CHAPTER VIII
"Do you know, sir, that that good woman has brought in the soup for the second time? I can see her fidgeting about the table through the window. If we go on like this, she will depart and leave us to wait on ourselves. Then see if you get any soup out of _me_."
David, for all answer, put his arm close round the speaker. She threw herself back against him, smiling into his face. But neither could see the other, for it was nearly dark, and through the acacia trees above them the stars glimmered in the warm sky. To their left, across a small gra.s.s-plat, was a tiny thatched house buried under a great vine which embowered it all from top to base, and overhung by trees which drooped on to the roof, and swept the windows with their branches. Through a lower window, opening on to the gravel path, could be seen a small bare room, with a paper of coa.r.s.e brown and blue pattern, brightly illuminated by a paraffin lamp, which also threw a square of light far out into the garden.
The lamp stood on a table which was spread for a meal, and a stout woman, in a white cap and blue cotton ap.r.o.n, could be seen moving beside it.
"Come in!" said Elise, springing to her feet, and laying a compelling hand on her companion. "Get it over! The moon is waiting for us out there!"
And she pointed to where, beyond the roofs of the neighbouring houses, rose the dark fringe of trees which marked the edge of the forest.
They went in, hand in hand, and sat opposite each other at the little rickety table, while the peasant woman from whom they had taken the house waited upon them. The day before, after looking at the _auberge_, and finding it full of artists come down to look for spring subjects in the forest, they had wandered on searching for something less public, more poetical. And they had stumbled upon this tiny overgrown house in its tangled garden. The woman to whom it belonged had let it for the season, but till the beginning of her "let" there was a month; and, after much persuasion, she had consented to allow the strangers to hire it and her services as _bonne_, by the week, for a sum more congruous with the old and primitive days of Barbizon than with the later claims of the little place to fashion and fame. As the lovers stood together in the _salon_, exclaiming with delight at its bare floor, its low ceiling, its old bureau, its hard sofa with the Empire legs, and the dilapidated sphinxes on the arms, the owner of the house looked them up and down, from the door, with comprehending eyes. Barbizon had known adventures like this before!
But she might think what she liked; it mattered nothing to her lodgers. To "a pair of romantics out of date," the queer overgrown place she owned was perfection, and they took possession of it in a dream of excitement and joy. From the top loft, still bare and echoing, where the highly respectable summer tenants were to put up the cots of their children, to the outside den which served for a kitchen, whence a wooden ladder led to a recess among the rafters, occupied by Madame Pyat as a bedroom; from the ma.s.ses of Virginia creeper on the thatched roof to the thicket of acacias and roses on the front gra.s.s-plat, and the high flowery wall which shut them off from the curious eyes of the street, it was all, in the lovers"
feeling, the predestined setting for such an idyll as theirs.
And if this was so in the hot mornings and afternoons, how much more in the heavenly evenings and nights, when the forest lay whispering and murmuring under the moonlight, and they, wandering together arm in arm under the gaunt and twisted oaks of the Bas Breau, or among the limestone blocks which strew the heights of this strange woodland, felt themselves part of the world about them, dissolved into its quivering harmonious life, shades among its shadows!
On this particular evening, after the hurried and homely meal, David brought Elise"s large black hat, and the lace scarf which had bewitched him at St. Germain--oh, the joy of handling such things in this familiar, sacrilegious way!--and they strolled out into the long uneven street beyond their garden wall, on their way to the forest. The old inn to the left was in a clatter.
Two _diligences_ had just arrived, and the horses were drooping and panting at the door. A maidservant was lighting guests across the belittered courtyard with a flaring candle. There was a red glimpse of the kitchen with its bra.s.s and copper pans, and on the bench outside the gateway sat a silent trio of artists, who had worked well and dined abundantly, and were now enjoying their last smoke before the sleep, to which they were already nodding, should overtake them. The two lovers stepped quickly past, making with all haste for that leafy mystery beyond cleft by the retreating whiteness of the Fontainebleau road--into which the village melted on either side.
Such moonlight! All the tones of the street, its white and greys, the reddish brown of the roofs, were to be discerned under it; and outside in the forest it was a phantasmagoria, an intoxication. The little paths they were soon threading, paths strewn with limestone dust, wound like white threads among the rocks and through the blackness of the firs. They climbed them hand in hand, and soon they were on a height looking over a great hollow of the forest to the plain beyond, as it were a vast cup overflowing with moonlight and melting into a silver sky. The width of the heavens, the dim immensity of the earth, drove them close together in a delicious silence. The girl put the warmth of her lover"s arm between her and the overpowering greatness of a too august nature. The man, on the other hand, rising in this to that higher stature which was truly his, felt himself carried out into nature on the wave of his own boundless emotion. That cold Deism he had held so loosely broke into pa.s.sion. The humblest phrases of worship, of entreaty, swept across the brain.
"Could one ever have guessed," he asked her, his words stumbling and broken, "that such happiness was possible?"
She shook her head, smiling at him.
"Yes, certainly!--if one has read poems and novels. Nothing to me is ever _more_ than I expect,--generally less."
Then she broke off hesitating, and hid her face against his breast.
A pang smote him. He cried out in the old commonplaces that he was not worthy, that she must tire of him, that there was nothing in him to hold, to satisfy her.
"And three weeks ago," she said, interrupting him, "we had never heard each other"s names. Strange--life is strange! Well, now," and she quickly drew herself away from him, and holding him by both hands lightly swung his arms backwards and forwards, "this can"t last for ever, you know. In the first place--we shall die." and throwing herself back, she pulled against him childishly, a spray of ivy he had wound round her hat drooping with fantastic shadows over her face and neck.
"Do you know what you are like?" he asked her, evading what she had said, while his eyes devoured her.
"No!"
"You are like that picture in the Louvre,--Da Vinci"s St. John, that you say should be a Bacchus."
"Which means that you find me a queer,--heathenish,--sort of creature?" she said, still laughing and swaying. "So I am. Take care! Well now, a truce to love-making! I am tired of being meek and charming--this night excites me. Come and see the oaks in the Bas Breau."
And running down the rocky path before them she led him in and out through twisted leafy ways, till at last they stood among the blasted giants of the forest, the oaks of the Bas Breau. In the emboldening daylight, David, with certain English wood scenes in his mind, would swear the famous trees of Fontainebleau had neither size nor age to speak of. But at night they laid their avenging spell upon him. They stood so finely on the broken ground, each of them with a kingly s.p.a.ce about him; there was so wild a fantasy in their gnarled and broken limbs; and under the night their scanty crowns of leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so lofty a remoteness.
They found a rocky seat in front of a certain leafless monster, which had been struck by lightning in a winter storm years before, and rent from top to bottom. The bare trunk with its torn branches yawning stood out against the rest, a black and melancholy shape, preaching desolation. But Elise studied it coolly.
"I know that tree by heart," she declared. "Corot, Rousseau, Diaz--it has served them all. I could draw it with my eyes shut."
Then with the mention of drawing she began to twist her fingers restlessly.
"I wonder what the _concours_ was to-day," she said. "Now that I am away that Breal girl will carry off everything. There will be no bearing her--she was never second till I came."
David took a very scornful view of this contingency. "When you go back you will beat them all again; let them have their few weeks" respite! You told me yesterday you had forgotten the _atelier_."
"Did I?" she said with a strange little sigh. "It wasn"t true--I haven"t."
With a sudden whim she pulled off his broad hat and threw it down.
Reaching forward she took his head between her hands, and arranged his black curls about his brow in a way to suit her. Then, still holding him, she drew back with her head on one side to look at him. The moon above them, now at its full zenith of brightness, threw the whole ma.s.sive face into strong relief, and her own look melted into delight.
"There is no model in Paris," she declared, "with so fine a head."
Then with another sigh she dropped her hold, and propping her chin on her hands, she stared straight before her in silence.
"Do you imagine you are _the first?_" she asked him presently, with a queer abruptness.
There was a pause.
"You told me so," he said, at last, his voice quivering; "don"t deceive me--there is no fun in it--I believe it all!"
She laughed, and did not answer for a moment. He put out his covetous arms and would have drawn her to him, but she withdrew herself.
"What did I tell you? I don"t remember. In the first place there was a cousin--there is always a cousin!"
He stared at her, his face flushing, and asked her slowly what she meant.
"You have seen his portrait in my room," she said coolly.
He racked his brains.
"Oh! that portrait on the wall," he burst out at last, in vain trying for a tone as self-possessed as her own," that man with a short beard?"
She nodded.
"Oh, he is not bad at all, my cousin. He is the son of that uncle and aunt I told you of. Only while they were rusting in the Gironde, he was at Paris learning to be a doctor, and enlarging his mind by coming to see me every week. When they came up to town to put in a claim to me, _they_ thought me a lump of wickedness, as I told you; I made their hair stand on end. But Guillaume knew a good deal more about me; and _he_ was not scandalised at all; oh dear, no. He used to come every Sat.u.r.day and sit in a corner while I painted--a long lanky creature, rather good looking, but with spectacles--he has ruined his eyes with reading. Oh, he would have married me any day, and let his relations shriek as they please; so don"t suppose, Monsieur David, that I have had no chances of respectability, or that my life began with you!" She threw him a curious look.
"Why do you talk about him?" cried David, beside himself. "What is your cousin to either of us?"
"I shall talk of what I like," she said wilfully, clasping her hands round her knees with the gesture of an obstinate child.
David stared away into the black shadow of the oaks, marvelling at himself? at the strength of that sudden smart within him, that half-frenzied restlessness and dread which some of her lightest sayings had the power to awaken in him.
Then he repented him, and turning, bent his head over the little hands and kissed them pa.s.sionately. She did not move or speak. He came close to her, trying to decipher her face in the moonlight.
For the first time since that night in the studio there was a film of sudden tears in the wide grey eyes. He caught her in his arms and demanded why.
"You quarrel with me and dictate to me," she cried, wrestling with herself, choked by some inexplicable emotion, "when I have given you everything? when I am alone in the world with you? at your mercy? I who have been so proud, have held my head so high!"