Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (434 page)

Some miles westward of the village there was a gap in the sierra, from which the eye plunged direct upon the residencia; and thither it became my daily habit to repair.  A wood crowned the summit; and just where the pathway issued from its fringes, it was overhung by a considerable shelf of rock, and that, in its turn, was surmounted by a crucifix of the size of life and more than usually painful in design.  This was my perch; thence, day after day, I looked down upon the plateau, and the great old house, and could see Felipe, no bigger than a fly, going to and fro about the garden.  Sometimes mists would draw across the view, and be broken up again by mountain winds; sometimes the plain slumbered below me in unbroken sunshine; it would sometimes be all blotted out by rain.  This distant post, these interrupted sights of the place where my life had been so strangely changed, suited the indecision of my humour.  I passed whole days there, debating with myself the various elements of our position; now leaning to the suggestions of love, now giving an ear to prudence, and in the end halting irresolute between the two.

One day, as I was sitting on my rock, there came by that way a somewhat gaunt peasant wrapped in a mantle.  He was a stranger, and plainly did not know me even by repute; for, instead of keeping the other side, he drew near and sat down beside me, and we had soon fallen in talk.  Among other things he told me he had been a muleteer, and in former years had much frequented these mountains; later on, he had followed the army with his mules, had realised a competence, and was now living retired with his family.

‘Do you know that house?’ I inquired, at last, pointing to the residencia, for I readily wearied of any talk that kept me from the thought of Olalla.

He looked at me darkly and crossed himself.

‘Too well,’ he said, ‘it was there that one of my comrades sold himself to Satan; the Virgin shield us from temptations!  He has paid the price; he is now burning in the reddest place in Hell!’

A fear came upon me; I could answer nothing; and presently the man resumed, as if to himself: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘O yes, I know it.  I have passed its doors.  There was snow upon the pass, the wind was driving it; sure enough there was death that night upon the mountains, but there was worse beside the hearth.  I took him by the arm, Senor, and dragged him to the gate; I conjured him, by all he loved and respected, to go forth with me; I went on my knees before him in the snow; and I could see he was moved by my entreaty.  And just then she came out on the gallery, and called him by his name; and he turned, and there was she standing with a lamp in her hand and smiling on him to come back.  I cried out aloud to God, and threw my arms about him, but he put me by, and left me alone.  He had made his choice; God help us.  I would pray for him, but to what end? there are sins that not even the Pope can loose.’

‘And your friend,’ I asked, ‘what became of him?’

‘Nay, God knows,’ said the muleteer.  ‘If all be true that we hear, his end was like his sin, a thing to raise the hair.’

‘Do you mean that he was killed?’ I asked.

‘Sure enough, he was killed,’ returned the man.  ‘But how?  Ay, how?  But these are things that it is sin to speak of.’

‘The people of that house . . . ‘ I began.

But he interrupted me with a savage outburst.  ‘The people?’ he cried.  ‘What people?  There are neither men nor women in that house of Satan’s!  What? have you lived here so long, and never heard?’  And here he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even the fowls of the mountain might have over-heard and been stricken with horror.

What he told me was not true, nor was it even original; being, indeed, but a new edition, vamped up again by village ignorance and superstition, of stories nearly as ancient as the race of man.  It was rather the application that appalled me.  In the old days, he said, the church would have burned out that nest of basilisks; but the arm of the church was now shortened; his friend Miguel had been unpunished by the hands of men, and left to the more awful judgment of an offended God.  This was wrong; but it should be so no more.  The Padre was sunk in age; he was even bewitched himself; but the eyes of his flock were now awake to their own danger; and some day — ay, and before long — the smoke of that house should go up to heaven.

He left me filled with horror and fear.  Which way to turn I knew not; whether first to warn the Padre, or to carry my ill-news direct to the threatened inhabitants of the residencia.  Fate was to decide for me; for, while I was still hesitating, I beheld the veiled figure of a woman drawing near to me up the pathway.  No veil could deceive my penetration; by every line and every movement I recognised Olalla; and keeping hidden behind a corner of the rock, I suffered her to gain the summit.  Then I came forward.  She knew me and paused, but did not speak; I, too, remained silent; and we continued for some time to gaze upon each other with a passionate sadness.

‘I thought you had gone,’ she said at length.  ‘It is all that you can do for me — to go.  It is all I ever asked of you.  And you still stay.  But do you know, that every day heaps up the peril of death, not only on your head, but on ours?  A report has gone about the mountain; it is thought you love me, and the people will not suffer it.’

I saw she was already informed of her danger, and I rejoiced at it.  ‘Olalla,’ I said, ‘I am ready to go this day, this very hour, but not alone.’

She stepped aside and knelt down before the crucifix to pray, and I stood by and looked now at her and now at the object of her adoration, now at the living figure of the penitent, and now at the ghastly, daubed countenance, the painted wounds, and the projected ribs of the image.  The silence was only broken by the wailing of some large birds that circled sidelong, as if in surprise or alarm, about the summit of the hills.  Presently Olalla rose again, turned towards me, raised her veil, and, still leaning with one hand on the shaft of the crucifix, looked upon me with a pale and sorrowful countenance.

‘I have laid my hand upon the cross,’ she said.  ‘The Padre says you are no Christian; but look up for a moment with my eyes, and behold the face of the Man of Sorrows.  We are all such as He was — the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us — ay, even in me — a sparkle of the divine.  Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning returns bringing peace.  Suffer me to pass on upon my way alone; it is thus that I shall be least lonely, counting for my friend Him who is the friend of all the distressed; it is thus that I shall be the most happy, having taken my farewell of earthly happiness, and willingly accepted sorrow for my portion.’

I looked at the face of the crucifix, and, though I was no friend to images, and despised that imitative and grimacing art of which it was a rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was carried home to my intelligence.  The face looked down upon me with a painful and deadly contraction; but the rays of a glory encircled it, and reminded me that the sacrifice was voluntary.  It stood there, crowning the rock, as it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by, an emblem of sad and noble truths; that pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.  I turned and went down the mountain in silence; and when I looked back for the last time before the wood closed about my path, I saw Olalla still leaning on the crucifix.

THE TREASURE OF FRANCHARD.

CHAPTER I.  BY THE DYING MOUNTEBANK.

They had sent for the doctor from Bourron before six.  About eight some villagers came round for the performance, and were told how matters stood.  It seemed a liberty for a mountebank to fall ill like real people, and they made off again in dudgeon.  By ten Madame Tentaillon was gravely alarmed, and had sent down the street for Doctor Desprez.

The Doctor was at work over his manuscripts in one corner of the little dining-room, and his wife was asleep over the fire in another, when the messenger arrived.

‘Sapristi!’ said the Doctor, ‘you should have sent for me before.  It was a case for hurry.’  And he followed the messenger as he was, in his slippers and skull-cap.

The inn was not thirty yards away, but the messenger did not stop there; he went in at one door and out by another into the court, and then led the way by a flight of steps beside the stable, to the loft where the mountebank lay sick.  If Doctor Desprez were to live a thousand years, he would never forget his arrival in that room; for not only was the scene picturesque, but the moment made a date in his existence.  We reckon our lives, I hardly know why, from the date of our first sorry appearance in society, as if from a first humiliation; for no actor can come upon the stage with a worse grace.  Not to go further back, which would be judged too curious, there are subsequently many moving and decisive accidents in the lives of all, which would make as logical a period as this of birth.  And here, for instance, Doctor Desprez, a man past forty, who had made what is called a failure in life, and was moreover married, found himself at a new point of departure when he opened the door of the loft above Tentaillon’s stable.

It was a large place, lighted only by a single candle set upon the floor.  The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man, with a Quixotic nose inflamed with drinking.  Madame Tentaillon stooped over him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet dangling.  These three were the only occupants, except the shadows.  But the shadows were a company in themselves; the extent of the room exaggerated them to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the candle the light struck upwards and produced deformed foreshortenings.  The mountebank’s profile was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and it was strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the flame was blown about by draughts.  As for Madame Tentaillon, her shadow was no more than a gross hump of shoulders, with now and again a hemisphere of head.  The chair legs were spindled out as long as stilts, and the boy set perched atop of them, like a cloud, in the corner of the roof.

It was the boy who took the Doctor’s fancy.  He had a great arched skull, the forehead and the hands of a musician, and a pair of haunting eyes.  It was not merely that these eyes were large, or steady, or the softest ruddy brown.  There was a look in them, besides, which thrilled the Doctor, and made him half uneasy.  He was sure he had seen such a look before, and yet he could not remember how or where.  It was as if this boy, who was quite a stranger to him, had the eyes of an old friend or an old enemy.  And the boy would give him no peace; he seemed profoundly indifferent to what was going on, or rather abstracted from it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap.  But, for all that, his eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with a thoughtful fixity of gaze.  Desprez could not tell whether he was fascinating the boy, or the boy was fascinating him.  He busied himself over the sick man: he put questions, he felt the pulse, he jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still, whenever he looked round, there were the brown eyes waiting for his with the same inquiring, melancholy gaze.

At last the Doctor hit on the solution at a leap.  He remembered the look now.  The little fellow, although he was as straight as a dart, had the eyes that go usually with a crooked back; he was not at all deformed, and yet a deformed person seemed to be looking at you from below his brows.  The Doctor drew a long breath, he was so much relieved to find a theory (for he loved theories) and to explain away his interest.

For all that, he despatched the invalid with unusual haste, and, still kneeling with one knee on the floor, turned a little round and looked the boy over at his leisure.  The boy was not in the least put out, but looked placidly back at the Doctor.

‘Is this your father?’ asked Desprez.

‘Oh, no,’ returned the boy; ‘my master.’

‘Are you fond of him?’ continued the Doctor.

‘No, sir,’ said the boy.

Madame Tentaillon and Desprez exchanged expressive glances.

‘That is bad, my man,’ resumed the latter, with a shade of sternness.  ‘Every one should be fond of the dying, or conceal their sentiments; and your master here is dying.  If I have watched a bird a little while stealing my cherries, I have a thought of disappointment when he flies away over my garden wall, and I see him steer for the forest and vanish.  How much more a creature such as this, so strong, so astute, so richly endowed with faculties!  When I think that, in a few hours, the speech will be silenced, the breath extinct, and even the shadow vanished from the wall, I who never saw him, this lady who knew him only as a guest, are touched with some affection.’

The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be reflecting.

‘You did not know him,’ he replied at last, ‘he was a bad man.’

‘He is a little pagan,’ said the landlady.  ‘For that matter, they are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not.  They have no interior.’

But the Doctor was still scrutinising the little pagan, his eyebrows knotted and uplifted.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Jean-Marie,’ said the lad.

Desprez leaped upon him with one of his sudden flashes of excitement, and felt his head all over from an ethnological point of view.

‘Celtic, Celtic!’ he said.

‘Celtic!’ cried Madame Tentaillon, who had perhaps confounded the word with hydrocephalous.  ‘Poor lad! is it dangerous?’

‘That depends,’ returned the Doctor grimly.  And then once more addressing the boy: ‘And what do you do for your living, Jean-Marie?’ he inquired.

‘I tumble,’ was the answer.

‘So!  Tumble?’ repeated Desprez.  ‘Probably healthful.  I hazard the guess, Madame Tentaillon, that tumbling is a healthful way of life.  And have you never done anything else but tumble?’