CHAPTER II

GABRIELLE

My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man of twenty-one--she was two years older than I--and only knew of her changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas. Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and denying it.

Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that embarrassed the grieving girl.

Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between us. In our walks around fair Briois we--both perhaps prematurely serious and inquisitive--talked of things invisible and beautiful, as angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung, wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth. Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.

But really there was no mystery, and her modesty was a lovely maidenly reserve. Gabrielle was nervously over-strung, and her susceptibilities were extremely tender and responsive, and then there was growing in her that inexplicable power which forms the _raison d'être_ of all this marvellous experience which--as everyone knows now--put an end to the awful WAR.

Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons--rather direct, imperious, and active men--would wear away her apparent mistrust and nervousness.

But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and disease, her pity for it--willing and self-sacrificing as was her desire to help--caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of wounds, amputations, incisions--all the obtrusive physical facts of the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate, soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures--hard to realize to others differently conditioned--in this enforced service.

Perhaps I was not myself solicitous enough about her, and her welfare; because--well, it is clear I am sure--because I was much in love with Blanchette, and as the days brought me nearer to that moment when I would leave home, and struggle for that wealth America seems to hold so temptingly out in her outstretched hands to everyone, I felt almost bitterly the probability that--in the nature of things--Blanchette would not, could not wait for me. When might I return--Ah when?--the thought wrenched me like a physical violence, and the nightly scarlet of the evening skies almost, to my despairing heart, seemed stained with the drops of my own blood.

It was a year before I went to America--that was in 1895--that I sat with Blanchette in the garden back of her pleasant home on a low mound, in a bosque or coppice of trimmed beeches, with a little fairyland of garden beds before us, of larkspur, hollyhocks, geraniums, and piebald four-o'clocks, and the slant lights fading slowly upwards left a thousand hues among their petals. The captain favored our _rendez-vous_, and I half thought that I saw him in an upper window of the house benignantly smiling upon our tryst.

The comeliness of a sweetly fair girl was Blanchette's, and the ringletted hair of her blonde mother--a Swede--caught in an abundant chignon behind her well shaped head, brought into ravishing relief the rounded and blushing cheeks, the winning deep-set blue eyes, where something, to me almost etherial, dwelt, the full lipped mouth, with the blue veins of her temples, the round white neck, and the ample contours of her shoulders, hidden that night beneath the blue folds of a crepe handkerchief, crossed over her breast like a _fichu_.

"Blanchette," I said at length, just as the last lingering patches of sunlight seemed to escape skyward from the flowers, "you know that I am going away to America--and--I am not going solely for myself--_pas de tout_. You will be with me in my daily thoughts, in my work, and every dollar--_toujours dollars en l'Amerique_--I make, will be put away for YOU; _Mais comme je t'aime!_"

It was a sudden impulse, and its very awkwardness showed the sincerity of my feeling, its impetuous earnestness; and deliciously was it rewarded. Blanchette caught my face in her soft long hands, and brought it down to her own; our lips met, and the pledge of our future life together unuttered, was sworn so deeply in our hearts, that we were dumbfounded with the overmastering passion of the moment.

Again and again we embraced, and our lips sought each other with a rapture inexpressible--_une rapture indicible_--while the moving hours swept the heavens of all light, and the fragrance of the gardens rose overpoweringly like sensuous incitations to our immeasurable needs.

The long pent-up torrent of our love caught upon its waves each momentary reserve, and smothered it in the racing tides of our limitless joy. Voices seemed to speak to us from every side, as if the spirits of nature, enthralled in flower, and tree, and grass, and herb, disincarnate through sympathy, spoke to us, inarticulate but real. _C'était l'appel aphrodisiac de l'âme_--the ecstatic epitome of a life-time.

That night I leaned out of the window of my room, and the night, calm and gloriously light with the gibbous moon half flooding the broad distances with its pale splendors, seemed to bathe my spirit in incredible consolations of hope, ambition. An exorbitant confidence seized me. Anticipation and resolve raised innumerable visions, and the bending salutation of Success almost audibly filled my ears with its siren promises.

Blanchette would wait. I must not be too avaricious. A little was enough for our serene and inconspicuous days. Let it be in a year--two? _Les fortunes merveilleuses ne viendraient-ils?_ Perhaps--perhaps--let us believe so, now, and if the time is lengthened, well--_les noces s'attarderaient seulement un peu_.

So dreaming, so feeding illustrious hopes, I forgot Gabrielle, in my selfish egotism, and while I had dimly divined the result of her new work I offered no opposition to our parents' designs, and even encouraged Gabrielle with specious flatteries. She would grow stronger; the life of the great city would be full of wonders, and captivate her mind with its marvels. Then there would be fresh friendships, the gayety of companionships, innumerable alleviations of _l'ennui_.

Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.

I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of self-reproach.

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and if--if--perhaps--I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself. Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."

"Yes," she murmured between sobs that wrung my heart. "_Oui_ Alfred, _c'est vrai_--but I feel so sorrowful at times, and I am afraid of the great city, and the visions come to me at night and I wake up shaking with strange doubts."

"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of that before. What visions?"

It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.

"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side--it was late and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened--No, not at all, but I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me, and--I thought so--I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then--perhaps then Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came voices in my ears--faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and then--"

"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes with mute expostulating curiosity.

"I knew nothing more--all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."

We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked to the center of her room--its walls were well filled with pretty colored prints, for the most part religious figures--and with her hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued--and now her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and it became her.

"I waited for the visitation again and again, putting myself in the same position, and shutting out the light, and--praying. It came once, a few months after the first, and then I thought it was some forewarning of danger to father or mother, or to you Alfred, and I dreaded to open my eyes in the mornings, fearing disaster, sickness--I know not what; and then Alfred it suddenly seemed to me it meant that _it was my own summons_!"

"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.

"No, quite the same, but less bright and more restless, changing in its brightness, and flitting slowly up the walls and back again, and never forming a figure as at the first. But something else was different; O! much different--_The Voices_. They were stronger, and Alfred it is the voices now that fill my ears at night with callings, and singular messages, that I cannot understand, and Alfred," she came closer to me, and her voice, sinking to a whisper, seemed almost stealthy; "I have spells of fainting. Mother has picked me up many times and I have heard her talking to father about it, and they have written to the doctors in the Training School and-- Well you know it is all settled, but Alfred it will not help me. I dread it. I shall be unhappy."

The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture, as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:

"In those trances--if they are really trances--the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them--some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but--Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to--O! but it is marvelous."

Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy--a little wild I thought--and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural--all the eccentricities of the disembodied--we had loved them the more.

We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries, dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also. Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had told me to Blanchette.

Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is best to do?"

"Alfred, Gabrielle is unwell; you must get her away. She lives too lonely a life, reads too much, and is unsociable. Let her once live among the hard facts of the hospital, and the training school, and--Ah! then--it will all go, like the fogs--_comme les brouillards s'evanouis-saient quand le soleil les éclate_. Eh? Alfred, you know that."

I did not know it, and I was ill disposed at first to adopt Blanchette's view. But she was very tender and affectionate, and I was blind and too happy--too miserable too, as I must soon leave her--to do justice to Gabrielle. And so it came about that I argued the matter with Gabrielle, and insisted that she must try Paris, and the school, and the doctors, and forget the visitations, and mingle with the world a little, and, amongst new acquaintances, put to flight the aggravating "voices," for--the other marvel--the shining image--had never returned.

This latter fact contributed a better efficacy to my persuasions, as it seemed to prove that the whole business was some delusion of the mind. Gabrielle was not a bit convinced, but she was so dutiful, so resigned, and so faithful, that she yielded, put on the address of willingness she did not really feel, just to please me.

I took her to Paris and entrusted her with, O so many adjurations, to Doctor Manuelle Herissois, who was most considerate and pleasing and talked with Gabrielle with great adroitness and--I left her smiling, but as she kissed me _Adieu_, her dear eyes were very wet indeed, and for a moment in my own heart I mistrusted the part I had played, and might have, in an instant, reversed the whole transaction, when Gabrielle turned half away, while our hands yet pressed each other, and said; "_Adieu_ Alfred. Do not come to see me when you go away to America. I could not stand it. Write only. That will do," and then, with a half stifled cry she fled into her room--her apartment in the school, and quickly closed the door, and I was left mute and irresolute.

What is more bitter than the remembrance of careless acts, thoughtless things we have done which caused grief to those we loved, and yet, while loving, neglected. It all came wrong, and still--_assurement le bon Dieu, Il le faisait_--it ended the war!

That night--I well recall it, I think, each minute of it--Blanchette ravished me with her loveliness, her joyous salutation, her infectious gayety, and lost in my own pleasure, the foolish vanities of doting youth, poor Gabrielle in her loneliness, was altogether forgotten. Dear sweet sister, with the patient heart, the endless resignation, the guileless impulses, and with that inscrutable mysticism of feeling, that finally brought to her the discarnate souls of the slain, the ghostly assault of the unnumbered dead--Ah! _Malheureuse!_ not yet! again my tell-tale tongue, the hurrying scribble of my heedless pen!

Well, there were so many things to think of, and Blanchette was so eager to see me every minute, that when I had taken leave of all of our friends, and father and mother had invoked blessings on my head, and exacted promises that I would write each week, and the captain had made me very sure that he wanted a few pounds of the Texas pecan nuts sent to him, and Privat Deschat asked for a half dozen hanks of Texas cotton, if they could be found in the Galveston stores, Emile Chouteau (it was after he had left the school), wished only my happy return, that the waters would be propitious, the winds and the waves, and, if storms, why then:

_dicto citius tumida aequora placat Collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit_;

and Sebastien Quintado had hugged me a dozen times and smacked me robustly as many times on each cheek--why, there was no time to be lost for me to pack up my few belongings, and get away to Marseilles as fast as ever I could--and then had not Gabrielle said _not to come to bid her Adieu; that she could not stand it_? _Certainement._ And so it was, that when I stood on the quay at Marseilles, trembling, nervous, and half regretful, everyone had been seen, everyone embraced, and everyone's orders taken, and--she, the wounded, dear sister of my flesh and blood, was forgotten--O! No, not forgotten--not that, but missed as it were in the furious haste, and wonderment, and expectation, and dread.

It was a big ship, a frigate, loaded with wines and cheeses and spices, and many jim-cracks of all sorts, that was to take me to the New World, and when I stood on her glistening deck, beneath the blazing sun, and France slowly sank away from my eyes and just at last the white spot of Marseilles, like a disk on the horizon, _went out_, like a light snuffed out in a candle, I went to my room and cabin, and laid down and held my hands before my face and cried pretty hard.

And somehow then, the very presence of Gabrielle surged before me like some embodiment of rebuke, and the physical pressure of a hand on my shoulder startled me to my feet with a cry of anguish. But it was nothing, only the reaction of my body to the urgency of my grief over Gabrielle's neglect. For days the thought of my sister obscured my happiness, although the newness of everything--ministered deliciously to my _amour-propre_. Good resolutions helped to comfort me, and the first thing for me to do when America was gained would be to write a long, careful, loving letter to Gabrielle.

My project of going to America can be briefly explained, as it may appear almost quixotic and unreasonable otherwise, especially my destination in Texas. But some years before acquaintances, made in Paris, where I was studying law, led to this departure. They had interests in cattle and farm lands, in the great state, and had frequently made me offers to go out, and watch their rights, and report the prospects and conditions, with inducements so advantageous to myself that, conjoined with the long cherished project formed in my own mind to try the chances in the Republic, resulted in this. I accepted their invitations against my parents' wishes, who at first resolutely denied their permission. This was overcome by my own increasing obstinacy, that had begun to approach the earnestness of disobedience.

Blanchette and I had, with the ludicrous solemnity of young lovers, exchanged the pledges of fidelity, and I, in an exuberance of hopefulness, promised to return in five years, which by some fancied finality seemed to both of us the limit of our possible endurance. With forceful vows I had engaged to live most simply and the frugality of my expectations in living--measured the quickness and value of my savings, and indeed, as it happened, I made my way fast.

At San Antonio I became at last established, with the various interests, I was to watch, quite fully comprehended and diligently tended. I do not know that I ever fell in love with San Antonio, but I certainly got to like it very well, and in later years I have recalled it with feelings of tenderness, that came pretty near to affection. I have every reason to be grateful to it, for I was most successful. I had prospered, greatly prospered. When I found at last that the term of my exile came ideally near to the period when I might consider myself well enough off to go back and claim Blanchette, I think that my respect for San Antonio rose to the apex of unaffected enthusiasm.

Because the purpose and body of this history is connected with the utterly unparalleled circumstances of the ending of the monstrous war of this century, I pass over the irrelevant details of my life in America, except only to point out the financial luck that enabled me to return to France, at a critical moment. In five years I was almost rich--in my own modest estimation. At any rate I had enough, and a luxurious indolence, which was part of my nature, fascinated me with its temptations of rest and culture, while the thought of the waiting Blanchette--whose letters were so true-hearted and devoted--kept sensitized my eagerness to return almost to the point of madness. And there was Gabrielle.

I had been most dutiful to Gabrielle. I fulfilled all of the many brotherly resolves I made on the voyage to America, which had been the index of my self-reproach at leaving her so carelessly, and sweetly and reassuringly had she answered. Alas! I only learned much later how devotedly she had hidden her sufferings from me, that I might not be distressed in my new home. Now when I realized that my little fortune--part of it the result of a speculative incident so frequent in the wonderful land of Hope--would not only unite me with Blanchette but enable me to give comfort and happiness to Gabrielle, I was wild with impatience to get away. It was my last month in San Antonio; the leave for my return had been received by me, from my employers, and the successor to my position would be at any moment in my office ready to take charge.

It was my last day; a sultry wilting day towards the end of August, and I had exerted every energy in arranging the directions for my successor, and incidentally clearing off a large amount of that surreptitiously invading refuse of unfinished odds and ends, that accumulate, in one way and another, in any business, which cannot be completed by daily installments of work. A large amount of mail had been disposed of. The office force, tired out, and half angry at the unexpected pace I had demanded, had left, and I was alone in a large shop fronting upon ---- Street, the principal street of San Antonio. Gray frowning clouds had formed somewhere in the upper air. I could detect their presence even without seeing them, by the deepening obscurement of the opposite houses, and a chill brought in their enveloping bosoms as they crowded down upon the city, conveyed a well understood notice of some sudden meteorological caprice that would relieve the tension of the heat, with possibly damaging accompaniments of disaster.

I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets, and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human utterance--that letter--it might have cried out to me with the incisive agony of its menacing contents. It might I say--perhaps it did--but through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.

I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness, behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!

In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring them around me in consternation and in anger.

My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:

_Dear Brother_,

_Something has happened. Alfred, Blanchette is sick_--vraiment--_quite sick. I am now home in St. Choiseul nursing her. She asks for you, Alfred. Could you come? Perhaps it would be well_--Je dis peut-etre seulement--_and yet, Alfred, I believe it would be best. You could help her wonderfully. Even yet, say, you will come, and things will be better._

_Ah! my brother, I am sorry. O! so sorry to write this, but you see there is nothing to be done but to--shall I say it?--Alfred, Blanchette is very sick. It is a fever. The doctors reassure us, but because Blanchette calls for you so often, they are convinced that it would be good--very good--perhaps indispensable; you understand. Come Alfred--Come, come. We will tell her you are coming._

_Gabrielle; St. Choiseul, 1900_

The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes, and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.

And when again the coordinated senses revealed sensibly to me my surroundings, I was on a bed in the hospital, in a wide white room, with a nurse and a doctor, and in my own ears now sounded my own voice, and all it said was compressed in struggling cries: "_Je viens, Je viens, Je viens_--I come, I come, I come!"