Chapter V: Part II: I (1)

THE MAKER OF RUINS

OF all the lakes of Lombardy Orta is the least frequented. It is lost in the reputation of the Lago Maggiore like a small boat in the wake of a vessel.

From the train which runs along its border the voyager is content to regard it negligently and does not deign to stop. He sees the clearly drawn lines of the wooded mountains that shut it in, and the hollows of the valleys where the white villages half hide themselves like a flock of sheep in a pasture. He catches a hasty glimpse of a little hill planted with trees thrust forth on a promontory into the waters, of a straggling town on the bank, of an island all built up, and in this rapid flight he imagines he has culled the smiling delicacy of this landscape, which indeed stores up and epitomises the whole charm of the Lombardy country: a mixture of grace and harshness. The shore of the lake rounds itself off lazily, but the contours of the hills against the horizon are crisp and well marked, not soft and vaporous as under the paler skies of Switzerland and Savoy. In the evening they seem to sink deep into the clear background. The almost symmetrical undulations of the hills repeat the same forms, exaggerating themselves accordingly as one looks toward the north, so that one feels almost as if they could be measured by the clearly marked stages with which the Novare plain comes up at last against the formidable barrier of the Alps.

Orta Novarese is not yet equipped for the reception of travellers, and on that account enjoys its fortunate neglect. A single hotel on the side of the Sacred Mount--Orta is crowned by a little mountain, where twenty chapels, scattered among the trees, illustrate the life and miracles of St. Francis of Assisi--the Hotel Belvedere, from spring until the beginning of winter, receives a limited number of lodgers. But all through the green of the woods, along the lake’s edge, one discovers country houses, where the aristocracy of the province come for rest and recreation. The iron gates are left open, and from well-kept gardens comes a perfume of flowers that is quite delicious after the musty smell of table-d’hôte that vitiates one’s stay at Pollanza or Baveno.

Fleeing from the large towns where they had spent the stormy months of winter, Mrs. Frasne and Maurice Roquevillard had installed themselves at the Belvedere in May. They had been tempted to stay on there because they were tired of change, as well as by the moderate prices, so that they found themselves still there at the end of October. An exceptional autumn followed almost slyly in the steps of summer, and but for the shorter days, and a little freshness in the air, or the timid gold that began to touch the foliage, the sun would have inspired unlimited confidence in good weather.

This morning, in the sitting-room of their suite at the hotel, the young man was occupied with the translating of a little Italian book, _Vita dei SS_. _Jiulio e Giuliano_, a history of those two apostles who came from the Ægean Sea in the fourth century to preach the gospel in Orta. A passage taken from Lamartine, and left there in the original text, held him longer than the obscurest phrase. In a reverie he lifted his head from the prospect near the window. His eyes disdained the bouquet of trees which finished off the peninsula below him, the calm and transparent lake, the little island, a place where enchantments were performed in ancient days, which the poetic author of the biography compared to a camellia on a silver plate. Spontaneously they sought the ridge of the mountains which barred the horizon, as if he would pierce them and look beyond. While he was thus absorbed, a white form glided into the room and bent over his shoulder to glance at the open book. From among the foreign phrases the passage from Lamartine detached itself in italics:

_The predestined fate of the child is the house in which it was born: his spirit is made up above all else of impressions there received. The look of our mother’s eyes is a part of our soul, entering through our oxen eyes into our inmost parts._

Mrs. Frasne quietly closed the book; and her lover, who had not heard her come in, started at the movement. Between them passed a look full of those things which lovers hardly dare to speak or even think.

“What day of the month is it?” she asked indifferently.

Reassured, he replied:

“The twenty-fifth of October.”

Then all at once she made him anxious once more:

“A year ago, do you remember, we met each other at the Calvary of Lemenc. It was there we made up our minds to flee together. Only a year, and already my love is no longer enough for you.”

“Edith!”

“No, it’s no longer enough for you.”

And with a sad smile she added simply:

“See, how you work.”

“Edith, must we not think of the future?”

“No, not yet. What do we need?”

He took umbrage at her question:

“My resources are used up. The money we’re spending now is yours. I can’t forget that.”

“But all is the same between us. Am I not your wife?”

He wrinkled his eyebrows with a purposed look.

“I want your dot to remain intact. I’ve asked one of my friends, who is a political writer in Paris, to find me a place with the newspapers. Can’t I send them some review from the foreign journals? I learned English at college, and later German for my doctor’s thesis. And I speak Italian already. This side work and a place in a lawyer’s office will give us enough to live on.”

She listened to him with an enigmatic smile, while she stroked his face with that gesture of adoration so familiar to him.

“To-morrow we’ll talk about the future. To-morrow, not to-day,” she said.

“Why should we wait a day? On the contrary, we ought to decide at once on the date of our departure.”

“Our departure?”

“Yes, for Paris.”

She could not conceal her discontent.

“Always Paris. You talk about it all the time. You are obsessed by it.”

“It’s in Paris that I must earn my daily bread,” he replied, in a melancholy voice.

Supply and fawningly she slid into his arms, and sought the red of his lips beneath his moustache, murmuring close to him:

“I asked you for one year of your life. To live one year with neither past nor future, to breathe in our tenderness every day, to have you forget all the rest of the world for me. Don’t you remember?”

“Have I not done all this for you, and much more, too?”

“There’s one day due me. To-morrow is our anniversary.”

“To-morrow, Edith,” he repeated, with some emotion.

All trembling with her memories she stood erect again.

“Don’t spoil this day that’s left us. Since it’s the last, let’s have it the most beautiful of our year that has run away drop by drop. Don’t let us talk of the future before to-morrow. Will you promise me?”

He smiled at so much ecstasy.

“I’ll do as you wish.”

“Then I’ll go and dress. It won’t take long. And we’ll go out together. We’ll have lunch on the island.”

She disappeared, and during her absence he tried to begin again at his work on the translation. But for the second time he began the phrase from Lamartine:

“_The predestined fate of the child is the home in which it was born_----” And again he paused.

Edith was right. The present did not suffice him any more, had never sufficed him. By tacit consent they had both of them brushed aside the future, but into the past, of which they dared not speak, their minds looked when their mouths were mute. Silence, for him, became a supplication. Beyond those nearer mountains there, at this hour, what were _they_ doing, those dear ones from whom he had no news?

Edith reappeared on the threshold, soliciting his approval.

“Don’t you think I look nice this morning?”

She wore a summer dress of white serge, which, without fitting too closely, outlined her flexible form, and a hat surmounted by white wings, which gave her whole person a finishing touch of light and slender grace. This year had rejuvenated her. Her eyes of fire could not have flashed more brilliantly than before, but her cheeks were rounder and less pale. Her thin body had taken on an appearance of weight, and through her whole person was diffused an indefinable and pervasive air of love.

He admired her, but did not put in words the compliment for which she waited.

They went down to the port of Orta by a steeply inclined path, paved with round stones, so little used that grass was growing in the crevices. In the square, before the bank where the boats were moored, they came upon a young girl in a red bonnet, whom they had already encountered several times in their walks and who must have lived somewhere near. The little foreigner stared at them, especially Maurice, without timidity.

“She is pretty,” remarked Maurice, after they had passed.

His companion made a little grimace of sadness, which for a moment brought back all her age.

“Don’t look at her,” she said. “I am jealous.”

“Jealous? And can’t I be, too?” he asked, teasing her for her severity.

“Of whom, good heavens!”

“Why, of that black and moustachioed Italian at the hotel. He forgets his mistress during meals and makes bold eyes at you.”

She burst into laughter.

“Lorenzo!”

“You know his name?”

“He told me. He made me a declaration, rolling up the whites of his eyes. It was too funny!”

He forced himself to laugh in his turn. But when they were installed in their boat, and two or three strokes of the oars had carried them from the shore, he was conscious of the same feeling of uneasiness. This present that they were managing with so much art, from which they set aside all memories and consequences, so that they might extract its essence in all its force, here was the least little incident tainting it. What barriers must be built for love to give it shelter from the world even for a year! This love, for which they had sacrificed everything, was pressed upon from every side by life and by the impulses of their own hearts, even as the shores of the little island that lay before them were laved by the waters of the lake.

She was the first to feel the consciousness of their misery. She leant from the thwart and drew nearer to him. But instead of divining what she meant, he began and told her the legend of St. Jules, for whom they neither of them cared a rap.

“This island in olden times,” he recited, “was infested with snakes. When St. Jules wanted to go to Orta the fishermen all refused to lend him their boats, whereupon he spread his mantle on the water for a boat and used his staff for an oar.”

She was vexed, and murmured sardonically:

“How much you know!”

“I’ve just been reading about this miracle.”

“I detest your book.”

He guessed her reason for detesting it. In this last day of their first year of love, that was to sum up all its sweetness, everything hurt them, everything turned sad for them, even the most innocent words.

They got out at the foot of a staircase that led up from the beach, and fastened their boat to an iron ring fixed in the gravel for that purpose. They went into the old Roman basilica, which contained some Byzantine frescoes, recently discovered under a thick coat of rough-cast, a chair of black marble, a sarcophagus and some frescoes by Ferrari and Luino. Because they had seen these at other times together, they visited them now without pleasure. Lovers must always have new sights, so much do they shrink from blunted sensations, for fear instinctively of wearying each other. Maurice and Edith preferred to explore this morning a narrow passageway that was quite new to them. The whole summit of this precipitous little island is covered with the buildings of a seminary that looks as if it were a fortress. The little road turned presently and led them abruptly up to a closed door. Their progress was blocked, and they found themselves face to face in the most utter isolation, shut in by two high walls and on an island. There could not have been a completer effect of isolation for them, of having no one besides themselves in the whole world. Surely this is the professed desire of lovers. One year ago they would have welcomed for all their lives an isolation like this. To-day, without a word, they turned and fled back to the beach.

An old man was fishing with his line in the midday sun. Under a willow tree near the strand two barefooted children were playing ducks and drakes. Along the shore country houses appeared among the trees, whose leaves autumn was slowly garnishing with colour, and Orta, a mass of white, was reflected in the motionless lake. The spectacle of this calm and normal life in the midday stillness helped to restore their spirits.

They ate their lunch on the steps of the stairway that led up to the basilica. Afterwards they floated here and there over the water for a part of the afternoon, seeking some place unknown to them in which they might revivify sensation. Finally they went back to the port, and once on shore again, still sought some new use to make of time.

“Shall we go back to the hotel?” he asked, as they stood in the little square.

But she protested against the idea of shutting themselves up in the house.

“Oh, no! The sun is still high above the mountain. Let’s go back by the long way, and not hurry.”

The road, after crossing through the town, which was quite destitute of sidewalks, ran along the shore of the lake, rising little by little from its level, and following the contours of the Sacred Mount, whose trees and chapels dominated the peninsula, past the iron gates or walls of villas, with ornamental palms and orange trees at their entrances. In front of one of these villas, a quite modest and shabby one, which they could see at the end of a short avenue through the open portals, Edith caught the smell of roses.

“Wait,” she said to her lover. “They are so sweet, and they must be the last.”

“Let’s go in,” he said. “I’ll beg some for you.”

They went in together, and discovered in the inner garden a strange assemblage of statues--small truncated columns, little stuccoed towers with their coating half peeled off, unfinished porches, all the devastation of a miniature art city, but regular and organised as with a decorative motive. In the midst of this symmetrical group of stones, all symbolising with factitious grace the injuries of time, a little marble Cupid stood on his pedestal, with roses all around him, bending his bow with a smile upon his lips.

The young woman saw only Love among the roses.

“He is charming, and the day caresses him.”

“Isn’t it bizarre?” observed Maurice. “We must be in the grounds of some collector of monuments. They’ve no objection to such things in Italy.”

An elderly man with a white blouse put on over his clothes, and a sculptor’s chisel in his hand, came forward to meet them, and greeted them quite solemnly, with a mixture of obsequiousness and nobility. He entered into conversation with Maurice in Italian, while Edith, with his permission, gathered some flowers. She rejoined the two men presently with a sheaf of them in her hands.

“Here is my bouquet. I’ll give you each a rose,” she said.

The despoiled proprietor stumbled through some half intelligible form of thanks and greeting. Maurice introduced him:

“Mr. Antonio Siccardi, a maker of artificial ruins. It’s a fine occupation.”

Edith raised inquiring eyes to her lover.

“I’ll explain,” he added for her benefit.

When they were on the road again, after having taken leave of their host of the moment, Edith made game of this very unusual and unheard-of occupation, and repeated in a jesting tone:

“A manufacturer of artificial ruins?”

“Exactly,” said Maurice, “for decorating parks. In the shrubbery, or near a garden bench, you put a broken column, or an unfinished archway or some clever rock work: it’s quite effective. I knew a good man in the Latin Quarter who made cobwebs for old wine bottles, and people bought them that very evening for their grand dinners.”

“And could he make much money at such work?”

“A good deal.”

“It doesn’t seem possible.”

“He told me, as a matter of fact, that all the newly rich, and there are a great many of them, people who have made money at finance or trade, were mad about his art. Their houses are brand new, and they themselves have just risen from the soil, but they must have ruins for beauty.”

“Fancy! But Cupid? What is Love doing in the midst of those dreadful ruins? Roses would be enough for him.”

“I asked the good man that question, too.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“‘He delights in ruins,’ he assured me, with a mysterious smile, a Mona Lisa smile that merchants can put on at will, I’ve noticed.”

“Yes, it’s funny,” she concluded. “The Italians put marble groups in city clothes in their cemeteries, making them look like dressmakers’ parlors, and they select the emblems of death to decorate their gardens....”

Slowly they climbed the Sacred Mountain, which rose about a hundred yards above the town. When they reached the summit they found evening there, and a new secret sweetness in the great woods of firs, larches, chestnuts and parasol pines, in the midst of which, here and there under the declining sun, were scattered the twenty sanctuaries of St. Francis. These little chapels, built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, are all of different styles of architecture, round or square, with or without peristyles, Gothic or Romanesque, Byzantine effects prevailing. Each of them encloses, instead of an altar, some scene from the saint’s life, done in life-size terracotta images, a motionless Oberammergau. A naïve and candid art had presided over the installation of this pilgrim’s goal. The stigmata of the saint are the ends of the wires that raise his hands to the gold rays in the ceiling that denote God’s presence there.

Since they had come to Orta Edith and Maurice had never let many days go by without visiting the Sacred Mountain. You could reach it from the Belvedere Hotel in a few steps. Among all the chapels they had elected the fifteenth, which, according to tradition, had been designed by Michelangelo, as their special favourite. It was circular in form, with a cupola, and had a peristyle supported by slender little granite columns. It reminded them of the Calvary of Lemenc, where their flight had been decided on. Along its gallery, which rose a few steps from the ground, the graceful vaulted arches framed successively the various perspectives of the woods: sometimes a view of other chapels among the foliage, sometimes the outlines of a well-curb, and sometimes, between the branches, a panel of sky, a corner of the lake, or the island of St. Jiulio, with its campanile at its front, looking like some big ironclad run aground in the tiny water.

They made their way instinctively toward their special chapel, and climbed its steps. The pine trunks near them stood out against the reddening background of the sky, and here and there one of the other sanctuaries gleamed among the trees like a friendly dwelling.

She held her roses in one hand and rested the other on the shoulder of her lover.

“It was a beautiful evening, like this,” she sighed.

“When?”

“A year ago. You are not sorry?”

He turned away his eyes.

“No.”

“You aren’t going to be sorry for anything?”

As she pressed him for an answer he replied, almost sternly:

“No, never.”

She leant nearer to him to reach his lips, and in his eyes she caught a distant look that frightened her. The something that had been separating them all day, all this last day of their year of tenderness, showed there now with more distinctness than ever. She said at last something that prudence should have counselled her to leave unsaid:

“Maurice, where is Chambéry?”

“Down there.”

His reply came so quickly, and with a gesture so certain, that she was all upset by it. He took his bearings often, then, from that quarter of the sky. Even in his love he had forgotten nothing. Tears started in the young woman’s eyes. He did not ask her the reason of them, but tried to console her with caresses.

“Edith, I love you so.”

She made a little face to show that she was not deceived.

“More than everything?”

“More than everything.”

“Enough to die for me?”

“Yes.”

“Not more than that?”

“It would not be possible.”

With insatiable ardour she cried out:

“But I don’t want to die, I want to live. Shall you love me as much to-morrow?”

“Why not to-morrow?”

“Because I’m afraid. Don’t you see that we can’t go on like this?”

“Oh, you see it, too, then. No, we can’t any more. The future, the past, the world, we can’t suppress them. Each day you have been putting off the final reckoning.”

“Keep still, Maurice--keep still.”

She put her hand against his mouth to stop him, and for a second time she begged him:

“To-morrow, to-morrow, I promise you. I’ll do as you wish to-morrow. You shall decide our fate. But not this evening. This last evening is mine.”

And she put her lips to his, where her hand had been.

The day was waning swiftly. Among the trees the red streak that edged the mountain grew softer, and the waters of the lake took on a uniform tint of grey, barely streaked and lightened here and there by the last reflections from the setting sun.

It was he who first moved down the steps of the peristyle. He walked, unheeding what he did, in the direction that he had just pointed out to her with his hand. When he turned back again he saw his companion motionless there between two columns. So she had waited for him that other time before the Calvary of Lemenc. Her white figure stood out against the greyer wall.

“How beautiful she is,” he reflected, defeated a second time.

She was smelling of her flowers, watching the evening light, and he recalled their queer visit of the afternoon: “Love and his roses.”

He called to her:

“Edith, aren’t you coming? It’s getting chilly, and you have no wrap.”

As she came over toward him he gazed still toward that point in the horizon that marked his native land for him, and thought:

“The ruin is down there.”

Had not the artist in Orta assured them, with his engaging smile, that Love took delight in ruins?

II

THE ANNIVERSARY

EVEN on the day of their “anniversary” Maurice tried to persuade his companion to decide on their departure. After lunch he led her into the avenue that bounded the Sacred Mountain and widened at intervals into little terraces, with stone balustrades placed so as to give good views over the lake.

The sunlight filled it everywhere, but at the end of October the sun was grateful and not a thing to shun.

Whether from sadness or absent-mindedness, she did not appear disposed to talk. He was the first to speak, breaking the silence that now separated them, instead of bringing them closer to each other.

“This day had to come, Edith. We have been happy here. But we must go. They are waiting for me in Paris. It will be the beginning of a new life.”

He hoped for an answer, some encouragement, and began again with some embarrassment:

“We’ll set up housekeeping for our love. We’ll have a home. I’ll take steps to legalise our situation, and get a divorce for you. You haven’t wanted me to do anything about it hitherto. We’ve broken all our bonds without a backward glance.”

Edith eluded this question of getting domiciled. She had only a confused idea of not leaving Italy, and seemed without a hint of any plan besides.

“How good it is at this hour of day,” she murmured. “Last evening I felt cold.”

He followed her lead patiently.

“Cold? The air is so soft it seems almost summer still.”

“And yet it’s autumn. Look.”

At their feet stretched the high irregular shores of the lake. Opposite them rose the clearly drawn forms of the mountains. Here and there a shrine, a village, or a tower fixed the salient points of the landscape for them. Trees and shrubs in a few days had changed their colours: only the group of pines kept their green intact in the pale gold sea.

They were leaning on the balustrade. As in Savoy, the menacing beauty of things made Edith feel an almost painful ecstasy. With nostrils dilated and nerves taut, vibrating in all her being, she breathed in the autumn’s mortal grace. And he, gazing on that face across which some passion always stirred, that seemed to burn with some inner devouring flame behind the windows of her soul, that face which probably he had never yet seen in utter calm, could not tear his eyes away. Certain delicate lines, the coursing of the blood beneath her healthy skin, the smell of her dark hair, blotted out the beauty of the world for him, or rather gathered all beauty in that little space. He could not help noticing the effect upon her of the year that had slipped by. Her youth recovered, liberty, pleasure, the cities and works of art which they had seen together, had helped her and brightened her. Her heart had been seething with confused desires when they had set out, and her year had purified and completed her at the same time. Never until now had he appreciated so distinctly the work his love had wrought in her. He felt an anguished joy in reflecting that he might lose her.

She was conscious of Maurice’s persistent gaze, and smiled at him, pointing toward the horizon with a comprehensive gesture that seemed to gather it all in at once.

“It’s lovelier even than in those first days.”

He could not help translating his recent thoughts for her.

“You, too, are more beautiful, Edith.”

The unlooked-for compliment took her by surprise.

“Really?”

“Yes, I mean it. Do you see those trees? They are more graceful, as if they had thrown off some useless weight. You can see farther through their branches. In the same way I can see deeper into your eyes.”

“As deep as my heart?”

“Into your heart.”

She smiled, thinking how much a young man has yet to learn of a woman’s heart. And doubting her power no longer, she judged the moment favourable to begin, herself, the explanations that had been so long postponed. Her idea was to cast aside all falsehood, and bind her lover to herself irrevocably by making him accept a complicity that he could not disavow at so late a day. Such an acceptance of a share of guilt with her would be the greatest proof of tenderness that he could give her. She would have given it to him, herself, without hesitating, were the case reversed. But with men, one could never tell till the very end, so strange is their idea of honour.

Herself she had not had a single doubt as to her right to take away the amount of the settlement Mr. Frasne had made her of his own accord. What sort of gift was it that the giver could keep hold of? She thrust aside even her scruples as to the manner in which she had gone about the business. What did the way of it signify to her? Women only half understand any questions of self-interest that bother them.

It had been explained to her that this money belonged to her, and this explanation sufficed her. Even if she had robbed her husband she would have felt no remorse, because she hated him. But in good faith she did not believe she had despoiled him. She had only taken what was strictly due her, and had only to have opened her hands to take more. _She_ had given him her youth and beauty. She had paid with her life, and tears. Could she be paid back for her nine years of repugnances overcome, her nine years of accumulated distaste?

Nevertheless, at the moment of revealing all to Maurice, she hesitated. With her most coaxing voice she began:

“Happiness improves one’s looks, then? Since my childhood this has been my first year of happiness. Oh, if you knew my past!”

“I have often asked you, Edith. Tell me about it now. Let me have the story. Neither you nor I must keep any more secrets from each other.”

It was her own version that she told, somewhat adapted, like all autobiographies: a childhood happy and petted, an environment of prosperity and luxury; then the ruin of her father, overtaken by his passion for gambling, a ruin that brought out the worst in him and led rapidly to idleness, then drunkenness and fatal illness: next her retirement to the country with her forlorn and feeble mother, and already the revolt within herself at her monotonous existence, the fever of desire and envy that consumed her girl’s heart. She had inherited her father’s imprudence and generosity, but was reduced to giving music lessons to the children of the surrounding villas and waiting impatiently for the lover that should set her free. Maurice interrupted her recital to murmur:

“It was misery.”

She believed that he pitied her, and she smiled on him, thanking him for his compassion. She was absorbed in her recollections, and did not see the strict attention that he was concentrating on her every word.

“Almost,” she replied.

“And already you were pretty?”

“I don’t think so. I was so thin. A grapevine.”

But she understood herself very well, for she added in a tone of mischief:

“Good for kindling fires.”

Then began the pursuit of her by Mr. Frasne. With his pop-eyes and his set ways, which she could feel underneath his insipid airs, her only sentiment toward him was one of repulsion. She was revolted by it all. He was the first of all her suitors to ask for her hand. He possessed a comfortable fortune, an honourable position in Paris; he could, if he liked, acquire a lawyer’s practice at Grenoble or in some neighbouring village. It was the marriage of convenience in all its horrors. She detested poverty; her mother, who was not accustomed to it, objected to it still more. Old people want to live, and mere love does not move them. All her relations got round the girl.

“And so I sold myself,” she concluded.

He had not interrupted her once. With heart beating, he followed her throughout, like one who skirts the edge of an abyss. When she ended her story with this climax he hurled the words at her which came in an instant to his lips, brutally:

“And your dot?”

“Wait, you’ll see.”

Only a few pedestrians were taking the air in the avenue. Some children were playing in the woods, quite far from them. They were almost alone, but even by the presence of these discreet witnesses she lost her best argument in this crisis that she had so adroitly postponed until to-day--the argument of her kisses. She had understood, she could not fail to have understood, what was agitating her lover: so often had it lain upon her own mind, too. It had for so long a time tormented both of them; and at the expense of much effort, by many lies and refusals to talk about the past--which counts for so little when one is in love--she had succeeded in keeping it until now at a safe distance from their happiness. At the back of her head, however, was the idea that by this very thing she would chain him to her forever.

She was bravely straining her intelligence, like a bow, to drive her arguments far forward; she wanted her explanation to be sincere and loyal as well as decisive; and all the time he was repeating in a strangled voice:

“Your dot? You had no dot?”

He showed a tone of command that he got from his father, and gave his orders sharply:

“Speak. You must tell me now.”

She was surprised, dismayed, staring at him almost in terror. This big young man of twenty-five, so sweet, so adorable, whom she had felt so sure of, lo, how abruptly he became the master. Then she had not yet explored all the corners of this heart that she had thought was hers. Instinctively, to shield their love, she shifted her tactics, and yielded up the least possible portion of the truth.

“My dot, Maurice? It truly belongs to me, my dot.”

“Where did it come from? It was not settled on you, then, by your relatives? Oh, I can guess how it was. It was he, wasn’t it, who settled it on you in your marriage contract? Answer me.”

She tried to hold out against him.

“Yes, it was he who gave it to me. And afterwards? It’s mine now.”

He was more upset than she was, but contained his anger on account of the passersby, going on with his questioning of her, nevertheless.

“No, unfortunately, it isn’t yours. I am familiar with these contracts. It was a settlement made in case of your surviving your husband. That’s what it was. I’m sure of it. Try to remember now, and be careful.”

She stiffened with all her being at these menacing words from these two dear lips, these set red lips. It was not a question any more now for her of making an accomplice of her lover, of getting this supreme gauge of love from him, only of saving that love. Her only weapons were the caresses in her voice, and she knew he would yield to them; and, besides, was it not the truth, what she was telling him?

“Maurice, don’t treat me like this. You deceive yourself. My dot belongs to me. It was mine from the beginning. A friend of my father’s insisted upon it. Do you want proof of it? As long as my mother lived I used the income from it for her. I could dispose of it as I saw fit. You see, you are mistaken. Don’t treat me like this.”

In his mental disarray the former law student of the Frasne offices was summoning up all his ideas of law, trying to reason the thing out.

“It’s always been a gift. A gift from him. And a settlement is revocable in case of divorce.”

“Not mine, I swear to you,” she assured him, hazarding everything on the throw.

“Try to think, Edith. It is so serious. My very life is at stake.”

“Your life?”

“Yes. Or my honour. It’s the same thing. Was it you who took charge of this sum, who handled the revenues?”

“Yes, I.”

She was on the alert now, and guessed swiftly what way she must make her answers, plunging into falsehood greedily.

The settlement of one hundred thousand francs to which Mr. Frasne had consented upon her marriage was her own property in fact, but under the administration and control of her husband. It was not to continue in the event of an action for divorce against her. In any case, she had not the free use of it, she could not arrange, by herself alone, for withdrawing any of it. But what did these quibbles amount to?

Nevertheless, Maurice went on, implacable as a trial judge.

“Where was this money deposited?”

“In the Universal Bank, in funds that I negotiated myself with it. I’ve told you all this already. Let me be, Maurice.”

“Deposited in your name?”

“In my name.”

“Was it there you drew it out before we left Chambéry?”

“Yes, there.”

“You were able to withdraw it from the branch at Chambéry on your endorsement alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then you were married under the arrangement of a separate maintenance account?”

“That was it.”

Several times he had questioned her on this subject, since she had told him, a little while after their flight, of having realised upon her personal fortune, which she represented as having been an inheritance from her family. This fiction of a deposit account, conceived at that time to avoid rousing the young man’s susceptibilities, she was maintaining now energetically the very day on which she had thought to give it up completely.

Her replies, made clearly and rapidly, and conforming to her previous explanations, were plausible, taken as a whole. It was not improbable that some counsellor of the Dannemarie family should have interposed before the signing of the marriage contract, to turn Frasne’s passion to account and exact an absolute and definite settlement on her; it would safeguard the young woman’s future and make her circumstances more dignified and independent. Why did Maurice doubt these statements? Did they not sufficiently destroy his happiness? It was already too much that he had yielded to a sort of entombment, from which he awakened now in anger; too much that by an unworthy compromise he had delayed his return to work until this end of their year of love. But he had not suspected the tainted origin of this fortune of Edith’s, though he deluded himself into thinking that he would restore it completely some day by his own earnings. And, lo, here was the truth now shedding the veil that hid it, crushing his pride and shattering all his self-esteem. This fortune, even if it belonged of right to Edith, came really from the man whose home he had ruined. That he should have turned the least particle of it to his own account was an infamous proceeding that he could not tolerate at any price.

With a sinking sensation, he made a mental calculation of the amount of his indebtedness to her.

“Your money is deposited in the International Bank of Milan, Edith. Do you know how much of it has been used?”

“You have had charge of it.”

“Eight thousand francs, more or less.”

“We have not spent much,” she protested gently. As a matter of fact, this sum, added to what he had had himself, came to a very moderate figure for the expenses of a whole year spent in travel. But at Orta, where they had stayed for six months, living was very cheap, diversions were infrequent and not costly. Edith, after a brief fling of extravagance, had shown herself always easy to please, quite simple and content with few expenditures, finding her love enough.

When and how could he get hold of eight thousand francs? As long as he was unable to reimburse her he should feel crushed, and dishonoured, his life a burden to him. Because he deeply resented his humiliation, Maurice loaded his companion with reproach.

“Very well, then. I am your debtor. I will pay you back, though. After that we’ll see.”

“What a discussion for two lovers,” sighed Edith, at her wits’ end, discouraged, beaten: “on the day of our anniversary!”

She hid her face, and Maurice, more miserable than herself, came up to her and tried to pull away her clenched hands.

“Listen, Edith, I don’t accuse you, not you yourself. We have been living together as if we were married. I have had no thought but for our happiness. I was wrong. I am still quite young.”

She yielded her hands up to him, not afraid to show him her poor swollen eyes.

“Shouldn’t I have accepted everything from you and been grateful for it?”

“And I from you, yes, but from him? Oh, he’s well avenged. If I have destroyed his home he has crushed my honour.”

“Have I been thinking of him, do you suppose?” But he continued gravely and with sad insistence: “We were living so heedlessly. It’s all finished now.”

There was such despair in his voice that she flung herself impulsively into his arms, and cried, “Hush!”

Her whole scheme of life had crumbled under them here on this little terrace; she must get him away from it.

“Maurice, come to our woods with me,” she pleaded. “Come and sit in the shade behind our chapel. We shall be alone there, and less unhappy.”

He made up his mind abruptly that he would listen to her.

“Yes, let’s get away from here,” he said.

The rays of the sun coming through the pines marked bands of clear light on the leaf-strewn ground. On the shadowy path they lay like golden puddles that must be stepped across. Edith led him round the chapel, and searched out a mossy corner a little to one side, making her lover be seated there. She took his face in her hands and covered it with kisses, and he seemed to yield to her caresses a moment, then suddenly thrust her off.

“No, leave me, Edith. Please don’t. When your lips press mine I’ve no more force of will. I am just nothing any more, only a beating heart.”

“I love you,” she moaned.

“That’s just it. I love you.”

He stood up, and half wildly pointed out the lake to her, where it lay glowing through the trees. Already Edith was trembling, and divined the temptation that was upon him.

“But I love you more than ever before,” she coaxed. “You may command me and I’ll obey. I’ll listen.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Where will you take me to, Maurice?”

“Down there,” he said, pointing to the lake.

“Hush!” she cried, and recoiled instinctively.

But as on the Calvary of Lemenc the year before, when she had urged him to come away, he in his turn felt a kind of ecstasy in conquering her will.

“Yes, come. Our year of love is dead already. Come, Edith. Already our love is dead. No one will look for us. The water isn’t cold. We’ll let ourselves slip over the edge of a boat. I have no more honour left. Will you come, Edith?”

She took him in both her arms and cried out in a frightened voice:

“No, no, no! Because I love you. When you love you don’t want to die. You lie, you steal, you kill, but you don’t want to die. Lovers who kill themselves don’t love their love.”

He broke loose from her grasp roughly, heedless whether he wounded her or not.

“Let me go,” he cried. “Don’t touch me again. Don’t hold me back.”

He fled away from her, and she, almost as agile, started in pursuit of him. Some children playing nearby stopped their games to watch the race.

When he was safely out of reach he turned his course and hurried away in the direction of the Tower of Buccione. It was a place he had discovered once in his walks with Edith, behind the ruins of an old fortress castle, a high square tower surrounded by panelled walls now in ruins and overrun by climbing plants. It stood at the far end of the Lake of Orta, on a hill covered with chestnut trees, and commanding a wide view from south to north. You could see as far as Novare, that shining city at the other end of the plain, and Monte Rosa, whose distant summit and glaciers scintillating in the sun looked round on all the other mountain levels. From no part roundabout was there a wider view than from this deserted place. Often when his companion’s fatigue left him with empty hours to fill Maurice would come here to gaze toward home and sense his exile to the full.

He stayed there now a long time, letting his wounds rankle. Why should he now in this hour be feeling only misery from his love, that passion that should have been the crown of all his youth? Was there, then, something besides love, something so considerable that even if it could not destroy love it was strong enough to reduce it to a second place in life and spoil its pleasures? Love was not all of life. It could not even isolate itself, or detach itself from the rest of life. Of itself it was only a disorganised and destructive force. On the other side of those mountains that marked the horizon there his love had certainly wrought disaster. Maurice was sure of that now.

Could he honestly say that only circumstances were to blame? No, his past, when he summoned it back frankly, condemned only him. The evidence showed that he himself had been guilty of lightness and feebleness, culpable in having consented to go away with Edith at all, when he could easily have foreseen that their resources would not hold out; himself to blame for having accepted without proofs the explanations which Edith made him, when it should have been easy for him to see her inconsistencies; responsible for having yielded to the influence of her caresses in the present without binding that present to either past or future; responsible for having yielded to her when she insisted upon a year of forgetfulness from him, a year of happiness, a year of indolence and cowardice.

And it came to him distinctly that if it was a question of his honour, there could be no salvation unless it reached him through his family. Without his family, he knew that he was lost. He could not, perhaps for a long time, make good that money of Edith’s which he had used and was not willing to have lived on; but with his family, if he asked their help, he might be saved. How could they refuse to save him? Were they not all one with him in his shame? But if they were one with him in shame, he had also duties toward them, and had neglected them.

Fortunate in his birth, he had contracted obligations that he had turned his back on; a compact, and he had broken it. If our families owe us help in evil fortune or in peril, by what right do we forget them and pursue our egotistical bents, sowing our own happiness and reaping consequences that do them harm?

Pride kept him from appealing to his father. His mother had been his confidante: he would ask her for the sum he needed for his liberation. That was the pressing thing. Above all things, he must win back his own self-esteem.

Having come to this decision, he returned promptly to the hotel and wrote a letter to Mrs. Roquevillard. He had just finished it and put it in the postbox when Edith came in. He saw her at the end of the garden walk, almost with a feeling of astonishment at beholding her so soon again, so far away from her had his thoughts translated him in a few hours. For a year she had filled all his days, each beating of his heart. Was she so soon dispossessed of her kingdom?

When she saw him she stopped, as if stunned, then ran and threw herself into his arms.

“It’s you--it’s you----” she cried.

“Dear sweetheart----” he murmured, very gently.

“You’re here! I’m so glad----”

She pointed toward the lake with a frightened gesture, to explain to him where she had been.

“I’ve been down there. I went along the beach. Let’s sit down, shan’t we? I can scarcely stand. I was so afraid.”

She could not turn her eyes away from him, and again the old enchantment at the sight of her came over him. The autumn landscape was all around them, tender and voluptuous. Love stood victorious amid the ruins.

Desperately they tasted of their happiness, both knowing that it had been condemned to death.

Thenceforth they talked no more about the past. He was waiting for an answer to his letter, and she dared not question him, only redoubling her charms to keep him pleased. She modified and adapted her fascination. She was no longer provoking and perpetually agitated. The fear of losing her lover made her humble and submissive, kept her quite frail and tender. She sought out the things that he liked to talk about, the books he preferred to read. She divined what music he would have her play to him on the piano. And he, on his part, was more than ever good to her. It was only that both had some feeling of embarrassment in this renewal of peace and affection between them. It was a joyless concord, lacking confidence, and unconvincing.

The second of November was a particularly cruel day for them. Maurice wanted to give himself up more freely to the memories of his family on this day of the Dead, that should have made them more vivid for him, and would have preferred to take his walk alone. Edith, however, begged to go with him, and he consented, though with no pleasure in the prospect. She went off to get ready, and he was to wait for her at the Sacred Mountain.

“Where shall we go to-day?” she asked, when she joined him there.

“To the cemetery. Everybody goes there to-day.”

Before you come to the cemetery at Orta you have to cross an untilled field which once formed part of it, but has been gradually disused. The graves enclosed in it were now unrecognisable and anonymous. Nothing marked them any more--neither name nor cross, not even a mound of earth. In memory of All Saints’ Day some unknown hand had scattered clusters of chrysanthemums here and there on the field, and the waste place was transformed into a kind of temporary garden.

Edith and Maurice stopped a moment in this enclosure. It was bordered by a row of chestnut trees, whose leaves fluttered in the supporting softness of the air. A breath of wind was enough to strip them. With the coming evening a bit of fresh north wind arose, and the golden leaves fell indeed, spinning round and round and piling themselves up at last in the gutter along the main alley-way of the cemetery. One of them in its flight alighted on Edith’s hat. It was a desolate symbol to poise above that warmly tinted face, with its eyes of fire, that fleshly shape so animate with life in its most immobile moments, and it stirred the last depths of emotion in Maurice, overwrought as he was this day.

He said nothing still, and she pointed out the chrysanthemums to him.

“The pretty flowers,” she said.

And to both of them came the reflection that the flowers were strewn above the dead. By an instinctive recoil upon themselves they glanced at the line of trees which half concealed them, and, moving nearer each to the other, embraced among the graves.

III

THE RUINS

THE morning after this walk Maurice was called to the office of the hotel.

“It’s for a registered letter. The postman wants you.”

He recognised the yellow envelopes that his father used, and rapidly stripped off the seals, while the manager, catching sight of the amount of the remittance, observed him with an admiring air. The letter inside contained a French bill of one hundred francs and a cheque on the International Bank of Milan for eight thousand, signed by his sister Margaret.

“Now,” he said to himself, “I am my own master.”

After his recent humiliation his first thought now was pride. In his reassurance, however, he noticed the black border on the letter and his heart beat fast again. There had been some sorrow, then, a great sorrow, during his absence. In one’s extreme youth, and even later on in life sometimes, one does not take in the possibility of losing those one loves: one goes away from them with no sorrow, feeling sure of seeing them again when one comes back. Only with our first grief is the future’s credit injured. Maurice, separated from his own people, deprived of news, preserved by the heedlessness of his age and the egotism of his love, had not been conscious of the inquietude that wrung his heart brutally when memory intervened. Often, more and more often, he found himself calling up the memory of his family, picturing the empty place that he had left among them. Edith’s presence was not always enough to chase away these phantoms. But he had never had any presentiments of death. And yet for several days of late, ever since the season and his happiness had begun to wane together, the vision of his mother’s pale face had risen before him; he had felt her last caress on his cheek, the caress of that cool hand, the touch of which he could feel again now after a whole year.