King of Camargue

He had a fine voice, smooth and clear, powerful without effort, and of wide range.

Livette had stopped her horse, to hear better. It was in the morning. In the light there was the reflection that tells that the day is young, that makes hope dance in hearts of sixteen, and sows hope anew even in the hearts of the old.

A vague hope that is naught but the desire to love; but its loss, bitterer than death, makes the thought of death a consolation!

the singer repeated, and the little one involuntarily urged her horse toward the song that called to her to come.

“Aha!” said Renaud, pausing in his work, “aha! young lady! you are astir early!—with a white horse that will soon be all red!”

“Yes,” she said, laughing, “with gnats and gadflies; there are swarms of them! too many, by my faith in God!”

“You are covered with them, young lady, as a bit of honey is covered with bees, or a tuft of flowering genesta! But what brings you here?”

“I come from my father. You must come with me at once.”

“But comrade Rampal borrowed my horse just now to go to Saintes. They went off one upon the other.”

“Take mine, then,” said Livette.

“And what will you do, young lady?”

She was ashamed of her thoughtlessness, and blushed scarlet.

“I?” said she, and the words of the ballad rang in her heart:

“Unless,” said he, laughing in his turn, “you care to take me en croupe?”

“People would never stop talking about it all over our Camargue,” said she, with laughter in her voice. “A drover like you, the terror of riders, en croupe like a girl? No, no; no false shame, that is my place. We will take off my saddle, and you can bring it to me to-morrow.”

“Very luckily,” said Renaud, “Rampal didn’t take mine, which I never lend.”

Livette jumped down from her horse; and at the breeze made by her skirt a cloud of great flies and enormous mosquitoes rose and flew buzzing about her. Blanchet’s snow-white rump looked as if it were covered with a net of purple silk, there was such a labyrinth of little streams of blood crossing and recrossing one another. Another instant, and gadflies and mosquitoes settled down again upon the bleeding surface and dotted it with a myriad of black spots; but Blanchet, albeit somewhat cross, was used to that annoyance.

Livette fastened him to one of the rings in the wall, and sat down upon the stone bench, waiting until Renaud had finished his séden.

The wheel turned and turned, striking its dull blow with perfect regularity at every turn.

“That was a pretty song, Renaud,” said Livette suddenly, answering her thoughts without intention; “that was a pretty song you were singing just now.”

“I learned it,” said Renaud, “from a boatman, a friend of my father, with whom I went up the Rhône as far as Lyon—and then came down again——”

“And is all that country very beautiful up there?” said she.

“Yes,” he answered, “it is beautiful.”

And he said nothing more.

“You don’t look as if you meant what you say, Renaud. Pray, didn’t you like the city of Lyon we hear so much about?”

There was a long silence, broken only by the monotonous rhythm of the wheel.

“No sun!” said Renaud abruptly. “It’s a city in a cold cloud!—The Rhône isn’t fine till you come down again,” he added.

Livette looked at him, and her wide-open eyes seemed to say:

“Why is that?”

He answered her look.

“When one of us goes up yonder, young lady, you understand, he leaves everything to go nowhere, and when he gets there, all he asks is to start back again!—When he comes from there here, on the contrary, he leaves nothing at all, and knows that, at the end of the journey, he will have arrived somewhere! You see, young lady, the best horse must, of necessity, stop at the sea—and that is the only place where I am willing to consent to go no farther. Where the sea is not, you have all the rest of the journey still to do.—Enough, my boy!” he added, raising his voice.

The wheel stopped. He examined the séden. The rope, of black and white strands in regular alternation, was finished.

“That’s a good piece of work,” said he; “look, young lady.”

He leaned over, almost against her, to look at a point in the rope which seemed to him defective; he leaned over, and a short black curl touched lightly the disordered, almost invisible, locks that formed a sort of fleecy golden cloud over Livette’s forehead. And thereupon it seemed to both of them—young as they were!—that their hair blazed up and shrivelled softly, like the fine grass that takes fire in summer, under the hot sun. Ah! holy youth!

Then, for the first time, Renaud thought of the girl. Hitherto he had seen in Livette only the “young lady.” They remained bending forward, she over the rope which she seemed to be examining attentively, he over Livette’s hair. Livette wore her “morning head-dress,” consisting of a little white handkerchief which covered the chignon, and was tied in such fashion that the two ends stood up like little hollow, pointed ears on top of her head. When they are in full-dress, the women of Camargue surround the high chignon, covered by a fine white linen cap, with a broad velvet ribbon, almost always black, whose long, unequal ends fall behind the head, a little at one side.

Renaud, then, was looking at Livette’s clear flaxen hair,—in which there was, here and there, a lock of a darker golden hue,—symmetrically massed on top of her head, advancing in little waves toward her temples, coquettishly arranged, but so short and fluffy that some few locks escaped, here, there, and everywhere, enough to form the faint golden mist above her head.

He looked at the pretty, round neck, whence the fair hair seemed to spring, like a vigorous plant, so slender and so fine! so long, and full of life! And the temptation to press his lips upon it drew him on, as, after a long day’s journey among dry, stony hills, the sight of the water draws on the horses of Camargue, accustomed to moist pasturage.

She felt that she was being stared at too long.

“Let us go!” she said, suddenly. “My father’s orders were that you should come as soon as possible.”

Renaud felt as if he were waking from a long sleep and from a dream. He jumped to his feet. Without a word, he went to Blanchet, took off the woman’s saddle and carried it into the house, placed his own upon the beast, which the mosquitoes had at last made restive, and leaped upon his back.

Livette, assisted by the drover’s strong hand, leaped to the croup behind him with one spring; highly amused she was as she threw one arm around Renaud’s waist. It is the fashion among the Camarguese young women, all of whom, on fête-days, ride to the plains of Meyran, or to Saintes-Maries, “fitted” to the horses of their promised husbands.

The drover started Blanchet off at a gallop, gave him his head, and let him take his own course. Blanchet left the travelled road, headed straight for the château across the moor, through the sand thickly sown with stiff, rounded clumps of saltwort at irregular intervals. The good horse flew over these clumps, scarcely touching the tops, landing always between them in the damp sand, from which, however, by force of long habit, he withdrew his feet without effort, calculating in advance the distance between the obstacles, galloping freely and evenly, changing feet as he chose, making sport of his heavy burden, happy at being left to himself.

And Livette must needs hold tight to the drover’s waist; he was a lithe, supple fellow, and swayed with the horse. And the swift motion, the free air, youth and love, all combined to intoxicate the two young people; and without meaning it, without thinking of it, the horseman repeated his song of a few moments before, between his teeth, but loud enough to be overheard by the girl:

And it seemed to them as if the whole horizon were theirs.

When they dismounted, in front of the farm-house of the château, they had not spoken a word, but they had exchanged in silence the subtlest and strongest part of themselves.

From that day, Renaud, being sincerely in love, exerted himself to please. He was careful about his dress, paid more attention to the adjustment of his neckerchief, shaved more closely, and had not a single glance to spare for the other girls, even the prettiest of them.

At last, he said to Livette one day:

“Your father will never be willing!”

Those were his first words of love.

“If I am willing, my father will be. And when my father is willing, grandmother always is!”

“The good God grant it!” replied Jacques.

And it had happened as she said. For almost five months now they had been betrothed.

The fascinating thing about Livette was that she was just the opposite of Renaud, so slender and delicate, so fair and such a child,—and, furthermore, that she loved him with all her might, the sweetheart,—there was no mistake about that.

V

THE LOVERS

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 Rhône 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 Château d’Avignon! she was his fiancée, 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 fiancée 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 fête-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 Rhône?”

“With all my heart!”

And often they would go and sit together beside the Rhône, 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 Rhône, 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 Rhône, 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 Rhône. 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 Rhônes 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

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 Rhône, 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 féna, 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 fête 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 Béziers 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 fête 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

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.

For an instant, he seemed to see it with his eyes, to see his vision realized in the dazzling splendor of the boundless sea, that lay glistening in the sunlight, with sharp, fitful flashes, like a mirror broken into narrow, moving fragments of irregular shape. It was an undulating sheet of diamonds and sapphires. The sun’s rays, as he sank lower and lower toward the horizon, assumed a ruddier hue as they fell obliquely upon the fast-subsiding waves, and soon the water was like a sheet of old burnished gold, moving slowly up and down; one would have said it was a vast melted treasure beneath a polished vitreous surface! At long intervals, a solitary wave greater than its fellows fell with a dull roar upon the beach, and ever and anon a cloud passed overhead; and in the mist flying from the gold-tipped wave, in the slow-moving shadow of the cloud, the water seemed a deep, dark blue. The sun sank lower, and broad bright red bands began to overshadow the bands of ochre, amethyst, light green, pale blue, that rose one above another on the horizon line. The changing sea was now like a cloak of royal purple, with fringe of azure, gold, and silver.

On the desert side, the marshes likewise were changed to vast floors carpeted with gorgeous drapery and rich embroidery. Everything was ablaze with sparkles—sea, sand, and salt. At intervals, a red flamingo rose from among the reeds, flew heavily along, seeming to carry on his side a little of the ruddy hue of sky and sea,—then lighted on the brink of the gleaming water.

The gulls were like white dream-birds in this enchanted country. They sat in lines, like brooding doves, on the crests of the waves in the offing, or on the hot sands, or on the surface of the ponds.

And, down in the northwest, Renaud was looking for the high, square terrace of the Château d’Avignon, for Livette sometimes went up there to see if she could not spy Blanchet and her dear Renaud’s straight spear somewhere in the plain.

Suddenly Renaud checked his horse and gazed fixedly at a black object moving on the surface of the water, rising and falling with the motion of the waves, some two hundred feet from shore.

He thought he could descry a woman’s head; a head covered with dripping black hair and surrounded by a copper circlet, from which depended glistening Oriental medallions.

The gipsy was swimming, disporting herself in the waves, which, coming from the deep sea, rose and fell slowly and at long intervals. She glided through them like a conger-eel, happy in the sensation caused by the gentle lapping of the salt water caressing her flesh. Her movements were undulating, like those of the waves themselves; she writhed and twisted like seaweed tossed about by the surf. Now and then a heavier, higher wave would come upon her. She would turn and face it, put her hands together in a point above her lowered head, as divers do, plunge into the broad wave horizontally, and cleave it through from front to rear.

From his horse, Renaud watched the dark head emerge on the other side of the swelling wave, which, as it approached the shore, curled over with whitening crest, broke upon the beach in snowy foam and spread out over the sand, beneath and all about him, in shallow, transparent, overlapping streams, all studded with sparks. He could not see the swimmer’s body distinctly. Its fleeting outlines could scarcely be made out beneath the clear, transparent water, ere they were blotted out again by the undulations and reflections.

Suddenly the swimmer turned toward the shore, apparently gained a footing, and, raising one arm out of the water, motioned to Renaud to be gone, shouting:

“Go your way!”

But he, who had thus far watched her with curiosity and with no feeling of anger, was irritated by those words. Certainly he had forgotten none of Livette’s grievances against the gipsy. Not a week had passed since her threatening visit to the Château d’Avignon. But, in that beautiful evening light, Renaud’s heart felt at peace, and he had recognized the gipsy queen without emotion. It may be that curiosity was dominant in his heart, and urged him toward this mysterious being, surprised in her bath, in the utter solitude of the desert at evening; the curiosity of a traveller to examine a strange animal, of a Christian to investigate a heathen woman. “Go your way!” This command, hurled at him from afar by a woman’s voice, wounded him in that part of his heart where the memory of the gipsy’s threat against Livette was stored away.

“Ah! it’s you,” he cried, “you, who go about and stand in doorways to frighten young girls when they happen to be left alone! who tell lies and play monkey-tricks to make them give you what they refuse to give! Don’t let it happen again, thief! or you’ll find out how the pitchfork and the goad feel!”

The insulted queen was absolutely convulsed with furious rage. If she had been near the drover, she would have jumped straight at his throat, as the serpent straightens itself out like an arrow and darts at its prey. She felt that she grew pale, a shiver ran through her whole body, and swaying a little, like the adder about to spring, with her head thrown slightly back, she walked toward the horseman—but how far away he was!

“Aha!” he cried, “you are coming near to hear better! Come on, you heathen, come! I will explain it all to you!”

As he remembered how the woman had threatened Livette, his wrath rose within him. They were not Christians, these Bohemian creatures, but thieves, bandits, one and all. Why, it was said that they ate human flesh, child’s flesh, when they could find nothing better. If that were not true, how would they have whole quarters of bleeding flesh in their kettles so often? Ah! a race of wolves, of accursed foxes!

“Come on!” he cried again.

She came on, but not without difficulty, having to force her way step by step through the resisting waves. Her shoulders were not yet visible, and she was accelerating her speed by using her arms under the water. She could have made the same distance more quickly by swimming, but she did not even think of that. She was thinking of something very different!

Renaud mechanically cast his eye along the shore, behind him, and saw, a few steps away, the gipsy’s clothes lying in a heap out of reach of the waves,—and her tambourine on top of them; then he looked around once more at the woman coming toward him. The water was now up to her armpits, and not until then did he see that she was entirely naked.

Her bust slowly emerged from the water. At a hundred paces from the shore, the water reached only to her knees. She was beautiful. Her slender, well-knit body was very youthful. She stood very erect, and seemed as if she were going into battle without any thought of shame. She had been assailed: she was rushing at her assailant, that was the whole of it. Her fists were clenched, her arms slightly bent, her head still thrown back a little. Her whole attitude was threatening. The water was rolling down in glistening pearls from her neck to her feet, over every part of her swarthy, bronzed body. Her swelling chest seemed to be put forward, as if it were ready, like a magic buckler, to receive the blows that would be powerless to injure it.

The drover sat still in speechless amazement. He gazed at the approaching woman, who, as he saw her, springing from the water, surrounded by white foam, with her unusual coloring, appeared to him like a supernatural being.

What was she there for? She came forward, boldly aggressive; and her witch’s mind was revolving many evil schemes, no doubt.

Did she not bend over a moment, as if to pick up pebbles from beneath the water, with which to stone her enemy? Was she not holding them now in her clenched fists. No: the sands of Camargue stretch very far beneath the water, sloping very gradually, and not the tiniest pebble meets the swimmer’s bare foot.

What was she doing then?

And now she was close beside the horseman, whose curiosity constantly increased. But he had ceased questioning himself. He simply stared at her, stupefied and enchanted.

He followed her with his eyes, fascinated, forgetting his spear resting upon his stirrup, forgetting his horse, forgetting everything.

And now she was within three paces of him, standing perfectly straight, insolent in her whole bearing, in every undulation of her figure, looking him in the face, with eyes from which a steely flame shot forth, and which no other eye could penetrate. And as she presented her profile to him for a second, he had a swift, hardly conscious thought that the lower part of the face—from below the nostrils to the base of the chin—resembled the head of the lizard of the sand, and the turtles and snakes of the swamp. There was the same vertical line, broken by thin, slightly-receding lips, whence he expected to see a forked, vibrating tongue come forth, as in a dream of the devil.

But this impression was but momentary, and he saw naught but the woman, young, fair, unclothed, seemingly offering herself voluntarily to his savage lust, in the security of that deserted shore, amid the plashing of the waves, in the fresh breeze blowing from the sea, and the evening sunlight, which, with the salt water, coursed in streams over the whole lovely body.

Dazzled, blinded, drunken with the waves of blood, which from his heart, whither it had rushed at first, suffocating him and making him waver in his saddle,—now poured back to his brain, suffusing his face and bull-like neck with red,—he was about to leap down from his horse, or perhaps to stoop over only, snatch up the creature—a mere feather in his hands—by strength of wrist, and centaur-like carry her away en croupe,—when she, more prompt to act, darted forward, stretching out her arms, and with her left hand seized and pulled back with all her strength the double rein of Renaud’s horse, making him rear and fall back. And with her right hand she struck the creature’s face!