第 5 页

contained--Madame Maze motionless, overwhelmed with grief; little Rose

gently moaning in her mother's lap; La Grivotte, whom a hoarse cough was

choking. For a moment Sister Hyacinthe's gay face shone out amidst the

whiteness of her coif and wimple, dominating all the others. The painful

journey was continuing, with a ray of divine hope still and ever shining

yonder. Then everything slowly vanished from Pierre's eyes as a fresh

wave of memory brought the past back from afar; and nothing of the

present remained save the lulling hymn, the indistinct voices of

dreamland, emerging from the invisible.

Henceforth he was at the seminary. The classrooms, the recreation ground

with its trees, rose up clearly before him. But all at once he only

beheld, as in a mirror, the youthful face which had then been his, and he

contemplated it and scrutinised it, as though it had been the face of a

stranger. Tall and slender, he had an elongated visage, with an unusually

developed forehead, lofty and straight like a tower; whilst his jaws

tapered, ending in a small refined chin. He seemed, in fact, to be all

brains; his mouth, rather large, alone retained an expression of

tenderness. Indeed, when his usually serious face relaxed, his mouth and

eyes acquired an exceedingly soft expression, betokening an unsatisfied,

hungry desire to love, devote oneself, and live. But immediately

afterwards, the look of intellectual passion would come back again, that

intellectuality which had ever consumed him with an anxiety to understand

and know. And it was with surprise that he now recalled those years of

seminary life. How was it that he had so long been able to accept the

rude discipline of blind faith, of obedient belief in everything without

the slightest examination? It had been required of him that he should

absolutely surrender his reasoning faculties, and he had striven to do

so, had succeeded indeed in stifling his torturing need of truth.

Doubtless he had been softened, weakened by his mother's tears, had been

possessed by the sole desire to afford her the great happiness she dreamt

of. Yet now he remembered certain quiverings of revolt; he found in the

depths of his mind the memory of nights which he had spent in weeping

without knowing why, nights peopled with vague images, nights through

which galloped the free, virile life of the world, when Marie's face

incessantly returned to him, such as he had seen it one morning, dazzling

and bathed in tears, while she embraced him with her whole soul. And that

alone now remained; his years of religious study with their monotonous

lessons, their ever similar exercises and ceremonies, had flown away into

the same haze, into a vague half-light, full of mortal silence.

Then, just as the train had passed though a station at full speed, with

the sudden uproar of its rush there arose within him a succession of

confused visions. He had noticed a large deserted enclosure, and fancied

that he could see himself within it at twenty years of age. His reverie

was wandering. An indisposition of rather long duration had, however, at

one time interrupted his studies, and led to his being sent into the

country. He had remained for a long time without seeing Marie; during his

vacations spent at Neuilly he had twice failed to meet her, for she was

almost always travelling. He knew that she was very ill, in consequence

of a fall from a horse when she was thirteen, a critical moment in a

girl's life; and her despairing mother, perplexed by the contradictory

advice of medical men, was taking her each year to a different

watering-place. Then he learnt the startling news of the sudden tragical

death of that mother, who was so severe and yet so useful to her kin. She

had been carried off in five days by inflammation of the lungs, which she

had contracted one evening whilst she was out walking at La Bourboule,

through having taken off her mantle to place it round the shoulders of

Marie, who had been conveyed thither for treatment. It had been necessary

that the father should at once start off to fetch his daughter, who was

mad with grief, and the corpse of his wife, who had been so suddenly torn

from him. And unhappily, after losing her, the affairs of the family went

from bad to worse in the hands of this architect, who, without counting,

flung his fortune into the yawning gulf of his unsuccessful enterprises.

Marie no longer stirred from her couch; only Blanche remained to manage

the household, and she had matters of her own to attend to, being busy

with the last examinations which she had to pass, the diplomas which she

was obstinately intent on securing, foreseeing as she did that she would

someday have to earn her bread.

All at once, from amidst this mass of confused, half-forgotten incidents,

Pierre was conscious of the rise of a vivid vision. Ill-health, he

remembered, had again compelled him to take a holiday. He had just

completed his twenty-fourth year, he was greatly behindhand, having so

far only secured the four minor orders; but on his return a

sub-deaconship would be conferred on him, and an inviolable vow would

bind him for evermore. And the Guersaints' little garden at Neuilly,

whither he had formerly so often gone to play, again distinctly appeared

before him. Marie's couch had been rolled under the tall trees at the far

end of the garden near the hedge, they were alone together in the sad

peacefulness of an autumnal afternoon, and he saw Marie, clad in deep

mourning for her mother and reclining there with legs inert; whilst he,

also clad in black, in a cassock already, sat near her on an iron garden

chair. For five years she had been suffering. She was now eighteen, paler

and thinner than formerly, but still adorable with her regal golden hair,

which illness respected. He believed from what he had heard that she was

destined to remain infirm, condemned never to become a woman, stricken

even in her sex. The doctors, who failed to agree respecting her case,

had abandoned her. Doubtless it was she who told him these things that

dreary afternoon, whilst the yellow withered leaves rained upon them.

However, he could not remember the words that they had spoken; her pale

smile, her young face, still so charming though already dimmed by

regretfulness for life, alone remained present with him. But he realised

that she had evoked the far-off day of their parting, on that same spot,

behind the hedge flecked with sunlight; and all that was already as

though dead--their tears, their embrace, their promise to find one

another some day with a certainty of happiness. For although they had

found one another again, what availed it, since she was but a corpse, and

he was about to bid farewell to the life of the world? As the doctors

condemned her, as she would never be woman, nor wife, nor mother, he, on

his side, might well renounce manhood, and annihilate himself, dedicate

himself to God, to whom his mother gave him. And he still felt within him

the soft bitterness of that last interview: Marie smiling painfully at

memory of their childish play and prattle, and speaking to him of the

happiness which he would assuredly find in the service of God; so

penetrated indeed with emotion at this thought, that she had made him

promise that he would let her hear him say his first mass.

But the train was passing the station of Sainte-Maure, and just then a

sudden uproar momentarily brought Pierre's attention back to the carriage

and its occupants. He fancied that there had been some fresh seizure or

swooning, but the suffering faces that he beheld were still the same,

ever contracted by the same expression of anxious waiting for the divine

succour which was so slow in coming. M. Sabathier was vainly striving to

get his legs into a comfortable position, whilst Brother Isidore raised a

feeble continuous moan like a dying child, and Madame Vetu, a prey to

terrible agony, devoured by her disease, sat motionless, and kept her

lips tightly closed, her face distorted, haggard, and almost black. The

noise which Pierre had heard had been occasioned by Madame de Jonquiere,

who whilst cleansing a basin had dropped the large zinc water-can. And,

despite their torment, this had made the patients laugh, like the simple

souls they were, rendered puerile by suffering. However, Sister

Hyacinthe, who rightly called them her children, children whom she

governed with a word, at once set them saying the chaplet again, pending

the Angelus, which would only be said at Chatellerault, in accordance

with the predetermined programme. And thereupon the "Aves" followed one

after the other, spreading into a confused murmuring and mumbling amidst

the rattling of the coupling irons and noisy growling of the wheels.

Pierre had meantime relapsed into his reverie, and beheld himself as he

had been at six-and-twenty, when ordained a priest. Tardy scruples had

come to him a few days before his ordination, a semi-consciousness that

he was binding himself without having clearly questioned his heart and

mind. But he had avoided doing so, living in the dizzy bewilderment of

his decision, fancying that he had lopped off all human ties and feelings

with a voluntary hatchet-stroke. His flesh had surely died with his

childhood's innocent romance, that white-skinned girl with golden hair,

whom now he never beheld otherwise than stretched upon her couch of

suffering, her flesh as lifeless as his own. And he had afterwards made

the sacrifice of his mind, which he then fancied even an easier one,

hoping as he did that determination would suffice to prevent him from

thinking. Besides, it was too late, he could not recoil at the last

moment, and if when he pronounced the last solemn vow he felt a secret

terror, an indeterminate but immense regret agitating him, he forgot

everything, saving a divine reward for his efforts on the day when he

afforded his mother the great and long-expected joy of hearing him say

his first mass.

He could still see the poor woman in the little church of Neuilly, which

she herself had selected, the church where the funeral service for his

father had been celebrated; he saw her on that cold November morning,

kneeling almost alone in the dark little chapel, her hands hiding her

face as she continued weeping whilst he raised the Host. It was there

that she had tasted her last happiness, for she led a sad and lonely

life, no longer seeing her elder son, who had gone away, swayed by other

ideas than her own, bent on breaking off all family intercourse since his

brother intended to enter the Church. It was said that Guillaume, a

chemist of great talent, like his father, but at the same time a

Bohemian, addicted to revolutionary dreams, was living in a little house

in the suburbs, where he devoted himself to the dangerous study of

explosive substances; and folks added that he was living with a woman who

had come no one knew whence. This it was which had severed the last tie

between himself and his mother, all piety and propriety. For three years

Pierre had not once seen Guillaume, whom in his childhood he had

worshipped as a kind, merry, and fatherly big brother.

But there came an awful pang to his heart--he once more beheld his mother

lying dead. This again was a thunderbolt, an illness of scarce three

days' duration, a sudden passing away, as in the case of Madame de

Guersaint. One evening, after a wild hunt for the doctor, he had found

her motionless and quite white. She had died during his absence; and his

lips had ever retained the icy thrill of the last kiss that he had given

her. Of everything else--the vigil, the preparations, the funeral--he

remembered nothing. All that had become lost in the black night of his

stupor and grief, grief so extreme that he had almost died of it--seized

with shivering on his return from the cemetery, struck down by a fever

which during three weeks had kept him delirious, hovering between life

and death. His brother had come and nursed him and had then attended to

pecuniary matters, dividing the little inheritance, leaving him the house

and a modest income and taking his own share in money. And as soon as

Guillaume had found him out of danger he had gone off again, once more

vanishing into the unknown. But then through what a long convalescence

he, Pierre, had passed, buried as it were in that deserted house. He had

done nothing to detain Guillaume, for he realised that there was an abyss

between them. At first the solitude had brought him suffering, but

afterwards it had grown very pleasant, whether in the deep silence of the

rooms which the rare noises of the street did not disturb, or under the

screening, shady foliage of the little garden, where he could spend whole

days without seeing a soul. His favourite place of refuge, however, was

the old laboratory, his father's cabinet, which his mother for twenty

years had kept carefully locked up, as though to immure within it all the

incredulity and damnation of the past. And despite the gentleness, the

respectful submissiveness which she had shown in former times, she would

perhaps have some day ended by destroying all her husband's books and

papers, had not death so suddenly surprised her. Pierre, however, had

once more had the windows opened, the writing-table and the bookcase

dusted; and, installed in the large leather arm-chair, he now spent

delicious hours there, regenerated as it were by his illness, brought

back to his youthful days again, deriving a wondrous intellectual delight

from the perusal of the books which he came upon.

The only person whom he remembered having received during those two

months of slow recovery was Doctor Chassaigne, an old friend of his

father, a medical man of real merit, who, with the one ambition of curing

disease, modestly confined himself to the _role_ of the practitioner. It

was in vain that the doctor had sought to save Madame Froment, but he

flattered himself that he had extricated the young priest from grievous

danger; and he came to see him from time to time, to chat with him and

cheer him, talking with him of his father, the great chemist, of whom he