Paul sat down at the table, which was laid ready for breakfast, and
put his hat on the chair beside him, and while his mother was pouring
out his coffee he asked in a calm voice:
"Did you take that letter?"
She nodded, pointing towards the kitchen for fear the boy should hear.
"Who is there?" asked Paul.
"Antiochus."
"Antiochus!" he called, and with one spring the boy was before him,
cap in hand, standing to attention like a little soldier.
"Listen, Antiochus, you must go back to the church and get everything
ready for taking extreme unction to the old man later on."
The boy was speechless with joy: so _he_ was no longer angry and was
not going to dismiss him and take another boy in his place!
"Wait a moment, have you had anything to eat?"
"He would not have anything to eat; he never will," said the mother.
"Sit down there," ordered Paul, "you must eat. Mother, give him
something."
It was not the first time that Antiochus had sat at the priest's
table, so he obeyed without shyness, though his heart beat fast. He
was aware somehow that his position had changed, that the priest was
speaking to him in a way different from usual; he could not explain
how or why, he only felt there was a difference. He looked up in
Paul's face as though he saw him for the first time, with mingled
fear and joy. Fear and joy and a whole throng of new emotions,
gratitude, hope and pride, filled his heart as a nest full of warm
fledglings ready to spread their wings and fly away.
"Then at two o'clock you must come for your lesson. It is time to set
to work seriously with Latin; and I must write for a new grammar,
mine is centuries old."
Antiochus had stopped eating: now he went very red and offered his
services enthusiastically without inquiring the why or the wherefore.
The priest looked at him with a smile, then turned his face to the
window, through which the trees could be seen waving against the
clear sky, and his thoughts were evidently far away. Antiochus felt
again as if he had been dismissed and his spirits fell; he brushed
the crumbs from the tablecloth, folded his napkin carefully and
carried the cups into the kitchen. He prepared to wash up, too,
and would have done it very well, for he was accustomed to washing
glasses in his mother's wine-shop; but the priest's mother would not
allow it.
"Go to the church and get ready," she whispered, pushing him away. He
went out immediately, but before going to the church he ran round to
his mother to warn her to have the house clean and tidy as the priest
was coming to see her.
Meanwhile the priest's mother had gone back into the dining-room,
where Paul was still idling at the table with a newspaper in front of
him. Usually, when he was at home, he sat in his own room, but this
morning he was afraid of going up there again. He sat reading the
newspaper, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was thinking of the
old dying hunter, who had once confessed to him that he shunned the
company of men because "they are evil itself," and men in mockery had
called him King, as they had called Christ King of the Jews. But Paul
was not interested in the old man's confession; his thoughts turned
rather to Antiochus and his father and mother, for he meant to ask
the latter whether they conscientiously realized what they were doing
in allowing the boy to have his own way and carry out his unreasoning
fancy for becoming a priest. But even this was really of little
importance: what Paul actually wanted was to get away from his own
thoughts, and when his mother came into the room he bowed his head
over his paper, for he knew that she alone could divine what those
thoughts were.
He sat there with bowed head, but he forbade his lips to frame the
question he longed to ask. The letter had been delivered; what more
was there for him to know? The stone of the sepulchre had been rolled
into its place: but ah! how it weighed upon him, how alive he felt,
buried alive beneath that great stone!
His mother began to clear the table, putting each object back in the
cupboard that served as a sideboard. It was so quiet that the birds
could be heard chirping in the bushes and the regular tap-tap of the
stone-breaker by the roadside. It seemed like the end of the world,
as though the last habitation of living men was this little white
room, with its time-blackened furniture and its tiled flooring, upon
which the green and gold light from the high window cast a tremulous
reflexion as of water and made the small place seem like some prison
chamber in the dungeon of a castle.
Paul had drunk his coffee and eaten his biscuits as usual, and now he
was reading the news of the great world far away. Outwardly there
was nothing to show that this day was in any way different from other
days, but his mother would rather he had gone up to his room as was
his custom and shut the door. And why, since he was sitting there,
did he not ask her more about her errand, and to whom she had given
the letter? She went to the kitchen door with a cup in her hand, then
carried it back to the table and stood there.
"Paul," she said, "I gave the letter into her own hand. She was
already up and dressed, and in the garden."
"Very well," he answered, without raising his eyes from the newspaper.
But she could not leave him, she felt she must speak; something
stronger than her will impelled her, something stronger even than the
will of her son. She cleared her throat and fixed her eyes on the
little Japanese landscape painted at the bottom of the cup she was
holding, its colours stained and darkened with coffee. Then she went
on with her tale:
"She was in the garden, for she gets up early. I went straight to her
and gave her the letter: nobody saw. She took it and looked at it;
then she looked at me, but still she did not open it. I said 'There
is no answer,' and turned to go away, but she said, 'Wait.' Then she
opened the letter as if to show me there was no secret in it, and she
turned as white as the paper itself. Then she said to me, 'Go, and
God be with you!'"
"That's enough!" he cried sharply, still without looking up, but his
mother saw the lashes quiver over his downcast eyes and his face turn
as white as that of Agnes. For a moment she thought he was about to
faint, then the blood slowly came back into his face and she breathed
again with relief. Such moments as these were terrible, but they must
be met bravely and overcome. She opened her lips to say something
else, to murmur at least, "See what you have done, how you have hurt
both yourself and her!" but at that instant he looked up, jerking
his head back as though to drive the blood of evil passion from his
face, and glaring angrily at his mother, he said roughly:
"Now that is enough! Do you hear? It's enough! I absolutely refuse
to hear another word on this matter, otherwise I shall do what you
threatened to do last night: I shall go away."
Then he got up quickly, but instead of going to his room he left the
house again. His mother went into the kitchen, the cup still in her
trembling hands; she put it down on the table and leaned against the
corner of the fireplace, utterly broken down. She knew now he had
gone away for ever; even if he came back he would no longer be her
Paul, but a poor wretch possessed by his evil passion, one who looked
with threatening eyes at whoever crossed his path, like some thief
lying in wait to commit a crime.
And Paul, indeed, was like one who has fled from home in fear. He had
rushed out to avoid going up to his room, for he had an idea that
Agnes might have got in secretly and be waiting for him there, with
her white face and the letter in her hand. He had escaped from the
house in order to escape from himself, but he was carried away by
his passion more violently than by the wind on the night before. He
crossed the meadow without any definite aim, feeling as though he
were some inanimate thing flung bodily against the wall of Agnes's
house and thrown back by the rebound as far as the square before
the church, where the old men and the boys and the beggars sit on
the low parapet all day long. Scarce knowing how he had come there,
Paul stayed a little while talking to one or another of them without
heeding their replies, and then descended the steep road that led
from the village down to the valley. But he saw nothing of the road
he trod nor the landscape before his eyes: his whole world had turned
upside-down and was a mere chaos of rocks and ruins, upon which he
looked down as boys lie flat on the ground at the cliff's edge to
gaze over into the depths below.
He turned and climbed up again towards the church. The village seemed
almost deserted; here and there a peach tree showed its ripe fruit
over a garden wall and little white clouds floated across the clear
September sky like a peaceful flock of sheep. In one house a child
was crying, from another came the regular sound of the weaver at his
loom. The rural _guardia_, half-keeper, half-police, who had charge
of the village also, the only public functionary in the place, came
strolling along the road with his great dog on a leash. He wore a
mixed costume, the hunter's jacket of discoloured velvet with the
blue, red-striped trousers of his official uniform, and his dog was
a huge black and red animal with bloodshot eyes, something between
a lion and a wolf, known and feared by villagers and peasants, by
shepherds and hunters, by thieves and children alike. The keeper kept
his beast beside him day and night, chiefly for fear of him being
poisoned. The dog growled when he saw the priest, but at a sign from
his master he was quiet and hung his head.
The keeper stopped in front of the priest and gave a military salute,
then said solemnly:
"I went early this morning to see the sick man. His temperature
is forty, his pulse a hundred and two. In my poor opinion he has
inflammation of the loins, and his granddaughter wanted me to give
him quinine." (The keeper had charge of the drugs and medicines
supplied for the parish and permitted himself to go round visiting
the sick, which was exceeding his duty, but gave him importance in
his own eyes, as he imagined he was thus taking the place of the
doctor who only came to the village twice a week.) "But I said,
'Gently, my girl; in my humble opinion he does not want quinine,
but another sort of medicine.' The girl began to cry, but she shed
no tears; may I die if I judged wrongly! She wanted me to rush off
immediately to call the doctor, but I said, 'The doctor is coming
to-morrow, Sunday, but if you are in such a hurry then send a man
yourself to fetch him! The sick man can well afford to pay a doctor
to see him die, he has spent no money during his life.' I was quite
right, wasn't I?"
The keeper waited gravely for the priest's approval, but Paul was
looking at the dog, now quiet and docile at his master's bidding, and
he was thinking to himself:
"If we could only thus keep our passions on a leash!" And then he
said aloud, but in an absent-minded way, "Oh yes, he can wait till
the doctor comes to-morrow. But he is seriously ill, all the same."
"Well then, if he is seriously ill," persisted the keeper firmly and
not without contempt for the priest's apparent indifference, "a man
had better go for the doctor at once. The old fellow can pay, he is
not a pauper. But his granddaughter disobeyed my orders and did not
give him the medicine I myself prepared and left for him."
"He should receive the Communion first of all," said Paul.
"But you have told me that a sick person may receive the Communion
even if they are not fasting?"
"Well then," said the priest, losing patience at last, "the old man
did not want the medicine; he clenched his teeth, and he has them all
still sound, and struck out as if nothing was the matter with him."
"And then the granddaughter, in my humble opinion," continued the
keeper indignantly, "has no right to order me, an official, to rush
off for the doctor as though I were a servant! It was not a question
of an accident or anything requiring the doctor's official presence,
and I have other things to do. I must now go down to the river by the
ford, because I have received information that some benefactor of his
neighbours has placed dynamite in the water to destroy the trout. My
respects!"
He repeated the military salute and departed, jerking his dog up by
the leash. Suddenly sharing its master's repressed contempt, the
animal stalked off waving its ferocious tail; it did not growl at the
priest, but merely turned its head to give him a parting glance of
menace out of its savage eyes.
Having completed his preparations for carrying extreme unction to the
old man, Antiochus was leaning over the parapet of the piazza under
the shade of the elms, waiting for the priest; and when he saw him
approaching, the boy darted into the sacristy and waited with the
surplice in his hands. The pair were ready in a few minutes, Paul in
surplice and stole, carrying the silver amphora of oil, Antiochus
robed in red from head to foot and holding a brocade umbrella with
gold fringe open over Paul's head, so that he and his silver amphora
were in shadow whilst the boy himself appeared the more brilliant
in the sunshine in contrast to the black and white figure of the
priest. Antiochus's face wore a look of almost tragic gravity, for
he was much impressed with his own importance and imagined himself
specially deputed to protect the holy oil. Nevertheless this did not
prevent him from grinning with amusement at the sight of the old men
hurriedly shuffling down from the parapet as the little procession
passed, and the boys kneeling with their faces to the wall instead of
towards the priest. The youngsters jumped up immediately, however,
and followed Antiochus, who rang his bell before each door to warn
the people; dogs barked, the weavers stopped their looms and the
women thrust their heads out of the windows to see, and the whole
village was in a tremor of mysterious excitement.
A woman who was coming from the fountain bearing a jug of water on
her head set down her jug upon the ground and knelt beside it. And
the priest grew pale, for he recognized one of Agnes's servants, and
a nameless dread seized upon him, so that unconsciously he clasped
the silver amphora tightly between his hands as though seeking there
support.
The attendant crowd of boys grew larger as they approached the old
hunter's dwelling. This was a two-story cottage built of rough stone
and standing a little back from the road on the side towards the
valley; it had a single unglazed window and in front a small yard
of bare earth enclosed by a low wall. The door stood open and the
priest knew that the old man was lying fully dressed on a mat in the
lower room; so he entered at once, reciting the prayers for the sick,
whilst Antiochus closed the umbrella and rang his bell loudly to
drive away the children as if they were flies. But the room was empty
and the mat unoccupied; perhaps the old man had at last consented
to go to bed or had been carried there in a dying condition. The
priest pushed open the door of an inner room, but that too was empty;
so, puzzled, he returned to the door, whence he saw the old man's
granddaughter limping down the road with a bottle in her hand. She
had been to fetch the medicine.
"Where is your grandfather?" asked Paul, as the girl crossed herself
on entering the house. She glanced at the empty mat and gave a
scream, and the inquisitive boys immediately swarmed over the wall
and round the door, engaging in a free fight with Antiochus, who
tried to oppose their entrance, till Paul himself sternly bade them
disperse.
"Where is he? Where is he?" cried the granddaughter, running from
room to room, whereupon one of the boys, the last to join the crowd,
sauntered up with his hands in his pockets and inquired casually,
"Are you looking for the king? He went down there."
"Down where?"
"Down there," repeated the boy, pointing with his nose towards the
valley.
The girl rushed down the steep path and the boys after her: the
priest signed to Antiochus to reopen the umbrella and gravely and in
silence the two returned to the church, whilst the villagers gathered
together in wondering groups and the news of the sick man's flight
spread from mouth to mouth.