Childerique herself had been on the watch for any sign of disappointment in her husband, but she thought that the loveliness of the children had conquered their father’s heart. When the boy was born she made all the house and land of Champmeslé clap their hands at this master-stroke of hers.
She had wanted the child named first after his father and then after hers. To him neither choice had seemed seemly, he thought: “Let each of the dead men have that peace of the grave now, which they have more and less deserved.”
He often wondered what would happen to her should she come to know the truth now. He imagined that she would go into a convent; she would have to throw herself away from them all into the arms of Heaven for her salvation. It was not her actual fate either which took up his thoughts, but the transformation which, at a word, all her world would undergo. He had seen grass fires, and the black and waste land which they leave behind them; her flowering world would come to look like that. When he had been a boy he had been the friend of an old Indian horse-trader, who had assured him that he was, at the very same hour as he was trading horses in the marketplace of Quebec, even as well, in the strong and shaggy shape of a timber wolf, hunting and sleeping in the mountains. Thus, he thought, the white house of Champmeslé was even at this time at once the pride and refuge of her heart and to her mind a house of crime against the law of God, a place of shame. The three children, playing under her eyes on the terrace, were both the flowers and the crown of a proud, old race, and, more terrible than the cubs of the timber wolves, nameless offspring of dishonor. And he himself—like to his friend Osceola, who, while he was grooming his sleek horses and tying up their tails, was also trotting upon a trail in the woods or sitting in the snow and howling at the terrified mares and foals—he was at the same time the head of the corner of her happiness, and her enemy, the destroyer of it all.
In the beginning of their married life his consciousness had made him a little unsteady in his relations with his wife. He would leave her then, to come back begging for her love, as if he thought that they were soon to be separated for life. Childerique, who had no means of comparing him to other young men in love, took this as the normal expression of a man’s passion; it did not affect her; her strength and resilience of heart could have stood out against a heavier weight thrown at it. Sometimes she felt a slight compassion for him because he was still a stranger to many things which seemed to her foundation stones of existence. He was at home neither in the old nonsense rhymes of the nursery nor in the Divine service of Church, and he hardly remembered his First Communion.
One trait in the nature of his wife made Philippe wonder if she had in her an instinct which knew more than she did herself. With him, while she was such a devoted wife, radiant with love, her feelings seemed to be more those of a sister or comrade than of a woman in love, as if she knew his love to have been born with him, and to be hers by right of nature. Many women, he was aware, will buy their supremacy over their lovers at the price of much self-denial, and will submit to servitude through all the hours of the day to hold, within one hour of the night, triumphantly, the highest power of life and death. This, in a woman, had always made him uncomfortable; he distrusted both the servitude and the triumph. Childerique would be prepared to buy his appreciation of her as a housewife or a mother, and his admiration of her wisdom, justice and virtue, at the cost of her greatest efforts, and of a good deal of persuasion. For his desire and adoration, which were her happiness, she would give nothing at all, as if holding that within their sphere there can be neither sale nor purchase.
But with the young Lord of Haut-Mesnil, six years younger than herself, she showed all the attributes of a passionate and jealous mistress. She could not live without his adoration, and would humor and coax him into it; in her relation to him she never ran short of coquetries and artful flattery. She was vain about his appearance and about her own when he was near, and melancholy when he was melancholy, like one of his own dogs. And with him she was also capricious, zealous of attention, hurt by negligence and ever on her outlook for a rival, be it only one of his friends from school. She rarely gave her husband any caress on her own accord, but she would take trouble to keep near the boy, fondling and petting him, holding his hands and playing with his fingers or running her own fingers through his red locks.
III
There was in the forest a large oak near which the roads divided and went off, the one to Haut-Mesnil and the other to Champmeslé. Here Childerique had her carriage stopped to. take leave of her brother.
But the boy rode up to her and said: “I will dine at Champmeslé if I may. I have something to talk to you about.” She smiled at him very tenderly.
Still during dinner she decided to make him ride home early. He caught hay fever easily, and tonight he looked tired and restless; his face was pale and his eyes and nose red and swollen.
After dinner the brother and the sister walked up and down the terrace. Her husband watched them from the window of the library as he went through his papers and letters. He was starting in a day or two on his annual trip to La Rochelle, where he was to arrange the business of his Canadian property, and this time meeting some people of his from over there. A letter from Canada, received the same day, and not yet read, was on his table before him. The couple on the terrace walked into and out of his range of sight. Childerique had let down her hair, still moist from the children’s splashings. It was very thick and soft, and wafted round her neck and shoulders as she moved. Philippe remembered having seen pictures of deities with hair of snakes, rays of sun or zigzagged lightning, and he could well believe the personality of the bearer forcing itself thus even into the hair. These dark tresses, dead stuff which you might cut off or burn without her feeling it, just because at one point they were attached to her head, would twist, shine and fill the air with fragrance. As she turned and came toward him, the sun behind her, her head was wrapped in a dark cloak, within which red fires were smoldering.
The boy was silent for a while, gazing not at her but far away over the landscape. In the setting sun it was filled with strong and live colors, the shadows lengthening across it on all the eastern sides of slopes and forests. The glinting river wound along in the distance, in and out between groups of trees and rushy margins. The sister did not speak either; she had picked a rose and from time to time touched her lips with it.
Suddenly the boy stopped and spoke. “Remember this afterwards,” he said, “I need not have told you. I have told no one else, nor shall I do so. But one time, long ago, out in the forest, I said to you that I should probably always tell you everything that I was doing. In three days’ time I am marrying the miller’s widow at Masse-Bleue,”
His sister made big laughing eyes up at him over her rose, confident of some jest. On meeting the ice-cold, bloodshot eyes of an antagonist, she stood dead still and looked at him, and the color of her face slowly deepened to dark crimson; her eyes even seemed to water from the heat of the fire on her forehead and cheeks. It was as if, on finding her brother murdered and plundered in a dark forest, her first feeling should have been that of shame on seeing him naked. Soon her silence became intolerable to him.
“Yes,” he said, “this is Udday’s curse. We are lost. But I am free to be lost, if I choose, whatever all the world, whatever you say of it.”
It hurt her mortally that he should speak of all the world and of her in the same breath; still she dared not give in to her emotion, lest she should fall down dead, when she could not afford to fall, for she was standing up here to fight him.
“Why,” she said, gazing straight into his pale, agonized face, “are you doing this?”
Her question seemed to calm him; he looked back at her. So many times had he explained his whims and difficulties to her, to get her influence in their home on his side, that her words were to him like a bugle call, which he could not disobey. After a moment he sighed deeply, and spoke to her, very slowly and brokenly.
“You know,” he said, “that people l
ive on the moors and the waste land where the vipers are. There is not one of them who has not been bitten by vipers at some time. They have become immune to the poison; not only do they not die from it, as we do, nay it harms them not at all. You know, Childerique, how frightened I have been, all my life, of vipers and snakes—even now, when I set eyes on one of them I feel as if I should die. Well, I should like to be invulnerable to their bites, too. I will be with the people who cannot be hurt by vipers,” after a moment he added, “who play with them, and make them dance.”
It was her weakness that she understood him so well. His mother, she thought, would not have grasped the meaning of a single word he was saying; she would have met him with an absolute, heroic lack of understanding, which would have swept all he had said into nothingness. Her own fatal insight into his soul was like a weight round her neck. Still she disdained pretending not to understand. She was aware that all their common past was behind his words. They brought up a swarm of pictures of him and of herself, out on travels in the woods, in those moors or marshes of which he spoke, where they had strayed against the orders of his mother and their nurses. They had seen vipers there, and had been looking for wolves, which they knew to have lived there many years ago. They had been out in search of other things as well, of the dangers and horrors of the world. She had then egged the delicate boy on, indignant of his timidity, and she had triumphed when in the end she had called forth his foolhardiness. Their dangers had caused her great delight. But on what wild track was her little dog now running? She could not follow him, and she would not let him get away.
“Ah, indeed,” she cried, “you talk like a man! It is the right thing for the lord of Haut-Mesnil to go to the people of the moors, to be taught to make vipers dance, to be taught witchcraft, and treachery. It was thus that you went away, in the old days, to learn the ways of Turks and infidels, and left the women to guard your land. But what about us? Might we not also want to try the taste of poison, to sleep in the woods at night?” She was surprised at her own words; they rushed to her lips on their own. What was she saying?
“Might we not also,” she went on, “marry, at our pleasure, someone who could make vipers dance? But we did not do so. We did not forget our honor, or the honor of our houses, when you went away. There is not one, no not one, of the women of Haut-Mesnil, who has disgraced her name, the name of our father. Is it forever, then, the task of the women to hold up the houses, like those stone figures which they call caryatids? And are you now, Lord of Haut-Mesnil, going to pull down all the stones of our great house, upon your own head, and upon mine, and the heads of all of us?”
He looked at her with a strange, cold and hard curiosity. “What about you?” he repeated. “You, women of the great houses, who are holding up the houses upon your arms? You believe, Mama and you, that you are the finest things in all the world, but then it is, perhaps, easier to make fine things out of stone than in flesh and blood.”
Childerique drew in her breath in a long deep sigh. It was easier to her to hear herself, in his mouth, compared to his mother than, as before, to all the world, for she loved her stepmother, and had great respect for her.
“You curse us, when we leave you, you say,” the young man went on, “but what have you got to do with us, when you can never get your arms down? You know what you want; that is a good thing to you. But what do we want? No one thinks of that. Father never liked Mama, how could he, when she was made out of stone, a caryatid, as you say, on the house of Haut-Mesnil? Why should I want more stones, a son of stone, with a heart of stone, which you must break with a hammer, and throw on the road? A weight, that’s what you want to give us, always a weight. The devil take it,” he cried, having worked himself into a childish fury, “if the loveliest things in the world be made of stone, we must be free to go and play with those that are less lovely.”
She was as furious as he was, and it seemed to her that some huge black shadow, of such depth as she had never known, was stealing upon her from all sides. But she spoke calmly. “When you were a baby,” she said, “and we were out in the forest together, I watched Rose-Marie nurse you, and when the milk ran from the corner of your mouth I wished that I had been grown up like her, and able to nurse you myself. Now I think it would have been better had I forced the juice of gall-apples into your little mouth, so that you should never have grown up to shame us. How have you come to turn from all our old ways like this? What has the mill witch,” she cried out, “given you, so that you must forget me?”
“Who?” he asked, staring at her as if he had forgotten what they had been talking about.
She stared back at him contemptuously. “The mill witch,” said she.
As if his thoughts were, by her words, forced back to a resting-place, his eyes fell, and slowly his distorted face was smoothed out, as if someone had kept stroking a hand over it. “I do not know,” he said, “but she knows.”
The darkness and the pain were now closing all round the sister. “Let us go away together, you and I,” she cried. “We will sleep in the marshes, we will walk on the moors. Shall we not, in time, become immune, we two, to the vipers’ poison? Come.”
He stood straight up and looked at her for a moment. Then he sighed deeply. “Childerique,” he said, “do you always dream of me? At night, I mean, when you are asleep?”
“Dream?” she asked. “No.”
“No, you do not,” said he, with deep, bitter emotion. “But I, you see—it is only in the mill, in my dreams, that you have never been. When I dream of the mill, that I am in the mill, you are never there. I have gone to the mill, I chose it for myself, now it is too late to go back. Now it is too late for you and me to go together. I wish, now,” he went on very slowly, “that you would never think of me again. I should like to know for certain that you were never to think of me.”
For a second her knees, within her voluminous skirt, swayed, as if she meant to throw herself down upon them to him, but her movement took another direction; she cast herself toward him, folding his slim figure in her arms with the energy of a protecting mother or of a drowning woman, looking with radiant eyes into his face.
“Oh, my brother, my dearest love,” she said, “I will never let you go. Do you not think that I know more than you, that I can also open up a new world to you? Oh, I can teach you dances too, darkness, magic too.” While she spoke she lifted her hand and pressed up his chin.
The boy turned so deadly white under her touch that he frightened her. He drew back a step, and as she followed him, with strong hands he freed himself of her. “No, do not do that,” he said, “Simkie has held me, holds me, like that.”
The sister stood where he had left her, as white as he. She thought: “That was the last time that I ever held him in my arms.”
Suddenly he walked away.
At that moment a strange and terrible thing happened to her, which she had never experienced. She saw herself, clearly, as with her own eyes. She saw her own figure standing before the house, with her loosened hair; she even saw it grow smaller and smaller, upon the terrace, as he walked away from her.
The young Master of Haut-Mesnil rode away quickly, making his horse trot down the long avenue of sweetly smelling lime trees. But as he got onto the road he thought: “At this pace I shall be home in three-quarters of an hour,” and drew in his reins. He saw before him the long crimson drawing room, and his mother below her lamp, looking up from her cross-stitch to welcome him. He blew the air through his nostrils and turned his horse from the road to a narrow path which ran through the woods; after half an hour’s ride it brought him out in the open, and to the moors.
He rode slowly now, down the slope from the forest to the open land, first through a thicket of nettles, raspberries and crane’s bill, then through the deep undergrowth of bracken that crushed under his horse’s hoofs. The sound of the breaking branches and the strong and bitter smell went to his head and heart; it seemed to him that this was his fate: to crush and destroy everything
where he went. As he got out, the wide stretch of moor lay before him.
The sun was just setting; the air was filled with clear gold. The heather was not yet in flower, but the long hills had in their somberness a sweet promise of bloom. Along over the dark moor ran a floating line of fine golden dust that was the dry grass flowering in the wagon track across the dark land.
Into the head of the boy, riding on in deep thought, ran the often playfully repeated sentence of his old Swiss tutor about him: “Homo non sum, humanum omne a me alienum puto.” He wondered what it was that these human people named human. It seemed to him that there was a curse upon him—of human beings loving him, and claiming love from him in return, when he could not, would not love! He thought of his mother, who from his early childhood had ever been hoping for some richness of life through him and his love of her; of his friends at school, who had liked him, and wanted him to like them. He was sorry for them all. But all this love—it was like the cravings of vampires, with their large wings, asking for your blood and offering you, with deep sighs, their own thick hot blood in return.
He rode alongside a long slope that ran from north to south, and was suddenly struck by seeing, upon a lower parallel hill, east of him, his own shadow and that of his horse, accompanying him as he rode, upright, huge and long—a giant horseman stretching himself as far as he could over the land.
“God,” he thought, “oh God! Save the world from me.”
The sun went down, and with the setting of it, the hills that had blushed in its last slanting rays in a soft shine of grayish purple, suddenly cooled and darkened, like steel withdrawn from the furnace; the world became indescribably somber and severe. Immediately after, an owl flew past him on noiseless wing-strokes.
He tried to follow its flight in the glass-clear air. He remembered the joy which the sight of the big night-bird always caused to the heart of Childerique. “I count that a great stroke of luck, a great happiness, to see an owl,” she had said to him. He had asked her if she believed that the birds were omens of happiness. “I do not know,” she said, “I think it a great happiness, in itself, to see them.”