CHAPTER XXVIII THE FATEFUL LIGHT

When Martinique was a young colony, when Versailles was the palace of a king, away in those sunlit times before the storm of the Revolution, the Jardin des Plantes of St. Pierre was a garden. The most curious and the most beautiful in the world. The spacious imagination that conceived Versailles touched the tropical forest, and the hand that laid out Luciennes fell upon the ceibas, the palmistes and the loseille bois. The poetry and perfect beauty of the tropical trees, the splendour of the creeping plants, fathoms of convolvulus, air gardens where orchids swung suspended by the cables of the Liantasse, tree ferns, trumpet flowers, star flowers, all lay there waiting for the gardener, just as in life all the splendour of passion, the beauty of love, and the mystery of death lie waiting for the poet.

He came and the cutlasses sounded amidst the air shoots and the lianas, he destroyed nothing needlessly, pushing the forest back where a path should go, making here a fairy lake—less a lake than a mirror for the tree ferns to see themselves in—here a glade, a twilit home for a statue. He heard the murmur of the waterfall, whose voice still sounds like a voice of mourning for the ruin of his work, and he brought the waterfall into the scheme of things. You can fancy how beautiful it was, this garden in the old day, scented, languorous, sunlit, twilit, filled with the notes of193 the bell bird and the siffleur de montagne, the whisper of the trees and the voice of the waterfall.

As certainly as there were flowers in that garden there were lovers; men fought and killed one another in the allée des duels; what a volume of romance lay here brightly written, vivid in colour, of which remains nothing but a few torn leaves; faded pictures where the forest had half blotted out the garden paths and the glades from which the statues have vanished.

The fer de lance hides amidst the leaves and makes the place frightful with death. He is the crowning fascination of the ruined garden.

Gaspard, releasing the lips of the girl, and holding her warm body close to him, kissed her eyes, her forehead, her hair. Beyond the gates, the roadway like a great white lamp burned in the sun trying to pierce the gloom. The world seemed trying to peep at them, and the forest with its great green sleeve to shelter them from the world.

“Come here—here!—here! forget the world and the road—follow me where the ferns are high—into the twilight—come here!—here!”

A siffleur de montagne in the gloom of the garden was calling to his mate; they scarcely heard him yet they came, taking a path on the left, a path hemmed on either side by tree ferns and hundred feet soaring palms.

“You love me!”

“Ché—I have loved you since the world began.”

The reply held all the truth of love.

She had loved him since the world began. Aeons before Martinique saw the white men from the East, in the dawn of time, dim, cometic, her being had been projected towards his, that she might stand in the Jardin des Plantes clasped in the arms of Gaspard a million ancestors had lived and194 loved, and died; that he might stand clasping her in his arms a million ancestors had fought the battle of life. This embrace was the victory of the dead over death, the triumph of life over time. In eight words she had spoken the secret which all lovers feel vaguely in the depths of their being. “I have loved you since the world began.”

The voice of the waterfall came now through the trees, a burst of light shewed where the palms and angelines, the ferns, and the ceibas, gave place to the lake into which the torrent falls leaping, rainbowed, dim with mist from amidst the foliage of the cliff; a hundred feet of cascading water, every drop a gem. It seemed alive and laughing, if water spirit ever lived she surely lived here. Then, as they stood watching it, just as though the spirit had lost its gaiety, the rainbow dazzle passed away and dimness spread through the glade. The sun was sinking above the treetops.

Marie glanced up.

“Come,” she said, “the light is fading—ah, the sun, could he not have waited a little longer! but he waits for no one, not even for us.”

It was dark when they reached St. Pierre. The night had welled up from the harbour like a flood, the moon was up, and the stars alight in the dark pansy-blue above, but Pelée’s crest still held a touch of sunlight. One might have imagined the day standing there just before flight on that burning crest. Then, spreading wings westward as the light left the summit, leaving Martinique to night and the stars.

All the way along the road from the Jardin des Plantes the great fireflies had waltzed and drifted about them, they had heard the first shuddering of the night wind in the palms, they had paused to listen, the night had told them things beyond the comprehension of all but lovers and195 poets. The Creole French of the tropics still hold a veil between their minds, yet they understood one another perfectly.

They came by the sea way, the harbour was full of stars and the anchor lights of the ships in the bay, shone like glow-worms, the red port-light of a steamer sent a red ripple of light across the water. They could hear the wash of the little waves against the sea-steps, and from out there somewhere in the starlight the “creak-creak” of oars.

Some shore boat was putting off from a ship.

“See,” said Gaspard, “out there, that light near the steamer, that is La Belle Arlésienne.” He had told her on their way back of how Sagesse had pushed forward the expedition intending to start on Friday. The news had been a blow to her—how hard a blow he did not guess, for in the darkness he did not see the tears in her eyes, or the quivering of her lips.

She looked across the water at the fateful light. It seemed to her sinister, the eye of a Zombi staring straight at her, malignant, and threatening.

“I am taking him away,” said the light, “beyond the rim of the sea; you have seen the ships go there, great ships that become little ships, and then just specks that vanish utterly, just as people vanish when they die. Remember Ti Finotte; she passed away like that, and the sun remains and the blue sea, and sky, but she has not returned—she will never come back. Yes, I am taking him away. I am the Zombi who comes to take away happiness. I change my form as Zombis do; you saw me once before, I was then the coffin in which they placed Ti Finotte away there, amidst the blowing palms of Morne Rouge, now I am the light that will take away your love across the wind-blown sea.”

She turned to Gaspard, and casting her arms about his196 neck, pressing her face to his breast—sobbed. She could keep a brave heart when he told her of his going, she could keep the words back that would tell him of her despair, but she could no longer control her tears. Fate had spoken to her. That mind which knew nothing, knew everything. In days long past, by the blue Caribbean Sea, the women of her remote ancestry had seen their men going away, never, perhaps, to return, and had clasped them like this. Grief, who is ageless, had cast them upon the breasts of their lovers. Just as in her love she had resumed their love, so in her grief she was resuming their sorrow.

There by the starlit harbour of St. Pierre, this girl of the people, clasping this man of the people, formed with him a picture that the patient stars had watched for ages. The story of love and separation told by two forms clinging together—a vision statuesque, eternal.

“But I will come back—and it is not yet—not for some days—”

“You will come back?”

“Ah, believe me, nothing will stop me—nothing—nothing.”

“It is so far—I do not know where. If I knew; but the ships go away out there, and it is the distance that takes my heart from me; they fade into nothing, pass into the sky.”

“But they come back—you have seen the ships come back?”

His voice told her that he was in trouble, and that it was her grief that caused his trouble. She could not tell whether the ships she had seen going away ever came back, the sailing vessels were all alike to her. The American steamer came back, but it was different from the others, but the trouble in his voice made her dry her eyes and answer him.

197 “Yes—I had not thought of that, do not mind me, I am foolish—ché, thou wilt surely return. The Bon Dié will surely send you back to me.”

The boat that had been rowing across the harbour was now at the steps near by, and a man was coming up the steps. It was Sagesse. He did not notice them as he walked away towards the town, but they saw him clearly.

Marie shuddered.

“Come,” said she, “how late it is—later than I have ever been before, and the house will be closed.”

They turned, and by the Passage Bertine sought the Street of the Precipice; there was not a soul to be seen, and the moonlight was now pouring in the city.

The old street looked never more mysterious or beautiful than by this light, brilliant, yet tinged with the suggestion of death, and snow, and dreams. Had you seen Marie standing at the door of the house where she lived, and knocking for admittance, dressed as she was in her robe, light, and graceful as the dress of some Athenian woman, you might have fancied yourself far from the world of our time, in some street of Mycenae—some moonlit street of Taormina whence the flute-players had just vanished, leaving behind them silence and the vision of Amaryllis at her door.