Bohemian Days Part 14

"My ancient _patronne_."

"What's her name?"

"I don't know."

"Where does she live?"

"I shan't tell you."

He held her wrist tightly and pressed her back till her eyes were compelled to mark his white, pinched lips and altogether bloodless temples. His hand tightened upon her; his full, boyish figure straightened and heightened beyond nature; his regard was terrible. A terrible fear and silence fell around about them.

"These are the gifts of a man," he whispered; "you do not know it better than I. I shall walk out for one hour; at the end of that time there must not be even a ribbon of yours in this chamber."

PART IV.

REMORSE.

He gave the same order to the proprietor as he pa.s.sed down-stairs, and hurried at a crazy pace across the Pont des Arts to the rooms of Terrapin. That philosopher was playing whist with his friends, and gave as his opinion that Ralph was "spooney."

Ralph drank much, talked much, chafed more. Somebody advised him to travel, but he felt that Europe had nothing to show him like that which he had lost. He told Madame George the story at the _cremery_.

"Ah, monsieur," she said, "that is the way with all love in Paris."

He played "ramps" with the French, but the game impressed him as stupid, and he tried to quarrel with Boetia, who was too polite to be vexed. He drank pure cognac, to the astonishment of the Gauls, but it had no visible effect upon him, and Pere George held up his hands as he went away, saying: "Behold these Americans! they do everything with a fever; brandy affects them no more than water."

The room in the fifth story was very cold now. He tried to read in bed, but the novel had no meaning in it. He walked up and down the balcony in the November night, where he had often explained the motions of the stars to her. They seemed to miss her now, and peeped inquisitively. He looked into the bureau and wardrobe, half ashamed of the hope that she had left some _souvenir_. There was not even a letter. She had torn a leaf, on which she had written her name, out of his diary. The sketches he had made of her were gone; if she had only taken her remembrance out of his heart, it would have been well. Then he reasoned, with himself, sensibly and consistently. It was a bad pa.s.sion at first. How would it have shamed his father and mother had they heard of it! Its continuance was even more pernicious, making him profligate and idle; introducing him to light pleasures and companies; enfeebling him, morally and physically; diverting him from the beautiful arts; weakening his parental love; divorcing him from grand themes and thoughts. He could never marry this woman. Their heart-strings must have been wrung by some final parting; and now that she had been proved untrue, was it not most unmanly that he should permit her to stand even in the threshold of his mind? It was a good riddance, he said, pacing the floor in the firelight; but just then he glanced into the great mirror, and stood fixed to mark the pallor of his face. Say what he might, laugh as he did, with a hollow sound, that absent girl had stirred the very fountains of his feelings. Not learned, not beautiful, not anything to anybody but him--there was yet the difference between her love and her deceit, which made him content or wretched.

He felt this so keenly that he lifted his voice and cursed--himself, her, society, mankind. Then he cried like a child, and called himself a calf, and laughed bitterly, and cried again.

There was no sleep for him that night. He drank brandy again in the morning, and walked to the banker's. His remittance awaited him, and he came out of the Rue de la Paix with thirty gold napoleons in his pocket.

He met all the Americans at breakfast at Trappe's in the Palais Royal, and strolling to the morgue with a part of them, kept on to Vincennes, and spent a wretched day in the forest. At the Place de la Bastille, returning, he got into a cabriolet alone and searched ineffectually along the Rue Rivoli for a companion who would ride with him. "Go through the Rue de Beaux Arts!" he said, as they crossed Pont Neuf. This is a quiet street in the Latin Quarter filled with cheap _pensions_, in one of which dwelt Fanchette. His heart was wedged in his throat as he saw at the window little Suzette sewing. She wore one of the dresses he had given her. Her face was old and piteous; she was red-eyed and worked wearily, looking into the street like one on a rainy day.

When she saw him, he thought, by her start and flush, that she was going to fall from the chair; but then she looked with a dim, absent manner into his face, like one who essays to remember something that was very dear but is now quite strange. He was pleased to think that she was miserable, and would have given much to have found her begging bread, as she did that night of him.

He had ridden by on purpose to show that he had money, and she sent him by Terrapin's word a pet.i.tion for a few francs to buy her a chamber.

Fanchette's friend had come home from the country, and it would not do for her to occupy their single bedroom; but Ralph made reply by deputy, to the effect that the donor of the jewelry would, he supposed, give her a room. It was a weary week ensuing; he drank spirits all the time, and made love to an English governess in the Tuileries garden, and when Sunday came, with a rainy, windy, dismal evening, he went with Terrapin and Co. to the Closerie des Lilas.

This is the great ball of the Latin Quarter. It stands near the barriers upon the Boulevard, and is haunted with students and grisettes. Commonly it was thronged with waltzers, and the scene on gala nights, when all the lamps were aflame, and the music drowned out by the thunder of the dance, was a compromise between Paradise and Pandemonium. To-night there was a beggarly array of folk; the mult.i.tude of _garcons_ contemplated each other's white ap.r.o.ns, and old Bullier, the proprietor, staggering under his huge hat, exhibited a desire to be taken out and interred. The wild-eyed young man with flying, carroty locks, who stood in the set directly under the orchestra, at that part of the floor called "the kitchen," was flinging up his legs without any perceptible enjoyment, and the policemen in helmets, and cuira.s.siers, who had hard work to keep order in general, looked like lay figures now, and strolled off into the embowered and sloppy gardens. There were not two hundred folk under the roofs. Ralph had come here with the unacknowledged thought of meeting Suzette, and he walked around with his cigar, leaning upon Terrapin's arm and making himself disagreeable.

Suddenly he came before her. She seemed to have arisen from the earth.

She looked so weak and haggard that he was impelled to speak to her; but he was obdurate and hard-hearted. He could have filled her cup of bitterness and watched her drink it to the dregs, and would have been relentless if she was kneeling at his feet.

"Flare, what makes you tremble so?" said Terrapin; "are you cold?

Confound it, man, you are sick! Sit here in the draft and take some cognac."

"No," answered Ralph, "I am all right again. You see my girl there?

(Don't look at her!) You know some of these girls, old fellow? I mean to treat two of them to a bottle of champagne. She will see it. I mean for her to do so. Who are these pa.s.sing? Come with me."

He walked by Suzette and her friend as if they had been invisible, and addressed those whom he pursued with such energy that they shrank back.

He made one of them take his arm, and hurried here and there, saying honeyed words all the time, by which she was affrighted; but every smile, false as it was, fell into Suzette's heart.

Weary, wan, wretched, she kept them ever in view, crossing his path now and then, in the vain thought that she might have one word from him, though it were a curse. He took his new friends into an alcove. She saw the wine burst from the bottle, and heard the clink of the gla.s.ses as they drank good health. She did not know that all his laughter was feigned, that his happiness was delirium, that his vows were lies. She did not believe Ralph Flare so base as to put his foot upon her, whom he had already stricken down.

And he--he was all self, all stone!--he laid no offence at his own door.

He did not ask if her infidelity was real or if it had no warrant in his own slight and goading. The poor, pale face went after him reproachfully. Every painful footfall that she made was the patter of a blood-drop. Such unnatural excitement must have some termination. He quarrelled with a waiter. Old Bullier ordered a cuira.s.sier to take him to the door; he would have resisted, but Terrapin whispered: "Don't be foolish, Flare; if you are put out it will be a triumph for the girl;"

and only this conviction kept him calm. The cyprians whom he wooed followed him out; he turned upon them bitterly when he had crossed the threshold, and leaping into a carriage was driven to his hotel, where he slept unquietly till daybreak.

See him, at dawn, in deep slumber! his face is sallow, his lips are dry, his chest heaves nervously as he breathes hard. It is a bad sleep; it is the sleep of bad children, to whom the fiend comes, knowing that the older they grow the more surely are they his own.

This is not, surely, the bashful young man who started at the phantom of his mother, and sinned reluctantly. Aye! but those who do wrong after much admonishment are wickeder than those who obey the first bad impulse. He is ten times more cast away who thinks and sins than he who only sins and does not think.

Ralph Flare was one of your reasoning villains. His conscience was not a better nature rising up in the man, and saying "this is wrong." It was not conscience at all; it was only a fear. Far down as Suzette might be, she never could have been unfeeling, unmerciful as he. It is a bad character to set in black and white, yet you might ask old Terrapin or any shrewd observer what manner of man was Ralph, and they would say, "So-so-ish, a little sentimental, spooney likewise; but a good fellow, a good fellow!" And more curious than all, Suzette said so too.

He rose at daylight, and dressed and looked at himself in the gla.s.s. He felt that this would not do. His revenge had turned upon himself. He had half a mind to send for Suzette, and forgive her, and plead with her to come back again. The door opened: she of whom he thought stood before him, more marked and meagre than he; and the old tyranny mounted to his eyes as he looked upon her. He knew that she had come to be pardoned, to explain, and he determined that she should suffer to the quick.

PART V.

TYRANNY.

If this history of Ralph Flare that we are writing was not a fiction, we might make Suzette give way at once under the burden of her grief, and rest upon a chair, and weep. On the contrary, she did just the opposite.

She laughed.

Human nature is consistent only in its inconsistencies. She meant to break down in the end, but wished to intimidate him by a show of carelessness, so she first said quietly: "Monsieur Ralph, I have come to see to my washing; it went out with yours; will you tell the proprietor to send it to me?"

"Yes, madame."

"May I sit down, sir? It is a good way up-stairs, and I want to breathe a minute."

"As you like, madame."

He was resting on the sofa; she took a chair just opposite. There was a table between them, and for a little while she looked with a ghastly playfulness into his eyes, he regarding her coldly and darkly; and then, she laughed. It was a terrible laugh to come from a child's lips. It was a woman's pride, drowning at the bottom of her heart, and in its last struggle for preservation sending up these bubbles of sound.

We talk of tragic scenes in common life; this was one of them. The little room with its waxed, inlaid floor, the light falling bloodily in at the crimson curtains and throwing unreal shadows upon the spent fire, the disordered furniture, the unmade bed; and there were the two actors, suffering in their little sphere what only _seems_ more suffering in prisons and upon scaffolds, and playing with each other's agonies as not more refined cruelty plays with racks and tortures.

"You are pleased, madame," said Ralph.

"No, I am wondering what has changed you. There are black circles around your eyes; you have not shaved; the bones of your cheeks are sharp like your chin, and you are yellow and bent like a dry leaf."

"I have had an excess of money lately. Being free to do as I like, I have done so."