King of Camargue Part 35

"I want no more of their medicine," she said one day to Renaud. "They might do very well for swamp fever, but there is something else the matter with me. It was my heart that you drowned. I never could believe you again; it is much better that I should die."

She had explained nothing to her father or grandmother.

"They would have turned you out of the house," she said, "and I wanted to see you to the end."

Her journey to the Icard farm, her nocturnal flight, her accident, all were attributed to an attack of fever, which was supposed to have been responsible for her actions, whereas, on the contrary, her illness was the result of them all.

Renaud, by a desperate effort, mastered his pa.s.sion at last. Was it forever? He chose to think so, because it was necessary that it should be so, in order to keep her alive.

He tried not to think of the other. He tried to repent. Every moment he tore from his mind by an exertion of his will--as he would tear up gra.s.s with his hand--some one of his memories. He told amusing stories, pretending to laugh loudest at them.

His heart was filled with a great pity for Livette, but, for all that, you would not have had to lift a very large stone to find there, in a spot that he knew well, the sleeping viper.

"I shall die, I shall die!"--Livette often said, "but I want to see the fete of Saintes-Maries once more. I want to live till then. You must carry me there and lay me on the relics; that is where I want to die. And at my burial, I want the drovers, your comrades, to follow on horseback--promise me this--with their spears reversed, like the soldiers I saw at Avignon one day, marching to the cemetery, holding their guns that way."

With a sort of gaiety, she often recurred to the subject of her burial, and embellished it with other details, saying, with the air of a playful child:

"There must be lilies, as there are in the procession at Saintes-Maries when they go to bless the sea; I want lots of lilies!

Lilies are so pretty and white! they are so proud on their stalks, and they smell so sweet!"

Meanwhile, the season was hastening away; the months came and went, like the same months in years past for centuries.

Summer set the sky and land and sea ablaze, drawing the last drop of moisture from the swamps, sowing the venomous seeds of miasma in the heavy air that people breathed. The crops ripened; then came the harvest. It was autumn. The redbreast sang in the park of the Chateau d'Avignon. The nights grew long once more. The leaves fell. The sad days of the year began.

The b.u.t.tercups had disappeared. The Vaccares, which had been dry all summer, no longer exposed to the sun its lovely mouse-gray bed; it was once more a sea. The light golden tint of the September sky was long since hidden from sight behind the rising mists.

The birds of pa.s.sage began anew their flight over the mirror-like island which promised them abundant prey. The eagle hurried from the Alps to make war upon the fish-hawks. And at night, when the wind howled and the rain fell in torrents, the storks and cranes and geese pa.s.sed over in triangular flocks, at a great height in the drenched atmosphere, uttering cries like cries of alarm.

Livette's suffering became more intense. She pa.s.sed whole days sitting at her window.

One evening, Renaud was sitting beside her, in silence, while the grandmother and Pere Audiffret were dining in the room below. The room was dimly lighted by a lamp. Suddenly Livette sprang to her feet, then fell back, crying:

"There she is! there she is! No! no! don't go with her! I don't want you to! no, no, Jacques!"

Renaud also had risen, and was staring vacantly at Livette; following the direction of her gaze, he began to tremble. Outside the window stood a pale, uncertain, but very recognizable spectre, the gipsy herself! He had no sooner recognized her than she disappeared, after making a significant sign to him, that said: "Come!"

It was not a vision of the sick girl's imagination, for he, too, had seen it!

Perhaps the fever-laden island had sown its poison in the blood of both. The germs of fever were taking root and flouris.h.i.+ng in them. The blight of the _paluns_ implanted in their brains, as in a cloudy mirror, the image everlastingly repeated of the familiar plaintive objects of the desert, with which the current of their thoughts was mingled.

"Don't go! don't go! my Jacques!"

She dragged herself along the floor on her knees, shaken with sobs, imploring the drover, as she clung with both hands to his jacket.

The father and grandmother had hastened to the room.

The father, too, was sobbing, and knew not what to do. The grandmother slowly seated herself by the bed on which Renaud had gently laid Livette.

Calm and silent, the old woman gazed long and with a beautiful expression of perfect trust upon the copper crucifix and the images of the saints that hung on the wall of the recess.

And, on the bed, Livette, uttering cries like a lost bird, twining her fingers about her as if clinging to life, to the reeds in the swamp wherein she still fancied that she was drowning--Livette breathed her last.

Livette was dead.

The drovers, on horseback, with spears reversed, attended her body to the cemetery. Her favorite dog followed her thither.

Renaud placed lilies on her grave. She sleeps in the cemetery of Saintes-Maries, at the foot of the dunes, under the cultivated lilies, among the wild asphodels, on the sea-sh.o.r.e.

Renaud returned to the desert, too much like the bull that, when wounded in the arena, returns to the solitude of the swamps, where he can lick his wounds, give free vent to his rage, bellow at the clouds, and to no purpose, but to his heart's content tear at the steel left in the wound.

One day they found, on the sh.o.r.e of the Vaccares, Rampal's bleeding body, pierced by horns in two places. Bernard alone saw his duel with Renaud one evening, when the sky was red with the afterglow. They fought hand to hand, in the midst of the drove, and Renaud, lifting his enemy from the ground in his arms, laid him face upward, dead, on the horns of a heifer that came rus.h.i.+ng at them and, with one motion of her bulky head, tossed a corpse into the air.

Rampal died without a cry. He lay three days where he fell. The black bulls, that mourn nine days when one of their kind falls dead in the pasture, bellowed for three days around Rampal's body, at a respectful distance.

Bernard alone saw the duel and said nothing; but the people of the desert knew; they guessed the truth.

Since that, Renaud has become like a phantom himself.

In all weathers, summer or winter, rain or s.h.i.+ne, he can be seen here and there, in the Camargue desert, sitting erect and melancholy on his horse, spear in hand.

He regrets Livette. He loves Zinzara. He weeps only for himself, the wretched creature! He has lost the paradise of affection he had dreamed of, and the appetizing h.e.l.l of savage love he had tasted. He has nothing. It seems to him that Livette's death, for which he blames himself, has left him free to abandon himself to his pa.s.sion for the other; but the other is absent--and, though absent, she tortures him as relentlessly as on the day when, clinging to his horse's mane, she defied him with insulting words, and aroused his pa.s.sions, while he dared not shake her off, trample upon her, or seize her.

The memory of her is upon him like the gadfly that persists in following back the b.l.o.o.d.y track of its sting. Vainly does he shake himself; he cannot rid himself of it. Renaud loves Zinzara; he longs for her without hope, and, ruled by that single desire, he feels no other, so that the unexpended power of his youth acc.u.mulates within him and drives him mad.

The friends' houses, the fetes he used formerly to visit, have no further interest for him, because the only being he seeks cannot be found. The desert, once peopled with hopes in his eyes, has become an empty void. The roads that traverse it no longer lead anywhere.

He surprises himself sometimes, at night, bellowing with the bulls, against the wind that annoys them, toward the distant horizon. He is like one possessed. A devil dwells within him.

When he is weary of wandering about and of being in the saddle, and chooses to lie down and sleep for a day, he repairs to the cabin of his love, in the _gargate_, and there, full sure of being undisturbed, raves like a wild beast, in his frenzy at being alone. In the morning, he emerges from his retreat, more depressed, more miserable, more haunted with visions than ever.

At times, he fancies that he sees Livette under his horse's feet, imploring wildly, with hands outstretched--but he digs his spurs into his horse and rides on. A terrible shriek constantly rings in his ears.

He rides toward another spectre that calls him from the farthest point of the horizon.--He says, to any one who cares to listen, that he has come from Egypt, where he was a king, and that he will return there some day, King of Camargue.

His disordered mind seems the very incarnation of the wild moor. He fancies that he is flying about in circles with the birds of the swamps that weep in the drizzling rain. The _mistral_ lashes his wings. When the wind blows through his hair, he pities the poor gra.s.s of the plains because the _mistral_ is torturing it.

All the lamentations of the reeds and swamps, of the river and the sea, are but the ringing in his ears, and their loud wailing is constantly punctuated by a shriek--oh! so heart-rending it is!--the shriek of Livette!

As the bell-tower of the church of Saintes-Maries is filled with owls, so his heart is full of the remorse of a Christian; and the cure's kindness to him does not drive it away.

When he stands upon the sea-sh.o.r.e, many times he feels an overpowering desire to urge his horse, bleeding beneath the spur, far out to sea, farther and farther, until he vanishes in the direction of the country, vaguely seen in dreams, from which the saints and gipsies come--but something stops him; his destiny holds him back; he belongs to his kingdom.

If he has known one hour's peace of mind, it was on a certain morning when, among the usual hideous nightmares inspired by the memory of Zinzara, he had a pleasant dream, in which he saw Livette, dressed in white, with lilies in her hands like the saints in church pictures, smiling and saying to him: "I have forgiven you. FORGIVE YOURSELF."

The respite was of brief duration, for the herdsman did not know that excessive repentance is a crime, when it goes so far as to dry up the springs of will-power in a man, when it renders sterile his field of activity, when it bars the way to doing better in the future.

Self-pardon, at the proper time, after due penance has been done, is one of the secrets of the wise among men; for, without it, the first misstep would lead to never-ending despair, and would render all courage useless forever.

Such was the cure's opinion, which Renaud listened to, in the confessional, without paying heed to it.