built of oak and plaster upon a stone foundation. Here was his last
hope of aid, and of succour which he might accept without any detriment
to the pride of Puysange, for this was the ill spoken-of home of his
half-sister, Marie-Claire Cazaio. She was alone at her spinning when he
came into the room. He took her hand. He kissed it.
“You told me once, dear Marie-Claire, a long while since, that in
the end I would come to you in an old garden where dead leaves were
falling, and would kiss your hand, and tell you I had loved you all my
life. I wonder, Marie-Claire, if you remember that?”
“I have forgotten,” she said, “nothing.”
“You were wrong as to the garden and as to the dead leaves. But in all
else you were right. This is the end, Marie-Claire. And in the end I
fulfill your prophecy.”
She looked at him, for no brief while, with those small darkened eyes
which seemed to see beyond him. “Yes, you are speaking the truth. I
had thought that when this happened it would matter. And it does not
matter.”
“Only one thing has mattered in all our lives, Marie-Claire. I was at
Storisende last week. I remembered you and our youth.”
“And were you”—she smiled faintly,—“and were you properly remorseful?”
“No. I have regretted many of my doings. But I can find nowhere in
me any of the highly requisite repentance for those of my actions
which people would describe as criminal. I suppose it is because we
of Puysange are so respectful of the notions of others that we do
not commit crimes rashly. We enter into no illegal turpitude until
rather careful reflection has assured us of its expediency. I, in any
event, have sometimes been virtuous with unthinking levity, and with
depressing upshots: but my vices, which my judgment had to endorse
before prudence would venture on them, have resulted well enough. So I
can regret no irregularities, and certainly not the happiness of our
far-off youth.”
Again Marie-Claire was in no hurry to reply. When she spoke, it was
without any apparent conviction either one way or the other. “Our
happiness involved, they say, considerable misdoing.”
This stirred him to mild indignation. “And is love between brother
and sister a misdoing? Come, Marie-Claire, but let us be logical! All
scientists will tell you that endogamy is natural to mankind as long
as men stay uncorrupted by over-civilization. The weight of history
goes wholly one way. The Pharaohs and the Ptolemies afford, I believe,
precedents that are tolerably ancient. Strabo is explicit as to the old
Irish, Herodotus as to the Persians. In heaven also Osiris and Zeus
and I know not how many other supreme gods have, in cherishing extreme
affection for their sisters, set the example followed upon earth by the
Kings of Siam and of Phœnicia, and by the Incas of Peru—”
She shook that small dark head. “But, none the less—”
“—An example followed by the Sinhalese, the Romans of the old
Republic, the Tyrians, the Guanches of the Canary Islands—”
“Let us say no more about it—”
“—An example, in short, of the best standing in all quarters of the
globe. In the Rig-Veda you will find Yami defending with unanswerable
eloquence the union of brother and sister. In Holy Writ we see Heaven’s
highest blessings accorded to the fruit of Abraham’s affection for his
sister Sarah, nor need I allude to the marriage of Azrun with her two
brothers, Abel and Cain. And in the Ynglinga Saga—”
She laid her hand upon his mouth. “Yes, yes, you have your precedents:
and in your eyes, I know, that is the main thing, because of your
dread of being unconventional and offending the neighbors. We were
not wicked, then, whatever our less well-read father thought: we were
merely”—and here she smiled,—“we were merely logical in our youth. In
any event, we wasted our youth.”
“Yes,” Florian admitted, “for I was then logical, but not sufficiently
logical. I could, as easily at that time as later, have cured our
father of his habit of meddling with my affairs. But I turned
unthinkingly away from the contented decades of technical criminality
which we might have shared. For I was in those days enamored of the
beauty that I in childhood had, however briefly, seen: even while my
body rioted, my thoughts remained bewilderedly aware of a beguiling
and intoxicating brightness which stayed unwon to; and I could care
whole-heartedly about nothing else.”
“I know,” she answered. “You were a dear boy. And it does not matter,
now, that you went away from me, and played at being a man about whom I
knew nothing and cared nothing. For old times’ sake my sending followed
you to Brunbelois, and even there for old times’ sake I warned you. But
you would not heed—”
“I cared for nothing then save the beauty of Melior. And now her
beauty,” he said, with a wry smile, “is gone. And that also does not
matter. For months her beauty has been the one thing about her I never
think of.”
“She is flesh and blood,” said Marie-Claire, as if that explained
everything. “It is a combination which does not long detain Puysange.
What is this peril that you go to encounter to-day?”
“I go up upon Morven to keep my word as frankly and as utterly as I
gave it; and thereby to be embroiled, I am afraid, in open conflict
with my patron saint.”
“That is bad. You must keep your word of course, because favoritism to
anybody is wrong. But these saints do not understand this; they build
all upon Heaven’s favoritism: and these holy persons are stronger than
we, precisely because they are immune to such clear seeing as we are
cursed with.”
[Illustration:
Caption, surrounded by garland: He closed upon FLORIAN, straight-
forwardly, without any miracle-
working.
_See page 281_
The image]
“But your powers of sending and perverting and blighting and so on,” he
said,—“are none of these to be enlisted in my favor?”
“Not against Hoprig,” she replied, “for the elect have that invincible
unreason and stupidity against which alone our powers are feeble. No,
my dearest, I cannot aid you. For these saints are stronger than we
are: and in the end, whatever grounds they may afford us for contempt
or for laughing at them, they conquer us.”
It was in some sort a relief to know there was not hope anywhere.
Florian spoke now with more animation. “No, Marie-Claire. Even at the
last let us adhere to logic! These saints do not conquer; they destroy
us, that is all. The ruthless power of holiness is strong enough for
that, but it is not strong enough to hold me, not for one instant, in
subjection.”
“Ah, and must you still be playing, dear boy that was, at being a most
tremendous fellow?” she said, still smiling very tenderly. “Heaven will
destroy you, then: and this is the hour of your return, the hour which
I once prophesied, the hour which comes—so unportentously!—to end our
living. So let us not waste that hour in quibbles.”
“You are so practical,” he lamented, “and with all that is lovable
you combine such a dearth of admirable sentiments. In brief, you are
Puysange.”
She said pensively: “You were not lonely in my little time of
happiness. You would not ever have been lonely with me.”
“Have you divined that also, Marie-Claire? Yes, it has been lonely.
I have had many friends and wives and mistresses. Perhaps I have had
everything which life has to give—”
Florian sat looking moodily at two queer drawings done in red and black
upon the plaster of the wall: one represented a serpent swallowing
rods, the other a serpent crucified. Beneath these drawings was a dark
shining stone, and in its gleaming he saw figures move.
Florian turned, and said without any apparent emotion: “But I have
lived quite alone, with no comprehension of anyone, and with so much
distrust of everybody! And now it is too late.”
She considered this: she spread out her hands, smiling without mirth.
“Yes, it is too late, even with me. Nothing is left, where all was
yours once, Florian. I seem a husk. I do not either love or hate
you any longer. Only,”—again that dark blind staring puzzled over
him,—“only, it is not you who wait here in this fine black suit.”
That made him too smile, and shrug a little. “It is what remains of
me, my dear,—all that remains anywhere to-day. Such is the end of every
person’s youth and passion. I sometimes think that we reside in an
ill-managed place. For look, Marie-Claire!” He waved toward the window,
made up of very small panes of leaded glass, through which you saw the
first vaporous green of the low fruit trees and much sunshine. “Look,
Marie-Claire! spring is returning now, on every side. That seems so
tactless.”
But Marie-Claire replied, with more tolerance: “That is Their notion of
humor. I suppose it amuses the poor dears, so let us not complain.”
Then they fell to talking of other matters, and they spoke of shared
small happenings in that spring of eighteen years ago, talking quite at
random as one trifle reminded them of another. The son of Marie-Claire,
young Achille Cazaio, was away from home in the way of business: for
at seventeen he had just set up as a brigand, and he was at this time
only a hopeful apprentice in the trade through which he was to prosper
and to win success and some fame. So they were undisturbed; and Florian
that day saw nothing of the stripling bandit, whom gossip declared
remarkably to resemble his half-uncle.
And Florian stayed for some while in this neat sparsely furnished
room. He was content. At the bottom of his mind had always been the
knowledge that by and by he would return to Marie-Claire. Such
events as had happened since he left her, and the things that people
had said and thought and done because of him, and in particular the
responsibilities with which he had been entrusted,—his dukedom, his
wives, his order of the Holy Ghost, a whole château to do with whatever
he pleased,—were the materials of a joke which he was to share with his
sister some day, when the boy that had left her came back after having
hoodwinked so many persons into regarding him as mature and efficient
and unprincipled and all sorts of other amusing things. Marie-Claire
alone knew that this fourth Duke of Puysange was still the boy who had
loved her; and her blind gazing seemed always to penetrate the disguise.
Well! he had come back to her, to find that both of them were changed.
The fact was sad, because it seemed to him that boy and girl had been
rather wonderful. But it did not matter. Probably nothing mattered.
Meanwhile he was again with Marie-Claire. It was sufficient to be home
again, for the little while which remained before his destruction by
that pig-headed and meddlesome Hoprig. And Florian was content....
Toward mid-day Florian parted with his sister for the last time. He
found it rather appalling that neither she nor he was moved by this
leave-taking. Then he reflected: “But we are dead persons, dead a
great while ago. This is the calm of death.”
He saw that this was true, and got from it the comfort which he always
derived from logic.
Nevertheless, he went back very softly, and he peered through the door
he had left not quite closed. Marie-Claire now knelt before the dark
polished stone in whose gleaming moved figures.
“Lalle, Bachera, Magotte, Baphia—” she had begun.
Florian shrugged as, this time, he really went away from the house of
oak and plaster. He knew whom she invoked. But that did not matter
either. And in fact, for Marie-Claire to pass from him to that other
was profoundly logical.
_25._
_The Gander That Sang_
Florian followed the brook. Florian went hillward, walking upon what
seemed a long-ruined roadway. As he went upstream, the brook was to his
left hand: to his right was the hillside thick with trees. Florian,
whose familiarity with rural affairs was limited, was perforce content
to recognize among these trees the maples, the oaks, the pines and the
chestnuts.
“Only, I should by every precedent, now that I go to inevitable
destruction, be observing everything with unnatural vividness,” he
reflected: “and to have about me so many familiar looking but to me
anonymous trees and bushes makes my impression of the scenery quite
unbecomingly vague.”
Midges danced vexatiously about his face, and now and again he slapped
at them without gaining the least good. So much of the ruined roadway
had collapsed into the brook, in disorderly jumbles of stones and clay
and splintered slate, that what remained was very awkward to walk on:
your right foot was always so much higher up the hill than your left.
All was peculiarly still this afternoon: it startled you, when, as
happened once or twice, a grasshopper sprang out of your way, rising
from between your feet with vicious unexpected whirrings. That did not
seem wholly natural, in April.
Florian came at last to a log hut beside three trees. Here then was
the hermitage of Holy Hoprig, wherein Florian was to encounter the
unpredictable. Florian regarded this hut with disfavor. He had never
thought to be destroyed in such an unimpressive looking building.
He shrugged, he loosened Flamberge in the scabbard, he went forward,
and he pushed open the door. “Now if only,” he reflected, “I had the
height and the imposing appearance of Raoul!” Florian made the most of
every inch; and entered with the bearing becoming to a Duke of Puysange.
The hut was unoccupied, save that in one corner was a cage painted
brown; and inside this sat, upon a red silk cushion, a large gander.
“Do not disturb me,” said this bird, at once, “for I have had quite
enough to upset me already.”
Florian for an instant stayed silent and somewhat confused. For this
evidently was not the saint’s hermitage, and a talking gander seemed
not wholly natural. Then Florian recollected that Morven had always
been the home of sorcery. So Florian replied, with great civility, that
he had not meant to intrude, but merely happened to be passing. And
Florian then talked with this gander, who told of the quite disgusting
scene he had witnessed when a woman, riding upon a magic staff, had
come into the hut, and had there been delivered of a child.
“Children are not usually acquired so,” said the gander, “for as a
rule, a stork brings them, and that is a much nicer method.”
“But where,” said Florian, “is now this honorarium?”
“I do not know what that means,” the bird replied, “but I do know that
if it means anything objectionable it has almost certainly been in here
to-day to annoy me.”
And the bird told of how a dove had come and had carried off in its
beak the ring the woman had given it. He told how presently had come
a fine looking man with a shining about his head, not flying but
luxuriously riding through the air upon a gold cloud, with cherubs’
heads floating about him; and how the woman and the child had gone away
upon this same cloud, surrounded by, the gander thought, extremely
fretful looking cherubs.
“The whole affair has upset me very much,” said the gander, “for I was
composing, and I can never bear to be interrupted.”
And the gander sang to Florian of the proper way in which children
should be born and should live thereafter. About the glory of love and
the felicities of marriage, about patriotism and success in business
and about the high assurances of religion, the gander sang, and about
optimism and philanthropy and about the steady advancing of every kind
of social improvement. And of man that is the child and heir of God,
and of the splendor of man’s works, and of the magnanimity of human
nature, and of the wonder of man’s living upon earth, the gander sang
also.
“Parbleu, but let us be logical about this!” said Florian. “Your art is
very pleasing; but it embellishes a lazar-house with pastels. For human
living is not at all like the song you have made concerning it.”
“So much the worse for human living,” the gander answered. “It does not
bother me here in my cage. Besides, the purpose and the effect of my
singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my fellows with a
sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of
their destinies. So I do not mimic. I create.”
Florian looked at the gander for some while, and Florian sighed. This
creature too had in it nothing of the realist, Florian reflected,
and it preferred to live by its own code; but its æsthetic theories
coincided with Hoprig’s. And the hermitage of that—somehow—ambiguous
Hoprig was still to seek.
Florian left the imprisoned gander singing very gloriously, and Florian
went now across Morven, that place of abominable fame. These uplands
were thickly overgrown with a queer vine that had large oval leaves,
the green of which was mottled with red, somewhat like the skin of
snakes. Here also grew strawberry vines. As he walked this undergrowth
was continually catching in the buckles of Florian’s shoes. Everywhere
were inexplicable soft noises, and about his face danced a small cloud
of midges.
There was no other sign of life except that once five large black and
white birds rose from the ground immediately before him, seeming to
rise from between his feet as the grasshoppers had done. This did not
frighten Florian, exactly, but the suddenness of it, in this lonely
place, gave him a shock not wholly delightful. These birds, he saw,
had been feeding there upon the berries of a small bush, upon purple
berries which were about the size of a wren’s egg, and whose outer
sides had been pecked away by the birds, leaving the seeds exposed. All
this was natural enough until you reflected that in these latitudes no
bush produced berries as early as April.
Now toward twilight Florian came to clumps of big and vividly yellow
toad-stools, which seemed fat and poisonous and very evil. He passed
among these, breaking many of them with his feet, and reflecting
that the tiny screams which appeared to be uttered by these broken,
loathsomely soft things must be the cry of some other sort of queer
bird hidden somewhere near at hand. And he presently saw the appearance
of a man coming toward him, and about the head of this man was a
shining, as Florian perceived from afar, and was so assured that this
was Hoprig.
Florian went forward intrepidly, once he had loosened Flamberge in the
scabbard. But this was not Hoprig. It was, instead, an incredibly old
man in faded blue, who carried upon his arm an open basket filled with
small roots. At his heel came a blue and white dog. The old man looked
once at Florian, with peculiarly bright eyes, like the eyes of those
who had watched the Feast of the Wheel, and he passed without speaking.
The dog paused, and without making any noise, sniffed about Florian’s
legs once or twice, as if this inspection were a matter of duty, and
then followed this old man who had about his head a shining. It was
odd, but the dog made no noise when he sniffed thus close to you;
and neither the man in blue nor the blue and white dog made any least
noise as they passed through the thick and tangled vines underfoot; nor
did their passing at all move these vines which caught at the buckles
of Florian’s shoes so that he was continually tripping. These things
rendered it difficult to believe that the man and the dog could be
wholly natural.
And still those pertinacious midges danced before Florian’s eyes: and
he was tired of slapping at them without ever driving them away. Morven
did not appear a merry place, upon this the last day of April, as
Florian toiled through Morven’s thickening twilight, in search of Holy
Hoprig’s hermitage, wherein was now the child that Florian had need of.
_26._
_Husband and Wife_
Toward evening Florian came into the saint’s hermitage. Inside, it
proved a most comfortable hermitage, having walls builded of logs with
the interstices filled with plaster. It seemed rather luxuriously
furnished, to Florian’s glance, which took exact note of nothing more
specific than the skull upon the lectern and the three silver-gilt
candelabra. These twelve candles, as you came in from the twilight,
made the room quite cosy. Florian did not, however, look at the room’s
equipment with the interest he reserved for his wife.
Melior sat there, alone except for the newborn child in her lap. At the
sound of Florian’s entrance she had drawn the child closer, raising her
blue mantle about it in an involuntary movement of protection: and as
she faced him thus, Florian could see, without any especial interest,
that with motherhood all her lost beauty had returned. It seemed
inexplicable, but Melior was, if anything, more lovely than she had
ever been: it was probably one of Hoprig’s miracles: and Florian found
time to wonder why he should be, so unquestionably and so actively,
irritated by the sight of a person in everything so pleasing.
Neither spoke for a while.
“I thought that you would be here before long: and all I have to say
is that I wonder how you can look me in the face,” observed Melior,
at last. “Still, that you should be so bent upon your own destruction
that you have followed us even here, does, I confess, astonish me. Why,
Florian, have you no sense at all!”
“My dearest, you underestimate the power of paternal affection.”
Florian came to her, and gently uncovered the child’s face. The baby,
having supped, was asleep. Florian looked at it for a moment and
for yet another moment. He shrugged. “No: I am aware of none of the
appropriate emotions. The creature merely seems to me unfinished. Its
head, in particular, has been affixed most unsatisfactorily; and I
lament the general appearance of having been recently boiled. No, I
sacrifice little.”
Melior put the sleeping child into the cradle yonder, a cradle
which Florian supposed that Hoprig must have created extempore and
miraculously when a cradle was needed. It hardly seemed the most
natural appurtenance of an anchorite’s retreat.
Then Melior turned, and she regarded Florian with her maddening air of
dealing very patiently with an irrational person.
“Do you actually think, Florian, that, now, you can harm the little
pet? Florian, that is one fault you have, though I am far from saying
it is the only one. Still, as I so often think, no one of us is
perfect: and perpetual fault-finding never gets you anywhere, does
it? Even so, Florian, there is no denying you do not like to take a
common-sense view of the most self-evident facts when the facts are not
quite what you want them to be, and that much I feel I ought to tell
you frankly. Otherwise, Florian, you would comprehend at once that I
have only to cry out to St. Hoprig, who is back yonder chopping the
wood to cook our supper, after those cherubs were positively rude about
being asked to do it, and then he will blast you with a miracle.”
She had gone back to her outlandish mediæval clothing. He recognized,
now, the dreadful gown she was wearing the morning he first came to her
upon the mountain top,—that glaring, shiny, twinkling affair, which
reminded you of an Opera dancer’s costume in some spectacular ballet.
For a Duchess of Puysange to be thus preposterously attired was
unbecoming, and was in quite abominable taste.
“First, madame,” said Florian, with a vexed, rather tired sigh, “let us
explain matters. I have loved you since my boyhood, Melior, with a love
which no woman, I think, can understand. For I loved you worshipfully,
without hope, without any actual desire: and I loved you, by ill-luck,
with a whole-heartedness which has prevented my ever loving anything
else. It is droll that a little color and glitter and a few plump
curves, seen once and very briefly, should be able to make all other
things not quite worth troubling about. But the farce is old. They used
to call us nympholepts; and they fabled that the beauty which robbed us
of all normal human joys was divine. Well, I have no desire to discuss
the nature of divinity, madame, nor to bore you with any further
talking about what no woman understands. It suffices that I loved you
in this pre-eminently ridiculous fashion; and that a way was offered me
by which I might very incredibly win to you.”
To which Melior replied: “You mean about your bargaining with Janicot,
I suppose, and I am sure I never heard of such nonsense in my life.
Why, Florian, to think that the moment I let you out of my sight, even
if it was a little while before I first actually saw you, because that
does not in the least alter the principle of the thing,—quite apart
from its happening the same morning, anyhow,—that you should be mixing
yourself up with such people! It is positively incredible! But, as for
your supposing that I am going to let you and your Janicots lay one
finger on my precious lamb—!”