Part 13

The old woman rarely spoke, for her thoughts were always with the dead and gone grandfather, who had been the faithful companion of her toilsome life. She was slowly drying up, like wood that is sound in all its fibres, but has lost its sap. Hers was a lovely old age, such as are seen in the land of the grasshopper, where people live sober lives, preserved by the light. Already advanced in years when she came to Camargue, she had never suffered from the malevolence of the swamps. It was too late. The cypress-tree does not allow the worms to draw their lines upon its surface.

She was patiently awaiting death, sometimes mumbling _paters_ upon her rosary of olive-nuts, gazing fearlessly, with her dimmed eyes, straight before her at the vague shadow wherein her departed old man, her good, faithful Tiennet, was waiting for her;--Tiennet, who had never, in forty years, caused her a pang, and whom she had never wronged by a smile, even in the days of her gayest youth. Tiennet, from the depths of the shadow, sometimes called to her softly, and then the old woman would be heard to murmur, in a dreamy voice: "I am coming, good man! I am coming!"

Being left alone for a moment with Livette, just before supper, Renaud did not know what to say. Nor did she. He did not dare to lie, and she hoped that he would open his heart and confess. At one moment, she felt that the very fact of his silence was sufficient proof of his treachery, and the next moment, on the contrary, she said to herself: "If there was an understanding between them, he would not be here! I was mad! He loves me."

At supper, he was very talkative, told about his battles and his hunting exploits; how, the year before, with that rascal of a Rampal, he had beaten up two coveys of partridges, on horseback, in a single morning. They had taken twenty-eight, more than twenty being killed on the wing at a single casting of their staves, Arab-fashion.

Audiffret, overjoyed at the recovery of a horse he had thought lost forever, drew from under the woodpile an old-fashioned bottle, a gift from the masters, those masters who are always absent--like all the landowners of Camargue, who prefer to dwell in cities,--Paris, Marseilles, or Montpellier,--leaving the desert to their _bailiffs_.

"Ah! the masters in old times!" said Audiffret, "they had more courage and were better served and better loved!" Renaud, becoming more and more animated, stood up for the times we live in. The grandmother, grave and serious as always, said once to Audiffret at table, speaking of Renaud: "Wait upon your son, my son." Well, well, he was decidedly one of the family.

And that certainty, which it behooved him to retain at any price, instead of moving his heart to gratitude, led him on to play the hypocrite. He was ready to betray Livette, without renouncing her, for he loved her so dearly, so sincerely, that he felt that he was ready, on the other hand, to renounce the gitana, without too great a pang, if circumstances should make it necessary. He laughed a great deal, raising his glass with great frequency, and winking involuntarily at Audiffret, as if to say: "We are sly fellows!" But honest Audiffret could not detect his excitement. He had never interested himself in anything except the farm accounts. He had never divined anything in all his life, not he!--As far as the gipsy was concerned, she certainly would not leave Saintes-Maries before the fete, that is to say, for a week or more. After that, she could go where she chose! it would make little difference to him. What could he hope for from a wandering creature like that? An hour's meeting at the cross-roads on the way to Arles! Nothing more!

As to Zinzara, he had hopes; as to Livette, he had certainty. And he was very light of heart.

So it was, that, when the time came for him to take his leave, he indulged in an outburst of affection toward his new family, quite contrary to his usual habit, and to the habit of all drovers, who are rough-mannered by profession.

You must know that the peasants, in general, do not kiss except on great occasions--weddings or baptisms. Only the mothers kiss their young children. The man of the soil is of stern mould.

"Audiffret," the grandmother suddenly said to her son, laying her knitting on the table and her spectacles on her knitting;--"Audiffret, every day brings me a little nearer the end, and I would like to see this marriage take place before I die. You must hurry it as much as possible, now that it's decided on. And if I can't be present on the wedding-day, don't forget, my children, that the old woman blessed you from the bottom of her heart to-night."

And, without another word, she calmly took up the stockings and needles.

She had spoken almost without inflection, in a grave, calm tone, moving her lips only.

Every one was deeply moved. Livette looked at Renaud. He, carried away by his emotion, forgot everything except this new family that offered itself to him, the orphan. Livette saw it and was grateful to him for it. She felt that he was won back, like the stolen horse, and she sprang to her feet in a burst of enthusiasm.

"Kiss me, my betrothed!" said she proudly.

He kissed her with heartfelt sincerity.

The father and the grandmother looked on with eyes that gradually became dim with tears.

When he had pressed the father's hand, Renaud turned to the grandmother, as she stuck her knitting-needle into the white hair that fluttered about her temples.

"Kiss me, grandmother!" he said, with a smile.

The old woman gave a leap, then stood erect, recoiling a little as if in fear:

"Since my husband died, no man has ever kissed me," she said, "not even my son there! Let young people kiss. Life is before them. I," she added, "am already with the dead."

And with that, the old peasant-woman, straight and stiff and withered,--the image of a by-gone time, when it was deemed a praiseworthy thing to remain true to a single sentiment,--sought the bed of her old age, which was soon to see her lying dead, with the tranquillity of a simple, loving, faithful heart upon her parchment-like face.

XVIII

THE BLESSED RELICS

The great day has arrived. From all parts of Languedoc and Provence, pilgrims, rich and poor, have come to Saintes-Maries. There are fully ten thousand strangers in the town.

For three days past they have been arriving in vehicles of all shapes and of all ages.

Many of these pilgrims lodge with the villagers at extraordinary, princely rates. A bunch of straw on the floor brings twenty francs. The villager himself sleeps on a chair, or passes the night in the open air on the warm sand of the dunes. If the bulls arrive during the night for the sports of the following day, he assists the drovers to drive them into the compound, in the wake of the _dondaire_, the enormous ox with a bell.

The houses are soon filled to overflowing. New-comers are obliged to camp. Tents are pitched. People live in carts and wagons, in breaks, tilburys, caleches, omnibuses, as far away as possible, be it understood, from the gipsy encampment.

Around the little town, the hundreds of vehicles constitute a roving town of their own, resting there like a flock of birds of passage around a swamp.

And on all sides naught can be seen but tattered, crippled, hunchbacked, deformed, blind, or one-eyed creatures, broken in health, lame, maimed, scrofulous, and paralytic, dragging themselves along or dragged by others, carried in men's arms or on litters, some with bandages over their faces, others displaying unhealed wounds from which one turns aside in horror.

Here a poor fellow who has been bitten by a mad dog wanders about with gloomy brow, tormented by insane anxiety and hope, for a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries is especially efficacious against hydrophobia.

All varieties of misfortune are represented. All the children of Job and Tobias have journeyed hither to find the healing angel and the miraculous fish.

A motley crowd swarms upon the public square in the bright sunlight, and in the narrow streets, under the luminous shadow of the awnings. From time to time, it parts, with loud shouts, before a drover, who rides proudly by, his sweetheart _en croupe_ with her arms about his waist.

Here and there flat baskets laden with rosaries, sacred images, Catalan knives, and handkerchiefs of brilliant hue stand out like islets in the midst of the sea of promenaders, and all the merchandise displayed for sale takes on a pink or pale-blue tint through the great stationary umbrellas that shield it from the sun.

Amid the fantastic piercing notes of a _galoubet_, or high-pitched flute, tambourines can be heard humming in cadence in the interior of a wine-shop, where young girls of the province are dancing in Provencal costume, dark-skinned girls with white teeth beneath their sensuous lips; very like Moors they are, the descendants of some Saracen pirate who ravaged the Ligurian shore.

The town is flooded with joyous light. Everybody is in his Sunday dress. Upon the fever-haunted strand, whither a whole people flocks to pray to the Saintes Maries for bodily health, that joyous sun is dangerous. The whole scene has the appearance of a hospital ball, a fete given by dying men. The devil wields the baton, it may be. One would think it, to see the faces of the gipsies, whose expression, notwithstanding certain cunning leers, is and remains undecipherable.

In the church with the black, dirt-begrimed walls, filled with a fetid odor by such an accumulation of misery, diseased flesh, and perspiring humanity, the people crowd about the iron balustrade of the little well, as if it were the Fountain of Youth. The poor, green, dilapidated pitcher humbly descends at the end of its cord to bring up from the sand below brackish water that to-day seems sweet.

Keep faith with them, O saints!--Faith gives what one wishes.

They are waiting for four o'clock, the hour at which the relics descend.

At four o'clock precisely, the shutter of the high window up yonder, under the ogive arch of the nave, will open. The relics will come down toward the outstretched arms. The little children will be lifted up toward them. The dead arms of the paralytics will be raised toward them. The blind will turn toward them their sightless eyes, or their empty, blood-stained orbits.

Meanwhile, Livette, who is standing there in the centre of the crowd, directly in front of the altar, facing the grated door through which you go down into the crypt, is preparing to sing the solo of invocation. Her fresh, pure voice is to be the voice of all these wretched creatures, crushed under the weight of impurity and disease.

Just below the high altar, which is studded with tapers, the gipsies are huddled together in their crypt, with tapers in their hands, invoking Saint Sara. The vault is dark. The gipsies are black. The little glass shrine of Saint Sara has become black under the accumulated filth of years. From the centre of the church you can see through the grated opening, which resembles an air-hole of hell, the innumerable twinkling lights of the tapers below, waving to and fro in the hands that hold them. A muffled sound of praying comes up through the opening.

In the church, every hand now has its taper, and they are rapidly lighted one from another. The lights dance about in the air. But the interior of the nave is dark. The high walls, pierced by narrow windows, are grimy with age. And all this obscurity, where suffering and misery crawl and cower, is studded with stars like heaven. To the gipsies in the crypt, who will not see the blessed relics descend, the body of the church, which they can see from below through the air-hole, is a heaven beyond their reach, the world of the elect.

But the elect, alas! are damned. Their heaven is the chapel up yonder, in which the power they invoke lies sleeping, beneath the stained wood of the boxes, like to a double coffin--the power that may remain deaf, the all-powerful power that will never perhaps awaken for any one, the marvellous power upon which cures depend and which withholds happiness!

Such was the interior of the three-storied church of Saintes-Maries on that day. And above the lofty chapel, there was the bell-tower overlooking the whole country-side. Surrounded by endless numbers of swallows and sea-gulls, for centuries past it has looked upon the glistening desert, the dazzling sea, the dumb infinitude of space, which could explain things if it would, but only beams and laughs.

The hour drew near. The crowd was panting with heat and hope and fear.

Renaud was not there.

"Remember--we promised to burn three tapers each before the relics," Livette had said to him.

"I will come to-night," was his reply. "There's the branding to-day. I have to look after my bulls."

So Livette was a little distraught. She was thinking of joining Renaud, of being present at the branding, of keeping an eye on her betrothed. Where was he?

But Monsieur le cure made a sign: Livette began to sing. Alas! why was not her lover there? Her voice, which she knew was pleasant to the ear, might have some effect on him. How eagerly he listened to the gipsy's singing the other day!--Livette sang, and the buzzing of prayers and litanies and invocations of all sorts, that every one was indulging in on his or her own account, subsided as her clear, pure voice arose. O God! what is this humanity of ours? It is vile and abject, but it has some sense of shame. The basest know how to pray that they may be cured of their baseness. And, however much they may have rolled in the mire of their natural inclinations, a time comes when they set the flame alight, when they burn incense, and when all keep silent to listen to the voice ascending to Heaven, imploring for them a grace that no one knows, that perhaps does not exist, but that every one imagines and desires!

"Eat your excrement, dog!" say the gipsies; "what care I? There is a light in the dog's eye that is not often seen in the eyes of kings."

Livette sang. The cure said to himself:

"O my God, mayhap this child of Thine will obtain favor in Thy sight!"

Livette's voice was as fresh as the water of salvation for which the assembled multitude thirsted. And how intently they listened! But, at the end of each stanza, weary of restraining their tumultuous ejaculations of hope, they sent up from thousands of throats an inarticulate roar in which only the two words: _Saintes Maries!_ could be distinguished.

Livette sang:

"Quand vous etiez sur la grande eau, Sans rames a votre bateau, Saintes Maries! Rien que la mer, rien que les cieux---- Vous appeliez de tous vos yeux La douceur des plages fleuries."[9]

"_Saintes Maries!_" roared the people; uttered at the same moment by a thousand voices acting upon a common impulse, the frenzied appeal was like an explosion.

Every one shouted with all his strength, for the saints must be made to hear! Every one shouted with all his lungs, with all his heart, with all his body, one might say. Heaven is so far away! Open-mouthed, their faces twitching convulsively, they gazed upward. The veins in their necks were swollen to the bursting-point. The muscles swelled and thickened in faces to which the blood rushed in torrents. The brothers, lovers, husbands, mothers, fathers, of the sufferers, availed themselves of their own strength to call for help, howling like wounded wild beasts turned toward the dawn. All this suffering multitude, all this swarming heap of tainted, diseased flesh, uttered the terrifying roar of a monster in pain--and still the preternaturally shrill shriek of some doting mother would soar above the horrid uproar. And all around the church, filled with the nameless appeals of these damned of earth, lay the calm, silent desert, the blue, foam-flecked sea, the brilliant sunlight, insensible to everything.

"Sous le soleil, sous les etoiles, De vos robes faisant des voiles (Vogue, bateau!) Sept jours, sept nuits vous naviguates, Sans voir ni trois-ponts ni fregates---- Rien que la mer et la grande eau!"[10]

"_Saintes Maries!_" roared the people, and each time the shout burst forth from thousands of throats, suddenly and at the same instant, with the effect of a strange kind of explosion.

"Dieu qui fait son fouet d'un eclair, Pour fouetter le ciel et la mer, Saintes Maries! Amena la barque a bon port---- Un ange, qui parut a bord, Vous montra des plages fleuries!"[11]

"_Saintes Maries!_" the people roared again. And the appealing cry, made up of so many cries, burst forth with a sound like that made by a great wave that breaks against a cliff and is instantly scattered about in foam! And again the young girl's voice arose above all the vociferating, grinning creatures. Might not one fancy that he saw a sea-swallow, white as the dove of the Ark, soaring over a bottomless abyss?

"Vous pour qui Dieu fit ce miracle, Voyez, devant son tabernacle, Tous a genoux, Souilles du peche de naissance, Nous invoquons votre puissance,---- Saintes femmes, protegez-nous!"[12]

And for the last time, the deafening, harsh cry arose:

"_Saintes Maries!_"

Oh! the thousand, two thousand ejaculations of insane longing that flew upward, at a single flight, flapping all their wings at once, to fall back, dead, upon themselves.

It is very certain that there was in that frenzied appeal all the madness of suffering, all the wrath of unsatisfied longing, and rage as of unchained beasts, against the very beings they implored.

Meanwhile, the double shutter up above had not yet been thrown open. And Livette, in accordance with the cure's instructions, was to repeat the last verse.

So she began again:

"Vous pour qui Dieu fit ce miracle----"

But these first words had hardly passed her lips when her voice faltered and died away. For a few seconds there was a silence as of utter amazement in the church. Of what was Livette thinking? Of what?--For the last minute, just God! her eyes had been obstinately fixed upon the black opening leading to the crypt. In that opening, on a level with the floor of the church, she had seen a head: it was the gipsy queen, who had come up from the crypt, in mischievous mood, curious to see Livette singing. Immediately below the great altar she emerged from the dark depths of the cellar amid the ascending smoke of the tapers. She came from her kingdom below, and with her copper crown and gleaming ear-rings, her swarthy skin and her fiery black eyes, she seemed to Livette a genuine devil from hell.

Zinzara ascended two steps more and her bust appeared. She darted a keen, penetrating glance at Livette. That is why Livette was confused, and why she called with all her strength upon the women of compassion, the holy women above, for help against this woman from the chapel below.

But the shutters that concealed the shrines were opened at last. And slowly, very slowly, they descended, swinging from side to side, with a slight jerky movement, at the ends of the two ropes, embellished here and there with little bunches of flowers.

Is not this the image of every life? Is there aught else in the world? Something descends from heaven, something ascends from hell; and we suffer with hope and fear.

"_Saintes Maries!_"

Amid the vociferations of the crowd, Livette lost her head, she forgot to sing, and, carried away by the prevailing excitement, hope, and terror, she began to cry aloud with all the rest, like a lost soul, while Zinzara, from below, continued to gaze fixedly at her.

What would you say, Monsieur le cure, to Livette's thoughts, who,--poor creature of the world we live in!--between the holy women and the woman devil, no longer knew which way to turn? Had she not reason to tremble? For the shrines descend to no purpose, they bring us naught but dead relics--while the sorceress is a creature of flesh and blood, whose feet walk, whose eyes see!

Far away from us, in the land of dreams, of supernatural hopes, above the sky and the stars, are the sainted souls that have pity for mankind; as far from man as Paradise itself are the chaste women who embalm the crucified ones in herbs and spices, while _she_ is close at hand, always ready, always armed against the repose of Christian souls, she, queen of diabolic love, who, seeking only to gratify her caprice, makes sport of everything!

Livette became more and more confused beneath Zinzara's steadfast glance, and she tried in vain, after silence had at last been restored, to resume the invocation. She faltered and stopped again.

Thereupon there was great confusion among the waiting multitude. All those men and women who were holding their peace in order to listen to the outpouring of their own souls in the maiden's voice, to the pure, unspoken prayer which was in their hearts, but which they could not put in words, had been thrown back once more, and more despairingly than ever, upon themselves, upon their own helplessness, when Livette's voice died away. Just at the decisive moment, their interpreter failed them! They were afraid of their profound silence, so contrary to the impulses of their hearts. In order to be heard on high, their prayer must be offered; and, seized by the same thought, every one began to shout or sing on his own account, some beginning again at the very beginning, others taking the stanza they knew by heart or had before them in a book, others repeating at random bits of the litanies, one the _credo_, another the _pater_, and never did prayers offered up to God create such a hellish uproar, since the discordant cries of all the sorrows of mankind ascended to Heaven.

Stronger women than Livette would have been disturbed as she was, would have felt their powers failing. She put her hand to her forehead to detain her mind that seemed to be making its escape. Was not she the cause of all this trouble? What would become of her, in this state? She was afraid and ashamed at once.

Instead of looking up, instead of watching the blessed relics that had now accomplished half of their descent, she could not refrain from returning the fixed stare of the gipsy woman below, whose eyes seemed to pierce her soul.

Livette suffered keenly. The gipsy's gaze entered into her very being, and she felt that she could do nothing. It seemed to her as if a sharp-toothed beast were gnawing at her heart. Instead of praying, she listened to the terrible thoughts within her. She fancied that she could feel the hatred go out from her with the glances that shot from her eyes! She tried to stab to the heart with it that creature who was defying her down there. Would not somebody kill the witch, who was the cause of everything? Ah! Saintes Maries! what thoughts for such a place! at such a time!

The relics slowly descended, and, amid the roars that greeted them, Livette, in her overwrought imagination, fancied that she saw herself clinging to Renaud, beseeching him to be faithful and kind to her, and not to go to that other woman; and when he refused and left her, she leaped at the gipsy's face and scratched her and clawed at her like a cat.

Thus the sorceress's soul passed into Livette. Already, without suspecting it, she had begun to resemble her enemy, the gitana who leaped at the nostrils of Renaud's horse the other day. And yet this little fair-haired girl was not one of the dark-skinned maidens of Arles, who have African and Asian blood in their veins! No matter; she, too, has a wild beast's fits of passion. Love and jealousy are at work making a woman's soul.

The relics were still descending; and Livette feverishly told off _paters_ and _aves_ on her rosary.--Patience! on the day after the fete, the gipsies, she knows, will leave the town! Two more days and her agony will be at an end.