The Ten-foot Chain Part 16

There was no one there to see. Some day, perhaps, in the far distant future, this part of the world would be thickly populated. But this was not yet the case. Gaspard brought his bride close to his breast, smiled gravely into her upturned face. He kissed her tears away. Sweet Susette!

She was such a child! How little she knew of life!

And yet what was that fragile, fluttering, elusive, tiny suggestion of a regret in the back of his brain? Now he saw it; now it was gone--a silver moth of a thought, yet one, some instinct warned him, was there to gnaw a hole in his happiness.

He said nothing about this to Susette, of course; he chased it from his own joy. And this joy was a beautiful, tumultuous thing.

"It's like the source of the Rhone, which I saw one time--this joy of ours," he said with placid rapture. "All sparkling it was, and wild cataracts, and deep places, clean and full of mystery."

"Ah, I want it to be always like this," said Susette.

Gaspard let himself go in clear-sighted thought. They were seated on a gra.s.sy shelf that overhung the great river. The forest hemmed them in on three sides like a wedding-bower fas.h.i.+oned to order; but here they could follow the Rhone for miles--with its drifting barges, its red-sailed shallops, its hamlets, and villages.

"Yes, ever like the Rhone," he said; "but growing, like the Rhone, until it's broad and majestic and strong to carry burdens--"

Susette interrupted him.

"Kiss me," she said. "Kiss me again. No--not like that; like you did a while ago."

And Gaspard, laughing, did as he was bidden. But what was that silver glint of something like a regret, something like a loss, that came fluttering once more across the atmosphere of his thought? Susette, though, kept him diverted. She was forever popping in upon his reflections with innocent, childish questions; and he found this infinitely amusing.

"Did you desire me--more than the princess?"

"Beloved, I have desired you for years."

"Did you think me more beautiful--than she?"

Again Gaspard laughed; but it set him to thinking. He liked to think. He thought at his forge, at his meals, nights when he happened to be awake.

"Love and beauty," he said, "these are created by desire. As a stone-cutter desires what is hidden in the rock, and hews it out and loves the thing he shapes, though it be as ugly as a gargoyle, because of the desire that brought it forth--"

"Do you think that I'm a gargoyle?" queried Susette hastily.

"Certainly not."

"Then, why did you call me one?"

So he had to console her again, and took a certain joy in it, although she protracted the dear, silly dispute by telling him that he had chained her to him simply so that he could torture her, and that he had wanted to spare the princess such suffering, and that therefore it was clear that he loved the princess more.

"Why, no," said Gaspard; "as for that, she's really in love with that young Sieur de Macon."

But thereupon Susette wanted to know how he came to be so well informed as to the contents of the lady's heart. So the smith gave over any attempt to reason, except in the silences of his brain; and just confined his outer activities to cooings and caresses, as Susette would have him do.

Yet his thought would persist.

That was the trail of a great truth he had almost stated back there, about the place held by desire in the origins of love and beauty. He had watched a certain Italian named Botticelli do a mural painting in the duke's private chapel. Lord, there was a pa.s.sion! He had helped in the building of the cathedral at Sens. Lord, what fervor the builders put into their work! They were all like young lovers.

The smith sat up. It was almost as if he had cornered that glinting moth of doubt.

Yes, they had been like young lovers--Sieur Botticelli, in pursuit of the beautiful; the church-builders in pursuit of G.o.d. But--and here was the point--what if their desire had been satisfied? The quest would have stopped. The vision of the artist would have faded. The steeple would have fallen down. For desire would have ceased to exist.

"I'm hungry and I'm thirsty," said Susette.

He kissed her pensively. They started home.

IV.

"Gaspard! Gaspard!"

The smith sat up swiftly on his couch.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

All the same, in spite of certain disquieting dreams, it struck him as sweet and curious to be awakened like that by Susette. But he perceived that she was alarmed.

"Some one hammers at the door," she said.

Then he heard it himself, that thing he had already been hearing obscurely in his sleep.

"Coming!" he yelled. And he smilingly explained to Susette: "It's my old friend, Joseph, the carter. He'd bring his work to me if he had to travel five leagues." And he was for jumping up and running to the door.

"Wait," cried Susette. "I'll have to go with you, and I can't be seen like this."

"That's right," said Gaspard. "That confounded chain! I'd forgotten all about it." So he called out again to his friend, and the two of them held quite a conversation while Susette tried to make herself presentable. But Gaspard turned to her as she shook her hair out for the third time, starting to rearrange it. "Quick!" he urged. "He's in a hurry. One of his horses has cast a shoe."

"You can't show yourself like that, either," cried Susette, playing for time.

"Me?" laughed Gaspard. "I'm a smith. I'd like to see a smith who couldn't show himself in singlet and ap.r.o.n!"

"You look like a brigand."

But he merely laughed: "Joseph won't mind."

And, indeed, Joseph the carter did appear to have but little thought for anything except the work in hand. For that matter, neither, apparently, did Gaspard. After the first few brief civilities and the inevitable jests about the chain, their attention was absorbed at once by the horses. There were four of these--Percherons, huge monsters with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks and ma.s.sive feet; yet Joseph and Gaspard went about lifting these colossal hoofs, and considering them as tenderly as if the two had been young mothers concerned with the feet of babes.

At last Susette let out a little cry, and both men turned to look at her.

"I faint," she said weakly.

And Gaspard sprang over and caught her in his arms. He was filled with pity. He was all gentleness.

"Are you sick?" he asked.

"It was the odor of the horses," Susette replied in her small voice.

Joseph the carter seemed to take this as some aspersion on himself.

"Those horses don't smell," he a.s.serted stoutly.