With a spire like that of a cathedral, a poplar colossus with a hoary head dominated the leafage. I had always known it thus—a monumental tree—and the sight of it stirred in me the memories of my childhood.
Suddenly a flight of terror-struck birds escaped from it—two rooks left it, cawing, a squirrel jumped from branch to branch, and took refuge on the neighboring walnut tree.
Some unpleasant creature, climbing into the tree, had doubtless threatened their safety. I could not distinguish it, for a clump of bushes hid all the lower part of the poplar, but with a surprise that was almost pain I saw it quiver from the top to the roots, shake itself once or twice, and slowly sway its branches. One would have said that a breeze had sprung up which blew for it alone.
I thought of the woodcutters, without, however, forming a very precise conception of the part they might be playing in this drama.
“Can my uncle,” I said to myself, “have ordered them to execute the poplar—that venerable patriarch—that king of Fonval? That would be too much.”
Then, as I was on the point of asking Lerne about the matter, I perceived that he was in one of his fainting-fits.
I satisfied myself of the presence of the distinctive symptoms of his trouble, the immobility—the pallor—the fixed look—and I succeeded in determining what he was looking at with that persistent fixed stare of a somnambulist.
What he was gazing at was the poplar—that animate tree, whose appearance at the moment was recalling in so terrifying a way the date trees of the hothouse excited by love and battle.
I remembered the note-book. Was there not some appalling analogy between the absence of that man and the life of that tree?
Suddenly an ax smote the trunk with a sound as of low thunder. The poplar quivered, twisted about, and my uncle gave a start. His cup dropping from his hand, was dashed to pieces on the floor, and whilst his cheeks regained their color, he put his hand down quickly to his ankles, as if the ax had struck the man and the tree at the same blow.