But Florian answered: “You cannot give me anything worthy of comparison with that which I once had, and now have lost. I had my dreams of beauty and of holiness. I had the noblest dreams imaginable. These dreams I have embodied as no other man has ever done before me: these dreams I have made vital things, and I have introduced them into my living, full measure. No, you can give me nothing worthy of comparison with what I have lost. And you are free. In all these years the one service I have asked of you, who have been so long the mainstay and the destroyer of Puysange, is now at the last to reveal to me the shortest way to my patron saint.”
“From these saints you will get a quick and ugly shrift: from me long years of ease and wisdom, master,—utter wisdom, and no more restless doubtings about anything.”
Florian felt of a sudden that this small fawning creature was loathsome: and just as suddenly, Florian too was weary of all things that are and of all that was ever to happen anywhere.
“No, Collyn, I repudiate your wicked aid; and I set you free, not really hating evil or good either. But I honestly prefer to owe allegiance to nobody except myself. Because of that preference I shall go undefended to yet another high place in quest of my embodied dreams,—now for a second time, and now with a somewhat different intent.”
“You march toward death and toward utter destruction, my proud little master, when even now my power might save you. There is no other power that would befriend you now, for you march up against Heaven.”
“Yes, yes! that is regrettable of course, it tends to establish a bad precedent. But it is my ill luck to be both a gentleman and a poet,—a poet who, I can assure you,” Florian said, hastily, “has never written any verses. That, at least, nobody can charge me with. Now to a gentleman destruction is preferable to dishonor: and to a married poet, Collyn, there are worse things than death.”
24. Marie-Claire
FLORIAN left Bellegarde at dawn. For once, he did not travel in his favorite bottle-green and silver. Good taste suggested that a plain black suit with his best Mechlin ruffles, was the appropriate wear in which to court destruction. Thus clad, he girded on Flamberge, and set out as merrily as might be, afoot: no horse could come to the top of Morven, where once had stood the grove of Virbius.
Florian journeyed first to Amneran, and went to a very retired cottage built of oak and plaster upon a stone foundation. Here was his last hope of aid, and of succour which he might accept without any detriment to the pride of Puysange, for this was the ill spoken-of home of his half-sister, Marie-Claire Cazaio. She was alone at her spinning when he came into the room. He took her hand. He kissed it.
“You told me once, dear Marie-Claire, a long while since, that in the end I would come to you in an old garden where dead leaves were falling, and would kiss your hand, and tell you I had loved you all my life. I wonder, Marie-Claire, if you remember that?”
“I have forgotten,” she said, “nothing.”
“You were wrong as to the garden and as to the dead leaves. But in all else you were right. This is the end, Marie-Claire. And in the end I fulfill your prophecy.”
She looked at him, for no brief while, with those small darkened eyes which seemed to see beyond him. “Yes, you are speaking the truth. I had thought that when this happened it would matter. And it does not matter.”
“Only one thing has mattered in all our lives, Marie-Claire. I was at Storisende last week. I remembered you and our youth.”
“And were you”—she smiled faintly,—“and were you properly remorseful ?”
“No. I have regretted many of my doings. But I can find nowhere in me any of the highly requisite repentance for those of my actions which people would describe as criminal. I suppose it is because we of Puysange are so respectful of the notions of others that we do not commit crimes rashly. We enter into no illegal turpitude until rather careful reflection has assured us of its expediency. I, in any event, have sometimes been virtuous with unthinking levity, and with depressing upshots: but my vices, which my judgment had to endorse before prudence would venture on them, have resulted well enough. So I can regret no irregularities, and certainly not the happiness of our far-off youth.”
Again Marie-Claire was in no hurry to reply. When she spoke, it was without any apparent conviction either one way or the other. “Our happiness involved, they say, considerable misdoing.”
This stirred him to mild indignation. “And is love between brother and sister a misdoing ? Come, Marie-Claire, but let us be logical! All scientists will tell you that endogamy is natural to mankind as long as men stay uncorrupted by over-civilization. The weight of history goes wholly one way. The Pharaohs and the Ptolemies afford, I believe, precedents that are tolerably ancient. Strabo is explicit as to the old Irish, Herodotus as to the Persians. In heaven also Osiris and Zeus and I know not how many other supreme gods have, in cherishing extreme affection for their sisters, set the example followed upon earth by the Kings of Siam and of Phoenicia, and by the Incas of Peru—”
She shook that small dark head. “But, none the less—”
“—An example followed by the Sinhalese, the Romans of the old Republic, the Tyrians, the Guanches of the Canary Islands—”
“Let us say no more about it—”
“—An example, in short, of the best standing in all quarters of the globe. In the Rig-Veda you will find Yami defending with unanswerable eloquence the union of brother and sister. In Holy Writ we see Heaven’s highest blessings accorded to the fruit of Abraham’s affection for his sister Sarah, nor need I allude to the marriage of Azrun with her two brothers, Abel and Cain. And in the Ynglinga Saga—”
She laid her hand upon his mouth. “Yes, yes, you have your precedents: and in your eyes, I know, that is the main thing, because of your dread of being unconventional and offending the neighbors. We were not wicked, then, whatever our less well-read father thought: we were merely”—and here she smiled,—“we were merely logical in our youth. In any event, we wasted our youth.”
“Yes,” Florian admitted, “for I was then logical, but not sufficiently logical. I could, as easily at that time as later, have cured our father of his habit of meddling with my affairs. But I turned unthinkingly away from the contented decades of technical criminality which we might have shared. For I was in those days enamored of the beauty that I in childhood had, however briefly, seen: even while my body rioted, my thoughts remained bewilderedly aware of a beguiling and intoxicating brightness which stayed unwon to; and I could care whole-heartedly about nothing else.”
“I know,” she answered. “You were a dear boy. And it does not matter, now, that you went away from me, and played at being a man about whom I knew nothing and cared nothing. For old times’ sake my sending followed you to Brunbelois, and even there for old times’ sake I warned you. But you would not heed—”
“I cared for nothing then save the beauty of Melior. And now her beauty,” he said, with a wry smile, “is gone. And that also does not matter. For months her beauty has been the one thing about her I never think of.”
“She is flesh and blood,” said Marie-Claire, as if that explained everything. “It is a combination which does not long detain Puysange. What is this peril that you go to encounter to-day?”
“I go up upon Morven to keep my word as frankly and as utterly as I gave it; and thereby to be embroiled, I am afraid, in open conflict with my patron saint.”