The Story of André Cornélis

by Paul Bourget

Will you pardon me that falsehood which I told you in your last hours, O my beloved dead? Your desire that I should never read those fatal letters, which have begun to shed so terrible a light upon the past, arose from your solicitude to spare me the suspicions that had tortured yourself. On your death-bed your sole thought was for my happiness. Will you forgive me for having frustrated that foresight of the dying? I must speak to you, although I know not whether you can see me this day, or hear me, or even feel the emotion which goes out to you, beloved one, from my inmost soul. But, I am ashamed of having lied to you, when you thought only of being good to me, so good, so good that no human creature was ever better to another; and I am forced to tell you this. You, at least, I have never doubted; there is only one touch of bitterness in my thoughts of you; it is that I did not cherish you sufficiently while you were here with me, that I betrayed you in the matter of the last earthly desire of your pure soul.

I see you now, and those eyes which revealed your stainless but sorely wounded heart. You come to me, and you pardon me; your hand strokes my check with that sad, sad caress which you gave me before you went away into the darkness, where hands may no more be clasped or tears mingled. If death had not come to you too quickly, if I had obeyed your last desire, you would have carried the secret of your most painful doubts to the grave. You do not blame me now for having wanted to know? You no longer blame me for having suffered? A destiny exists, and weighs upon us, which requires that light shall be cast upon the darkness of that crime, that justice shall resume its rights, and the avenger come. By what road? That power knows, and uses strange weapons for its task of reparation. It was decreed, dear and pious sister of my murdered father, that your faithful cherishing of his dear memory should at last arouse my slumbering will. Reproach me not, O tender, unquiet spirit, with the torments which I have inflicted upon myself, with the tragic purpose to which I have sacrificed my youth. Rest, I say, rest! May peace descend upon the grave in which you sleep beside my father, in the cemetery at Compiègne, where I too shall find repose one day. And to think that to-morrow might be that day!

[IX]

My aunt died at nine o'clock in the evening. I closed her eyes, and sat by her side until eleven, when Julie came to me and persuaded me to go downstairs and eat something. I had taken nothing but a cup of coffee at noon. What a mournful meal was that in the dining-room, with its walls adorned with old china plates, where I had so often sat opposite to my dear aunt! A lamp stood on the table and threw a light upon the table-cloth just in front of me, but did not dispel the shadows in the room, which was warmed by a big earthenware stove, cracked by the heat. I listened to the noise of this stove, and it brought back the evenings in my childhood, when I used to roast chestnuts in the ashes of just such a fire, after I had split them, lest they should burst. I looked at Julie, who insisted on waiting upon me herself, and found her drying the big tears that rolled down her wrinkled cheeks with the corner of her blue apron. I have passed hours that were more cruel, but have never known any more poignant; and I may do myself the justice to record that grief absorbed every other feeling in me at first. During the whole of that dismal night I never for an instant thought of opening the packet of letters which I had obtained by so shameful a falsehood. I had forgotten its existence, although I had taken care to pick it up and take it to my own room. Where was now my curiosity to learn the secrets of those letters? I knew that I had just lost for ever the only being who had loved me entirely, and that knowledge crushed me. I wished to keep the watch by the side of the dead for part of the night, and I could not turn my gaze from that motionless face which had looked upon me for so many years with absolute and unbounded tenderness, but now lay before me with rigid features, closed lips, shut eyelids, and wearing an expression of profound sorrow such as I have never seen upon any other dead face. All the melancholy thoughts which had distilled their slow poison into her heart while she lived, were revealed by that countenance now restored to its truth. Ah! that expression of infinite sadness ought to have driven me on the instant to seek for its mysterious cause in the letters which had occupied her mind to the very brink of the grave, but how could I have had strength to reason while gazing on that mournful face? I could only feel that the lips which had never spoken any words but those of tenderness to me would utter them no more, that the hands which had caressed me so tenderly would clasp mine no more for ever. The nun who was watching the dead repeated the appointed prayers, and I found myself uttering the old forms in which I no longer believed. As I recited the Paternoster and the Ave, I thought of all the prayers which she, who lay at rest before me, had put up to God for my peace and welfare.

At three o'clock in the morning Julie came in to take my place, and I retired to my room, which was on the same floor as my aunt's. A box-room divided the two. I threw myself on my bed, worn out with fatigue, and nature triumphed over my grief. I fell into that heavy sleep which follows the expenditure of nerve power, and from which one awakes able to bear life again and to carry the load that seemed unendurable. When I awoke it was day, and the wintry sky was dull and dark like that of yesterday, but it also wore a threatening aspect, from the great masses of black cloud that covered it. I went to the window and looked out for a long time at the gloomy landscape closed in by the edge of the forest. I note these small details in order that I may more faithfully recall my exact impression at the time. In turning away from the window and going towards the fire which the maid had just lighted, my eye fell upon the packet of letters stolen from my aunt. Yes, stolen—'tis the word. It was in the place where I had put it last night, on the mantelshelf, with my purse, rings, and cigar-case. I took up the little parcel with a beating heart. I had only to stretch out my hand and those papers would fall into the flames and my aunt's dying wish be accomplished. I sank into an easy-chair and watched the yellow flame gaining on the logs, while I weighed the packet in my hand. I thought there must be a good many letters in it. I suffered from the physical uneasiness of indecision. I am not trying to justify this second failure of my loyalty to my dear aunt, I am trying to understand it.

Those letters were not mine, I never ought to have appropriated them. I ought now to destroy them unopened; all the more that the excitement of the first moment, the sudden rush of ideas which had prevented me from obeying the agonised supplication of my poor aunt, had subsided. I asked myself once more what was the cause of her misery, while I gazed at the inscription upon the cover, in my aunt's hand: "1864—Justin's Letters." The very room which I occupied was an evil counsellor to me in this strife between an indisputable duty and my ardent desire to know; for it had formerly been my father's room, and the furniture had not been changed since his time. The colour of the hangings was faded, that was all. He had warmed himself by a fire which burned upon that self-same hearth, and he had used the same low, wide chair in which I now sat, thinking my sombre thoughts. He had slept in the bed from which I had just risen, he had written at the table on which I rested my arms. No, that room deprived me of free will to act, it made my father too living. It was as though the phantom of the murdered man had come out of his grave to entreat me to keep the oft-sworn vow of vengeance. Had these letters offered me no more than one single chance, one against a thousand, of obtaining one single indication of the secrets of my father's private life, I could not have hesitated. With such sacrilegious reasoning as this did I dispel the last scruples of pious respect; but I had no need of arguments for yielding to the desire which increased with every moment.

I had there before me those letters, the last his hand had traced; those letters which would lay bare to me the recesses of his life, and I was not to read them! What an absurdity! Enough of such childish hesitation. I tore off the cover which hid the papers; the yellow sheets with their faded characters shook in my hands. I recognised the compact, square, clear writing, with spaces between the words. The dates had been omitted by my father in several instances, and then my aunt had repaired the omission by writing in the day of the month herself. My poor aunt! this pious carefulness was a fresh testimony to her constant tenderness; and yet, in my wild excitement, I no longer thought of her who lay dead within a few yards of me.

Presently Julie came to consult me upon all the material details which accompany death; but I told her I was too much overwhelmed, that she must do as she thought fit, and leave me quite alone for the whole of the morning. Then I plunged so deeply into the reading of the letters, that I forgot the hour, the events taking place around me, forgot to dress myself, to eat, even to go and look upon her whom I had lost while yet I could behold her face. Traitor and ingrate that I was! I had devoured only a few lines before I understood only too well why she had been desirous to prevent me from drinking the poison which entered with each sentence into my heart, as it had entered into hers. Terrible, terrible letters! Now it was as though the phantom had spoken, and a hidden drama of which I had never dreamed unfolded itself before me.

I was quite a child when the thousand little scenes which this correspondence recorded in detail took place. I was too young then to solve the enigma of the situation; and, since, the only person who could have initiated me into that dark history was she who had concealed the existence of the too-eloquent papers from me all her life long, and on her death-bed had been more anxious for their destruction than for her eternal salvation—she, who had no doubt accused herself of having deferred the burning of them from day to day as of a crime. When at last she had brought herself to do this, it was too late.

The first letter, written in January, 1864, began with thanks to my aunt for her New Year's gift to me—a fortress with tin soldiers—with which I was delighted, said the letter, because the cavalry were in two pieces, the man detaching himself from his horse. Then, suddenly, the commonplace sentences changed into utterances of mournful tenderness. An anxious mind, a heart longing for affection, and discontent with the existing state of things, might be discerned in the tone of regret with which the brother dwelt upon his childhood, and the days when his own and his sister's life were passed together. There was a repressed repining in that first letter that immediately astonished and impressed me, for I had always believed my father and mother to have been perfectly happy with each other. Alas! that repining did but grow and also take definite form as I read on. My father wrote to his sister every Sunday, even when he had seen her in the course of the week. As it frequently happens in cases of regular and constant correspondence, the smallest events were recorded in minute detail, so that all our former daily life was resuscitated in my thoughts as I perused the lines, but accompanied by a commentary of melancholy which revealed irreparable division between those whom I had believed to be so closely united. Again I saw my father in his dressing-gown, as he greeted me in the morning at seven o'clock, on coming out of his room to breakfast with me before I started for school at eight. He would go over my lessons with me briefly, and then we would seat ourselves at the table (without a table-cloth) in the dining-room, and Julie would bring us two cups of chocolate, deliciously sweetened to my childish taste. My mother rose much later, and, after my school days, my father occupied a separate room in order to avoid waking her so early. How I enjoyed that morning meal, during which I prattled at my ease, talking of my lessons, my exercises, and my school-mates! What a delightful recollection I retained of those happy, careless, cordial hours! In his letters my father also spoke of our early breakfasts, but in a way that showed how often he was wounded by finding out from my talk that my mother took too little care of me, according to his notions—that I filled too small a place in her dreamy, wilfully frivolous life. There were passages which the then future had since turned into prophecies. "Were I to be taken from him, what would become of him?" was one of these. At ten I came back from school; by that time my father would be occupied with his business. I had lessons to prepare, and I did not see him again until half-past eleven, at the second breakfast. Then mamma would appear in one of those tasteful morning costumes which suited her slender and supple figure so well. From afar, and beyond the cold years of my boyhood, that family table came before me like a mirage of warm homelife; how often had it become a sort of nostalgia to me when I sat between my mother and M. Termonde on my horrid half-holidays.