III
He went away, begging his bread through the world.
He held out his hand to horsemen on the highways, approached the harvesters with genuflexions, or remained motionless before the barriers of courts; and his visage was so sad that they never refused him alms.
In his humility he told his story; thereupon all fled from him, crossing themselves. In the villages where he had already passed, as soon as he was recognized, they shut the doors, shouted threats at him, threw stones at him. The more charitable set a dish on their window-sill, then closed the shutter so as not to see him.
Repulsed everywhere, he avoided men; and nourished himself with roots, plants, wild fruits, and shell-fish which he sought along the shores.
Sometimes on turning a hill he would see below him a confusion of crowded roofs, with stone spires, bridges, towers, black streets crossing one another, whence a continual hum rose up to his ears.
The need of mingling with the existence of others would force him to descend to the town. But the brutish air of the faces, the din of occupations, the indifference of their talk, froze his heart. On feast-days, when the great bell of some cathedral filled the whole people with joy from break of day, he watched the inhabitants issuing from their houses, then the dances in the squares, the fountains running ale at the crossings, the damask hangings outside the lodgings of princes, and at evening, through the panes of the ground-floors, the long family tables, where grandparents held little children on their knees; sobs choked him and he turned back to the country.
He contemplated with transports of love the foals in the pastures, the birds in their nests, the insects on the flowers; at his approach all fled farther away, hid themselves in alarm, flew off as fast as they could.
He sought the solitudes again. But the wind brought what seemed groans of death-agony to his ear; the tears of the dew falling to earth recalled other drops of heavier weight to his mind. The sun showed like blood in the clouds every evening; and every night, in a dream, his parricide began anew.
He made himself a haircloth shirt with iron points. He climbed on his two knees up every hill that had a chapel on its summit. But pitiless thought obscured the splendours of the sanctuaries, and tortured him amid the macerations of his penance.
He did not revolt against God who had inflicted this deed upon him, and yet he was in despair to think that he could have wrought it.
His own person caused him such horror that he adventured himself in perils in the hope of delivering himself from it. He saved paralytics from fires, children from the bottom of gulfs. The abyss rejected him, the flames spared him.
Time did not ease his sufferings. They became intolerable. He resolved to die.
And one day that he found himself at the edge of a fountain, as he stooped over it to judge the depth of the water, he saw facing him an old man, all fleshless, with white beard and so lamentable an aspect that he could not restrain his tears. The other wept also. Without recognizing his own reflection, Julian had a confused remembrance of a face that resembled it. He uttered a cry; it was his father; and he had no more thought of killing himself.
So bearing about the burden of his memory he covered many countries; and he arrived beside a river the crossing of which was dangerous because of its violence, and because there was a great stretch of mud on its banks. No one had dared to cross it for a long time.
An old boat, sunk by the stern, reared its prow among the reeds. On examining it, Julian discovered a pair of oars; and the thought struck him to employ his existence in the service of others.
He began by establishing a sort of causeway on the bank, which would permit of descending to the channel; and he broke his nails dislodging enormous stones, thrust his stomach against them to move them, slid in the mud, sunk in it, all but perished several times.
Then he repaired the boat with some wreckage, and built himself a cabin with clay and tree-trunks.
When the ferry became known, travellers presented themselves. They summoned him from the other bank by waving flags; Julian quickly sprang into his boat. It was very heavy; and they overloaded it with all sort of baggage and bundles, not to speak of the beasts of burden, which, plunging with terror, increased the encumbrance. He asked nothing for his trouble; some gave him scraps of victuals that they took from their wallets, or worn-out clothes that they no longer wanted. Rough characters vociferated blasphemies. Julian reproached them gently, and they retorted with insults. He contented himself with blessing them.
A little table, a stool, a bed of dead leaves and three earthenware cups, that was all his furniture. Two holes in the wall served for windows. On one side, as far as the eye could reach, extended sterile plains with pale meres on their surface here and there; and in front of him the great river rolled its greenish waves. In spring the humid earth had an odour of rottenness. Then a wanton wind would raise the dust in clouds. It came in everywhere, muddied the water, crunched under his teeth. A little later, there were clouds of mosquitoes, whose trumpeting and stinging never ceased day or night. Next came cruel frosts, which gave things the rigidity of stone and caused a mad longing to eat flesh.
Months passed without Julian seeing any person. Often he closed his eyes, trying by way of memory to return to his youth;—and a castle yard appeared with greyhounds in a porch, serving-men in the hall, and beneath an arbour of vines a fair-haired youth between an old man in furs and a lady with a great head-dress; all at once the two corpses were there. He threw himself flat on his face upon his bed and weeping repeated:
“Ah, poor father! poor mother! poor mother!” and fell into a swoon in which the doleful visions continued.
One night as he slept he thought he heard some one calling him. He listened intently and could make out nothing but the roaring of the waves. But the same voice repeated:
“Julian!”
It came from the other side, which seemed extraordinary, considering the breadth of the river.
A third time the call came:
“Julian!”
And the loud voice had the tone of a church-bell.
Lighting his lantern he went out of his cabin. A furious hurricane filled the night. The darkness was profound, rent here and there by the whiteness of leaping waves.
After a moment’s hesitation, Julian unfastened the moorings. The water immediately became calm, the boat glided upon it and touched the other bank, where a man was waiting.
He was wrapped in a tattered sheet, his face like a plaster mask, and his two eyes redder than coals. On holding his lantern to him, Julian saw that he was covered with a hideous leprosy; yet he had in his bearing a sort of kingly majesty.
As soon as he entered the boat, it sank prodigiously, crushed under his weight; a shock sent it up again, and Julian began to row.
At each stroke of the oar the surge of the waves heaved up the bow. The water, blacker than ink, rushed furiously past either side of the planking. It scooped out abysses, it made mountains, and the skiff now leaped up, now sank back into depths where it spun round, tossed about by the wind.
Julian bent his back, stretched his arms, and taking a purchase with his feet, came back, bending from his waist, in order to get more power. The hail lashed his hands, the rain ran down his back, the violence of the wind choked him, he halted. Then the boat was carried away by the current. But, comprehending that some great thing was afoot, some order which he durst not disobey, he took to his oars again; and the creaking of the tholes broke on the clamour of the tempest.
The little lantern burned in front of him. Birds flying past hid it at intervals. But he saw always the eyes of the Leper, who sat up in the stern immobile as a column.
And this lasted long, very long!
When they arrived in the cabin, Julian shut the door; and he saw him sitting on the stool. The sort of shroud that covered him had fallen to his haunches; and his shoulders, his chest, his meagre arms, were hidden under patches of scaly pustules. Enormous wrinkles furrowed his brow. Like a skeleton, he had a hole in place of a nose; and his bluish lips gave out a breath as thick as a fog and nauseating.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
Julian gave him what he had, an old piece of bacon and the crusts of a black loaf.
When he had devoured them, the table, the dish, and the haft of the knife all bore the same marks as were to be seen on his body.
Next he said, “I’m thirsty!”
Julian went to get his pitcher; and as he took it an aroma came from it which made his heart swell and his nostrils dilate, it was wine; what a find! But the Leper put out his arm and emptied the whole pitcher at one draught.
Then he said, “I’m cold!”
With his candle Julian set light to a bundle of fern in the middle of the hut.
The Leper went to it to warm himself; and, squatted on his heels, he trembled in every limb, became weaker; his eyes no longer shone, his sores ran, and in a voice almost inaudible he murmured:
“Your bed!”
Julian aided him gently to drag himself to it, and even spread over him, to cover him, the sail of his boat.
The Leper groaned. The corners of his mouth exposed his teeth, a quicker rattle shook his breast, and at each breath his belly sank in to his backbone.
Then he closed his eyelids.
“My bones are like ice! Come beside me!”
And Julian, lifting up the canvas, lay down on the dead leaves, beside him.
The Leper turned his head.
“Undress yourself, so that I can have the warmth of your body!”
Julian stripped off his garments, then, naked as at the day of his birth, got into bed again, and against his thigh he felt the Leper’s skin, colder than a serpent and rough as a file.
He tried to cheer him, and the other answered panting:
“Ah, I am dying!... Come close to me, warm me! No, not with your hands! No, with your whole body!”
Julian stretched himself full length upon him, mouth against mouth and breast against breast.
Then the Leper caught him in his embrace, and his eyes all at once assumed the brightness of stars; his hair lengthened out like sunbeams, the breath of his nostrils had the sweetness of roses; a cloud of incense rose from the hearth; the waves sang. There at a fulness of delight, a joy more than human, descended like a flood upon Julian’s fainting soul; and he whose arms clasped him grew greater and greater; till he touched either wall of the hut with his head and feet. The roof flew off, the firmament opened wide,—and Julian mounted up to the azure spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who bore him away into Heaven.
Such is the story of Saint Julian Hospitator, almost exactly as it is to be seen in a church-window in my native province.
THE GATE-KEEPER
FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
Her Majesty the Queen of Bohemia—for story-tellers there will always be a kingdom of Bohemia—is travelling in the strictest and most modest incognito, under the name of the Comtesse des Sept-Châteaux and accompanied only by the old Baroness de Georgenthal, her reader, and General Horschowitz, her gentleman in waiting.
In spite of their hot-water pans and furs, it has been cold all the time in their reserved compartment, and when the Queen, tired of her English novel, or fidgetted by the general’s knitting—for the general knits—wished to look out at the landscape white with snow, she was forced to rub a moment with her handkerchief on the carriage-window, which the frost covered with sparkling crystals and delicate ferns of ice. It is a singular caprice indeed that her Majesty has had, and well worthy of a twenty-year-old head, to set out for Paris in mid-winter, there to meet her mother, the Queen of Moravia, though she had arranged to see her at Prague next spring. In spite of that, she must needs start on her journey in ten degrees below zero, the baroness has had to shake up her old rheumatic bones, the general, in despair, has left a magnificent bedspread behind him that he was busy knitting for his daughter-in-law, taking nothing with him to beguile the tedium of the journey but material for a modest pair of worsted stockings. The journey has been bad; all Europe is covered with snow, and they have come half-way across, with many delays and difficulties, on railways where the service is disorganized by the severity of the season. At last the end is coming near; this evening, at nine o’clock, they have dined in the refreshment room at Mâcon, and now, though to-night the foot-warmers are once more barely lukewarm, and outside the great flakes whirl in the darkness, the baroness and the general, slumbering under their furred mantles and their rugs, dream in their corners of their arrival and their stay in Paris, where the good lady will be able to fulfil a special little piece of devotion, and where the old campaigner will betake himself without delay to a certain wool-shop in the Rue Saint-Honoré, the only one where he can match his green skeins to his satisfaction.
As for the Queen, she is not sleeping.
Feverish and shivering in her great blue-fox pelisse, her elbow in the padded rest, and her hand clenched amid the disorder of her magnificent straw-coloured hair which escapes from her smart travelling toque, she is reflecting, her great eyes open in the half-shadow, listening mechanically to the vague and distant music that the tired ears of travellers fancy they hear in the iron gallop of an express. She reviews in memory all her existence, poor young Queen, and she reflects that she is very unhappy.
First she sees herself again as the little princess with red hands and a flat waist, beside her twin sister, the one who is married far away in the North, her sister whom she loved so, and who resembled her so closely that when they were dressed alike they had to have different-coloured bows put in their hair to distinguish them. That was before the rising had overthrown her parents’ throne; and she loved the calm, sleepy atmosphere of the little court of Olmutz, where etiquette was tempered with homeliness; that was the time when her father, the good King Louis V., who has since died in exile of a broken heart, used to take her for a walk across the park, without laying aside his court-suit and his stars, to drink coffee with her sister at four o’clock in the afternoon, in a Chinese pavilion overrun with convolvulus and virgin’s bower, from which the course of the river was seen and the distant amphitheatre of the hills reddened by the autumn.
Then there was her marriage and the grand state-ball, on that lovely night in July, when they heard through the open windows the murmur ascending from the crowd that thronged the illuminated gardens. How she trembled when she had been left alone for an instant in the conservatory with the young King! Yet she loved him already, she had always loved him from her first glimpse of him, when he had advanced, the white aigrette in his busby, so elegant and supple in his blue uniform all over diamonds, at each step jingling the curved gold spurs on his little grey boots with a thousand folds. After the first waltz Ottokar had taken her arm, and, caressing his long black moustache all the time, had led her to the conservatory, had made her sit down under a great palm, then, placing himself beside her and taking her hand with the most noble ease, had said to her, looking her in the eyes, “Princess, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” Then she had blushed, bowed her head, and replied, repressing with one hand the mad beating of her heart, “Yes, Sire!” while the furious violins of the Hungarians attacked all together the first notes of the Czech March, that sublime song of enthusiasm and triumph!
Alas, how quickly that happiness had taken wings! Six months of error and illusion, barely six months, and then, one day, when soon to become a mother, a brutal chance had informed her that she had been deceived, that the King did not love her, never had loved her, that the very day after his marriage he had supped with La Gazella, the première danseuse at the Prague Theatre, a common strumpet. And that was not all! She had then learned what every one knew but herself, Ottokar’s old liaison with the Comtesse de Pzibrann, by whom he had three children, whom he had never quitted amid a hundred passing fancies, and whom he had had the audacity to make first lady in waiting to his wife. At one blow the Queen’s love was killed, that frail and timid love which she had never dared to avow to her husband, and which she now compared to the pet bird that she had smothered when she was a little girl through closing her hand suddenly at the noise of a Chinese vase broken by a housemaid.
Her son! To be sure she had a son, and she loved him; but, dreadful thought, very often, when seated beside the gilded cradle adorned with the royal crown in which her little Ladislas was sleeping, the Queen had felt an icy pang shoot through her heart as she looked at the child, begotten by a man who had cruelly, cynically outraged her. Besides, she never had him to herself, at least to herself alone. Things were not as they had been at home with her good parents, whom—a fresh grief—a revolution had lately driven far away, and everything in this old-fashioned and pompous court of Bohemia was done according to the laws of the most rigid ceremonial. A whole swarm of duennas and dry nurses, ancient ladies with grand airs and imposing head-gear, bustled about the royal cradle, and, when the Queen went to look at her son and embrace him, they would say to her solemnly, “His Highness was coughing a little during the night.... His Highness’s teeth are troubling him....” And she felt as if the icy breaths of those women blew on her mother’s heart to freeze it and extinguish it.
Ah, she was indeed helpless, poor Queen, and life was too cruel! So sometimes, giving way to vexation and weariness, she obtained permission from the King to go and see the Queen of Moravia, a refugee in France; she escaped away, she stole out as if from a prison—alone, for tradition forbade the Heir Apparent to travel without his father—and she hastened to pour out all her tears, with her arms round the neck of her grey-haired mother.
This time she had left suddenly, without asking permission, and after a hasty kiss on the brow of the sleeping Ladislas; for she was almost mad with disgust and shame. The King’s debauchery was becoming more notorious every day; he now had establishments and families in all the towns of Bohemia, at all his hunting-resorts. It was food for derision everywhere, and satirical verses were sung in the streets of Prague, asking what was to become of this illegitimate race, and if Ottokar, like Augustus the Strong in his day, would not form a squadron of Life Guards from his bastards. To meet the expense of such a warren, the King was turning everything into money, was exhausting and burdening the state. The trade in decorations was particularly scandalous, and a case was quoted of a tailor in Vienna who had made a fortune by selling connoisseurs of foreign crosses, for five hundred florins, black coats, in the pocket and button-hole of which the purchaser found the diploma and ribbon of Bohemia’s most illustrious order, a military order that dates back to the Thirty Years’ War.
But what is the matter? For the last minute the train has been slowing down; it stops. What is the meaning of this halt in the open country, at dead of night? The general and the baroness have waked up, much alarmed; and the gentleman in waiting, having let down the window, leans out into the darkness, and, see, the guard’s lamp, who was running alongside the carriages in the snow, stops, is raised, and all at once illumines the general’s long, white, bristling moustache and his otter cap.
“What’s the matter? What’s the reason of this stoppage?” asks old Horschowitz.
“The matter is, sir, that we are held up for an hour at least.... Two feet of snow! No way of getting further!... The Parisians will have to do without their coffee to-morrow.”
“What? An hour to wait here, in this weather!... You know that the foot-warmers are cold....”
“What can we do, sir?... They have just telegraphed to Tonnerre for a gang to clear the line.... But, I repeat, we’re here for an hour at least.”
And the man goes off with his lamp toward the engine.
“But this is abominable! Your Majesty will catch cold!” chirps the baroness.
“Yes, I do feel cold,” says the Queen, with a shiver.
The general divines that now is the moment to be heroic; he jumps down to the rails, sinks knee-deep in the snow and overtakes the man with the lamp. He says something to him in an undertone.
“I don’t care though it was the Grand Mogul, I couldn’t do anything,” answers the railwayman. “However, we are opposite a gate-keeper’s house, there should be a fire there.... And if the lady cares to get down.... Hey, Sabatier!...”
A second lamp comes up.
“Just go and see if there is a fire in the gate-keeper’s house.”
By great good-fortune there is. The general is happier than if he had won a battle or finished the last strip of his famous knitted bedspread. He returns to the Queen’s compartment, announces the result of his exertions, and, an instant afterwards, the three travellers, with much stamping of feet to shake off the snow that has gathered under their shoes, are in the low room of the tiny house, where the gate-keeper, who has just let them in and has kept on his goatskin, kneels in front of the fire and puts dead wood on the fire-dogs.
The Queen, seated in front of the cheerful blaze, has thrown her pelisse over the back of her straw-bottomed chair; she has taken off her long suède gloves to warm her hands, and is looking about her.
It is a peasant’s room. The floor is hard and uneven underfoot; bunches of onions hang from the smoky beams; there is an old poacher’s gun on two nails over the fire-place, and some flowered dishes on the dresser. The general has just made a wry face on catching sight of two Épinal pictures fastened to the wall with pins: the portrait of M. de Thiers, decorated with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, and that of Garibaldi in a red shirt. But what attracts the young Queen’s attention is, beside the great bed, and half hidden by the curtains of striped calico, a wicker cradle, from which the whimpering of a waking child has just sounded.
In a moment the gate-keeper has left his fire and has gone to the cradle, and there he is rocking it gently.
“Go bye-bye, my biddie, go bye-bye! It’s nothing, it’s friends of papa.”
He looks a good father, the man in the goatskin, with his bald Saint Peter’s pate, his fierce old soldier’s moustache, and the two great, sad wrinkles in his cheeks.
“Is that your little girl?” the Queen asks him, interested.
“Yes, ma’am, she’s my Cecily.... She’ll be three years old next month.”
“But ... her mother?” Her Majesty asks with some hesitation, and, as the man shakes his head, “you are a widower?”
But he makes another sign of negation. At that the Queen, greatly moved, rises, goes to the cradle, and looks at Cecily, who has fallen asleep again, tenderly clasping to her heart a little pasteboard poodle.
“Poor child!” she murmurs.
“Don’t you think, ma’am,” the gate-keeper thereupon says in a hoarse voice, “don’t you think that a mother must be very heartless to leave her daughter at that age? As for her leaving me, after all, that is partly my fault.... I was wrong to marry a wife too young for me, wrong to let her go to town, where she made undesirable acquaintances. But to leave this darling!... Is it not a scandal?... Well, well, I’ll have to rear her all by myself, poor little brat!... It’s difficult, I can tell you, because of my duties.... At night I have often to leave her there screaming and crying, when I hear the train whistle.... But in the day-time, you see, I carry her about with me, and she is quite used to it already, the darling, she’s not afraid of the railway now.... Why, yesterday I held her in my left arm, while I held out my flag with my right. Well, she did not even tremble when the express passed.... What bothers me most, you know, is sewing her dresses and bonnets. It’s a good thing that I’ve been a corporal in the Zouaves in my day, and know a little about needles and thread.”
“But, my poor man,” replies the Queen, “that is a very difficult task.... See here, I should like to help you.... There must be a village in the neighbourhood, and in that village some respectable people who would undertake to look after your little girl.... If it’s only a question of money....”
But the gate-keeper shook his head again.
“No, ma’am, no, thank you kindly. I am not proud, and I would cheerfully accept any offer of help for my little Cecily ... but I will never part from her ... never, not even for an hour!”
“But why?”
“Why?” the man answered in a sad tone. “Because I will trust no one but myself to make the child what her mother has not been ... a good woman! But excuse me, would you be so kind as rock Cecily for a little?... I’m wanted on the line.”
Will it ever be known what the young Queen of Bohemia thought about that winter night when she nursed a poor gate-keeper’s child for a whole hour, while the general and the baroness, whose help she had refused, sat mightily offended by the fire? When the guard opened the door and called, “Come, ladies and gentlemen, the express is about to start again ... all aboard!” the Queen laid her purse well filled with gold, and the bunch of violets from her waist, on little Cecily’s cradle, then she climbed back into the carriage.
But her Majesty spent only two days in Paris; she went back at once to Prague, from which she is scarcely ever absent now, and where she devotes herself entirely to her son’s education. The governesses with thirty quarterings who used to cast the shadow of their funereal head-gear over the infancy of the Heir Apparent have only sinecures now. If there are still kings in Europe when little Ladislas has grown up, he will be what his father has not been, a good king. At five years of age he is already very popular, and when he travels with his mother on those dear Bohemian railways that crawl like four-wheelers, and when he sees from the window of the saloon-carriage a gate-keeper carrying a baby on one arm and presenting his little flag with the other, the royal child, to whom his mother has made a sign, always throws him a kiss.