Monsieur le curé has entered the room. He has a kindly air that comforts the poor child at once.
He points to a chair. She sits down and dares not say a word. Where shall she begin?
He urges her.
“Well, my child?”
He closes his eyes, that he may not embarrass her by his glance, which he knows to be searching. He has left his spectacles up-stairs on his great book. He closes his eyes; and with compressed lips, presses his jaws against each other to a sort of rhythm, so that you can see his temples bulge out and subside like a fish’s gills. It is a nervous affection. His hands are folded on his waist; he clasps his fingers and plays at making them revolve about one another, mechanically; but he is keenly attentive. Monsieur le curé loves the souls of his fellow-men. He knows that they suffer, that life is infinite, and that they veer about and call to one another in the boundless expanse of space and time, like birds in a storm. He is reflecting. He is a kind-hearted priest. He is imbued with the spirit of the Gospel. He is indulgent. Does he not know that some great saints have been great sinners? He desires to be kind. He knows how to be.
What can be the matter?
At last, Livette speaks. She tells him everything; the gipsy’s first appearance, her refusal to give her the oil she asked for insolently, with jeering remarks about extreme unction; then of the ominous spell she cast upon her, realized even now perhaps; the change in her Renaud’s character, his coldness, his flight; and then, that very morning, the scene of the snakes; how she had been attracted—partly by curiosity, no doubt, but also by her conviction that she should hear something of Renaud. And how she gave her hand to the gipsy to have her fortune told! That, she had done against her inclination! She knew that it was wrong. Who would have dared say a moment before that she would commit such a sin? But she was afraid of seeming cowardly, not because of what the world would say, but because of her, the gitana, in whose presence she deemed it her duty to display pride and courage. She felt that she was very hostile to her. She was afraid of her, and yet, in her despite, she would defy her. She was the stronger of the two.—At last, she arrives at her most shocking avowal—she is jealous. A terrible thought has come into her mind; is it possible that Renaud could——? But no. Did he not, to save her from Rampal, risk his life by leaping down from a first-floor window the whole height of the house? To be sure, Rampal had stolen a horse from Renaud, and Renaud had been looking for him for a long time——
Livette is undone. She has glanced at Monsieur le curé, who, before replying, is listening to his own thoughts, in order not to be diverted from the matter in hand. He is still playing with his clasped fingers, making them revolve about one another.
Around them the swans, the pelican, the red flamingo, the petrel, the ibis, look on with their eyes of glass imbedded in those heads that have lived! There they stand, those phantom birds, with wings outspread and one claw put forward, exactly similar in shape, color, and plumage to the birds that are soaring above the Nile and the Ganges, beyond seas, at this moment, and no less like other birds that lived six thousand years ago.
The reptile on the ceiling, laughing down at them with his numerous long, sharp teeth, does, in very truth, resemble some one a little—but whom?