down the low walls which had once supported them, and now spread

abroad in wild confusion, freed from the trammels of trellis work,

broken fragments of which still adhered to some of their branches. They

grew just as they listed, and resembled well-bred trees, once neat and

prim, which, having gone astray, now flaunted but vestiges of whilom

respectability. And from tree to tree, and from bough to bough, vine

branches hung in confusion. They rose like wild laughter, twined for

an instant round some lofty knot, then started off again with yet more

sonorous mirth, splotching all the foliage with the merry ebriety of

their tendrils. Their pale sun-gilt green set a glow of bacchanalianism

about the weather-worn heads of the old orchard giants.

Then towards the left were trees less thickly planted. Thin-foliaged

almonds allowed the sun’s rays to pass and ripen the pumpkins, which

looked like moons that had fallen to the earth. Near the edge of a

stream which flowed through the orchard there also grew various kinds of

melons, some rough with knotty warts, some smooth and shining, as oval

as the eggs of ostriches. At every step, too, progress was barred by

currant bushes, showing limpid bunches of fruit, rubies in one and all

of which there sparkled liquid sunlight. And hedges of raspberry

canes shot up like wild brambles, while the ground was but a carpet

of strawberry plants, teeming with ripe berries which exhaled a slight

odour of vanilla.

But the enchanted corner of the orchard was still further to the left,

near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found

yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which

the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge,

ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of

lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that

in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted

from the old wood. Next you passed on through groves of strawberry trees

with verdure like that of giant box-plants, and with scarlet berries

which suggested maize plants decked out with crimson ribbon. Then

there came a jungle of nettle-trees, medlars and jujube trees, which

pomegranates skirted with never-fading verdure. The fruit of the latter,

big as a child’s fist, was scarcely set as yet; and the purple blossoms,

fluttering at the ends of the branches, looked like the palpitating

wings of the humming birds, which do not even bend the shoots on which

they perch. Lastly, there was a forest of orange and lemon trees growing

vigorously in the open air. Their straight trunks stood like rows of

brown columns, while their shiny leaves showed brightly against the

blue of the sky, and cast upon the ground a network of light and shadow,

figuring the palms of some Indian fabric. Here there was shade beside

which that of the European orchard seemed colourless, insipid; the warm

joy of sunlight, softened into flying gold-dust; the glad certainty

of evergreen foliage; the penetrating perfume of blossom, and the more

subdued fragrance of fruit; all helping to fill the body with the soft

languor of tropical lands.

‘And now let us breakfast,’ cried Albine, clapping her hands. ‘It must

be at least nine o’clock, and I am very hungry.’

She had risen from the ground. Serge confessed that he, too, would find

some food acceptable.

‘You goose!’ she said, ‘you didn’t understand, then, that I brought you

here to breakfast. We sha’n’t die of hunger here. We can help ourselves

to all there is.’

They went along under the trees, pushing aside the branches and making

their way to the thickest of the fruit. Albine, who went first, turned,

and in her flute-like voice asked her companion: ‘What do you like best?

Pears, apricots, cherries, or currants? I warn you that the pears are

still green; but they are very nice all the same.’

Serge decided upon having cherries, and Albine agreed it would be as

well to start with them; but when she saw him foolishly beginning to

scramble up the first cherry tree he found, she made him go on for

another ten minutes through a frightful entanglement of branches. The

cherries on this tree, she said, were small and good for nothing; those

on that were sour; those on another would not be ripe for at least a

week. She knew all the trees.

‘Stop, climb this one,’ she said at last, as she stopped at the foot of

a tree, so heavily laden with fruit that clusters of it hung down to the

ground, like strings of coral beads.

Serge settled himself comfortably between two branches and began his

breakfast. He no longer paid attention to Albine. He imagined she was in

another tree, a few yards away, when, happening to cast his eyes towards

the ground, he saw her calmly lying on her back beneath him. She had

thrown herself there, and, without troubling herself to use her hands,

was plucking with her teeth the cherries which dangled over her mouth.

When she saw she was discovered, she broke out into a peal of laughter,

and twisted about on the grass like a fish taken from the water. And

finally, crawling along on her elbows, she gradually made the circuit of

the tree, snapping up the plumpest cherries as she went along.

‘They tickle me so,’ she cried. ‘See, there’s a beauty just fallen on my

neck. They are so deliciously fresh and juicy. They get into my ears,

my eyes, my nose, everywhere. They are much sweeter down here than up

there.’

‘Ah!’ said Serge, laughing, ‘you say that because you daren’t climb up.’

She remained for a moment silent with indignation. ‘Daren’t!--I!--’ she

stammered.

Then, having gathered up her skirts, she tightly grasped the tree and

pulled herself up the trunk with a single effort of her strong wrists.

And afterwards she stepped lightly along the branches, scarcely using

her hands to steady herself. She had all the agile nimbleness of a

squirrel, and made her way onward, maintaining her equilibrium only by

the swaying poise of her body. When she was quite aloft at the end of

a frail branch, which shook dangerously beneath her weight, she cried;

‘Now you see whether I daren’t climb.’

‘Come down at once,’ implored Serge, full of alarm for her. ‘I beg of

you to come down. You will be injuring yourself.’

But she, enjoying her triumph, began to mount still higher. She crawled

along to the extreme end of a branch, grasping its leaves in her hands

to maintain her hold.

‘The branch will break!’ cried Serge, thoroughly frightened.

‘Let it break,’ she answered, with a laugh; ‘it will save me the trouble

of getting down.’