The Salzburg Tales (41 page)

The Marquis sat down under a tree in the thicket. The arcades were high-roofed and heavily groined in that old wood; the winds stirred in the high branches, but below, to the intoxicated eye, autumn itself flowed through the trees, savage, flattering, overripe, full of corrupt purples and blues, perfect and preternatural as the exotic orchid and the hieratic panther. He ran his fingers through the coarse humus, now full of the dead leaves of this draconic season,
whose bronze scales spill out from its musty maw as it munches its own tail.

Leaning back and looking at the woven sky of the thinning wood, our friend began to divert himself by throwing pellets of earth at the trees; and in a moment he noticed there, dangling vivaciously against the sky, a mannikin of rag, with arms and legs stuck out, hanging by a Chinese pigtail from the twigs, some child's toy thrown up for an instant's flight, and kept for a permanent lodger by the shivering buds. The Marquis had met the fellow before, surely: a doll of his wife's, bought by her nurse once in Bordeaux. She must have played with it here, walking with her nurse in the summer. Under the flippant gestures of the superior and unkind little man, he thought with sour anxiety of the child coming to cloak itself in his name, and claim the result of his labours. He got up, and following the same path, came at last to its end in an open ground. A hut raised on stilts stood with a few trees. Vines still hung on the protected cabin. He mounted the steps and looked out from the verandah over the ample hollow, again visible. How pleasant was the situation; everything was visible over the tops of the trees, yet the place was sufficiently distant from the other hills and outcrops, thrown far to each side, to be completely invisible from them. The country on this side was wild and hirsute: the village and chateau were completely hidden: no roads were to be seen. He began considering his plans for the building of a village, and wondered if it would be better to put here a summer-house and sylvan retreat, instead: the first time in his career he had thought of ease.

He pushed at the door, and finding it fastened, broke the lock. Within, he gazed in surprise at the room, furnished as if for a beggar's household. The day was cold, but clearing. The Marquis examined all the objects in the room, but they were small vulgar utensils such as were used in every cabin in the country. There was in the corner a mass of straw which might have been used for a bed or an animal's stall; in the fireplace a fire was built, and hanging in the corners were beans, carrots, corncobs and grapes. In a box he found some cheese and lard
and, coming suddenly upon a little carved jewel-case, he found there articles for the toilet of a woman of fashion, stolen, surely! A flask of scent smelled familiarly of vervain. Who used such a scent, his mistress, his wife's nurse? He trod on the straw, and parting it, found beneath it one of Isabella's cushions, worked with an escutcheon of Castelreal, that one indeed which bore the arms of Symphorien of Castelreal; those arms, a baton sinister on a field barry-nebuly, or and sable, were carried in derision at the sacking of the thirteenth-century castle by a Jacques Bonhomme of 1358, who described them as representing “the stick of the husbandman descending on the grapes and grains”. His wife had been pleased with this cushion when she had worked it, on account of the brilliancy of the stripes of gold. He took the coffer and the cushion and fastened the door. Under the influence of the place, it seemed to him that some creature was anxiously shadowing him from bush to bush, but there was no alien sound in the hooting wood, and no movement round the shuttering trunks or across the golden carpet. The little Chinese dangled a debonair farewell, as if the intruder, for all his curiosity, left the mystery intact. Had the Marquise, seized with a nostalgia almost royal, retired to this hut, and who companioned her? Did the gipsies, poachers or woodcutters bivouac here? Or Jean the dwarf? Or had Raymond a peasant lover?

Scarcely had he reached the castle when Jean the dwarf, whom Nigaudin used sometimes as his informant in village matters, arrived, panting, anxious, to say that he had just visited the cabin Gaspard, discovered the evidences of a housekeeping there, the coffer, the pillow, and had since then been looking for his master. All the servants of the castle were now confronted with the two articles, but none was confused and none was guilty of the theft. Raymond came, and recognising the bottle of vervain, his gift to the Marquise, blushed under his cousin's stern eye. Last of all, to her husband and Jean the dwarf, came the Marquise, unsuspecting, who, when she saw them standing there with the cushion and the box, turned red, turned pale and fainted. While her attendants were hastening her to her apartment, the Marquis, cruel and intractable, listening to no
protests, dismissed Raymond and forbade him to enter the bounds of the estate. He told him he would not see his cousin again, and that he, Emile, Marquis de Beaumesnil de Castelreal (born Nigaudin), would endeavour to have him unseated from his trusteeship and control of Isabella's interests. This he did, and making no more inquiries of the Marquise, devoted himself entirely to his affairs, which, do what he would, were not as prosperous as he expected them to be. The peasants, struck by the forced sales of wheat, wine, cattle and other goods to speculators and to the master himself, at prices which meant their ruin, irritated by the type of
corvée
invented by Nigaudin on his estate, impoverished by the innumerable taxes, the inspections by armed fiscal officers, lived in misery and anger: the small farmers and shopkeepers, ruined, taxed out of existence, were either turned out on the street or, perpetually in the hands of bailiffs, were forced to work directly for their mortgagers and banks, themselves unable to realise their investments. One whole village was sold at auction: a provincial bank had failed, credit was not to be had, and all those who still had money were concealing it in pots, stockings, skirting-boards, and wells. The Marquis had thus more to do than to attend to his minor domestic disturbances. He engaged Jean, in whom he now had great confidence, in numerous private affairs, and discovered in him a sharp and cynical intelligence.

A baby was shortly born to Isabella, an arrow shot from another bow than Nigaudin's. Two days later, the Marquis commissioned Jean to find him a peasant woman to nurse the child, and if possible, someone willing to adopt it. He would give a certain sum of money with the child, but would not interest himself further in it, nor permit it to claim any rights in his estate. This he regulated by legal and medical certificates. Jean, sorry for the gentle companion of his summer, conspired with her nurse to prevent this abandonment, but without avail. Jean then brought forward a strong and pleasant peasant woman named Froment, widow of a blacksmith, who took the child and had it baptised, according to Jean's suggestion, Jean
Gaspard Froment, but secretly she always inserted “de Castelreal” in describing the child.

The Marquise, at first ill and melancholy, gradually recovered from this dismal event. Her husband, perceiving her from the castle one day in the spring of 1789, saw her take the old path towards Gaspard, and hurried after her, but did not succeed in catching her up all the way. When he arrived at the place, he heard from behind the hut voices and little cries, and looking with caution, saw Isabella playing with a baby, undoubtedly her own. An osier cradle with a fine satin coverlet stood beside the hut. No one else was in sight.

The Marquis thought he would wait till the foster-mother came to take the child. It was a warm day, and the Marquis had remarked for some time that his health was not what it had been; his back ached badly. He fell asleep, and did not waken till he heard a fresh voice. Drawing in his legs and looking through the leaves, he saw Jean the dwarf quietly carrying off the willow cradle, while the Marquise stood looking after him. The Marquis stepped up to her and took her by the arm. She cried out, and Jean, looking round, saw the Marquis, looked at him squarely, and then quietly resumed his way without a word or backward glance. The Marquis called, “Jean!” but Jean quickly disappeared through the wood.

The Marquis confined his wife to her apartment under her nurse's care the next day, and went himself to the hut. He found Jean, without the child, already waiting for him, tranquil, almost somnolent.

“Where is the child?”

“With its foster-mother in B——”

“Why is it in B——?”

“It caught a cold; it had to see a doctor.”

“The child's not a prince,” said the Marquis angrily; “it doesn't need a doctor; bring it to me tomorrow with the nurse. I'll pay her and it can go to a foundling asylum. And now kindly get out of my sight; or, stay a little, what does my wife pay you for this little service?”

“Nothing,” said Jean, “all in this world are not without pity.”

“I am without pity in this case,” said the Marquis; “let the softhearted pity me, without a wife or child, in all my great labours.”

“Aren't you ashamed to abandon in this way a poor woman, a poor creature, almost abandoned by God himself?” said the dwarf.

“Am I not ashamed …” said the Marquis incredulously. “Jean, you are too deep in all this: why this extraordinary interest in the Marquise? You certainly know the origin of that child you brought here yesterday: you know all the scandals and all the business of the country—you know mine, too. For the love of Heaven, what a game you play! I feel certain that you know the whole thing; those trinkets that were carried to this hut—was it Raymond?”

“My mother hadn't half the opinion of my wits that you have,” said Jean: “how should I know these things, matters of a marquisate!”

“To trust a dwarf,” said the Marquis coldly, “deformed in body and morals, was a marvellous aberration.”

The dwarf turned his back to his master, who moved forward angrily and struck him across the shoulders with a stick he had broken off in the wood. Jean turned and stood before the Marquis, laughing quickly, defiant and on guard. The Marquis at this moment felt a lumbar twinge. He was also convinced that something unusual lay under this association of Jean with his less auspicious affairs. He therefore said in a hard voice to Jean, “Bring the child to the castle as soon as you can get it here; when will that be?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” said Jean quietly.

The Marquis waited until sundown the next day, when messengers informed him that Jean the dwarf had fled, and that the peasant woman, a friend of his of long standing, had not returned with the child. The Marquis went in, smiling pleasantly, to the Marquise, and said, “Your precious friend Jean, his peasant woman, the child and the cash settlement have left these parts for spheres no doubt better suited to their considerable talents.”

A week later he was summoned hastily to his wife, and was led to the chapel of the castle, where he found Isabella lyin with her
back broken. She had received that morning, by an unknown hand, the mannikin of the wood, cleaned, painted and dressed in a new piece of cloth; and, after looking at it for a long time, had walked to the balcony and thrown herself down from it, in the insupportable despair which causes even birds and dogs sometimes to commit suicide. She had asked the terrified labourers who found her to carry her to the chapel, remembering the legends of her Catholic girlhood, and there they had covered her with a cloth they found over a chest, while they waited for her husband and his doctor. The sun poured in now, as in her childhood, staining guiltily the snowy stone floor with impotent saints and foolish ladies, staining with a beggar's patchwork the tapestry with which they had covered her. The tapestry bore a radiant design, “The good Lord rewarding the honest villagers”, where a gallant lord gave his hand in the country dance to the ribboned village beauty; on one side a press of noble youths and dames elegantly admired and whispered, and on the other, the stout simpletons of the village jostled each other: in the distance little boys in their Sunday best reared up a maypole. I have seen this remarkable, but now faded piece.

The Marquise was dying. Her husband sat by her side and held her hand, apparently lost in melancholy thought, bending over her from time to time and veiling his eyes with appropriate commiseration: but she read there, sickly and without much interest, the eager travail of his thoughts. He found himself at a still marriageable age, rich, honourable and unattached—or would be so in an hour or two. He went over in his head the elegant and remunerative matches going round the countryside, which had been an affliction to him up to this moment.

Just as he arrived at the eligible image of Consuela, young, proud and prepossessing daughter of a shipping merchant at Bordeaux, and contrasted it with the advantages of a maturer titled heiress of the environs, his dying wife cried, “Jean, Jean, where art thou?”

“She is wandering: she thinks he will bring her child,” said the nurse.

The priest, long absent from the castle, arrived shortly and wished to confess her, but she now seemed unable to speak. He said to her husband, “I must proceed: she is dying.” She suddenly opened her eyes with the candour of a last moment, gave her husband a long, alien look, and trying to twist her head towards the door, cried “Jean,” and thus, in a paroxysm, died.

The nurse cried inconsolably, “What a dreadful death!” The husband, furious and tormented, sat for a long time by her, and prevented the priest or nurse from coming near. It was hot there, but a cold sweat started out from his back and ran down his limbs.

He heard, after a while, a noise at the door, and looking up, saw Jean Eveille-chien there, and went pale, as if his wife's last cry had been heard miraculously far off in the province, and Jean had come with feet of air.

“What do you want?”

Jean, extremely pale, with goggling eyes, advanced into the chapel, and when he had come to the side of the folded tapestry, under the curious, angry eye of his master, he stood staring straight down at the body, still discomposed with its last effort, and at its eyes. He stretched out his hand to straighten the twisted head.