The story of Fifine

I always come back to Paris or to London as to a rich feast after abstinence. There are the reserves of perfect health to draw upon for its enjoyment; and I enjoy it while the reserves last. But, on the first sign of their depletion, I return to my lentils and spring water, which can stand my happiness in quite as good stead as young partridges and Montrachet.

So the New Zealand shepherd, come once in a while to town, dissipates in a week of glorious debauch the accumulated earnings of a year or so spent in the comfortable solitudes. I don’t blame him: on the contrary. What is the sense of storing up health and vigour for no other purpose than, like a miser, to hoard them? I use my physical energy to serve every ounce of me, brain, nerves and organs. A man in health is a man in happiness, whether he be dining at Voisin’s, or on ripe figs on the hot rocks of les Baux. And I am a man in health; thank my good stars for that.

Of all the great cities, I have sojourned in Paris more than in any other. I have not, like Byron, shaken the dust of my native land off my shoes; but I came so early abroad, that English ways have grown foreign to me. I did not in fact ever fit into their social scheme, though somewhere in my heart a respect survives for it. But the little island is too small for me; or I am too big for it. There is not my peer there in the art of modelling; not a piece of native sculpture that I should like to acknowledge for my own.

For some years now I have rented a little flat in the Rue de Fleurus. It is the topmost suite in a high building, and troublesome of access to short-winded visitors, on whom the interminable succession of bare stone flights with their iron railings acts as a veritable treadmill. But the eyrie, once reached, is remote, and the view from its windows superb, including on the right the fathomless green sea of the Luxembourg gardens, on the left, like a golden buoy in the transparent mists, the dome of the Invalides. Here I possess three rooms at no great rent; and it suits me to retain them, as a conventional refuge, for use when I make my periodic returns from the wilderness.

I had been in repossession of them but three or four days when the story of Fifine began for me. It opened with a visit from Marion.

Marion, my step-sister, is the daughter of the Vicar: I am the son of the Vicar’s second wife, whose first husband was a barrister. In most tales the step-mother indulges her own offspring at the expense of her spouse’s; in mine the custom was reversed. Marion had ruled at Neverston, and Marion continued to rule. She ruled my mother consecrate, and myself unregenerate, and we both accepted her finding--with unnatural consequences for me. At the age of twenty-one I carried my Pariahship abroad for good, and my visits to Neverston since have been few and unexhilarating.

On one of these I discovered, to my amazement, that Marion herself had gone to Paris--that actually, without my knowledge, she had been living there for over a year. She was a woman of really surpassing energy, which, in course of time, I suppose, had craved a wider scope than that afforded by the narrow bounds of a country parish. And she had wanted to improve her French, for Marion was always wanting to improve something or somebody. So she had accepted a position, au pair, in the household of a penurious French Marquis--recently made a widower, and possessing one child, a daughter--where she had established herself in the true Marionesque spirit, ruling and dogmatising. I wrote to her, on my next visit to the Capital, and she came to see me once or twice, and always, as the more experienced Parisian, with some condescending pity for my easy capacity to be led astray through my ignorance of the world. She had seen enough in her short time to qualify her for a very Mentor to the gullible. But it was not to be supposed that, with my record, I should come to do other than perish in my own conceit. So she accused and judged me without a particle of evidence; but I had a small amused liking for her, all the same. She was so sturdily insular, from her contempt for temperament to her tailor-made dress, which she persisted in wearing in defiance of all continental fopperies.

On this September evening in question I had been dining in one of those exiguous Cafés in the Boulevard S. Michel, which cater largely for students of the Sorbonne and their little chère-amies. I have never much to say against the custom of such connexions, save for the hardship they entail upon certain of the girls--mostly shop or factory hands--when a necessary period is put to them. In other respects they serve to solve, and to solve cleanly, a problem which English prudery cannot bring itself to face. Yet better surely the informal comrade than the bagnio; and, after all, those who consent accept with their eyes open, and with a full knowledge of the impermanent nature of the relations.

I returned to the flat about eight o’clock, to find the wife of the Concierge already peering for me behind the closed iron gates of the lodge, which led out of a courtyard reached through an archway.

“Why closed?” I said.

“Ah!” returned Madame Crussol, snapping viciously at the lock: “Why indeed, but to oblige the laudable sister of a good-for-nothing, who is never so little to be found as when respectability calls. Likely this is one of your pranks, for which you are to be taken to task. You will find Madame upstairs.”

She swung open the gate, and locked it behind me again as I entered. I accepted the enigma with a laugh, and a little pat on the good wife’s ample shoulder. I am never eager about solving riddles which left alone will unravel of themselves. It is a good rule for ensuring serenity of mind.

As I turned to the stairs, I noticed a figure seated dimly in the porter’s lodge. It was shrouded and obscure, but I believed it was that of a young girl, whose white face, picked out by the lamp-light, blossomed from the shadows with an oddly Rembrandtesque effect. It seemed, as I passed, to be projected in sudden interest or curiosity, and then, like a face seen from a train at night, to vanish instantly.

I found, on entering my principal room, the electric light turned on and the curtains drawn close. Marion, her hands clasped behind her back, was striding restlessly up and down; but, I observed, with a stealthy motion, as though she feared the sound of her own footsteps. She stopped, on the instant of my entrance, and faced on me, her lips compressed. I thought she looked unusually grim, and that her constitutionally dead complexion betrayed a livider pallor.

“At last!” she said. “Shut the door, Felix Dane. I want to speak to you.”

“I have only been dining, Marion. Quite respectably, believe me. Had you any reason for drawing to the curtains this warm night?”

“I never do anything without a reason. I was afraid of being followed and the light betraying me.”

Marion the subject of an adventure! I begged her to be seated, with the urbanity of a doctor introduced to a remarkable case.

“No,” she said: “I cannot keep still.”

She walked, in fact, as she spoke, her gaunt figure jerked by some odd emotion. She was struggling to meet me on equal terms. Though she was my senior by two years, you must understand that mine numbered full thirty-five, and that I had had quite a little experience of the world. But it would never have done for me to presume on that pretence with her. Presently she made up her mind, and gave forth, still tramping:--

“You know my opinion of you, Felix Dane?” She commonly addressed me by my full name, as if to remind me of my untitled place in the family connexion.

“Quite,” I answered. “It is summed up in one word--wastrel.”

“Not a very flattering opinion.”

“Not in any way otherwise, Marion. It means merely to be natural.”

“Natural in the irresponsible and squandering sense.”

“Why, of course. That is the very essence of Nature--to show a blind trust in a bountiful Providence. Look at animals feeding--birds, beasts and fishes. They take the best of what is offered to them, and trample or spill abroad the ninety per cent. residue. You kept a parrot once, and ought to know. I am really, if you look at it rightly, the more religious of us two!”

She did not answer me, but continued her spasmodic march, while I observed her curiously. Suddenly she flounced to a stop before me, a suggestion of queer defiance in her expression.

“I should not have come to you,” she said, “in a very difficult situation, if I had believed your character really summed up in that word. Perhaps I can do you more justice than you do yourself, Felix.”

“That I can’t tell, Marion, until I know what it is you ask of me.”

“Courage, Felix Dane,” she answered, looking me straight in the face; “and self-restraint.”

A short silence ensued. Then, “I am waiting,” I said.

She took yet a quick turn or two, and came back as before.

“You know something of my position here,” she said, “and of its responsibilities? Well, those have suddenly assumed a very grave and menacing aspect. There have been discoveries and revelations of late, more than enough.”

I saw that, for all her self-repression, she was distressed and agitated, and the man in me, no less, perhaps, than the curiosity, was moved.

“Well, take my better qualities for granted,” I said.

She squeezed her lips with her hand, still staring at me; then broke out:--

“I will--I must. I have a claim upon them, after all, and a right to urge it. Felix, if you will swear to keep my confidence----”

“I will swear to nothing. Tell me or not, as you like.”

She canvassed me a little before deciding. I would not have accused her of guile, though I fancied I knew something of women. And at last she spoke:--

“I have got the Comtesse de Beaurepaire hidden away in the Conciergerie below, and I want you to take charge of her, to conceal and protect her, until such time as I can redeem her from your hands.”