Last Tales (15 page)

“And why not Monsieur Tutein?” asked Childerique.

“Oh God,” said Delphine, “the old ladies would never believe that a man who is not of the old nobility could keep from revoking.”

The party broke up, first seeing Delphine off in her phaeton. From the entrance to the dense wood she waved her hand with the whip; her gay colors were swallowed up by the somber deep.

Childerique got herself and her family into the landaulet; she let the coachman drive the horses for the return journey. The little boy grew sleepy on his nurse’s knees.

“Give him to me, Marie,” said the mother.

No sooner was he seated in her arms than he dropped off to
sleep, his dark curls—luminous as the black cherries that they had been served—toward her bosom. She became absorbed in the delight of the pressure of his firm little body against her own, and sat silent, thinking of the struggle she had had with her stepmother, before she got the old woman’s consent to nurse her babies herself. “What obstacles people do make for our happiness,” she thought.

The two riders trotted on, a little behind the carriage, their horses here in the forest much worried by the gadflies and prancing on the narrow road; they did not talk. The young boy, red-haired, tall and slim on his tall horse, was pushing his mount on impatiently, as if he could not stand this state of things one moment longer. Philippe had his eyes on the carriage, and that air of listening and keeping watch which rarely left him.

On his return to France from America nine years before, his neighbors had been impressed and a little frightened by his new ideas and schemes of reform, but he had quite settled down by now, and seemed to form himself like a ringwall round the little world of his domestic life. It had indeed taken him some time to get used to the abundance growing up around him. It seemed to him that he had done nothing but take to himself a lovely young girl of his native province, and from that one step had resulted the richness of life on all sides, the multiplicity of color and melody in his house and garden, the activity everywhere, laughter and crises of tears, the sweetness of young lives and alternation of work and hopes, the whole solar system of Champmeslé.

He watched the figure of his wife, sunk in musing in the carriage seat. He recognized the thoughtful mood which had come over her, the wave-motion of her being, following the rhythm of the moon like the tidal waves of the sea. It was as if a weight were being gathered grain by grain, within the depth of her, balancing down her vitality into a new calm and a deeper understanding. Sometimes she would disappear from him altogether for a day or two, but only to come back, radiant,
as from a flight into a distant world from which she brought with her fresh flowers to adorn her home.

II

The young master of Champmeslé himself had had an uncommon destiny.

He was born in Dordogne, but when he was seven years old his father had gone away from the country, and had taken him with him, to live in Canada, on an estate near Quebec, upon the river of Maskinongé, which had been in his family for a long time. The boy never quite knew what quarrels about politics and religion had driven his father into exile. His mother had died two years before.

For some reason his father took up, in the new country, the life of a hard-working farmer, and left the interest on his capital to accumulate in France, and to keep up and improve his estates there. Philippe was told that they were rich, but he never knew in practice what it meant to be rich.

He became conscious of himself and of the world in a rough new country. Still the old province, these same hills and valleys, woods and old towns which now encircled him, were with him during all his childhood, as God is ever present to a child piously brought up. The names of the old places were on his father’s tongue, and the boy would not forget how the rivers ran and the roads turned, what were the signs of the changing seasons, or how the old people on the farms were related to one another. The records of stags killed and horses bred in France were kept on the Canadian farm. Most often of all would come back the name of Haut-Mesnil and of the people who lived there.

His boyhood, lonely in a strange country, in the company of a melancholy man, had shone all the same with rainbow radiance from a lost, a promised land.

Time after time in the course of these years his father would take up the idea of going back to France. The life of the child then reflected the terrible struggle within the soul of the
ordinarily collected, quiet man. He saw him. thrown off his balance, upset and stirred to the bottom of his being. The occupations of their daily life were than left and forgotten as if they had not existed. For weeks the agony would go on; the man would decide to go and give it up ten times within one night, or he would imagine them already on the way, wake up and find himself in the Canadian home, and despair. These outbreaks became a yearly returning rite, an equinoctial gale in the existence of the boy. One thing he would notice: as soon as there was any plan of going back to France the names of Haut-Mesnil and its inhabitants would disappear from the vocabulary of his father. Then, in the end, the mood passed, always in the same way, and the Baron de La Verandryé never went back to France.

When his father fell ill, the conflict of his life suddenly dissolved itself in his plans and hopes of his son going to France when he himself should be dead. During his last months he talked much of all that the boy was to do there, with such gay hopefulness as Philippe had never known in him. The boy would find him feverish in his bed, waiting for his return to instruct him how to put out carob in a pond of Champmeslé. On his last day his mind was swarming with the names of old servants and dogs; to the son listening it was as if the world of Champmeslé were rushing out to meet him.

Six months after his father’s death, when he had settled the affairs of their estate, Philippe started on his journey home.

He had his first real feeling of freedom at the sight of the ocean. But one moonlight night, when he was on the deck of the ship, in the dark-brown, transparent shadow of the large sails, it was to him suddenly as if the cold gray wandering waters spoke to him, warning him not to go, but to turn back. The feeling did not last long, but he remembered it long.

On his return to France, for a time he forgot everything.

The promised land more than kept its promises. Strange
as it was to him to travel toward his home, to meet, one after the other, the blue hills and rivers, and the towns, and to find them so much smaller than he remembered them—for in Canada the problem of distances had been one of the serious phenomena of life, but with the fertility and smooth roads of the French land all seemed to be one neighborhood and distance nonexistent, and this was much like a dream, and from the first made everything dreamlike to him—conditions were soon, in a much stranger way, changed entirely. He was no longer acting himself, but was being received and handled by something stronger than he. Just as it had come to lift up his dying father, the country came out to meet him, put its arms round him and held him. He learned that his father had been dear to people here in a way which he would never himself have guessed; they talked of him with smiles and tears. A new picture of the lonely man was here forming itself for his son.

This extraordinary happiness of his first year in France was, even now, sometimes brought back to Philippe, unconsciously, in an old tune or a scent. And when he thus got the whole fullness of the nights and days of that year, of friendships, hunts, journeys, meals and dreams, distilled and in one draught, the strongest flavor within it was still that feeling of belonging to something, and of having been taken into, and made one with, a life outside himself, in which he had still a more perfect freedom than he had known before. It had the sweetness of a first union of love. Consciously he could never recall it, it had lasted too briefly.

In due time he also called at Haut-Mesnil. There he found things much changed, for the master of the house had died, his widow was a second wife, whom his father had never known, and the present head of the family, her son, was a boy of ten. The daughter of the first marriage, with whose name he was familiar, was in a convent at Pirigueux. But he was received as kindly there as everywhere, and in time, in spite of the place being so unlike the Haut-Mesnil of his childhood
dreams, he came to feel more at home there than in any other house. So much power is there in lifeless things, in houses, roads, trees and bridges. Also there was a particular influence at work in the place, for which, later on, he came to find a name.

From the Countess he learned a thing which surprised him, namely, that the heads of the houses of Haut-Mesnil and Champmeslé had not been on friendly terms. This did not affect the benevolence of the Countess toward him; in fact it seemed that this lady had made it a line of conduct to take, in life, the opposite side from her husband. Thus she had taken, on her marriage, the side of her stepdaughter against her father, and even, when her own son appeared on the stage and was made much fuss about, against him. She did not come from Dordogne, but from the Province of Geneva; she was a highly bigoted, dry woman, with little knowledge of the world or the heart, no imagination and no faculty for loving. Life was dull to her, and she welcomed, with a passionate gratitude, the few phenomena in it which were capable of awakening her imagination. Probably it was her grudge against her husband that he had never been able to do so—even her son, when he had once been born, had failed. For scandal she had no taste; the world of sentiment lay too far off her domain. Religion had often shown a fatal tendency to dry up under her hands, from the ecstasy which, upon the best of authorities she had expected of it, into sawdust of moral principle. But adventure she appreciated. When Philippe would talk to little Childerique of red Indians, of bear-hunts, or of canoe expeditions, she would listen, as spellbound as the child; for these last she had even a particular preference, being terrified of water herself. Something of the picture of the little boy who had grown up, motherless, far from France, in the company of wild red-skinned men, struck her heart and brought out one of the rare little wells of feeling in it. Philippe found in the narrow-minded
woman, who could not love, a rare talent for being a friend, which, toward him, lasted all her life.

Many things at Haut-Mesnil were explained by the strange luster which was still spread everywhere by the memory of the Countess Sophie, Childerique’s mother. The remembrance of this beautiful young woman seemed to live in all the province, like an afterglow of her rich vitality. People talked about her as if she were still alive, and little tales of her grace and generosity were hurried upon him, as if he could not be accepted as a true child of the community until he shared this creed. He heard of her curious taste for disguise, so that she would, like a neat female Haroun al Raschid, become acquainted with the poor and outcast of the land in her maid’s apron, or even dressed up as a horse-dealer’s boy, for she was an exquisite horsewoman; and of her impulsive heart, when, on finding a poor tenant’s household lamenting a dead mother and a new-born baby, she had shifted her own little daughter to the arms of the nurse, and laid the forlorn child to her full breast. The present Countess herself, who had never seen Madame Sophie, had a special feeling toward the frail figure, a mixture of admiration and pity. In Childerique, while she strove to graft into her the strictest principles of prudence, her true devotion went toward those imaginative, defying sides of her nature which recalled the dead woman.

When Childerique came from her convent she found the new young neighbor a persona grata of Haut-Mesnil, so much the friend of her little brother that to begin with she did not like him. Philippe afterwards wondered whether the stepmother had not, before the girl’s return, planned—as much as she had it in her to plan anything in life—to unite sense and romance by marrying off her stepdaughter to the largest estate of the province as well as to the blood-brother of the Mohicans. The heart of the young man needed no encouragement; it was prepared for love for this girl as a field, plowed
and harrowed, for the spring rains. Virginal and generous, Childerique seemed to him, from the beginning, the incarnation of France and of all there that he had dreamed of as a child. At times it was as if he had known her first, and as if the country were imitating the girl in sweetness and ease of heart. Now even had the old woman and the young man been scheming together skillfully; the prey would not have been easy for them to come up to.

Childerique was at this time intoxicated with her freedom, but not at all with her power. She had grieved as a child because she had not been born a boy; for the sake of her mother’s honor, she was indignant that her stepmother should have accomplished, without any effort, the exploit which her beloved mother had failed to achieve. She was also at this period of her life troubled by being unusually tall for her age. Toward both these worries of her existence she took up the same attitude; she seemed to feel that as the truth could not be concealed, the world might as well have it point-blank. On this account she carried herself erect in her full height and also allowed herself the full freedom of being a girl, following all her own whims and frankly keeping from the society of males. In spite of her conventual education she was a Diana of Dordogne, a kind deity, but with bow and arrows. She might well, had she been bathing in her favorite forest pool, and had Actaeon approached, sweaty from the hunt, congratulating her on her choice of a bathing place, have invited him to join her in a swim. But had she found him spying on her secretly she would not have been behind the goddess in loosing her fierce hounds on him, or in her enjoyment of the sight of his dismembering. She had no desire to be desired, and her woman’s kingdom of longing, rapture and jealousy seemed to her all too vast; she did not want to take up the scepter at all. Like a young stork which considers that it runs very well, and does not care to fly, she had to be lured into her element. But once in it she gave proof of great powers. After his first kiss and words of love, she
fluttered up audaciously into flight; it was, in their honeymoon an ecstatic, easy soaring, and as the children were conceived and born a succession of majestic wing-strokes.