Chapter 21
It filled him with a kind of awe, and the feeling was by no means
agreeable. It was not a feeling to which even a man of Bernard
Longueville's easy power of extracting the savour from a sensation could
rapidly habituate himself, and for the rest of that night it was far from
making of our hero the happy man that a lover just coming to
self-consciousness is supposed to be. It was wrong — it was dishonorable — it
was impossible — and yet it was; it was, as nothing in his own personal
experience had ever been. He seemed hitherto to have been living by
proxy, in a vision, in reflection — to have been an echo, a shadow, a futile
attempt; but this at last was life itself, this was a fact, this was reality. For
these things one lived; these were the things that people had died for.
Love had been a fable before this — doubtless a very pretty one; and
passion had been a literary phrase — employed obviously with considerable
effect. But now he stood in a personal relation to these familiar ideas,
which gave them a very much keener import; they had laid their hand
upon him in the darkness, he felt it upon his shoulder, and he knew by its
pressure that it was the hand of destiny. What made this sensation a shock
was the element that was mixed with it; the fact that it came not simply
and singly, but with an attendant shadow in which it immediately merged
and lost itself. It was forbidden fruit — he knew it the instant he had
touched it. He felt that he had pledged himself not to do just this thing
which was gleaming before him so divinely — not to widen the crevice, not
to open the door that would flood him with light. Friendship and honor
were at stake; they stood at his left hand, as his new-born passion stood
already at his right; they claimed him as well, and their grasp had a
pressure which might become acutely painful. The soul is a still more
tender organism than the body, and it shrinks from the prospect of being
subjected to violence. Violence — spiritual violence — was what our luxurious
hero feared; and it is not too much to say that as he lingered there by the
sea, late into the night, while the gurgitation of the waves grew deeper to
his ear, the prospect came to have an element of positive terror. The two
faces of his situation stood confronting each other; it was a rigid, brutal
opposition, and Bernard held his breath for a while with the wonder of
what would come of it. He sat a long time upon the beach; the night grew
very cold, but he had no sense of it. Then he went away and passed
before the Casino again, and wandered through the village. The Casino
was shrouded in darkness and silence, and there was nothing in the streets
of the little town but the salt smell of the sea, a vague aroma of fish and
the distant sound of the breakers. Little by little, Bernard lost the feeling
of having been startled, and began to perceive that he could reason about
his trouble. Trouble it was, though this seems an odd name for the
consciousness of a bright enchantment; and the first thing that reason,
definitely consulted, told him about the matter was that he had been in
love with Angela Vivian any time these three years. This sapient faculty
supplied him with further information; only two or three of the items of
which, however, it is necessary to reproduce. He had been a great fool — an
incredible fool — not to have discovered before this what was the matter
with him! Bernard's sense of his own shrewdness — always tolerably
acute — had never received such a bruise as this present perception that a
great many things had been taking place in his clever mind without his
clever mind suspecting them. But it little mattered, his reason went on to
declare, what he had suspected or what he might now feel about it; his
present business was to leave Blanquais-les-Galets at sunrise the next
morning and never rest his eyes upon Angela Vivian again. This was his
duty; it had the merit of being perfectly plain and definite, easily
apprehended, and unattended, as far as he could discover, with the
smallest material difficulties. Not only this, reason continued to remark;
but the moral difficulties were equally inconsiderable. He had never
breathed a word of his passion to Miss Vivian — quite the contrary; he had
never committed himself nor given her the smallest reason to suspect his
hidden flame; and he was therefore perfectly free to turn his back upon
her — he could never incur the reproach of trifling with her affections.
Bernard was in that state of mind when it is the greatest of blessings to be
saved the distress of choice — to see a straight path before you and to feel
that you have only to follow it. Upon
the straight path I have indicated, he
fixed his eyes very hard; of course he would take his departure at the
earliest possible hour on the morrow. There was a streak of morning in
the eastern sky by the time he knocked for re-admittance at the door of the
inn, which was opened to him by a mysterious old woman in a nightcap
and meagre accessories, whose identity he failed to ascertain; and he laid
himself down to rest — he was very tired — with his attention fastened, as I
say, on the idea — on the very image — of departure.
On waking up the next morning, rather late, he found, however, that
it had attached itself to a very different object. His vision was filled with
the brightness of the delightful fact itself, which seemed to impregnate the
sweet morning air and to flutter in the light, fresh breeze that came
through his open window from the sea. He saw a great patch of the sea
between a couple of red-tiled roofs; it was bluer than any sea had ever
been before. He had not slept long — only three or four hours; but he had
quite slept off his dread. The shadow had dropped away and nothing was
left but the beauty of his love, which seemed to shine in the freshness of
the early day. He felt absurdly happy — as if he had discovered El Dorado;
quite apart from consequences — he was not thinking of consequences,
which of course were another affair — the feeling was intrinsically the finest
one he had ever had, and — as a mere feeling — he had not done with it yet.
The consideration of consequences could easily be deferred, and there
would, meanwhile, be no injury to any one in his extracting, very quietly,
a little subjective joy from the state of his heart. He would let the flower
bloom for a day before plucking it up by the roots. Upon this latter course
he was perfectly resolved, and in view of such an heroic resolution the
subjective interlude appeared no more than his just privilege. The project
of leaving Blanquais-les-Galets at nine o'clock in the morning dropped
lightly from his mind, making no noise as it fell; but another took its
place, which had an air of being still more excellent and which consisted
of starting off on a long walk and absenting himself for the day. Bernard
grasped his stick and wandered away; he climbed the great shoulder of the
further cliff and found himself on the level downs. Here there was
apparently no obstacle whatever to his walking as far as
his fancy should
carry him. The summer was still in a splendid mood, and the hot and
quiet day — it was a Sunday — seemed to constitute a deep, silent smile on
the face of nature. The sea glistened on one side, and the crops ripened on
the other; the larks, losing themselves in the dense sunshine, made it ring
here and there in undiscoverable spots; this was the only sound save when
Bernard, pausing now and then in his walk, found himself hearing far
below him, at the base of the cliff, the drawling murmur of a wave. He
walked a great many miles and passed through half a dozen of those rude
fishing-hamlets, lodged in some sloping hollow of the cliffs, so many of
which, of late years, all along the Norman coast, have adorned themselves
with a couple of hotels and a row of bathing-machines. He walked so far
that the shadows had begun to lengthen before he bethought himself of
stopping; the afternoon had come on and had already begun to wane. The
grassy downs still stretched before him, shaded here and there with
shallow but windless dells. He looked for the softest place and then flung
himself down on the grass; he lay there for a long time, thinking of many
things. He had determined to give himself up to a day's happiness; it was
happiness of a very harmless kind — the satisfaction of thought, the bliss of
mere consciousness; but such as it was it did not elude him nor turn bitter
in his heart, and the long summer day closed upon him before his spirit,
hovering in perpetual circles round the idea of what
might be, had begun
to rest its wing. When he rose to his feet again it was too late to return to
Blanquais in the same way that he had come; the evening was at hand, the
light was already fading, and the walk he had taken was one which even if
he had not felt very tired, he would have thought it imprudent to attempt
to repeat in the darkness. He made his way to the nearest village, where
he was able to hire a rustic
carriole, in which primitive conveyance,
gaining the high-road, he jogged and jostled through the hours of the
evening slowly back to his starting-point. It wanted an hour of midnight
by the time he reached his inn, and there was nothing left for him but to
go to bed.
He went in the unshaken faith that he should leave Blanquais early
on the morrow. But early on the morrow it occurred to him that it would
be simply grotesque to go off
without taking leave of Mrs. Vivian and her
daughter, and offering them some explanation of his intention. He had
given them to understand that, so delighted was he to find them there, he
would remain at Blanquais at least as long as they. He must have seemed
to them wanting in civility, to spend a whole bright Sunday without
apparently troubling his head about them, and if the unlucky fact of his
being in love with the girl were a reason for doing his duty, it was at least
not a reason for being rude. He had not yet come to that — to accepting
rudeness as an incident of virtue; it had always been his theory that virtue
had the best manners in the world, and he flattered himself at any rate that
he could guard his integrity without making himself ridiculous. So, at
what he thought a proper hour, in the course of the morning, he retraced
his steps along the little lane through which, two days ago, Angela Vivian
had shown him the way to her mother's door. At this humble portal he
knocked; the windows of the little chalet were open, and the white
curtains, behind the flower-pots, were fluttering as he had seen them
before. The door was opened by a neat young woman, who informed him
very promptly that Madame and Mademoiselle had left Blanquais a couple
of hours earlier. They had gone to Paris — yes, very suddenly, taking with
them but little luggage, and they had left her — she had the honor of being
the
femme de chambre of ces dames — to put up their remaining possessions
and follow as soon as possible. On Bernard's expressing surprise and
saying that he had supposed them to be fixed at the sea-side for the rest
of the season, the femme de chambre, who seemed a very intelligent
person, begged to remind him that the season was drawing to a close, that
Madame had taken the chalet but for five weeks, only ten days of which
period were yet to expire, that
ces dames, as Monsieur perhaps knew,
were great travellers, who had been half over the world and thought
nothing of breaking camp at an hour's notice, and that, in fine, Madame
might very well have received a telegram summoning her to another part
of the country.
And where have the ladies gone?
asked Bernard.
For the moment, to Paris.
And in Paris where have they gone?
Dame, chez elles — to their house,
said the femme de
chambre, who appeared to think that Bernard asked too many questions.
But Bernard persisted.
Where is their house?
The waiting-maid looked at him from head to foot.
If Monsieur wishes to write, many of Madame's letters come
to her banker,
she said, inscrutably.
And who is her banker?
He lives in the Rue de Provence.
Very good — I will find him out,
said our hero, turning
away.
The discriminating reader who has been so good as to interest
himself in this little narrative will perhaps at this point exclaim with a
pardonable consciousness of shrewdness:
Of course he went the next
day to the Rue de Provence!
Of course, yes; only as it happens
Bernard did nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he
ever did in his life — a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with
regard to which he often afterward wondered whence he had drawn the
ability for so remarkable a feat — he simply spent a fortnight at
Blanquais-les-Galets. It was a very quiet fortnight; he spoke to no one, he
formed no relations, he was company to himself. It may be added that he
had never found his own company half so good. He struck himself as a
reasonable, delicate fellow, who looked at things in such a way as to make
him refrain — refrain successfully, that was the point — from concerning
himself practically about Angela Vivian. His saying that he would find out
the banker in the Rue de Provence had been for the benefit of the femme
de chambre, whom he thought rather impertinent; he had really no
intention whatever of entering that classic thoroughfare. He took long
walks, rambled on the beach, along the base of the cliffs and among the
brown sea-caves, and he thought a good deal of certain incidents which
have figured at an earlier stage of this narrative. He had forbidden himself
the future, as an object of contemplation, and it was therefore a matter of
necessity that his imagination should take refuge among the warm and
familiar episodes of the past. He wondered why Mrs. Vivian should have
left the place so suddenly, and
was of course struck with the analogy
between this incident and her abrupt departure from Baden. It annoyed
him, it troubled him, but it by no means rekindled the alarm he had felt
on first perceiving the injured Angela on the beach. That alarm had been
quenched by Angela's manner during the hour that followed and during
their short talk in the evening. This evening was to be forever memorable,
for it had brought with it the revelation which still, at moments, suddenly
made Bernard tremble; but it had also brought him the assurance that
Angela cared as little as possible for anything that a chance acquaintance
might have said about her. It is all the more singular, therefore, that one
evening, after he had been at Blanquais a fortnight, a train of thought
should suddenly have been set in motion in his mind. It was kindled by no
outward occurrence, but by some wandering spark of fancy or of memory,
and the immediate effect of it was to startle our hero very much as he had
been startled on the evening I have described. The circumstances were the
same; he had wandered down to the beach alone, very late, and he stood
looking at the duskily-tumbling sea. Suddenly the same voice that had
spoken before murmured another phrase in the darkness, and it rang upon
his ear for the rest of the night. It startled him, as I have said, at first;
then, the next morning, it led him to take his departure for Paris. During
the journey it lingered in his ear; he sat in the corner of the
railway-carriage with his eyes closed, abstracted, on purpose to prolong
the reverberation. If it were not true it was at least, as the Italians have it,
ben trovato, and it was wonderful how well it bore thinking of. It bears
telling less well; but I can at least give a hint of it. The theory that Angela
hated him had evaporated in her presence, and another of a very different
sort had sprung into being. It fitted a great many of the facts, it explained
a great many contradictions, anomalies, mysteries, and it accounted for
Miss Vivian's insisting upon her mother's leaving Blanquais at a few
hours' notice, even better than the theory of her resentment could have
done. At any rate, it obliterated Bernard's scruples very effectually, and
led him on his arrival in Paris to repair instantly to the Rue de Provence.
This street contains more than one banker, but there is one with whom
Bernard deemed Mrs. Vivian most likely to have
dealings. He found he
had reckoned rightly, and he had no difficulty in procuring her address.
Having done so, however, he by no means went immediately to see her;
he waited a couple of days — perhaps to give those obliterated scruples I
have spoken of a chance to revive. They kept very quiet, and it must be
confessed that Bernard took no great pains to recall them to life. After he
had been in Paris three days, he knocked at Mrs. Vivian's door.