King of Camargue Part 9

"Suppose we go out on the terrace?"

Livette wished to prolong the tete-a-tete, to ascertain if, after her prayer, she would find _her_ Renaud in him once more.

He placed his lamp on the floor at the top of the staircase, and, pushing open the door just above the last step, they both stood on the terrace that overlooks the whole chateau.

A square terrace, and in the centre the great bell lay upon its side in its iron cage--the great bell, three feet in diameter, that in the old days called to work as well as to prayer, and when it rang the Angelus caused the fever-haunted farm-laborers to fall upon their knees on the brink of the miasmatic bogs.

Both of them, one after the other, mechanically struck the bell with their foot, as it lay there on its side. It gave forth a short, plaintive note, quickly stifled by contact with the flag-stones. It was like the sigh of a mystery-haunted soul.

With hearts as sad as the bell, they leaned on the stone parapet in presence of the night.

Livette and Renaud loved each other, but affection was no longer enough for him. The sap of the spring-time, boiling in his veins in l.u.s.tful desire, gave birth, in Livette's heart, to sweet flowers of reverie.

The swarming of the stars above their heads was beyond comprehension.

They were as many as the gadflies and frogs in the desert, or the waves of the sea. They seemed to open and half close, like flowers in a meadow, waved to and fro by a light, quickly-pa.s.sing breath, like eyelids making signs.

They seemed to have something to say, to move like lips speaking a living language, telling of something of great moment that must be known at once--but no sound coming from them reaches the ears of men, for human hearing is not keen enough. Nor is the human sight keen enough to see that the dust of the Milky-Way (pale as the pollen of flowers) is also made of stars. Though men have seen it with a different sight, afforded by man's inventive genius, that sight is powerless to pierce farther and deeper--to learn all there is to know.

Moreover,--and Renaud himself had heard the story from the shepherds who pa.s.s the winter in Camargue and Crau, and spend their nights in summer counting the stars upon the summits of the Alps,--there are, in s.p.a.ce, beyond the skies visible to our eyes, fires alight so far away from us, so far away that their light, now on its way toward our earth, will not reach us for centuries to come. The men who follow us centuries hence will see twinkling stars that even in our day were lighted and making signs we could not see. And in those days ideas, which are already kindled in men's minds, and are seen to-day by none save those in whom their light is shed, will shine for all, and one of them will be, for every mortal, the love and pity of the world.

Certain it is, that neither Renaud nor Livette could fathom those infinite depths; but from the vast expanse of heaven, swarming with tiny lights, a nameless emotion stole into their hearts, made up of all their hopes to come.

Future worlds, lovelier than this of ours, were dreaming in them, with them.

In them, too, because they were young and human, there was a share in the future. In them, too, was the responsibility for future lives. In them, too, lurked the mystery of generations to be born, for whom a single couple, surviving the wreck of the demolished world, would be enough to bestow upon them the desire to live and the power.

A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why the great scholars, who figure like Barreme, know no more of life and the heart than Livette and Renaud--who knew nothing at all.

They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the same moment--but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing.

They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy, that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that creation may be a.s.sured by outbursts of pa.s.sion, and the future of mankind by the imperious need of pleasure.

What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate.

Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until they have been slowly a.s.similated by the human mind to the matter of which it is made.

They suffered, they longed for happiness--beneath that mystery-laden spring sky. They awaited the coming of their joy, they summoned their every hope, and they gazed at the dark horizon, at the desert, where the tracts of sand shone like mirrors among the dark reeds, and the ponds glistening with salt between the black lines of tamarisks. They gazed upon the boundless expanse in which they seemed lost, and where, nevertheless, they felt that they alone were an epitome of everything; they listened, without hearing them, to the unending noises of the island,--the murmuring of the water, the rustling of the reeds, the waving foliage, the growling of wandering beasts, the distant roaring of two rolling rivers and a restless sea;--and this combined voice of the whole island formed a fitting accompaniment, by reason of the extent and number of the sounds that composed it, to the silent twinkling of the stars, that no one hears.

There was in the park, invisible to them at that hour, a foreign tree, on which the flowers could be seen, by daylight, opening with a slight noise. They sometimes amused themselves by watching that tree, said to have come from Syria. A slight report, as if m.u.f.fled, and a tiny cloud, of very powerful odor, would issue from the bursting cell. The tree continued, during the night, to send out its dust of pa.s.sions in quest of prey, and its strange perfume was wafted upward to the lovers.

They trembled with joy at the slightest contact with each other. Ah!

if she could but have given him, on that beautiful May evening, all the love his l.u.s.ty youth demanded; if he could but have felt her clinging lips melt beneath his burning ones, upon that lofty terrace overlooking the rounded tops of the huge trees in the park, beneath that dark star-spangled sky, doubtless his little betrothed would have remained sole mistress of his heart!

But there were too many obstacles between Livette and Renaud; and as he struggled virtuously to keep away from her, his thoughts flew off to the other.

And Livette was already conscious of the heartache of the deserted lover. All the broad expanse of level country that her eyes knew so well, and that she felt about her in the darkness, suddenly seemed empty to her, a desert in very truth, and thereby to resemble her own heart. And softly, silently, she began to weep,--whereupon one of the great farm dogs, her favorite, who had been seeking her in every direction, came up to her and licked her hand as it hung at her side.

And down yonder, far down above the dark line of the sea, Renaud, meanwhile, fancied that he saw a naked woman's form emerge from the water, and await his coming, suspended in mid-air, or standing on the surface of the waves.

"Livette! Livette!"

It was the grandmother's voice calling.

They went down without exchanging a word.

"Good-night, Monsieur Jacques," said the maiden.

"Good-night, mademoiselle," Renaud replied.

So they called each other monsieur and mademoiselle that night, and, a moment after they had parted, Renaud took his horse from the stable in perfect silence, and rode away.

His heart did not tell him that Livette, at her window, watched him depart, her eyes filled with tears.

"Where is he going?"

She followed for a moment with her glance the luminous point (the reflection of a star upon the head of the drover's spear) dancing about in the darkness among the trees like a will-o'-the-wisp,--and when that spark went out, she no longer saw the stars.

XI

THE HIDING-PLACE

Whither he was going he had no idea. He rode at random under the spur of the energy that was rampant within him, demanding to be expended.

Love guided him as he himself guided his horse. He was the rider of his own steed, and at the same time the accursed steed of the pa.s.sion that impelled him, spurred him on, shouted to him: "Forward!" guided this way and that, without purpose, his mad race across the moor. He, too, was mounted, hara.s.sed, bridled, whipped, bit in mouth, raging and powerless. And the horse shared the mad humor of his master, who was under the spell of love, so that Blanchet, wearied though he was by his day's labor, having had but a very brief rest, was wild with excitement none the less. Fortunately, he knew all the ditches and ca.n.a.ls and bogs, and, in his rapid flight with the reins lying on his neck, he chose his own road. Sometimes he would slacken his pace on approaching a ditch, in order to walk down into it, head first, compelling his rider to stand in his great stirrups, with his back touching the croup: sometimes he leaped them at full speed.

Drunken, bareheaded,--his hat having blown away somewhere in the darkness,--the wind whistling through his hair, Renaud rode, for the sake of riding, because the violence of his pace corresponded to the violence of the pa.s.sions that were raging within him. He tore along as a beast does in the rutting season, from its mad desire to be alone.

And he said to himself that it was abominable to think of the other, when he had for his own that flower of beauty, chast.i.ty and sweetness; but he was thirsting for something very different; and he was conscious of an intensely bitter taste in his mouth, a clinging, dry saliva, a moisture that made his thirst the more unbearable.

Powerless to devise a means of escape from all the evil impulses in his heart, he rode on confessing to two longings: either to meet Rampal and take vengeance upon him for everything, or else to fall over backward into a ditch and rise no more, thus giving a different turn to his evil destiny;--and a third longing which he did not admit even to himself: to meet the gipsy at daybreak, begging at the door of some farm.--And then?--He did not know!

Suddenly he thought that he heard a beating of hoofs behind him, the echo of his own gallop; he turned and saw--he saw in very truth!--pursuing him at full speed, the naked gipsy, sitting firmly astride her saddle, man-fashion, upon a shadowy horse whose feet did not touch the ground.

She flew through the air, laughing in mockery as she cried to him:

"Stop, coward!"

He said to himself that it was not real, but he did not say to himself that it was a vision; he thought: "It is witchcraft!" and fear seized upon him, fear as powerful as his desire, and he fled from the image of her he sought.

He turned to look no more; he fled. He heard the double gallop still: his own and the other's. He rode through the transparent mist that hovered over the damp, salt sand; and as he cut through those crawling clouds it seemed to him as if he were riding through the sky, above the higher clouds. In very truth, his brain was wandering, for love will be obeyed, and his youthful pa.s.sion was like insanity.

Suddenly Blanchet's four legs, as he flew over the ground, became motionless and rigid as stakes, and his shoeless feet began to slide over an absolutely smooth surface of clay, hard as iron and as slippery as if it had been soaped. Swiftly the horse slid along, digging furrows with his hoofs upon the polished surface, and when he lost his acquired momentum, he stopped, tried to resume his former pace, raised one foot and fell heavily to the ground, exhausted, his mouth and nostrils breathing despair.

In an instant, Renaud, leaning on his spear, which he had not let go, stood at his horse's head, struggling to lift him up, and encouraging him with his voice. Blanchet, supported by the rein in his master's hand, regained his feet after two fruitless slides.

Renaud looked about: there was nothing to be seen save darkness, the desert, the stars,--tatters of pallid mist that strayed hither and thither, as if clinging to a bush, a tamarisk, a clump of rushes,--and a.s.sumed, from time to time, the shape of fantastic animals.