He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the stones. They sat together, as closely as possible, her head upon his shoulder, his arms about her.
The hot anguish began to recede, and with it came a heavy lassitude in which they sat without speaking. The night closed in upon them. They heard their own disordered breathing in the black silence.
“Ah, Louis, Louis!” murmured the girl, in a faint and mournful voice. “It is farewell. Why do I weep? I do not know. But tomorrow I leave for the convent in Amiens, where my aunt is abbess. Kiss me, Louis. Hold me. Let me forget for this night.”
When he kissed her again, he tasted the tears that fell from her eyes. He held her as he might have held a sinking child. Some bleeding wound opened in his heart, like a gaping flame.
“No,” he said, at last, “you cannot leave me, Marguerite.”
He listened to his own words, and a cold horror seized upon him. He repeated them in his mind. He said aloud: “I am a priest.”
She lifted one of his icy hands to her lips and pressed it there, and her cries were stifled against it. He kissed her hair through her veil, caught her to him. Now he sobbed aloud, without tears, but as a man sobs who cannot endure his mortal pain.
All at once the endless and empty torment of his days seemed to rise before him in visions lighted by infernal fire. All at once all the terrible hours of doubt, hatred, fury, madness, loneliness and yearning welded together in one upsurge like a devouring conflagration. He felt himself dying. He fell on his knees before the girl; he dropped his head in her silken lap, feeling the warmth of her young thighs under his cheek. His arms embraced her despairingly. For an instant her hands took his head as though to lift it away from her, and then she dropped it. She sat motionless and silent, staring blindly into the darkness.
He began to speak in a hoarse and tearing voice, and his head rolled upon her lap in torture:
“Have pity on me, Marguerite. Do you know I love you, my child? We have met here, often—it has been a dream, a nothingness. What has it been to you, also? A nothingness. But it has given me happiness. Do you know I have never been happy, Marguerite? Do you know there has been nothing for me in all the world, in all these years, but longing and pain, loneliness and sadness, doubt and fear? Who has cared for me, but you?
“Do you know why I entered the Church, my little one? Never have I had the courage to know until now! I sought peace in the Church, a stifling, a thoughtless tranquillity, because I found nothing in the world, in living. For me, there has been only repudiation, only scorn and disdain. Who has known me, or cared to know me, but you?”
He paused a moment. His voice came back to the girl in doleful echoes from the forest. It was a voice from the very depths of the hell of a man’s soul. She shuddered. She looked down upon him, and her hands pressed themselves to his cheeks in compassion and understanding.
Now his voice rose on the wave of his mounting agony, as at last the iron walls went down and the flood burst forth:
“What has the Church been to me? I see so clearly, now! Why did I not see before? I found no peace in it, for there is no God, Marguerite! There is only a devil, an Evil in the world! I found only malevolent faces in the Church, the malevolent faces of a universe of men. I listened to the plottings, and I told myself they were the plottings in the service of God. But there is no God, my little one, my darling. There is only nothingness, an eternal darkness. We are lost in a wilderness.”
His strange and incoherent words, bursting from his lips, filled all the forest with dread murmurings and cries, incomprehensible. The girl shuddered more and more. Wild terror possessed her. She caught his head to her breast and held it there, crying aloud. But, in spite of her youth and innocence, she knew that he was hardly aware of her except as a channel through which his torture roared, finding expression at last for a lifetime of confusion and appalling suffering. And some deep eternal awareness came to her, a lofty understanding and tenderness, for all her inexperience. She felt that terrible forms and faces were gathering breathless about them in that forest, listening dangerously to these revelations, and that they were waiting for revenge on one who dared to speak from out his soul at last:
“O Marguerite!” he cried. “Where can a man fly? Where is there hope, light and refuge in all this universe of horror? We look upon each other and ask ourselves: Does there live in this man, under his calm face and his lying words, the frightfulness that is in me? The same knowledge of nothingness and evil, of blackness and death, of pain and despair? Who can tell of the hatred which inspires one against the other, because of the silence of the secret, because we dare not speak? Marguerite, do you know how I have hated all other men, because of my agony? And now I know that we hate each other because of our mutual agony, because of our knowledge that there is no God, and we are lost in a pit from which we cannot escape!”
The warmth of her innocent breast beneath her black bodice at last heated his cold flesh. He felt her hands, such little tender hands, pressed against his cheeks, as a mother presses a wounded and suffering child.
“There is love,” she whispered. “Oh, my dearest one, there is always love. And who knows but what that love is God?”
She felt in herself the passionate nobility of suffering for another, the strength of that suffering. She desired nothing but to give this writhing man a moment’s peace, a moment’s alleviation. She could find no words that were not worn thin and featureless by the lips of shallow men, as coins are worn by thousands of anonymous hands. Where were there words that had not become hollow and shameful, maudlin and foolish? Her heart was opening in a wide wound of compassion and love, and no words but empty ones could rise to her lips. Incoherent whisperings rose from her throat. Her eyes overflowed with her tears. She sobbed in her helplessness.
But he had heard her. His rigidity did not relax, but he was silent, drawing her closer and closer to him. And now a golden wave flowed from her to him, as though she was a spring rising from the depths of life. The bright wave engulfed her in radiance, caught him in its fringes, drew him nearer to her beyond the barriers of flesh. She felt that their souls embraced in that dazzling light. She was overcome with joy.
“No,” she said, and now her voice was pure and soft and steadfast, “there is no death, my dear one. There is no darkness, but the darkness in our own eyes. There is God, beyond our knowing, but always waiting.”
She wondered if he had heard her. He said at last: “I am weary. I wish to die, to rest. I wish not to know, or feel, or be. I am tired of God. As He is tired of us.”
“Rest,” she murmured. “Rest, for a little while.”
She cradled him in her young arms, rocking back and forth, murmuring words against his forehead, his hair. A faint crooning sound came from her lips; her eyes were shining in the dark. She smiled a little, with infinite mercy and tenderness. She felt the mortal exhaustion in his flesh, but it could not hurt her now. She was stronger than it. Her joy increased.
Now he stirred. “Have pity on me, Marguerite,” he said, hoarsely. “I love you, as I never loved a thing before.”
“I love you,” she said.
She sat in silence as his hands rose to her breasts and moved over her body. Now the soundlessness and the darkness of the forest was thrilling with life. She could not move. She was a glowing and ecstatic image of fire, love, desire and compassion. Moons wheeled before her staring eyes; she heard strange harmonious crashings in her ears. Now the soft earth and grass was beneath her, and she saw Louis’ eyes bent over her, burning and filled with light stronger than the enveloping darkness. She reached up to him, encompassed him in arms filled with the strength of all life. All at once she knew that the price of such life, such rapture and joy, was death. But she knew also that this death would pass as the night passes, and there was the renewal of the morning.
She was not the seduced, the helpless. Some wild and passionate ecstasy welled up from her, some solemn knowledge and enormous surrender which was in itself stre
ngth and heavy with eternity. In giving herself up to him, she redeemed him, and granted him peace.
There was less of lust in that frenzied and convulsive embrace in which the wretched man grasped the girl than a wild and piteous hunger for human contact, for human warmth; the mad passion which had seized him was the primordial desire to escape from isolation and imprisonment into light and freedom. His spirit was obsessed with his hunger, and his desire, and thus his frenzy. He could not press himself close enough to her; he buried his lips in her bosom, in her neck, and arms and hair. He sobbed aloud in his ravening starvation. She felt his hot breath in her ear, against her soft flesh, and she smiled in the darkness.
When at last he was exhausted, he fell at once into a deep and profound slumber. The moon’s faint long beams penetrated the forest and lay upon his face. It was quiet and still, almost deathlike in its expression of peace.
The forest was weighted under the approaching dawn. Now the trees hung in cool silence over the little glade. The moon had sunken beyond the horizon of the world. The eastern sky turned to a faint and pulsating opal. The voices of awakening birds called from branch to branch. Not a wind stirred, but from the earth rose the sweetest and most poignant of scents, and the pale air turned to crystal.
Marguerite slept on her lover’s breast, her little hands still holding one of his. As the air brightened, she smiled in her sleep and turned to him. He lifted himself on his elbow to gaze down on her, to fill all his eyes and soul with the sight of her. The black veil had gone, was lost. Her copper curls were disheveled about her face, which was too bright, too luminous. Her parted lips glowed, and the fringes of her lashes were golden shadows on her cheeks. Her disordered bodice revealed the soft whiteness of her bosom and one shoulder, which was like a translucent pearl.
“My sweet love,” he whispered. Now the agony was gone from him; it had been replaced by a vast but strangely comforting sorrow and peace. He experienced no shameful and petty guilt, no regret, and no remorse. He had risen beyond these things. There was a sad joy in him, a speechless but all-pervading tenderness.
And now as he looked down at the frail body of this girl, he had some mysterious prescience that death was upon her. But there was no despair in him. He felt that a strange covenant, a promise, was granted to him. For the first time in his life he was aware of God, of life, of radiance and eternal rapture.
He looked about him at the forest, and his eyes were heavy with dreams, too vast for the narrow confines and patterns of thoughts and words.
She stirred, and her eyelids lifted. She smiled at him, and turned to him. He held her in his arms. “Do not leave me,” he whispered. “Oh, never leave me!”
“Never,” she said. “Never.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
A short time before, Paul de Vitry would have smiled gently at the story which Arsène told him of Madame duPres and the priest, de Pacilli, believing it some exaggeration of his friend’s vehement and colorful brain. But now he listened with incredulous dismay, still half-doubting. His last experience with the perfidy of man was still heavy upon him, and he was almost prepared to believe anything.
“I shall return at once to Chantilly,” he said. The loss of that bright virtue which had distinguished him was more obvious than ever. He sighed with weariness. “However, there may be some explanation. It might not have been Madame, nor the priest. The world is full of plotting—. It is strange, though, that I did not receive your message.”
“The woman is still at your château?”
“Yes.”
“Pardieu! Then there is no time to waste!”
Force of habit made Paul part his lips to calm Arsène’s extravagance, but they closed again without a sound, and the new drawn lines on his pale face sprang into strong visibility. He appeared overcome with lassitude, a lassitude of the spirit rather than the flesh. Arsène scowled with suppressed impatience. He could not conceive, in his vigor, that any one should be permanently distressed at the discovery of human meanness and treachery. He, Arsène, had known of it all his life, and morbleu! it had never robbed him of an hour’s sleep or a relish for a good meal! In truth, it added a piquancy to life. One then could match wits with rats and weasels and small monkeys, and see who was the better! There seemed something a little contemptible in Paul’s crushing wretchedness and ingenuousness.
They sat in the small drawing room of Paul’s Paris hôtel, warming their feet at the fire, for the evening had turned cool. Paul had already ordered his lackey to prepare for the journey to Chantilly. Paul gazed at the fire, and his thin and delicate features were etched with scarlet. His hands lay on the arms of his carved chair, and there was a disarmed appearance about them, more than a trifle touching. He began to speak in a low voice, without looking at Arsène:
“We meet next, then, at La Rochelle, in two weeks?”
“Yes. Certes! We shall have trouble enough there. I do not flinch from it. I anticipate it.”
Paul, despite his misery, could not restrain a smile. Still, he did not look at his friend.
“Is there a message you desire to give me for your old friend, Grandjean? And Mademoiselle Cecile?”
Arsène was abruptly silent. Then he spoke in a strained voice: “Give them both my remembrance.”
Paul said, as if Arsène had not spoken: “It is a strange history which Grandjean has told me, of himself. No doubt he communicated this to you?”
“I was too ill. Moreover, I was not interested.”
Paul shifted in his seat. “Nevertheless, it is very strange, and might intrigue you.”
Arsène was about to say curtly that he could not imagine himself intrigued, but something peculiar in his friend’s persistence aroused his curiosity. He felt that all this was pertinent to himself, and he was not a young man who would overlook such pertinence.
Paul spoke half aloud, still gazing at the fire:
“The family is very respectable, of good Breton sailor stock. Grandjean was captain of his own small merchant vessel, plying between France and England. Moreover, he possessed a large grant of land, which had been the home of his forebears for generations. He had a young daughter, who was the core of his heart, and whom he had brought to girlhood himself, as her mother had died at her birth.”
Paul was silent a moment. His hands moved listlessly on the arms of his chair.
“He had frequently taken Eloise, his daughter, on his sea journeys. But now, as she was almost a woman, he left her at home, to manage his house. He emphasized that she was gently bred, of much beauty and charm. She had been educated unusually well at the local convent, and was much loved by the abbess and all the nuns.”
It was a dull enough history, and only the peculiar tone of Paul’s voice kept Arsène from yawning and moving restlessly, for his quick mind lacked the ability to focus with concentration on much of anything that did not concern himself.
“Mademoiselle Eloise finally became betrothed to the first mate on Grandjean’s vessel. They were to be married in a certain June. Unfortunately, the vessel, out on a journey which they anticipated would be concluded within five weeks, was lost in a storm. They did not return to France for nearly four months. They had been given up for lost. But the most tragic thing was that the young mate had been swept overboard at sea, and was never found.”
Now Paul was silent for a long time. But Arsène’s attention was now caught with a premonition of dread excitement.
“It seems,” Paul almost whispered as he proceeded, “that the priest of the parish was a man in full vigor of life. He had long before observed the young Eloise and her growing beauty, and her innocence. He had seduced her a short time before her father and her betrothed had gone on their illfated journey. The results were already known. However, he had persuaded the distracted girl that her marriage, which was to have taken place in the near future, would hide their guilty secret, and the girl, who dearly loved her betrothed and dared not think of the possible effect upon him, could do nothing else but listen t
o the priest, in her despair.”
Arsène listened to that sordid story with wrinkled brows and angry disgust. He leaned towards Paul, who still did not look at him.
Paul continued: “Imagine that home-coming of the devoted father, with his tragic news of the death of his daughter’s betrothed! Imagine what took place between him and the poor distracted girl, when all was revealed and confessed! Grandjean was beside himself. That night, he sought out the priest and killed him.”
Arsène uttered a short ejaculation. Now he was truly absorbed in the story.
“He returned to his daughter, who had attempted to kill herself. He rescued her, in his great compassion and despair. But they had to flee at once, after that murder. Think what it meant to that man, to have to abandon his land and his vessel, and flee in the night with a girl almost in extremis. He had little time to prepare himself. There was one small bag of gold in the house, and this he took with a few garments of his own and the girl’s, and a single horse, on which they both rode. After exhausting journeys, they arrived in Paris, and lost themselves in the gutters and the anonymity of the masses. It was in Paris that the young Cecile was born, at the moment that her heart-broken young mother died.”
There was silence in the room after Paul had finished his story. Arsène had risen. He stood near the fire and looked down fully at his friend, whose eyes were averted. Then Arsène said in a changed voice:
“Why have you told me this?” But his heart was beating in a very strange manner, and he was more than a little disgusted.
Paul finally lifted his eyes and looked fully at Arsène, and now there was a stern expression upon his face.
“Grandjean told this to me when I asked him for Cecile’s hand.”
“You!” exclaimed Arsène, incredulously. “You, the Comte de Vitry!”
Paul rose abruptly to his feet. He regarded Arsène with scorn and hauteur. “I thought you would say this, Arsène! But I hoped that there had been a change in you. I thought you had become a man, a reasonable, understanding being, at last. It seems that I was mistaken.”
The Arm and the Darkness Page 49