Last Tales (16 page)

They were married in the month of June, and Philippe took his young wife by her own team of four horses, which were his wedding present to her, the dreamlike easy distance from Haut-Mesnil to Champmeslé. The house to which he brought her was inferior to her old home, for the manor of Champmeslé had been burnt down during the Revolution. The family had since lived in a long white house, formerly the habitation of the inspector of the estate. But it lay very finely, surrounded by the terraces, gardens and woods of the old chateau; and within, it was richly furnished with choice old things and tasteful modern furniture.

Up under the roof of this house there was a large room, light in itself, but darkened by shutters. Upon the day-week of his wedding the young husband, a little giddy with happiness, roaming about in the house of which many corners were still unknown to him, came up here, and on finding the place filled with old furniture, mirrors, pictures, books and papers, sat down for half a lazy hour, going through old letters in the chiaroscuro of the room, and scattering them round him. Really he was looking for some trace of the little boy Philippe who had wandered about in the same house twenty years before, and might have left a reflection in some dim and dusty old looking glass, into which no one had since gazed.

Out of an old, tortoise-shell box, which opened by the touch of a spring, a packet of letters, tied together with a pale blue ribbon, came into his hand. They were love letters, written by a lady to her lover, by Childerique’s mother to his father. Afterwards he remembered how he had, after the first glance, got up to destroy them, when his eyes had been caught by his own name.

The young mistress wrote: “Your clever and adorable little Philippe, who, when I sat with him on the garden seat, and
had closed my eyes to think of you, poked his little finger into my face and said: ‘Light your eyes, Madame.’ ”

Here was the child of Champmeslé then, no longer lonely; a young woman had sat with him in a garden, had smiled at him, and repeated his little sayings in a letter to her lover.

He read all the letters through, only once, but he found later that he knew many passages of them by heart, and could have passed an examination on the correspondence of the dead lovers. The last of them was a crumpled bit of paper, unlike the others in form as well. It ran: “Dear Baron de La Verandryé. Just a word. I am sorry for what I said to you yesterday. The bearer, the gypsy Udday, has got my message and will give it to you correctly, it is too long for me to write, as I am not well. Good-bye, good-bye.”

Philippe looked at the date, it was the day of Childerique’s birth. This letter was written to deceive anybody into whose hands it might fall; the lovers had quarreled, and unable to bear the burden of their disagreement at this moment, Sophie had sent the gypsy with a verbal message, and the little note as a credential.

As soon as he understood the sense of the letters, Philippe got up and locked the door. It was as if he had found his father in here, defenseless and exposed to danger.

Here, then, was the central point and the heart of his world, even from childhood, and of his father’s wanderings, exile and death, run to earth at last in the attic of Champmeslé. This sweetness and this fire had hurled people to and fro across the ocean. He looked round him, so strongly did he feel the presence of the man in the grave over the sea, and the woman in the mausoleum of Haut-Mesnil. How was it possible that he had not known till now? His heart was squeezed by pain as he thought of the companionship and comfort that he might have given his father had he only understood that when he said “France,” he meant “Sophie.”

He made a heap of all the letters together with the same
ribbon, struck a light and watched them flame up and come to ashes upon the cold fireplace.

So Childerique was his father’s child. There was no doubt about it, the young impassionate mother had informed her lover of the happiness and danger, and had come back to it many times. It seemed natural enough, and that rare sympathy and feeling of home which he had with her was real and sprang from a source deep in their blood. He had had the sensation, when they had laughed and jested together, of being with someone whom he had known well and loved all his life, and now he understood that too: he had then been playing with his father as a child.

He smiled at the thought that he and she were works of the same artist. He had met, in his father’s nature, a deep conflict between his sense of duty and the strong and wild inclinations of the heart. He himself was then a product of the man’s conscience, his respect of, and resignation to, outward forces, but Childerique was what his father could do when he was left free, where he wanted to be.

Suddenly the thought of Childerique filled the room so completely that it drove away all the shadows, and he rose to go to her when he remembered that he had locked the door. He was struck by a great wave of terror. It seemed to him that he had separated himself from her forever. That gray and cold ocean upon which he had looked down from the ship, he had laid it between him and the young wife downstairs whom he had lately held in his arms, and had left arranging bouquets for their home.

Frightened to death, he could not bear the silence. “Father!” he cried, his hands to his head, and in a moment, as there was no answer: “Sophie—Madame Sophie, what have I done?”

Why had they not told him, but let him walk straight into this misery? Still, he knew now that his father had told him, had he only understood. But, he thought again, the day before
his wedding a bridge had given way as he rode across it, and he had been in danger of his life. Why had the dead people not helped him there, and let him die? Now they had left him here, all alone.

He sat for a long time in the room, to make up his mind. Had it been the week before, he thought, he could have told her, or he could have gone away without ever telling her; it would have been better to have done that. Now he could do nothing. In the end, before he left the room again, he had sealed his mouth and his heart forever; she should never know that anything had been changed between them. He thought: It would bring down all the world around her, the sacred memory of her dead mother, her strong faith in honor and virtue, her joy and hope about their future. Was it not then for him to guard her against such disaster? In his heart he knew well that all these reasons were of no account, and that the true motive for his silence was that he could not, he would not suffer her to think with horror of his embrace.

His longing for her, as he got up, was so strong that his arms and hands ached. “Let it be as it will,” he thought. “Let them even separate our souls forever, if it be as they tell us. Our bodies they shall not separate at all.”

As life went on at Champmeslé during the following seven years, and his existence grew up on all sides, this same thought was ever with him. Their home became, round Childerique, a little world of its own, through all of which one line and spirit ran. The horses and dogs, the servants of the house, the furniture and the books of the library, the lilacs on the terrace, the drive up to the door, the silhouette of the roofs as you came home late in the dusk, and the tunes that she played—all belonged to one another, and were each of them part of a greater whole. If they were scattered by another revolution, or if, their earthly career finished, they were to meet again in another world, wherever two or three of them were gathered together they would recognize each
other and cry “Hail, there is one more of us. We, too, were there. We, too, were part of Champmeslé.”

When the first two children were born, he was glad that they were daughters. He thought that it would be wrong should a child of incest carry forth the name of La Verandryé. After the birth of his first little girl he had even gone to their old doctor to ask him whether there was any sure way of deciding the sex of children beforehand.

The old man laughed at him. “Oh, Monsieur le Baron,” he said, “you are too impatient. Do not refuse to plant us a few roses at Champmeslé, for the joy of the province, before you graft the oak.”

Childerique herself had been on the watch for any sign of disappointment in her husband, but she thought that the loveliness of the children had conquered their father’s heart. When the boy was born she made all the house and land of Champmeslé clap their hands at this master-stroke of hers.

She had wanted the child named first after his father and then after hers. To him neither choice had seemed seemly, he thought: “Let each of the dead men have that peace of the grave now, which they have more and less deserved.”

He often wondered what would happen to her should she come to know the truth now. He imagined that she would go into a convent; she would have to throw herself away from them all into the arms of Heaven for her salvation. It was not her actual fate either which took up his thoughts, but the transformation which, at a word, all her world would undergo. He had seen grass fires, and the black and waste land which they leave behind them; her flowering world would come to look like that. When he had been a boy he had been the friend of an old Indian horse-trader, who had assured him that he was, at the very same hour as he was trading horses in the marketplace of Quebec, even as well, in the strong and shaggy shape of a timber wolf, hunting and sleeping in the mountains. Thus, he thought, the white house of
Champmeslé was even at this time at once the pride and refuge of her heart and to her mind a house of crime against the law of God, a place of shame. The three children, playing under her eyes on the terrace, were both the flowers and the crown of a proud, old race, and, more terrible than the cubs of the timber wolves, nameless offspring of dishonor. And he himself—like to his friend Osceola, who, while he was grooming his sleek horses and tying up their tails, was also trotting upon a trail in the woods or sitting in the snow and howling at the terrified mares and foals—he was at the same time the head of the corner of her happiness, and her enemy, the destroyer of it all.

In the beginning of their married life his consciousness had made him a little unsteady in his relations with his wife. He would leave her then, to come back begging for her love, as if he thought that they were soon to be separated for life. Childerique, who had no means of comparing him to other young men in love, took this as the normal expression of a man’s passion; it did not affect her; her strength and resilience of heart could have stood out against a heavier weight thrown at it. Sometimes she felt a slight compassion for him because he was still a stranger to many things which seemed to her foundation stones of existence. He was at home neither in the old nonsense rhymes of the nursery nor in the Divine service of Church, and he hardly remembered his First Communion.

One trait in the nature of his wife made Philippe wonder if she had in her an instinct which knew more than she did herself. With him, while she was such a devoted wife, radiant with love, her feelings seemed to be more those of a sister or comrade than of a woman in love, as if she knew his love to have been born with him, and to be hers by right of nature. Many women, he was aware, will buy their supremacy over their lovers at the price of much self-denial, and will submit to servitude through all the hours of the day to hold, within
one hour of the night, triumphantly, the highest power of life and death. This, in a woman, had always made him uncomfortable; he distrusted both the servitude and the triumph. Childerique would be prepared to buy his appreciation of her as a housewife or a mother, and his admiration of her wisdom, justice and virtue, at the cost of her greatest efforts, and of a good deal of persuasion. For his desire and adoration, which were her happiness, she would give nothing at all, as if holding that within their sphere there can be neither sale nor purchase.

But with the young Lord of Haut-Mesnil, six years younger than herself, she showed all the attributes of a passionate and jealous mistress. She could not live without his adoration, and would humor and coax him into it; in her relation to him she never ran short of coquetries and artful flattery. She was vain about his appearance and about her own when he was near, and melancholy when he was melancholy, like one of his own dogs. And with him she was also capricious, zealous of attention, hurt by negligence and ever on her outlook for a rival, be it only one of his friends from school. She rarely gave her husband any caress on her own accord, but she would take trouble to keep near the boy, fondling and petting him, holding his hands and playing with his fingers or running her own fingers through his red locks.

III

There was in the forest a large oak near which the roads divided and went off, the one to Haut-Mesnil and the other to Champmeslé. Here Childerique had her carriage stopped to. take leave of her brother.

But the boy rode up to her and said: “I will dine at Champmeslé if I may. I have something to talk to you about.” She smiled at him very tenderly.

Still during dinner she decided to make him ride home
early. He caught hay fever easily, and tonight he looked tired and restless; his face was pale and his eyes and nose red and swollen.

After dinner the brother and the sister walked up and down the terrace. Her husband watched them from the window of the library as he went through his papers and letters. He was starting in a day or two on his annual trip to La Rochelle, where he was to arrange the business of his Canadian property, and this time meeting some people of his from over there. A letter from Canada, received the same day, and not yet read, was on his table before him. The couple on the terrace walked into and out of his range of sight. Childerique had let down her hair, still moist from the children’s splashings. It was very thick and soft, and wafted round her neck and shoulders as she moved. Philippe remembered having seen pictures of deities with hair of snakes, rays of sun or zigzagged lightning, and he could well believe the personality of the bearer forcing itself thus even into the hair. These dark tresses, dead stuff which you might cut off or burn without her feeling it, just because at one point they were attached to her head, would twist, shine and fill the air with fragrance. As she turned and came toward him, the sun behind her, her head was wrapped in a dark cloak, within which red fires were smoldering.