GABRIELLE'S SEANCE
It was only a few minutes later that, shaking off the dreary sluggishness of my grief, I started out of the house for a brisk walk. Down through the village, out into the broad highway towards Briois, where the Diligence from Paris then shot past me, with salutations shouted from its windows, and handkerchiefs waved from its Imperial and still on, along the fields growing verdant, while the warm tremulous air, with its procreative touch, unclasped the glutinous envelopes of the buds in the alders and poplars, and afar towards Bienne, and the ruined chateau, the massed background of the walled forests spanned the horizon with a palpitating purple haze, as of an arrested atmosphere or emanation, and in the very zenith above me a creamy rosiness, like an etherial colored lymph, dripped from cloudlet to cloudlet.
How wonderfully beautiful it all was; its tenderness, the auroral lights of the sky, and the definite joy of the returning life; it renewed my courage, rather it put to flight the dull meanness of sottish fears and regrets. The verses of —— came to my mind, and aloud, on the straight road that was now darkening, as the day fled to the empyrean, and thence must fly over the great ocean to the wonderland of America, I repeated them:
O renouveau! Soleil! Tout palpite, tout vibre
Tout rayonne, et J'ai dit, ouvrant la main; "Sois libre,"
L'oiseau s'est évadé dans les rameaux flottants,
Et dans l'immensité splendide du printemps;
Et J'ai vu s'en aller au loin la petite âme
Dans cette clarté rose ou se mêle une flamme,
Dans l'air profond, parmi les arbres infinis,
Volant au vague appel des amours et des nids,
Planant éperdument vers d'autres ailes blanches,
Ne sachant quel palais choisir, courant aux branches,
Aux fleurs, aux flots, aux bois, fraîchement reverdis,
Avec l'effarement d'entrer au paradis....
Alors, dans la lumière et dans la transparence,
Regardant cette fuite et cette deliverance,
Et ce pauvre être, ainsi disparu dans le port,
Pensif, je me suis dit: "Je viens d'être la morte."
Then my thoughts reverted to the strange things Gabrielle had told me, to the mysterious experience she promised to lead me through, that night, and, as the stars stole one by one timorously out of the filmy shadows of the east, into the grey dark sky, I speculated on our relations with the unseen, and whether we might be so attuned, as Gabrielle seemed to be, to respond and feel that numerous company, and their thoughts, and wishes, their influences, and their designs? I knew, everyone knows, that the scale of sound runs beyond the coarse mechanism of our ears at either end of the gamut, as indeed there are rays of light which our eyes do not catch in the ultra-violet end of the spectrum. Could it be that actually we are immersed in a vast ocean of spiritualized animation, which we cannot apprehend—most of us—which touches us on every side, and is yet as unapproachable as the stars I was looking at, but, unlike the stars, is not even suspected.
But perhaps—so I mused—there were hierophants, translators of its mysteries, souls enriched with some finer sense, who felt it, saw it, or, like pulsating membranes that record the varying pressure of the air, were so marvellously made as to feel its pressure too. They were pendulums, swinging in two worlds, and passing from one to the other, as one might pass from darkness to light, from discord to harmony, from confusion to order, from the apparent and back again to the real. Of these was Gabrielle. Or they were doorways, windows, passages, that afforded access to us, the corporeal prisoners of the earth, through which they came back—les revenants—when they too dearly loved us to find even happiness in their new abode unless they might occasionally regain our company. Ah could it be so with Blanchette! And then the queer book of Du Maurier's (that was the name of the English artist who wrote it) came into my head, and the impossible fancy of the Martian woman living in the body or the brain of Barty Joselin, and the death of the girl Marty who had become the second home of the beautiful demon woman—the Martian sprite.
I half wondered whether Blanchette could come and tenant my own body, with me, or was she inhabiting Gabrielle? Ah—la folie—but should I indeed see her tonight? I hurried along the familiar road, now in a growing tempest and terror of mind, almost with, I cannot describe it, a queer sense of disembodiment, as if I, myself, were not in my flesh and blood, but some ghost of myself, with an engagement to meet the ghost I had loved—and yet loved. Thus I hastened backward in the night, and entered my home, where the lights burned most cheerfully, and found my parents and sister waiting for me, and Hortense—still with us, with her flagging energies helped out by a pretty brunette waitress Gabrielle had brought from Paris—impatient, at the table, for our evening repast.
"Alfred, we have been waiting for you. Tonight your mother and myself must go to Briois. There is to be a meeting there of the Protestant Union, and I am expected to say something on the needs of our country-side for religious instruction. I hope to be able to bring about the building of a little church where our people may have the consolations of their religion;" it was my father speaking.