The Secret Book of Paradys (63 page)

To each kind and type of entreaty or demand, Roland Coville would say substantially the same thing, as various testimony later showed. What he said was this: “I killed Marie. I strangled her. She’s dead.”

But to the eternally repeated question
Why
? he would answer, white-faced and wooden, “I have nothing to say on that.”

In those parts, the unchastity of a bride might have furnished a reason. There were historic tales, to be sure, of girls slain on the wedding night, having been discovered unvirgin. The father challenged his son, but Roland shook his head. He even gave a grim and white-faced smile. No, he replied, she was intact. “What, then – what? Did she slight you?” No, he had not been slighted. Marie was a virgin and she had not insulted him. She had given no provocation. She had encouraged his advances.

“Why, then, in the name of God –”

“I won’t say, Father. Nothing on this earth will induce me to do so.”

It was the father of Marie, of course, who impugned the manhood of Roland. The husband had been unable to fulfill his duties, and had strangled the innocent maiden for fear she would betray him. There were a couple of
girls in the city who could give the lie to this. Nevertheless, the fathers ended fighting in the cobbled yard of the Coville house, under the peacocks.

In their turn, the police came. They had little to add but the uniform and threat of the law.

The village had fallen apart like a broken garden. Stones rattled by night on the shutters of the Coville house, on the embrasures of the village jail to which Roland had been removed. They wanted his death.

He was taken to the City in the dead of night, unpublicized, in a covered carriage, like an escape. The Coville house was locked up like a box. They had gone too into the darkness, to the City. Like all cities, it reeked of Hell. This had a rightness then, the flight toward Paradys, as, not too many years in the future, others would flee away from the drums and blades of Revolution, into the outer night of the world.

The trial of Roland Coville caused no stir in Paradys, City of Damnations. It was not unusual enough. A man had killed a girl, his lover and wife. So what? It happened twice a day. That the case had been explosive enough it was removed from village to City was nothing. A cough out of season was a wonder in the provinces.

The young man stood bravely, deadly, and composed before his judges. He was courteous and exact, and he refused them nothing except what he refused all others, the motive for the murder. He was defended with great difficulty.

“It is plain to me, and to those who sit in judgment on you, that you are no murderer. Let alone of a defenseless girl at your mercy in the dark, your young wife, looking to you for love and protection, receiving death at your hands. Clearly, monsieur, there is a momentous reason.
Tell us
.”

“No,” said Roland Coville. “I can tell you nothing at all.”

“But it may save your life, monsieur.”

Roland shook his head. He looked only sad and very young.

“But
monsieur
, for God’s sake. This will end in your hanging. Don’t you prefer to live?”

Roland looked surprised, as if he were unsure. “Perhaps not.”

“His face,” said the lawyer after, considerably shaken, “was like, I think, that of a woman I once heard of. She had been shown the mechanism of the human body, its heart, viscera, intestines, all the tubes and organs that support life. And having seen, she was so disgusted at the method whereby she lived that, when she got home, she cut her wrists and died. To be rid of it all. Just so, he looked, my Roland Coville. He isn’t reluctant to die.”

Once, during the examination at Paradys, Roland was asked about the lacerations on the fingers of his right hand. He answered that his wife, Marie, had indeed bitten him.

“And this was during her final moments, as she fought for her life?”

“No. It happened earlier.”

“Then your wife behaved violently toward you?”

“No,” said Roland.

“But you say that she bit you without any act on your part that would have invited her so to do.”

“No, I did not say this.”

“Monsieur Coville, we must be precise. When was it that these bites occurred?”

Roland hesitated. “When I touched the lips of Marie.”

“But this, then, was an extreme and unloving response.”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you kill her because of this? Because of her attack on you?”

Roland Coville thought for a moment, and then said, “Would it be deemed a suitable defense, to kill a woman because she had bitten me?”

“No, monsieur, of course it would not.”

“I did not,” said Roland, “kill Marie because of the bite.”

“
Why
, then? You are bound to speak. The weight of this assembly, and of the law itself, insist.”

“I can and will say nothing,” said Roland Coville. “It is beyond me to say it.” And then in a sudden and conclusive passion he screamed, so the room echoed and dinned, the spectators and the judges recoiled, “It would be as if you tore out my heart, to say it. It would be as if you cut out my tongue. Nothing. Nothing! I will say nothing.”

And so he was judged a murderer. He was condemned. In a small gray yard at sunrise he would be hanged.

But in the cell, before that, he must confront the confessor, the priest who was to hear his final statements, and who must, of them all, get the truth from him.

“I can’t tell you,” said Roland Coville to the priest who angrily confronted him.

“You have forfeited your life,” said the priest. “Is this not enough? You have spat upon the robe of God, and upon the gift he gave you.”

“No, father,” said Roland. “God knows, and understands, what I have done. And why.”

And his face was then so pitifully pared, trusting, and desperate, so positive of the pity of God after all, that the angry priest was softened.

“Come, then,” he said, “make what confession you can. I will absolve you, and God must do the rest.”

Roland then knelt down, and unburdened himself of all his crimes, which were none of them terrible, but for that one. And then he spoke of that too, quietly and stilly. “I strangled my young wife, she was only seventeen, and I
loved her. It was on her wedding night, in our bed. She was a virgin and died so. I killed her with no compunction, and would do it again.” And then, head bowed under the hands of the priest, he added softly, “For my reasons, I believe such things can’t be spoken of. This would be like showing the face of the Devil. How can I be responsible for that?”

The priest was in the end very sorry for him. He was a handsome and a good young man, guilty of nothing but the one appalling and senseless act. The priest absolved Roland Coville, and went away to watch all through the night before the execution, in the little church on a slanting street of the City. And when through the narrow window a nail of light pierced in and fell on the crucifix and the white flowers, the priest knew the rope in the gray yard had performed its office, and one more benighted soul had struggled forth into the Infinite, toward long anguish or the life eternal, or toward oblivion, for he was a wise priest, faithful and doubting, a man like men.

Two days after the execution of Roland Coville, the priest was brought a letter. It was on the paper obtained in the prison, and came from the dead man, written in the last hour of his life. As such it had extraordinary weight. But on opening it anxiously, the priest read these words: “I cannot after all go into the night without passing on this burden that has consumed me. Forgive me, father, that I turn to you. Who else can I rely on? Who else can bear it?”

And after that the priest read on, and the scales fell from his eyes, the dark glass was clear before him. He did not believe, then he believed. And he locked the letter from Roland Coville away in a place where none could come at it, not even he himself. And there it stayed for seven years, burning slowly through the wall of the safe and of his mind.

One spring, when the roads were muddy, a priest came to the village by means of the coach that stopped there once a month, and he inquired for the domicile of the family Desbouchamps. On being directed, he took himself off toward the manor house in the meadows. The lanes were spare and washed with rain, the tall poplars swept the sky. The manor had lost its roselike abundance and seemed now decaying, the shutters half off, the lofts rotting. No doves flew from the cotes. A dog barked only sullenly in the courtyard.

To his inquiry at the kitchen door, the housekeeper shook her head. “Mistress sees no one.” The priest indicated his habit. “What does she want with another priest? She’s had enough of you, burying the master.”

But he won through, because he had set his mind to it. He stood with his habit and his bag and would not go. Finally a thin old woman of no more than forty years came down to the cold parlor, where drapes were on the furnishings, and she made no pretense at removing them or lighting the fire.
The hearth gaped black, and cold whistled down the chimney. She leaned to it and rubbed her hands.

“We are unfortunate,” said Madame Desbouchamps. “In a year, everything must be sold. Those men, those men in their holy day coats!” (She presumably meant the lawyers.)

“I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“It’s been a great loss. Ever since monsieur died. It was the tragedy killed him. He always loved her so.” And over her worn and discarded face there crossed a slinking jealousy, out in the open now, having no need any more to hide. Marie-Mai was dead, and her loving father was as dead as she, why dissemble?

“Your daughter, do you mean?” asked the priest with some care. “But she was very young to die.”

“Murdered,” said madame, “in her bridal bed.”

The priest said what was inevitable.

“You will have heard,” said Madame Desbouchamps. “It was the talk of the City. They made up songs about it, the filthy wretches.”

The priest had never heard one, and was glad. He said, “I believe I caught a rumor of the case. The bridegroom had no motive for his action. The girl was innocent and chaste.”

Madame Desbouchamps compressed her lips like withered leaves. She sat a long while in utter silence, and he intuitively allowed this. At length, the blossom came.

“She was a sly girl,” said the mother. “She hid things, was secretive. She was no daughter to me. I knew no better then. But it was never affection she gave me. She saved that for her father, a clever pass. I remember, her courses came early. She wasn’t nine years, she was crying and there was blood, and I said, Let me see, Marie, what’s the matter with you? But she ran away. And the blood stopped, and then there was no more till the proper time. She was eleven years then. She wasn’t fearful when it happened, only asked me for a napkin.”

The priest might have been astonished and shocked at being awarded such information. Even in country people madame’s reminiscence was forthright. But in fact he was not thinking of this. He had gone very pale. And she, she had a crafty look, as if she had meant to tell him something, and saw that she had.

“Poor young girl,” said the priest after a few moments. “What a loss to you, the daughter, then the husband. Where are they buried?”

“And the house,” interjected the woman brutishly. Then she said, “On the land. The Desbouchamps bury their dead close. Now what shall I do? The land’s no longer mine.”

“Their graves must be moved, madame,” said the priest.

“I’ll show you,” she said. And again there was the flash of malign conspiracy. As if she knew what he was at,
liked
it, although that could hardly be.

It was a little mausoleum, like a Roman tomb, not unusual among wealthy country families. Through the grille he glimpsed the shape of coffins. He would need a pick to smash the lock, but the place was up the hill, hidden by trees and deserted. They chained the three last dogs by night, and there were only a pair of old men now on the estate.

So, at two in the morning, he duly returned, with his pickax and his lantern.

The incongruity of what he did had ceased to irk him. He was beyond that. The letter burning through the safe had gradually seared out his ethics. He struck the lock and broke it with four blows, each of which echoed away along the valley, but no light fluttered up in the manor house, no one rushed from the buildings, not even the owls hooted.

The stench and awfulness of the mausoleum did not check him either, for he had been expecting them, and once or twice he had stood over an opened grave, the stink of it worse than excrement or sewers in its omen of mortality.

Her box, the coffin of Marie-Mai, he located without difficulty, knowing what to look for. He dredged up the cobwebs and saw the tracks of a squirrel over the lid – it must have come in at the broken grille. What had attracted it to this one case alone? For it had ignored the others. Shuddering, the priest levered up the planks. He saw what he had reckoned to see, the bones of a young girl whose young girl’s skin had gone to mummy and fallen away, some strands and traces of hair, the crumbled wedding garments in which she had been buried, the marriage ring rattling on the thinnest of thin fingers.

“God strengthen me. God forgive me,” said the priest. And then he tore down the powdery bridal clothes. And so he saw, without any shadow of doubt, for indeed he held the lamp over the coffin, he spared himself nothing. Roland Coville had not lied.

Then, going outside, the priest threw up, tried to throw up it seemed his heart and soul. And when he was done, trembling, he went back in and shut up the coffin fast with a hammer and nails, closed it more tightly than before. This work finished, he left the place and went down the hill, and back to the village inn, where they were too respectful of a City priest to ask any questions.

The priest paced the length of three weeks, in his church on the slanting street, in his rooms, under the architraves of Paradys. There was no help for Roland, who by now was as near to dust as the thing he had killed and died
for. What, then, to do with the truth, that terrible naked sword? At length, the priest made his decision, and it resembled Roland’s own, for neither would he, the priest of God, tamper with the revealed face of the Devil.