CHAPTER I
We mortals discuss the world as a subject of our common understanding, and no two of us see it with the same eyes. To Victor-Amadeus the third’s, for example, it was a stage for fêtes galantes; to the Chevalier de France’s a ball fettered to the ankle of an heir-at-law, infamously kept from his inheritance; to those of a certain “little corporal,” as yet unaccredited, it was a potential family estate; to Yolande’s and Louis-Marie’s a reformatory for original sin; to Bonito’s it was a footstool to the stars, to Cartouche’s an absurd necessity, to Jacques Balmat’s a glorious field for adventure.
In 1786 Jacques was the most famous man in Le Prieuré, and for long distances beyond it. In notability he had outstripped all these other claimants to our attention. For he had won his mountain and his wife, and basked in the lustre and the reward of a great enterprise greatly accomplished. Yet he took his reputation modestly, as became one who had looked on Death too often and too close to boast himself superior to that God. He’d propitiated, not defied him. There was something very solemn, very sobering in having gained that awful shadow for one’s friend. So he accepted his part without arrogance, but without hypocrisy.
“Ah! monsieur,” he said to Saint-Péray, lord-consort to his lady of the Manor: “you should have held on; you should not have lost heart; you should have been with me. There are no heights so inaccessible but that the good God will surrender them to our trust in Him as the first guide of us all. There is no corner of His world of which He hath said, ‘Faith shall not enter here.’”
Madame Saint-Péray (she had dropped—flung away, rather—her title) looked up from her needle-work, with a little frown, like an acute accent, nicked between her eyes. She was conscious, on this occasion as she had been on others, of that half protective half accusatory note in the young mountaineer’s respectful addressings of her husband, which somehow touched a corresponding chord in herself. It vibrated on a thought of weakness; it was the tremor in the heart of dying dreams; its first movement in her had been co-instantaneous with the fall of her saint from transcendent to merely human heights. Something of discharm spoke in it; a sense as of an idol convicted of petitioning his worshipper; a sense as of an unwilling accessory to another’s secret sin; a sense as of a responsibility incurred where help had been expected. These several emotions she found suggested somehow in young Balmat’s tone. Were they common to all sympathetic spirits brought into whatsoever relations with her husband? She feared so. She feared, more, that Louis-Marie liked it to be so. His caressing confidence in all others than himself constituted at once his strength and his weakness. He ruled by sweet dependence, and was satisfied to rule.
There were hints of a certain change in her in these days—signs of an enforced self-emancipation, which, in its process, had a little chilled the texture of her faith. It was, in its moral, like that hardening of the grain which only a close observer can detect in the “fixing” of a pastel. The bloom was a thought less virgin; the eyes less liquid-clear; the lips had tightened to a scarce perceptible primness. Her love was as single, as great, as self-sacrificing as ever. Only it had altered its habit to a sterner garb. It ruled where it had served; it had made a subject of him who had been its lord; it justified itself by every concession to the loved one but that of self-abandonment. And in such implied reproaches as those of honest Balmat’s it felt its attitude vindicated. “You should have been with me,” he had said. He should. If he had, if it had been in his nature to be, this twin history of theirs, she believed, had never come to find its tragedy and redemption. Louis at this moment had been her king—her tyrant, even; their parts had never of necessity been reversed.
Of course, in all this, she only skimmed the truth. There was more to be inferred, even than she supposed, from the young mountaineer’s tone. It implied, in fact, a troubled conscience, seeking to allay its own suspicions on the strength of a serenity in their object which must surely, it told itself, be incompatible with guilt.
For, indeed, a certain serenity had come to succeed in Louis-Marie the storms and anguish of a former state. His wife’s tender ministrations; a year of utter peace, of utter immunity from disturbance in their retreat, had restored him to a measure of self-confidence—even to a point of view something broader than that in which Cartouche had confirmed him. Now he was inclined to think that his deed had been not only righteous, but heroic; that his bearing of its burden in silence was a saintly discipline; that, in any case, his confiding of his awful secret, like King Midas’s barber, to the reeds, had acquitted him of the first responsibility to it. And the last was, after all, his most characteristic comfort. He grew well on it, as a worried schoolboy, quit of his imposition to a merciful parent, forgets his troubles in a moment.
There remained only, to disturb his conscience, the question of his conditional absolution, as decreed by Cartouche. Well, as to that, he had assured and reassured himself, his friend was scarcely matriculated in moral philosophy. But, even were he called upon by him to answer for his act, he had still this to plead—that he had not married Yolande, but Yolande him.
For the rest, slow growing sense of security had come to mend his sickness of another shadow. A year had passed, and it had not yet pursued him to his fastness in the Château di Rocco. He hoped now it never would. He hoped he read, in the social exile which their own mutinous act had decreed upon himself and Yolande, an abandonment of any interest in their further fortunes. God grant they might be permitted to make out their days in peace, justifying—as they for ever strove, and intended for ever to strive to do—in their devotion to their church, in a wide and noble beneficence, their inheritance of a wicked man’s possessions. For to this end only had they decided to take up the burden of an estate otherwise hateful to them.
It was a mellow September noon. The three sat under the front of the grim old Château in the quiet sunlight. Far off across the valley, on a level with their eyes, great flakes of silver-white, spangling a golden haze, were the huddled masses of the Alps, no less. Soft and unsubstantial in appearance as the floating iridescences one sees in water, they were still the native home and most austere dominion of primordial rock and ice. It seemed impossible to realise it. The very shadows on their slopes were traced so soft, they were no more shadows than the blue veins in marble, than the blue inter-webbings of running surf. Surely that mist of peaks must be descended cloud, and the changing colours of it the bloom of angelic wings beating within!
Below the sitters’ feet terrace declined upon terrace, until, halted against a buttress wall, the cultivated land gave place beyond to stony pastures, which descended to the lower verge of the estate and the great wrought-iron gates of the entrance.
And between, poised high in the mid-ether of the valley, a watching kestrel floated like a leaf.
Madame Saint-Péray, looking up, answered for her husband. Her recognition that neither high achievement nor great failure was ever for this dear weanling of her passion was not to find her loyalty to him at fault—rather to confirm her jealousy for his reputation.
“That is a very right sentiment for a guide, M. Jacques,” she said; “but there may be nobler conquests for duty even than those of mountains. Monsieur owed his life to me; and he sacrificed his ambitions to that debt.”
That was the thorn. Then she offered the rose.
“For you, you owed that conquest to your love; and bravely you strove and gained. I hope the dear father recovers himself of your naughtiness?”
Jacques laughed; then essayed his little gallantry. No Frenchman, however primitive, lacks that essential grace,—
“I said, Monsieur should not have lost his heart for the enterprise. I was a dog, an imbecile. What summit could equal that to which his heart attained! I thought myself near heaven as I stood up there alone—the first to get so near. Alas, Madame! Monsieur staying on the ground had already gained it.”
Monsieur, lying comfortably back in his chair, smiled kindly.
“That is very true, Jacques; and I wish I could take credit for the best deserts. But you have not answered Madama’s question.”
“Of Dr Paccard, Monsieur? The old man is almost himself again. He can see his son-in-law at last.”
“It was cruel of you to force him to the summit,” said Madame.
“Why, what would you?” answered the mountaineer. “He would never have believed else; and upon his belief depended my reward.”
“But, by all accounts, he could not see, even then.”
“That is true; but others could. My faith, he was bad! But it was his bargain, not mine, that he should accompany me to witness. He would have given up before we slept the first night on la Côte. There had been enough and to spare already to terrify him. With dusk had come an oppression of the air. Our axes sang like flutes. Suddenly, as I climbed, holding my staff by the middle, it had a knob of light for head—a thing like a luminous bladder, that palpitated, and swelled, and shrunk and swelled again; till, in a moment, it detached itself and floated away, far, far into the shadows, where it burst with a clap like thunder. Then came the lightning, above, everywhere. One blaze struck the ground, right in front of us. It was as if a bucket of fire had been emptied from some window of the rocks. It splashed up and was gone, leaving a stench—Mon Dieu! the fish they had been gutting up there were not very fresh.”
“O, horrible, horrible!”
“Better than that our heads had received it. But I am fatiguing Madame?”
“No, no. Go on. I have wanted so much to hear it from your lips.”
“He slept exhausted, for all his fright, wrapped in my blanket, and moaning for the good roast chicken, which he had ordered at home against his soon return. When he awoke, it was bright calm sunlight, and he had gathered new heart of rest. We went on and up; but his courage soon ebbed, running out at his heels, until, Mon Dieu! he was crawling on his belly like a mole. That was laughable enough; but even so, my merriment could urge him no further than the Dôme du Goûter, where he sat down and refused to move a step further. I gave him my glass, and told him to look how the villagers watched us from below, and at Martha herself, the brave child, waving to us with her handkerchief. It was all of no use. I had to leave him and go on alone. The thin air suffocated me. The wind shaved my cheeks, drawing blood from them like a clumsy barber. Every sweep of its razor was a gash. But by then I was mad to conquer or perish. Though it strip me to the bone, I thought, my skeleton shall stand on the summit. And presently, all in an instant, I was there.
“O, Madama! It is something, that, to have seen the stars by daylight. They were all about my head, crowning me. Perhaps their glory intoxicated my brain. In any case, I was fierce now to go and fetch my comrade, and force him to come up and believe. And I went down to him again, and roused him from his stupor, and drove him before me up the heights. He was quite dumb and silly, like a drunken man; but my will was great, and I got him there. He could see nothing; the snow-blindness was in his eyes; he would hear nothing. ‘Take your Martha,’ he said, ‘and let me sleep.’ That was all. How I got him down and home is known to none but God; it is not known to me.”
Louis-Marie, listening in a glow, had caught something of the speaker’s transport. He turned, with kindled eyes, to Yolande. “See,” his looks confessed, “what I have foregone for your sake!” She gave a sudden cry “Ah!” and pointed down. The hawk had swooped into a tree, and re-emerged with a little fluttering life in its claws.
“That is very pitiful,” she said. “I had heard the poor thing singing to his mate but a moment ago.”
Balmat took up his hat.
“He sang of himself, by the token, Madama,” he said—“of what a fine fellow he was. It is the way with cock-birds. That was a good lesson to me. Be sure, it said, before you start to blow your own trumpet, that an enemy is not within hearing.”
As, having made his respectful adieux, he went down the hill at a swing, the lodge gate clanked at the foot of the drive far below. They saw his diminishing figure halt against another which was approaching. The two appeared to exchange greetings and a few words. At the end, Balmat resumed his way down, and the stranger turned again to the ascent. As he came on, the cuttings of the hill path swallowed him, and he disappeared from view. In the same instant, Yolande, bent over her work, heard her husband get hurriedly to his feet, and glanced up at him. Silks and needles went to the ground. She was by him in a moment.
“What is it—Louis! Louis!”
He was deadly pale; he was holding his hand to his forehead in a lost way.
“Take me in, take me in!” he muttered. “I—I think the sun—ah!—it was perhaps too strong for me.”
He was wild over her momentary hesitation.
“I would not stop to question if you were sick,” he said. She put her arm about him at once, and guided him into the house. Entered into its refuge, a little reassurance, as of a sanctuary gained, seemed to brace him. He moved of his own accord, and towards the stairs, making for the upper rooms. She never released him, until he was lying back on his own pillows. Then he seized her hands and kissed them as she knelt beside him.
“Dear wife,” he said, in great emotion. “I think, perhaps, the sun—and the excitement—of listening. There; I shall be well in a little—only rest—utter rest—I can see no one—no one: Yolande—it would be very bad for me—it—”
She soothed him.
“Why needst thou, most sweet, with me to stand between? If visitor there be, sleep here in confidence; thou shalt not be disturbed.”
A servant’s voice at the door announced that a stranger craved a word with Madame. Madame answered that she would be down in a minute. The invalid uttered a little tremulous cry.
“No, no, at once, in a second,” he urged in extremest agitation. “Think if he were to anticipate you by mounting to this room! My God! I have known him do it!”
“Him!” she exclaimed astonished. “Whom?”
“I have known people do it,” he responded in tremulous irritation—“ill-mannered people. Why do you delay? Do you want to drive me mad? If he comes in here, I will not answer for myself.”
Seeing him so wrought up, she felt it the wise policy to obey. With a last word or two of assurance, she went quickly from the room and down the stairs.
The old corridors, the old house, the old chinks piping-in the draughts which swayed the old tapestries, the old dust which seemed to crawl upon the floors, as if the swarming of their slow decay were for ever being disturbed by ghostly footfalls—in all, this dark old habitation, with its stony echoes, had never before seemed to her so instinct with the spirit of a watchful secrecy. Wickedness hung somewhere brooding in its vaulted silences. The air was thick with omen.
She had to pause a moment to recover herself, before opening the door of the room into which the visitor had been shown. But at last she turned the handle, and entered—and there was Dr Bonito facing her.