Part 4
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was closed; the flute lay untouched. A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse off than we had been when the same day dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of every tempter always: he touches the innocent, closed eyes of his victims with a collyrium which makes the happy blindness of content no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he has still his vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they were before that fatal hour in which he showed them all that they were not, all that they might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how intensified million-fold seemed cold and loneliness and poverty and darkness, all!--for we had for the first time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as _possible_, and then to lose them all forever!
I had been resigned for love’s sake to dwell amongst the roofs, seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the sun; but now--I had dreamed of the fair freedom of garden-ways and the endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and shivered and sickened, and was twice captive and twice exiled, and knew that I was a little nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather for a crown.
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy: the poverty remained, the joy had flown.
The winter was again very hard, very cold: they suffered greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as your strange phrase runs; they went without food sometimes for days and days, and fuel they had scarcely ever.
The bird in his cage was sold; they would not keep the little golden singing thing to starve to silence like themselves.
As for me, I nearly perished of the cold; only the love I bore to Lili kept a little life in my leafless branches.
All that cruel winter-time they were strong still, those children of Paris.
For they sought no alms, and in their uttermost extremity neither of them ever whispered to the other: “Go seek the tempter; repent, be wise. Give not up our lives for a mere phantasy of honor.”
“When the snow is on the ground, and the canvases have to burn in the stove, then you will change your minds and come to me on your knees,” the old wicked, foul spirit had said mocking them, as he had opened the door of the attic and passed away creaking down the dark stairs.
And I suppose he had reckoned on this; but if he had done so, he had reckoned without his host, as your phrase runs: neither René nor Lili ever went to him, either on knees or in any other wise.
When the spring came we three were still all living--at least their hearts still beat and their lips still drew breath, as my boughs were still green and my roots still clung to the soil. But no more to them or to me did the coming of spring bring, as of old, the real living of life, which is joy. And my lover the wind wooed me no more, and the birds no more brought me the rose-whispers of my kindred in Provence. For even the little pigeon-hole in the roof had become too costly a home for us, and we dwelt in a den under the stones of the streets, where no light came and scarce a breath of air ever strayed to us.
There the uncompleted canvases, on which the painter whom Lili loved had tried to write his title to the immortality of fame, were at last finished--finished, for the rats ate them.
All this while we lived--the man whose genius and misery were hell on earth; the woman whose very purity and perfectness of love were her direst torture; and I, the little white flower born of the sun and the dew, of fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment of this blindness, this suffocation, this starvation, this stench of putrid odors, this horrible roar of the street above, was a moment worse than any pang of death.
Away there in Provence so many a fair rose-sister of mine bowed her glad, proud, innocent head with anguish and shuddering terrors to the sharp summons of the severing knife that cut in twain her life, whilst I--I, on and on--was forced to keep so much of life as lies in the capacity to suffer and to love in vain.
So much was left to them: no more.
“Let us compel Death to remember us, since even Death forgets us!” René murmured once in his despair to her.
But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his: “Nay, dear, wait; God will remember us even yet, I think.”
It was her faith. And of her faith she was justified at last.
There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror insupportable--of ceaseless sound beside which the roar of the mere traffic of the streets would have seemed silence--a stench beside which the sulphur smoke and the gas fumes of a previous time would have been as some sweet, fresh woodland air--a famine beside which the daily hunger of the poor was remembered as the abundance of a feast--a cold beside which the chillness of the scant fuel and empty braziers of other winters were recalled as the warmth of summer--a darkness only lit by the red flame of burning houses--a solitude only broken by the companionship of woe and sickness and despair--a suffocation only changed by a rush of air strong with the scent of blood, of putridity, of the million living plague-stricken, of the million dead lying unburied.
For there was war.
Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was always the same blackness as of night; the same horror of sound, of scent, of cold; the same misery; the same torture. I suppose that the sun was quenched, that the birds were dumb, that the winds were stilled forever--that all the world was dead; I do not know. They called it War. I suppose that they meant--Hell!
Yet Lili lived, and I; in that dead darkness we had lost René--we saw his face no more. Yet he could not be in his grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my barren branches to her breast, would murmur: “Whilst he still lives I will live--yes, yes, yes!”
And she did live--so long, so long!--on a few draughts of water and a few husks of grain.
I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times she muttered aloud: “Another day? O God!--how long? how long?”
At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched to her, once, close beside me. A foul, fierce light, the light of flame, was somewhere on the air about us, and that moment glowed through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in the bowels of the earth. I saw the hand and what it held to her; it was a stranger’s, and it held the little colorless dead rose, my sweetest blossom, that had lain ever upon René’s heart.
She took it--she who had given it as her first love-gift. She was mute. In the glare of the flame that quivered through the darkness I saw her--standing quite erect and very still.
The voice of a stranger thrilled through the din from the world above.
“He fought as only patriots can,” it said softly and as through tears. “I was beside him. He fell with Regnault in the sortie yesterday. He could not speak; he had only strength to give me this for you. Be comforted; he has died for Paris.”
On Lili’s face there came once more the radiance of a perfect peace, a glory pure and endless as the glory of the sun. “Great in death!” she murmured. “My love, my love, I come!”
I lost her in the darkness.
I heard a voice above me say that life had left her lips as the dead rose touched them.
What more is there for me to tell?
I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and to desire vainly, and to suffer always, are surest proofs of life.
I live, since that stranger’s hand, which brought my little dead blossom as the message of farewell, had pity on me and brought me away from that living grave. But the pity was vain; I died the only death that had any power to hurt me when the human heart I loved grew still forever.
The light of the full day now shines on me; the shadows are cool, the dews are welcome; they speak around me of the coming of spring, and in the silence of the dawns I hear from the woods without the piping of the nesting birds; but for me the summer can never more return--for me the sun can never again be shining--for me the greenest garden world is barren as a desert.
For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile and France is desolate.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.