Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
All chapters begin with an illustrated capital, and most end with a
decorative image. These have not been indicated.
_The
High
Place_
BOOKS _by_ MR. CABELL
_Biography_:
BEYOND LIFE
FIGURES OF EARTH
DOMNEI
CHIVALRY
JURGEN
THE LINE OF LOVE
THE HIGH PLACE
GALLANTRY
THE CERTAIN HOUR
THE CORDS OF VANITY
FROM THE HIDDEN WAY
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK
THE EAGLE’S SHADOW
THE CREAM OF THE JEST
_Scholia_:
THE LINEAGE OF LICHFIELD
TABOO
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
THE JEWEL MERCHANTS
* * * * *
JURGEN AND THE LAW
(_Edited by Guy Holt_)
[Illustration: Image followed by;
Caption surrounded by a garland: FLORIAN felt himself to be in not
quite the company suited to a
nobleman of his rank.
_See page 147_]
THE HIGH PLACE:
A COMEDY OF DISENCHANTMENT
BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND DECORATIONS BY
FRANK C. PAPÉ
“_Build on high place for Chemosh, the abomination
of Moab, and for horned Ashtoreth, the
abomination of Zidon, and for Moloch, the
abomination of the children of Ammon._”
[Illustration: Figure and shadow.]
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
NEW YORK: 1923
Copyright, 1923, by
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
_Printed in the
United States of America_
_This First Edition of THE
HIGH PLACE is limited to
two thousand numbered copies,
of which this is_
_Copy Number_ 1825
Published, 1923
To
ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL III
_this book, where so much more is due_.
_Contents_
PART ONE
THE END OF LONG WANTING
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE CHILD ERRANT 3
II SAYINGS ABOUT PUYSANGE 10
III WIDOWERS SEEK CONSOLATION 24
IV ECONOMICS OF AN OLD RACE 36
V FRIENDLY ADVICE OF JANICOT 42
VI PHILOSOPHY OF THE LOWER CLASS 53
VII ADJUSTMENTS OF THE RESURRECTED 64
VIII AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD 74
IX MISGIVINGS OF A BEGINNING SAINT 80
X WHO FEASTED AT BRUNBELOIS 89
PART TWO
THE END OF LIGHT WINNING
XI PROBLEMS OF BEAUTY 97
XII NICETIES OF FRATRICIDE 114
XIII DÉBONNAIRE 123
XIV GODS IN DECREPITUDE 141
XV DUBIETIES OF THE MASTER 148
XVI SOME VICTIMS OF FLAMBERGE 159
XVII THE ARMORY OF ANTAN 166
XVIII PROBLEMS OF HOLINESS 178
XIX LOCKED GATES 189
XX SMOKE REVEALS FIRE 204
PART THREE
THE END OF LEAN WISDOM
XXI OF MELIOR MARRIED 219
XXII THE WIVES OF FLORIAN 225
XXIII THE COLLYN IN THE POT 237
XXIV MARIE-CLAIRE 246
XXV THE GANDER THAT SANG 256
XXVI HUSBAND AND WIFE 263
XXVII THE FORETHOUGHT OF HOPRIG 275
XXVIII HIGHLY AMBIGUOUS 282
XXIX THE WONDER WORDS 292
XXX THE ERRANT CHILD 304
_Illustrations_
Florian felt himself to be in not quite the company
suited to a nobleman of his rank _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
She waited—there was the miracle—for Florian
de Puysange 44
He did not move, but lay quite still, staring upward 82
Florian’s plump face was transfigured, as he knelt
before his Melior 120
Now Florian came forward 162
Presently the Collyn of Puysange had opened her
yellow eyes and was licking daintily her
lips 198
He closed upon Florian, straightforwardly, without
any miracle-working 250
“—And this is the last cloud going west” 286
PART ONE
_THE END OF LONG WANTING_
“_Lever un tel obstacle est à moy peu de chose.
Le Ciel défend, de vray, certains contentemens;
Mais on trouve avec luy des accommodemens._”
_1._
_The Child Errant_
Probably Florian would never have gone into the Forest of Acaire had
he not been told, over and over again, to keep out of it. Obedience
to those divinely set in authority was in 1698 still modish: none the
less, such orders, so insistently repeated to any normal boy of ten,
even to a boy not born of the restless house of Puysange, must make the
venture at one time or another obligatory.
Moreover, this October afternoon was of the sun-steeped lazy sort which
shows the world as over-satisfied with the done year’s achievements,
of the sort which, when you think about it so long, arouses a dim
dissent from such unambitious aims. It was not that the young Prince
de Lisuarte—to give Florian his proper title,—was in any one point
dissatisfied with the familiar Poictesme immediately about him: he
liked it well enough. It was only that he preferred another place,
which probably existed somewhere, and which was not familiar or even
known to him. It was only that you might—here one approximates to
Florian’s vague thinking, as he lay yawning under the little tree from
the East,—that you might find more excitement in some place which
strove toward larger upshots than the ripening of grains and fruits, in
a world which did not every autumn go to sleep as if the providing of
food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough.
To-day, with October’s temperate sunlight everywhere, the sleek country
of Poictesme was inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze. The
thronged trees of Acaire, as Florian now saw them just beyond that low
red wall, seemed to have golden powder scattered over them, a powder
which they stayed too motionless to shake off. Yet logic told him
these still trees most certainly veiled wild excitements of some sort,
for otherwise people would not be at you, over and over again, with
exhortations to keep out of that forest.
Nobody was watching. There was nothing in especial to do, for Florian
had now read all the stories in this curious new book, by old Monsieur
Perrault of the Academy, which Florian’s father had last month
fetched back from Paris: and, besides, nobody at Storisende had, for
as much as a week, absolutely told Florian not to leave the gardens.
So he adventured: and with the achievement of the adventure came a
strengthening of Florian’s growing conviction that his elders were in
their notions, as a rule, illogical.
For in Acaire, even when you went as far as Brunbelois, the boy found
nothing hurtful. It was true that, had he not at the beginning of
his wandering met with the small bright-haired woman who guided him
thereafter, he might have made mistakes: and mistakes, as Mélusine
acknowledged, might have turned out awkwardly in approaching the
high place, since monsters have to be handled in just the right
way. She explained to Florian, on that warm long October afternoon,
that sympathy is the main requisite, because the main trouble with
such monsters as the bleps and the strycophanês and the calcar (she
meant only the gray one, of course) is that each is unique, and in
consequence lonely.
The hatred men feel for every ravening monster that wears fangs and
scales, she pointed out, is due to its apparel being not quite
the sort of thing to which men are accustomed: whereas people were
wholly used to having soldiers and prelates and statesmen ramping
about in droves, and so viewed these without any particular wonder or
disapproval. All that was needed, then, was to extend to the bleps
and the strycophanês a little of the confidence and admiration which
men everywhere else accorded to the destroyers of mankind; and you
would soon see that these glittering creatures—as well as the tawny
eale, and the leucrocotta, with its golden mane and whiskers, and the
opal-colored tarandus,—were a great deal nicer to look at than the most
courted and run-after people, and much less apt to destroy anybody
outside of their meal hours.
In any event, it was Mélusine who had laid an enchantment upon the high
place in the midst of the wood, and who had set the catoblepas here
and the mantichora yonder to prevent the lifting of her spell, so that
Florian could not possibly have found a better guide than Mélusine. She
was kindly, you saw, but not very happy: and from the first, Florian
liked and, in some sort, pitied her. So he rode with her confidingly,
upon the back of the queerest steed that any boy of ten had ever been
privileged to look at, not to speak of riding on it: and the two talked
lazily and friendlily as they went up and up, and always upward, along
the windings of the green way which long ago had been a road.
As they went, the body of this sweet-smelling Mélusine was warm and
soft against his body, for Mélusine was not imprisoned in hard-feeling
clothes such as were worn by your governesses and aunts. The monsters
stationed along the way drew back as Mélusine passed; and some purred
ingratiatingly, like gigantic kettles, and others made obeisances: and
you met no other living creatures except three sheep that lay in the
roadway asleep and very dingy with the dust of several hundred years.
No self-respecting monster would have touched them. Thus Florian and
Mélusine came through the forest without any hindrance or trouble, to
the cleft in the mountain tops where the castle stood beside a lake:
and Florian liked the stillness of all things in this high place, where
the waters of the lake were without a ripple, and the tall grass and so
many mist-white flowers were motionless.
He liked it even more when Mélusine led him through such rooms in
the castle as took his fancy. He was glad that Mélusine did not
mind when Florian confessed the sleeping princess—in the room hung
everywhere with curtains upon which people hunted a tremendous boar,
and stuck spears through one another, and burst forth into peculiarly
solid-looking yellow flames,—seemed to him even more lovely than was
Mélusine. They were very much alike, though, the boy said: and Mélusine
told him that was not unnatural, since Melior was her sister. And
then, when Florian asked questions, Mélusine told him also of the old
unhappiness that had been in this place, and of the reasons which had
led her to put an enduring peacefulness upon her parents and her sister
and all the other persons who slept here enchanted.
Florian had before to-day heard century-old tales about Mélusine’s
father, Helmas the Deep-Minded. So it was very nice actually to see
him here in bed, with his scarlet and ermine robes neatly folded on
the armchair, and his crown, with a long feather in it, hung on a
peg in the wall, just as the King had left everything when he went
to sleep several hundred years ago. The child found it all extremely
interesting, quite like a fairy tale such as those which he had lately
been reading in the book by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy.
But what Florian always remembered most clearly, afterward, was the
face of the sleeping princess, Melior, as he saw it above the coverlet
of violet-colored wool; and she seemed to him so lovely that Florian
was never wholly willing, afterward, to admit she was but part of a
dream which had come to him in his sleeping, on that quiet haze-wrapped
afternoon, in the gardens of his own home. Certainly his father
had found him asleep, by the bench under the little tree from the
East, and Florian could not clearly recollect how he had got back to
Storisende: but he remembered Brunbelois and his journeying to the
high place and the people seen there and, above all, the Princess
Melior, with a clarity not like his memories of other dreams. Nor did
the memory of her loveliness quite depart as Florian became older, and
neither manhood nor marriage put out of his mind the beauty that he in
childhood had, however briefly, seen.
_2._
_Sayings about Puysange_
When Florian awakened he was lying upon the ground, with the fairy
tales of Monsieur Perrault serving for Florian’s pillow, in the gardens
of Storisende, just by the little tree raised from the slip which his
great-uncle, the Admiral, had brought from the other side of the world.
Nobody knew the right name of this tree: it was called simply the tree
from the East. Caterpillars had invaded it that autumn, and had eaten
every leaf from the boughs, and then had gone away: but after their
going the little tree had optimistically put forth again, in the mild
October weather, so that the end of each bare branch was now tipped
with a small futile budding of green.
It was upon the bench beneath this tree that Florian’s father was
sitting. Monsieur de Puysange had laid aside his plumed three-cornered
hat, and as he sat there, all a subdued magnificence of dark blue and
gold, he was looking down smilingly at the young lazibones whom the
Duke’s foot was gently prodding into wakefulness. The Duke was wearing
blue stockings with gold clocks, as Florian was to remember....
Not until manhood did Florian appreciate his father, and come properly
to admire the exactness with which the third Duke of Puysange had
kept touch with his times. Under the Sun King’s first mistress Gaston
de Puysange had cultivated sentiment, under the second, warfare, and
under the third, religion: he had thus stayed always in the sunshine.
It was Florian’s lot to know his father only during the last period,
so the boy’s youth as spent dividedly at the Duke’s two châteaux, at
Storisende and at Bellegarde, lacked for no edifying influence. The
long summer days at Storisende were diversified with all appropriate
religious instruction. In winter the atmosphere of Versailles
itself—where the long day of Louis Quatorze seemed now to be ending
in a twilight of stately serenity through which the old King went
deathward, handsomely sustained by his consciousness of a well-spent
life and by the reverent homage of all his bastards,—was not more pious
than was that of Bellegarde.
Let none suppose that Monsieur de Puysange affected superhuman
austerities. Rather, he exercised tact. If he did not keep all
fast-days, he never failed to secure the proper dispensations, nor to
see that his dependants fasted scrupulously: and if he sometimes, even
now, was drawn into argument, Monsieur de Puysange was not ever known
after any lethal duel to omit the ordering of a mass, at the local
Church of Holy Hoprig, for his adversary’s soul. “There are amenities,”
he would declare, “imperative among well-bred Christians.”
Then too, when left a widower at the birth of his second legitimate
son, the Duke did not so far yield to the temptings of the flesh as
to take another wife; for he confessed to scruples if marriage, which
the Scriptures assert to be unknown in heaven, could anywhere be a
quite laudable estate: but he saw to it that his boys were tended by
a succession of good-looking and amiable governesses. His priests
also were kept sleek, and his confessor unshocked, by the Duke’s
tireless generosity to the Church; and were all of unquestioned
piety, which they did not carry to excess. In fine, with youth and
sentiment, and the discomforts of warfare also, put well behind him,
the good gentleman had elected to live discreetly, among reputable but
sympathetic companions....
When Florian told his father now about Florian’s delightful adventure
in Acaire, the Duke smiled: and he said that, in this dream begotten
by Florian’s late reading of the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault,
Florian had been peculiarly privileged.
“For Madame Mélusine is not often encountered nowadays, my son. She was
once well known in this part of Poictesme. But it was a long while ago
she quarreled with her father, the wise King Helmas, and imprisoned
him with all his court in the high place that ought not to be. Yet
Mélusine, let me tell you, was properly punished for her unfilial
conduct; since upon every Sunday after that, her legs were turned to
fishes’ tails, and they stayed thus until Monday. This put the poor
lady to great inconvenience: and when she eventually married, it led
to a rather famous misunderstanding with her husband. And so he died
unhappily; but she did not die, because she was of the Léshy, born of a
people who are not immortal but are more than human—”
“Of course I know she did not die, monsieur my father. Why, it was only
this afternoon I talked with her. I liked her very much. But she is not
so pretty as Melior.”
It seemed to Florian that the dark curls of his father’s superb peruke
now framed a smiling which was almost sad. “Perhaps there will never
be in your eyes anybody so pretty as Melior. I am sure that you have
dreamed all this, jumbling together in your dreaming old Monsieur
Perrault’s fine story of the sleeping princess—La Belle au Bois
Dormant,—with our far older legends of Poictesme—”
“I do not think that it was just a dream, monsieur my father—”
“But I, unluckily, am sure it was, my son. And I suspect, too, that
it is the dream which comes in varying forms to us of Puysange, the
dream which we do not ever quite put out of mind. We stay, to the
last, romantics. So Melior, it may be, will remain to you always that
unattainable beauty toward which we of Puysange must always yearn,—just
as your patron St. Hoprig will always afford to you, in his glorious
life and deeds, an example which you will admire and, I trust, emulate.
I admit that such emulation,” the Duke added, more drily, “has not
always been inescapable by us of Puysange.”
“I cannot hope to be so good as was Monseigneur St. Hoprig,” Florian
replied, “but I shall endeavor to merit his approval.”
“Indeed, you should have dreamed of the blessed Hoprig also, while you
were about it, Florian. For he was a close friend of your Melior’s
father, you may remember, and performed many miracles at the court of
King Helmas.”
“That is true,” said Florian. “Oxen brought him there in a stone
trough: and I am sure that Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved
Melior very much.”
And he did not say any more about what his father seemed bent upon
regarding as Florian’s dream. At ten a boy has learned to humor the
notions of his elders. Florian slipped down from the bench, and tucked
his book under his arm, and agreed with his father that it was near
time for supper.
None the less, though, as the boy stood waiting for that magnificent
father of his to arise from the bench, Florian reflected how queer it
was that, before the falling of the Nis magic, this beautiful Melior
must have known and talked with Florian’s heavenly patron, St. Hoprig
of Gol. It was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s mother had commended the
boy with her last breath, and it was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s
father had taught the boy to pray in all time of doubt or peccadillo,
because this saint was always to be the boy’s protector and advocate.
And this made heaven seem very near and real, the knowledge that always
in celestial courts this bright friend was watching, and, Florian
hoped, was upon occasion tactfully suggesting to the good God that
one must not be too severe with growing boys. Melior—Florian thought
now,—was remotely and half timidly to be worshipped: Hoprig, the friend
and intercessor,—a being even more kindly and splendid than was your
superb father,—you loved....
Florian had by heart all the legends about Holy Hoprig. Particularly
did Florian rejoice in the tale of the saint’s birth, in such untoward
circumstances as caused the baby to be placed in a barrel, and cast
into the sea, to be carried whither wind and tide directed. Florian
knew that for ten years the barrel floated, tossing up and down in all
parts of the ocean, while regularly an angel passed the necessary food
to young Hoprig through the bung-hole. Finally, at Heaven’s chosen
time, the barrel rolled ashore near Manneville, on the low sands of
Fomor Beach. A fisherman, thinking that he had found a cask of wine,
was about to tap it with a gimlet; then from within, for the first
time, St. Hoprig speaks to man: “Do not injure the cask. Go at once to
the abbot of the monastery to which this land belongs, and bid him come
to baptize me.”
It seemed to Florian that was a glorious start in life for a boy of
ten, a boy of just the same age as Florian. All the later miracles and
prodigies appeared, in comparison with that soul-contenting moment, to
be compact of paler splendors. Nobody, though, could hear unenviously
of the long voyage to the Red Islands and the realm of Hlif, and to
Pohjola, and even to the gold-paved Strembölgings, where every woman
contains a serpent so placed as to discourage love-making,—of that
pre-eminently delightful voyage made by St. Hoprig and St. Hork in the
stone trough, which, after its landing upon the coasts of Poictesme,
at mid-winter, during a miraculous shower of apple-blossoms, white
oxen drew through the country hillward, with the two saints by turns
preaching and converting people all the way to Perdigon. For that,
Florian remembered, was the imposing fashion in which Holy Hoprig had
come to the court of Melior’s father,—and had wrought miracles there
also, to the discomfiture of the abominable Horrig. But more important,
now, was the reflection that St. Hoprig had in this manner come to
Melior and to the unimaginable beauty which, in the high place, a
coverlet of violet stuff just half concealed....
Certainly Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved Melior very much, and
these two must have been very marvelous when they went about a more
heroic and more splendid world than Florian could hope ever to inhabit.
It was of their beauty and holiness that the boy thought, with a dumb
yearning to be not in all unworthy of these bright, dear beings. That
was the longing—to be worthy,—which possessed Florian as he stood
waiting for his father to rise from the bench beneath the little tree
from the East. There, the Duke also seemed to meditate, about something
rather pleasant.
“You said just now, monsieur my father,” Florian stated, a trifle
worried, “that we of Puysange have not always imitated the good
examples of St. Hoprig. Have we been very bad?”
Monsieur de Puysange had put on his plumed hat, but he stayed seated.
He appeared now, as grown people so often do, amused for no logical or
conceivable reason: though, indeed, the Duke seemed to find most living
creatures involuntarily amusing.
He said: “We have displayed some hereditary foibles. For it is the
boast of the house of Puysange that we trace in the direct male line
from Poictesme’s old Jurgen. That ancient wanderer, says our legend,
somehow strayed into the bed-chamber of Madame Félise de Puysange; and
the result of his errancy was the vicomte who flourished under the last
Capets.”
Young Florian, in accord with the quaint custom of the day, had been
reared without misinformation as to how or whence children came into
the world. So he said only, if a little proudly, “Yes,—he was another
Florian, I remember, like me.”
“There were queer tales about this first Florian, also, who is reputed
to have vanished the moment he was married, and to have re-appeared
here, at Storisende, some thirty years later, with his youth
unimpaired. He declared himself to have slept out the intervening
while,—an excuse for remissness in his marital duties which sceptics
have considered both hackneyed and improbable.”
“Well,” Florian largely considered, “but then there is Sir Ogier still
asleep in Avalon until France has need of him; and John the Divine is
still sleeping at Ephesus until it is time to bear his witness against
Antichrist; and there is Merlin in Broceliande, and there is St. Joseph
of Arimathæa in the white city of Sarras—and really, monsieur my
father, there is Melior, and all the rest of King Helmas’ people up at
Brunbelois.”
“Are you still dreaming of your Melior, tenacious child! Certainly you
are logical, you cite good precedents for your namesake, and to adhere
to logic and precedent is always safe. I hope you will remember that.”
“I shall remember that, monsieur my father.”
“Certainly, too, this story of persons who sleep for a miraculous
while is common to all parts of the world. This Florian de Puysange,
in any event, married a granddaughter of the great Dom Manuel; so that
we descend from the two most famous of the heroes of Poictesme: but,
I fancy, it is from Jurgen that our family has inherited the larger
number of its traits.”
“Anyhow, we have risen from just being vicomtes—”
Florian’s father had leaned back, he had put off his provisional plan
of going in to supper. You could not say that the good gentleman
exactly took pride in his ancestry: rather, he found his lineage worthy
of him, and therefore he benevolently approved of it.
So he said now, complacently enough: “Yes, our house has prospered.
Steadily our fortunes have been erected, and in dignity too we have
been erected. Luck seems to favor us, however, most heartily when a
woman rules France, and it is to exalted ladies that we owe most of
our erections. Thus Queen Ysabeau the Bavarian notably advanced the
Puysange of her time, very much as Anne of Beaujeu and Catherine de
Medici did afterward. Many persons have noted the coincidence. Indeed,
it was only sixty years ago that Marion de Lorme spoke privately to
the Great Cardinal, with such eloquence that the Puysange of the
day—another Florian, and a notably religious person,—had presently been
made a duke, with an appropriate estate in the south—”
“I know,” said Florian, not a bit humble about his erudition. “That is
how we came to be here in Poictesme. Mademoiselle de Lorme was a very
kind lady, was she not, monsieur my father?”
“She was so famed, my son, for all manner of generosity that when my
grandfather remodeled Bellegarde, and erected the Hugonet wing of
the present château, he sealed up in the cornerstone, just as people
sometimes place there the relics of a saint, both of Mademoiselle de
Lorme’s garters. Probably there was some salutary story connected with
his acquiring of them; for my pious grandfather cared nothing for such
vanities as jeweled garters, his mind being wholly set upon higher
things.”
“I wish we knew that story,” said Florian.
“But nobody does. My grandfather was discreet. So he thrived. And his
son, who was my honored father, also thrived under the regency of Anne
of Austria. He thrived rather unaccountably in the teeth of Mazarin’s
open dislike. There was some story—I do not know what,—about a nightcap
found under the Queen’s pillow, and considered by his eminence to need
some explaining. My honored father was never good at explaining things.
But he was discreet, and he thrived. And I too, my son, was lucky in
Madame de Montespan’s time.”
Now Madame de Montespan’s time antedated Florian’s thinking: but about
the King’s last mistress,—and morganatic wife, some said,—Florian was
better informed.
“Madame de Maintenon also is very fond of you, monsieur my father, is
she not?”
The Duke slightly waved his hand, as one who disclaims unmerited
tribute. “It was my privilege to know that incomparable lady during
her first husband’s life. He was a penniless cripple who had lost
the use of all his members, and in that time of many wants I was so
lucky as to comfort Madame Scarron now and then. Madame de Maintenon
remembers these alleviations of her unfortunate youth, and notes with
approval that I have forgotten them utterly. So Madame is very kind.
In short,—or, rather, to sum up the tale,—the lords of Puysange are
rumored, by superstitious persons, to have a talisman which enables
them to go farther than may most men in their dealings with ladies.”
“You mean, like a magic lamp or a wishing cap?” said Florian, “or like
a wizard’s wand?”
“Yes, something in that shape,” the Duke answered, “and they tell how
through its proper employment, always under the great law of living,
our house has got much pleasure and prosperity. And it is certain the
Collyn aids us at need—”
“What is the Collyn?”
“Nothing suitable for a boy of ten to know about. When you are a man I
shall have to tell you, Florian. That will be soon enough.”
“And what, monsieur my father, is this great law of living?”
The Duke looked for a while at his son rather queerly. “Thou shalt not
offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor.”
With that he was silent: and, rising at last from the bench, he walked
across the lawn, and ascended the broad curving marble stairway which
led to the south terrace of Storisende. And Florian, following, was for
an instant quiet, and a little puzzled.
“Yes, monseigneur my father, but I do not see—”
The Duke turned, an opulent figure in dark blue and gold. He was
standing by one of the tall vases elaborately carved with garlands, the
vases that in summer overflowed with bright red and yellow flowers:
these vases were now empty, and the gardeners had replaced the carved
lids.
“Youth never sees the reason of that law, my son. I am wholly
unprepared to say whether or not this is a lucky circumstance.” The
Duke again paused, looking thoughtfully across the terrace, toward the
battlemented walls and the four towers of the southern façade. His
gazing seemed to go well beyond the fountain and the radiating low
hedges and gravelled walkways of the terrace, to go beyond, for that
matter, the darkening castle. Twilight was rising: you saw a light in
one window. “At all events, we are home again, young dreamer. I too was
once a dreamer. And at all events, there is Little Brother waiting for
us.”
_3._
_Widowers Seek Consolation_
Little brother was indeed waiting for them, at the arched doorway,
impatient of his governess’ restraint. At sight of them he began
telling, coincidently, of how hungry he was, and of how he had helped
old Margot to milk a cow that afternoon, and of how a courier was
waiting for Monsieur my Father in great long boots, up to here. The
trifold tale was confusing, for at eight little Raoul could not yet
speak plainly. His sleeve was torn, and he had a marvelously dirty face.
Behind him stood pallid pretty Mademoiselle Berthe, the governess who a
trifle later, during the next winter, killed herself. She had already
begun bewailing her condition to the Duke, even while she obstinately
would have none of the various husbands whom her kindly patron
recommended, from among his dependants, as ready to make that condition
respectable. There seemed no pleasing the girl, and Florian could see
that his father, for all his uniform benevolence, regarded her as a
nuisance.
But the Duke now gazed down, at the pale frightened-looking creature,
with that fine condescending smile which he accorded almost everybody.
“Mademoiselle, children are a grave responsibility. I have just found
Florian asleep in the mud yonder, whereas you have evidently just
plucked this other small pest from the pig-sty. It is lucky that we
have no more brats to contend with, Mademoiselle, for the present, is
it not?”
Florian wondered, long afterward, how Mademoiselle had looked, and
what she replied. He could not recollect. But he did remember that at
this instant Little Brother ran from her and hugged first one of his
father’s superb legs and then Florian. Little Brother was warm and
tough-feeling and astonishingly strong, and he smelled of clean earth.
Florian loved him very much, and indeed the affection between the two
brothers endured until the end of their intercourse. Florian was always
consciously the elder and wiser, and felt himself the stronger long
after Raoul had become taller than Florian. Even after Raoul was well
on in his thirties, and both the boys had boys of their own, Florian
still thought of the Chevalier de Puysange as a little brother with a
dirty face and a smell of clean earth, whom you loved and patronized,
and from whom you had one secret only. For of course you never told
Raoul about Melior.
You spoke to nobody about Melior. You found it wiser and more delicious
to retain all knowledge of her loveliness for entirely private
consideration, and thus not be bothered with people’s illogical notion
that Melior was only a dream.
For the memory of the Princess Melior’s loveliness did not depart as
Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage could put quite
out of mind the beauty that he had in childhood, however briefly, seen.
Other women came and in due season went. His wives indeed seemed to die
with a sort of uniform prematureness in which the considerate found
something of fatality: nor did the social conventions of the day permit
a Puysange to shirk amusing himself with yet other women. Florian
amused himself so liberally, once his father was dead, and the former
Prince de Lisuarte had succeeded to the major title and to his part of
the estates, that they of Bellegarde were grieved when it was known
that the fourth Duke of Puysange now planned to marry for the fifth
time.
At Florian’s château of Bellegarde, affairs had sped very pleasantly
since the death of his last wife, and the packing off of his son to
Storisende. Storisende, by the old Duke’s will, had fallen to Raoul.
Affairs had sped so pleasantly, they said at Bellegarde, that it
seemed a deplorable risk for monseigneur to be marrying a woman who
might, conceivably, be forthwith trying to reclaim him from all
fashionable customs. Besides, he was upon this occasion marrying a
daughter of the house of Nérac, just as his brother the Chevalier had
done. And this was a ruiningly virtuous family, a positively dowdy
family who hardly seemed to comprehend—they said at Bellegarde,—that
we were now living in the modern world of 1723, and that fashions had
altered since the old King’s death.
“For how long, little monster, will this new toy amuse you?” asked
Mademoiselle Cécile. It appears unfair here to record that at nine
o’clock in the morning they were not yet up and about the day’s duties,
without recording also, in palliation of such seeming laziness, that
there was no especial need to hurry, for all of mademoiselle’s trunks
had been packed overnight, and she was not to leave Bellegarde until
noon.
“Parbleu, one never knows,” Florian replied, as he lay smiling lazily
at the smiling cupids who held up the bed-canopies. “It is a very
beautiful feature of my character that at thirty-five I am still the
optimist. When I marry I always believe the ceremony to begin a new and
permanent era.”
“Oh, very naturally, since everywhere that frame of mind is considered
appropriate to a bridegroom.” The girl had turned her sleek brown head
a little, resting it more comfortably upon the pillow, and she regarded
Florian with appraising eyes. “My friend, in this, as in much else, I
find your subserviency to convention almost excessive. It becomes a
notorious mania with you to do nothing whatever without the backing of
logic and good precedent—”
“My father, mademoiselle, impressed upon me a great while ago the
philosophy of these virtues.”
“Yes, all that is very fine. Yet I at times suspect your logic and
your precedents to be in reality patched-up excuses for following the
moment’s whim: or else I seem to see you adjusting them, like colored
spectacles, to improve in your eyes the appearance of that which you
have in hand.”
“Now you misjudge me, mademoiselle, with the ruthlessness of intimate
personal acquaintance—”
“But indeed, indeed, those precedents which you educe are often rather
far-fetched. You are much too ready to refer us to the customs of the
Visigoths, or to cite the table-talk of Aristotle, or to appeal to the
rulings of Quintilian. It sounds well: I concede that. Yet these, and
the similar sonorous pedantries with which you are so glib to justify
your pranks, do not, my friend, let me assure you, seem always wholly
relevant to the conditions of modern life—”
“My race descends from a most notable scholar, mademoiselle, and it
well may be the great Jurgen has bequeathed to me some flavor of his
unique erudition. For that I certainly need not apologize—”
“No, you should rather apologize because that ancient hero appears
also to have bequeathed to you a sad tendency to self-indulgence in
matrimony. Now to get married has always seemed to me an indelicate
advertising of one’s intentions: and I assuredly cannot condone in
anybody a selfish habit which to-day leads to my being turned out of
doors—”
“A pest! you talk as if I too did not sincerely regret those social
conventions which make necessary your departure—”
“Yet it is you who evoke those silly conventions by marrying again.”
“—But in a grave matter like matrimony one must not be obstinate
and illiberal. Raoul assures me, you conceive, that his little
sister-in-law is a delightful creature. He thinks that as a co-heiress
of Nérac, without any meddlesome male relatives, she is the person
logically suited to be my wife. And I like to indulge the dear fellow’s
wishes.”
“Behold a fine sample of your indulgence of others, by marrying a
great fortune! After all, though,” Cécile reflected, philosophically,
“I would not change shoes with her. For it is not wholesome, my
friend, to be your wife. But it has been eminently pleasant to be your
playfellow.”
Florian smiled. And Florian somewhat altered his position.
“_Bels dous amicx_,” sang Florian, softly, “_fassam un joc novel—!_”
“I must ask for some explanation of, at least,” Cécile stated, with
that light, half-muffled laugh which Florian found adorable, “your
words.”
“I was about to sing, mademoiselle, a very ancient aubade. I was
beginning a morning-song such as each lover in the days of troubadours
was used, here in Poictesme, to sing to his mistress at arising.”
“So that, now you are, as I perceive, arising, you plan to honor the
old custom? That is well enough for you, who are a Duke of Puysange,
and who have so much respect for precedent and logic. But I am not
logical, I am, as you can see, a woman. Moreover, I am modern in all,
I abhor antiquity. I find it particularly misplaced in a bedroom. And
so, my friend, I must entreat you, whatever you do, not to sing any of
those old songs, which may, for anything I know, have some improper
significance.”
Florian humored this young lady’s rather strict notions of propriety,
and they for a while stopped talking. Then they parted with a friendly
kiss, and they dressed each for travelling: and Mademoiselle
Cécile rode south upon a tentative visit to Cardinal Borgia, whose
proffered benefactions had thus far been phrased with magniloquence
and vagueness. This fair girl had the religious temperament, and she
delighted in submitting herself to her spiritual fathers, but she
required some daily comforts also.
Florian next sent for the boy Gian Paolo, who had now for seven months
been Florian’s guest. “I am marrying,” said Florian. “We must part,
Gian Paolo.”
“Do you think so?” the boy said. “Ah, but you would regret me!”
“Regretting would become a lost art if people did not sometimes do
their duty. Now that I am about to take a wife, you comprehend, I
shall for the while be more or less pre-empted by my bride. It is
unlikely that I shall be able, at all events during the first ardors
of the honeymoon, to entertain my friends with any adequacy. Let us
be logical, dear Gian Paolo! I find no fault in you, beloved boy, I
concede you to be fit friend for an emperor. It is merely that the
advent of my new duchess now compels me to ensure the privacy of our
honeymoon by parting, however regretfully, with Mademoiselle Cécile and
with you also.”
“Your decision does not surprise me, Florian, for they say that you
have parted with many persons who loved you, and who left you—”
“Yes?” said Florian.
“—Very suddenly—”
“Yes?” Florian said, again.
“—And yet without their departure surprising you at all, dear Florian.”
“Oh, it is merely that in moments of extreme anguish I attempt to
control my emotions, and to give them no undignified display,” said
Florian. “Doubtless, I was as surprised as anybody. Well, but this
foolish gossip of this very censorious neighborhood does not concern
us, Gian Paolo: and, now that you too are about to go, I can assure you
that all your needs”—here for an instant Florian hesitated,—“have been
provided for.”
“Indeed, I see that you have wine set ready. Is it”—and the boy smiled
subtly, for he was confident of his power over Florian,—“is it my
stirrup-cup, dear Florian?”
Florian now looked full upon him. “Yes,” Florian said, rather sadly.
Then they drank, but not of the same wine, to the new Duchess of
Puysange. And the boy Gian Paolo died without pain.
“It is better so,” said Florian. “Time would have spoiled your beauty.
Time would have spoiled your joy in life, Gian Paolo, and would have
shaken your fond belief that I was your slave in everything. Time lay
in wait to travesty this velvet chin with a harsh beard, to waken harsh
doubtings in the merry heart, and to abate your lovely perversities
with harsh repentance. For time ruins all, but you escape him, dear
Gian Paolo, unmarred.”
Now Florian was smiling wistfully, for he found heartache in this
thinking of the evanescence of beauty everywhere, and heartache too in
thinking of the fate of that charming old lady, La Tophania, who had
been so kind to him in Naples. For Florian could rarely make use of
her recipes without recollecting how cruelly the mob had dealt with
his venerable instructress: that was, he knew, a sentimental side to
his nature, which he could never quite restrain. So he now thought
sadly of this stately old-world gentlewoman, so impiously dragged from
a convent and strangled, now four years ago, because of her charity
toward those who were afflicted by the longevity of others. Yes, life
was wasteful, sparing nobody, not even one who was so wise and amiable
as La Tophania, nor so lovable as Gian Paolo. The thought depressed
him: such wastefulness was illogical: and it seemed to Florian, too,
that this putting of his household into fit order for the reception of
his bride was not wholly a merry business.
Then Florian, stroking the dead hand which was as yet soft and warm,
said gently: “And though I have slain you, dear Gian Paolo, rather
than see you depart from me to become the friend of another, and
perhaps to talk with him indiscreetly after having learned more about
me than was wise, I have at worst not offended against convention,
nor have I run counter to the fine precedents of the old time. Just
so did the great Alexander deal with his Clitus, and Hadrian with
his Antinous; nor did divine Apollo give any other parting gift to
Hyacinthos, his most dear friend. Now the examples afforded us by
ancient monarchs and by the heathen gods should not, perhaps, be
followed blindly. Indeed, we should in logic remember always that all
these were pagans, unsustained by the promptings of true faith, and
therefore liable to err. None the less, they at least establish an
arguable precedent, they afford people of condition something to go by:
and to have that is a firm comfort.”
He kissed the dead lips fondly; and he bade his lackeys summon Father
Joseph to bury Gian Paolo, with due ceremony, in the Chapel, next to
Florian’s wives.
“We obey. Yet, it will leave room for no more graves,” one told him,
“in the alcove wherein monseigneur’s wives are interred.”
“That is true. You are an admirable servant, Pierre, you think
logically of all things. Do you bury the poor lad in the south
transept.”
Then Florian took wine and wafers into the secret chamber which nobody
else cared to enter, and he made sure that everything there was in
order. All these events happened on the feast day of St. Swithin of
Winchester, which falls upon the fifteenth of July: and on that same
day Florian left Bellegarde, going to meet his new wife, and traveling
alone, toward Storisende.
_4._
_Economics of an Old Race_
Florian rode alone, spruce and staid in a traveling suit of
bottle-green and silver, riding upon a tall white horse, riding toward
Storisende, where his betrothed awaited him, and where the wedding
supper was already in preparation. He went by the longer route, so
that he might put up a prayer, for the success of his new venture into
matrimony, at the church of Holy Hoprig. Nobody was better known nor
more welcome at this venerable shrine than was Florian, for the Duke of
Puysange had spared nothing to evince his respect for the fame and the
favorable opinion of his patron saint. Whether in the shape of candles
or a handsome window, or a new chapel or an acre or two of meadow
land, Florian was always giving for the greater glory of that bright
intercessor who in heaven, Florian assumed, was tactfully suggesting
that such generosity should not be overlooked. So it was that Florian
kept his accounts balanced, his future of a guaranteeable pleasantness,
and his conscience clear.
Having prayed for the success of this new marriage and for the
soul of Gian Paolo, and having confessed to all the last month’s
irregularities, Florian went eastward. He passed Amneran and a spur of
the great forest, now that he went to ford the Duardenez. As he neared
Acaire he thought, idly, and with small shrugs, of a boy’s adventuring
to the sleeping princess in the midst of these woods, and of the beauty
which he had not ever forgotten utterly: and his heart was troubled
with that worshipful and hopeless longing which any thinking about this
Melior would always evoke in Florian, because he knew that his “dream,”
as people would call it, was a far more true and vital thing than
Florian’s daily living.
Then on a sudden he reined up his horse, and Florian waited there,
looking down upon the dark woman who had come out of this not
over-wholesome forest. Florian did not speak for some while, but he
smiled, and he shook his head in a sort of humorous disapprobation.
This woman was his half-sister, whom Florian’s father had begotten,
with the co-operation of the bailiff of Ranec’s daughter, some while
before middle age and the coming into extreme fashion of continence
had made such escapades criticizable. Marie-Claire Cazaio was thus
of an age with Florian, being his senior by only three months. In
their shared youth these two had not been strangers, for the old Duke
had handsomely recognized his responsibility for this daughter, and
had kept Marie-Claire about his household until the girl had outraged
propriety by bearing an illegitimate child. After this the Duke had no
choice except to turn her out of doors. She had since then taken up
with companions whose repute was not even dubious: and her manner of
living was esteemed intemperate by the most broad-minded persons in
Poictesme, where sorcery was treated with all reasonable indulgence.
“My dear,” said Florian, at last, still shaking his head, “I must tell
you, however little good it does, that there was another deputation of
peasants and declamatory grocers at me, only last week, to have you
seized and burned. You are too careless, Marie-Claire, about offending
against the notions of your neighbors. You should persuade your
unearthly lovers to curb their ardors until after dark. You should at
least induce them not to pass over Amneran in such shapes as frighten
your neighbors in the twilight, and so provoke their very natural
desire to burn you at broad noon.”
“These little peasants will not burn me yet,” she answered. “My term
is not yet run out—” You saw that Marie-Claire was thinking of quite
other matters. She said, “So, they tell me, you are to marry again?”
She had lifted to him now that half-pensive, half-blind staring which
he uneasily recognized. Florian had always under this woman’s gaze
the illogical feeling that, where he was, Marie-Claire saw some one
else, or, to be exact, saw some one a slight distance behind him. Her
eyes could not be black. Florian knew that nobody’s eyes were really
black. But this woman’s small eyes were very dark, they had such
extraordinarily thick lashes upon both upper and lower lids, that these
little eyes most certainly seemed blobs of infernal ink. There was in
his sister’s eyes a discomfortable knowingness. Puysange looked at
Puysange.
He answered, quietly, “Yes, Mademoiselle de Nérac is now about to make
me the happiest of men.”
“Unhappy child! for she too is flesh and blood.”
“And what does that anatomical truism signify when it is so cryptically
uttered, Marie-Claire?”
“It means that you and I are not enamored of flesh and blood.”
Florian did not reply to this in words. But he smiled at his
half-sister, for he was really fond of her, even now, and they
understood each other excellently.
So he stayed silent, still looking at her. By and by he said: “You come
out of a wood that is not often visited by abbots and cherubim, and you
carry a sieve and shears. Who is yonder?”
Marie-Claire replied, “How should I know the real name of the adversary
of all the gods of men?”
“Pardieu!” said Florian, “so it is company of such sinister grandeur
that you entertain nowadays. You progress, my sister, toward a truly
notable damnation.”
“In these parts, to be sure, they call him Janicot—”
“Yes, I know,” said Florian, “and, certainly, his local name does not
matter in the least.” Florian smiled benevolently, and said, “Good luck
to you, my dear!”