THE
WOOLLEN DRESS

HENRY BORDEAUX

AUTHOR OF “THE PARTING OF THE WAYS”

TRANSLATED BY

RUTH HELEN DAVIS

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1912

TO PIERRE LOTI

In dedicating to you this story of “The Woollen Dress,” I discharge a very old debt, a debt of my youth, when enthusiasm for your works—your poems, I ought rather to call them—flushed and exalted me as the first misty moments of the dawn suffuse the surface of the earth.

With what magic did you not gild our adolescent years! We were at the spoiled age of twenty, at the threshold of life’s work, when one arms one’s self against love, and indulges in yearnings for universal things which only later, alike with him who has lived too much and him who has not lived at all, accept their limitations and disenchantments;—we were twenty, and we found in you that melancholy which at twenty it is so sweet to breathe.

This book is the story of a quite simple young girl crushed by the cruelties of our modern life. When I hear children singing that old round, which I am sure you loved as well as I,

“We were ten girls in a field

All waiting to be married,”

I picture Claudine, Suzanne, Dumaine and their companions as a graceful chorus in which the voices of old France still sound. I call them by name and they come to me from all the provinces,—Sylvia from Valois and Marie from Brittany, the little Fadette from Berry, humble Genevieve from Dauphiné, and from Aunis that little Madeleine, whose feet tread the same crooked path where later Dominique must pass, drawn back by sorrow to his native land, “like an animal wounded and bleeding who yet knows his way home.” Here, too, are Mireille and Nerte, glowing with the sun of Provence, Gracieuse from Basque, and Colette from Metz.

In the field they were only ten. Can they not take by the hand a little sister who has such need of their protection, this Raymonde, that I have gathered from Savoy, who would like so much to join their game if she could do so without intrusion?

H. B.

CHALET DU MAUPAS, September 20, 1910.

CHAPTER
I [THE SLEEPING WOODS]
II [AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES]
III [THE FACE OF THIS WORLD CHANGES]

PART I
THE SLEEPING WOODS

AMAZED, enraptured, I gazed about me. This, surely, was the very forest of the Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Suddenly, at a turn of the road, her castle loomed up among the trees, huge and mysterious.

I had been pushing my bicycle, despite its various gears, up a long heavy slope. Once again in the saddle, I had penetrated into a wild valley, a mere gorge at first, then broadening into field and forest, with a pool in the lower distance. The brilliant bouquet that autumn can make if it pleases, of water and trees and bushes massed upon a mountain side, was before me—autumn, the flower time of the woods, when the heaviest burdens have fallen and the spring of trunk and branch and airy foliage show all the indescribable hues of light. Golden lindens, pale elms, ruddy chestnuts, copper horse-chestnuts, rusty oaks, purplish fruit trees, poplars like golden candle-sticks, form under the level rays of sunlight, a fairy train: it is a gay parade that would cause a thrill of joyful amazement, did not the lightest whispering breeze threaten the loss of all the marvellous attire. Dread and pleasure meet in October walks, dread that comes with the pleasure that is fleeting.

It was Sunday, and I had met no one. A village through which I had passed was as if dead. The women were no doubt at church, the men in the wine-shop. From the whole valley, as from a vast deserted garden, arose a perfume of old legend, which I inhaled with rapture. The country here had the look of some deserted park, and I was keen to discover some abandoned habitation in it. Any usual modern villa would have dishonoured this ageless landscape. Nothing would answer my mood but a confusion of ancient stones and wild vines, or at least real ruins, authentic and crumbling.

To tell the truth, it was not ruins that I had perceived on the hillside at the end of the avenue of more than century-old oaks. The avenue led up to a terrace ornamented by urns and stretching all along the front of the house. The urns were empty and no one had thought to mow the grass. The chateau was a large building, with mullioned windows, and a sort of cloister running its entire length, and but for these ivy wreathed arcades would have appeared almost commonplace. The dark tone of its walls gave it an aspect of venerable age, with all the added solitude of silence and the melancholy of the season and the surrounding forest. There it stood, in its own well-sheltered place, presenting its front, as an old man his face, to the warmth of the sun, letting the days flow by. A clump of yellow chrysanthemums and a few climbing roses gave it the look of a faint smile.

I dismounted to enter into communion with this old place. The gate was open; indeed the hinges, being sprung, would not allow it to be shut. A lodge at the entrance was almost hidden among the trees, overwhelmed as with a flood of greenery by their luxuriant growth. As I drew nearer I observed that several oaks had been replaced by horse-chestnuts, the rapid growth of which had speedily filled the gaps that time had made in the avenue.

A peasant was raking up the nuts, though they seemed to me to be uneatable.

“They are for my beasts,” he explained.

I at once proceeded to question him.

“What is the name of this chateau?”

“The chateau of the Sleeping Beauty, that is, of the Sleeping Woods.”

I could hardly have imagined a name more perfectly responding to the enchantment which had taken possession of me since my entrance into the valley.

“Was it not an ancient nunnery?”

“Perhaps—once upon a time, long ago. No one knows how long.”

“Before the Revolution?”

“Long before that. At the Revolution it belonged to the Count.”

“What Count?”

“Count d’Alligny. The same whose grandson sold it.”

“Sold it to whom?”

“To M. Cernay, the present owner.”

The name Cernay is known to every one nowadays as that borne by the millionaire aviator who has devoted himself to perfecting the aeroplane, and in the train of Bleriot, Latham, the Wrights, has experimented in the conquest of the air. I knew Raymond Cernay personally, having met him in society a few years ago, before he became interested in aviation, and I was proud of the acquaintance. He gave me the impression of a man richly endowed mentally, though perhaps too versatile, one who would find it difficult to fix upon any interest, likely to abandon every attempt if the outcome of it were within easy reach. He had begun to succeed in many things, giving them up, each one, at the first smile of success, as if a mere forecast of glory was all he sought. A few rough-hewn sculptures, the narrative of a journey in the Indies, daring century motor rides, brief scientific investigations had sufficed at that time to win for him a sort of reputation in society for originality. The reputation was fostered by constant change, and appeared to satisfy him, for above all things he valued the celebrity of the drawing room. During the last few years he had disappeared from Paris, doubtless to devote himself all the more fervently to the new passion of aviation.

I at once spread out my arms in imitation of a bird.

“Cernay—the one who flies?”

The man gazed at my pantomime with astonishment. He did not understand. Fame is short-lived. But there might be other Cernays. Pointing to the building I asked:

“Does he live here?”

“Not much, since his lady died.”

“His lady is dead? How long ago?”

“The grain has been reaped three times.”

Then, memory awakening within him, he added:

“I who tell you, I carried her to the grave. She was not very heavy, poor thing! But to know she was dead—that took the strength out of your arms and legs. All the villagers came.”

By the dates it might be Madame Cernay of whom he spoke. But she had passed away almost unnoticed. Her death, too early though it was, had not awakened such regret in Paris. It had occurred at a distance, in the country, unobtrusively. Raymond Cernay himself had not reappeared after it until the notable week of Rheims, when he had won the prize for altitude by an ascension in regular spirals, like the circles described by some gigantic bird of prey, and amid the applause of a delirious crowd, became in a moment the popular hero.

We are always ready to consider reserved persons, who ward off our confidences or fail to accord to our remarks all the importance we ourselves attach to them, as insignificant. This was the epithet with which she who was dead had been characterised in my hearing. My memory could at first revive her only as a colourless, washed out, vanishing figure. Then I vaguely recalled her hair, of many tinted blond, and her limpid eyes, so bright that one might suppose no shadow should ever have dimmed them. She was so reserved or so indifferent that people talked little with her. Once, chance having placed me beside her at a charity concert, I had been struck by an ecstatic expression on her usually pale countenance. Her face was suffused with colour, while on the stage a singer was interpreting, with an orchestral accompaniment, the air in Lulli’s Amadis:

O faithful wood, redouble now your shades,

You can not be too sombre—nothing fades

Too pale before my own too luckless love.

It is an entreaty and supplication to the familiar forest that Lulli develops with a classic regularity, which far from weakening the energy of its musical expression, is in fact strengthened by it. Not a single one of those crude imitations of nature sounds superficial and meaningless, such as the well-known “Murmurs” in Siegfried, marred the air, in which passion is restrained by purity, and by consciousness of its own danger; but its ardour is none the less felt for not being expressed in outcry and convulsive rhythm. Mme. Cernay at my side was veritably living again the sentiments of the great poem. The episode gave me an intuitive conviction that the imputation of insignificance put upon her by society to justify its neglect of her, was false. I recalled it now. Still she had either little conversational power, or cared little to use it; she never sought the slightest display of culture. She kept her impressions to herself. Certainly no one ever saw her posing, nor ever practising the slightest deception, as other women in society do, putting on knowledge of art like a new headdress.

I don’t know whether it was due to some dim conviction, or to curiosity now, that I asked the good man who had thus far been my informant:

“Where is the graveyard?”

The avenue crossed the country road by which I had come, and no doubt ended in a terrace, for at its extremity I could perceive nothing more of the near landscape, but only the slope of the distant mountain on the border of the valley. The road crossed the Cernay property, one of those expropriations, no doubt, which make no account of the decorative value of private estates. The peasant indicated the direction by a gesture.

“Over there.”

At the entrance of this part of the avenue were two granite columns, once evidently intended as supports for an iron chain, which, rusty and disused, was lying on the ground between them. I remounted my machine and urged it on over the rustling leaves. There were so many that I sank among them, and needed to take care not to be tripped up. Beyond the last two oaks I found, as I had expected, a terrace, from which, as from a balcony, one overlooked the deep valley. A pool in the hollow reflected the light of day, doubling the glory of the landscape, its banks of serried reeds, so close as to conceal their separate pliancy, forming a long golden barrier.

This was what I saw at first, as from a window one first sees the opposite distance and later takes in the nearer features of the scene. When I looked closer I perceived beside me on the right a chapel, and on the left, against a hillock, the little graveyard for which I was looking.

What a charming, sunny little graveyard it was! Girdled with a newly whitewashed wall, overrun with wild plants, it had the look rather of a deserted garden patch than of a cemetery. Here and there a cross pierced the thick green, making itself the trellis for some shrub. The lovely coral clusters hanging from one or two roan trees achieved an aspect almost of gaiety for the little enclosure. Sloping gently and with a fine exposure it seemed quite literally a tiny garden plot. It invited to terrestrial rest, not the eternal repose of death. No idea of the end of things was in this place.

I wanted to sun myself on the wall there like a lizard, and had to resist the temptation. I entered, and before I realised it was searching for the grave of some one I hardly knew. The monument of the Allignys, crenelated like a fortress and crowned with a truncated pillar, first caught my eye. Happily the passing of this ancient family had given nature and the audacious weeds an opportunity to make successful headway against man’s domination. No other monument looked down upon these flower beds. Was the millionaire Cernay, noted for his love of pomp, so neglectful of his wife’s memory? No—at last a very simple tombstone, hardly higher than the weeds, showed me an inscription, though I could read it only by raising the ivy beneath which it lay half hidden:

RAYMONDE CERNAT
BORN MAIRIEUX
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

How potent is the idea of youth! The mere reminder of her years upon this tombstone gave at once to the neglected plot its touch of glory and majesty. With an involuntary gesture I removed my hat. Not less mechanically I turned to go. If the forest had flung down the last of its beautiful flower-tinted leaves dead upon the ground in the meantime I should not have been surprised. I had felt too keenly my experiences of the morning: it was as if now, in a gust of wind, I felt the passing by of death.

On my return, as my old man was still raking up his chestnuts, I resumed my questions:

“Can one visit the chateau?”

“Ask the steward.”

“Where is he?”

In reply he simply pointed to the lodge.

The land steward received me in a glass-enclosed dining room which resembled a conservatory. It opened upon the woods, though the trees were not near enough to shut out the air. An invitation to rest there could not but be most agreeable. I was at once politely invited to drink and smoke, for my host was at the moment filling his pipe, with an open bottle of white wine at his elbow. The sun shone upon his half-filled glass in sparkles of dull gold.

“You see,” he explained, “I have already made my rounds on horseback this morning.”

I too had been in the saddle all the morning, and so I accepted his invitation to fellowship. He was a man of some sixty years, holding himself a little too upright, as if to resist a tendency to stoop. He had the ruddy skin of those who live much in the open air, a colour emphasised by his white hair. One would have taken him, at a first glance, for an old cavalry officer worn out in the service. But he showed nothing of that apparent assurance acquired by the habit of command. His blue eyes had a confiding expression such as one used to see in those of young girls. I was prepared, from our first libation in common, to find a certain familiarity, but not the air of distinction and total absence of pose, the nobility of manner, unobtrusive and innate, that shrouded his simplicity as a tower in ivy. He bore the true hallmark of ancient lineage. In neither his person nor his speech was there anything superficial.

At first he met my request with a refusal. To begin with there was nothing to see in the chateau. But he had hardly made the statement when, as if from an instinctive horror of falsehood, he corrected himself with an exception: perhaps a few old tapestries and pieces of furniture, and a small Italian painting, no bigger than that, representing an Annunciation. At once, I knew not why, perhaps because of his very reserve, a strong desire to see the interior of the chateau took possession of me, and I repeated my request, pleading my acquaintance with M. Cernay.

“That is another thing. I will take you,” he said.

In the avenue I expressed regret that I should not see the owner, adding:

“But he seldom comes here.”

“Oh, no,” said my friend. “He will be here in a few days. He always spends the month of November here. He comes before All Saints’ Day, on account of my daughter.”

“Of your daughter?”

The steward looked at me in some surprise.

“Did you not know that he married my daughter, and that we have lost her?”

There was no ostentation in the reminder, only a deep sadness. I told him of my visit to the graveyard.

“Could you find her grave? It is hidden among the others.”

“Yes, only an ivy covered stone. But there is so much of youth in the inscription that it goes to the heart.”

“My wife would have liked a different monument. But it is enough.”

The cloister surrounding the chateau, with the purity of its arches, over which vines and clematis clambered at will, was a joy to see.

“It is all that remains of the ancient nunnery,” my guide explained. “The nunnery was abandoned in the seventeenth century for another religious house, larger and more severe, that of Saint Hugo, and the family of the Count d’Alligny took possession. The present Count sold the estate to M. Cernay. I had been steward in his day. He lost all his money at the gaming table; he cared for nothing so much as play. He was an excellent man.”

“What has become of him?”

“He is in command of the four soldiers of the Prince of Monaco, and having not a sou to lose he looks on while other men ruin themselves. The occupation diverts him. And yet I had administered his estate well. But he cared nothing for the land. No one cares for the land any more.”

“Not you?”

“Oh, I! I have walked these woods so long that I know every tree of them. I used to walk here so much with my daughter when she was a little girl.”

The memory of his daughter visibly obsessed him. Was it that he wished to remind me of her brilliant marriage? Hardly: because he seemed, as I have said, so utterly free from snobbery.

We found ourselves in the dwelling rooms, and he pointed to a portrait.

“When she used to run the country with me she was not so pale and thin.”

I recognised her pallor, a bloodlessness which the artist’s palette had not flattered. In the sumptuous ball dress in which she was tricked out her bare arms and shoulders seemed to embarrass her. One felt that they were cold, and almost looked to see the goose flesh. To this impression of discomfort the eyes added an impression of timidity, almost of fear. For a moment I thought that it was a sort of ecstasy which held her thus rigid—had I indeed not seen her almost shivering, listening to the air from Amadis? Examining the portrait more closely I attributed the expression to fear—excessive modesty or secret wretchedness, a mystery now unfathomable, one which the artist had either penetrated or unconsciously revealed. She reminded one of those portraits of Spanish Infantas whose youth seems stifled by etiquette and tight lacing. Presently I discovered another resemblance.

By way of showing some degree of sympathy, I asked:

“You lost her so early: of what malady did she die?”

“No one knows.”

The tone of the reply was so full of pain that I involuntarily coupled his enigma with that of the portrait.

Just then I discovered the small Italian picture which the steward had mentioned, and hastened to ask for a better light upon it. It was an Annunciation, somewhat dark in tone, but surprisingly delicate, and easily to be attributed to the school of da Vinci. The subject was treated in the manner of that Ufizzi Annunciation in Florence in which people have found the special mark and stamp of the master’s style. The angel has just delivered his message: he has spoken, and now he bends the knee before the future mother of God. How touching she is in her surprise, her modesty and embarrassment! She crosses her hands upon her breast, as if to hold in check a heart that would leap from its resting place. She cannot refuse so high an honour, yet she feels herself unworthy; she is happy; and yielding under the burden of divine love she offers to God her readiness to endure the suffering that is to come.

I stood long before this picture, deeply moved by it: it was so perfect, so full of grace. Then a resemblance began to force itself upon me. The countenance of Mme. Cernay incontestably recalled that emotion, that modest embarrassment. She might have posed long ago for that portrait of the Virgin. There was the same tender grace, the same elongation of the throat, the same slimness and even the same light in the startled eyes. I remarked the fact aloud.

“My son-in-law bought this canvas because of the resemblance of which you speak,” said M. Mairieux.

“It is striking.”

“No doubt.”

And the steward turned his head towards his trees, as if under the influence of a sadness which he would fain hide from me, and which it was not for me to fathom.

By a refined delicacy, and as if anticipating probable comments, he took pains as we descended the stairs to dwell upon the generosity of his son-in-law, which I might have questioned on seeing that he himself retained his subordinate functions.

“We do not live in the chateau, my wife and I, though M. Cernay has begged us to do so. Why should we change our way of life? In this great building I should not feel at ease as in our lodge: we should need too large a household. And he won’t let me render the accounts of the estate to him; he pretends that the revenues are so small and hard to collect. He gave me my horse Zeno, which is of Farbeo pedigree, strong and sturdy as I like a horse to be. Did you not see him as I came in from my ride?”

“You had come in before my arrival.”

“Would you like to see him in his box?”

Condescendingly I accompanied him to the stable and admired the hind quarters of an ill-tempered brown beast which seemed more than willing to kick me. His owner calmed him with cajoling words, as a personage accustomed to flattery.

“There is not a gentler animal,” he assured me. “When I am on Zeno’s back, and in the Maiden’s Wood, I let myself live in my memories.”

In friendly wise he detailed his present pleasures. No doubt his country instincts would have found satisfaction in the monotonous administration of the estate, but for the tragedy caused in his peaceful existence by the untimely death of his daughter. A question came to my lips.

“Madame Cernay left no child?”

“Yes, indeed, a daughter, Dilette,” he answered. “Our little Dilette. My son-in-law entrusts her to us in the summer. In winter she needs more sunshine than we can give her here, on account of the trees. She will soon go away with her father. It is not a cheerful thought. See! There she is!”

A child of six or seven years, with long hair flying, was at the moment crossing the greensward. Lightly she skipped along, her feet hardly touching the ground, like a bird learning to fly. The moment she saw me she ran away. My host smiled, approving and disapproving at once.

“She is shy,” he said, “as her mother was.”

I was about to take my leave, when he earnestly begged me to come into the house.

“Madame Mairieux would be charmed to receive you,” he said.

I excused myself to the best of my ability, pleading the early hour, my bicycle costume. He would not let me off, and I perceived from his kindly pertinacity that a scolding would be his lot should he permit his wife to be defrauded of a visit—a rare event in these parts, no doubt. I was therefore admitted to the presence of Mme. Mairieux, who, I assumed, had been watching me, not without some ill-humour, from the window, since we found her at that early hour all tricked out in silk and lace; unless, indeed it might be her Sunday garb she had on. She was certainly endowed with charm and Conversational ability, though the charm was a bit affected and the conversation that of the fashion papers and the women’s magazines. I at once made a distinction in favour of her husband, though he kept silence and appeared to be dominated by her. She talked intimately of “Raymond,” and, not without a certain satisfaction, of the chateau in which they might live whenever it pleased them so to do.

“But M. Mairieux detests luxury and even comfort. And M. Mairieux must be heard too, for he will hear no one.”

I turned toward M. Mairieux, who made no protest. Possibly he was endowed with that gentleness possessed by obstinate folk, who quietly escape from everything that does not accord with their pleasure. The want of harmony between the pair was patent, but, contrary to first appearances, the reins of government were in the husband’s hands.

Mme. Mairieux confirmed the report of M. Cernay’s approaching arrival. “He always comes for All Saints’ Day,” she said.

And when for the second time I spoke of my visit to the graveyard she asked me if I did not deem her daughter’s tombstone very mean. She would have desired a larger monument, a colonade, a broken vase, a weeping angel; at least something that might be seen from a distance and would speak of grief.

“No, no,” interposed M. Mairieux, “a stone is enough.”

My leave-taking was quite a ceremony. I was about to occupy quarters in the neighbourhood, at the hunting lodge of Sylve-Benite, where I was to find my baggage. I promised to return and renew my acquaintance with M. Cernay, who was to be duly informed of my proximity. Just as I was bestriding my machine, little Dilette again crossed the court on the run, her long hair floating upon the breeze like wings. With this vision before me I turned my back upon the chateau of the Maiden of the Wood.

Was this in Savoy? In Dauphine? I have forgotten to say. But what does it matter? I recall to mind a ballad with the recurring refrain:

Was it in Brittany? Was it in Ireland?

Perhaps in the land of the King of Thule.

If I am not more definite every one will think it was in Savoy!

One evening about five o’clock as I came in from the chase, a hare in my game bag, a fine fatigue in my legs and my stomach empty down to my heels, I found an urchin awaiting me at Sylve. He was the bearer of a pressing letter from Mme. Mairieux, begging me to dine with her on the sudden and unannounced arrival of her son-in-law. Between Sylve Benite and the Maiden of the Wood there are two good leagues. In case of need one can cover three-quarters of the distance on the bicycle by a bad road, which shakes one to pieces, and I should greatly have preferred to be spared such a night march, and remain peacefully in my lair, where the soup was already simmering over the fire. But an inexplicable impulse of curiosity or vanity urged me to visit Raymond Cernay—the victor of Bethany.

“Very well, I will go,” said I to the small messenger. “Go on ahead. I will change my clothes and overtake you with my machine.”

He smiled with a knowing air, for he was riding an old nag which it might not be easy to distance. In fact, I did not see him again. When I descended the avenue the chateau with its cloister was half buried in obscurity, lighted at but a single window. I rang at the lodge: which on the other hand was resplendent with light. I had put on my most elegant hunting suit, but I regretted the lack of formality when I saw Mme. Mairieux in great pomp of toilette and her husband ill at ease in a frock coat which he must have exhumed with difficulty from the wardrobe in which it had been buried. I was beginning to dread M. Cernay’s dinner coat, when I was informed with no little embarrassment that he would not be of the party.

“He begs you to excuse him,” explained Mme. Mairieux. “An indisposition. The long journey—”

The steward, more sincere, came out with the truth:

“He desires to be alone. He always shuts himself up thus the first few days. I told my wife how it would be.”

“And your granddaughter,” I asked. “Will she hide again?”

“Dilette? She was here just now. She ran away when she saw you. She was afraid of you. Faces frighten her, but danger, never.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“In her usual place I’ll wager, perched upon the cloister wall, waiting for some adventure to come to pass—an apparition of angels, or the arrival of a knight on horseback. Wait a little: perhaps I can persuade her to come.”

M. Mairieux returned with the fugitive, whom he had succeeded in taming. The grandfather and grandchild had no doubt come to understand one another by their walks in the forest together. I looked more closely at the child, of whom I had barely caught a glimpse on my first visit. Her hair, golden at the ends of the curls, paler blond on her head, fell unconfined far down her back. She was small and slight with legs and arms of no size at all, and yet her slightest motion revealed the easy play, the facile grace of the swift runner. Her dark eyes, at once limpid and deep, like still water pools, encircled by shade, the transparency of which serves no purpose, were wide open, and far too shy for the eyes of a child. Had her mother transmitted to her some of that mysterious fear that haunted her?

I paid systematic court to this little girl of six and a half years. At coffee she handed me sugar, remembered to remove my empty cup, and shortly after she was perched upon my knee. Proud indeed I was of the conquest.

“It is surprising,” remarked Mme. Mairieux, somewhat disconcerted by the importance which I attached to the incident.

But her husband was unreservedly delighted with my attentions to Dilette. As for Dilette, she would not go to bed. Only a scolding could detach her from the place to which I had enchained her with stories.

“You’ll tell me some more, won’t you, Sir?”

“Surely.”

“Stories with afraid in them?”

We parted the best friends in the world.

* * *

Two days later, passing that way, gun on shoulder, I perceived her slim little figure in the part of the avenue that leads to the graveyard. It stood out sharply against the sunlit arch. She was kicking her feet through the dead leaves, which rose as it were in a wave before her. All the golden autumn was pouring itself in light upon the child, and all unknowingly she adapted herself to it, miraculously. When she saw me she darted to one side and would have hidden behind the oaks. I called to her, reassuringly:

“Dilette, don’t you know me?”

She stopped at the sound of my voice: in two or three leaps, like a young greyhound, she was beside me.

“Have you run away, Dilette?”

“No, papa is over there with flowers.”

“With flowers?”

“Yes, that he is taking to mamma.”

“And you?”

“I got tired of it. So he told me to go back.”

“All alone?”

“This is our place, and I know it all.”

She gravely led me toward the chateau when it appeared that I was minded to join Cernay.

“We mustn’t disturb papa. He doesn’t like any one to talk to him when he is there.”

“Very well, let us go.”

We installed ourselves upon the low cloister wall, Dilette with her legs swinging, I leaning against a pillar under the pendant sprays of the wild vines whose reddening leaves clambered over the arches.

“Now,” she said, “a story, quick!”

Rapidly I reviewed in mind my repertory of myths and legends, choosing from it a touching version by Tennyson of an ancient ballad. Do you know it perhaps? If not I must tell it to you too. Try to imitate Dilette and listen very quietly, for it is necessary to follow this story if you would understand what is to come in my book.

* * *

THE STORY

The eyes of the little shepherdess were fastened upon the picture which the poor painter who had lately come to the village was making at the edge of the forest. Upon a square of canvas no bigger than that he had put everything one could see,—or almost everything. How could he do it? It was wonderful!

He gave the last stroke of the brush, then turned and looked into her face as if he would like to carry it away with him. She was the prettiest and best girl in all the country-side.

“You are beautiful,” he said; “did you know it?”

She laughed gaily as if pleased.

“The fountain told me so,” she said.

“Did it tell you something else?”

“What else?”

“That you please me?”

And he added, softly: “Will you be my wife?”

She turned her face away, trembling with happiness, for she loved him secretly.

“Yes,” she murmured.

They were married in the village church. But before leading her to their home, a little thatched cottage on the edge of the wood, he turned toward the fields:

“Let us take a walk, while the sun shines,” he said; “we can go home when evening comes. Shall we go to the great castle, away over there? I have heard wonderful things about it. You have never seen it, have you?”

She smiled disdainfully.

“I would not exchange our little home for it,” she said.

But he asked again: “Don’t you want to see the castle?”

“I want whatever you want,” she said.

They went beyond the end of the parish and through the gate of a park into a long shady avenue of ancient oaks. Far away at the end of the avenue they could see the castle. Evening was coming on; the branches of the trees leaned kindly over them. The birds were singing, but they heard only their own hearts.

As they drew near the castle, the dogs came running out.

“I am afraid,” she said.

“With me?”

But the dogs barked joyfully and licked the young man’s hands.

“Why, they know you!” she said.

“I have been here sometimes,” he answered.

They went up the steps of rose-coloured marble.

“We may go in,” he said. “Visitors are allowed.”

They went in, and he showed her all the glories of the palace. While he was pointing out the beauty of the pictures and furniture, the convenience and luxury of the rooms, she was all the time thinking of the little white cottage among the trees. They would be going there soon. He had showed it to her the evening before, saying: “Here is the fireside where we shall warm ourselves when winter comes. It is small and mean, but love is enough for us, is it not?” Yes, love was enough. She would love him so tenderly that he would never think again of this fine castle, to which he had no right to bring her.

He saw that she was not noticing what he showed her.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked.

“Of you,” she said, simply.

They had reached the great drawing room, where there were windows upon all sides through which one could see the trees and fountains of the park. The sun was setting, and the mirrors reflected its last rays.

“It is getting late,” she whispered. “Shall we go home?”

He bowed low before her, smiling.

“This castle is yours, Madame.”

The vast room echoed with the young wife’s merry laugh.

“Mine!”

He replied gravely:

“Yes, yours. I am the Lord of Burleigh. All that I have is yours, with my heart.”

She turned pale and was obliged to lean against the wall, near the window. The view from it, at that sunset hour, was full of peaceful beauty. Far away, the little white cottage reflected the sunlight.

“Alas!” she murmured softly, as if her happiness was gone.

“I chose you before all others,” he went on, “because you are beautiful and good. And I wanted to win your love apart from my rank and fortune.”

Until then he had always said “thou” to her, as the country people did, but now he was saying “you.”

“Why did he so suddenly stop saying ‘thou,’” she whispered to herself. But not wishing to disappoint him, she smiled upon him sweetly, though with sadness.

She soon became mistress of herself, and acted as I was fitting in her new estate. But every evening when she was alone, she would stand weeping, at the window from which she could see the little white cottage among the trees.

“Ah,” she would think, “if only he were still the poor, proud artist who could put all the country-side upon a square of canvas, and bounded our horizon with his love of me!”

Soon she began to pine away. Not doctors, nor journeys to new places, nor amusements, nor all the attention and comforts that money could buy were to make her strong again. One summer evening, like that on which she had first come to the castle, she leaned her head against the window casing and closed her lovely eyes for ever.

“We cannot tell of what disease she died,” said the doctors.

“But I know,” said the Lord of Burleigh, bowed down with grief.

Then he called to her attendants: “Put her in her wedding gown. The simple woollen dress which she wore when she came Here, that she may rest in peace.”

* * *

I realise that this was hardly a story for a little girl of six or seven; a tale of disillusionment, rather; of use in discouraging the ambitious,—if the ambitious trouble themselves about the poets—teaching the beauty of a humble lot in an age when every one is envious of his neighbour and eager to push himself into the foreground. But a whole flood of questions and comments from Dilette explained and embellished it. What is an outskirt? A thatched cottage? An horizon? A doctor who does not understand sickness? etc.—

I admit, too, that the ending is sad enough, and that when Dilette demanded some changes, in particular a happier conclusion, I should have been willing to revive my heroine, if the angry man who intervened had given me time. I admit whatever you wish. But certainly all this did not warrant the scolding I received from Raymond Cernay, who had crept silently behind the cloister wall, and now sprang up so abruptly that he both frightened and shocked us.

“Leave that child alone, if you please!”

I am telling the exact truth: he spoke to me thus rudely. In a second I was on my feet, angry, and my face crimson. My first words challenged him without regard for politeness.

Now I ask you whether any man has a right to behave in this way to a person who is taking enough interest in his progeny to sit on top of a wall and teach her English ballads. Dilette, herself, although she did not dare say anything, suffered from the paternal injustice. Such a lack of courtesy, she realised, was not likely to help our future relations. Cernay turned to his daughter.

“Go find your grandfather and say good-night to this gentleman who has been trying to entertain you.”

This pacified me somewhat, and still more the gracious good-night that Dilette purposely emphasised. When the child had gone, Cernay appeared to hesitate over his course; then he resolutely commenced a strange catechism, to which, I confess, I submitted with a bad grace, for his ridiculous injunction still rang in my ears.

“How do you know what happened?” he began.

“What do you mean?” I retorted.

“What happened in my home. Who told you?”

“I do not understand,” I answered.

“You understand very well—but the heroine of your story did not die as you said. Her husband killed her. Her husband, do you understand? But of course you know that—only you did not want to say so to my little girl. You were very wise—I was there, I heard every word—and I should not have allowed you to go on. One does not talk to a child about her mother’s unhappiness.”

My anger left me. Cernay was evidently crazy. He had suddenly imagined that he was Lord Burleigh. His experiments in aviation, which taxed too heavily his daring and presence of mind, possibly also, his disappointment and isolation, had unsettled his mind. In order not to provoke him, I decided to humour him.

“Follow me,” he commanded imperiously.

The prospect was not very reassuring. Night was falling and I did not care for a walk in the country with an individual who gave every evidence of being demented.

He led me, however, directly to the garden-like grave of Madame Cernay, whence the mingled fragrance of the flowers rose to us, though the gathering dusk obscured their colours. There, my companion became lost in his memories. Forgetting my presence and his own pride, he permitted at intervals a kind of wail of agony to escape him. Yet I was not greatly affected by this manifestation of despair, because, dreading some more dangerous happening, I devoted my attention to a close watch upon his movements. When he had grown calmer, he was to astonish me still more. We were walking back up the avenue through the night, when at last he decided to speak:

“I was at fault just now,” he said. “Forgive me. That story which you were telling my daughter—I don’t know where you found it.”

“In Tennyson,” I hastened to reply, in order to clear myself of my unknown offence.

“It caused me much pain.”

“You?” I asked.

“It is so much like my own,” he replied.

This, then, was the explanation of his distress. I had attributed it to madness but it was really only the expression of a protracted agony, of a secret that had been kept too long and was now perhaps ripe for confidence. He continued to accuse himself in broken phrases.

“It was I who killed her, do you understand? Some murderers are less cruel. They only strike once. They do not kill gradually, by a slow fire. She forgave me. And I—instead of expiating my crime, I am preparing to commit another. Oh, I hoped, I dared, to take up my life again. Since my return here, the past has gripped me, possessed me absolutely again, and I feel a savage pleasure in coming back to it—”

Without any farewell, he turned away, in what direction I could not tell. Night enveloped us. I lost sight of him almost immediately, and returned to my quarters at Sylve-Benite, surprised and dumbfounded by such an unexpected revelation, a revelation which the future was so strangely to fulfil.

* * *

After a farewell day of fairly good shooting I prepared to leave Sylve-Benite, despite the peace and quiet that I had enjoyed there, and I was collecting my luggage when Raymond Cernay called upon me. He charged up at a full gallop, on M. Mairieux’s horse, and the hardy animal must have been pushed beyond reason for he was badly blown. It was five or six days after our singular meeting. Cernay noticed my preparations and demanded abruptly:

“You are leaving.”

“As you see,” said I.

“Where are you going?”

“I am going home.”

“Is it necessary?”

“We must always go home in the end.”

“But nobody is waiting for you?”

“No, nobody.”

“Very well, then, I will take you with me.”

“Where?”

“To the chateau. You can stay there several days, as long as you wish. Your luggage is ready. Come.”

I was so far from expecting this invitation that I had myself thrown away all pretexts for declining. Nevertheless I was determined to refuse it, the more so on account of the peremptory way in which it was given, much as a millionaire with money to spare might throw down a little cash. “Come, now,” he seemed to say, “strap up your valise, you are wanted.” Without troubling my conscience, therefore, I invented some pressing obligations.

“But just now you did not mention any of those things,” he said.

“I had not thought, then,” I replied.

Raymond Cernay made an angry movement. Apparently he did not admit the possibility of the least opposition from any one, or possibly he was in a highly nervous condition.

“No, no, no,” he repeated, “you will come.”

“I am exceedingly sorry.”

“I wish it.”

I could not keep from smiling as I listened to him storming, ordering and commanding. He was ashamed of making an exhibition of his temper, and he changed his tone with a promptitude that amazed and touched me.

“Yes,” he said. “I am not yet chastened. Shall I ever be? It is not easy when one has taken the wrong turn from childhood. I always knew that I could satisfy every one of my whims, and so I could not endure opposition. Even misfortune does not always succeed in humbling us. You must excuse my brusqueness.”

Then he added, pleadingly:

“Won’t you come with me. They are waiting for you, M. and Mme. Mairieux, and Dilette especially. Dilette wants you. She asks every one for stories, stories like yours. I cannot tell them to her; I have never learned them.”

“Ah, Dilette wants me.”

He dwelt upon his daughter’s wishes, until out of respect to my wild little friend, whom I was proud to have conquered, I permitted myself to be convinced, or rather to be carried off, for we left without delay, he on Zeno and I on my bicycle. My luggage would be sent for. That evening I was installed in the chateau.

* * *

I sincerely believe that my arrival there was a pleasure to every one. The atmosphere pervading the chateau was troubled with mists which the presence of a stranger might perhaps succeed in dissipating. I am not speaking only of Dilette, who bounded to welcome me like a dog wild with joy, but also of M. and Mme. Mairieux, who despite their long life together had neither feelings nor opinions in common, and above all of Raymond Cernay, who, to all appearances was not in a state of mental equilibrium. He had urged his daughter as a pretext to secure me, when in fact he sought assistance for himself.

For the first few days he monopolized me. The emptiness or the bitterness of his life he lightened with fishing, shooting, riding, and walking. He had long since retired from all intercourse with other men. Hitherto his unhappiness, his mechanical studies, his experiments and his flights had sufficed to interest him. Now, however, yielding to his old taste for society, or perhaps simply to the thousand and one charms and attractions of everyday life, which does not long permit us to defy it, he felt the need of a companion and sought one. His daughter he surrounded with an almost passionate affection, yet he did not know how to talk with her as one talks with a child. He recognised this and left her, not without sorrow, to M. Mairieux, who understood both the child’s bursts of confidence and her reserve. I noticed, not without surprise, the respect that Cernay showed his father-in-law, though he exhibited too such embarrassment in the older man’s presence that of his own accord he kept out of his way.

I soon believed that I had found the explanation of his character. Out of conjugal loyalty he imposed upon himself each year one month of solitude in this dwelling in the heart of the woods, and little by little the solitude became intolerable to him. Boredom preyed upon him, he turned about in his prison like a tiger in a cage. I supplied him with a diversion. He was faithful to the grief in his heart, to his abiding love. But, then, what can one expect? He did not know how to feast upon his sorrow, how to satiate himself with it. Few people do. Introspection had played but a small part in his life. His days had been consumed by the need of physical activity. Within him a similar fever had devoured that tender affection which was most dear to him, and he was grief-stricken at his helplessness to fan its ashes into flame.

Thus I analysed his restlessness. I deceived myself thoroughly, it afterwards appeared; but how could I then have perceived its complex causes?

* * *

In the course of our walks I noticed the minute and prolonged study that he invariably bestowed upon the sky before we started. He was skilled in interpreting the form and movements of the clouds; those cumuli, lying on the horizon like snow hills, would dissolve in rain; these parasites hanging upon the summits of the mountains heralded a storm. I saw him sniff the air, examining it, one might say, as a hunter studies the depths of the woods and inhales their odour, or a fisherman scrutinises the mysteries of the water.

“It is the enemy,” he confided to me one day. “It is invisible and formidable. Before attacking it, we must try to understand it.”

I knew that he was thinking of his flying machines, and while we walked on to a neighbouring pond, I questioned him about the origin of his sudden interest in aviation.

“It is no sudden interest,” he explained. “I have always loved the conquest of space. The same motor drives the automobile and the aeroplane. Is not the rudder for the air much like that which steers a sailboat at sea? One grows out of the other. But what does the sensation of speed amount to, compared with the satisfaction of springing free from the soil and attaining true liberty at last? And the field is infinite.”

I listened without interrupting him, knowing that he was interested only in his own visions.

“She did not dissuade me when I thought of it before.” (He did not mention his wife more directly.) “To her, work was the glory of man. ‘I am afraid,’ she said to me, ‘but I will pray. A woman can afford to be afraid.’ The other, at Rheims, always cried to me to go higher.”

What other? I abandoned any attempt to understand this unexplained allusion. On several previous occasions I had questioned his incoherent remarks. This time it was better not to interrupt him.

“After I lost her, I endured days of agony. I should have been glad to punish myself, to scourge myself.”

Again I found trembling on his lips the same confession of some mysterious guilt which had come when he heard “The Lord of Burleigh.” Here was the secret that tormented him. After a moment’s hesitation he went on:

“Even in the greatest suffering, the desire for life keeps its power. It seemed to me that danger would bring me nearer to her and at the same time in danger there is an exaltation which carries you one does not know where. Perhaps my vocation, as you call it, is due to that. Some old investigations and scientific studies had prepared me for it. I have perfected somewhat the work of others, but I have not yet invented anything. My merit is unimportant. Do not exaggerate it. Only good luck and a certain audacity have enabled me to attain interesting results. Ah, if I could discover some automatic way to assure lateral stability, that would be another story.”

Our path ended in the reeds along the bank of the pond. He cast loose the boat that was moored there, and I took the oars, while he steered. After we had pushed off, he continued:

“The monoplane which I use I have named for her, but nobody knows it. Very soon I shall not have the right to do so.”

Why would he not have the right?

I inquired about his experiments in altitude.

“I must fly high,” he replied. “It is an irresistible fascination, a necessity. Above my two wings, I possess the infinite. The air surrounds me, bathes me, caresses me, as this water does our boat. I forget the noise of the motor, the buzzing of the propeller. Energy clamours within me. My wings shift about, like extended arms, to ensure control. A horseman is no more one with his living mount than I am with my machine. I experience a new calm, a peace like that of religion. She is with me, she does not speak, she smiles. She is no longer a victim of the fear that paralysed her on earth. It is just as if I were carrying her to her heaven. I am quite sure that I shall never again cause her any harm. As long as my flight lasts, I am scarcely a separate being from her. Between my suspended life and her invisible one, there is no longer anything but a thin veil.—But we fly too seldom. The machines need incessant repairing.”

In the very act of describing his sensations to me, he had forgotten me. It was to himself, rather than to me, that he continued:

“Some wood and linen, a little steel, and a few wires, and you have an arrow with which to cleave the air. It is not complicated. And yet, how much study, how much preparation and effort in order to fly a few hours, a few hours without touching earth, while we do not take the trouble to learn to know a soul which trusts itself to us, which would carry us equally high in life, if we understood it.”

Expressed though it was in incoherent phrases, his exaltation won me, and I begged him some day to take me with him. But he refused with unexpected violence.

“Do not ask me that. I have never carried a single passenger. My solitude is necessary to me, the comforting solitude of space. The Rheims woman asked me to take her. She wished to drive away the other. Ah, I used to think that some day I would break my wings while in full flight. It would have been a good end, and so easy, nothing but the cutting of a rope. Nobody would have suspected. But it is impossible. It would mean betraying the machine, allowing a false suspicion to rest upon it. It can play false: the man it carries—no.”

I laid down the oars. He had already abandoned the rudder, and we drifted with the current. Seated in the back of the boat, he stared down at our wake. Thoughts of death or madness accompanied us like sombre birds. From that moment I began to alter my opinion of the intensity of his memories, in which remorse for some crime showed itself clearly.

We returned almost in silence. I had not dared to question him and he was absorbed in himself.

* * *

The next day I waited in vain for him to take the walk which we had planned. He did not leave his room until the luncheon bell rang, and at table uttered nothing but a few insignificant remarks. Without Dilette, with whom I talked and laughed, and M. and Mme. Mairieux, who took their meals at the chateau while their son-in-law was there, we should not have exchanged twenty sentences during the whole luncheon.

* * *

In the afternoon he again isolated himself, and on the succeeding days I saw no more of him. Did he avoid me because he thought he had told me too much, too much and not enough? At first I believed this to be the case, and without making any explanations, I informed Mairieux that I was about to leave. Of what use was it to remain?

“No,” he urged, “do not affront him that way.”

“He would not notice my absence,” I said.

“Listen,” replied M. Mairieux. “For one or two weeks last year he was so depressed that he moved me to pity. Besides, your company will be welcome to us. Wait, I beg of you.”

“But what does he do all day?” I asked.

We were talking in the carriage road. Raymond Cernay’s apartments consisted of three adjoining rooms on the second story, a library, a study, and a bedroom. The autumn days were so mild that the large bay window of the study was open and we could see him seated at a table, with his head between his hands. He was reading or studying. A ray of light came to me—he disappeared in order to work the better on his monoplanes.

“Calculations?” I asked M. Mairieux.

“I don’t think so.”

In spite of myself, the secret of this man’s life tormented, I was about to say haunted, me. Why at our first meeting had he imagined himself to be the Lord of Burleigh whose wife could not live outside of her own environment? What was there connected with Mme. Cernay for which he blamed himself? Why did he insist upon punishment for some unknown crime or crimes which nobody but he suspected?

* * *

I fell into the habit of spending the end of each day at the pavilion in order to escape from the morose atmosphere of the chateau. One evening it happened that Mme. Mairieux began to speak freely of her daughter and with deep emotion. Sympathising with her grief, I tried to console her:

“At least she was happy,” I murmured.

“Was she not?” the good lady replied quickly. “Her husband gave her such a beautiful life, Paris, society, luxury, entertainments, everything that one cares for at her age. It is true that she was not as fond of that sort of thing as most young women are. According to my ideas, she was a little too quiet and serious. It was pleasure, nevertheless, especially after this desert of The Sleeping Woods.”

“This desert pleased her,” interrupted M. Mairieux, who did not like this statement.

“Perhaps the change was too abrupt,” I suggested.

“Oh, no. She never complained of it, and surely she would have told me. In whom would she confide, if not in her mother? I knew her so well, the dear child.”

Her husband was obviously and unmistakably growing irritated. He tried to change the subject, but she would have none of it.

“During her long illness Raymond was perfect to her,” she persisted. “He came here with her, he gave up all his own affairs, he called in the most celebrated physicians, and now, on top of it all, he accuses himself of not having been a sufficiently devoted husband. To us, who saw him at the time, it is simply madness.”

She had reached this point in her eulogy of her son-in-law, when M. Mairieux left the room. I believed that I understood the meaning of his departure: he was protesting silently against his wife’s praises.

* * *

Cernay’s seclusion led me to frequent the park with the steward and Dilette. M. Mairieux, little by little, as he watched the child skipping ahead and then running back to us like a young greyhound travelling over the same road two or three times, fell into the habit of conjuring up before me an earlier childhood, that of his daughter. He never spoke to me of Mme. Cernay, but constantly of little Raymonde. I learned every detail of her life up to the age of fourteen or fifteen. Beyond that there was silence.

His memories kept time with Dilette’s actions. One morning, as she bent over a colchicum, he asked:

“Why don’t you pick it?”

“It is better there in the grass, grandpa,” she said.

This reply seemed to me to affect him beyond measure.

“Raymonde,” he explained, “loved flowers in the same way, and never plucked them. She thought them lovelier growing on their stems in the fields. No one could ever get a bouquet from her. It is odd, don’t you think?”

But the oddity brought tears to his eyes. At other times he spoke of other characteristics.

“I had taken her into the forest at sunset,” he said once. “How old was she? Probably Dilette’s age. The leaves were nearly all gone, it was this time of year. In front of us the tree trunks partly blocked our view of the sun’s red disc. She stretched her little arms towards the disappearing orb and when it had completely vanished, I found her dear face so sad that I began to apologise. ‘I can’t stop the sun, my darling,’ I said. ‘It is a great pity, grandpa,’ she replied with a sigh. Ah, it was a sigh that would break your heart! Would you believe it? That evening I envied Joshua. As a matter of fact, I had as good reason as he for working a miracle. The laughter of a little girl is the dew which refreshes our years. A child who does not laugh seems to be reproaching the one who gave it life.”

On this topic he was never silent; now, it was Raymonde’s inborn love for all things, or again, of her running along the forest paths and her abrupt halts, as if she saw some one coming, her charming combination of trust and fear.

“She was so timid, so shy,” he said, “that we even determined to send her to boarding school near by, in a convent in the city, in order that contact with companions might accustom her to everyday life. You have no idea of the ceremony that took place before she left. She wished to say good-bye to all the rooms in the house as if they were persons of flesh and blood, and to certain favoured trees and to Stop, the dog, and my horse, and the whole farmyard. She was not absent long. At the end of three days she ran away. She had to climb over a wall, topped with iron spikes. A little of her dress stayed there. Moreover she lost her hat and did not go back to look for it. In this condition she passed through the city somewhat ashamed of her appearance; and ran off at full speed from an old gentleman who began to question her. Once out in the country she was reassured. The city faces did not trouble her any more and those of the peasants gave her confidence, as though she were on familiar ground. So she came back to us on foot, just before nightfall. Have you noticed at the side of the gate a single birch, planted there by chance? It was much smaller then. Raymonde’s first act was to go to this friend and embrace it. From a distance I thought a little pauper girl was coming up the avenue. Stop was already licking her hands, and even her cheeks. And in this beggar I recognised my own daughter.”

While he was narrating this memorable Odyssey, M. Mairieux straightened up, he seemed to grow younger, and he smiled. He threw out his leg and walked like a dancing master explaining a step. Then suddenly he fell back into his former attitude, as though ashamed of his spirit. He was recovering from the past a little of its lost happiness.

“And how lovely she was at fifteen! Like a ray of golden light, you understand. Curls of changing shades, a fresh complexion of that unsullied white that actually shines, and eyes which it did one good to look at, because you would never imagine that there could be any so pure. There was a little terror in my love for her. She seemed too delicate, too sensitive, and yet I would not have wished her less so. I felt that she would never be happy. I feared for her beforehand. Oh, how right I was!”

The last reflection, which escaped involuntarily from his lips, appeared to upset him completely. It coincided too well with the painful allusions of Raymond Cernay not to strike me forcibly. M. Mairieux did not agree with his wife about the conjugal felicity of their daughter. There was a secret here, which a few days later I was destined to learn under tragic circumstances.

* * *

Bad weather followed the last of the Autumn sunshine. We were prisoners of the rain. A dense fog hid the forest from our sight, and the atmosphere of the chateau became unbearable.

Raymond Cernay, buried in his study like an alchemist in his laboratory, occasionally passed like a ghost through a corridor or sat at the table without recognising us, his gaze lost in space. Dilette, not daring to raise her eyes to him, implored my protection. M. and Mme. Mairieux, being in accord on nothing, maintained protracted silences. I determined to take refuge in flight, but the tragedy anticipated me.

On the day of which I speak, we were together in the drawing-room after luncheon, sitting almost in silence, like a family whose scattered members have re-assembled in anticipation of a funeral and await the coming of death. The child once more insisted on a story from me, and I protested that I did not know any more. Cernay, who had not yet opened his mouth, descended from his tower of ivory:

“And the Lord of Burleigh?”

“I have already told that.”

But Dilette clapped her hands, and insisted so long and so hard that I began over again the story of the Lord of Burleigh. I attempted to introduce a variation, generously permitting the heroine to recover, but Cernay shocked his daughter by objecting. When I had finished, he asked in a sarcastic voice:

“And what happened then to your Lord of Burleigh?”

What was the purpose of this embarrassing question?

“I don’t know,” I answered at random. “I suppose he went on living.”

“Yes,” he announced, in a tone of utter despair that I can still hear. “Yes, one lives.”

He rose from his arm-chair at the corner of the hearth, where a fire was sputtering—one of those fires of half-dried wood which char, cry, and smoke. He paced the room two or three times, his pace growing quicker and quicker. His irregular gait and the fixed expression on his face impressed and worried us. Moreover we heard distinctly phrases not intended for us but referring to my story.

“He lived—He forgot the evil he had done—Perhaps he married again.”

Then, with sudden decision, he rushed to the door and disappeared. We looked at each other wearily. Some moments later we saw him rush bare-headed through the rain and wind, down the avenue of oaks, and disappear in the direction of the forest.

We found nothing more to say until Dilette went out to play. Then Mme. Mairieux assumed an air of importance and favoured us with this news:

“Listen to me, I know something. He is really going to marry again. He is already engaged.”

“How do you know,” demanded her husband.

“I read it in the society announcements two days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did not want to give you pain. I was waiting for him to announce it.”

“Do you know the name of his fiancée?”

“Mlle. Simone de R—. A good family. It is quite right. He is still so young, he is so rich, so prominent, so much sought after. During that week at Rheims the papers did not talk of anybody but him.”

“It is not right,” replied M. Mairieux drily.

And we relapsed into silence in spite of the desire that possessed Mme. Mairieux to excuse and to justify her son-in-law, to whom, whether from indulgence or admiration, she conceded every privilege.

I had instantly connected this information with the obscure allusions to “The Woman at Rheims” and “the other” which had escaped from Raymond Cernay when he had been previously disturbed that day at the pond. Nowadays even young girls are famous and the name of Mlle. Simone de R— was not unknown to me. I had met her two or three times, a tall woman, the effect of height being increased by her way of carrying herself, supple, muscular, possessed of the grace that strength gives, devoted to sport, and a champion at tennis or perhaps polo—I no longer remember exactly—which brought her the honour of having her picture in the illustrated weeklies. She went steadily on her way without coquetry but with the thirst for conquest which is the mark of the new generation. I could easily imagine their introduction at Rheims, she conquered by the boldness of the aviator, he attracted, despite the past, to this beautiful and frank being, who breathed life and promised victory.

Two or three hours passed before Raymond Cernay returned, exhausted and drenched, but not calm. The insane look on his face terrified us, as he passed by without noticing our presence.

When the bell rang for dinner he did not come down. Going up to his apartment in search of him, I had great difficulty in securing his attention. When I did obtain a reply, it was a flat refusal. Without him the meal was lugubrious, and Mme. Mairieux was quick to withdraw with little Dilette. When we were alone, M. Mairieux confided his fears to me.

“I believe I understand him,” he said. “Since his return the past has gripped him again. There are some memories one cannot betray. If you only knew! ... Well, he has not made up his mind about this new marriage. He is tormented, crushed. And it is right that he should be.”

Then, either through a deliberate effort at compassion or from an inherent goodness that was stronger than all his bitterness, he added:

“His agitation to-night alarms me. You have seen his eyes. He must be watched.”

We summoned his valet, Jean, and he admitted that the condition of his master seemed so serious to him that he had not slept for three nights. “M. Cernay,” he said, “was in the habit of immersing himself in his reading or writing until a late hour, and it was not until the early morning that he sought his bed. However, the library adjoined the study and it would be possible to observe him from there without his knowing anything about it.”

Preferring to retire late, I claimed the first watch and seated myself silently in the library, close to the communicating door, with a book in front of me to serve as a pretext in case I should be surprised. Outside the closed windows the silence of the country soon grew so marked that I could hear not only my own breathing, but the least movement on the other side of the thin partition which separated us, even the light touch of a sleeve against the arm of a chair. Without doubt he was reading at his table. From time to time I fancied I could catch the rustle of a page as he turned it over. Suddenly he pushed back his chair and began to pace the room with his irregular step. None of his actions escaped me—my ears took the place of my eyes. I was certain that he would open the door, and how was I then to explain my presence there? He stopped. I calculated that he must be in front of the window. Then he appeared to turn the bolt and throw open the glass wings. Only empty space was now in front of him. Anxiety paralysed me. I did not dare interfere; what if my interference should determine him! The few seconds of suspense were filled with agony. At last he left the threshold of the window, but without shutting it, and seated himself again at the table. I could not endure the situation any longer. I preferred to talk to him, to attempt to distract him, anything rather than abandon my reason to his unseen madness. With a great effort, for my legs seemed too weak for their task, I rose and went to the door. I knocked; he did not reply. A second time there was no response. Then I walked in.

At first I saw nothing but his back. A portfolio of documents lay open on the table, but he was not reading. Some white paper, covered with geometrical figures, was littered about, but he was not writing. He sat with his head erect, apparently absorbed in his thoughts. Then I perceived in a mirror the reflection of his face. Occasionally, in order to indicate that a sick man is doomed, we use the expression: “he has death in his face.” But a young man in perfect health—how can he bear this stamp? Nevertheless I perceived it clearly. There it was, unmistakable, obvious, threatening, and time stopped for me.

I remained motionless behind him as though hypnotised. To shake off the evil influence, I lowered my glance, and an object on the table, which I had not at first noticed, attracted my attention. I was not mistaken. He had a revolver within reach of his hand—and it seemed to me that his arm was reaching toward it.

It was no time to hesitate longer. I stepped abruptly and silently forward, and seized the weapon. Raymond Cernay shook his head like one who has received a blow, and remarked with astonishing indifference, as if he had just returned to life:

“What are you afraid of? That revolver is not loaded.”

Nevertheless I kept it in my hand, for I doubted him.

“If you don’t believe me,” he said again, “you can throw it out the open window. I know what I wish to do, and nothing will hinder me from doing it.”

Convinced then, I put the revolver back where I had taken it, and apologised, a little ashamed of my interference and ready to retire. But he stopped me.

“No, stay, I beg of you,” he said. “I have not yet decided. That can happen any minute.”

So I had not deceived myself about his determination after all. He continued in a manner that was both savage and enigmatic.

“What I do not want, what I will not have at any price, is to have my inexperience or my machine blamed some day. I have already killed that which I loved; I will not kill my work at the very moment I am perfecting it.”

I should have regarded these words as merely incoherent if, by one of those lucid intuitions which in exceptional circumstances guide us like some mysterious instinct, I had not instantly connected them with the less confused utterances of a few days before: “I used to think that some day I would break my wings while in full flight. It would have been a good end, and so easy. Nobody would suspect. But it is impossible. It would mean betraying the machine, allowing a false suspicion to rest upon it. It can play false; the man it carries—no.”

He was forearmed against death when its appeal would be most immediate, most alluring, most caressing; the revolver was there to put an end to the temptation if it should become irresistible. This reverence for a sacred work, which I had not expected from Raymond Cernay, formerly so fickle and so easily wearied, threw more light upon that which followed:

“A soldier goes on to the end.”

But the reason for it all still eluded me. Trembling under the domination of the raging fire that he struggled to restrain within him, he permitted himself fragmentary explanations, which the information imparted by Mme. Mairieux prepared me to comprehend:

“I am tormented by an intolerable situation—and there is no way out. I crush my victims under me as I go. I am about, you understand, to cause another misfortune.”

Believing that I had divined his meaning, I challenged him brusquely to greater frankness:

“Yes, you are divided between the old love and the new.”

He bent on me that madman’s look that no one faces willingly.

“No love will ever equal mine for Raymonde. No love will ever efface her memory from my life.”

I ceased to understand him. After a silence which I did not disturb, he continued:

“The week at Rheims was filled with shouts of applause, it was a veritable triumphal progress. You were not there, you cannot imagine it. The boldest hopes accompanied our flights. I had my share of glory. The intoxication of success which I had formerly been so eager to taste even in small measure, exaggerated and magnified now, went to my head and for the moment made me forget. I was introduced to this young girl, who shone with enthusiasm as the windows of an unknown city blaze in the sun. When I came to myself I was her fiancé. Do you know that the day of our marriage has been announced? It is set for next month. Since my return here, I have recognised my mistake. The days have passed; they are passing now, and I am still silent and they are waiting for me. But understand me, it is impossible, it would be monstrous.”

He addressed me with increasing violence, and I endeavoured to reassure him. Life holds us captive, I urged, in spite of ourselves. Youth has an aptitude for happiness which may be nothing more than the faculty of beginning over again. He stopped me.

“No, no, you don’t understand.”

Two manuscript portfolios were lying on the table, one open and the other closed. With a movement that seemed almost inspired, he suddenly picked them up and handed them to me.

“Here, read this,” he said. “You will understand then. You will learn that there are silent dramas more tragic than the bloodiest crimes. Now leave me. Good-bye till to-morrow. Oh, don’t fear for me. Your presence this evening has dissipated bad ideas.”

It was his secret that I was about to learn.

PART II
AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES

I KILLED the one I loved ... Raymond Cernay had said to me on that mournful night.

It is almost the phrase of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” which I have used at the head of this transcription:—the explanation will come later: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

The first note-book was dated November of the year following the death of Mme. Cernay. The second, also dated November, the month he consecrated to thoughts of the past, was written one year later, and one year therefore before my visit to the Sleeping Woods.

In the course of that same Autumn night in which I believed I had seen death, I read the two without a pause.

FIRST NOTE BOOK

November 19—

Six months, day by day, have already passed since the moment when I lost her. And already when I wish to recall them, many recollections evade and escape me, or seem inconsistent.

I shall try to fix here all that I can grasp of joy and sorrow, from our first meeting to her last breath. Thus, perhaps, I may be able to keep her nearer me. Each effort to find suitable words will help me to commune with her, as the faithful commune with God in prayer....

* * *

The first time that I caught a glimpse, between the two rows of oak trees, of the chateau of the Sleeping Woods, I thought of a scene at the opera.

Twelve years ago, on my return from Italy, I had passed the place in an automobile. The road maps were none too good, and I had lost my way. The road plunges down into the valley with many sharp turns. It was in the early days of the new mode of locomotion and I was in the habit of committing many imprudent acts. Nevertheless I was obliged to slow down, and then, fascinated by the beauty of this forgotten nook, made golden by the Autumn, as it is to-day with the light falling on the last of the leaves, I stopped my car.

To stop was, and is still, for me to experience unusual sensations.

Ordinarily my impressions of landscapes are swiftly gathered. My eye is trained to seize them at a glance, just as the snapping of the shutter of a camera is sufficient to secure an instantaneous photograph. I had never been able to stop for more than a minute or two. But now, I had a sudden impulse to stop entirely.

On the gate, which was open and sprung,—I have not wished ever to repair it—hung a sign announcing that the property was for sale. Immediately I determined to purchase it.

At that time I was twenty-five years old; all I knew of life was the intoxication of youth and strength. I was indeed one of those merciless rulers of the upper classes who do not tolerate restraint from law or men while they have, or think they have, the means of escaping it. I had at my disposal a fortune whose extent I did not measure; my whim was my guide, and I recognised no obstacle. Who would have been able to convince me that there were limits to my wishes? The friends whom I favoured or neglected at will were flatterers and parasites whom one picked up in abundance in the resorts of pleasure. If the women that I selected did not treat me with cruelty, the very nature of their choice would have prevented me from deriving any pride from it, if it had not been for the ridiculous admiration that I openly professed for myself. Crude and headstrong, what a foolish creature a young man is before he has been flayed by the plane of suffering, of compelling ambition or by love!

The chateau pleased me. Therefore I coveted the property at once. I could scarcely conceive of beauty without possession, and immediate possession.

As I approached the lodge a young girl was leaving it. She wore no hat and her beautiful hair covered her shoulders. A lock or two had blown out of place and gleamed like pure gold in the sunlight. But I thought her neither pretty nor ugly. I had noticed at once that she was only a slight, unformed girl, fourteen or fifteen years old at the most, an age which did not interest me.

“Here, little girl,” I called to her, as if I were speaking to a servant.

She turned around, revealing a startled countenance.

“What’s your name,” I continued.

She stiffened, as she answered:

“Mlle. Raymonde Mairieux, Monsieur.”

She had taught me a lesson; what right had I to address her so familiarly? But I did not understand at first, and having caught only her first name I answered:

“Raymonde? And I am Raymond.”

I burst out into a stupid laugh at a coincidence that was sufficiently trivial. My laughter completed her fear, my laughter and my goatskin motor coat as well, which gave me the appearance of some shaggy animal.

She hurried back to hide herself in the lodge, as a hunted hare seeks its form. I followed her, opened the door without ringing, entered a hall and then a room which I found to be the kitchen. There I breathed the appetising odour of a dish of potatoes au-gratin, which gave promise of being delicious. It was not far from noon and I was very hungry. In fashionable restaurants one cannot get true potatoes au-gratin. This particular dish made my nostrils dilate with desire. I leaned over it. I inhaled the odour with avidity. Nothing in the world would have induced me to leave without tasting it. Already a threatening cook, emerging from the pantry, was shrieking aloud at the sight of a wild animal in her kitchen. She shook a soup ladle in her hand, crying out at the thief.

I tried in vain to reassure her.

“No, no! My Heavens, I will pay you what you want,” I said.

The superintendent, M. Mairieux, attracted by the commotion, now ran into the room. He did not waste any time, but would have thrown me out bodily without listening to me. At last I succeeded in explaining my presence, and my desire both to buy the chateau and to devour the potatoes.

“The chateau, yes,” he replied, “the gratin, no.”

Nothing excited me like contradiction.

“I shall not take the one without the other,” I declared. “The chateau and the gratin at the market price.”

“My dinner is not for sale,” said M. Mairieux.

“Then invite me.”

“I don’t know who you are,” he returned.

This conversation was being carried on in a kitchen which I had entered by force. Despite my self-satisfaction, I had to admit that my manner of introducing myself was hardly a correct one. I opened my coat, therefore, which, incidentally, was suffocating me, and presented my card. At the same time I offered to write a cheque at once for the price of the property. At this the superintendent multiplied the number of his objections.

“It is impossible,” he said, “you have not seen the place.”

“One glance has been sufficient for me. It pleases me.”

“But we must discuss the price. It is my duty to protect the interests of Count d’Alligny. The amount which he named is not definite.”

“Then you can arrange that with him,” I said; “and now for the dinner table. That gratin should be delicious.”

My companion evidently took me for a lunatic, but an unexpected ally presented herself in the person of the cook, who, flattered by my compliment, suggested that she set another place. I clapped my hands.

“That’s right, that’s right. Quick, another place! As for my chauffeur he can have his luncheon when we have finished.”

“Your chauffeur?”

“Yes, I left him outside in the automobile. He takes care of the car and I run it. A fine machine, eh?”

* * *

While the table was being set and Mme. Mairieux was being informed of the incident I told M. Mairieux how I had happened to reach the gate with my car. He condescended at last to take me seriously on account of the automobile’s forty horse power. That was the way I lunched for the first time with my future parents-in-law.

Mme. Mairieux immediately took me under her protection, but Raymonde did not address a word to me. For my part, it is true, I paid no attention to the child.

When I was well-fed and nourished and it was time for me to go, I repeated my offer of the cheque for the property. M. Mairieux, however, would not accept it. Instead, he gave me the address of the attorney whom Count d’Alligny had put in charge of the sale.

“Is his office far from here?” I enquired.

“The town is about nine or ten miles distant.”

“I shall go there and sign the papers at once.”

“Think it over a little longer,” he said.

“I never reflect,” I replied, “and besides have I not eaten your gratin?”

“It will prove expensive,” replied my host with a laugh.

While my chauffeur was cranking his machine, I observed on M. Mairieux’s face a pre-occupied, anxious expression as if he had something to say which embarrassed him. He did not make up his mind to put it into words until just as we were leaving.

“No doubt,” he stammered timidly, “you will replace the superintendent.”

“What superintendent? You? Never in the world. On the contrary, I shall buy the property only on condition that you remain. Your cook will give her recipes to my chef.”

The cook, who had come out from the lodge in order to watch me get under way, blushed to the roots of her hair with satisfaction, before hiding behind the Mairieux family which had gathered to say good-bye. We exchanged resounding farewells. The little girl alone did not open her mouth.

* * *

My fine enthusiasm had no immediate result. I waited two years before I returned to the Sleeping Woods. Without losing a minute, I had signed the deed of transfer in due form, but once I was away other adventures less strange and more absorbing led me elsewhere. I endorsed the accounts without verifying them. How many accounts during my lifetime have I passed without verifying! In this case at least, with my scrupulous superintendent, I could do so without fear. And then one fine day, remembering my property, I took there a company of my acquaintances, with little enough to recommend them.

I had notified Mr. Mairieux by telegram. We descended upon the place like a cyclone, with champagne, patties and cakes, a rattle of dishes and an uproar of cries and laughter. It was a great scandal in the country. The Mairieux family, shut up in the lodge, did not even show their noses at the windows. And when I visited them, I encountered icy frigidity. I enquired familiarly for news of their daughter, whom I had not seen.

“And Raymonde?”

“Mlle. Mairieux is very well,” replied her father solemnly.

I left there the more depressed, because I felt that I had done wrong disturbing the peace of these good people.

But then, are you compelled to place restraint upon yourself in order to retain the good opinion of your superintendent?

Happily Mariette, the cook, comforted me with a word of welcome. But I dared not order another gratin from her. And the pretentious chef whom I had brought with me completely spoiled the one which he tried himself to prepare for me.

* * *

I wonder at landlords who live on their estates. How do they spend their time? As for me, I was always knocking about, always somewhere else.

A year later I came back again, but this time alone. I had learned my lesson. My physician, somewhat alarmed by certain symptoms of overwork—physical overwork—had prescribed a rest cure.

“You need a place where you will bore yourself,” he had said, “where you can stay a good month without any distraction. If I knew some thoroughly uncivilised spot I should send you there.”

“Ah,” I said, “don’t look. I have the thing you want, my chateau in the Sleeping Woods.”

He agreed, after some explanation, that it was perfect, and so behold me established in my own house by order of the doctor. Being distrustful of me the Mairieux family extended no invitations. They remembered my previous visit and maintained their reserve. But after all a superintendent is a superintendent, and I was certainly not going to cringe before him. My physician had condemned me to boredom; I was having it in abundance. There was no one to see, no one to talk to, and the length of the days made one believe that the sun had forgotten itself.

* * *

But—Spring was in the woods!

I thought I knew her, and I soon found that I had not known her at all. Each morning in the forest paths I discovered some new manifestation of her presence. New buds appeared on the trees, and little garlands of green leaves seemed to creep from branch to branch like insects, and little by little made a robe of themselves. On the sward and in the moss she opened the bells of the lily of the valley, and in the hedges the wild roses. In the orchards she powdered the apple and cherry trees with white and pink snow, stolen from the mountains already re-covered with a new supply and glistening in the sunlight before God! How charming were all these daily details! And before, had I delighted in this spectacle, or rather, to be more accurate, had I ever followed so closely the joyous and wonderful march of Springtime?

But at last I met Spring herself.

I met her on her fête day, which in some of our provinces is still celebrated on the first of May. Those of us who spend the greater part of our lives in the city, where one day is like another, are ignorant of the things that it is important to know, beginning with the earth’s renewal.

There are customary ways of celebrating the coming of Spring, and these ways, differing in various parts of the world, reveal the delicate or coarse tastes of the people. I recall one night, many years ago, being awakened by a frightful tumult. It was at Saint Moritz, whither I had gone for the skating and coasting. Hunting horns, fifes, clarions, trumpets, tambourines, cowbells, gongs, cymbals, rattles and castanets, as well as cans tied to the tails of maddened dogs;—there was all this in this imperial charivari. I jumped out of bed, convinced that the hotel was afire, and ran to the window. In fact, there was a red glow shaking and moving about beneath me. In the glare of torches triumphing over the night, I saw from fifty to a hundred young boys capering around like demons, blowing horns with the full strength of their lungs or drumming with their arms. The light was sufficient for me to distinguish their triumphant faces. They passed by and little by little the tempest which they had unchained died away. I looked at my watch, it was five o’clock in the morning. What could be the meaning of all this music? I was furious at such a premature reveille, but, not understanding the reason for it, I put off the search for an explanation. At a more suitable hour I attempted to obtain some information. Nobody at the hotel, however, seemed surprised by the performance.

“Did you hear that row?” I enquired.

“Most certainly,” I was told.

“What does it mean?”

“It is the birthday of Spring.”

The birthday of Spring! March had just begun, and it had snowed the greater part of the day before. All the neighbouring mountains were white, and there was not the faintest trace of verdure to be seen; even the pitch pines were hidden by the frost.

This birthday of Spring seemed to me a little precocious. In the Engadine it takes place on the eve of Shrovetide, and the formidable uproar is intended to drive away the winter, to give it its rude dismissal. Possibly that is necessary in a country where the winter is prone to fall asleep and never depart. If one did not scream in his ears “Go away” he might remain throughout the year. Therefore in that country they pray to Spring in the midst of cold and darkness.

At the Sleeping Woods such a hubbub is not necessary. Things happen differently. But that day is so important to me that, reluctant to recall it, I have interposed some other recollections. Still, nothing happened to me on that day.

Nothing happened to me on that day, and yet that day is the brightest of my life!

Little girls and boys, all of them barefooted—for those who had shoes carried them in their hands in order not to wear them out on the hard roads—appeared at the end of the avenue of oaks. I stood astonished at the window.

“What does that lot of brats want?” I thought. They marched along singing, and very quickly, too, for their little legs. When they reached the arches of the cloister, just below me, they entertained me with a song. It was an old folk song, which I had once heard sung at a concert, but had not imagined to be genuine; by that I mean to say I did not know that it was really sung in the country. Out in the open air, bursting from these youthful lips, it soared in swift flight far higher than in any theatre.

“Who taught you that?” I asked, when they had finished.

“Nobody.”

“Did you all know it when you were born?”

“Surely.”

I have kept the words of the refrain. Whoever thinks them commonplace, does not grasp their real significance:

Awaken, sleeping beauty!

Awaken, if you sleep.

To me this beautiful sleeping one is Nature, who stretches herself after the winter’s sleep and smiles in the woods and in the gardens.

After this the children ranged themselves on the lawn, the girls on one side and the boys on the other, and danced—upon my word—a pavane. Perhaps it was not really a pavane, but I will not call it otherwise. It deserved that beautiful name, for it included some complicated steps, embellished with graceful bows.

I threw them some coppers and even some silver pieces. They scarcely thanked me, which impaired their success with me, and ran away toward the lodge. Why several moments later did they burst out into such clamorous joy, a joy that piqued me? I came down from my room and approached them. Seated at M. Mairieux’s table they were eating, drinking and laughing with their mouths full. Then they went off with red cheeks and full stomachs to other houses and other villages.

“Everywhere,” my superintendent explained, “they gather presents of bread and butter, cheese, eggs and other provisions in accordance with each one’s resources, but no one gives them money, and in the evening they return to their own homes well laden. Even the poor offer them something. You understand, no one refuses anything to those who herald fine days. We must pay attention to these swarms of little children when we see them passing by as the days grow longer. They warn us to watch for the Spring, and to rejoice when we perceive it in the distance.”

Thus forewarned, I did not fail to meet it.

After I had followed the children, I plunged into the woods. As I reached the cross-roads that are called the Green Fountain, because of a tiny little natural basin whose clear water rests on a bed of soft starry moss, I saw Spring coming from afar.

She was riding a horse that was a golden chestnut, and I caught sight of her under the light, broken arch of an alley of ash trees, coming slowly and inattentively toward me. I held my breath, for fear that I might alarm her, for I was ignorant of the forest customs of the gods. Motionless, I awaited her approach. When she was quite near, I removed my hat, and saluted her politely, as courteously as I could.

“Good-day, Mlle. Raymonde.”

That was Spring’s name.

Quite proud of my own valour, I was to learn that the gods are sometimes afraid of simple mortals. My “Spring” turned about and fled away at a gallop, her youthful body swaying in rhythm with each stride of her horse. Soon she disappeared, leaving me, after one movement of offended pride, in a state of depression that was almost anger.

I rushed away to the lodge.

“How many horses have you?” I asked M. Mairieux.

“Only one, my old Sultan,” he answered.

“The one which your daughter is riding now?”

“Yes, I trust him, he is very gentle.”

“Well, I want two more, one for you and one for me. Set yourself to find them. We shall arrange some riding parties.”

He was accustomed to my sudden wishes, and to this one he lent himself with a good will. Together we rode through the neighbouring woods, both those of the estate, which covered close to a hundred acres, and which I, as the proprietor, explored with delight, and those of Sylve-Benite, which were more extensive and more broken.

The dead leaves amassed by the winter in the roads are soft under horses’ feet, and we rode along noiselessly. As if by magic the returning verdure covered all the branches of the trees. The forest, which seems boundless when it is bare, now enclosed us, embraced us, and hemmed us in with a jealous love. Here and there an opening, whence one or two paths branched off, restored to us our sense of space: at the end of the vaulted ways holes of light marked the horizon. Nevertheless the foliage was quite high, and the oblique rays of the setting sun shone through among the straight, slender trunks of the trees.

After these excursions, I often invited myself to the home of the Mairieux. My superintendent never accepted my invitations to dine at the chateau, although in his little house he gave me the warmest welcome in the world, and yet, I must say, with perfect simplicity and without display. Mme. Mairieux would have preferred more ostentation, but happily he restrained her. The poor woman, I recall now, never ceased to evince toward me a kind of sanctimonious admiration. Later I realised that this unmerited worship was directed toward my fortune, through an inborn and conventional respect for social distinctions. At that time, however, I thought it was due to myself, and I did not dislike it. It fed my vanity.

She questioned me incessantly about Paris, about the theatres, the fashions and what she called “the grand life,” and never noticed that her husband indulged her with a courtesy that was a trifle mocking. “We live in a desert here,” was her favourite expression, the prelude to, and the excuse for, her questions.

Although in delicate health, she was still very pretty, pretty with that grace and delicacy which one sees in the eighteenth century pastels, and which implies in most cases a shallow mind, always ready to blossom forth in society, and less fitted for intimacy. The powder which she used to excess strengthened this resemblance. I have since learned of her humble origin. In order to marry her, M. Mairieux, then an officer in the chasseurs, left the army, for she could not bring him the prescribed dowry. They settled at first at Compiègne, where an honourable place was offered the former captain, the supervision and maintenance of a part of the forest.

“We rode to hounds then, Monsieur,” said Mme. Mairieux, in recalling that brilliant phase of her existence.

Whether it was due to the too keen pleasure that she took in hunting, or to a taste for more complete isolation, or to more pressing necessities, M. Mairieux accepted an offer to bury himself at the Sleeping Woods, close to his native country, and to manage for Count d’Alligny, whom he had known at Saint-Cyr, this estate, which was in a bad enough way.

I perceive that I am not setting down my true opinion of Mme. Mairieux. She showed on every occasion that power of adaption to circumstances which is characteristic of happy natures. When the time arrived to leave Compiègne, where she enjoyed herself, I know that she did not protest, and physical ills she always faced with courage. Without doubt she loved, and still loves, glittering, stirring, noisy things; many women have the same taste. She is perfectly good and loyal. If she has never suspected the martyrdom which exhausted and then slowly killed her daughter, I cannot forget that even this lack of comprehension has perhaps helped to save me from despair by making me doubt the extent of my culpability. For her I have remained a sort of god, to whom everything is permitted, who has the right to be an unscrupulous egotist, for no other reason than because he is. Although she sometimes bores me with her trivial worldliness, which was strong enough to survive Raymonde’s death, and which will last as long as she herself does, now that I know her thoroughly, her affection touches me. My marriage only flattered her maternal pride. She has retained this somewhat childish feeling, and I cannot bear her a grudge for it.

As for M. Mairieux, although our mutual sorrow has not brought us closer together—for he has divined its cause—what can I write here that will be worthy of my respect for him? His sensitive pride, which at that time prevented his accepting my invitations to the chateau and later caused him to reject, with a certain excess of resolution, offers from a son-in-law whose highest wish was to be taken for a son; the uprightness and nobility of his character, even the courtesy which enabled him to maintain unaffectedly the proper distance between us, should have enlightened me as to his ancient lineage and the superiority of his nature; matters to which, at that time, my thoughtlessness attached no importance. The firmness underlying his kindliness, the adoration which he bestowed upon his daughter and afterwards extended to Dilette; his generosity, which permitted him to appear to attribute my ill-omened work to the fates rather than to myself, by virtue perhaps, of the unfortunate lesson he had received in his own life of the differences of taste and feelings;—all that I venerate in him brings me closer to the memory of my dear Raymonde.

* * *

Little by little, during our rides together, I saw Raymonde’s shyness and reticence melt, like the mist which rises from the earth when the dew evaporates in the light of a beautiful morning.

The first time I heard her laugh I stopped in surprise. It sounded so crystalline, so pure, so aerial, that no note of music in my memory could suggest an equivalent. She was greatly amused by my ignorance. I did not know how to distinguish an ash tree from a beech, an aspen from an elm, or a hornbeam from a sycamore. At first I was not a very apt pupil. The usefulness of this forest-lore did not impress me. I permitted myself to be instructed as a pastime, but she brought much patience to the work, for she believed in it. What do we learn at college, that we should be ignorant of such elementary things? If I had asked of her, as I asked the children about their songs, who had taught them to her, she would doubtless have answered as they did:

“No one.”

The forest, of which she was the little queen, revealed to me all its rites and mysteries; not only those which one sees from horseback in the alleys, but those also which belong to the depths of its life and which one must seek on foot, gently, under its arched trees, as one studies the aisles of a church and the ornaments of the chapels.

“A tree, like a human being, grows refined in society,” M. Mairieux explained to me. “When it stands alone we see its trunk short, stumpy and gnarled, its roots cramped in the soil, its foliage growing close to the ground and its summit bare, as if it had rolled itself up to resist the wind; but in the company of others it reveals a smooth, round shaft, bare of branches until far up, while at the top they form a thick and symmetrical group. But this elegance, this dash, this grace, I was about to say this politeness, does not preclude the competition which is the law of nature. A grove of beautiful trees rises toward the sun, each wishes to receive from on high the light of day, and the conquered ones, broken and suffocated, degenerate and soon perish. The law of selection is at work here as everywhere, for the benefit of the strong who overthrow the weak and attain to a free and higher expansion.”

Raymonde admired the victors, but disapproved of their pride.

“I believe,” she said, “that if I were changed into a tree, I should be a species of shadow.”

“A species of shadow?” I repeated in astonishment.

“Yes, there are trees of shadow and trees of light. Did you not know that?”

And then while her father listened to her tenderly as she instructed me in her turn, she obligingly taught me how to distinguish them. Trees of light are the oak, which, despite the fable, resists the storm, the exquisite but robust birch, the pitch pine, which still grows at an altitude of eighteen hundred metres, and the even hardier larch, which attains the land of external snow; the shadow trees are the fir and the beech, with their delicate organisms, sensitive to frost, the attacks of the sun and the lack of water. They too bravely attempt to storm the mountain, but they are in too close touch with the elements. Whatever affects the earth, affects them. They forecast the atmospheric changes. They experience the suffering of the sun as well as its joy, for which they hasten to smile with due gravity. In them the heart of the world beats more delicately. The others are harder and their fate simpler.

I at once placed myself among the trees of light. One morning, Raymonde picked up a seed which was supplied with a wing.

“The trees fly,” she told me. “See how the wind can carry them along!”

At the border of the forest she threw the tiny seed in the air with this incantation:

“Go find favourable soil, and grow to shelter a happy home some day.”

Before she tossed it to the wind, I studied the little wing attentively. Those of the birds had never inspired me with any desire to rival them, but this little vegetable membrane disturbed me. Later I recalled this omen of the forest....

* * *

Thus our walks were full of sweetness.

I was in love with her eighteen years. No woman, no young girl whom I had ever met, had offered me such clearness of regard, such freshness. The others, like the children of St. Moritz, had created a great uproar in order to arouse the springtime in my heart. It was too soon, or maybe the barbarians lacked the grace of our little children at the Sleeping Woods, for whom a song without such a multitude of brass pans and drums, was sufficient to announce the coming of joy.

* * *

I should have delighted in what was to me an unpublished story, in the feeling of new birth into such supreme love as it is the privilege of few lives to know; but instead I plotted an infernal scheme of which, as I confess it to-day, after so long a time, I am still ashamed. My absolute power recognised no scruples. The persons with whom I associated habitually scoffed freely at conventionalities and all moral restraint, and treated virtue, honour, and respect for women as hypocrisy. I was willing to betray without remorse the confidence of the Mairieux. As for the complicity of the young girl in my scheme, I did not imagine that the whim of a multi-millionaire could encounter obduracy. Must she not, like her mother, be dying of ennui “in this desert”? I would awaken my sleeping beauty of the woods, and carry her off to Paris. What could be more natural? What more fine?

My plan was laid. There only remained the simple task of securing Raymonde’s consent. I might obtain it by means of jewels as in Faust, or through the fascination of Paris as in Manon. The everlasting presence of her father prevented my paving the way, but I took advantage one day of a sufficiently useless forestry investigation with which I had purposely charged M. Mairieux, to propose to our Amazon that I should accompany her alone on her ride. I intended to seize the opportunity to open negotiations. Our conversation was of the shortest, and I shall record it faithfully:

“Mlle. Raymonde,” I began, “would you not like to go to Paris?”

“Of course,” she answered, “I should love it.”

“With me? Would you consent if I asked you very nicely?”

“Oh yes, with you. Because in the forest I can guide you, but in Paris you would be guide.”

She laughed as she lowered her head to avoid a branch. I can see her now!

“We’ll go as soon as possible,” I said.

“To-night, if you wish to.”

“To-night, then, I want to very much.”

And again her laugh, the laugh of a little girl, rang clear in the alley. She touched her horse lightly with her riding whip and old Sultan went off at a gallop. As I urged on my horse to rejoin her, I was stupefied by the speed of my conquest.

“Look at those little humbugs who are so reserved and discreet,” I thought. “At the first word of love they catch fire.” For the meaning of our departure, emphasized by the equivocal tone I had employed, was, I thought, very explicit. No one could possibly have been deceived by it.

Then, as suddenly as she had started off, my companion and accomplice halted.

“We must go home at once,” she said.

“What for?” I asked.

“Why, to let father and mother know we are going away.”

I opened my eyes in astonishment, which she interpreted at once.

“Let us go on,” she said, “I see clearly that it was only a joke. You were amusing yourself with my credulity. And besides;—”

“And besides?” I repeated in my bewilderment. “I am like my father—I prefer the Sleeping Woods.”

The enormity of my aberration caused me at that moment one of the keenest disappointments of my life. How could I even have thought of the possibility of realising such a preposterous scheme! So keen was my discomfort that I must have looked like a fool. But later, I detected with delight a feeling of shame that was quite new to me. When one has misused his all, such a discovery is full of enchantment. One perceives, beyond the dull fields he has travelled all too often, a shining country which draws him on, toward which he gazes as Moses must have gazed upon the Promised Land. I tried to regain my composure.

“Why?” I said at random.

“I do not know. Paris frightens me.”

Then she added gaily: “No doubt I shall never go there. So much the worse for me.”

We turned toward home. Except for a few insignificant words she said nothing more to me, as if a belated intuition had warned her not to prolong the conversation. During the following days, and up to the time of my departure, she carefully avoided a tête-à-tête. Or perhaps she did not even think of one. I too did not desire to meet her. It seemed to me that I had insulted her, and the cowardice of my intentions, if not of my acts, wounded my pride. This feeling was stronger even than her attraction for me. Her presence threw me into a state of extreme confusion which I bore with impatience. I was relieved to get away. At the Sleeping Woods I felt lowered and shrunken in my own esteem. And nothing is more unnerving.

I returned to my former life, but with this difference, that, disgusted with the gross cynicism cultivated by my free set, I went more into formal society. This was the worse for me, however, for I lost thereby that mental independence which some day might have been guided into more natural channels.

I frequented several salons, and was led to reflect bitterly not only upon the frailty of women, though I took advantage of it, but also upon their ability to forget, a frailty and an ability possessed in equal parts by those women whose broadly scattered amorous favours encourage young people in the delusion that such as they represent all womankind.

But this harmful and commonplace pessimism was of little account compared with another and much more dangerous habit of mind which I began to form. To it I attribute my unhappiness. The spectacle of society had infected me with the craze for scheming and success. I considered nothing comparable to the momentary triumphs achieved by a costume, a clever word or conversation. In things like these I saw the quintessence of glory. Should not a man seize his share of it? In my world it blazed in kohl-widened eyes, in rouged cheeks, in cunningly suggestive words and bared flesh. Like the trees of the forest, this mass of men and women flung themselves up to the light that glittered on them, and trampled down the weakest. Did not the desire to please, to prove themselves superior to each other, induce them to surpass themselves and put forth their greatest powers of seduction? And had I not recognized that I belonged to the trees of light? What did I care for closet scholars, for those creative minds whom their own thought satisfies, for lovers imprisoned by their love, for all humanity at labor? The obvious triumphs of society furnished me with sufficient excitement. Thus I began a course of frittering away a life which excessive prosperity and a lack of discipline had already marred, but which, thanks to a new emotion, I was on the point of being able to redeem, when of my own accord I threw away the opportunity.

In this way two years rolled by. They were two years of intoxication and poison. Pierre Ducal, one of those false friends whom public opinion rather than our own taste thrusts upon us, handed me the poison. His reputation he had built with a smile upon devastation and ruin, as well as upon frivolity, in which he quite understood his power, and he took pains equally with his liaisons and with his waistcoats. His assurance in the most delicate situations, that social dexterity which is often the possession of those who live only for the moment, I regarded as the refinement of intellect. He played with passions which he did not really feel. I too indulged in this dangerous game which wears away and withers the heart, and my emotions became mere vanities. By a miracle, it is true, I was going to recover my health, but in the moral as in the physical world one cannot inhale with impunity deadly germs. Their evil effects endure.

* * *

Mlle. Mairieux had taken advantage of these two years to blossom forth like a flower on a long stem. Her slender figure did not indicate weakness so much as a life in the open air. If she blushed or turned pale too rapidly it was due to a sensitiveness too exquisite, like that of the shadow trees, not to the fluctuations of an irregular circulation.

Her features were regular without being bold, and were softened by a crown of blond hair of blended shades, so thick that combs could with difficulty restrain it. And her eyes, which had been so large before, seemed to me to have grown even larger. It seemed as if the whole sky had sought to enter into them. Had I seen her again in the woods, she would have appeared to me like a huntress, more quickly frightened than the hunted game.

I have often searched my memory, in order to defend myself against the fault with which I feel charged, for any physical symptoms which at that time might have foretold the shortness of her life. I cannot recall any. Though the doctors were not able to discover the origin of that strange malady which, after having long sapped her strength, at last carried her away, I, I know whence it came, and I know too that it was not her body that was first attacked.

During our separation I had almost avoided going back to her even in my thought. What with superficial occupation, sport, travel and some sensual indulgence, ordinarily one is fairly successful in suppressing such a fancy. The instant I saw her again, however, my love revived. Had I imprisoned her in the chateau of the Sleeping Woods, and was she only awaiting my return?

* * *

The summer which I spent on my estate was warm and stormy. The forest offered us its freshness, its sheltered nooks, its peace. But why was it that we did not resume our rides? My superintendent evaded any reply to my suggestions. He had devoted more time than I to observing the external attractions of his daughter. To her I spoke only with the most scrupulous deference, for the most part in the presence of her parents, only occasionally when we met alone, these meetings having now become rare. Her clear eyes remained inscrutable to me. Why was it that she did not realise I loved her? And if she did realise it, why did she give no evidence of her joy and gratitude?

Yes, her gratitude. For there was no use in my recognising in her every moral superiority over the women that I had previously met; I was still confident that I was doing her a favour in loving her. Her father might belong to a family much older than my own; but he was nevertheless my employé. She would mount in the social scale. I would raise her to my level. Through me she would attain the summit of fortune. Out of a little sylvan nymph I was going to create one of those divinities who reign over Paris, one of those queens whose despotic tyranny and recognised fascination I had recently experienced. Was not that enough to intoxicate her? I thought how I could inform her of her good fortune tactfully, in order not to overwhelm her with the revelation. Thus do we judge from on high when we perch ourselves upon riches and prejudice. We like to believe that we attach no importance to them, that we are showing genuine simplicity, that we treat as equals those whom we overwhelm with our insolence; and all the time the treasures of the soul escape our vision. We need the virgin ore, and we make use only of the minted gold!

I should have prolonged this period of waiting; for me a period of spiritual refreshment. Raymonde was nearing her twentieth birthday, the white summit of her first youth. In her “desert” she had sprung up like a lily of the fields. She was ignorant of the very existence of those sensations, those flirtations, those trivial love affairs, which, weak emotions though they are, mere forerunners to true love, are yet sufficient to tarnish the heart of a young girl, to put upon it a useless stigma before life has really begun. But those women who preserve themselves unsullied even in their inmost thoughts, who cross their pure hands upon their breasts as though to guard the tabernacle of their future and only love—what husband can ever merit the absolute surrender that they will some day make to him? Can he ever comprehend, can he ever realise the significance of such a gift of infinite confidence, of undying promise? He accepts his conquest as if it were a foreign country, while all the sweetness of a fatherland is offered to him. Yes, I should have prolonged that period of waiting.

Before marriage every man ought to compel himself to retire from the world, to leave an interval between his past and that future for which he is not prepared. A little time must be permitted to flow over our dead passions. A new life demands a new-born spirit. My self-conceit convinced me that I was beloved by Raymonde, although nothing had betrayed her. Might I not have profited by this security to attempt to merit her love by cultivating my own? Was there any need to demand so soon a useless confession, when the spectacle of a heart which was ignorant of itself could cleanse my heart that knew too much?

On the contrary I was all impatience and desire. I imagined in advance Raymonde’s joy on learning that among all others I had chosen her for my wife. I wished to be the only one to see her transfigured face. Without any fear of reversing the convention I intended to speak to her first, in order the better to enjoy her surprise. Later I would speak to her parents, who would be only too happy to consent to so brilliant a match! Such was the arrangement I determined upon.

Chance favoured me after I had spent several days in a vain attempt to arrange so important an interview. I had asked Mme. Mairieux, of whom I knew I could easily dispose, at the opportune moment, to come to the chateau, to help me with some household arrangements with which I was not satisfied. I hoped that Raymonde would accompany her. However, she came without her mother. Less perspicacious than her husband, Mme. Mairieux kept no supervision over her daughter’s actions. Besides, did not Raymonde’s own dignity protect her sufficiently? I looked upon her with an intoxication of delight, but how can I depict what I felt? I looked at her as a sovereign at his subject, as an Ahasuerus upon an Esther. My imagination dwelt lovingly upon the dream that she was about to realise through me. She was coming to me who awaited her. In a few moments she would learn of her good fortune. It seemed to me that I could already hear her heart beat. It would beat like that of the pigeon which I had once wounded while hunting. I had picked it up in my hands and felt its warm life as I caressed it, the warm life that was ebbing away.

After we had settled the details in question I suggested that we look over the chateau.

“It is strange,” I said, “that you have never visited it. Would you like to?”

“Very much,” she replied.

We began our inspection of the salon and the galleries. I opened the doors for the young girl and showed her the pictures and the furniture, while she listened attentively to my small remarks. She wore, I remember, a dress of white serge, touching in its simplicity, and rather clumsily cut, which, however, did not succeed in concealing the slender lines of her figure. The plain dress seemed to match the frankness of her face and the peace of her eyes.

Outside it was one of those September days whose close one dreads, for fear that on the morrow one may not find its equal.

After our little expedition was over and she was about to leave, I stopped her:

“Would you enjoy living here, Mlle. Raymonde?”

She turned her calm eyes to me.

“Our lodge satisfies me,” she said.

So then I should have to dazzle her with one stroke, in spite of my desire to drink in her emotion slowly and in little swallows. She would not guess. Not to lose anything of the agitation she was about to feel I looked her full in the face, as I went on:

“You will leave your lodge some day.”

She was astonished and even showed some anxiety.

“Our lodge? When?”

“When you marry.”—

Then, in order to strike her the more suddenly, I added with scarcely a pause: “When you become my wife.”

I watched for the rapture which these magic words were surely to produce. Instead she only burst into a laugh, though it seemed to me that the laugh did not have its accustomed clearness.

“It is absurd,” she said, “to make fun that way.”

I insisted that I was in earnest, and repeated my declaration, which was more like an announcement than a proposal of marriage, so certain was I in advance of her consent. Could the idea of a refusal have entered my mind? I could sooner have believed that Raymonde was mad.

When at last she understood, I saw the colour leave her face. She swung for a second like a boat on the sea when the wind rises, and then she fled at full speed through the open door of the ante-chamber.

I scarcely heard her light tread as she descended the stairs, but I saw her cross the court without slackening her speed. In the same way two years before she had run away at the Green Fountain. Was it even then on account of my love?

To me, her flight was an insult, an unjust and cruel insult, and I hastened to lay the blame for it upon the Mairieux. Did not this girl deserve to be scolded for her rudeness? And what was the meaning of this access of shyness? at the very moment when I was thinking of checking generously an outburst of gratitude!

Nevertheless I loved her, and to lose her would have been intolerable. But, like the majority of lovers, I could not distinguish between love and the selfish gratification of my immediate desires.

The elder Mairieux, whom I found in their drawing room, raised dismayed faces to me. Indeed, it is stretching a point to say that I was not even welcomed by my superintendent. Raymonde had told them nothing, and they were laying all the blame upon me.

“Where is your daughter,” I demanded of them almost violently.

“In her room—what have you said that has wounded her so? I insist upon knowing.”

It was a new M. Mairieux that I, dumbfounded by this note of antagonism, saw before me. His broad experience of life, his indifference to the fashionable world, his courtesy in his business relations, the good-fellowship of his conversations with me, everything, in short, which had made our relations so agreeable, prevented me from crediting him with such firmness of character. Now, however, when his daughter was concerned, he spoke with an authority I had not anticipated.

In a single word I explained the situation.

“I asked her to marry me and she ran away.”

M. Mairieux, accustomed as he was to the quickness of my resolves, understood at once. So much his smile told me, a smile that was quite grave, somewhat serious even, in the face of such wonderful news. He repeated my statement to his wife, who could not believe her ears, and insisted upon demanding further explanations from me without giving me an opportunity to utter a word.

“Is it really true, monsieur? Do you wish to marry our daughter?” she exclaimed, and then lifting her hands to heaven, she cried: “And she ran away from you!”

This particular gesture, and in fact, her general attitude, flattered my vanity a little. But I knew that Mme. Mairieux was peculiarly alive to the social advantages of this union, even more to them than to the material benefits that would result from it.

“Be seated, monsieur,” said the good woman; “I am going to scold Raymonde and bring her down to you.”

“Wait,” ordered her husband.

It was a command which conveyed a warning to her. Then he began to question me about the hasty scene at the chateau. His conclusion was that I should have talked to him before I spoke to his daughter. I was no longer addressing my superintendent, but the father of Raymonde, from whom I wished to take, without obtaining his consent, that which was most precious to him. A totally new view of life was opened to me, upon which I had never bestowed a thought. His reasoning overcame me, and though I was conquered by it for the moment, I was furious at my inability to withstand him. To submit without a protest to the categorical rebuke of this man whom I regarded as an inferior—was that not in itself a proof of my love?

However, M. Mairieux went on with a calm determination, which overawed me despite myself, and which now, as I look back upon it, revealed truth and simplicity, a greatness of spirit which I did not then appreciate:

“Marriage,” he began, “is a lifelong bond. It involves the whole of one’s life. For us, who are good Catholics, it implies a definite choice; it is indissoluble. Do you also consider it so? Is it in this way that you regard marriage? The point is essential.”

Most assuredly, I did. When one is about to marry one believes that it will last forever, and very often, also, when one is in love. What useless questions! And there were more to come, together with some definitions.

“The husband is the head of the family,” declared M. Mairieux, “but he owes his wife the protection of his love. You understand: you must protect her against others, against unhappiness, against herself, against you yourself, and the temptations that you will encounter more frequently in your world. Have you taken into account all these obligations, so foreign to your past life?”

Hurt by these doubts, and convinced of my omniscience as to the care of a wife, I assured him that I was prepared to fulfill all my duties. Thereupon M. Mairieux softened.

“Let me speak to you now of my little Raymonde,” he said; “she will come to her fiancé with a pure heart, and the treasure, yes, the treasure, of the rarest feeling. You will give her wealth and surroundings very different from her own. But she—how much more will she bring you! You are too young to understand all the perfection that is in her. You must watch over her, watch over yourself, if your union is to be blessed.”

With these words, the last of which rose to the height of solemnity, he completely overthrew the conception that I had formed of our mutual relations. My pride might perhaps have revolted against them, seeing in them chiefly an evidence of paternal partiality sufficiently remarkable in the mouth of my superintendent, if I had not appreciated their essential truth. As it was, I confined my reply to promises whose full extent I did not then perceive.

“Are you sure, at least, that you love her?” went on M. Mairieux.

Was I sure of it! My presence there proved it.

“But she?” he persisted.

“I believe she loves me.”

“Has she told you so?”

“No, she has not told me.”

“How do you know it?”

As this examination grew more pointed, I searched vainly in my memory for a single token, a single sign, no matter how slight, which might have revealed Raymonde’s heart. There was nothing—not a word, not a look, not a gesture, neither the intimacy of some ride, nor some sudden shyness—there was absolutely nothing to put me on the track. I had settled the question without ever having asked it. And so, after a hesitation which covered me with confusion, I confessed aloud that I knew nothing about it.

For the first time since the commencement of this conversation, M. Mairieux regarded me with sympathy. His clear eyes are almost as limpid as his daughter’s were, and I was surprised at their tenderness. Nevertheless, at the moment, I hated him for the avowals that his cross-examination forced upon me. Was he not casting me down from the pedestal I had mounted? My wealth, by which I thought he would of course be conquered, had been stripped of all its importance in my offer of marriage, and now, uncertain that I had inspired love, I was like those poor lovers whom suspense drives to despair and excess of hope keeps in suspense. But I did not remain there long. Internally I was boiling over, and if I restrained myself on the surface, it was because I thought I should surmount these obstacles without delay.

Mme. Mairieux, to whose remarks her husband had several times responded by requesting her to keep silent, and who had not ceased bestowing upon him evidence of her surprise and disapproval, arose at last to play her part.

“I am going to question her,” she declared.

“No, no, my dear,” protested M. Mairieux.

He attempted to detain her and she grew angry.

“A daughter hides nothing from her mother,” she cried.

I can only guess at what passed between the two women. Raymonde never spoke to me of her mother except with the deepest and the most filial respect. Nevertheless one can divine the conversation from the reply which her mother brought back.

“The child is peculiar,” she said. “I consider her stubborn; she does not want to listen to reason.”

“What is the matter.”

“She considers you too different from us, too—I don’t know what, too rich.”

“And because of that?”

“She will not accept? Yes, because of that. It is crazy. I am heart-broken. I ask—I ask your pardon for it.”

She asked my pardon for this refusal as if it were a lapse in good manners. In the conversation which she had just had with Raymonde without doubt she had emphasised that which appealed to and blinded her, that upon which I had based my own superiority: the unexpected opportunity of this union, the change of circumstances, the pleasures of success and of life in the great world, far from “this desert.” Over the vanishing of a dream in such harmony with her aspirations she mourned as sorrowfully as Pierette over her broken pitcher.

M. Mairieux, on the contrary, seemed comforted: he was to keep his daughter.

On my part, suffering from this blow struck at both my passion and my pride, I cried out:

“But since I love her!”

I could not conceive that any one should oppose my will. Was it possible to tolerate any obstacle which did not proceed from me myself?

“Possibly you do,” observed M. Mairieux, “but she is the question.”

I felt an intense anger at this child, who at her age and in her position, dared not to love me. I could not believe such audacity. The whole current of my life was stopped, congealed like the surface of a frozen stream. Yet I had not said, “Will she ever love me.” Neither had I said, “Will she not love me some day.” No, I had simply said, “Since I love her!”

“She will accept,” good Mme. Mairieux assured me. “How can you imagine that she will not?”

To her the refusal was almost sacrilege.

Seeing my stupefaction and my emotion, her husband took my hand.

“We are much touched by your offer, M. Cernay,” he said. “We expected it so little. We are simple folk, without ambition. Some nice fellow, an industrious, cheerful, intelligent, upright, sensitive-souled lad who would have assured us Raymonde’s happiness—we did not ask anything more. In order to find him we were planning to go to the city the next winter or two. But you—no, truly, we did not think of it.”

Throughout this harangue, which was scarcely to her taste, Mme. Mairieux kept shaking her head. Despite her denials, however, her husband continued:

“Your offer is an honour. Many advantageous marriages were open to you and you chose this. Now allow us to recover our breath and think it over. I will question my daughter, and learn whether her answer is final or not.”

“No, no,” protested his wife. “It is not.”

“I will let you know, I promise you,” he said.

“When?” I demanded instantly.

“Some day soon.”

To wait still longer! It was not to be dreamed of, and I turned impetuously upon my superintendent.

“No, no, not some day soon—immediately. I wish to see her, to speak to her. I will learn from her why it is that she avoids me. I insist upon it.”

But in the face of M. Mairieux as he confronted me, there was the same resolution which had so much surprised me when I first observed it, and which I felt was invincible. Influenced by it despite myself, I modified my language.

“Allow me to see her, I beg of you, if only for a few moments. I will talk to her before you, before her mother. Don’t you understand my suffering?”

Mme. Mairieux, who had been incessantly encouraging me with all kinds of significant looks, now turned to her husband.

“My dear,” said she, “see how he suffers. It is inconceivable. Do you wish me to go back to Raymonde?”

But, reaching his own decision, he rebuffed her.

“I will go myself,” he said, and walked to the door.

“I will go with you,” said his wife.

He instructed her to keep me company instead, and disappeared. His absence seemed long to me, though I do not believe that it was really so. Mme. Mairieux deluged me throughout this period of expectation with the most consoling flattery, and the consoling flattery of Mme. Mairieux had the gift of exasperating me. I began to walk up and down the room, now fast, now slow.

“Everything will come out all right,” the good woman kept repeating. “If she does not love you now, she will not fail to do so in time. It is not an opportunity that presents itself twice, and Raymonde is so reasonable.”

But these assurances merely increased my anxiety.

At last M. Mairieux reappeared. He did not bring back with him, however, the repentant culprit, as I had hoped he would. Walking up to me, he laid his hand upon my shoulder.

“We must give her time to come to herself,” he said. “You have frightened her a little. You should have spoken to me first. She is timid. She does not know.”

I heeded nothing but the delay that was being forced upon me.

“Time?” I demanded. “How much time?”

“Several days.”

“Oh, several days! That will be death. A day, one day, won’t that be enough? Mayn’t I come back to-morrow?”

“Well, try it,” agreed M. Mairieux.

I returned to my own home exalted by mingled sensations of anger and love. In the avenue several dead oak trees had been replaced by early chestnuts, and from one of these a leaf blew away. It was certainly one of the first to fall. A breath of wind kept it in the air, and it floated, like a tired bird, around one of the stone vases on the open lawn. Would it rest there, or would it reach the earth? With childish superstition, I looked upon it as an omen. If it fell to the ground, it would mean happiness for me.

The wind understood me and the urn swallowed it.

When the heart is truly alive the least trifles are important.

* * *

In later years M. Mairieux consented to tell me how he had learned his daughter’s secret. It was later, much later, after we had lost her, and I was questioning him greedily about the past. I had envied him the possession of this secret, but it was just that he should have received it, and not me. After twenty years of boundless and absolutely unselfish affection, what an advantage he had over me!

When he entered Raymonde’s rooms, she was standing by the threshold of the window, motionless, inert, almost indifferent. He told her of my impatience, my unhappiness. Nevertheless, he said, she should take counsel only of her own heart. The material advantages of a marriage should only be a secondary consideration.

She kept repeating obstinately:

“No, no, I do not want to marry him.”

“But why?”

“M. Cernay is not the husband for me.”

He was tempted to stop there. A presentiment, which he took to be paternal selfishness warned him, as he confessed to me, warned him not to insist. Conscientious scruples, however, and the desire to exhaust every argument in favour of the alliance, urged him to add:

“Possibly, but he loves you.”

This time he received no reply; indeed it was not a question. There was only one thing more to say:

“And you—do you love him?”

“How can I know?” she murmured, and then, realising the truth, she wept. These first tears I did not see. How many others did her love cost her, less observed, even more secret, which I saw no better?

To young girls who have not squandered their imagination in precocious little flirtations, love is like a garden in springtime before the dawn. The flowers are there, all the flowers. We do not realise it, although we inhale their perfume, because it is so incredible. Thus, enclosed within the heart, the magic enchantment sleeps, invisible. Day breaks, and with it all the world seems to be born. But the love which shines forth was always there.

* * *

The next day I had my turn.

Mme. Mairieux watched for my arrival. It was she who opened the door for me, and from her I learned of my happiness. It lost nothing in the telling, for she was anxious to spare me several moments of anxiety.

Raymonde met me in the drawing-room, holding her father’s hand.

She wore the same simple dress of white serge that she had had on the day before. Her smooth cheeks had grown pale; she did not smile, she was serious, indeed almost severe. When her eyes rested upon me they seemed to me to have grown not only even larger, but almost terrified, and at the same time that I read in them the avowal of her love, I saw a kind of holy fear, a sort of religious ecstasy. With ardour I poured out all my love to her, but of what value were my protestations in comparison with that pathetic countenance haloed by devotion? Why did I not throw myself upon my knees to plead before her, to pray to her as to a saint?

I have before me as I write a little picture of the Annunciation. Mary, who is scarcely fifteen years old, has just learned from the angel her divine mission. With clasped hands she strives to quiet her heart. In spite of her unworthiness, she accepts the honour at which she thrills, but at the same time she foresees all the sorrow that will come to her. She trembles with joy or fear, or rather with joy and fear together.

In the course of a journey to Italy I came upon the picture in a little town. To secure it I needed more than money; I had to use persistence, strategy, eloquence. But I wanted it at any price. For this acceptance without fear—oh, in my comparison I do not intend any irreverence, which as far as I am concerned would only be detestable and ridiculous—this acceptance without fear recalled to me my betrothal, which in truth was for Raymonde an oblation that she made to me of all the suffering to come. With mystic intuition she foresaw it, but I, I guessed nothing.

She had listened to me without speaking. At last, as though there were any need of words when I saw that the whole current of her being was arrested, I demanded:

“Will you not tell me, too, that you love me?”

She shivered all over and I dared insist.

“Not to-day,” she murmured at length in a colourless voice. “I cannot.”

“And to-morrow?”

“To-morrow perhaps.”

Fool that I was, I could obtain nothing more from her, though she was sinking under the weight of her love. Ordinarily we employ the same phrases in common conversation that we use for the deepest emotions. Through reluctance, through delay, through the difficulty of giving them utterance, the desire to keep them in her heart, which cherished them in order the better to absorb their virtue, Raymonde restored to the divine words their true meaning, their power and their freshness. And I complained!

I wished to embrace her, but despite myself my respect for her checked me, and instead I bent over the hand that hung by her side. She had to restrain herself from drawing it away, as if my kiss had burned it.

“Leave her now,” said her father. “You do not see that she is thoroughly tired out.”

Ah, how I pity those who become engaged, who marry, in the city! Does not everything urge them to set bounds to a love which they must keep, as it were, on a leash, in the streets, must protect incessantly in the midst of acquaintances, difficulties and embarrassments? My own and Raymonde’s love blossomed forth in freedom.

We had resumed our horseback rides, and sometimes M. Mairieux accompanied us, sometimes he entrusted his daughter to me, when he would follow us with his eyes for several moments before he returned to his office or his work outdoors.

The trees still retained their foliage, but the colours changed from day to day, a marvel to behold. The leaves of the lindens became a pale yellow, those of the oaks, at first a red copper, later that colour of rust which they keep all winter, for they do not fall: shrivelled, hardened, and curled up they cling to the branches until the new growth comes in the spring and flings them down.

“They are like those feelings,” I said to Raymonde, “which remain in the heart even after they are dead, and which only a new passion has the power to drive away.”

Whenever I gave vent to such sentimental rubbish as this, the art of which one acquires in society, she used to look me full in the face, her astonished eyes seeming to discover in me some unknown abysses. Why did I aim to dazzle her with such empty talk? I was thinking of those faded memories which still occasionally obtruded themselves upon my mind, and which, although they had not yet entirely gone, were destined, under the influence of my love, to disappear only to be reborn another day.

“None of my affections is dead,” she replied. “None will die before I do.”

We were passing the Green Fountain, and we paused to give our horses a drink from the basin. We saw the reflection of their heads mingle in the calm water, and leaning forward, she unconsciously and I intentionally, we saw our own heads come together and touch. Drawing back I looked at Raymonde: she was blushing as if she had felt my lips, although they had never yet touched her.

Two years before, more than two years since, it was, on the birthday of spring, I had waylaid her there. I recalled the incident to her, and asked her the reason of her fear.

“I did not expect you,” she said.

“Was I so dreadful?” I inquired.

“We must believe so, since I was afraid,” she answered, with her clear laugh.

I should have been glad to have her assure me that even at that time she had begun to love me, although nothing could have equalled the charm that her ignorance of her own heart then possessed.

“Whom did you love before me?” I asked.

“Before you? My mother, and my father and all this besides,” she answered, and stretched out her arms in a comprehensive gesture that her little riding whip accentuated.

“All this?” I repeated, not grasping her meaning.

“Yes, the trees, the little pond that is down there, the orchards, the meadows, and the whole sky that you see.”

I laughed as I listened to this catalogue.

“I am not jealous of them,” I said.

She looked about her at the forest, the luminous autumn forest which had contributed to the awakening of her spirit, and murmured:

“You may well be, nevertheless.”

She never questioned me about my past. Through a generosity, the nobility of which I understand now, she did not wish to crush me with it, although she suspected that it had been turbid and stormy. Believing me to be as honest as she was, she considered that I was sufficiently punished by not being able to sweep it utterly away when we exchanged our unequal love.

As we turned for home the wind arose. Should we find our leaves again in the morning? On the avenue, those on the chestnut trees were stained brown and red. Before the chateau, the plane trees, with their leaves open like giant hands, were green and dull gold. They offered a splendid prize to the north wind which was beginning to blow. Each one, as it was gathered in, wavered gently in the air. Along the wall, the well-sheltered Virginia creeper spread out its vivid red, and the hardy hedges of privet and hawthorne preserved a touch of green in this symphony of brilliant colours.

I was a little ahead and I turned.

Why did Raymonde, in her white woollen dress, and mounted on her glistening horse, why did she, so young, seem to be so in harmony with the autumn, and like it to be so clothed with the delicate charm of things that perish? And why, feeling thus, did I not swear to watch over each instant of her happiness and her life?

In the forest she showed me a young ash tree which, after several years, had succeeded in piercing the baleful vault of foliage and crept upward between its two powerful neighbours, now exposing its summit to the sun’s rays.

“Raymonde, are you still a shadow-tree?” I asked.

She recalled our former conversations, and, surprised at the attention I had paid to them, smiled.

“The ash,” she said, “is a tree of light.”

I believed that this was an answer and gloried in it. In reality she had not replied to me at all; possibly she was thinking of those trees that are so sensitive that the least hardship pierces them.

* * *

“I am glad,” she said to me one day, “that I had never given a single thought to any one before I met you. If it were not for this, my love would not be complete.”

* * *

Another day, under the arch of the cloister, she said:

“My spirit seems so light that I can hardly hold it back. I feel as though it were beating its wings, as though it wished to fly away. I hold it back as much as I can, for if it should fly away, I should die. And I do not wish to die now, oh, no!”

* * *

In the valleys in October the evening falls swiftly. On our return from our ride, when night had surprised us, a falling star crossed the sky in front of us. Actually it seemed purposely not to hasten in its passage, as if it were asking us to tell it our desires.

“What wish have you made?” I asked Raymonde.

She turned on me her calm look.

“None. Why should I?”

“You would have had ample time,” I said. “One always wants something.”

“Not I,” she answered. “I wish nothing.”

* * *

All the recollections that I pluck from the past contribute to picture her in a perfection of a love that I cannot imagine more complete. It was her very life, the very breath of her being.

This love I believed myself worthy of inspiring, so many illusions did I still cherish. Her fervour, the solitude, the woods and the autumn days, strove together to exalt me. I truly believe that during this period I tried unconsciously to raise myself to her level. Her glance calmed, soothed and purified me. They say the moonlight calms the waves. In the same way, her influence stilled my transports and my desires. I should have striven to find my true self, to prune the forest of my spirit, to clear it of all its vanity and sham, of all that rank vegetation which I had permitted to grow up there—which, though temporarily stifled, would soon flourish again. I did not comprehend her love. I thought that I should teach her life, while she already knew by intuition that it was quite simple, and direct, level and smooth.

One night the wind carried away the leaves. The next day we found them under our horses’ feet, and we left a track of red gold rustling behind us. However, in the forest we could the better appreciate the upward shooting of the bare trees, and the depth and charm of the paths. Winter was here, and the cold. Soon we should have to face bad weather. That ride would be one of our last. Mindful of all our others, we rode in silence more and more slowly, as if to prolong the hours....

* * *

Mme. Mairieux always prepared tea and small cakes for us on our return.

She was very busy. Her daughter entrusted to her the choice of the trousseau, and she it was also who fixed the date for the marriage, made the arrangements for the official ceremony, marshalled the bridal procession as a captain his company, and finally even attempted to secure a bishop to pronounce the nuptial benediction.

Her husband, somewhat reserved since our engagement, teased her gently, and by a calculated stubbornness obtained from her some concessions and omissions. These tilts consumed the evenings.

“We must have a large wedding,” she said.

“No, indeed, no,” he replied.

Nevertheless she made out a list on the back of a mourning announcement, a sheet which she had economically torn from a letter of condolence. I recall that detail now, that omen: a black bordered sheet of paper for the list of our wedding guests.

M. Mairieux read the list, which assumed disturbing proportions. Hoping for allies, he turned to the corner of the room where Raymonde and I were sitting, paying indifferent attention to these preparations.

“What is your opinion, dear?” he inquired.

“Oh, I,” she said, “you know very well that all the others are indifferent to me. All that I want are here now.”

“One does not get married in secret,” protested her mother. “You, M. Cernay, who know so much of the world, must agree with me, do you not?”

Thus drawn into the discussion, I supported my fiancée with an energy which astonished myself. Unquestionably, like her, I preferred to be alone with my happiness. Perhaps too—I am ashamed to admit it, but have I not undertaken to confess?—even at this happy time my vanity may not have been so completely dead that it did not suggest the advantage of not seeking to advertise too loudly a marriage without distinction, a union which would astonish the world, which they would make fun of in Paris. I was marrying my superintendent’s daughter; there was nothing in that on which to pride myself. Such were some of the imaginary difficulties that I had not succeeded in dispelling. When our judgment has been warped in early life by excess of worldly advantages and success, how many years and how much suffering are necessary to bring the truth, the real meaning of life, back to us! And in the interval, irreparable harm can be done.

* * *

One night about this time we began to discuss the plans of our life after the wedding. My wife and I intended to spend the winter in Rome, the following summer at the Sleeping Woods, and to postpone until the next winter our residence in Paris. I adopted this plan partly to secure more leisure for Raymonde’s education, which I flattered myself I was to undertake. Curiously enough, she smiled at the thought of Rome, while Paris frightened her.

“But why?” I asked her.

“In Italy we know nobody, all our time will be our own, all our hours, all our thoughts. It will be like the forest.”

“Like the forest?” I repeated.

“Yes, instead of the trees, the names of which I who know nothing of anything, was so proud to teach you, we shall see beautiful things, of which I am totally ignorant and which you will explain to me.”

“And in Paris?”

“In Paris, I shall be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you will not be pleased with me; I am only a little girl.”

“How strange you are, Raymonde!” I answered.

Nevertheless I did not ask her in what I could possibly fail to be pleased with her. It is not enough to say that I divined her doubts, for I actually shared them. But that which with her was merely modesty and shyness, was in my case, unwarranted distrust, a wretched preoccupation with the world’s opinion, which, even when away from it, I could not entirely disregard. What would be thought of my wife by the world, would my friends approve my choice?

After a prolonged silence, in which there was no harmony of spirit, I determined to show my generosity, and turned to my parents-in-law.

“It is understood,” I said, “that whether or not we are here, you will live in the chateau. I do not wish you to remain in this little lodge.”

Mme. Mairieux broke into loud protestations of gratitude. Evidently I was making real one of her dreams. She had always wished to live in state, with dignity and ceremony, a troupe of servants, a continual round of visits, much publicity. A certain childishness lent to her ambition a touch of prettiness. The simplicity of her husband disconcerted her, for she did not recognise in it the superiority of breeding. The daughter of a bookseller in the town where he had been in garrison, thoroughly saturated with romantic novels, she had been captivated by his uniform and his horsemanship, and, after his marriage had cost him his career, had always cherished a grudge against him for the lack of money which compelled him to abandon his life of show. I reconstructed without difficulty this domestic drama, so common and inglorious.

Raymonde looked at her father, who had not yet spoken. I noticed the anxiety in her glance, but I could not understand it. M. Mairieux gave me the explanation. He thanked me most amicably for what he called my delicacy, and declined. “This lodge,” he concluded, “was sufficient for us when we had our daughter. Without her it will be much too big and too empty. And see how conveniently it is arranged, and outside, the walls are clothed with vines and clematis. Let us live and die here.”

Mme. Mairieux made a face, and I too was a little hurt by his refusal. I insisted, but ungraciously.

“If not for your own sake, accept, for mine,” I said. “I cannot permit my parents-in-law to remain in an inferior position. What will they say in the neighbourhood?”

This was the poorest of all arguments. At once the blood rushed to Raymonde’s face and she blushed all over. This excessive sensitiveness, which, however, she showed only in connection with the most subtle sentiments, gave her an incomparable charm. The time was still to come when I should reproach her for it.

“That is perfectly true,” said Mme. Mairieux, her hopes reviving. “What will people say?”

“What does it matter?” Her husband scorned the objection. “Are they not saying already that we have long lain in wait for M. Cernay in order to give him our daughter?”

He regretted having repeated this gossip when he saw Raymonde’s eyes fill with tears.

“They say that!” she cried.

He endeavoured to soothe her at once.

“Little one, little one! There are always evil-minded people. One must realise that.”

“When you are happy,” she murmured, “how is one to know that?”

* * *

On the day we signed the marriage contract, she followed the example of her father. In the contract I had settled upon her a sum which would insure her future. She refused to accept it, and all my entreaties were useless.

“But I may die, Raymonde,” I said.

“Then I shall no longer need anything.”

“One has to live even in sorrow,” I explained.

“It takes very little.”

“Fortune has favoured me,” I said. “Let me look after you.”

“I want only your heart,” she answered, “because you already have mine.”

“You know that you have mine too, Raymonde, but there are laws—”

“The law cannot provide for everything.”

Why had I not determined upon the expedient of holding the property in common? Why did I adopt that of dividing it, and then pose as a benefactor? Why, after her refusal to accept, did I not alter the contract? And, not having done so, why did I not draw a will in her favour on the day after the wedding? We forget too often to make our deeds consistent with our attitude in life. Our carelessness, or our egotism, or some mental reservation which escapes superficial analysis, leads us astray.

Raymonde came to me with empty hands. Her youth and innocence amazed me, and I bargained for her.

Now, now, I understand her better. There was no need of a contract between us, or, if one was necessary, it was only in order that a brief and indissoluble formula might unite our fortunes.

* * *

Our triple alliance cut down the greater part of Mme. Mairieux’s guests. I confined my own list to my two witnesses, Col. Briare, my nearest relative, and Pierre Ducal, one of my most intimate friends.

The Colonel appeared to be satisfied with my alliance when he learned that my future father-in-law was an old army officer. Outside of his troopers, nothing interested him. Every one, including Mme. Mairieux, who was enraptured at the prospect of beholding a uniform, called him “my Colonel.” When he learned that Raymonde was an excellent horseman, he congratulated me brusquely.

Pierre Ducal made me more uneasy. He brought into our woods the atmosphere of Paris, the dreaded judgment of Paris. His sarcasm is almost famous there. It is he who utters the last word about things, he who with no authority but his own acts as arbiter of fashion. Why did I choose him rather than another? I hoped by offering him this compliment to secure him as an ally. Would it not be better to have him with me than against me? Clearly I foresaw hostilities and in asking him to help me I would disarm him. Then too, although I had of late seen little of him, he still possessed for me the fascination with which he had once dazzled me. At one time, when the world monopolized me, I had copied him, so strongly did his assurance and ease of manner appeal to me as the summit of attractiveness.

From the moment of his arrival at the chateau he was on the alert. The news of my marriage had burst like a bombshell upon the society we frequented. I had been the target for several of those forward, modern girls who look up a possible husband’s eligibility in advance. What rival in some forgotten corner of the world had snatched me from out of their experienced hands? No one knew anything, no one suspected anything, for my brief letter of invitation explained nothing. Nevertheless, I have learned since, before leaving, he trumpeted forth great news of the event. He had been generally commissioned to investigate my case.

After the usual greetings he began the examination at once.

“Is she a neighbour in the country here?”

“Oh, a very close neighbour,” I replied. “She lives in the lodge which you see.”

“At the entrance of the Avenue? Isn’t that part of your estate?”

“Certainly, since her father is my superintendent.”

In order to be done with it as quickly as possible, I hurled the sentence at him in a single breath, as if it were the confession of a sin. I decidedly was not enjoying the serenity which should have come from the happiness and honour of marrying Raymonde. The presence of a single man was sufficient to cause me one of those little shudders of cowardice and baseness. Nothing suggested a greater menace to my own and Raymonde’s happiness than the troubled way in which I confessed this little fact to Ducal. It proved that I was not cured of my pettiest vanities.

Over them my love, born in solitude and nourished and beautified by the clear, fresh influence of my fiancée, temporarily triumphed. It did not destroy them. So many briers prevent the tree of our life from growing, and drain its sap.

When Pierre Ducal’s trunks arrived I laughed at their number.

“Well, you see,” he said nonchalantly, “I did not know.”

Did not know what? In this vague phrase I perceived a painful significance. After a moment he explained:

“You see I did not know exactly the character of the ceremony.”

“It will be very simple.”

“Naturally.”

Naturally! I could have boxed his ears.

At the same time a host of thoughts, which had not occurred to me during the happy months of my seclusion, beset and assailed me. I breathed again the intoxication of certain successes, I recollected the splendid alliances which had been offered me, I evoked the memory of some mistress whose rouge and whose treachery I had passed over because she carried to perfection the arts of dress and of fencing with words. What a position I might have held in Paris, had I wished! Forgotten impressions, as glittering and as false as the jewelry of a bazaar, impressions which tarnished my youth but had been happily lost during my rides with a pure child in the Sleeping Woods, conquests which had temporarily faded from my memory, these Ducal brought back to me as if they were precious stones that he had recovered.

However, he had not yet seen Her. My radiant Raymonde would restore order in my heart.

We were to take luncheon at the lodge before going to the mayor’s office. The religious ceremony was to be celebrated on the following day. Raymonde appeared in her plain street dress, almost entirely devoid of trimming or ornament, and for the first time I noticed those faults in attire which cost youth so little.

“She is charming,” Ducal said to me in an undertone. “She has a little gown—”

He hesitated a moment, then continued:

“A delightful little gown. My compliments.”

In words such as these the sneer is as plain as day, and I tasted its poison. It spoiled my pleasure. Why should I have attached any significance to what he said? I was like a mediocre artist or savant, who, not completely absorbed in his work, keeps his ears open for external sounds, for the voice of the critics, of rivals and of public opinion. The most beautiful love that could have illumined my youth did not shield me from such petty slights. Oh, dissipations of time and energy! Why must we perceive the greatest wonder of this life, that we can live but once, only when it has been put irreparably beyond our reach, when, like some perfect form arrested in the marble, or cloaked by night we cannot see it moving past?

* * *

My farmers, woodcutters and the neighbouring peasants, who adored M. Mairieux, but for whom I was a distant and puzzling landlord, had, during the night, covered with branches of fir trees the road which led from the lodge to the little church. They had despoiled the borders of the forest, in order that on this day of festivity we might walk on green boughs. It was late autumn in the forest, bare of leaves, but on the road it was spring. And in our hearts? Ah! Mine would have burst with joy, with that sheer joy which no impurity can spot, if Pierre Ducal had not been there.

But he was there, piercing the least detail with his gimlet eyes. I should have been indifferent to him, and I hated him. He absorbed part of my attention, he prevented me from abandoning myself without reserve to the current of my love.

Raymonde, her Book of Hours in her hand, slender and delicate, the contour of her face and the varying shades of gold in her hair softened despite the sunlight by her veil, looked in her white dress like one of those old missal pictures so radiant that it stands out from a golden background. Knowing the delicacy of her feelings I expected to see her agitated, but inwardly and outwardly she was peace. And seeing her thus I recalled the words she had said to me:

“My Soul is so high that I can hardly hold it down.”

I almost looked for wings, and it seemed to me that I could hear them beat. The first time I made a flight in my aeroplane, I distinctly saw a vision of Raymonde on the road strewn with foliage for the procession.

Pierre Ducal approached to greet her. As he bowed, I noticed an uneven pleat in her gown. He straightened up and looked at me. I thought that I read his meaning: “That gown is certainly not a Maulet creation.”

I realise that I am laying too much stress on impressions that were almost imperceptible, which slipped and fled away almost as soon as they were born. They indicated nevertheless the existence of that invisible crack in our happiness which made it the most vulnerable, the easiest to break.

The sky was of that delicate tint which it assumes in mountainous countries at the end of the season, changing from pale blue to a pearl grey, as though by its transparency it was announcing the coming of snow.

Raymonde, in order that we might be together in thought each moment of this unique day, had asked me to read the marriage service.

“You will see,” she said, “how beautiful the Liturgy is.”

I read it then. Since her death I have many times reread the words of St. Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ also the church: because we are members of his body. They two shall become one flesh—”

I understood, I realised for one moment at least, that miracle of immortal love, which dares to brave time and because of its injuries from the union of body and soul, arrives at unity, order and peace. Yes, I understood that in loving Raymonde and in Raymonde’s love, I loved my better self, the heart of my heart, that which lives on in us after our youth is fled, that which, in each one of us, is part of the living Spirit of God.

I had closed my Book of Hours. The thoughts which came to me were as refreshing as the living waters. I felt a kind of ecstasy. We were on our knees, and my bride signed to me to rise with her. I embraced her with my look, as though she were an object of infinite value, of which the internal charm exceeds by a thousand times the visible beauty. She smiled at me with perfect confidence, and at this moment we exchanged the mystic promise which includes in anticipation the sacramental “Yes.”

A slight movement brought Pierre Ducal within my range of vision. I knew well the subtle smile which hollowed his cheeks. He was amusing himself, collecting anecdotes, already preparing an interesting story in which I was to figure as a first communicant. I felt it intuitively. Seized suddenly by fear of becoming ridiculous, I studied my actions. The ecstasy did not return. I placed the wedding ring on my bride’s finger with the indifference of some trivial mechanical duty.

After luncheon Ducal asked me to lend him my automobile, for he wished to return to Paris that night. His many trunks, for which he had had no use, were placed on the machine, and after he had disappeared around the curve in the road, the wheels of the car crushing the fir boughs that had not yet been picked up, I breathed more easily, in fact I was conscious of a distinct sense of relief. Raymonde noticed the change at once.

“Why were you not like this a little while ago?” she asked. “During the service you changed completely. Did you regret anything?”

“Oh, Raymonde, what could I have regretted?”

“Listen, I think I have guessed it,” she said. “You were looking at my white gown. Perhaps it did not become me very well.”

“But, it did, I assure you.”

“No, no, I know it,” she said. “But I should have grieved my little dressmaker in the village too much if I had given the order to any one else. What does a bad pleat amount to? But in the midst of happiness, to be neglectful of others, you agree with me that that would have been wicked?”

I agreed with her, and moreover I did not discover the bad pleat again. It was as if it had disappeared with Pierre Ducal.

Mme. Mairieux, to whom Col. Briare was telling stories of hunting in the forest of Fontainebleau, had followed the course of our conversation and now began to excuse her daughter.

“I scolded her,” she said. “She is lacking in elegance. You will know how to give it to her.”

“Is it necessary?” asked Raymonde, laughing.

“Of course it is, in the world to which your husband is going to take you. You will be gowned by the great dressmakers. Isn’t she fortunate, Colonel?”

She spoke to every one of the luck of Mme. Cernay. These two words, “Madame Cernay,” assumed in her mouth majestic importance. Our marriage flattered her as though it were a personal triumph. The lack of guests, however, appeared to her unreasonable, harmful, and distressing. One had to talk continually to the same people. For lack of anything better, want of better guests, she gave orders that every peasant who passed the gate that day should receive entertainment.

When the evening came, and I was leading my wife away, Mme. Mairieux, at the moment of parting, looked at her daughter in admiration before kissing her, like a commander embracing a newly decorated soldier. The chateau represented in her eyes the Promised Land.

Her husband expressed his emotion differently:

“She is my only child,” he said to me. “Take care of her.”

Fearing lest he might break down, he dared not say more. In the midst of our little group, swayed by such different sentiments, Raymonde preserved her face of peace.

We had only to walk the length of the avenue, and we were at home. After the fir branches which carpeted the space in front of the lodge, we found the ground hard, and it crackled under our feet, for it was freezing. The night was not dark. In the depths of the sky, between the chestnut trees whose branches stood out black and bare, and the oaks with their dry, shrivelled leaves, shone thousands of stars, that almost touched each other, and seemed to be in motion like a swarm of bees. Certainly this sense of throbbing has remained in my memory. Have I since seen similar nights? Did I dream of that one? I do not know now.

The cold was stinging.

“Suppose we run?” I suggested.

“Come,” she answered.

She picked up the train of her wedding dress and darted off. Practice in the woods had made her agile, and I still see clearly before me this flight in the shadow, the bare trees, the lawn and the empty urns. Oh! it was a wonderful night, a holy night, when in the majestic silence I heard her two little shoes striking the ground.

I stopped, and then at last I pursued her. She was the first to gain the arches of the cloister. Without doubt the apparent life in the sky had struck her too, for when I rejoined her, she pointed it out to me with these words:

“There are no falling stars to-night. Do you still want something more?”

“No, Raymonde,” I said. “Nothing more.”

I might have added: “Not even you.” No, not even her! Beyond desire, I was experiencing that kind of love, which one enjoys in moments of ecstatic adoration, when the blood flows gently not to thwart the rush of the spirit, when life means sweetness, goodness, joy, light, serenity—

* * *

“Let us go in,” I said, “you will catch cold.”

“Listen,” she replied.

The branches nearest to the cloister cracked with the frost. And from the forest, of which we could distinguish only a vague outline, a confused murmur came to us.

“The night sings,” said I.

“The night is praying,” she replied, and again she raised her head to the stars.

“How many there are! How many there are!”

She named some of the constellations. Cygnus, the most beautiful, appeared to be on the wing like a diamond-shaped flock of birds. I took Raymonde’s hand in mine so that she would look at me.

“Now,” I said, “there is no one in the world but you and me. I shall love you all my life.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “that is not sufficient.”

“What must you have?”

“Our life—that is not enough. It will end. I wish a love which will never end. Never. Never.”

“Is that possible?”

“Of course, since there is Eternity.”

At that moment her faith was contagious, enlarging and consecrating our love.

* * *

At the chateau we found a large fire burning in the little salon, which I had refurnished for her. She looked at the furniture, the pictures and the hangings, and then at me with a smile that was a little sad. Did she have a presentiment of the future? Now that I am able to interpret truly the past, I recall having seen, one morning when I was out shooting, a young hind stop at the entrance to a wood, where I was hiding. She inhaled the fresh breeze and then hesitated in fear. Finally she came on in my direction.

“You are in your own home, Raymonde,” I said.

“Oh! it is very beautiful, but I am not accustomed to it.”

“You will become so soon.”

“Of course, I must.”

To her the new luxury was a burden. Otherwise it meant nothing. The only effect of this change of conditions for her was one of restraint.

She left me to change her gown. When she reappeared, she came over and clung to me.

“My love,” she said.

And as I held her to my heart, so young, so pure and so confiding, I felt two tears fill my eyes. Raising her head a little she saw them.

“What troubles you?” she asked anxiously. “Are you weeping?”

I am proud now to remember those tears, the quivering of my love and the obscure confession of my own unworthiness. Through them Raymonde recognised the upheaval that I felt before the perfection of her love. Later they unquestionably helped her to endure my cruelty and to forgive it.

I was silent.

“Dear,” she repeated, “why do you weep?”

“No doubt because I love you too much,” I managed to say at last, in an attempt to play with my emotion.

“That is so simple,” she answered.

Our happiness was indeed so simple that I could not believe that it was happiness. Until then I had sought it in the artificialities and complexities of pleasure. My engagement and marriage had restored it to me in its integrity and fulness, and I was astonished that it was serene.

She took down her hair, and it spread over her shoulders and breast, even more golden at the ends than on top. The various shades of gold blended to frame the whiteness of her face and neck. She had chosen the white woollen dress which she had worn on the day I had asked for her hand. I felt that this act brought her closer to me, and that I shared in the radiance which emanated from her.

We did not touch the supper which had been prepared. The chateau was asleep, and when we were silent there was nothing but the solemn silence of the country night. There was no one but us in the world; only us and love that was stronger than we.

“It is late,” she murmured, and it was like a prayer. “Don’t you want me to retire? I am tired.”

She leaned toward me and my mouth touched her forehead. Then I let her go. The peace that was in her dominated my love.

I sat long before the open fire—how long, I cannot say—and my heart opened to all the sweetness of life.

When I rejoined her she was sleeping. I did not waken her.

Second Note Book

November 19—

As we were nearing Rome, I pointed out to Raymonde the Sabine mountains, already covered with snow. But she only saw a rainbow, trembling in the golden haze which the setting sun, reappearing after the rain, drew from the damp soil. She derived from it a happy omen.

Then she compared the dome of St. Peter’s, which one sees first of all, to a rick in the field. Later, was she not to compare the Eternal City, upon which the centuries have left their imprint, to her forest, with its centenarian trees covered with moss, ivy, and mistletoe? One thinks that one will always remain bewildered, and soon things become so familiar, although imposing, that one speaks and listens to them. Her forest had prepared her. The shafts of the trees formed innumerable arches as at St. Paul’s outside the Walls; on the old trunks new stems grew, and the fallen leaves composed the soil which nourished the roots. Thus the continuity of historic Rome, which allowed Christian churches to flourish on the sites of pagan temples, did not astonish her.

Her divine ignorance preserved her miraculously from that insincere admiration which the sanctity of established reputations imposes upon most of us. She delighted in art as she breathed the morning air in the woods, of which one knows neither where it comes from nor why it leaves upon the lips so agreeable a flavour. With sure taste she walked through the midst of statues and pictures as through a garden pointing out to me her favourites. Invariably these were works of calmness and serenity, in which the old masters represented life either with all its natural joy or with religious acceptation,—the draped Muses of the Vatican, that veiled woman on one of the sides of the throne of the goddess in the “Thermos” Museum who keeps alive the sacred fire on the hearth,—what others shall I name, a young Madonna by Fra Angelico; Raphael’s Parnassus; or Michelangelo’s sublime creation of the first man. By instinct she turned to them as to old friends. I never caught her in a mistake. Like the doves of the Villa Adrien who stoop on the basin and then lift their throats swelled with water, she was drinking in the masterpieces, in her appreciation of which I might well have tried to imitate her.

However, I did not accept this unexpected superiority, this straightforward impulse of a young and unspoiled sensitiveness. I paraded my learning, I imposed on her my instruction. Her assurance disconcerted me, at the same time that her willing attention did not prevent her from confusing the different schools and classifications I tried to teach her. I corrected and scolded her, and she apologized and made more mistakes—except in the selection of her favourites.

Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest, misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the “Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty and not like a Diana free in her movements,—these satisfied me but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not understanding, for not knowing.

“She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.”

And I prided myself on the discovery.

All this she was to learn one day through me without permitting any alteration in her features to reveal it, merely becoming whiter and more distant as my cruelty increased and she grew nearer to death, death which writes for us our definitive expression, her own too pure and too noble to lower itself to complaints.

These differences, which I considered insignificant and which were in fact hardly perceptible, were they not already part of a more profound discord?

* * *

Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.

I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand secret bonds to artistic perfection.

I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure offerings.

* * *

Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont—she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too beautiful—I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in agony.

“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed. She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go away in order to rid me of her.”

With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!

I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.

“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”

All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself to it.

* * *

When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose sweetness—which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling—I can better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone to places where we had been together.

We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water. Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.

Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow, while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long to keep back, fell from her eyes.

“Why do you weep?” I asked.

“It was here,” she murmured.

What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran, a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen so perfect an image of peace.

* * *

Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself. Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the advantage of her.

However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road to the Pincio, where we went later.

But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the profit of my love alone?

“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in your thoughts.”

She was much surprised at my remark.

“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it be otherwise?”

I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to pronounce her childish.

* * *

I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences revealed.

The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes, were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and, stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.

“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique marble?”

But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.

“Listen,” she murmured.

Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced the Angelus. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious Rome was speaking to her.

I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to humiliate her, to bruise her.

I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her love.

* * *

When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.

M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.

“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.

He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now, showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older, and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:

“Thank you,” he said.

He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.

Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a coloured poster.

One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I felt only impatience at it.

My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.

“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.

“Down there.”

“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”

Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and kept silent.

That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me. My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet lake widen until they reach the shore.

Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to the lodge.

“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your liberty?”

Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not avail myself of it.

She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too, but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to myself, I impaired a source of joy.

The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.

* * *

Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.

“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little blades of grass. Shan’t we?”

In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite. The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in front of us with little bounds.

Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents, so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it, broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand some cause of estrangement.

When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush of colour:

“Let us talk about him.”

And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:

“Or, of her.”

She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow, whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness, freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance, her creative splendour.

“He will look like you,” she assured me.

“How can we tell?”

“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my thought is you.”

She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation, yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the future is holding for us the continuation of our race?

My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within her.

However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,—I saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive, she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.

“I am afraid,” she said.

I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.

“There is nothing, Raymonde.”

“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”

I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.

* * *

During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let me alone.

“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and entrenching herself behind my authority.

“Yes, but you are our lady.”

Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.

“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”

“I do not know them,” I answered.

“Exactly, but you will know them.”

“They bore me,” I replied.

“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”

“I don’t find it easy,” I said.

“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in our garden.”

THEWOOLLEN DRESS

CONTENTS

PART ITHE SLEEPING WOODS

PART IIAND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES

THE
WOOLLEN DRESS

PART I
THE SLEEPING WOODS

PART II
AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES