happened to her during her sleep of death in the _gargate_, but were
not reproduced in her dream. She felt Renaud's arms lifting her out of
the mire, and that, after all, is the one thing to be desired, more
than life itself--the protection of the man she loved, her lover's
mourning for her, thinking that she was dead.--But before that, a
moment before, had she not felt the weight of a fixed gaze upon
her?--She had looked dimly forth between her drooping eyelids, through
her long lashes which seemed to her like a thick grating; and she
fancied that she saw the gipsy, the ill-omened gitana, standing before
her. "Yes, it is she, it is really she. She is standing here beside
me. She looks very, very tall. Her head touches the sky. She is on the
path leading to the cabin. She is just coming from the rendezvous. She
has been kissing Renaud! When will he come? Will the witch's black
shadow, standing so straight there, never go? What more do you want,
witch? Don't you see that I am dead? I must make you think I am dead.
Then you will leave me, at last!--The wicked woman is always smiling.
Ah! there she goes.--How heavy her glance was! And how tall she was!
She kept all the light from me. Now I can see the sky again. Is it
you, Renaud, is it you, Jacques, who take me in your arms as if I were
dead?--It is you, at last!"
Thus cried poor Livette, delirious once more. But Renaud was sitting
beside her bed with his face in his hands, listening to her.
"It is you," she went on; "you think me dead, and I can feel you take
me in your arms and quickly carry me away. But why do you not weep,
when you see me so? It is you, at last! I am dead, and still I feel
you. You have me in your arms. Your heart beats fast. Mine has ceased
to beat. Where were you, bad boy? What did you say to her? But that is
past and gone!--Is that woman very dear to your heart?--Why do you
come no more to my father's house in the evening? He is very fond of
you. Grandma is a dear old soul. Do you see how faithful she is to her
dead husband? People knew how to love one another better in her day,
she says. Is it true? Do you believe it, Jacques? And if I die, won't
you keep my memory sacred, as she keeps grandpa's?--Why do you make me
suffer so?--Are we two never to walk under the great elm again? Our
pretty stone bench under the rose-bushes is very sad now, and lonely
like a tombstone. Ah! if you had chosen! I was pretty, yes, pretty,
pretty! And now I shall be ugly. For I have done with life, even if I
am not dead. My life is at an end, at an end!"
XXV
THE PHANTOM
Livette, who had been carried back to the Chateau d'Avignon many days
before, had not left her bed. The fever clung to her obstinately.
Nothing could be done.
Was it really true, O God, that she was doomed to die, and he to see
it? Was he to lose the future he had dreamed of, a future of unruffled
happiness, of love and peace, as her husband; the joy he had known for
such a brief space, of having a woman, sweet and dear and helpless as
a child, to cherish and protect?--Was he condemned never to know the
pleasure of having a family--a pleasure that had been denied to him,
an orphan, and of which he had often dreamed as of one of the joys of
Paradise--was he condemned never to know it, because he had forgotten
his longing for a single day? The picture, dear to country-folk, of
the chimney with the smoke curling upward, that seems to say to them,
as far as it can be seen: "The soup is hot, the wife is waiting, the
children are calling," recurred sometimes to his mind, and he sighed
profoundly.
The punishment that he saw coming upon him did not seem to him
proportionate to the offence. There was no justice in it!
What is the meaning of that most terrible of all mysteries: that the
love of the senses is more powerful than the love of the heart when
separated from its object, even though the last be recognized as the
more certain and the sweeter?
Between the lofty chapel and the subterranean crypt of the church of
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the level of human life, does the miracle
come always from below? And if it be so, is it any less a miracle?
Which of you has fathomed the meaning of life? Who can say: "It is
unjust," or: "It is useless," or: "What I do not see does not exist"?
Who can say if Livette's sufferings and Renaud's, their troubles and
their heart-burnings, all the invisible and inexplicable movements
within themselves,--of which they knew nothing,--were not preparing
the way for realities inconceivable to our minds? The _ideal_, the
dream of what is best, is the essential condition of the _material_
development of mankind. No force is wasted; everything is transformed.
"Everything is of some use," said the old shepherd Sigaud. "It takes
all kinds to make a world."
Livette had forgiven Renaud, Renaud had not forgiven himself.
Sometimes he gazed at her, deeply moved, and he suffered with her for
hours at a time. Sometimes he had sudden fits of rage against
her--paroxysms of wickedness, as it were. Was she not an obstacle in
his path? At such times, he believed that he was possessed by a devil,
and he would kneel by Livette's bed and pray to the saints, the women
of compassion.
Ah! how thin she was! Her eyes seemed to have grown larger, and to
have changed from blue to black, because the pupils were still
dilated. Her long, fair hair no longer shone. It seemed as if the
muddy water of the swamp had taken away its gloss forever.
She often started at noises that she imagined she heard.
She, who in the old days used to talk but little, was constantly
telling of the things she had dreamed, and she would be vexed if they
were not remembered.
The doctors of Arles tried everything. Nothing was of any avail.
"I want no more of their medicine," she said one day to Renaud. "They
might do very well for swamp fever, but there is something else the
matter with me. It was my heart that you drowned. I never could
believe you again; it is much better that I should die."
She had explained nothing to her father or grandmother.
"They would have turned you out of the house," she said, "and I wanted
to see you to the end."
Her journey to the Icard farm, her nocturnal flight, her accident, all
were attributed to an attack of fever, which was supposed to have been
responsible for her actions, whereas, on the contrary, her illness
was the result of them all.
Renaud, by a desperate effort, mastered his passion at last. Was it
forever? He chose to think so, because it was necessary that it should
be so, in order to keep her alive.
He tried not to think of the other. He tried to repent. Every moment
he tore from his mind by an exertion of his will--as he would tear up
grass with his hand--some one of his memories. He told amusing
stories, pretending to laugh loudest at them.
His heart was filled with a great pity for Livette, but, for all that,
you would not have had to lift a very large stone to find there, in a
spot that he knew well, the sleeping viper.
"I shall die, I shall die!"--Livette often said, "but I want to see
the fete of Saintes-Maries once more. I want to live till then. You
must carry me there and lay me on the relics; that is where I want to
die. And at my burial, I want the drovers, your comrades, to follow on
horseback--promise me this--with their spears reversed, like the
soldiers I saw at Avignon one day, marching to the cemetery, holding
their guns that way."
With a sort of gaiety, she often recurred to the subject of her
burial, and embellished it with other details, saying, with the air of
a playful child:
"There must be lilies, as there are in the procession at
Saintes-Maries when they go to bless the sea; I want lots of lilies!
Lilies are so pretty and white! they are so proud on their stalks, and
they smell so sweet!"
Meanwhile, the season was hastening away; the months came and went,
like the same months in years past for centuries.
Summer set the sky and land and sea ablaze, drawing the last drop of
moisture from the swamps, sowing the venomous seeds of miasma in the
heavy air that people breathed. The crops ripened; then came the
harvest. It was autumn. The redbreast sang in the park of the Chateau
d'Avignon. The nights grew long once more. The leaves fell. The sad
days of the year began.
The buttercups had disappeared. The Vaccares, which had been dry all
summer, no longer exposed to the sun its lovely mouse-gray bed; it was
once more a sea. The light golden tint of the September sky was long
since hidden from sight behind the rising mists.
The birds of passage began anew their flight over the mirror-like
island which promised them abundant prey. The eagle hurried from the
Alps to make war upon the fish-hawks. And at night, when the wind
howled and the rain fell in torrents, the storks and cranes and geese
passed over in triangular flocks, at a great height in the drenched
atmosphere, uttering cries like cries of alarm.
Livette's suffering became more intense. She passed whole days sitting
at her window.
One evening, Renaud was sitting beside her, in silence, while the
grandmother and Pere Audiffret were dining in the room below. The
room was dimly lighted by a lamp. Suddenly Livette sprang to her feet,
then fell back, crying:
"There she is! there she is! No! no! don't go with her! I don't want
you to! no, no, Jacques!"
Renaud also had risen, and was staring vacantly at Livette; following
the direction of her gaze, he began to tremble. Outside the window
stood a pale, uncertain, but very recognizable spectre, the gipsy
herself! He had no sooner recognized her than she disappeared, after
making a significant sign to him, that said: "Come!"
It was not a vision of the sick girl's imagination, for he, too, had
seen it!
Perhaps the fever-laden island had sown its poison in the blood of
both. The germs of fever were taking root and flourishing in them. The
blight of the _paluns_ implanted in their brains, as in a cloudy
mirror, the image everlastingly repeated of the familiar plaintive
objects of the desert, with which the current of their thoughts was
mingled.
"Don't go! don't go! my Jacques!"
She dragged herself along the floor on her knees, shaken with sobs,
imploring the drover, as she clung with both hands to his jacket.
The father and grandmother had hastened to the room.
The father, too, was sobbing, and knew not what to do. The grandmother
slowly seated herself by the bed on which Renaud had gently laid
Livette.
Calm and silent, the old woman gazed long and with a beautiful
expression of perfect trust upon the copper crucifix and the images of
the saints that hung on the wall of the recess.
And, on the bed, Livette, uttering cries like a lost bird, twining her
fingers about her as if clinging to life, to the reeds in the swamp
wherein she still fancied that she was drowning--Livette breathed her
last.
Livette was dead.
The drovers, on horseback, with spears reversed, attended her body to
the cemetery. Her favorite dog followed her thither.
Renaud placed lilies on her grave. She sleeps in the cemetery of
Saintes-Maries, at the foot of the dunes, under the cultivated lilies,
among the wild asphodels, on the sea-shore.
Renaud returned to the desert, too much like the bull that, when
wounded in the arena, returns to the solitude of the swamps, where he
can lick his wounds, give free vent to his rage, bellow at the clouds,
and to no purpose, but to his heart's content tear at the steel left
in the wound.
One day they found, on the shore of the Vaccares, Rampal's bleeding
body, pierced by horns in two places. Bernard alone saw his duel with
Renaud one evening, when the sky was red with the afterglow. They
fought hand to hand, in the midst of the drove, and Renaud, lifting
his enemy from the ground in his arms, laid him face upward, dead, on
the horns of a heifer that came rushing at them and, with one motion
of her bulky head, tossed a corpse into the air.
Rampal died without a cry. He lay three days where he fell. The black
bulls, that mourn nine days when one of their kind falls dead in the
pasture, bellowed for three days around Rampal's body, at a respectful
distance.
Bernard alone saw the duel and said nothing; but the people of the
desert knew; they guessed the truth.
Since that, Renaud has become like a phantom himself.
In all weathers, summer or winter, rain or shine, he can be seen here
and there, in the Camargue desert, sitting erect and melancholy on his
horse, spear in hand.
He regrets Livette. He loves Zinzara. He weeps only for himself, the
wretched creature! He has lost the paradise of affection he had
dreamed of, and the appetizing hell of savage love he had tasted. He
has nothing. It seems to him that Livette's death, for which he blames
himself, has left him free to abandon himself to his passion for the
other; but the other is absent--and, though absent, she tortures him
as relentlessly as on the day when, clinging to his horse's mane, she
defied him with insulting words, and aroused his passions, while he
dared not shake her off, trample upon her, or seize her.
The memory of her is upon him like the gadfly that persists in
following back the bloody track of its sting. Vainly does he shake
himself; he cannot rid himself of it. Renaud loves Zinzara; he longs
for her without hope, and, ruled by that single desire, he feels no
other, so that the unexpended power of his youth accumulates within
him and drives him mad.
The friends' houses, the fetes he used formerly to visit, have no
further interest for him, because the only being he seeks cannot be
found. The desert, once peopled with hopes in his eyes, has become an
empty void. The roads that traverse it no longer lead anywhere.
He surprises himself sometimes, at night, bellowing with the bulls,
against the wind that annoys them, toward the distant horizon. He is
like one possessed. A devil dwells within him.
When he is weary of wandering about and of being in the saddle, and
chooses to lie down and sleep for a day, he repairs to the cabin of
his love, in the _gargate_, and there, full sure of being undisturbed,
raves like a wild beast, in his frenzy at being alone. In the morning,
he emerges from his retreat, more depressed, more miserable, more
haunted with visions than ever.
At times, he fancies that he sees Livette under his horse's feet,
imploring wildly, with hands outstretched--but he digs his spurs into
his horse and rides on. A terrible shriek constantly rings in his
ears.
He rides toward another spectre that calls him from the farthest point
of the horizon.--He says, to any one who cares to listen, that he has
come from Egypt, where he was a king, and that he will return there
some day, King of Camargue.
His disordered mind seems the very incarnation of the wild moor. He
fancies that he is flying about in circles with the birds of the
swamps that weep in the drizzling rain. The _mistral_ lashes his
wings. When the wind blows through his hair, he pities the poor grass
of the plains because the _mistral_ is torturing it.
All the lamentations of the reeds and swamps, of the river and the
sea, are but the ringing in his ears, and their loud wailing is
constantly punctuated by a shriek--oh! so heart-rending it is!--the
shriek of Livette!
As the bell-tower of the church of Saintes-Maries is filled with owls,
so his heart is full of the remorse of a Christian; and the cure's
kindness to him does not drive it away.
When he stands upon the sea-shore, many times he feels an overpowering
desire to urge his horse, bleeding beneath the spur, far out to sea,
farther and farther, until he vanishes in the direction of the
country, vaguely seen in dreams, from which the saints and gipsies
come--but something stops him; his destiny holds him back; he belongs
to his kingdom.
If he has known one hour's peace of mind, it was on a certain morning
when, among the usual hideous nightmares inspired by the memory of
Zinzara, he had a pleasant dream, in which he saw Livette, dressed in
white, with lilies in her hands like the saints in church pictures,
smiling and saying to him: "I have forgiven you. FORGIVE YOURSELF."
The respite was of brief duration, for the herdsman did not know that
excessive repentance is a crime, when it goes so far as to dry up the
springs of will-power in a man, when it renders sterile his field of
activity, when it bars the way to doing better in the future.
Self-pardon, at the proper time, after due penance has been done, is
one of the secrets of the wise among men; for, without it, the first
misstep would lead to never-ending despair, and would render all
courage useless forever.
Such was the cure's opinion, which Renaud listened to, in the
confessional, without paying heed to it.
He suffers, therefore, incessantly, awaiting the hour when his
suffering shall be allayed. He is like the camping-grounds abandoned
by shepherds and flocks, the _jasses_ of the desert, still black from
an old conflagration, and surrounded by briers where rose-bushes once
flourished. He is like the aloes that wither instantly in desolation,
after the stalk their love has caused to bloom has risen high into the
air.
The dream in which Renaud saw Livette was explained to him several
times by Monsieur le cure, but always to no purpose.
How, indeed, could his remorse cease, when his passion still endured,
and when he was constantly committing anew, in desire, the sin that
caused all the misery?
My friends, there is but one wise course to pursue: "Plant a tree,
build a house, rear a child. Be patient--everything comes in due time.
The thing that does not happen in a hundred years, may happen in six
thousand. The future is still yours!"
When Renaud, in the dreams of his unhealthy life, feels, as he
sometimes does, that his love is stronger in him than his passion, it
seems to him as if Livette were drawing him toward death, but
truthful, kindly beings never inspire thoughts of self-destruction.
Of one thing, at least, he is certain. He feels that voluntary death
would not remove him from the circle of the accursed. He would, on the
contrary, descend still lower in the spiral pit of mortals damned by
love.
They say that persons drowned in the Rhone, borne along without doubt
by the irresistible current, which brings them all together at the
mouth of the river, return, on certain evenings, to hold a carnival of
despair on the surface of the water.
Happy are they since they are, on those occasions, united.
But they who are drowned in stagnant waters, and they who, to join
them, die by their own hand, are never aught but solitary spectres.
They seek each other all the time, but always unavailingly. They are
the souls of the damned. They wander through the desert, calling to
one another; but never even approach or see one another; and at night,
in the deserts of Crau and Camargue, the traveller hears long-drawn,
wailing cries, flying unavailingly hither and thither over the vast
plains, forever and forever.
Even the clouds call and answer one another in their aerial flight.
NOTES
[1] "Do not wear out your shoes on the hard roads;
Rather take boat and so descend the Rhone.
"Leave Lyon and Valence behind;
Salute them with a nod as you pass beneath their bridges.
"Avignon is the queen,--but pass her by as well;
Not till you come to Arles will you find your love----
"The plain is fair and broad, O comrade,----
Take your love _en croupe_, and off you go!"
[2] "On the bridge of Avignon every one must pay toll."
[3] The name Vincent is pronounced very much like _vingt cent_, twenty
hundred, or two thousand.
[4] "May this work of mine, begun in God's name, be constantly blessed
with the favor of Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit wisely guide my
hand, my pen, and my understanding."
[5] What would the good cure have said had he been told that a
contemporary poet, Monsieur Pierre Gauthiez, has adopted the too
common error? According to him, an Egyptian Marie came to Camargue in
the boat with the saints.--When they approached the shore, it became
necessary to reward the devoted boatman who had helped them to
accomplish the prodigious journey. One of them gave him a sprig of
rosemary that had touched the lips of the Christ; another, a lock of
her fair hair. And as to the third--
"L'Egyptienne au doux oeil sombre,
Debout aupres d'un olivier,
Regarda le beau batelier.
"Elle prit son voile de lin,
Et decouvrit sa chair de vierge
Pure et luisante, ainsi qu'un cierge,
Sous le soleil a son declin.
Elle fut toute nue, et comme
Sur le sable roux, le jeune homme
S'agenouillait, la levre en feu,
Tendant ses bras comme vers Dieu,
La sainte, sans robe ni voiles,
Pareille aux celestes etoiles,
Lui dit: 'Tu vois, mon batelier,
Je n'ai que Moi pour te payer!'"
(Translation.)
"The Egyptian of the soft dark eye, standing beside an olive-tree,
gazed upon the comely boatman.
"She put aside her linen veil and discovered her virgin flesh, all
pure and glistening, like a wax taper, beneath the setting sun. She
was quite naked, and, as the young man knelt on the red sand, with
lips on fire, holding out his arms to her as if to God, the saint,
like the stars in heaven, wearing no gown or veil, said to him: 'Thou
seest, my boatman, I have naught but Myself wherewith to pay thee!'"
[6] The spirit, indeed, is willing, but the flesh is weak.
[7] The _tarasque_, perhaps, is nothing more than a reproduction of
the crocodile of the Rhone, increased in size to an absurd degree by
the popular imagination. This one, the last that was seen in Camargue,
so they say, is hanging to-day in the _Hopital des Antiquailles_ at
Lyon, with an inscription stating the source from whence it came:
"Gift of M. le Cure of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer."
[8] _C'est le sort._--_Sort_ may mean _fate_, and it may also mean
_spell_, being used in the latter sense almost synonymously with
_sortilege_. It may also mean _chance_.
[9] "When you were upon the great deep, without oars to row your boat,
Saintes Maries! Naught but the sea and sky about you--with all your
eyes you appealed to the verdant shore to be gentle."
[10] "Beneath the sun, beneath the stars, with sails made of the gowns
you wore--Sail on, O ship!--seven days and nights you sailed and
sailed and saw no vessel, large or small--naught but the sea and the
great deep!"
[11] "God, who makes of a lightning-flash His scourge, wherewith to
scourge the sky and sea, Saintes Maries! guided the bark to a safe
harbor--an angel, who appeared on board, pointed out the way to the
verdant shore."
[12] "Kneeling before God's tabernacle, we, stained with sin from
birth, do invoke your power, for whom God performed this miracle--Holy
women, protect us!"
[13] _Comment s'appelle ton chien?_--In common parlance--What is your
dog's name? The joke is lost unless it is translated literally.
Transcriber's Note
Minor punctuation errors have been repaired.
Hyphenation and accent usage has been made consistent.
A single closing quote was omitted on page 7. The transcriber has
added one in what seemed the most appropriate place--"... 'Look! I am
dark, but I am beautiful! ... So be it!'"
The following typographic errors have been fixed:
Page 6--Carmargue amended to Camargue--"... this 'Chateau
d'Avignon,' the finest in all Camargue."
Facing page 64 (illustration caption)--Renard's amended to
Renaud's--"... and pulled back with all her strength the
double rein of Renaud's horse, ..."
Page 111--Moveover amended to Moreover--"Moreover, after the
harvest was gathered, ..."
Page 300--house amended to horse--"... "we will ride
together till night. My horse has wings.""
The frontispiece illustration and introductory front matter has been
moved to follow the title page. Other illustrations have been moved
where necessary so that they are not in the middle of a paragraph.
The Table of contents has been added by the transcriber for the
convenience of the reader.
The List of Illustrations has been moved from its original location on
page 349 to the beginning of the book.