King of Camargue Part 8

Her voice was sad.

He shuddered, and the movement did not escape the little one's notice.

It seemed to him, as Livette uttered that reproach, that he saw the gipsy again as he had seen her in the afternoon, standing before him, near at hand, all naked and so brown! as if she were accustomed to pa.s.s her days naked in the sun, and were tanned from head to foot by his rays. And how lithe and sinewy the wild creature was! A genuine animal, a little Arabian mare, of much finer breed than the Camargue stock. Alas! for too long a time, through fidelity to his fiancee, he had been as virtuous as a girl, and now the hot-blooded fellow's continence was taking its revenge upon him, a cruel revenge, arousing mad, amorous longings that were not for Livette. And so his very respect for her--poor child!--turned against her!

"Jacques?" said Livette, in the hardly audible tone the sentiment of love imparts to the lover's voice, a soft, veiled tone, heard by the heart rather than by the ear.

Renaud did not hear her. He _saw_.--He saw the gipsy as plainly as if she were there before him, even more plainly. In the darkness of the night, her body, brown as before, seemed luminous, like an opaque substance giving forth a pale light. Her naked figure, obscure and bright at the same time, was standing motionless before his eyes--then it moved--and he fancied that he saw the gipsy bathing in the phosph.o.r.escent water peculiar to the summer months,--when swimmers cause a cold, liquid light to dart hither and thither through the dark water, following and marking the outlines of their forms, from which it seems to radiate.

"Have I the fever?" he said to himself.

As if in answer to the unspoken question, Livette took his hand. She felt it from wrist to finger-ends, to see if it were dry and hot.

"Yes," said she, "you must look out; father was right, you have a touch of fever. Come up and find the medicine."

"Come on," said he, glad of the diversion.

"Come," she repeated, "but move softly: grandma has fallen asleep!"

The old lady was asleep, as she said. She was leaning against the wall, perfectly motionless. The white handkerchief, tied in the Arlesian fas.h.i.+on, instead of covering her _chignon_ only, enveloped almost her whole head, allowing two tufts of coa.r.s.e, white hair, all in disorder, to protrude, like mist, on each side of her face.

She was asleep, her mouth partly open, a ray of light s.h.i.+ning through upon her teeth, which were still beautiful.

They left her there.

IX

THE PRAYER

Livette opened the farm-house door, which creaked loudly in the resonant emptiness of the s.p.a.cious stone staircase.

She lighted the lamp, which was hanging on a nail, and they went up-stairs together, she absorbed by thoughts of him, and he of her, but no longer in their accustomed condition of affectionate embarra.s.sment.

He held the iron lamp, hanging at the end of its hooked stick; and to relieve his conscience, to do his duty as a lover, and perhaps in that way to change the current of his thoughts, perhaps to set at rest the amorous anxiety with which he was a.s.sailed,--to force himself to return, heart and soul, to Livette, and, who knows?--so hard to fathom is man with his background of devil!--perhaps, with her and unknown to her, to satisfy to some extent the pa.s.sion kindled by the other--for all these reasons together, more inextricably mingled than the twigs of the climbing rose-bushes, he said to himself: "I will kiss her!" He had never done that thing,--except in the presence of the old people,--but the Renaud of that evening was not the Renaud of other days, in his feeling for Livette. The powerful leaven of his wild nature was swelling his veins to bursting. In very truth, he had the fever,--at all events, a species of fever. All his nerves were overstrained; in his eyes, even the most indifferent objects wore an unusual look. And in Livette he saw, in spite of himself, reproaching himself bitterly therefor, things which ordinarily he refused to see.

And as, being always dressed in the Arlesian fas.h.i.+on, she wore the _fichu_ of white muslin crossed upon her breast so low as to afford a glimpse, beneath the gold chain and cross, of the white throat, above the meeting of the stiff folds, laid neatly one upon another, his pa.s.sionate gaze fell upon that spot, amid the modest arrangement of muslin, prettily called "the chapel."

In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high, and as far away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and he wound his right arm about Livette's waist as she placed her hand upon the iron rail.

At every step they climbed, he felt the play of the muscles of his fiancee's youthful frame, imparting to the arm about her waist a soothing languor that ran through his whole being,--and yet his heart did not rejoice thereat; and he realized that, ordinarily, if the end of the velvet ribbon in Livette's head-dress touched his face, it caused a sweeter thrill of pleasure in his blood, and more than all else, a pleasure which there was no mistaking. And, thereupon, he grew vexed with himself as for a failure of duty, he was oppressed by a presentiment of disaster, vague but inevitable. And she felt more and more keenly the rebound of his emotions. She was conscious that her peace of mind was endangered. Something certainly was against her.

The arm, which had sometimes been about her waist as now, no longer seemed to be her lover's arm, but a mere ordinary man's. She suffered, and did not understand. The look she saw in his eyes was a strange look from him, without affection, without pity even. She knew him well, honest Renaud, her promised husband, and yet she was afraid of him as of a stranger!

All these thoughts pa.s.sed very quickly through their minds, the more quickly because they were simply conscious of them, and did not stop to try to a.n.a.lyze them. The all-powerful human electricity, less known than the other variety, was playing its game, impossible to follow, in their hearts, with its vast net-work of currents and connections. In these two creatures of instinct, the ever-recurring prodigy of love, of natural affinity--of the sympathies and their opposite--was seen once more, as mysterious, as marvellous, as profound as ever. So far as nature is concerned, there are two beings: man and woman; there are no subdivisions. At the basis of humanity, all life is the same, all pa.s.sion is the same. The student of the higher races labors incessantly to perfect his reasoning and his powers of expression, but there is more overflowing, complicated life in the heart of his ignorant brother than in the heads of the philosophers, who, by dint of self-a.n.a.lysis, have lost the faculty of emotion. They who deem themselves most skilful in discovering the real man in themselves, do not perceive that they pervert the secret impulses of their hearts by keeping too close a watch upon them. The light of their miner's lamp changes the psychological conditions, just as constant light would modify the physiological condition of human beings and plants. And, meanwhile, love and death repeat, in the eternal darkness of their simple hearts, their unwitnessed miracles.

They had reached the landing on the first floor--as large as an ordinary room. At the last step, Renaud, almost lifting Livette to the landing, tried to draw her to him, but she was seized with an impulse to resist, and he with a sudden impulse to resist himself; separately, the two impulses would have had no effect; but combined, they exerted sufficient force to place an obstacle between them, as if by mutual consent. That force was the witchery at work.

As they did not exchange a word, their embarra.s.sment increased.

Hastily, to escape the constraint each imposed upon the other, she ran to the door at the right and entered. And he, well pleased to be able to do or say something to bring them nearer together, called out:

"Wait for the light, Livette! I am coming."

But Livette had suddenly remembered the gipsy's threat. "It is fate,"

she said to herself, "I see it now!" And she felt herself grow pale.

Then she had an inspiration.

"Follow me, Renaud."

They pa.s.sed through rooms where furniture of the time of the Empire was sleeping beneath its covers, and the long hangings falling from the ceiling in broad, stiff folds, and withered, as it were, by time; rooms seldom visited by the master, but kept in order by Livette and her grandmother.

At last, Renaud and Livette reached an apartment with bare, whitewashed walls, once used as a chapel.

A wooden altar, entirely devoid of fittings and ornament, stood at one end of the room. Before the white and gold door of the tabernacle the sacred stone was missing, leaving a square hole in the wood-work of the altar.

But Livette opened a broad door flush with the wall. It opened into a closet in the wall. When the door was thrown wide open, they could see, below a shelf about level with their heads, chasubles and stoles hanging straight and stiff--with great crosses in heavy gold embroidery--suns from which the dove came forth; and mystic triangles, and _Agnus Deis_. Among all the others were vestments for use in mourning ceremonies,--black, with bones and executioners' ladders, hammers and nails, in heavy white embroidery; and--to Livette's amazement--there, in the centre of a stole, on silk as black as night, was worked a crown of thorns in silver, which, in the lamplight, seemed to emit bright rays.

On the shelf, above all these priestly vestments--which were arranged with the backs outward, hung in such fas.h.i.+on that you seemed to be looking at the priests standing at the altar--on the shelf, between the goblet and the pyx, shone the consecrated host, a radiant sun, mounted upon a pedestal like a candelabrum; and in the centre of its rays was a gleaming circle of plain gla.s.s, which also reflected, in fantastic guise, the flame of the lamp.

"Kneel, Renaud!" said Livette. "Prayer is the cure for what is happening to us. Kneel and let us pray!"

The drover obeyed. He understood that Livette's purpose was to exorcise fate.

She prayed in silence fervently. He, marvelling, unwonted to the att.i.tude of prayer, and striving to keep himself in countenance, looked from time to time at the lamp he held in his hand, raised it to get a better view of the ecclesiastical treasures, and, diverted for the moment, by constant effort, from the perplexity that weighed upon his heart, he was the more wretched when his mind suddenly reverted to Livette.

Thereupon he said to himself that she certainly had guessed the truth; that there was, in fact, a spell upon him, and, in his heart, he implored the merciful G.o.d of the Cross, the mystic triangle, the symbolical bird and lamb, to come to his aid.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chapter IX

_In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high, and as far away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and he wound his right arm about Livette's waist as she placed her hand upon the iron rail._]

"Forgive us our trespa.s.ses as we forgive those who trespa.s.s against us!" Livette suddenly exclaimed, aloud, thinking of the gipsy.--"O G.o.d," she added, "we promise Thee that on Saintes-Maries Day, which is near at hand, we will each carry three tapers to their church, and wait, until they are so far consumed, one after the other, in their honor, that our finger-tips are burned!"

Then she rose--but before they left the room, they closed the unpretentious double door upon the objects of a dead cult, left in the darkness of abandonment--the goblet without wine, the pyx without bread, and the consecrated host, whose polished metal case held naught within.

X

THE TERRACE

He was well aware that he needed no fever medicine, and that his fever did not come from the swamps.

She said no more about the drug, but as they stood on the landing and he was preparing to descend, she said: