Read Ebook: Love's Usuries by Creswicke Louis

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Ebook has 1092 lines and 46050 words, and 22 pages

"You never tried?"

"No. She was a noble woman, and her husband, too, was a decent fellow, as far as men go. They were admirably fitted by nature for each other, but matrimony dislocated them. That is another of the riddles that frustrate us."

To avert further comment Bentham folded the page and lounged deeper into his chair, as though overcome by fatigue.

Presently he resumed.

"That is a pansy. It was pressed in a book. It marked the place. We read the poem together, she and I, that creature of warm wax pulsating with childish naivetes and provoking contrariety. We read it together in the orange gardens of the hotel looking out over a green transparency of Mediterranean. I wonder if the scent of orange blossom, warmed by the breath of the sea, is an intoxicant, if it soaks in at the pores and quickens the veins to madness? Mine never seemed so palpitating with delirium as in those days with her by my side, and the free heavens and ocean for her setting. Yet she was ready to leave me without changing the indefinitude which always accompanied her words and actions, to leave me on the morrow--for I was anchored to a studio and some commissions to which I was pledged. But though she had a certain prosaic flippancy of speech which spelt discouragement, my heart refused a literal translation of her idiom. On the last day I determined to sound her, and subtly contrived to wrest her attention with this poem. We read it together. Her soft cheek neared mine with a downy magnetism, and vagrant fibrils of tawny hair danced with the wind against my ear. After the second verse I placed this pansy as a mile-stone to colour our travels on the open page. She assisted me to flatten the curling leaves, and my huge hand extinguished her tiny one. Then I whispered--oh, never mind what I whispered--it was a line of nature that the artistic reserve of the poet had omitted. She closed the book and covered her face with her hands to hide the trouble and the tears which puckered it. I made a nest for her in my arms, but she fluttered free out into the orange orchards and so to the house. All day I wandered about sore and sulky. At night I tried to see her, and was informed she was ill. On the morrow I was startled to find she had gone with her friends by the early train."

"And did you not hear from her?"

"Yes, she left a letter behind; I should like to show it you--to see what you make of it."

He rose and from his bureau extracted a note; then he resumed his seat and tossed me the almost illegible scrawl:--

DEAR LIONEL,--All this time I have been too blessed--too supremely happy to face the truth. You do not know my real name nor my grievous history, and the more I love and honour you the harder becomes the revelation. I can endure it no more--so good-bye.

"And was that all?"

"Well?"

"I was going to say--ennobled. Don't you think there are some women who, by power of faith, transmute even clay-footed idols into gold?"

I shook my head and prepared to turn over the leaf, but he made as though to remove the book.

"That last one is a marguerite. It tells a very bald narrative--just a common instance of man's blockheadedness and Fate's topsy-turvydom."

Bentham threw aside his cigarette and closed his eyes. He was looking worn and old.

"The same person?"

"No, another; she was what is called a coquette--an innocent girl baby, who played with men's hearts as children probe sawdust dolls--from a spirit of inquiry. For some silly wager she flirted with a man staying in the hotel, an uncouth provincial clown whom I ignored. But it maddened me. I started for the States to accept a commission that had been offered--that my love for her had held in the balance--and--and I never saw her alive again."

There was a long pause, during which the clock on the chimney ticked its forever--never--without remorse. Gradually the synopsis became more complete, for I could trace the outlines of the buried hours in Bentham's grey, impassive face. Then he went on as though soliloquising:--

A Quaint Elopement

"Ah! little sweetheart, the romance Of life, with all its change and chance, Is but a sealed book to thee."

Her people, an austere mother--who loathed the name of the Republic and rigidly clamped her door against both the bourgeoisie and our British nation of shopkeepers--and her brother, Le Sieur de Quesne, a foolish and thoroughly useless fine gentleman, occupied "La Chaumais," their ancestral domain, near St Servan, on the river Rance. This domain was almost as hermetically sealed as a convent, and far more gloomy. It served to perfection as a prison for the peccant Leonie, when it was discovered that, during a fortnight's stay with an aunt in Paris, she had ventured to eye as a lover a portionless upstart, an artist who worked for mere bread in the Quartier Latin. Here, for twelve months, the poor delinquent was incarcerated. In this mouldy mansion she either knitted or stared vacantly out at the rank unkempt grass and the dilapidated fences, kept by poverty unrepaired, while her parent reiterated stories of the grand old days when the tapestried chairs, woefully faded, had been fresh and beauteous, and when the de Quesne nobles had flitted from the splendours of the Tuilleries to hold rural court within those blackened portals now so severe of aspect, so melancholy and silent with the pulselessness of stagnation.

But love, which laughs at iron bars, makes also mock at the effrontery of blue blood. There came a day, not long after Ralph Hilyard's sudden arrival at St Malo, when, Valentine's expansive back being for a moment turned, a two-lined scribble on a shred of drawing paper was placed in Mademoiselle de Quesne's hands.

It said curtly, with concise eloquence:--

"I want you. I can live without you no longer."

She clasped her hands, drew a long breath of rapturous surprise, and devoutly whispered:--

The Catholic and Breton temperament is so finely interwoven that even this sudden overstepping of family restrictions had to her its pious side. She could there and then, in effervescent thankfulness, have knelt to worship all the infinitesimal saintlings of whom her lover had never heard, but who, with her, were active pioneers to mercy. Besides this, love, which, when real, touches the religious string in every breast, had so long played an accompaniment to prayer and worship, that her first action was almost mechanically devotional. Her second, in contrast, was crudely mundane. Valentine, complacency beaming from her triple chins, loomed expansively in the doorway of the tent, so Leonie, slipping the billet in her mouth, sped for protection to the ocean, the only haven where she could be free from company and espionage.

She battled against the waves till she neared the protective raft in deep water where timorous bathers never ventured. Then she hoisted herself up, took the scrap of paper from its hiding place, and re-read it, crossing herself devoutly and crying with childish exultation:--

"Oh sea, beloved sea, you have brought him to me at last! Never, never shall he depart but with Leonie!"

As she declaimed, a man's head appeared above the arch of the waves, and on the instant they recognised each other.

He sprang to the raft and deposited himself, radiant and dripping, by her side. They were too far at sea to be minutely observed. The roisterers on the beach could do no more than discern a couple of resting forms, a common sight in the bathing season.

"I arrived a week ago, and have been dodging you ever since," he explained.

"I have searched here in the morning when the soldiers parade--I have loafed up and down the St Servan Street till I know all the good people's wardrobes that hang to air--I have sneaked about the forts, and been nearly 'run in' for a spy. I almost despaired of seeing you, but now, at last, we are together."

His tone was dramatic with genuine ecstasy. Since their parting life's fruit for him seemed to have been pared and segmented with a steel knife--at this moment he felt as one who stands free to eat in a luscious raining orchard.

Leonie answered him never a word. She was speechless with stupefied satisfaction. She only laughed, looked down at her dainty sand shoes as she bobbed them in and out of the sparkling water, then, with a caressing glance at his drenched head, laughed again.

The English language sounded beautiful indeed, but her happiness found no sufficiently comprehensive outlet in that scarcely familiar tongue.

"Little one," he said, earnestly, "do you love me enough to be mine, to take me for now and always?"

She nodded only, but her beautiful blue eyes, borrowing intensity from the azure sky, seemed to answer and envelop him with an embrace of adoration.

"You must obey me; you must trust me much, very much," he explained, seriously, seeing the gaiety of her mood.

"To obey--to trust? Of course! Is not all enclosed in love? Have I not said, 'I love you?'"

"To-day," he admitted, "but to-morrow? You will be here in the same place?" He leapt up and knelt imploringly on the dancing planks.

"Yes," she whispered.

"And from that hour you will give yourself to me?" he insisted.

"To you I gave myself a year ago," she said, with solemnity, her candid Breton eyes beaming like a bluer heaven upon him.

He moved uneasily.

"You will not regret?" he urged, in some anxiety.

"Shall I regret that there is a God? that when we love He speaks with us?"

He pressed her hands and kissed them. Her faith was vastly simple, yet vastly complete.

That night he wandered about the restricted area of St Malo long after the Curfew--La Noyette, as it is termed--had sounded and the private dwellings were closed. He was distraught with misgivings. Was he a latent blackguard? he asked himself, or had he yet the courage to withdraw, to leave this innocent girl buried in her dungeon, inconsolable and doubting his fidelity?

No, he had not the courage. Fate held out its magnet--he must go whither it should lead. He was not an apostle--merely a man, an atom in the fortuitous system to be swept where destiny should decide. Need he, an artist, be more chivalrous--he put it baldly--more conventional and self-abnegating than other men? Must he, when the delicious moment of love's ripening had arrived, forbear to pluck, to eat? As he had loved this Breton girl a year ago he loved her, despite their severance, to-day. Nay, more, for in this year had he not flung himself headlong into the orgies of his Bohemian life to strangle recollection, and had he not been haunted by memory's unresting ghost, the more exquisite, the more endearing for its intangible, ineffaceable outlines? He recalled some verses of homage to the city he had encountered in an old St Malo record:--

"Quiconque t'a connue aime ton souvenir Et vers toi, tot ou tard, desire revenir."

The next day he was seated on the raft full half an hour before she appeared. In the lap of the waves he espied a purple-suited nymph, enwound with a sash of Roman red, extending white arms that glistened like newly chiselled marble in the green spray. Her pretty lips laughed as she swam towards him, the sole atom in an immensity of chrysoprase.

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