Bohemian Days Part 16

He feigned sleep in the same way each Sunday succeeding, and she disappeared as before. After a while she spoke of her family, and wondered if her father would forgive her. She would not have forgiven him three months ago, but was quite humble now.

She sent her photograph to the old man, and a letter came back, the first she had received for two years.

She felt unwilling, also, to receive further gifts or support from Ralph. If I were his wife, she said, it might be well, but since it is not so, I must not be dependent.

Foolish Suzette again! She did not know that men love best where they most protect. The wife who comes with a dower may climb as high as her husband's pocket, but seldom lies snugly at his heart. Her changed conduct did not draw him closer to her. He felt uneasy and unworthy. He missed the artfulness which had been so winning. He had jealousies no longer to keep his pa.s.sion quick, for he could not doubt her devotion.

There was nothing to lack in Suzette, and that was a fault. She had become modest, docile, truthful, grave. A n.o.ble man might have appreciated her the better. Ralph Flare was a representative man, and he did not.

His friends in America thought his copy from Rembrandt wonderful. Their flattery made his ambition glow and flame. His mother, whose woman's instinct divined the cause of his delay in Paris, sent him a pleading letter to go southward; and thus reprimanded, praised, rewarded, what was he to do?

He resolved to leave France--and without Suzette!

He had not courage to tell her that the separation was final. He spoke of an excursion merely, and took but a handful of baggage. She had doubts that were like deaths to her; but she believed him, and after a feverish night went with him in the morning to the train. He was to write every day.

Would she take money?

"No."

But she might have unexpected wants--sickness, accident, charity?

"If so," she said trustfully, "would not her boy come back?"

He had just time to buy his ticket and gain the platform. He folded her in his arms, and exchanged one long, sobbing kiss. It seemed to Ralph Flare that the sound of that kiss was like a spell--the breaking of the pleasantest link in his life--the pa.s.sing from sinfulness to a baser selfishness--the stamp and seal upon his bargain with ambition, whereby for the long future he was sold to the sorrow of avarice and the deceitfulness of fame.

There was a sharp whistle from the locomotive--who invented that whistle to pierce so many bosoms at parting?--the cars moved one by one till the last, in which he was seated, sprang forward with a jerk; and though she was quite blind, he saw her handkerchief waving till all had vanished, and he would have given the world to have shed one tear.

He has gone on into the free country, and to-night he will sleep under the shadow of the mountains.

She has turned back into the dark city, and she will not sleep at all in her far-up chamber.

It is only one heart crushed, and thousands that deserve more sympathy beat out every day. We only notice this one because it shall lie bleeding, and get no sympathy at all.

PART VII.

DISSOLVING VIEW.

That he might not meet with his own countrymen, Ralph halted at Milan, and in the great deserted gallery of the Brera went steadily to work.

If, as it often happened, Suzette's pale face got between him and the canvas, he mentioned his own name and said "renown," and took a turn in the remote corridor where young Raphael's _Sposializo_ hung opposite that marvel of Guercino's--poor Hagar and her boy Ishmael driven abroad. These adjuncts and the fiercer pa.s.sion of self had their effect.

He never wrote to Suzette, but sent secretly for his baggage, and was well pleased with the consciousness that he could forget her. After three months he set out for Florence and studied the masterpieces of Andrea del Sarto, and tried his hand at the _Flora_ of t.i.tian.

He went into society somewhat, and was very much afraid his unworthy conduct in Paris might be bruited abroad. Indeed, he could hardly forgive himself the fondness he had known, and came to regard Suzette as a tolerably bad person, who had bewitched him. He burned all her letters, and a little lock of hair he had clipped while she was asleep once, and blotted the whole experience out of his diary. The next Sunday he went to hear the Rev. Mr. Hall preach, and felt quite consoled.

The summer fell upon Val d'Arno like the upsetting of a Tuscan _Scaldino_, and Ralph Flare regretfully took his departure northward.

All the world was going to Paris--why not he? Was he afraid? Certainly not; it had been a great victory over temptation to stay away so long.

He would carry out the triumph by braving a return.

In accordance with his principles of economy, he took a third-cla.s.s ticket at Basle. He could so make better studies of pa.s.sengers; for, somehow, your first-cla.s.s people have not character faces. The only character you get out of them is the character of wine they consume.

He left the Alps behind him, and rolled all day through the prosaic plains of France; startling the pale little towns, down whose treeless streets the sun shone, oh! so drearily, and taking up boors and market-folks at every monastic station. There was a pretty young girl sitting beside Ralph in the afternoon, but he refused to talk to her, for he was schooling himself, and preferred to scan the features of an odd old couple who got in at Troyes.

They were two old people of the country, and they sat together in the descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met some soft departed scene which she would have none other see.

"She has a good face," said Flare. "I wish she would keep there a moment more. By George, she looks like somebody I have known."

The old man nodded on his staff. The rumble of the carriages subdued to a lull all lesser talk or murmurs, and the sky afar off brought into sharp relief the two Gallic profiles, close together, as if they were used to reposing so; yet in the language of their deepening lines lay the stories of lives very, very wide apart.

"The old girl's face is soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is in clever contrast to the silver shimmer of her hairs. How anomalous are life and art! How unconscious is this old lady of the narrow escape she is making from perpetuation! Doubtless she works afield beside that old Jacques Bonhomme, and drinks sour wine or Normandy cider on Sundays.

That may be the best fate of Suzette, but it must be an amply dry reformation for any little grisette to contemplate. For such prodigals going home there is no fatted calf slain. No fathers see them afar off and run to place the ring upon their fingers. They renounce precarious gayety for persistent slavery. The keen wit of the student is exchanged for the pipe and mug and dull oath of the boor. I wish every such girl back again to so sallow a fate, and pity her when she gets there."

And so, with much unconscious sentimentality, and the two old market people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, made his forehead fall and the world go up and down and darken.

It was the old woman who shook him from that repose; she only touched him, but her touch was like a lost sense restored. He thrilled and sat stock still, with her withered blue hand on his arm, and heard the pinched lips say, unclosing with a sort of quiver:

"Baby!"

He looked again, and seemed to himself to grow quite old as he looked, and he said,

"_Enfant perdu!_"

The turban kept its place, the peaked chin kept as peaked; there seemed even more silver in the smooth hair, and the old serge gown drooped as brownly; but the sweet old face grew soft as a widow's looking at the only portrait she guards, and a tear, like a drop of water exhumed, ran to the tip of her nostril.

"Suzette!" he said, "my early sin; do you come back as well with the turning of my hairs? Has the first pa.s.sion a shadow long as forever? Why have we met?"

"Not of my seeking was this meeting, Ralph. Speak softly, for my husband sleeps, and he is old like thee and me. If my face is an accusation, let my lips be forgiveness. The love of you made my life dutiful; the loss of you saddened my days, but it was the sadness of religion! I sinned no more, and sought my father's fields, and delayed, with my hand purified by his blessing, the residue of his sands of life. I made my years good to my neighbors, the sick, the bereaved. I met the temptations of the young with a truer story than pleasure tells, and when I married it was with the prelude of my lost years related and forgiven. With children's faces the earnestness and beauty of life returned; for this, for more, for all, may your reward be bountiful!"

There is no curse like the dream of old age. Ralph Flare felt, with the sudden whitening of each separate hair, the sudden remembrance of each separate folly; and the moments of grief he had wrung from the little girl of the Quartier Latin revived like one's mean acts seen through others' eyes.

"Pardon you, child, Suzette?" he said; "to me you were more than I hoped, more than I wished. I asked your face only, and you gave me your heart. For the unfaithfulness, for the wrath, for the unmanliness, for the tyranny with which I treated you, my soul upbraids me."

"How thankful am I," she answered; "the terror to me was that you had learned in the Quartier lessons to make your after-life monotonous. I am happy."

Their hands met; to his gray beard fell the smile upon her mouth; they forget the Quartier Latin; they felt no love but forgiveness, which is the tenderest of emotions. The whistle blew shrilly; the train stopped; Ralph Flare awoke from sleep; but the old couple were gone.

He went to Paris, and, contrary to his purpose, inquired for her. She had been seen by none since his departure. He wrote to the Maire of her commune, and this was the reply:

"_Ralph, Merci! Pardonne!_

"SUZETTE."

He felt no loss. He felt softened toward her only; and he turned his back on the Quartier Latin with a man's easy satisfaction that he could forget.