AMONG THE SPHINXES
The car slowly wound its way among the twists and turns of the
labyrinth. Sometimes in presence of a cluster of roads the postman
himself hesitated for a moment.
“Since when have these zigzags taken the place of the straight avenue?”
I asked.
“Four years ago, Sir--about a year after the settling in of Mr. Learne
in the _château_.”
“Do you know the meaning of them? You may speak freely. I am the
professor’s nephew.”
“Oh, well, he’s ... he’s, well an eccentric man.”
“What sort of unusual things does he do?”
“Oh, well, nothing. One hardly ever sees him. That’s just the funny
part of it. Before he took this higgledy-piggledy into his head, one
met him often. He used to walk about in the country, but ever since
then ... well, he does take the train to Grey once a month.”
So all my uncle’s eccentricities came to a head at the same epoch; the
maze and the different style of his letters coincided as to date.
Something at that time had profoundly influenced his mind.
“And what about his companions?” I went on, “the Germans?”
“Oh, as for them, Sir, they are invisible. Moreover, although I go to
Fonval six times a week I do not remember when I last clapped eyes on
the park. It’s Mr. Lerne himself who comes to the gate for his letters.
Oh, what a change! Did you know old John? Well, he’s gone, and his wife
too. It’s as true as I’m talking to you, Sir. No more coachman, no more
housekeeper ... no more horses.”
“That’s been so for four years, you say?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Tell me, postman, there’s game about here, is there not?”
“Faith, no. A few rabbits, two or three hares--but there are too many
foxes.”
“What, no roe-deer? no stags?”
“Never.”
* * * * *
And now I felt a strange thrill of joy.
“Here we are, Sir!”
After a final bend, the road did open out on the old avenue of which
Lerne had kept this little bit. It was fringed by two rows of limes,
and from the end of the two rows they formed, the door of Fonval seemed
to be coming towards us.
In front of it, a carriage-sweep in the shape of a half moon widened
the avenue, and beyond that one saw the outline of the blue roof of
the _château_ against the green of the trees, and the trees themselves
standing out on the somber flanks of the gully.
In the midst of the wall which joined the cliffs on either hand stood
the door with its tiled porch. It had aged, and the stone of the lintel
was worn away; the wood of its panels was worm-eaten and crumbling into
powder here and there; but the bell had not changed. Its sound came
from my distant boyhood, so bright and clear that I could have wept at
it.
We waited for a few moments.
At last some wooden shoes clattered.
“Is that you, Guilloteau?” said a voice with a trans-Rhenish accent.
“Yes, Mr. Lerne.”
Mr. Lerne! I looked at my guide with eyes wide with wonder--What! Was
that my uncle speaking like that?
“You are early,” went on the voice. There was the metallic sound of
moving bolts; then the door was opened ajar, and a hand was passed
through it.
“Give me them.”
“Here they are, Mr. Lerne. But there is some one with me,” said the
postman in an insinuating and timid way.
“Who is it?” cried the other--and in the fissure formed by the hardly
opened door, he appeared.
It was my uncle Lerne. But life had laid hand on him, had made him
much older, and turned him into this wild unkempt individual whose
straggling gray hair covered his shabby clothes with dirty grease. He
seemed smitten with premature old age, and there was an unfriendly
gleam in the evil eyes which he fixed on me, from under their knitted
eyebrows.
“What do you want?” he asked me rudely.
He pronounced the words like a German.
I had a moment of hesitation. The fact was that his face could no
longer be compared to that of a kind old woman; it was a Sioux
visage, hairless and cruel, and at the sight of it I experienced the
contradictory sensations of recognizing it and not recognizing it.
“But, Uncle,” I stuttered finally, “it’s I.... I have come to see
you--according to leave given by you. I wrote to you; but my letter ...
here it is! my letter and I arrive together. Excuse my carelessness.”
“Ah, you should have told me. It is I that ask pardon of you, my dear
nephew.”
A sudden change this! Lerne showed eagerness to welcome me! he blushed
and seemed confused and almost servile. This embarrassment, misplaced
with regard to me, shocked me.
“Ha ha! you’ve come with a mechanical carriage,” he added. “Hum,
there’s a place to put it in, isn’t there?”
He opened both folding-doors.
“Here one has often to be one’s own servant,” he said, while the old
hinges creaked.
Thereupon he burst into an awkward sort of laugh. I could have wagered,
looking at his perplexed expression, that he had no desire to do so,
and that his thoughts were far away from joking.
The postman had taken his leave.
“Is the coach-house still there?” I said, pointing to the right at a
brick building.
“Yes, yes. I did not recognize you because of your mustache--hum! Yes,
your mustache. You hadn’t one long ago ... had you? Well, and how old
are you?”
“Thirty-one, uncle.”
At the sight of the coach-house my heart stopped.
The dog-cart was moldering there, half buried under logs, and there, as
in the neighboring stable which was full of odds and ends, the spider
webs were hanging whole or in shreds.
“Thirty-one, already,” went on Lerne in a vague and obviously
distracted manner.
“But, Uncle, say _tu_ and _toi_ to me, as long ago.”
“Ah, yes, dear ... Nicolas, eh?”
I was very ill at ease, but he did not seem more at his ease than I
was. My presence clearly annoyed him.
It is always an interesting thing for an intruder to learn why he is
so,--I seized my valise. Lerne observed my gesture and seemed to form a
sudden resolve.
“Let it be--let it be, Nicholas,” he said in a tone of command. “I’ll
send to fetch your luggage shortly. But first we must have a talk. Come
for a walk.”
He took my arm and drew me towards the park. He was still reflecting,
however.
We passed near the _château_. With few exceptions the shutters were
closed. The roof in many places was sinking in, sometimes even broken,
and the moldy walls from which the whitewash had disappeared in large
flakes here and there showed their masonry. The plants in boxes still
surrounded the house, but, to tell the truth, for several winters no
one had thought of putting the verbenas and orange-trees and laurels
under cover. Standing in their battered and rotten tubs they were all
dead. The sandy carriage-drive, of yore so carefully raked, might have
imagined itself a second-rate meadow, there was so much grass growing
there mingled with nettles and hemlock. It was like the castle of
“Sleeping Beauty” on the Prince’s arrival. Lerne, clinging to my arm,
walked without further talk.
We got to the other side of the dreary pile, and the park lay before
our eyes. A jumble. No more baskets of flowers, no more wide, sandy
paths like winding ribbons. Except just in front of the _château_, the
lawn--which had been metamorphosed into a paddock fenced with wire
and given up to some cattle to feed in--had been encroached on by the
valley which had relapsed into its wild state. The garden was no more
than a great wood with open spaces and green paths in it. The Ardennes
had reassumed their usurped domain.
Lerne thoughtfully filled an immense pipe with feverish fingers, lit
it, and then we went under the trees into one of the alleys that were
like long caves.
Once more I saw the statues and with a disillusioned eye, the statues
which a former master of Fonval had erected in profusion. Those
magnificent dumb personages of my dramas were as a matter of fact
wretched modern figures, suggested to some commercially-minded magnate
of industry of the Second Empire by Rome or Greece. The tunics of
concrete swelled out into crinolines, the drapery of the cloaks was
like that of a shawl, and the divinities of the woods--Echo, Syrinx,
Arethusa--wore low chignons which filled their bag-like nets--in the
Benoiton manner. Those hideous representations of exquisite fantasies,
of forest charms transmuted into Dryads, were to-day more passable in
their mantles of virgin-vine and clematis, although certain heroes were
no more than ivy-clad figures of fun, and although a mere moss-clad
attitude represented Diana.
After walking for some time, my uncle made me sit down on a bench of
stone covered with a coat of lichen, under the shade of flourishing
hazels.
A little crackling sound made itself heard in the bower right over our
heads.
Lerne jumped convulsively and raised his head.
It was merely a squirrel watching us from the top of a branch.
My uncle darted a ferocious glance at it, fixing it as if he were
taking aim at it; then he began to laugh in a reassured sort of way.
“Ha, ha, ha! it’s only a little ... thing,” said he, unable to find the
word.
“Really,” thought I within myself, “how queer one may become as one
gets old. Environment, I know, is the cause of many evolutions; one
adopts the ways and manner of speech of one’s familiars in spite of
oneself; the surroundings of Lerne might suffice to explain why my
uncle is dirty, expresses himself ill, speaks with a German accent
and smokes that huge pipe.... But he has ceased caring for flowers,
he no longer looks after his property, and at this moment looks
extraordinarily nervous and preoccupied. If one adds to that the
happenings of last night, it all seems something less than natural.”
Meanwhile the Professor looked at me in a disconcerting way, and
eyed me up and down as if here were sizing me up and had never seen
me before. I began to lose countenance. A fierce debate was going on
within him which was reflected on his face. Every moment our looks
crossed, but at last they met, and joined, and my uncle, not being able
to hold his peace any longer appeared for the second time to make up
his mind.
“Nicolas,” he said, patting me on the thigh, “I am a ruined man, you
know.”
I understood his plan, and was revolted.
“Uncle, be frank with me; you want me to go!”
“_I_ want you to go! What an idea!”
“I am quite sure of it. Your invitation was rather discouraging, and
your welcome hardly hospitable. But, uncle, you must have a very short
memory if you think me avaricious enough to have come here merely for
your money. I see you are no longer the same--your letters indeed
made me fear that--and yet it utterly bewilders me that you should
have thought of this clumsy subterfuge intended to drive me away. For
during these fifteen years _I_ have not changed. I have never ceased
venerating you with my whole heart, and have deserved better at your
hands than those icy epistles and, above all, better than this insult.”
“There, there! Gently!” said Lerne, much annoyed.
“Moreover, if you want me to go, just say the word and I’m off. You are
no uncle of mine now.”
“Don’t talk such blasphemous nonsense, Nicolas.” He said that in a tone
of such alarm that I tried intimidation.
“And I shall inform against you, uncle, you and your acolytes and your
mysteries.”
“You are mad, you are mad. Hold your tongue. _There’s_ an idea for you!”
Lerne began to laugh loudly, but I don’t know why, his eyes frightened
me, and I regretted my phrase.
He went on.
“Look here, Nicolas, don’t get excited! You are a good fellow. Give me
your hand. You shall always find in me your old uncle who loves you.
Listen, it’s not true; no, I am not ruined, and my heir will certainly
get something--if he acts as I desire. But, as a matter of fact, I
think he would do better not to stay here.... There’s nothing here to
amuse a man of your age, Nicolas; personally I am busy all day long.”
The Professor might talk as he liked now. Hypocrisy showed itself in
every word; he was nothing but a contemptible Tartuffe; he was fair
game. I determined not to leave till I had completely satisfied my
curiosity. So, interrupting him, I said in a tone of deep dejection:
“There you are making use of the inheritance business again to make me
decide to leave Fonval. You have clearly no trust in me.”
With a gesture he deprecated the idea. I went on:
“No, allow me to remain in order that we may renew our acquaintance. We
both need to do so.”
Lerne knitted his eyebrows, then he said in a mocking tone:
“You insist on renouncing me?”
“No; keep me beside you, otherwise you will hurt my feelings deeply;
frankly,” this in a bantering tone, “I should not know what to think.”
“Stop,” rejoined my uncle with energy, “there is nothing wrong to
suspect here--far from it.”
“No doubt. All the same, you have secrets--as you have every right to
have. If I speak to you of them, it is because I must resign myself to
assure you that I shall respect them.”
“There is only _one_! A single secret. And its aim is noble and
salutary,” said my uncle sententiously and with animation: “One only, I
tell you--that concerning our work; a blessing to humanity--glory too
and gold! But we must have silence assured us. Secrets! Everybody knows
we are here, that we are working. The newspapers have said so--there is
no secret in that.”
“Keep calm, uncle, and tell me how I am to behave in your house. I am
entirely at your disposal.”
Lerne resumed his inward debate:
“Well,” said he, raising his brow, “it is agreed. Such an uncle as I
have always shown myself towards you cannot possibly drive you away.
That would be belying all my past. Remain then, but on the following
conditions:
“We are pursuing researches here that are about to come to their
fulfillment. When our discovery is a _fait accompli_ the public will
hear of it in its entirety. Till then, I do not wish it to be informed
of uncertain attempts whose revelation might raise up rivals capable
of anticipating us. I do not doubt your discretion, but I prefer not
to put it to the test, and I entreat you in your own interests not to
try to surprise any secrets, rather than to be obliged to hide them.
I say, ‘in your own interests’; not merely because it is easier not
to pry than to hold one’s tongue, but also for the following reasons:
Our business is a commercial one at bottom. A man of business like you
will be very useful to me. We shall become rich, nephew--millionaires!
But you must let me forget the instrument of your fortune in peace,
you must show yourself a man of tact and respectful of my orders--in
a word, the man I want as an associate. You must know, I am not alone
in this enterprise. _They_ might make you repent of your acts, if you
transgressed the rule I am laying down for you--cruelly repent--more
cruelly than you imagine. So practice indifference, my dear nephew. See
nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing, in order that you may become
very, very rich--and remain alive!”
“Oh, indifference is not so easy a virtue at Fonval. There have been
things going about here since last night which should not be here and
only find themselves here through some bit of carelessness.”
At those words an unexpected rage seized Lerne. He flung out his fists
and growled: “Wilhelm! Fool! Ass!” What I now felt sure of was that
the secrets were considerable and would give me fine surprises were
they discovered. As for the doctor’s promises, and his threats, I did
not believe in either, and his speech had neither aroused covetousness
nor fear in me--the two passions that my uncle wished to make my
counselors to obedience. I rejoined coldly:
“Is that all you ask of me?”
“No. But the next prohibition is of another kind, Nicolas. You will
be presented to somebody in the _château_; it is a young girl I
rescued....”
I made a movement of surprise, and Lerne guessed my imputation.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “she is like a daughter--nothing more. But her
friendship is precious to me, and it would be painful to me to see
it lessened by a sentiment which I can no longer inspire. In short,
Nicolas,” he said quickly and with a certain shamefacedness, “I ask you
to swear not to pay court to my _protégée_.”
Astounded at such a degraded view, and still more so at such a want of
delicate feeling, I told myself, however, that there is no jealousy
without love any more than there is smoke without fire.
“What do you take me for, uncle? It is sufficient that I am your guest.”
“All right--I know my physiology and how to use it. May I trust you?
You swear it? Very well.”
“As for her,” he added with a crafty smile, “I am easy for the time
being. She has lately seen my way of treating suitors. I advise you not
to make trial of it.”
Having got up, with his hands in his pockets, and his pipe between his
teeth, Lerne looked me up and down in a jocular and provocative manner.
This physiologist inspired me with an unconquerable aversion.
We continued our walk round the park.
“Ah, by the way, do you know German?” said the Professor.
“No, uncle; I only understand French and Spanish.”
“No English either? That’s not much for a future merchant prince. You
have not been taught much, I _fear_.”
“Tell that to the Marines, uncle,” said I to myself. “I had begun to
keep wide open those eyes you commanded me to keep shut, and I saw just
then that your satisfied expression gave your words the lie.”
We reached the end of the park by way of the foot of the cliffs and
came in front of the _château_ which seemed stretching its two wings
towards us and dominating the underwood with its ruinous _façade_.
And it was at this exact moment that my eye was caught by an abnormal
bird, a pigeon, which was wheeling in the air, and flew upwards with
ever-narrowing and giddy circles.
“Just look at those roses on that long branch of briar; they are pretty
and interesting,” said my uncle. “Left to grow wild, they have become
dog-roses again.”
“What a curious pigeon!” I said.
“Just look at those flowers,” insisted Lerne.
“One would think there was a drop of lead in its head. That happens
sometimes when one is out shooting. It will tower and tower, and then
fall from as high as possible.”
“If you don’t watch your feet, you will fall head over heels into the
thorn-bushes. It’s a breakneck place, this, nephew.”
This useful bit of counsel was growled out in a menacing tone that
sounded strangely out of place.
Then the bird attained the center of its spiral and began not to mount,
but to come down with wild tumblings, and whirling over and over. It
hit a rock not far from us and fell, an inert thing, into the thick
herbage.
Why did the Professor suddenly become more restless? Why did he
hasten his steps? That is what I was asking myself, when the big pipe
fell from his mouth. Having dashed forward to pick it up I could not
restrain a look of stupefaction; he had snapped it off sharp with a
furious bite.
The scene ended with a German word--doubtless an oath.
As we returned in the direction of the _château_ we saw running
towards us a fat woman who seemed bursting out of her blue apron.
She was evidently unused to such athletic exercise and it went against
the grain, for it shook her dangerously, and as she trotted along, she
kept herself together by means of her arms and hands as if she were
pressing some precious, huge and unwieldy burden against her person.
At the sight of us, she stopped all of a piece--a thing that seemed
almost an impossibility--then she seemed to want to retrace her steps.
However, she came on with a guilty look on her kindly face, a look as
of a school-girl caught in a fault. She awaited her fate.
Lerne scolded her:
“Barbe! What are you doing here? You have forgotten. I forbade you to
go beyond the paddock. I’ll end by sending you packing, Barbe, after
punishing you--you know.”
The fat woman was very much afraid. She tried to bridle, made a mouth
as if she were going to lay an egg with it and excused herself--she
had, from her kitchen, seen the pigeon fall and thought she might
brighten up the bill of fare with it. “You always have the same dishes
to eat.”
“And then,” she added stupidly, “I did not think you were in the
garden, I thought you were in the lab....”
A brutal slap in the face interrupted her on that syllable--the first
syllable of “labyrinth,” as I imagined.
“Oh, uncle!” I cried indignantly.
“Look here, you! Hold your tongue, or off with you! That’s clear
enough, isn’t it?”
Barbe was terrified and no longer wept. Her suppressed sobs made her
hiccup. She was very pale, and on her cheek the bony hand of Lerne
remained printed in red.
“Go and take this gentleman’s luggage from the coach-house and put it
in the lion-room.”
(This room was on the first story of the western wing.)
“Won’t you give me my old room, uncle?”
“Which was that?”
“Which? Why, the one on the ground floor, the yellow room, in the East
wing, you know.”
“No. I use that one,” he said sharply. “Off with you, Barbe.”
The cook decamped as fast as she could.
On our right the pond was lying there stagnant. Our silent passage
flung its shadow into it, and it looked there like a dream in a
lethargy.
My astonishment was growing every moment. However, I kept myself from
seeming too much surprised at the sight of a new and spacious building
of gray stone built against the cliff. It consisted of two blocks
separated by a courtyard. A high wall pierced with a carriage-gate, at
the moment shut, hid it from one’s eyes, but the clucking of fowls
escaped from it, and a dog, having scented us, raised his voice.
I flung out a plummet at a venture:
“You’ll take me over your farm, won’t you?”
Lerne shrugged his shoulders:
“Perhaps,” he said. Then turning towards the house, he shouted:
“Wilhelm, Wilhelm!”
The German with the face like a sundial opened a little window and the
Professor apostrophized him in his mother-tongue, so violently that the
poor fellow trembled all over.
“By Jove!” I said to myself. “It’s owing to him and his inadvertence
that _there are going about outside since last night, things that
should not be there_--that’s certain.”
When the execution was over, we went round the paddock. It contained a
black bull and four cows of various kinds, the whole lot of whom, for
no particular reason, followed after us. My dreadful relative began to
joke:
“Nicolas, let me introduce you to Jupiter; and here is the white
Europa, the dun-colored Io, the fair-skinned Athor, and Pasiphaë
clad in her robe of milk stained with ink, or ink stained with
milk--whichever way you prefer.”
This reference to libertine mythology made me smile. To tell the
truth, I should have seized the first pretext to have a laugh; I had
physical need of it. I also felt a hunger so intense that to satisfy
it seemed the only question of any interest. The _château_ was the one
and only attraction. It was there I should _eat_! And the attraction
it exercised on me almost made me fail to examine the hothouse, its
neighbor.
That would have been a pity. They had added two halls of glass to it
which flanked the original rotunda with their domed naves. Under its
lowered outer blinds the building seemed to me to form a whole that
was “perfect of its kind.” It suggested something between a Crystal
Palace and a glass melon-bell; it had quite a grand and out-of-the-way
appearance, if I may so say.
A hothouse of this kind in this thicket! I should have been less
astonished to find a love-philter in a monastery!
* * * * *
In the days of my late lamented aunt, the lion-room was reserved for
guests. It had--it still has--three windows, with deep recesses as deep
as alcoves. One of them looks out in the direction of the conservatory
and has a balcony attached; the second opens on the park; I saw the
paddock from it and further away the pond, and between the two that
summerhouse which once was Briareus. The third window faces the eastern
wing; from there I saw the window of my old room--shut--and the whole
_façade_ of the _château_ blocking the view on the left.
I felt as if I were in an hotel. Nothing there recalled anything to me.
A Jouy wall-paper stained with damp from the wall and hanging loose
in one corner, covered the walls with a host of red lions each with a
cannon ball fixed under its paw. The bed curtains and window curtains
showed, in distortion, the same subject. Two pictures balanced one
another: _The Education of Achilles_ and _The Rape of Deianeira_, in
which the damp spotted the faces of the four subjects with red and
dappled the cruppers of the Centaurs, Chiron and Nessus; there was
also rather a fine Norman clock which looked like a coffin set on end,
the emblem and at the same time the measures of Time--and the whole
furnishing of the room was commonplace and out-of-date.
I splashed my face with cold water and put on clean linen with
pleasure. Barbe brought me, without knocking at the door, a plate of
coarse broth, and made no reply to my condolences on her inflamed
cheek; then she waddled out of the room like a gigantic sylph.
There was no one in the drawing-room--unless shades are people. O
little black velvet armchair with your two yellow tassels, hideous
piece of squat puffiness, so well termed a _crapaud_, could I behold
you again as of yore without imagining seated on your toad-like form
the shade of my anecdotal aunt? And you, my mother’s chair--an austerer
one, and one I cannot jest about--will she not always be in my memory
leaning over your back as long as you shall be an armchair, if indeed
you ever really were one?
Not a detail was altered. From the unspeakable white paper on the walls
down which hung garlands of flowers trussed like sausages, to the
hangings of sulphur-colored damask draping their fringed basques in a
row, the work of the former owner--a contemporary of the crinoline--had
admirably stood the effect of time. A swollen stuffing puffed out the
sofas single and double, and nothing had succeeded in deflating the
inflamed chairs or the blistered settees.
From the wainscot smiled down on one all my dead and gone ancestors:
my great-great-grandfathers in chalk, my grandfathers in miniatures,
my father a schoolboy in daguerrotype; and on the mantelpiece (duly
petticoated with puffed-out fringed flounces) a few photographs were
sticking to the mirror. A large-sized group claimed my attention.
I took it up to look at it more carefully. It represented my uncle
surrounded by five gentlemen and a big St. Bernard dog. The group had
been taken at Fonval; the wall of the _château_ made the background,
and a rose-laurel in a tub figured in the picture. An amateur’s work
and unsigned. Lerne beamed with kindness and mental energy, resembling,
in a word, the _savant_ I had expected to find. Of the five men, three
were known to me, the Germans; I had never seen the two others.
Then suddenly the door opened without my having the time to replace the
photograph. Lerne was ushering in a young woman.
“My nephew, Nicolas Vermont--Mademoiselle Emma Bourdichet.”
Mlle. Emma had apparently been undergoing one of those sharp lectures
that Lerne distributed so prodigally. Her frightened expression showed
that. She had not even the courage to make the conventional grimace
usual in cases of constrained amiability, and merely made an awkward
sort of bow.
As for me, after bowing, I dared not raise my eyes for fear my uncle
should read my soul in them.
My soul? If by soul one means (as is generally meant) that _ensemble_
of faculties which result in man’s being a little above the other
animals, I think I had better not compromise my soul in this matter.
Oh, I’m not unaware that, if all loves, even the purest, are originally
animal desires, esteem and friendship sometimes add themselves thereto
to ennoble the relations of man and woman.
Alas! If some Fragonard wished to commemorate our first interview and,
in the 18th century manner, depict Love as presiding over it, I should
advise him to study a certain little Eros with goat’s feet and thighs,
a faun-like Cupid unsmiling and wingless; his arrows should be wooden
and in a quiver made of bark, and should be dripping with blood; he
might indeed pass under the name of Pan. He is Love universal, Pleasure
that is unintentionally fecund, the Master of Life who takes equal heed
of lairs and eyries, beasts’ dens and bridal beds.
Are there degrees of femininity? In that case, I never saw a woman who
was more a woman than Emma. I shall not describe her, having scarcely
noted more in her than an abstraction and not an object. Was she
beautiful? No doubt; most assuredly desirable.
Yet, I do remember her hair. It had the color of fire, a dull
red--possibly dyed--and the image of her body passes even now through
my dead passion. It would have put all flat-figured ladies to shame.
Well, this adorable creature was at the height of her charm.
The blood beat against my brain pan, and suddenly a fierce jealousy
possessed me. In truth I should willingly have given up this girl,
provided no one else should touch her ever. From unpleasing, Lerne now
became odious to me. I should remain _now_--at any price.
Meanwhile we did not know what to say. Thrown off my balance by the
suddenness of the incident, and wishing to hide my confusion, I
stuttered out anyhow:
“You see, uncle, I was just looking at that photograph.”
“Ah, yes! Me and my assistants, Wilhelm, Karl, and Johann. And this is
Macbeth, my pupil. It’s very like him. What do you think of it, Emma?”
He had put the photograph under his ward’s eyes and pointed out to her
a man close-shaven in the American way, slim, short and young, with a
distinguished bearing, who had his hand on the back of the St. Bernard
dog.
“A handsome, intelligent fellow, eh?” said the Professor in a mocking
voice. “The ace of Scots!”
Emma never changed her look of terror. She articulated with difficulty:
“His Nelly was very amusing with her performing-dog tricks.”
“And Macbeth,” said my uncle in a jesting voice. “Was _he_ amusing?”
There were symptoms of tears coming, and I saw Emma’s chin quiver. She
murmured:
“Poor Macbeth!”
“Yes,” said Lerne to me by way of answer to my puzzled looks, “Mr.
Donovan Macbeth had to give up his duties as a result of some
unfortunate occurrences. May Fate spare you such unhappiness, Nicolas!”
“And the other?” I asked, in order to turn the conversation. “The other
one, he with the brown mustache and whiskers, who is he?”
“He’s gone, too.”
“Dr. Klotz,” said Emma, who had drawn near us and was regaining her
calm. “Otto Klotz; oh, as for him....”
Lerne silenced her with a terrible look. I do not know what punishment
she foresaw, but a spasm rendered the poor girl rigid.
Hereupon Barbe introduced slantwise half of her opulent form and
murmured that lunch was on the table.
She had only set three places in the dining room; the Germans, I
fancied, must live in the gray buildings.
The lunch was gloomy. Mlle. Bourdichet never ventured a word, ate
nothing, and so I could not make out what was the matter, terror making
all creatures alike.
Besides, sleepiness was overwhelming me. Immediately after dessert I
asked leave to go to bed, begging to be allowed to sleep till the next
morning.
Once in my room, I immediately began to undress. To tell the truth my
journey, the night and the morning had worn me out. All those riddles,
too, worried me, first because they _were_ riddles and then because
they presented themselves so confusedly. I felt as if I were enveloped
in smoke wherein riddling sphinxes kept turning their vague faces
towards me.
My braces were just going to be flung off--and were _not_ flung off.
In the garden Lerne was making his way towards the gray buildings
accompanied by his three assistants.
“They are going to work in there,” said I to myself. “That’s clear. I
am not being watched; they have not had time to take many precautions;
uncle is persuaded I am asleep. Nicolas, this is the time for action,
now or never. But what to start with? Emma, or the secret? Hum ... the
little girl is utterly gorgonized to-day.... As for the secret....”
Having put on my coat again, I went mechanically from window to window.
There between the wrought-iron stanchions of the balcony the
Conservatory showed its mysterious additions. It was shut, forbidden,
attractive.
I went out stealthily and noiselessly, like a wolf.