Читать книгу Love's Usuries - Louis Creswicke - Страница 4

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"Ah! little sweetheart, the romance

Of life, with all its change and chance,

Is but a sealed book to thee."

It took Ralph Hilyard over twelve hours to journey from Southampton to St Malo on that momentous June night. The sea tossed and bounded and roared, but he kept his footing on deck, well satisfied with Nature's frenzied accompaniment to his own tempestuous thoughts. He was being borne to the historic town where She, from infancy to womanhood, had dwelt; he would meet those frank blue Breton eyes adjured for a year—eyes, whose innocence in one less well descended might have spelt ignorance—he would adore the graceful form, that, while clamouring of beauty, hinted all unconsciously of the haute noblesse, the ghost of which abides in St Malo to this moment, though the substance has long since passed away. He would risk all for the encounter, he told himself. Round the subject his mind had revolved for three hundred and sixty-four days; on the three hundred and sixty-fifth his thoughts had sprung to action—he had set sail.

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.

A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's naivete a passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted pictures and—vulgarian!—sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was penalty dire enough for a debutante who had but sipped Paris, it waxed doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and latterly—when the spring weather returned again—kicks! But the pricks of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's blood were spilt in the exercise. Restrictions only grew more rigid, and the poor little damsel, who had tricoteed sombrely in the ancestral dungeon during the winter, was, in summer, never permitted to roam without the vigilant companionship of the substantial retainer Valentine, a worthy who, from her elaborately starched coiffe to the heels of her sabots, was strongly imbued with a sense of conscientious vassalage to "Madame," as Leonie's mother in these degenerate days condescended to be styled.

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."

The opportunity presented itself in this wise. Though cut off from all other pleasures of youth, Leonie was, at midsummer, for the short six weeks' season, allowed to bathe in the sea, attended by the faithful Valentine. She crossed daily to St Malo on the "Pont Roulant"—a quaint structure that, moved by chains and steam, plies the water on sand-embedded rails—and there joined in the acquatic gambols of the merry crowd. With the strange inconsistency of the narrow, her relatives, who had almost tabooed society, permitted her to indulge her taste for swimming, a sport in which she excelled. This laxity probably owed its origin to routine cultivated in the girl's childhood, and retained—as were all the observances of Madame's distinguished household—still intact and unchallenged.

At St Malo, as the tide ebbed, all the delightfully insouciant and cheery French world congregated. The sands near the giant rock that marks the ideal resting-place of Chateaubriand were dotted with tents—a perfect army of mushrooms—which served as disrobing shelters for the bathers. From these emerged a brilliant throng of masqueraders of both sexes, who tripped to the tide with varying degrees of elegant assurance. As Leonie's lithe figure, with its natty tunic and cherry waist-band, slipped from the tent (Valentine for the moment was arranging the shed raiment) a gamin with bare limbs and furled shrimping net lurched up against her. There was unusual audacity in the eye of the youngster, but the disrespect was forgiven when a missive, crunched in his plump palm, was transferred to hers.

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

"Que Dieu soit beni!"

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.

"Mon cheri," she only said. Love's babyhood learns speech with difficulty.

"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?'"

"Enough to leave everyone, to come——"

"How? Valentine?" she cried, with a sudden look of terror; "she waits——"

"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."

He had come back to the "Souvenir" and realised how the character of this Ville d'elite so "douce et pieuse," so grandly sombre, so exquisitely poetic and noble, was expressed and summed up in her, his queenly, gracious Leonie. He decided finally that, come what might, she should be won!

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.

That day the usual crowd on the shore was thinned; a market and fair of some kind at St Servan had lured visitors and St Malouians to the other side of the Pont Roulant. The beach was comparatively deserted, and even the boatman who was deputed to row about the bathing course for purposes of rescue, was, with his craft, apparently off duty.

"How well you swim," said her lover, admiringly, as he greeted the young girl and noted enviously the drippings from her disfiguring cap that were privileged to alight upon her dimpled cheeks. He was tempted to put an arm round the pretty panting figure, but resisted.

"It is my one passe temps. I have swam half to Cezambre and back," she exclaimed proudly, indicating, by a glance over her shoulder, an island that reared its rocks some two miles distant.

He flushed slightly.

"It is there that I want you to swim—now, when you have rested."

"Too far," she sighed; "we could never get back."

"We should never come back," he announced with determination.

"Valentine? She will think I drown."

"She would prefer to bury you at La Chaumais?"

Leonie laughed.

"Are you ready?" he said, arresting further objections and crushing a word of endearment that rose to his lips. To be successful he must be matter-of-fact. Everything now depended on promptness and a cool head. He pulled a knotted string and lifted from the water a cork belt.

"You must run no risk of fatigue," he said, fitting it to her fragile form. "Now, let us start. Valentine will soon be on the qui vive."

Without demur she accepted his hand and leapt with him from the far side of the raft.

The sea stretched a sheet of silver under a sky of gauzy opal, shot with flame from the dozing sun; wind and tide were in their favour. Before long they had passed from the sight of the shore to the shade of the giant rock, whose railed summit, dedicated to Chateaubriand, seems to commune with and command the elements. Cezambre in the distance was as yet merely an apparent triangle of spikes jutting from mid ocean, but towards it they plied their way valiantly, two moving human dots, on the breast of the vast abyss. Once she laughed uproariously to relieve her happiness, but he checked her.

"We must reserve our forces, my darling, every breath in us. Valentine will give the alarm directly. She will wait and wait, and then there will be a hue and cry. It will be a matter of life and death. Do you understand?"

In the earnestness of his face she read for the first time all that this adventurous swim would mean for them both.

"If they come," she panted, "you will not leave me, you will not give me back to them?"

His jaws clenched hard.

"Never!" he vowed. "We will go under first!"

He trod the water for a moment while he scanned the expanse behind them. "Go on," he begged of her; "I will catch you up: spare yourself as much as you can."

His precaution was needless; nothing was to be seen on the still surface of the sea, and, as the rock now screened the shore, it was impossible to guess what might be taking place there. Presently he gained on her.

"Safe so far," he said. "Don't speak; float a little."

He caught the side of the life-belt she wore and swam out, drawing her in the direction of the island. Some sailing boats fluttered across the horizon, but their route lay in an opposite direction to that of the swimmers, who had now left the rocks and were well in the open. Gradually the St Malo coast grew more indistinct, and by degrees in front of them the spikes that had represented Cezambre developed into rocks. Then Leonie assembled her flagging forces and struck out with renewed zest. The sun was going down, and a cool breeze came up behind them and seemed to give them impetus and freshened courage. Before twilight they had safely piloted themselves to shore.

As they rose from the depths he flung his arms round her with a sense of ecstatic relief.

"Now, dearest, we must brave it out; go to the coastguard's hut, and"—he pointed to an oilskin satchel which he had worn across his shoulders—"buy him."

Leonie cast on her lover a glance of awe and pride and worship. He seemed to be God and fairy tale miraculously combined. She believed herself to be treading Elysium as they took their way to the humble stone cabin occupied by the coastguard and his son, the only inhabitants of the island. Her young brain reeled with the intoxication of freedom. How much rosier than any she had before seen were the sea-pinks that flowered their way; how surprisingly azure the common bluebells that nodded and waved and seemed, as they passed, to be ringing chimes to celebrate her happiness. And even the potatoes that grew in the little garden plot where this coastguard Crusoe toiled, had they not a world of wonder in their blossoms, in their golden eyes, which watched and watched and glowed, as she believed, before the triumphant coming of their Love?

A rude hobbledehoy of the St Malo peasant class opened the hut door and stared. Then he said something in his opaque patois which only Leonie could elucidate. She had often imitated the vulgar of her race from sheer plaisanterie.

She replied in the same key, and, seeing that the youth comprehended, the artist prompted a duologue.

"He says," Leonie began by explaining, "the coastguard is ill, he cannot leave him to go ashore, and does not know what to do. He refuses to take us back in his boat."

"He is under the delusion we want to go back? Good! Give him money and say we will stop here and attend his sick man."

This explanation ensured their entry. The boy was evidently relieved of a burden. The hut was composed merely of two rooms, in one of which a weather-beaten old man was evidently bedridden from pain. He looked askance at the two bathers, but at the same time his son put a coin into the sufferer's hand. The youth, with the acumen of his kind, understood the relative value of eloquence and action.

"Clothes—food," Leonie translated at her lover's request.

The boy shook his head. Then his eyes fell on the rough suit belonging to his father which was slung across the end of the bed.

"That might do for me," the artist cogitated, with wrinkled brow, "but for you?" He looked seriously at his sweetheart. The boy's eyes followed his glance and read it. The sick man turned in his bed, groaned, and wondered when these troublesome people were going away.

Leonie rubbed a gentle hand on the invalid's shoulder; it was presumably the seat of the worst pain. He suffered rheumatism in its most acute form, so the coastguard explained between his throes. He was afraid to seek help from the land, lest his condition should be known and he be removed from his post. Their silence was implored with tears and prayers—he would give them food and shelter if they would keep his secret. They promised assuringly.

Meanwhile the lad had disappeared into the inner room—it suggested a combined kitchen and workshop—and came back dangling from his arm some fragmentary portions of his wardrobe, which he displayed with pride.

"If madame would condescend?" he hinted.

At the word "madame" Leonie blushed delightedly.

He led the way into the kitchen, and deposited the dry clothes on a chair.

Ralph remained by the sick man, rubbing the afflicted limb, and expressing himself in the vilest French he knew in hope to imitate the local jargon.

He spoke sufficiently to crave bread and drink, and to learn that these were only obtained when fetched from the land in the island boat. His son, the coastguard said, was seldom allowed to go ashore, lest he should commit himself and divulge the fact that illness kept his sire from duty. Fortunately the boat had been provisioned that morning, and there was food for several days.

During the conversation the artist adjusted the coastguard's overcoat and trousers, which latter were three inches too short for his lengthy British limbs.

Presently a transformed Leonie emerged from the inner chamber. "An ideal fisher boy," the painter thought, as his enraptured eye travelled up and down the coarse blue clothing. When it reached some loose locks of her shining hair he became puzzled. She, divining his thought, felt in the pocket of her newly-acquired coat, and drew forth a maze of gold, soft as fleece of raw silk fresh from the cocoon, and gave it him.

He began to scold at the sacrifice.

"It is a web to entangle your love for always," she murmured, with cooing lips, which seemed, there and then, to suck the heart out of him.

He would fain have swept the coastguard and his son from the hut, but the exuberant patois of "madame," the more exuberant by reason of her characteristic disguise, broke out, demanding of the lad refreshment, and illustrating her request with significant pantomime. The childish joy of this noble Breton damsel as she devoured the rude meal in company with their quaint hosts delighted him, and the charming abandon with which she threw herself into the comedy of the situation brought heat to his already tingling blood.

Suddenly she grew grave.

"I was so hungry I forgot to ask a blessing," whereupon the buoyant little creature uprose from her seat and offered a prayer. The short Latin sentence was familiar to Ralph's ear; it was common to the whole Catholic Church; but now it had a parenthesis—a parenthesis during which her loving eyes looked first to his, then heavenward—a parenthesis of praise and thanksgiving for him.

He bent his head to hide the flush that overspread his cheeks, and, for an instant, he buried his face in his hands.

When the meal was over, Leonie ran into the potato garden. She gathered some loose weeds of which he did not know the name, picking here and there carefully that all of them should be of the right sort.

"I could not go to sleep and leave the old man to his pains," she said. "Of these"—she pointed to the herbs—"the poor people make poultices when they suffer."

He took the bundles from her hands and kissed her fingers. "You shall sleep, dearest, and I will devote myself to the poor fellow. We have reason to be very grateful to him."

"Very well, doctor," she laughed. "You must be careful to stew the leaves very soft."

Then she walked in and commanded the boy to get grass in a bag for a pillow, declaring merrily that some fishing nets and canvas in the kitchen would make her a couch fit for a queen.

The poultices certainly soothed, though they did not cure, the sufferer. This fact Ralph painfully discovered during the long hours of the night. His limbs were weary, and though the floor at the foot of the coastguard's bed was hard, he yearned heartily for rest. But the poor invalid, by whose side the son snored obdurately, hourly implored relief. Faithful to his word, the nurse, uprose at intervals and put fresh leaves in the stewpan, warming them on a rustic stove till soft enough for use. This lasted till day dawn. Then the lad went forth a-shrimping, and Ralph decided to refresh himself with a plunge in the sea. Washing utensils, he had discovered, were unknown in Cezambre.

He was speeding down the garden in bathing suit when he caught a glimpse of his purple dolphin riding the waves.

"I squeezed myself out of the window so as not to wake you," she spluttered, through the surf. "I thought, mon cheri, you would repose for ever."

"The old man is very thankful to you for your prescription." He avoided the confession of his night's unrest. "We must gather some more of those herbs to-day."

"Perhaps, but not till evening. You don't know that we must hide. There may come strangers for trips on boats from St Servan, and one is never sure."

"Your people?"

"Oh no; they would do nothing so roturier—English and Americans——"

"They would not know us; you forget what a good gamin my noble lady makes."

"I did forget," she chuckled. "I will dig potatoes, and you may take the boy to the other side of the island. The strangers only go there to stare one moment at the rocks and cry 'Oh!'"

When at midday the trippers landed at Cezambre, they saw no one but an urchin bent double over a spade. His face was covered with mud, some of which was also spattered on the floss silk of his hair.

A tourist addressed him, and received a reply in broad patois which he could not understand.

The youth was very voluble, despite the irresponsiveness of the audience; he waved his hand indicating the beauties of the island with an air of ownership. Now and then he punctuated his speech by rubbing his fustian arm across his nose in true plebeian fashion. The tourists were delighted, and, before departing, dropped a silver coin into his grimy but exquisitely shaped palm.

When Ralph returned she met him, dancing and rubbing the mud from her cheeks.

"See," she said, tossing the coin in the air, "this is the first wedding present we have had. I will cut Cezambre upon it and wear it for ever. But first you will come with me."

She took his hand and led the way to a curious cave carved in the rocks, in the centre of which was a cross. The walls were frescoed with common shells, the offerings, she explained, of poor pilgrims who had been worshippers at this primitive shrine.

With unconscious grace she prostrated herself in prayer.

He watched her in silence, his artist eye greedily tracing the picturesque in every line of this innocent devotion, though his panting heart longed to intrude on the sanctity of her worship. Presently she lifted her hand to his and drew him to his knees by her side.

Softly, like the sonorous gong from some grand cathedral belfry, she commenced to recite or chant in Latin.

"Speak with me," she whispered, repeating the melodious words with an accent of reverential appreciation.

He did as she bade. The fervour of her devotion communicated itself to him, he followed word for word to the end. The burthen, though not the absolute meaning of the sentences, inspired him—it was the ceremony of marriage they quoted, it was God's blessing they mutually invoked.

When they had returned to the potato garden, and were plucking herbs for the poultices he had promised to renew during his midnight vigils, he suddenly remarked:—

"We must leave here for the English coast as soon as we can get a fishing smack to take us along."

"Leave here?" she uttered in dismay. "I would remain for ever."

He gave a short gasp, clutched her hands, and looked straight into the transparent blue depths of her eyes. Then he moved away a step or two and shook his head.

"It is inevitable; we must go to England—give ourselves over to law and parson."

"Here it is better," she cooed; "you are king and I am priest." But he dissented.

"I never had much respect for Church or State. I appreciate them as one appreciates steel to sharpen one's blade against."

She did not understand. Only the simplest English formed her vocabulary, but she saw he disagreed with her.

"Here we are everything," she said; "we make laws straight from God for ourselves."

He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. "Those, I find, are the toughest laws of all! Come, darling, let us ask the boy yonder about the fishing boats."

They were informed that one might possibly pass on the following night. He borrowed from the youth a piece of hard chalk that acted in lieu of pencil, and begged Leonie to write with it on some rough paper which had served to wrap stores from the land.

"Tell your mother that we have decided, after three days on this island, to leave for Brighton, on the British coast, there to marry. A year ago we asked her blessing on our love, and she refused it; we pray that she will now be more lenient."

"No good," murmured Leonie, translating, however, what he had dictated.

Below, he scribbled the address of an hotel in England, where a reply might meet them.

"She is sure," he said, folding the note, "to call me a blackguard, and as certain, I hope, to consent."

"My best and dearest," cried the girl in prospective contradiction of anything that might be pronounced against him.

Twenty-four hours later, when the fishing smack alluded to hove in sight, the missive was handed to the coastguard's son. He was ordered to take it inland on the morrow, and deliver it without fail, at "La Chaumais."

"But supposing my brother should not write? Supposing he should come?"

"That is what I hope. Le Sieur will support the dignity of the De Quesnes—he will engage with the law and leave us to engage with only love."

So the next evening they put out to sea through the gossamer scarves of moving twilight—the man in his coastguard kit gay to frivolity, the girl in fisher disguise, meditative, half tearful. She breathed not a word while her straining eyes could clutch the outline of the land from the embrace of night; but when all was wrapped in gloom she lifted her gaze to the star-spangled heavens, and murmured with folded hands, "Cher Royaume de Cezambre, adieu!"