Part 3

It would never have occurred to him to tell her any of the vulgar jests with a double meaning, with which he regaled the more robust fair ones of his acquaintance on branding-days or on race-days. To do that would have seemed to him to be a villainous misuse of his power and his experience as a man. Still less did Livette cause him to feel the fierce desire, well known to him, which sometimes, with other girls, went to his brain like a rush of blood,--the desire to touch with his hands, to take in his arms, to throw down into the ditch, laughing at the gentle resistance, at the consent which repels a little, at the equal struggle between the youth and the maiden, who have, in reality, a tacit understanding to be robber and robbed. No: in Livette's presence, Renaud felt that he was a new man. There came to him, in regard to the little damsel with the golden hair, a tranquillity of heart that surprised him greatly. Love has a thousand forms. That which Renaud felt for Livette was a soothing emotion. He "wished her well." That was what he kept repeating to himself as he thought of her. And, as he desired all the others something after the fashion of the bulls of his _manade_, in the season when the germs are at work, it so happened that he seemed not to desire the only woman he really loved.

There was a sweet fascination in the thought, which he relished like a draught of pure water after a long day's walk through the dust in the hot sun. He rejoiced inwardly in his love as in a halt for rest in the shade of a great tree, beside a clear, cool spring, while the birds sang their greeting to the morning. Sometimes, in the blazing heat of midday, when he was riding across the mirror-like waste of sand and salt and water, his horse plodding wearily along with hanging head, the thought of Livette would steal softly into his mind, and it would seem as if a cool breeze were blowing on his forehead, washing away, in a sense, the dust and fatigue, like a bath. He would feel refreshed, and a smile would come unbidden to his lips. His whole being would thrill with pleasure, and, with renewed life, he would imperceptibly, with hand and knee alike, order his horse to raise his head. And the lover's steed would raise his head without further bidding, and snort and toss his mane, scatter, with a sudden lash of his tail, the gadflies that were streaking his sides with blood, and, with quickened step, reach the shelter of the hawthorns and the poplars on the Rhone bank--whose leaves forever quiver and rustle like the water, like the heart of man, like everything that lives and hopes and suffers and then dies!

Not only by her grace and weakness did she win his heart, strong and rough as he was; but also by the care expended on her dress, by the splendor of her surroundings, she, the wealthy farmer's daughter, enchanted him, the poor drover; and she seemed to him a strange, unfamiliar creature from another world. And so she was in fact. Of a different quality, he said to himself: a being outside his sphere, far, far above it.

That he might one day unloose the latchets of her little shoes had not occurred to him, and, lo! she was his! Livette, the daughter of the intendant of the Chateau d'Avignon! she was his fiancee, his betrothed, his future wife!

He seemed to himself the heir to a throne. In face of the mere thought of his future, he felt something like the embarrassment a beggar feels on the threshold of a palace, before the carpets over which he must pass to enter, with shoes heavy with mud.

She had in his eyes something of the sanctity of the blessed Madonna, carved from wood, painted blue and gold, and overladen with pearls and flowers, that he used to see when a child in the church of Saint-Trophime at Arles.

So it was that he felt a secret amazement at finding himself beloved.

It did not seem to him that it could really be true; and as he must needs be convinced of the fact every time he spoke to her, his love constantly appealed to him with all the force of novelty.

He was a little embarrassed, too, in her presence, could not find his words, contented himself with smiling at her, with yielding submission to her like a child, with running to fetch this or that for her, divining her desires from her glance; mistaking now and then, but rarely; feeling the same pleasure in being the maiden's footman that is felt by the misshapen court dwarf in love with the king's fair daughter.

His sobriquet of _The King_ seemed to him a mockery beside her. She embarrassed him; in her presence he was meek and lowly.

He was surprised, indignant even, in his heart, at the familiar tone assumed by others with Livette. It seemed strange to him that her companions should treat her as an equal; that her father and her grandmother should not have the same respect and consideration for his fiancee that he himself had.

Frequently, when the grandmother cried to Livette: "Do this or that; run! be quick!" he would be angry, and would long to say to her: "Why do you order her about? She was not made to obey! You're a bad grandmother! Don't you see that she is too delicate and pretty for such tasks?"

But this was a feeling kept hidden in his heart; he would not have dared to avow it, for women are made, according to our ancestors, to be the slaves of man. So he said no word of what he felt. He even deemed himself a little ridiculous to feel it. He contented himself by doing in a twinkling, in Livette's stead, the thing she was bidden to do, if it was something within his power.

Ah! but if any man had ventured to indulge in any ill-sounding pleasantry with Livette, to take any liberty with her--oh! then, be sure that he would without reflection have felled him on the spot with his stout fist!

Why, if any one, man or woman, in the crowd on a fete-day, happened to make a coarse remark in her hearing,--one of the sort that he himself knew how to make with great effect upon occasion,--he would be overcome with rage against that person; it seemed to him that every one should take notice of Livette's presence, should feel that she was near, and understand that, before her, they should show some self-respect.

All this he would have been incapable of explaining, but he felt it all, confusedly and vaguely, in his heart.

Livette, for her part, was keenly conscious of the drover's adoration. She revelled in it, without unduly seeming to do so. She saw very plainly that she had, without effort, tamed a wild beast. She laughed sometimes, as she looked at him--a frank, ringing laugh, in which there was, however, a touch of the triumph of the mysterious feminine witchery, the marvellous invention of nature, which decrees that the strong man shall be vanquished, rolled in the dust, at the pleasure of fascinating weakness. This miracle, performed by life, by nature, by love, she believed to be her own work,--hers, Livette's,--and the little woman was a bit swollen with pride! More than frequently she would say to herself: "What have I done? I don't deserve this good fortune; no, indeed, I don't deserve it!" She saw very clearly that, in his eyes, she was a being apart: that he did not treat her by any means as everybody else did: and, greatly astonished as she was, she was proud of it.

Thereupon, wondering in her sincere heart what she had "more" or better than another, and finding no answer to the question, it came about that she deemed her lover a little, just a very little, stupid to be so dominated by her, and he so strong! And then she would prettily make fun of him and laugh aloud at him, saying:

"Ah! great booby!"

So it was that the whole essence of Woman, profound, seductive, existed in this simple, obscure peasant-girl, who could have told nothing as to her own character.

In time, too, she came to look upon herself as pretty, beautiful, the prettiest, the loveliest of all, and to admire her own charms. When such thoughts came to her, and if the truth must be known, none were more frequent,--ah! then she felt her pride! And she no longer deemed her lover stupid in the least degree; on the contrary, he seemed to her very fortunate, too fortunate! and then it was he who hardly deserved her! At such times, she received his attentions, his humility, with the air of a princess accustomed to homage.

Then, too, she would wonder why all the others did not do for her what he did? And, thereupon, she would conceive a sort of gratitude for him. Such a constant revolution in our hearts of impressions, often irreconcilable and ever changing, around a fixed idea, is love.--Yes, in very truth he deserved to be loved simply because he had known enough to appreciate her! to choose her! The other young men were the fools, one and all!

Warm was his welcome if he arrived at the farm when that thought was in her mind. She would give the little cry of a happy bird, and run to meet her lover.

"Good-morning, Monsieur Jacques!"

"Good-morning, Demoiselle Livette!"

They would shake hands.

"Will you come to the Rhone?"

"With all my heart!"

And often they would go and sit together beside the Rhone, beneath the great hawthorn--a tree more than a hundred years old and known to everybody. The hawthorn, like the aspen and the birch, is a familiar Camarguese tree.

Sometimes, on the way, she would hold out to him a flexible green twig, broken from a poplar by the roadside, and they would walk along, united and kept apart at the same time by the short branch, followed by a swarm of gnats with their tiny iris-hued wings.

She was very fond of this sport of making him walk thus, not too near, not too far away, holding him without touching him, drawing him nearer or keeping him at a distance, as her fancy dictated, making of the leafy wand a whip if he showed signs of rebellion.

She had the feeling that thus she was indeed his mistress, remembering how she used sometimes to make her horse Blanchet follow her docilely in the same way by holding out to him a small wisp of flowering oats;--how she had sometimes, by the same means, led back behind her, quiet as an ox, a vicious bull that had escaped, wounded, from the arena, and that she had encountered by the roadside, in a thicket of thorn-broom, bathing his foaming tongue in the streams of blood that were flowing from his nostrils.

Arrived at the bank of the Rhone, beneath the great hawthorn with the gnarled black trunk and smooth white branches, that stretches its abundant rustling foliage well out over the stream, the lovers would sit down, side by side, upon the roots protruding from the ground or upon a bundle of cut reeds.

And they would watch the water flow. The earthy, yellowish water, with its whirling masses of foam, rushing toward the sea.

They would sit and gaze.

They would not speak. They would live on in silence, listening to the plashing of the Rhone, the tiny wavelets that came rippling in obliquely to the bank, to loiter there among the feet of countless reeds and poplars, while the main current in the centre of the stream flowed swiftly, hurriedly along, as if in haste to reach the sea, and there be swallowed up.--There they would sit and dream, not speaking.

They felt that they were living the same life as everything about them. From time to time, a kingfisher, sky-blue and reddish-brown, would pass before them, light on a low branch, gazing sidewise at the water with his beak ready to strike, then, suddenly, fly off across the Rhone. And, with the sky-blue bird, their thoughts would cross the river, there to light again upon a branch, bent like a bow, whose slender point trailed in the water, vibrating in the current, and surrounded with a mass of foam, dead leaves, and twigs. And suddenly the bird, like a sorcerer, had disappeared.

"How pretty!" Livette would sometimes say.

And that was all.

He would make no reply. He knew not what to say to her. He was too happy. He would not call the king his cousin!

In the evening twilight, many little rabbits, young in that month of May, would run out from the park, through the wild hedges, almost invisible in their gray coats, and play in the shadow at the foot of the bushes, their presence betrayed by the rustling of a tuft of grass or a low-hanging, horizontal branch that barred their path.

To heighten the enjoyment of the lovers, there was the nightingale's song, at the rising of the moon. Listen to it: 'tis always lovely in the darkness, is the nightingale's song. It begins with three distinct, long-drawn-out cries; you would say it was a signal, a preconcerted call; it enjoins attention. Then the modulations hesitatingly arise. You would say that it is timid, that it fears its prayer will not be granted. But soon it takes courage, self-assurance comes, and the song bursts forth and soars and fills the air with its melodious uproar. 'Tis love, 'tis youth and love that can no longer be restrained, that nothing stays, that claim their rights in life.--His song is done.

His song is done, but still the lovers listen on and on to the bird's song, echoed in the dark recesses of their own hearts.

At last, it would be time to return. They would rise and walk back toward the farm, not far away.

The grandmother would be calling from the doorway:

"Livette! Livette!"

Her voice would reach their ears, with a plaintive, caressing accent, tinged with sadness, from the edge of the vast expanse that rose in the darkness toward the stars, toward life and love,--a long, melancholy call. The voice at night upon the moor fills the air and rises tranquilly, disturbed by no echo, sad to be alone in a too great solitude.

Around the lovers as they returned to the farm, in the orchards, in the park, as the darkness increased, the deafening clamor of the frogs would soon be heard, a mighty noise, the sum total of a multitude of feeble sounds, a frightful din, composed of many minor croakings of unequal strength, which, massed together, drowning one another, mount at last into a rhythmic tumult like the ceaseless roaring of a cataract.

And amid this formidable everlasting clamor, made by the voices of myriads of amorous little frogs, accentuated by the cry of a curlew, or a heron on the watch, and accompanied by the humming of the two Rhones and the plashing of the sea--the lovers, both deeply moved, heard nothing save the calm beating of their hearts.

As time went on, their love waxed greater, increased by the memory of all these hours lived together.

Renaud was no longer simple Renaud in Livette's eyes, but the being by whom she knew what life was, through whom came to her that overwhelming consciousness of everything, of the horizons of land and sea, that sentiment of _being_, that longing for the future, for growth, that inflow of vague hopes that comes of love and gives a zest to life.

And now, if any one had sought to wrest Jacques from Livette, she would have died of it, and he who should try to wrest Livette from Jacques would have died of it--he would, my friends, even more certainly.

It is a good and excellent thing that love should be always busied in making the world younger--and the nightingale, like the frogs, is never weary of repeating it.

VI

RAMPAL

Rampal, who had borrowed Jacques Renaud's horse, had not returned.

Renaud now rode no other horse than Blanchet.

Rampal was a low rascal, gambler, hanger-on of wine-shops, well-known at Arles in all the vile haunts scattered along the Rhone.

Dismissed by several masters, a drover without a drove, he passed his life in these days, riding from town to town, from Aigues-Mortes to Nimes, from Nimes to Arles, from Arles to Martigues, and in each of these towns plied some doubtful trade, cheated a little at cards, winning the means of living a week without doing anything, and returning, for that week, to the Camargue he loved, where there were, in two or three farm-houses, women who smiled upon his mysterious, piratical existence.

For that existence, a horse was essential. Rampal, serving as a drover on foot, had, in the first place, stolen a horse from a _manade_, but he broke his tether the second night, left his master, swam the Rhone, and rejoined his fellows. Then it was that the rascal, having, in truth, important business on hand, had said to Renaud:

"I have to go to Saintes, I'll take your horse, Cabri."

"Take my horse," Renaud replied.

It did not occur to him that Rampal would not return. Jacques relied so surely upon his own reputation for strength and courage that he did not think that any one would venture to arouse his wrath.

And then he had a sort of pity for Rampal, mingled with a little admiration. He was a bold horseman, was Rampal, and, except for women and cards, he would have been, with Renaud, or just after him, a king of the drovers! So that, if Rampal aroused Renaud's compassion, Renaud aroused Rampal's envy.

However, the vagaries of this _marrias_, this good-for-nothing knave, were the pranks of a free man. Neither married nor betrothed, fatherless and motherless, with no one to support or assist, no one whom he must please, he had a perfect right to live as he pleased! At least, that is what most people thought.

Moreover, Renaud, although an honest man, had the tastes of a vagabond. Before his heart was filled with his strange affection for Livette, by which he felt as if he were bound hand and foot, he had, in truth, borne a part with Rampal in many curious adventures.

More than once they had galloped along side by side toward the open moor, each having _en croupe_ a laughing damsel, who, after the close of a bull-fight at Aigues-Mortes or Arles, had consented to accompany them for a night.

But on such occasions Renaud had always dealt frankly, never promising marriage nor any other thing, but simply giving the fair one a present, a souvenir, a brass ring, or a silk handkerchief--a _fichu_ to pleat after the Arlesian fashion, or a broad velvet ribbon for a head-dress; while Rampal was treacherous, promised much and did nothing,--in short, was nothing but _fena_, a good-for-nothing.

So Rampal had borrowed Renaud's horse with the intention of bringing him back the same evening; but that evening he had heard of a fete at Martigues and had ridden away thither without worrying about Renaud.

"He'll take a horse out of his _manade_," he said to himself.

Now, Audiffret, Livette's father, had insisted that Renaud should take Blanchet.

"Take Blanchet," he said. "I don't like to have our girl ride him. He's a fine horse, but bad-tempered at times. Finish breaking him for us. I want him to run in the races at Beziers this year. Take him."

Happy to have Blanchet in the hands of "her dear," for so she already called Renaud in her heart, Livette, who was fond of Blanchet, simply said:

"Take good care of him."

That was more than six months before.

Rampal, who had caused considerable gossip meanwhile, and of whom Renaud had heard more than once, had not brought back the horse.

Renaud did not lose his patience. Several times, being informed that Rampal was in this or that place, he had tried to find him, but had not succeeded.

"I shall catch him some day!" said Renaud. "He loses nothing by waiting."

He hoped that the fete at Saintes-Maries would bring the rascal back.

"He will come back with the thieving gipsies!" he said; and he was not mistaken.

Not for an empire would Rampal have missed making the pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries. The rascal would have thought himself everlastingly damned. It had been his habit from childhood to come and ask forgiveness of his sins from the two Marys and Sara the bondwoman, at whom he did nothing but laugh in a boastful way, unable to satisfy himself whether he believed in them or not.

This year, being affiliated with the gipsies in matters of horse-trading (every one knows that the gipsies, men and women,--_roms_ and _juwas_, as they say,--have a profound acquaintance with everything connected with the horse), Rampal had been a fruitful source of information to them.

By divers methods they had led him to talk about this and that, about every one and everything. He had no idea himself that he had told so many things. They had questioned him, sometimes directly, taking him unawares; sometimes in a slow, roundabout way; when he was drunk, and when he was asleep. And his replies had been pitilessly registered in the gipsies' unfailing memory--the wherewithal to astonish all Camargue.

Rampal had not even been questioned by the gipsy queen, who did not trust his discretion; she learned the secrets of the province at second-hand.

Once only had he spoken to her. It was one evening when the beggar queen began to dance for her own amusement on the high-road, to the music of her tambourine, which she hardly ever laid aside.

"You are beautiful!" he said to her.

"You are ugly!" she replied, quickly, in a contemptuous tone.

"Give me the ring on your finger," said Rampal, "and I'll give you another."

She glanced with a gleaming eye at her fantastic ring of hammered silver, then at the insolent Christian, and said:

"A sound cudgelling about your loins is what I will give you, dog, if you don't leave me!"

And she spat fiercely at him as if in disgust.

Rampal, somewhat abashed, abandoned the game.

This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted them. You would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from her eyes. It penetrated your being, searched your heart, and you were powerless against it. She fathomed your glance, but you could not fathom hers--which, on the contrary, repelled you, turned you back like a solid wall. And, at such moments, she would stand proudly erect, her head thrown slightly back, her whole body poised, at once so sinuous and so rigid, that she might have been compared to a horned viper standing on his tail, fascinating his prey and preparing to spring.

"I can't explain, Jacques, how that woman frightened me," said Livette to Renaud. "My blood is still running cold!--She threatened me! And when that crown of thorns fell at my feet--Holy Mother!--I thought I was going to faint!"

"If I meet her," Renaud replied, "she'll find she has some one to settle with!"

"Let the heathen alone, Jacques! It isn't well to have aught to do with the devil."

But the drover loved a fight, and he longed for nothing so much as to fall in with Rampal and Zinzara, the gambler and the queen of the cards; "a pair of gipsies, a pair of thieves," thought Renaud.

VII

THE MEETING

The gipsy queen was the first of the two he met.

Renaud, mounted on Blanchet, was riding along the beach toward Saintes-Maries.

The sea was at his right; at his left, the desert. He was riding through the sand, and from time to time the waves rolled up under his horse's feet, surrounding with sportive foam the rosy hoofs rapidly rising and falling.

Renaud was thinking of Livette.

He looked ahead and saw the tall, straight, battlemented walls of Saintes-Maries, and wondered whether he would lead his little queen, dressed in white, and crowned with flowers, to the altar there, or at Saint-Trophime in Arles.

He looked at the sea and wondered if nothing would come to him from that source; if his uncle, captain of a merchantman, who sailed on his last voyage so many years ago, would not come into port some day with a cargo of vague, marvellous things, a million in priceless stuffs and precious stones? In the poor, ignorant fellow's imagination, the thought of a fortune was a vision of legendary treasures, like those discovered in caverns in the Arabian tales.