CHAPTER XXIV FLOWER OF LIGHT

When they passed through Morne Rouge the last rays of sunset were flaming up the streets of St. Pierre and the light of the moon in her first quarter was beginning to flood the world. They had still some miles to go and now their shadow lay before them, dimly sketched on the road by the strengthening moonlight. At the approach of night the air had become filled with sound. The woods were beginning to awake. The cabritt bois, the great beetles that boom amidst the tamarinds, the thousand insects of the night were tuning up, the fireflies were drifting in clouds above the grenadilla blossoms and, now, as though a door had been suddenly shut, night filled the world and the stars the sky. When they reached the turn of the road leading down to St. Pierre Gaspard paused.

Beneath them lay the city sprayed with lights, the bay touched with starlight, and beyond the shadow of the mountains the sea in the light of the moon.

“Tell me,” said he, “I must meet you again to-morrow—where shall I meet you, and when?”

She stood for a moment without answering. To-morrow she would have to go to Calabasse far away towards Pelée and beyond Morne Rouge. The eternal labour to which Fate had condemned her gave little time for lovers’ meetings. Not for a moment did she think of breaking with her work and taking a holiday; it had become a part of her158 life; to cease working, to give up a day just for her own pleasure never occurred to her.

“Here,” said she, at last, “an hour before sunset. I will then have returned from Calabasse.”

“You will surely be here?”

“Ah!”

The word was less a word than a sigh.

Surely be there?—nothing but death would stop her from being there, mornes, and mountains, endless roads to be travelled by her little feet, heat of day, or storm, nothing overcomable by human heart and will could stop her from being there, and she said it all in that sigh which was half a word.

He took her hand and held it to his lips for a moment. It was their first kiss. Then side by side they began to descend the steep way to the city. It was late for St. Pierre where people went to bed shortly after sundown, the moon was just lifting above the mountains and the sound of the sea came up from the bay, breathing through the empty streets and mixing with the rippling and tinkling of the fountains and water courses.

The Street of the Precipice was filled with moonlight. The old street, to-night, was Romance itself made visible. The heavy-shuttered houses, the coigns of shadow, the causeway of moonlight leading the eye downward to the ghost of a silver sea.

At the entrance to the street she turned and gave him her hand. She did not wish him to come further, Man’m Charles would be sitting up to let her in. She had never been so late before and though she felt no qualms at all at the cause of her lateness she did not wish her aunt to hear her saying good-bye to Gaspard, that would mean explanations. All that day, its blueness, its fragrance, its mystery;159 the sunlight, and the hills, the distant ocean, the twilight in which her soul had met and touched the soul that had come to find her from far across the sea, all that seemed like some mysterious flower coloured with the colours of earth but immortal as the light of the stars.

Finotte, Florine, Lys, wandering in the fields of youth had plucked roses, lilies, flowers of a moment. She wandering alone, had found this flower of light, deathless, and indestructible. Let the world pass, let the man she loved betray her, let come what might, her flower would never fade.

He watched her as she passed away down the Street of the Precipice, she, whose grace Theocritus might have sung in the warmth of some Sicilian night, and as he watched her, just for a moment, there came upon him, untutored as he was, a breath from long ago. It was as though doors had been flung open to all the songs, the perfumes, and the starlight of all the nights of the past, nights by the Sicilian sea before Taormina had become a desolation, love songs blown across the roses, roses casting their fragrance to the sea and stars.

He saw the little figure, now, away down the street pausing before a house on the right hand side, then it vanished, leaving the Street of the Precipice deserted. He turned homewards, walking slowly; it was still early as Europeans reckon earliness, yet St. Pierre was already asleep. In a French town at this hour the cafés would be still blazing, the streets filled, theatres not yet empty; but St. Pierre, like a child, went to sleep with the dark; hushed by the murmur of the sea below and the woods above, and lit by the fireflies and the stars.