Part 12

"Now," he went on as he sat down, "I can execute my commission comfortably. A little while ago Mlle. Marguerite, in a thoughtless moment, gave you some instructions which most assuredly did not come within your province. Very properly, your susceptibility was aroused, we quite recognise that, and now the ladies charge me to beg that you will accept their regrets. They would be in despair if the misconception of a moment could deprive them of your good offices, which they value extremely, and put an end to relations which they esteem most highly. Speaking for myself, I have this evening acquired the right to add my entreaties to those of the ladies. Something I have long desired has been granted me, and I shall be personally indebted to you if you will prevent the happy memories of this day from being marred by a separation which would be at once disadvantageous and painful to the family into which I shall shortly enter."

"M. de Bevallan," I said, "I fully recognise and appreciate all that you have said on behalf of the ladies, as well as on your own account. You will excuse me from giving a final answer immediately. This is a matter which requires more judicial consideration than I can give it at present.

"At least," said M. de Bevallan, "you will let me take back a hopeful report. Come, M. Odiot, since we have the opportunity, let us break through the barrier of ice that has kept us apart till now. As far as I am concerned, I am quite willing. In the first place, Mme. Laroque, without revealing a secret that does not belong to her, has given me to understand that under the kind of mystery with which you surround yourself, there are circumstances which reflect the highest credit on you. And, besides, I have a private reason for being grateful to you. I know that you have lately been consulted in reference to my intentions towards Mlle. Laroque, and that I have cause to congratulate myself on your opinion."

"My dear sir, I do not think I deserve----"

"Oh, I know!" he continued, laughing. "You didn't praise me up to the skies, but, at all events, you did me no harm. And I admit that you showed real insight. You said that though Mlle. Marguerite might not be absolutely happy with me, she would not be unhappy. Well, the prophet Daniel could not have spoken better. The truth is, the dear child will never be absolutely happy with any one, because she will not find in the whole world a husband who will talk poetry to her from morning to night.... They're not to be had. I am no more capable of it than any one else, I own; but--as you were good enough to say--I am an honourable man. And really, when we know one another better, you will be convinced of it. I am not a brute; I am a good fellow. God knows I have faults ... one especially: I am fond of pretty women.... I am, I can't deny it. But what does it matter? It shows that one has a good heart. Besides, here I am in port ... and I am delighted, because--between ourselves--I was getting into a bit of a mess. In short, I mean only to think about my wife and children in future. So, like you, I believe Marguerite will be perfectly happy--that is to say, as far as she could be in this world with ideas like hers. For, after all, I shall be good to her; I shall refuse her nothing, and I shall do even more than she desires. But if she asks me for the moon and the stars, I can't go and fetch them to please her ... that's not possible.... And now, my dear friend, your hand once more."

I gave it him. He got up.

"Good! I hope that you will stay with us now.... Come, let me see that a brighter face! We will make your life as pleasant as possible, but you'll have to help us a bit, you know. You cultivate your sadness, I fancy. You live, if I may say so, too much like an owl. You're a kind of Spaniard such as one rarely sees. You must drop that sort of thing. You are young and good-looking, you have wit and talents; make the best of those qualities. Listen. Why not try a flirtation with little Helouin.... It would amuse you. She is very charming, and she would suit you. But, deuce take me! I am rather forgetting my promotion to high dignities! ... And now, good-bye, Maxime, till to-morrow, isn't it?"

"Till to-morrow, certainly."

And this honest gentleman--who is the sort of Spaniard one often sees!--left me to my reflections.

_October 1st_.

A strange thing has happened. Though the results are not, so far, very satisfactory, they have done me good. The blow I had received had left me numb with grief. This at least makes me feel that I am alive, and for the first time for three long weeks I have had the courage to open this book and take up my pen. Every satisfaction having been given to me, I thought there was no longer any reason for leaving, at least suddenly, a position and advantages which, after all, I need, and could not easily replace. The mere prospect of the personal sufferings I had to face, which, moreover, were the result of my own weakness, could not entitle me to shirk duties which involved other interests than my own. And more; I did not intend that Mlle. Marguerite should interpret my sudden flight as the result of pique at the loss of a good match. I made it a point of honour to show her an unruffled front up to the altar itself. As for my heart--that she could not see. So I contented myself with informing M. Laubepin that certain things incident to my situation might at any moment become unbearable, and that I eagerly desired some less lucrative but more independent occupation.

The next day I appeared at the chateau, where M. de Bevallan received me cordially. I greeted the ladies with all the self-possession I could command. There was, of course, no explanation. Mme. Laroque seemed moved and thoughtful; Mlle. Marguerite was a little highly strung still, but polite. As for Mlle. Helouin, she was very pale, and kept her eyes fixed on her work. The poor girl could not have been very much delighted with the final result of her diplomacy. She endeavoured once or twice to dart a look of scorn and menace at M. de Bevallan; but though this stormy atmosphere might have troubled a neophyte, M. de Bevallan breathed, moved, and fluttered about in it entirely at his ease. His regal self-possession evidently irritated Mlle. Helouin, but it quelled her at the same time. I am sure, however, that she would have played him the same sort of trick she had played me the day before, and with far more excuse, if she had not been afraid of ruining herself as well as her accomplice. But it was most likely that if she yielded to her jealous rage, and admitted her ingratitude and duplicity, she would ruin herself only, and she was quite clever enough to see this. In fact, M. de Bevallan was not the kind of man to have run any risks with her, without having provided himself with some very effective weapon which he would use with pitiless indifference. Of course, Mlle. Helouin might tell herself that the night before they had believed her when she made other false accusations, but she knew that the falsehood which flatters or wounds is much more readily believed than mere general truth. So she suffered in silence, not, I suppose, without feeling keenly that the sword of treachery sometimes turns against the person who makes use of it. During this day and those which followed I had to bear a kind of torture I had foreseen, though without realizing how painful it would be. The marriage was fixed for a month later. All the preparations had to be made at once and in great haste. Regularly each morning came one of Mme. Provost's bouquets. Laces, dresses, jewels poured in and were exhibited every evening to interested and envious ladies. I had to give my opinion and my advice on everything. Mlle. Marguerite begged for them with almost cruel persistence. I responded as graciously as I could, and then returned to my tower and took from a secret drawer the tattered handkerchief I had won at the risk of my life, and I dried my tears with it. Weakness again! But what would you have? I love her. Treachery, enmity, hopeless misunderstandings, her pride and mine, separate us forever! So let it be, but nothing can prevent me from living and dying with my heart full of her.

As for M. de Bevallan, I did not hate him; he was not worthy of it. He is a vulgar but harmless soul. Thank God! I could receive the overtures of his shallow friendliness without hypocrisy, and put my hand tranquilly in his. But if he was too insignificant for my resentment, that did not lessen the deep and lacerating agony with which I recognised his unworthiness of the rare creature he would soon possess--and never know. I cannot, and I dare not, describe the flood of bitter thoughts, of nameless sensations which have been aroused in me at the thought of this odious _mesalliance_, and have not yet subsided. Love, real true love, has something sacred in it, which gives an almost superhuman character to its pain as to its joy.

To the man who loves her, a woman has a sort of divinity of which no other man knows the secret, which belongs only to her lover, and to see even the threshold of this mystery profaned by another gives us a strange and indescribable shock--a horror, as of sacrilege. It is not merely that a precious possession is taken from you; it is an altar polluted, a mystery violated, a god defiled! This is jealousy. At least, it is mine. In all sincerity it seemed to me that in the whole world I only had eyes to see, intelligence to understand, and a heart to worship in its full perfection the beauty of this angel. With any other she would be cast away, and lost; body and soul, she was destined for me from all eternity. So vast was my pride! I expiated it with suffering as immeasurable.

Nevertheless, some mocking demon whispered that in all probability Marguerite would find more peace and real happiness in the kindly friendship of a judicious husband, than she would have enjoyed in the poetic passion of a romantic lover. Is it true? Is it possible? I do not believe it. She will have peace! Granted. But peace, after all, is not the best thing in life, nor the highest kind of happiness. If insensibility and a petrified heart sufficed to make us happy, too many people who do not deserve it would be happy. By dint of reasoning and calculation we come to blaspheme against God, and to degrade his work. God gives peace to the dead; to the living he gives passion! Yes, in addition to the vulgar interests of daily life, which I am not so foolish as to expect to set aside, a certain poetry is permitted, nay, enjoined. That is the heritage of the immortal soul. And this soul must feel, and sometimes reveal itself, whether by visions that transcend the real, by aspirations that out-soar the possible, by storms, or by tears. Yes, there is suffering which is better than happiness, or, rather, which is itself happiness--that of a living creature who knows all the agonies of the heart, and all the illusions of the mind, and who accepts these noble torments with an equable mind and a fraternal heart. That is the romance which every one who claims to be a man, and to justify that claim, may, and indeed is bound to put into his life.

And, after all, this boasted peace will not be hers. The marriage of two stolid hearts, of two frozen imaginations, may produce the calm of lifelessness. I can believe that, but the union of life with death cannot be endured without a horrible oppression and ceaseless anguish.

In the midst of these personal miseries, which increased each day in intensity, my only refuge was my poor old friend, Mlle. de Porhoet. She did not know, or pretended not to know, the state of my heart; but with her remote and perhaps involuntary allusions she touched my bleeding wounds with a woman's light and delicate hand. And this soul, the living symbol of sacrifice and resignation, which seemed already to float above our earth, had a detachment, a calmness, and a gentle firmness, which seemed to descend on me. I came to understand her innocent delusion, and to share it with something of the same simplicity. Bent over the album, I wandered with her for hours through the cloisters of her cathedral, and breathed for a while the vague perfumes of an ideal serenity.

I further found at the old lady's house another kind of distraction. Habit gives an interest to every kind of work. To prevent Mlle. de Porhoet from suspecting the final loss of her case, I regularly continued the exploration of the family archives. Among the confused mass I occasionally came across traditions, legends, and traces of old-world customs which awakened my curiosity and carried back my thoughts to far-off days remote from the crushing reality of life. My perseverance maintained Mlle. de Porhoet in her illusions, and she was grateful to me beyond my deserts. For I had come to take an interest in this work---now practically useless--which repaid me for all my trouble, and gave me a wholesome distraction from my grief.

As the fateful day approached, Mlle. Marguerite lost the feverish vivacity which had seemed to inspire her since the date of the marriage had been fixed, and relapsed at times into the fits of indolence and sombre reverie formerly habitual to her. Once or twice I surprised her watching me in wondering perplexity. Mme. Laroque, too, often looked at me with an anxious and hesitating air, as if she wished and yet feared to discuss some painful subject with me. The day before yesterday I found myself by chance alone with her in the _salon_, which Mlle. Helouin had just left to give some order. The trivial conversation in which we had been engaged ceased suddenly, as by common consent. After a short silence, Mme. Laroque said, in a voice full of emotion:

"M. Odiot, you are not wise in your choice of confidants."

"Confidants, madame? I do not follow you. Except Mlle. de Porhoet, I have had no confidant in this place."

"Alas!" she replied, "I wish to believe you ... I _do_ believe you ... but that is not enough----"

At this moment Mlle. Helouin came in, and no more could be said.

The day after--yesterday--I had ridden over in the morning to superintend some wood-cutting in the neighbourhood. I was returning to the chateau about four in the afternoon, when, at a sharp turn of the road, I found myself face to face with Mlle. Marguerite. She was alone. I prepared to pass her with a bow, but she stopped her horse.

"What a fine autumn day!" she said.

"Yes, mademoiselle. You are going for a ride?"

"As you see. I am making the best of my moments of independence, and, in fact, I have been rather abusing my liberty, for I am somewhat tired of solitude. But Alain is wanted at the house.... Poor Mervyn is lame.... You would not care to take his place?"

"With pleasure. Where are you going?"

"Well ... I thought of riding as far as the tower of Elven."

With her whip she indicated the misty summit of a hill which rose on the right of the road.

"I think," she went on, "you've never made that pilgrimage?"

"I have not. I have often meant to, but until now I have always put it off. I don't know why."

"Well, that is fortunate; but it is getting late; we must make haste, if you don't mind."

I turned my horse and we set off at a gallop.

As we rode along, I tried to account for this unexpected fancy which had an air of premeditation. I imagined that time and reflection had weakened the first impression that calumnies had made on Mlle. Marguerite. Apparently, she had conceived some doubts of Mlle. Helouin's veracity, and had seized an opportunity to make, in an indirect way, a reparation which might be due to me. My mind full of such preoccupations, I gave little thought to the particular object of this strange ride. Still, I had often heard the tower of Elven described as one of the most interesting ruins of the country. I had never gone along either of the roads--from Rennes or from Josselin--which lead to the sea, without looking longingly at the confused mass rearing up suddenly among the distant heaths like some huge stone on end. But I had had neither time nor opportunity to examine it.

Slackening our pace, we passed through the village of Elven, which preserves to a remarkable extent the character of a mediaeval hamlet. The form of the low, dark houses has not changed for five or six centuries. You think you are dreaming, when, looking into the big arched bays which serve as windows, you see the groups of mild-eyed women in sculpturesque costume plying their distaffs in the shade, and talking in low tones an unknown tongue. These gray spectral figures seem to have just left their tombs to repeat some scene of a bygone age, of which you are the only witness. It gives a sense of oppression. The sluggish life that stirs around you in the single street of the village has the same stamp of archaic strangeness transmitted from a vanished world.

A little way from Elven we took a cross-road that brought us to the top of a bare hillock. Thence, though still some distance off, we could plainly see the feudal colossus crowning a wooded height in front of us. The _lande_ we were on sloped steeply to some marshy meadows inclosed by thickets.

We descended the farther side and soon entered the woods. Then we struck a narrow causeway, the rugged pavement of which must once have rung to the hoofs of mail-clad horses. For some time I had lost sight of the tower of Elven, and could not even guess where it was, when all at once it stood out like an apparition from among the foliage a few paces in front of us. The tower is not a ruin; it preserves its original height of more than a hundred feet, and the irregular courses of granite which make up its splendid octagonal mass give it the appearance of a huge block cut out but yesterday by some skilful chisel. It would be difficult to imagine anything more proud, sombre, and imposing than this old donjon, impassible to the course of ages, and lost in the depths of the forest. Full-grown trees have sprung up in the deep moats which surround it, and their tops scarcely touch the openings of the lowest windows. This gigantic vegetation, which entirely conceals the base of the edifice, completes its air of fantastic mystery. In this solitude, among these forests, before this mass of weird architecture, which seems to start up suddenly out of the earth, one thinks involuntarily of those enchanted castles in which beautiful princesses slept for centuries awaiting a deliverer.

"So far," said Mlle. Marguerite, to whom I had endeavoured to convey these impressions, "this is all I have seen of it, but if you want to wake the princess, we can go in. I believe there is always somewhere near a shepherd or shepherdess who has the key. Let us tie up the horses and search, you for the shepherd, and I for the shepherdess."

We put the horses into a small inclosure near and separated for a little while, but found neither shepherd nor shepherdess. Of course this increased our desire to visit the tower. Crossing a bridge over the moat, we found to our great surprise that the heavy door was not closed. We pushed it and entered a dark and narrow space choked with rubbish, which may have been the guard-room. We passed thence into a large, almost circular hall, where an escutcheon in the chimneypiece still displayed the bezants of a crusader. A large window faced us, divided by the symbolic cross clearly carved in stone. It lighted all the lower part of the room, leaving the vaulted and ruined ceiling in shadow. At the sound of our steps a flock of birds whirled off, sending the dust of ages on to our heads.

By standing on the granite benches, which ran like steps along the side of the walls, in the embrasure of the window, we could see the moat outside and the ruined parts of the fortress. But as we came in we had noticed a staircase cut out of the solid wall, and we were childishly eager to extend our discoveries. We began the ascent, I leading, and Mlle. Marguerite following bravely, and managing her long skirts as best she could. The view from the platform at the top is vast and exquisite. The soft hues of twilight tinged the ocean of half-golden autumnal foliage, the gloomy marshes, the fresh pastures, and the distant horizons of intersecting slopes, which mingled and succeeded each other in endless perspective. Gazing on this gracious landscape, in its infinite melancholy, the peace of solitude, the silence of evening, the poetry of ancient days fell like some potent spell upon our hearts and spirits. This hour of common contemplation and emotions of purest, deepest pleasure, no doubt the last I should spend with her, I entered into with an almost painful violence of enjoyment. I do not know what Marguerite was feeling; she had sat down on the ledge of the parapet, and was gazing into the distance in silence.

I cannot say how many moments passed in this way. When the mists gathered in the lower meadows, and the distant landscape began to fade into the growing darkness, Marguerite rose.

"Come," she said in a low voice, as if the curtain had fallen on some beautiful spectacle; "come; it's over."

She began to descend the stairs, and I followed her.

But when we tried to get out of the donjon, to our great surprise we found the door closed. Most likely the doorkeeper, not knowing that we were there, had locked it while we were on the platform. At first this amused us. The tower was really an enchanted tower. I made some vigorous efforts to break the spell, but the huge bolt of the old lock was firmly fixed in its granite socket, and I had to give up all hope of moving it. I attacked the door itself, but the massive hinges and the oak panels studded with iron stolidly resisted all my efforts. Some stone mullions, which I found among the rubbish and hurled against the door, only shook the vault and brought some fragments from it to our feet. Mlle. Marguerite at last made me give up a task that was hopeless, and not without danger. I then ran to the window and shouted, but no one replied. For ten minutes I continued shouting, and to no purpose. We took advantage of the last rays of light to explore the interior of the donjon very carefully. But the door, which was as good as walled up for us, and the large window, thirty feet above the moat, were the only exits we could discover.

Meanwhile, night had fallen on the fields, and the shadows deepened in the old tower. The moonbeams shone in through the window, streaking the steps with oblique white lines. Mlle. Marguerite's gaiety had gradually died away, and she had even ceased to answer the more or less probable conjectures with which I still tried to calm her apprehensions. While she kept silent and immovable in the shadow, I sat in the full light on the step nearest the window, still shouting at intervals for help; but, to speak the truth, the more uncertain the success of my attempts became, the more I was conscious of a feeling of irresistible joyfulness. For suddenly I saw the eternal and impossible dream of lovers realized for me; I was shut in the heart of a desert and in the most complete solitude with the woman I loved. For long hours there would be but she and I in the world, but her life and mine. I thought of all the sweet evidences of protection and of tender respect it would be my right and my duty to show her. I imagined her fears at rest, her confidence restored, finally her slumbers guarded by me. I told myself, in rapture, that this auspicious night, though it could not give me her love, would at least insure me her unalterable respect.