AT A WINTER'S FIRE
by
BERNARD CAPES
Author of _The Lake of Wine_, etc.
1899
All except three of the following Tales have already appeared in Englishor American Magazines. The best thanks of the author are due to theEditors of the "Cornhill," "Macmillan's," "Lippincott's" and "Pearson's"Magazines, and to the Editor of the "Sketch," for permission to reprintsuch of the stories as have been published in their pages.
Contents
THE MOON STRICKEN
JACK AND JILL
THE VANISHING HOUSE
DARK DIGNUM
WILLIAM TYRWHITT'S "COPY"
A LAZY ROMANCE
BLACK VENN
AN EDDY ON THE FLOOR
DINAH'S MAMMOTH
THE BLACK REAPER
A VOICE FROM THE PIT
THE MOON STRICKEN
It so fell that one dark evening in the month of June I was belatedin the Bernese Oberland. Dusk overtook me toiling along the greatChamounix Road, and in the heart of a most desolate gorge, whose toweringsnow-flung walls seemed--as the day sucked inwards to a point secret as aleech's mouth--to close about me like a monstrous amphitheatre of ghosts.The rutted road, dipping and climbing toilfully against the shoulderingof great tumbled boulders, or winning for itself but narrow foothold overslippery ridges, was thawed clear of snow; but the cold soft peril yetlay upon its flanks thick enough for a wintry plunge of ten feet, or maybe fifty where the edge of the causeway fell over to the lower furrowsof the ravine. It was a matter of policy to go with caution, and a thingof some moment to hear the thud and splintering of little distanticefalls about one in the darkness. Now and again a cold arrow of windwould sing down from the frosty peaks above or jerk with a squiggle oflaughter among the fallen slabs in the valley. And these were the onlyvoices to prick me on through a dreariness lonely as death.
I knew the road, but not its night terrors. Passing along it some daysbefore in the glory of sunshine, broad paddocks and islands of green hadcomforted the shattered white ruin of the place, and I had traversed itmerely as a magnificent episode in the indifferent history of my life.Now, as it seemed, I became one with it--an awful waif of solemnity, athing apart from mankind and its warm intercourse and ruddy inn doors, aspectral anomaly, whose austere epitaph was once writ upon the snowcoating some fallen slab of those glimmering about me. I thought thewhole gorge smelt of tombs, like the vault of a cathedral. I thought, inthe incomprehensible low moaning sound that ever and again seemed to eddyabout me when the wind had swooped and passed, that I recognised theforlorn voices of brother spirits long since dead and forgotten of theworld.
Suddenly I felt the sweat cold under the knapsack that swung upon myback; stopped, faced about and became human again. Ridge over ridgeto my right the mountain summits fell away against a fathomless sky; andtopping the furthermost was a little paring of silver light, the coronetof the rising moon. But the glory of the full orb was in the retrospect;for, closing the savage vista of the ravine, stood up far away a clusterof jagged pinnacles--opal, translucent, lustrous as the peaks of icebergsthat are the frozen music of the sea.
It was the toothed summit of the Aiguille Verte, now prosaically bathedin the light of the full moon; but to me, looking from that grim andpassionless hollow, it stood for the white hand of God lifted in menaceto the evil spirits of the glen.
I drank my fill of the good sight, and then turned me to my tramp againwith a freshness in my throat as though it had gulped a glass ofchampagne. Presently I knew myself descending, leaving, as I felt ratherthan saw, the stark horror of the gorge and its glimmering snow patchesabove me. Puffs of a warmer air purred past my face with little friendlysighs of welcome, and the hum of a far-off torrent struck like a wedgeinto the indurated fibre of the night. As I dropped, however, themountain heads grew up against the moon, and withheld the comfort of herradiance; and it was not until the whimper of the torrent had quickenedabout me to a plunging roar, and my foot was on the striding bridge thattook its waters at a step, that her light broke through a topmost cleftin the hills, and made glory of the leaping thunder that crashed beneathmy feet.
Thereafter all was peace. The road led downwards into a broadeningvalley, where the smell of flowers came about me, and the mountain wallswithdrew and were no longer overwhelming. The slope eased off, dippingand rising no more than a ground swell; and by-and-by I was on a leveltrack that ran straight as a stretched ribbon and was reasonable to mytired feet.
Now the first dusky chalets of the hamlet of Bel-Oiseau straggled towardsme, and it was music in my ears to hear the cattle blow and rattle intheir stalls under the sleeping lofts as I passed outside in themoonlight. Five minutes more, and the great zinc onion on the spire ofthe church glistened towards me, and I was in the heart of the silentvillage.
From the deep green shadow cast by the graveyard wall, heavilybuttressed against avalanches, a form wriggled out into the moonlightand fell with a dusty thud at my feet, mowing and chopping at the airwith its aimless claws. I started back with a sudden jerk of my pulses.The thing was horrible by reason of its inarticulate voice, which issuedfrom the shapeless folds of its writhings like the wet gutturizing of aback-broken horse. Instinct with repulsion, I stood a moment dismayed,when light flashed from an open doorway a dozen yards further down thestreet, and a woman ran across to the prostrate form.
"Up, graceless one!" she cried; "and carry thy seven devils withindoors!"
The figure gathered itself together at her voice, and stood in an angleof the buttresses quaking and shielding its eyes with two gaunt arms.
"Can I not exchange a word with Mere Pettit," scolded the woman, "butthou must sneak from behind my back on thy crazed moon-hunting?"
"Pity, pity," moaned the figure; and then the woman noticed me, anddropped a curtsy.
"Pardon," she said; "but he has been affronting Monsieur with hisantics?"
"He is stricken, Madame?"
"Ah, yes, Monsieur. Holy Mother, but how stricken!"
"It is sad."
"Monsieur knows not how sad. It is so always, but most a great deal whenthe moon is full. He was a good lad once."
Monsieur puts his hand in his pocket. Madame hears the clink of coin andtouches the enclosed fingers with her own delicately. Monsieur withdrawshis hand empty.
"Pardon, Madame."
"Monsieur has the courage of a gentleman. Come, Camille, little fool! asweet good-night to Monsieur."
"Stay, Madame. I have walked far and am weary. Is there an hotel inBel-Oiseau?"
"Monsieur is jesting. We are but a hundred of poor chalets."
"An auberge, then--a cabaret--anything?"
"_Les Trois Chevres_. It is not for such as you."
"Is it, then, that I must toil onwards to Chatelard?"
"Monsieur does not know? The _Hotel Royal_ was burned to the walls sixmonths since."
"It follows that I must lie in the fields."
Madame hesitates, ponders, and makes up her mind.
"I keep Monsieur talking, and the night wind is sharp from the snow. Itis ill for a heated skin, and one should be indoors. I have a bedroomthat is at Monsieur's disposition, if Monsieur will condescend?"
Monsieur will condescend. Monsieur would condescend to a loft and a trussof straw, in default of the neat little chilly chamber that is allottedhim, so sick are his very limbs with long tramping, and so uninvitingfigures the further stretch in the moonlight to Chatelard, with itsburnt-out carcase of an hotel.
This is how I came to quarter myself on Madame Barbiere and her idiotson, and how I ultimately learned from the lips of the latter the strangestory of his own immediate fall from reason and the dear light ofintellect.
* *
* * *
By day Camille Barbiere proved to be a young man, some five and twentyyears of age, of a handsome and impressive exterior. His dark hairlay close about his well-shaped head; his features were regular and cutbold as an Etruscan cameo; his limbs were elastic and moulded into thesupple finish of one whose life has not been set upon level roads. At aspeculative distance he appeared a straight specimen of a Burgundianyouth--sinewy, clean-formed, and graceful, though slender to gauntness;and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul dieout of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself intosome accident of twisted branches as one approaches the billowing treethat presented it.
The soul of Camille, the idiot, had warped long after its earthlytabernacle had grown firm and fair to look upon. Cause and effect werenot one from birth in him; and the result was a most wistful expression,as though the lost intellect were for ever struggling and failing torecall its ancient mastery. Mostly he was a gentle young man, noteworthyfor nothing but the uncomplaining patience with which he daily observedthe monotonous routine of simple duties that were now all-sufficient forthe poor life that had "crept so long on a broken wing." He milked thebig, red, barrel-bodied cow, and churned industriously for butter; hekept the little vegetable garden in order and nursed the Savoys intofatness like plumping babies; he drove the goats to pasture on themountain slopes, and all day sat among the rhododendrons, the forgottensoul behind his eyes conning the dead language of fate, as a foreignervainly interrogates the abstruse complexity of an idiom.
By-and-by I made it an irregular habit to accompany him on theseshepherdings; to join him in his simple midday meal of sour brown breadand goat-milk cheese; to talk with him desultorily, and study him thewhile, inasmuch as he wakened an interest in me that was full ofspeculation. For his was not an imbecility either hereditary orconstitutional. From the first there had appeared to me somethingabnormal in it--a suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in thebrain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out. This wasnot merely conjectural, of course. I had the story of his mental collapsefrom his mother in the early days of my sojourn in Bel-Oiseau; for itcame to pass that a fitful caprice induced me to prolong my stay in theswart little village far into the gracious Swiss summer.
The "story" I have called it; but it was none. He was out on the hillsone moonlight night, and came home in the early morning mad. That wasall.
This had happened some eight years before, when he was a lad ofseventeen--a strong, beautiful lad, his mother told me; and with a dreamy"poet's corner" in his brain, she added, but in her own better way ofputting it. She had no shame that her shepherd should be an Endymion. InSwitzerland they still look upon Nature as a respectable pursuit for ayoung man.
Well, they had thought him possessed of a devil; and his father had atfirst sought to exorcise it with a chamois-hide thong, as Munchausenflogged the black fox out of his skin. But the counter-irritant failed ofits purpose. The devil clung deep, and rent poor Camille with periodicconvulsions of insanity.
It was noted that his derangement waxed and waned with the monthly moon;that it assumed a virulent character with the passing of the secondquarter, and culminated, as the orb reached its fulness, in a species ofdelirium, during which it was necessary to carefully watch him; that itdiminished with the lessening crescent until it fell away into a quietabeyance of faculties that was but a step apart from the normalintelligence of his kind. At his worst he was a stricken madmanacutely sensitive to impressions; at his best an inoffensive peasant whosaid nothing foolish and nothing wise.
When he was twenty, his father died, and Camille and his mother had tomake out existence in company.
Now, the veil, in my first knowledge of him, was never rent; yetoccasionally it seemed to me to gape in a manner that let a littlemomentary finger of light through, in the flashing of which a soulkindled and shut in his eyes, like a hard-dying spark in ashes. I wishedto know what gave life to the spark, and I set to pondering the problem.
"He was not always thus?" I would say to Madame Barbiere.
"But no, Monsieur, truly. This place--bah! we are here imbeciles all tothe great world, without doubt; but Camille!--_he_ was by nature of thosewho make the history of cities--a rose in the wilderness. Monsieursmiles?"
"By no means. A scholar, Madame?"
"A scholar of nature, Monsieur; a dreamer of dreams such as they becomewho walk much with the spirits on the lonely mountains."
"Torrents, and avalanches, and the good material forces of nature, Madamemeans."
"Ah! Monsieur may talk, but he knows. He has heard the _foehn_ sweep downfrom the hills and spin the great stones off the house-roofs. And one maylook and see nothing, yet the stones go. It is the wind that runs beforethe avalanche that snaps the pine trees; and the wind is the spirit thatcalls down the great snow-slips."
"But how may Madame who sees nothing; know then a spirit to be abroad?"
"My faith; one may know one's foot is on the wild mint without shiftingone's sole to look."
"Madame will pardon me. No doubt also one may know a spirit by the smellof sulphur?"
"Monsieur is a sceptic. It comes with the knowledge of cities. Thereare even such in little Bel-Oiseau, since the evil time when they tookto engrossing the contracts of good citizens on the skins of the poorjew-beards that give us flesh and milk. It is horrible as the Tannery ofMeudon. In my young days, Monsieur, such agreements were inscribed uponwood."
"Quite so, Madame, and entirely to the point. Also one may see from whomCamille inherited his wandering propensities. But for his fall--it wasalways unaccountable?"
"Monsieur, as one trips on the edge of a crevasse and disappears. Hissoul dropped into the frozen cleft that one cannot fathom."
"Madame will forgive my curiosity."
"But surely. There was no dark secret in my Camille's life. If the littlehead held pictures beyond the ken of us simple women, the angels paintedthem of a certainty. Moreover, it is that I willingly recount this griefto the wise friend that may know a solution."
"At least the little-wise can seek for one."
"Ah, if Monsieur would only find the remedy!"
"It is in the hands of fate."
Madame crossed herself.
"Of the _Bon Dieu_, Monsieur."
At another time Madame Barbiere said:--
"It was in such a parched summer as this threatens to be that my Camillecame home in the mists of the morning possessed. He was often out on thesweet hills all night--that was nothing. It had been a full moon, and thewhiteness of it was on his face like leprosy, but his hands were hot withfever. Ah, the dreadful summer! The milk turned sour in the cows' uddersand the tufts of the stone pines on the mountains fell into ashes likeDead Sea fruit. The springs were dried, and the great cascade of Buetfell to half its volume."
"This cascade; I have never seen it. Is it in the neighbourhood?"
"Of a surety. Monsieur must have passed the rocky ravine that vomits thetorrent, on his way hither."
"I remember. I will explore it. Camille shall be my guide."
"Never."
"And why?"
Madame shrugged her plump shoulders.
"Who may say? The ways of the afflicted are not our ways. Only I knowthat Camille will never drive his flock to pasture near the lip of thatdark valley."
"That is strange. Can the place have associations for him connected withhis malady?"
"It is possible. Only the good God knows."
But _I_ was to know later on, with a little reeling of the reason also.
* * * * *
"Camille, I want to see the Cascade de Buet."
The hunted eyes of the stricken looked into mine with a piercing glanceof fear.
"Monsieur must not," he said, in a low voice.
"And why not?"
"The waters are bad--bad--haunted!"
"I fear no ghosts. Wilt thou show me the way, Camille?"
&
nbsp; "I!" The idiot fell upon the grass with a sort of gobbling cry. I thoughtit the prelude to a fit of some sort, and was stepping towards him, whenhe rose to his feet, waved me off and hurried away down the slopehomewards.
Here was food for reflection, which I mumbled in secret.
A day or two afterwards I joined Camille at midday on the heights wherehe was pasturing his flocks. He had shifted his ground a little distancewestwards, and I could not find him at once. At last I spied him, hisback to a rock, his hand dabbled for coolness in a little runnel thattrickled at his side. He looked up and greeted me with a smile. He hadconceived an affection for me, this poor lost soul.
"It will go soon," he said, referring to the miniature streamlet. "It issafe in the woods; but to-morrow or next day the sun will lap it up ereit can reach the skirt of the shadow above there. A farewell kiss to you,little stream!"
He bent and sipped a mouthful of the clear water. He was in a morereasonable state than he had shown for long, though it was now closeon the moon's final quarter, a period that should have marked a moregeneral tenor of placidity in him. The summer solstice, was, however, athand, and the weather sultry to a degree--as it had been, I did not failto remember, the year of his seizure.
"Camille," I said, "why to-day hast thou shifted thy ground a little inthe direction of the Buet ravine?"
He sat up at once, with a curious, eager look in his face.
"Monsieur has asked it," he said. "It was to impel Monsieur to ask itthat I moved. Does Monsieur seek a guide?"
"Wilt thou lead me, Camille?"
"Monsieur, last night I dreamed and one came to me. Was it my father? Iknow not, I know not. But he put my forehead to his breast, and the evilleft it, and I remembered without terror. 'Reveal the secret to thestranger,' he said; 'that he may share thy burden and comfort thee; forhe is strong where thou art weak, and the vision shall not scare him.'Monsieur, wilt thou come?"
He leaped to his feet, and I to mine.
"Lead on, Camille. I follow."
He called to the leader of his flock: "Petitjean! stray not, my littleone. I shall be back sooner than the daisies close." Then he turned to meagain. I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he werestrung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless one still.
"Do you not fear?" he said, in a whisper; and the apple in his throatseemed all choking core.
"I fear nothing," I answered with a smile; yet the still sombreness ofthe woods found a little tremor in my breast.
"It is good," he answered, regarding me. "The angel spoke truth. Follow,Monsieur."
He went off through the trees of a sudden, and I had much ado to keeppace with him. He ran as one urged on by a sure sense of doom, lookingneither to right nor left. His mountain instincts had remained with himwhen memory itself had closed around like a fog, leaving him face to faceand isolated with his one unconfessed point of terror. Swiftly we madeour way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soonbroke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of thescene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted andgrotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions--savewhere some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing andstrewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here noflowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut witha whistle of alarm to vanish like a red shadow. All was melancholy andsilence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin. Storm, andavalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year byyear, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction. The verysaplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookeryof crime.
We strode with difficulty in an inhuman twilight through this great darkquickset of Nature, and had paused a moment where the thronging trunksthinned somewhat, when a little mouthing moan came towards us on thecrest of a ripple of wind. My companion stopped on the instant, andclutched my arm, his face twisting with panic.
"The Cascade, Monsieur!" he shook out in a terrified whisper.
"Courage, my friend! It is that we come to seek."
"Ah! My God, yes--it is that! I dare not--I dare not!"
He drew back livid with fear, but I urged him on.
"Remember the dream, Camille!" I cried.
"Yes, yes--it was good. Help me, Monsieur, and I will try--yes, I willtry!"
I drew his arm within mine, and together we stumbled on. The undergrowthgrew denser and more fantastic; the murmur filled out, increased andresolved itself into a sound of falling water that ever took shape, andvolume, and depth, till its crash shook the ground at our feet. Then ina moment a white blaze of sky came at us through the trunks, and we burstthrough the fringe of the wood to find ourselves facing the opposite sideof a long cleft in the mountain and the blade's edge of a roaringcataract.
It shot out over the lip of the fall, twenty feet above us, in a curvelike a scimitar, passed in one sheet the spot where we stood, and divedinto a sunless pool thirty feet below with a thunderous boom. What it mayhave been in full phases of the stream, I know not; yet even now it wassufficiently magnificent to give pause to a dying soul eager to shake offthe restless horror of the world. The flat of its broad blade divided thelofty black walls of a deep and savage ravine, on whose jagged shelvessome starved clumps of rhododendron shook in the wind of the torrent.Far down the narrow gully we could see the passion of water tossing,champed white with the ravening of its jaws, until it took a bend of thecliffs at a leap and rushed from sight.
We stood upon a little platform of coarse grass and bramble, whose fringedipped and nodded fitfully as the sprinkle caught it. Beyond, the slidingsheet of water looked like a great strap of steel, reeled ceaselessly offa whirling drum pivoted between the hills. The midday sun shot like apiston down the shaft of the valley, painting purple spears and anglesbehind its abutting rocks, and hitting full upon the upper curve of thefall; but half-way down the cataract slipped into shadow.
My brain sickened with the endless gliding and turmoil of descent, and Iturned aside to speak to my companion. He was kneeling upon the grass,his eyes fixed and staring, his white lips mumbling some crippled memoryof a prayer. He started and cowered down as I touched him on theshoulder.
"I cannot go, Monsieur; I shall die!"
"What next, Camille? I will go alone,"
"My God, Monsieur! the cave under the fall! It is there the horror is."
He pointed to a little gap in the fringing bushes with shaking finger.I stole gingerly in the direction he indicated. With every step Itook the awful fascination of the descending water increased uponme. It seemed hideous and abnormal to stand mid-way against aperpendicularly-rushing torrent. Above or below the effect would havebeen different; but here, to look up was to feel one's feet draggingtowards the unseen--to look down and pass from vision of the lip of thefall was to become the waif of a force that was unaccountable.
I had a battle with my nerves, and triumphed. As I approached the openingin the brambles I became conscious of a certain relief. At a littledistance the cataract had seemed to actually wash in its descent the edgeof the platform. Now I found it to be further away than I had imagined,the ground dropping in a sharp slope to a sort of rocky buttress whichlay obliquely on the slant of the ravine, and was the true margin of thetorrent. Before I essayed the descent, I glanced back at my companion. Hewas kneeling where I had left him, his hands pressed to his face, hisfeatures hidden; but looking back once again, when I had with infinitecaution accomplished the downward climb, I saw that he had crept tothe edge of the slope, and was watching me with wide, terrified eyes. Iwaved my hand to him and turned to the wonderful vision of water thatnow passed almost within reach of my arm. I stood near the point wherethe whole glassy breadth glided at once from sunlight into shadow. Itfell silently, without a break, for only its feet far below trod thethunder.
Now, as I peered about, I noticed a little cleft in the rocky margin, aminute's climb above me. I was attracted to this by an
appearance ofsmoke or steam that incessantly emerged from it, as though some witch'scaldron were simmering alongside the fall. Spray it might be, or thecondensing of water splashed on the granite; but of this I might not besure. Therefore I determined to investigate, and straightway beganclimbing the rocks--with my heart in my mouth, it must be confessed, forthe foothold was undesirable and the way perilous. And all the timeI was conscious that the white face of Camille watched me from above. AsI reached the cleft I fancied I heard a queer sort of gasping sob issuefrom his lips, but to this I could give no heed in the sudden wonder thatbroke upon me. For, lo! it appeared that the cleft led straight to anarrow platform or ledge of rock right underneath the fall itself, butextending how far I could not see, by reason of the steam that filled thepassage, and for which I was unable to account. Footing it carefully andgroping my way, I set step in the little water-curtained chamber andadvanced a pace or two. Suddenly, light grew about me, and a beautifulrose of fire appeared on the wall of the passage in the midst of whatseemed a vitrified scoop in the rock.
Marvelling, I put out my hand to touch it, and fell back on the narrowfloor with a scream of anguish. An inch farther, and these lines hadnot been written. As it was, the fall caught me by the fingers with thesuck of a cat-fish, and it was only a gigantic wrench that saved me fromslipping off the ledge. The jerk brought my head against the rock with astunning blow, and for some moments I lay dizzy and confused, daringhardly to breathe, and conscious only of a burning and blistering agonyin my right hand.
At length I summoned courage to gather my limbs together and crawl outthe way I had entered. The distance was but a few paces, yet to traversethese seemed an interminable nightmare of swaying and stumbling. I knowonly one other occasion upon which the liberal atmosphere of the openearth seemed sweeter to my senses when I reached it than it did on this.
I tumbled somehow through the cleft, and sat down, shaking, upon thegrass of the slope beyond; but, happening to throw myself backwards inthe reeling faintness induced by my fright and the pain of my head, myeyes encountered a sight that woke me at once to full activity.
Balanced upon the very verge of the slope, his face and neck cranedforward, his jaw dropped, a sick, tranced look upon his features, stoodCamille. I saw him topple, and shouted to him; but before my voice waswell out, he swayed, collapsed, and came down with a running thud thatshook the ground. Once he wheeled over, like a shot rabbit, and, boundingthwack with his head against a flat boulder not a dozen yards from me,lay stunned and motionless.
I scrambled to him, quaking all over. His breath came quick, and a spirtof blood jerked from a sliced cut in his forehead at every pump of hisheart.
I kicked out a wad of cool moist turf, and clapped it in a pad over thewound, my handkerchief under. For his body, he was shaken and bruised,but otherwise not seriously hurt.
Presently he came to himself; to himself in the best sense of theword--for Camille was sane.
I have no explanation to offer. Only I know that, as a fall will set along-stopped watch pulsing again, the blow here seemed to have restoredthe misplaced intellect to its normal balance.
When he woke, there was a new soft light of sanity in his eyes that waspathetic in the extreme.
"Monsieur," he whispered, "the terror has passed."
"God be thanked! Camille," I answered, much moved.
He jerked his poor battered head in reverence.
"A little while," he said, "and I shall know. The punishment was just."
"What punishment, my poor Camille?"
"Hush! The cloud has rolled away. I stand naked before _le bon Dieu_.Monsieur, lift me up; I am strong."
I winced as I complied. The palm of my hand was scorched and blistered ina dozen places. He noticed at once, and kissed and fondled the woundedlimb as softly as a woman might.
"Ah, the poor hand!" he murmured. "Monsieur has touched the disc offire."
"Camille," I whispered, "what is it?"
"Monsieur shall know--ah! yes, he shall know; but not now. Monsieur, mymother."
"Thou art right, good son."
I bound up his bruised forehead and my own burnt hand as well as I wasable, and helped him to his feet. He stood upon them staggering; butin a minute could essay to stumble on the homeward journey withassistance. It was a long and toilsome progress; but in time weaccomplished it. Often we had to sit down in the blasted woods and restawhile; often moisten our parched mouths at the runnels of snow-waterthat thridded the undergrowth. The shadows were slanting eastwardsas we reached the clearing we had quitted some hours earlier, and thegoats had disappeared. Petitjean was leading his charges homewards indefault of a human commander, and presently we overtook them browsinglyloitering and desirous of definite instructions.
I pass over Camille's meeting with his mother, and the wonder, and fear,and pity of it all. Our hurts were attended to, and the battery ofquestions met with the best armour of tact at command. For myself, Isaid that I had scorched my hand against a red-hot rock, which wasstrictly true; for Camille, that it were wisest to take no earlyadvantage of the reason that God had restored to him. She was voluble,tearful, half-hysterical with joy and the ecstasy of gratitude.
"That a blow should effect the marvel! Monsieur, but it passescomprehension."
All night long I heard her stirring and sobbing softly outside his door,for I slept little, owing to pain and the wonder in my mind. But towardsmorning I dozed, and my dreams were feverish and full of terror.
The next day Camille kept his bed and I my room. By this I at leastescaped the first onset of local curiosity, for the villagers naturallymade of Camille's restoration a nine-days' wonder. But towards eveningMadame Barbiere brought a message from him that he would like to seeMonsieur alone, if Monsieur would condescend to visit him in his room. Iwent at once, and found him, as Haydon found Keats, lying in a white bed,hectic, and on his back. He greeted me with a smile peculiarly sweet andrestful.
"Does Monsieur wish to know?" he said in a low voice.
"If it will not hurt thee, Camille."
"Not now--not now; the good God has made me sound. I remember, and am notterrified."
I closed the door and took a seat by his bedside. There, with my handshading my eyes from the level glory of sunset that flamed into the room,I listened to the strange tale of Camille's seizure.
* * * * *
"Once, Monsieur, I lived in myself and was exultant with a loneliness offancied knowledge. My youth was my excuse; but God could not pardon meall. I read where I could find books, and chance put an evil choice in myway, for I learned to sneer at His name, His heaven, His hell. Each manhas his god in self-will, I thought in my pride, and through it alone heaccepts the responsibility of life and death. He is his own curse orblessing here and hereafter, inheriting no sin and earning no doom butsuch as he himself inflicts upon himself. I interpret this from the worldabout me, and knowing it, I have no fear and own no tyrant but my ownpassions. Monsieur, it was through fear the most terrible that Godasserted Himself to me."
The light was fading in the west, and a lance of shadow fell upon thewhite bed, as though the hushed day were putting a finger to its lips asit withdrew.
"I was no coward then, Monsieur--that at least I may say. I lived amongthe mountains, and on their ledges the feet of my own goats were notsurer. Often, in summer, I spent the night among the woods and hills,reading in them the story of the ages, and exploring, exploring till myfeet were wearier than my brain. Strangers came from far to see the greatcascade; but none but I--and you, too, Monsieur, now--know the trackthrough the thicket that leads to the cave under the waters. I found itby chance, and, like you, was scorched by the fire, though not badly."
"Camille--the cause?"
"Monsieur, I will tell you a wonderful thing. The falling waters theremake a monstrous burning glass, when the hot sun is upon them, which hasmelted the rock behind like wax."
"Can that be so?"
"It is true--dear Je
sus, I have fearful reason to know it."
He half rose on his elbow, his face, crossed by the bandage, grey asstone in the gathering dusk. Hereafter he spoke in an awed whisper.
"When the knowledge broke upon me, I grew great to myself in thepossession of a wonderful secret. Day after day I visited the cave andexamined this phenomenon--and yet another more marvellous in itsconnection with the first. The huge lens was a simple accident of curvedrocks and convex water, planed smooth as crystal. In other than adroughty summer it would probably not exist; the spouting torrent wouldoverwhelm it--but I know not. Was not this astonishing enough? Yet Naturehad worked a second miracle to mock in anticipation the self-sufficientplagiarism of little man. I noticed that the rays of the sun concentratedin the lens only during the half-hour of the orb's apparent crossing ofthe ravine. Then the light smote upon a strange curved little fan ofwater, that spouted from a high crevice at the mouth of the shallowvitrified tunnel, and devoured it, and played upon the rocks behind, thathissed and sputtered like pitch, and the place was blind with steam. Butwhen the tooth of fire was withdrawn, the tiny inner cascade fell againand wrought coolness with its sprinkling.
"I did not discover this all at once, for at first fright took me, and itwas enough to watch for the moment of the light's appearance and thenflee with a little laughter. But one day I ventured back into the caveafter the sun had crossed the valley, and the steam had died away, andthe rock cooled behind the miniature cascade.
"I looked through the lens, and it seemed full of a great white lightthat blazed into my eyes, so that I fell back through the inner fan ofwater and was well soused by it; but my sight presently recovering, Istood forward in the scoop of rock admiring the dainty hollow curve thefan took in its fall. By-and-by I became aware that I was looking outthrough a smaller lens upon the great one, and that strange whirlingmists seemed to be sweeping across a huge disc, within touch of my handalmost.
"It was long before I grasped the meaning of this; but, in a flash, itcame upon me. The great lens formed the object glass, the small, theeyeglass, of a natural telescope of tremendous power, that drew the highsummer clouds down within seeming touch and opened out the heavens beforemy staring eyes.
"Monsieur, when this dawned upon me I was wild. That so astonishing adiscovery should have been reserved for a poor ignorant Swiss peasantfilled me with pride wicked in proportion with its absence of gratitudeto the mighty dispenser of good. I came even to think my individualitypart of the wonder and necessary to its existence. 'Were it not for mycourage and enterprise,' I cried, 'this phenomenon would have remained asecret of the Nature that gave birth to it. She yields her treasures tosuch only as fear not.'
"I had read in a book of Huyghens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel--the greathigh-priests of science who had striven through patient years to read thehieroglyphics of the heavens. 'The wise imbeciles,' I thought. 'Theytoiled and died, and Nature held no mirror up to them. For me, thepoor Camille, she has worked in secret while they grew old and passedunsatisfied.'
"Brilliant projects of astronomy whirled in my brain. The evening of mylast discovery I remained out on the hills, and entered the cave as itgrew dusk. A feeling of awe surged in me as dark fell over the valley,and the first stars glistened faintly. I dipped under the fan of waterand took my stand in the hollow behind it. There was no moon, but mytelescope was inclined, as it were, at a generous angle, and a section ofthe firmament was open before me. My heart beat fast as I looked throughthe lens.
"Shall I tell you what I saw then and many nights after? Rings andcrosses in the heavens of golden mist, spangled, as it seemed, withjewels; stars as big as cart-wheels, twinkling points no longer, butround, like great bosses of molten fire; things shadowy, luminous, ofstrange colours and stranger forms, that seemed to brush the watersas they passed, but were in reality vast distances away.
"Sometimes the thrust of wind up the ravine would produce a tremulousmotion in the image at the focus of the mirror; but this was seldom.For the most part the wonderful lenses presented a steady curvature, notflawless, but of magnificent capacity.
"Now it flashed upon me that, when the moon was at the full, she wouldtop the valley in the direct path of my telescope's range of view. Atthe thought I grew exultant. I--I, little Camille, should first readaright the history of this strange satellite. The instrument that couldgive shape to the stars would interpret to me the composition of thatlonely orb as clearly as though I stood upon her surface.
"As the time of her fulness drew near I grew feverish with excitement. Iwas sickening, as it were, to my madness, for never more should I lookupon her willingly, with eyes either speculative or insane."
At this point Camille broke off for a little space, and lay back on hispillow. When he spoke again it was out of the darkness, with his faceturned to the wall.
"Monsieur, I cannot dwell upon it--I must hasten. We have no right topeer beyond the boundary God has drawn for us. I saw His hell--I saw Hishell, I tell you. It is peopled with the damned--silent, horrible,distorted in the midst of ashes and desolation. It was a memory that,like the snake of Aaron, devoured all others till yesterday--tillyesterday, by Christ's mercy."
* * * * *
It seemed to me, as the days wore on, that Camille had but recovered hisreason at the expense of his life; that the long rest deemed necessaryfor him after his bitter period of brain exhaustion might in the endprove an everlasting one. Possibly the blow to his head had, in expellingthe seven devils, wounded beyond cure the vital function that hadfostered them. He lay white, patient, and sweet-tempered to all, butmoved by no inclination to rise and re-assume the many-coloured garmentof life.
His description of the dreadful desert in the sky I looked upon, merely,as an abiding memory of the brain phantasm that had finally overthrowna reason, already tottering under the tremendous excitement induced byhis discovery of the lenses, and the magnified images they had presentedto him. That there was truth in the asserted fact of the existence ofthese, my own experience convinced me; and curiosity as to this aloneimpelled me to the determination of investigating further, when my handshould be sufficiently recovered to act as no hindrance to me in forcingmy way once more through the dense woods that bounded the waterfall.Moreover, the dispassionate enquiry of a mind less sensitive toimpressions might, in the result, do more towards restoring the warpedimagination of my friend to its normal state than any amount of spokenscepticism.
To Camille I said nothing of my resolve; but waited on, chafing at theslow healing of my wounds. In the meantime the period of the fullmoon approached, and I decided, at whatever cost, to make the venture onthe evening she topped her orbit, if circumstances at the worst shouldprevent my doing so sooner--and thus it turned out.
On the eve of my enterprise, the first fair spring of rain in a droughtof two months fell, to my disappointment, among the hills; for I fearedan increase of the torrent and the effacement of the mighty lens. I setoff, however, on the afternoon of the following day, in hot sunshine,mentally prognosticating a favourable termination to my expedition, andtelling Madame Barbiere not to expect me back till late.
In leisurely fashion I made my way along the track we had previouslytraversed, risking no divergence through overhaste, and carefullyexamining all landmarks before deciding on any direction. Thus slowlyproceeding, I had the good fortune to come within sound of the cataractas the sun was sinking behind the mountain ridges to my front; andpresently emerged from the woods at the very spot we had struck in ourformer journey together.
A chilly twilight reigned in the ravine, and the noise that came up fromthe ruin of the torrent seemed doubly accented by reason of it. Thesound of water moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impressionof something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment thanthe drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in thisechoing gorge was appalling indeed.
For some moments I stood on the brink of the slope, looking across at thegreat knife of the fa
ll, with a little shiver of fear. Then I shookmyself, laughed, and without further ado took my courage in hand, andscrambled down the declivity and up again towards the cleft in the rocks.
Here the chill of heart gripped me again--the watery sliding tunnellooked so evil in the contracting gloom. A false step in that humidchamber, and my bones would pound and crackle on the rocks forty feetbelow. It must be gone through with now, however; and, taking a longbreath, I set foot in the passage under the curving downpour that seemedtaut as an arched muscle.
Reaching the burnt recess, a few moments sufficed to restore myself-confidence; and without further hesitation I dived under the innerlittle fan-shaped fall--which was there, indeed, as Camille had describedit--and recovered my balance with pulses drumming thicker than I couldhave desired.
In a moment I became conscious that some great power was before me.Across a vast, irregular disc filled with the ashy whiteness of the outertwilight, strange, unaccountable forms, misty and undefined, passed, andrepassed, and vanished. Cirrus they might have been, or the shadows flungby homing flights of birds; but of this I could not be certain. As thedusk deepened they showed no more, and presently I gazed only into aviolet fathomless darkness.
My own excitement now was great; and I found some difficulty in keepingit under control. But for the moment, it seemed to me, I pined greatlyfor free commune with the liberal atmosphere of earth. Therefore, Idipped under the little fall and made my cautious way to the margin ofthe cataract.
I was surprised to find for how long a time the phenomenon had absorbedme. The moon was already high in the heavens, and making towardsthe ravine with rapid steps. Far below, the tumbling waters flashed inher rays, and on all sides great tiers of solemn, trees stood up atattention to salute her.
When her disc silvered the inner rim of the slope I had descended, Ireturned to my post of observation with tingling nerves. The field ofthe great object lens was already suffused with the radiance of herapproach.
Suddenly my pupils shrank before the apparition of a ghastly grey light,and all in a moment I was face to face with a segment of desolationmore horrible than any desert. Monstrous growths of leprosy that hadbubbled up and stiffened; fields of ashen slime--the sloughing of a worldof corruption; hills of demon, fungus swollen with the fatness ofputrefaction; and, in the midst of all, dim, convulsed shapes wallowing,protruding, or stumbling aimlessly onwards, till they sank anddisappeared.
* * * * *
Madame Barbiere threw up her hands when she let me in at the door. Myappearance, no doubt, was ghastly. I knew not the hour nor the lapseof time covered by my wanderings about the hills, my face hidden in mypalms, a drawn feeling about my heart, my lips muttering--mutteringfragments of prayers, and my throat jerking with horrible laughter.
For hours I lay face downwards on my bed.
"Monsieur has seen it?"
"I have seen it."
"I heard the rain on the hills. The lens will have been blurred. Monsieurhas been spared much."
"God, in His mercy, pity thee! And me--oh, Camille, and me too!"
"He has held out His white hand to me. I go, when I go, with a safeconduct."
* * * * *
He went before the week was out. The drought had broken and for five daysthe thunder crashed and the wild rain swept the mountains. On themorning of the sixth a drenched shepherd reported in the village that alandslip had choked the fall of Buet, and completely altered its shape.Madame Barbiere broke into the room where I was sitting with Camille, bigwith the news. She little guessed how it affected her listeners.
"The _bon Dieu_" said Camille, when she had gone, "has thundered Hiscurse on Nature for revealing His secrets. I, who have penetrated intothe forbidden, must perish."
"And I, Camille?"
He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasingthe dying words of certain noble lips,--
"Be good, Monsieur; be good."
At a Winter's Fire Page 1