by Grant Allen
‘Oh, indeed,’ Ivy answered, shrinking into her shell at once. She didn’t know why, but it jarred upon her somehow to hear the English barrister with the loud bluff voice speak like that about her neighbour. M. Guy de Kermadec was of gentler mould, she felt sure, than the barrister’s coarse red hands should handle.
They stayed there some weeks. Aunt Emma’s lungs were endowed with a cavity. So Aunt Emma did little but sun herself on the terrace, and chirp to the canary, and look across at the Estérel. But Ivy was strong, her limbs were a tomboy’s, and she wandered about by herself to her heart’s content over that rocky peninsula. On her first morning at the Cape, indeed, she strolled out alone, following a footpath that led through a green strip of pine-wood, fragrant on either side with lentisk scrub and rosemary. It brought her out upon the sea, near the very end of the promontory, at a spot where white rocks, deeply honeycombed by the ceaseless spray of centuries, lay tossed in wild confusion, stack upon stack, rent and fissured. Low bushes, planed level by the wind, sloped gradually upward. A douanier’s trail threaded the rugged maze. Ivy turned to the left and followed it on, well pleased, past huge tors and deep gullies. Here and there, taking advantage of the tilt of the strata, the sea had worn itself great caves and blow-holes. A slight breeze was rolling breakers up these miniature gorges. Ivy stood and watched them tumble in, the deep peacock blue of the outer sea changing at once into white foam as they curled over and shattered themselves on the green slimy reefs that blocked their progress.
By and by she reached a spot where a clump of tall aloes, with prickly points, grew close to the edge of the rocks in true African luxuriance. Just beyond them, on the brink, a man sat bare-headed, his legs dangling over a steep undermined cliff. The limestone was tilted up there at such an acute angle that the crag overhung the sea by a yard or two, and waves dashed themselves below into a thick rain of spray without wetting the top. Ivy had clambered half out to the edge before she saw who the man was. Then he turned his head at the sound of her footfall, and sprang to his feet hastily.
‘Take care, mademoiselle,’ he said, holding his round hat in his left hand, and stretching out his right to steady her. ‘Such spots as these are hardly meant for skirts like yours — or mine. One false step, and over you go. I’m a pretty strong swimmer myself — our Breton sea did so much for me; but no swimmer on earth could live against the force of those crushing breakers. They’d catch a man on their crests, and pound him to a jelly on the jagged needles of rock. They’d hurl him on to the crumbling pinnacles, and then drag him back with their undertow, and crush him at last, as in a gigantic mortar, till every trait, every feature, was indistinguishable.’
‘Thank you,’ Ivy answered, taking his proffered hand as innocently as she would have taken her father’s curate’s. ‘It’s just beautiful out here, isn’t it?’ She seated herself on the ledge near the spot where he had been sitting. ‘How grandly the waves roll in!’ she cried, eyeing them with girlish delight. ‘Do you come here often, M. l’Abbé?’
The Abbé gazed at her, astonished. How strange are the ways of these English! He was a priest, to be sure, a celibate by profession; but he was young, he was handsome — he knew he was good-looking; and mademoiselle was unmarried! This chance meeting embarrassed him, to say the truth, far more than it did Ivy — though Ivy too was shy, and a little conscious blush that just tinged her soft cheek, made her look, the Abbé noted, even prettier than ever. But still, if he was a priest, he was also a gentleman. So, after a moment’s demur, he sat down, a little way off — further off, indeed, than the curate would have thought it necessary to sit from her — and answered very gravely in that soft low voice of his, ‘Yes, I come here often, very often. It’s my favourite seat. On these rocks one seems to lose sight of the world and the work of man’s hand, and to stand face to face with the eternal and the infinite.’ He waved his arm, as he spoke, towards the horizon, vaguely.
‘I like it for its wildness,’ Ivy said simply. ‘These crags are so beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ the young priest answered, looking across at them pensively, ‘I like to think, for my part, that for thousands of years the waves have been dashing against them, day and night, night and day, in a ceaseless rhythm, since the morning of the creation. I like to think that before ever a Phocæan galley steered its virgin trip into the harbour of Antipolis, this honeycombing had begun; that when the Holy Maries of the Sea passed by our Cape on their miraculous voyage to the mouths of the Rhone, they saw this headland, precisely as we see it to-day, on their starboard bow, all weather-eaten and weather-beaten.’
Ivy lounged with her feet dangling over the edge, as the Abbé had done before. The Abbé sat and looked at her in fear and trembling. If mademoiselle were to slip, now. His heart came up in his mouth at the thought. He was a priest, to be sure; but at seven-and-twenty, mark you well, even priests are human. They, too, have hearts. Anatomically they resemble the rest of their kind; it is only the cassock that makes the outer difference.
But Ivy sat talking in her imperfect French, with very little sense of how much trouble she was causing him. She didn’t know that the Abbé, too, trembled on the very brink of a precipice. But his was a moral one. By and by she rose. The Abbé stretched out his hand, and lent it to her politely. He could do no less; yet the touch of her ungloved fingers thrilled him. What a pity so fair a lamb should stray so far from the true fold! Had Our Lady brought him this chance? Was it his duty to lead her, to guide her, to save her?
‘Which is the way to the lighthouse hill?’ Ivy asked him carelessly.
The words seemed to his full heart like a sacred omen. For on the lighthouse hill, as on all high places in Provence, stood also a lighthouse of the soul, a sanctuary of Our Lady, that Notre-Dame de la Garoupe whereof he had told her yesterday. And of her own accord she had asked the way now to Our Lady’s shrine. He would guide her like a beacon. This was the finger of Providence. Sure, Our Lady herself had put the thought into the heart of her.
‘I go that way myself,’ he said, rejoicing. ‘If mademoiselle will allow me, I will show her the path. Every day I go up there to make my devotions.’
As they walked by the seaward trail, and climbed the craggy little hill, the Abbé discoursed very pleasantly about many things. Not religion alone; he was a priest, but no bigot. An enthusiast for the sea, as becomes a Morbihan man, he loved it from every point of view, as swimmer, yachtsman, rower, landscape artist. His talk was of dangers confronted on stormy nights along the Ligurian coast; of voyages to Corsica, to the Channel Islands, to Bilbao; of great swims about Sark; of climbs among the bare summits over yonder by Turbia. And he was wide-minded too; for he spoke with real affection of a certain neighbour of theirs in Morbihan; he was proud of the great writer’s pure Breton blood, though he deprecated his opinions— ‘But he’s so kind and good after all, that dear big Rénan!’ Ivy started with surprise; not so had she heard the noblest living master of French prose discussed and described in their Warwickshire rectory. But every moment she saw yet clearer that anything more unlike her preconceived idea of a Catholic priest than this ardent young Celt could hardly be imagined. Fervent and fervid, he led the conversation like one who spoke with tongues. For herself she said little by the way; her French halted sadly; but she listened with real pleasure to the full flowing stream of the young man’s discourse. After all, she knew now, he was a young man at least — not human alone, but vivid and virile as well, in spite of his petticoats.
People forget too often that putting on a soutane doesn’t necessarily make a strong nature feminine.
At the top of the lighthouse hill Ivy paused, delighted. Worlds opened before her. To right and left, in rival beauty, spread a glorious panorama. She stood and gazed at it entranced. She had plenty of time indeed to drink in to the full those two blue bays, with their contrasted mountain barriers — snowy Alps to the east, purple Estérel to westward — for the Abbé had gone into the rustic chapel to make his devotions. When he came out
again, curiosity tempted Ivy for a moment into that bare little whitewashed barn. It was a Provençal fisher shrine of the rudest antique type; its gaudy Madonna, tricked out with paper flowers, stood under a crude blue canopy, set with tinsel-gilt stars; the rough walls hung thick with ex-voto’s of coarse and naïve execution. Here, sailors in peril emerged from a watery grave by the visible appearance of Our Lady issuing in palpable wood from a very solid cloud of golden glory; there, a gig going down hill was stopped forcibly from above with hands laid on the reins by Our Lady in person; and yonder, again, a bursting gun did nobody any harm, for had not Our Lady caught the fragments in her own stiff fingers? Ivy gazed with a certain hushed awe at these nascent efforts of art; such a gulf seemed to yawn between that tawdry little oratory and the Abbé’s own rich and cultivated nature. Yet he went to pray there!
For the next three weeks Ivy saw much of M. Guy de Kermadec. She taught him lawn-tennis, which he learned, indeed, with ease. At first, to be sure, the English in the hotel rather derided the idea of lawn-tennis in a cassock. But the Abbé was an adept at the jeu de paume, which had already educated his hand and eye, and he dropped into the new game so quickly, in spite of the soutane, which sadly impeded his running, that even the Cambridge undergraduate with the budding moustache was forced to acknowledge ‘the Frenchy’ a formidable competitor. And then Ivy met him often in his strolls round the coast. He used to sit and sketch among the rocks, perched high on the most inaccessible pinnacles; and Ivy, it must be admitted, though she hardly knew why herself — so innocent is youth, so too dangerously innocent — went oftenest by the paths where she was likeliest to meet him. There she would watch the progress of his sketch, and criticise and admire; and in the end, when she rose to go, native politeness made it impossible for the Abbé to let her walk home unprotected, so he accompanied her back by the coast path to the hotel garden. Ivy hardly noticed that as he reached it he almost invariably lifted his round hat at once and dismissed her, unofficially as it were, to the society of her compatriots. But the Abbé, more used to the ways of the world and of France, knew well how unwise it was of him — a man of the Church — to walk with a young girl alone so often in the country. A priest should be circumspect.
Day after day, slowly, very slowly, the truth began to dawn by degrees upon the Abbé de Kermadec that he was in love with Ivy. At first, he fought the idea tooth and nail, like an evil vision. He belonged to the Church, the Bride of Heaven: what had such as he to do with mere carnal desires and earthly longings? But day by day, as Ivy met him, and talked with him more confidingly, her French growing more fluent by leaps and bounds under that able tutor Love, whose face as yet she recognised not — nature began to prove too strong for the Abbé’s resolution. He found her company sweet. The position was so strange, and to him so incomprehensible. If Ivy had been a French girl, of course he could never have seen so much of her: her mother or her maid would have mounted guard over her night and day. Only with a married woman could he have involved himself so deeply in France: and then, the sinfulness of their intercourse would have been clear from the very outset to both alike of them. But what charmed and attracted him most in Ivy was just her English innocence. She was so gentle, so guileless. This pure creature of God’s never seemed to be aware she was doing grievously wrong. The man who had voluntarily resigned all hope or chance of chaste love was now irresistibly led on by the very force of the spell he had renounced for ever.
And yet — how hard it is for us to throw ourselves completely into somebody else’s attitude! So French was he, so Catholic, that he couldn’t quite understand the full depth of Ivy’s innocence. This girl who could walk and talk so freely with a priest — surely she must be aware of what thing she was doing. She must know she was leading him and herself into a dangerous love, a love that could end in none but a guilty conclusion.
So thinking, and praying, and fighting against it, and despising himself, the young Abbé yet persisted half unawares on the path of destruction. His hot Celtic imagination proved too much for his self-control. All night long he lay awake, tossing and turning on his bed, alternately muttering fervent prayers to Our Lady, and building up for himself warm visions of his next meeting with Ivy. In the morning, he would rise up early, and go afoot to the shrine of Notre-Dame de la Garoupe, and cry aloud with fiery zeal for help, that he might be delivered from temptation: — and then he would turn along the coast, towards his accustomed seat, looking out eagerly for the rustle of Ivy’s dress among the cistus-bushes. When at last he met her, a great wave passed over him like a blush. He thrilled from head to foot. He grew cold. He trembled inwardly.
Not for nothing had he lived near the monastery of St. Gildas de Rhuys. For such a Heloise as that, what priest would not gladly become a second Abelard?
One morning, he met her by his overhanging ledge. The sea was rough. The waves broke grandly.
Ivy came up to him, with that conscious blush of hers just mantling her fair cheek. She liked him very much. But she was only eighteen. At eighteen a girl hardly knows when she’s in love. But she vaguely suspects it.
The Abbé held out his hand. Ivy took it with a frank smile. ‘Bonjour, M. de Kermadec!’ she said lightly. She always addressed him so — not as M. l’Abbé, now. Was that intentional, he wondered? He took it to mean that she tried to forget his ecclesiastical position. ‘La tante Emma’ should guard her treasure in an earthen vessel more carefully. Why do these Protestants tempt us priests with their innocent girls? He led her to a seat, and gazed at her like a lover, his heart beating hard, and his knees trembling violently. He must speak to her to-day. Though what, he knew not.
He meant her no harm. He was too passionate, too pure, too earnest for that. But he meant her no good either. He meant nothing, nothing. Before her face he was a bark driven rudderless by the breeze. He only knew he loved her: she must be his. His passion hallowed his act. And she too, she loved him.
Leaning one hand on the rock, he talked to her for a while, he hardly knew what. He saw she was tremulous. She looked down and blushed often. That intangible, incomprehensible, invisible something that makes lovers subtly conscious of one another’s mood had told her how he felt towards her. She tingled to the finger-tips. It was sweet to be there — oh, how sweet, yet how hopeless!
Romance to her: to him, sin, death, infamy.
At last he leaned across to her. She had answered him back once more about some trifle, ‘Mais, oui, M. de Kermadec.’ ‘Why this “monsieur”?’ the priest asked boldly, gazing deep into her startled eyes. ‘Je m’appelle Guy, mademoiselle. Why not Guy then — Ivy?’
At the word her heart gave a bound. He had said it! He had said it! He loved her; oh, how delicious! She could have cried for joy at that implied avowal.
But she drew herself up for all that, like a pure-minded English girl that she was, and answered with a red flush, ‘Because — it would be wrong, monsieur. You know very well, as things are, I cannot.’
What a flush! what a halo! Madonna and vows were all forgotten now. The Abbé flung himself forward in one wild burst of passion. He gazed in her eyes, and all was lost. His hot Celtic soul poured itself forth in full flood. He loved her: he adored her: she should be his and his only. He had fought against it. But love — love had conquered. ‘Oh, Ivy,’ he cried passionately, ‘you will not refuse me! You will be mine and mine only. You will love me as I love you!’
Ivy’s heart broke forth too. She looked at him and melted. ‘Guy,’ she answered, first framing the truth to herself in that frank confession, ‘I love you in return. I have loved you since the very first moment I saw you.’
The Abbé seized her hand, and raised it rapturously to his lips. ‘My beloved,’ he cried, rosy red, ‘you are mine, you are mine — and I am yours for ever.’
Ivy drew back a little, somewhat abashed and alarmed by his evident ardour. ‘I wonder if I’m doing wrong?’ she cried, with the piteous uncertainty of early youth. ‘Your vows, you know! your vows! How will yo
u ever get rid of them?’
The Abbé gazed at her astonished. What could this angel mean? She wondered if she was doing wrong! Get rid of his vows! He, a priest, to make love! What naïveté! What innocence!
But he was too hot to repent. ‘My vows!’ he cried, flinging them from him with both hands into the sea. ‘Ivy, let them go! Let the waves bear them off! What are they to me now? I renounce them! I have done with them!’
Ivy looked at him, breathing deep. Why, he loved her indeed. For she knew how devoted he was, how earnest, how Catholic. ‘Then you’ll join our Church,’ she said simply, ‘and give up your orders and marry me!’
If a thunderbolt had fallen at the young priest’s feet, its effect could not have been more crushing, more instantaneous, more extraordinary. In a moment, he had come to himself again, cooled, astonished, horrified. Oh, what had he said? What had he done? What vile sin had he committed? Not against Heaven, now, or the saints, for of that and his own soul he thought just then but little: but against that pure young girl whom he loved, that sweet creature of innocence! And how could he ever explain to her? How retract? How excuse himself? Even to attempt an explanation would be sheer treason to her purity. The thought in his mind was too unholy for her to hear. To tell her what he meant would be a crime, a sin, a bassesse!
