by nature eloquent showed the force of his love and its delicacy.
This may be so: I hardly know. My lover the wind, when he is amorous, is loud, but then it is true his loves are not often very constant.
René chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He brought her little lovely wild flowers, for which he ransacked the woods of St. Germains and Meudon. He carried the billets of her fire-wood up the seven long, twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for her with the wicked old porteress at the door downstairs. He played to her in the gray of the evening on a quaint simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the sad, wild, touching airs of his own southern mountains—played at his open window while the lamps burned through the dusk, till the people listened at their doors and easements and gathered in groups in the passage below, and said to one another, "How clever he is!—and he starves."
He did starve very often, or at least he had to teach himself to keep down hunger with a morsel of black chaff bread and a stray roll of tobacco. And yet I could see that he had become happy.
Lili never asked him within her door. All the words they exchanged were from their open lattices, with the space of the roadway between them.
I heard every syllable they spoke, and they were on the one side most innocent and on the other most reverential. Ay, though you may not believe it—you who know the people of Paris from the travesties of theatres and the slanders of salons.
And all this time secretly he worked on at her portrait. He worked out of my sight and hers, in the inner part of his garret, but the swallows saw and told me. There are never any secrets between birds and flowers.
We used to live in Paradise together, and we love one another as exiles do; and we hold in our cups the raindrops to slake the thirst of the birds, and the birds in return bring to us from many lands and over many waters tidings of those lost ones who have been torn from us to strike the roots of our race in far-off soils and under distant suns.
Late in the summer of the year, one wonderful fête-day, Lili did for once get out to the woods, the old kindly green woods of Vincennes.
A neighbor on a lower floor, a woman who made poor scentless, senseless, miserable imitations of all my race in paper, sat with the old bedridden grandmother while Lili took her holiday—so rare in her life, though she was one of the motes in the bright champagne of the dancing air of Paris. I missed her sorely on each of those few sparse days of her absence, but for her I rejoiced.
"Je reste: tu 't 'en vas," says the rose to the butterfly in the poem; and I said so in my thoughts to her.
She went to the broad level grass, to the golden fields of the sunshine, to the sound of the bees murmuring over the wild purple thyme, to the sight of the great snowy clouds slowly sailing over the sweet blue freedom of heaven—to all the things of my birth-right and my deathless remembrance—all that no woman can love as a rose can love them.
But I was not jealous; nay, not though she had cramped me in a little earth-bound cell of clay. I envied wistfully indeed, as I envied the swallows their wings which cleft the air, asking no man's leave for their liberty. But I would not have maimed a swallow's pinion had I had the power, and I would not have abridged an hour of Lili's freedom. Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasury of fragrance, at the feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too abundant sacrifice, you cry, "A yellow, faded thing!—to the dust-hole with it!" and root us up violently and fling us to rot with the refuse and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of beauty made sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odors of a lost paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just
