"It was in such a parched summer as this threatens to be that my Camille
came home in the mists of the morning possessed. He was often out on the
sweet hills all night--that was nothing. It had been a full moon, and the
whiteness of it was on his face like leprosy, but his hands were hot with
fever. Ah, the dreadful summer! The milk turned sour in the cows' udders
and the tufts of the stone pines on the mountains fell into ashes like
Dead Sea fruit. The springs were dried, and the great cascade of Buet
fell to half its volume."
"This cascade; I have never seen it. Is it in the neighbourhood?"
"Of a surety. Monsieur must have passed the rocky ravine that vomits the
torrent, on his way hither."
"I remember. I will explore it. Camille shall be my guide."
"Never."
"And why?"
Madame shrugged her plump shoulders.
"Who may say? The ways of the afflicted are not our ways. Only I know
that Camille will never drive his flock to pasture near the lip of that
dark valley."
"That is strange. Can the place have associations for him connected with
his malady?"
"It is possible. Only the good God knows."
But _I_ was to know later on, with a little reeling of the reason also.
* * * * *
"Camille, I want to see the Cascade de Buet."
The hunted eyes of the stricken looked into mine with a piercing glance
of fear.
"Monsieur must not," he said, in a low voice.
"And why not?"
"The waters are bad--bad--haunted!"
"I fear no ghosts. Wilt thou show me the way, Camille?"
"I!" The idiot fell upon the grass with a sort of gobbling cry. I thought
it the prelude to a fit of some sort, and was stepping towards him, when
he rose to his feet, waved me off and hurried away down the slope
homewards.
Here was food for reflection, which I mumbled in secret.
A day or two afterwards I joined Camille at midday on the heights where
he was pasturing his flocks. He had shifted his ground a little distance
westwards, and I could not find him at once. At last I spied him, his
back to a rock, his hand dabbled for coolness in a little runnel that
trickled at his side. He looked up and greeted me with a smile. He had
conceived an affection for me, this poor lost soul.
"It will go soon," he said, referring to the miniature streamlet. "It is
safe in the woods; but to-morrow or next day the sun will lap it up ere
it can reach the skirt of the shadow above there. A farewell kiss to you,
little stream!"
He bent and sipped a mouthful of the clear water. He was in a more
reasonable state than he had shown for long, though it was now close
on the moon's final quarter, a period that should have marked a more
general tenor of placidity in him. The summer solstice, was, however, at
hand, and the weather sultry to a degree--as it had been, I did not fail
to remember, the year of his seizure.
"Camille," I said, "why to-day hast thou shifted thy ground a little in
the direction of the Buet ravine?"
He sat up at once, with a curious, eager look in his face.
"Monsieur has asked it," he said. "It was to impel Monsieur to ask it
that I moved. Does Monsieur seek a guide?"
"Wilt thou lead me, Camille?"
"Monsieur, last night I dreamed and one came to me. Was it my father? I
know not, I know not. But he put my forehead to his breast, and the evil
left it, and I remembered without terror. 'Reveal the secret to the
stranger,' he said; 'that he may share thy burden and comfort thee; for
he is strong where thou art weak, and the vision shall not scare him.'
Monsieur, wilt thou come?"
He leaped to his feet, and I to mine.
"Lead on, Camille. I follow."
He called to the leader of his flock: "Petitjean! stray not, my little
one. I shall be back sooner than the daisies close." Then he turned to me
again. I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he were
strung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless one still.
"Do you not fear?" he said, in a whisper; and the apple in his throat
seemed all choking core.
"I fear nothing," I answered with a smile; yet the still sombreness of
the woods found a little tremor in my breast.
"It is good," he answered, regarding me. "The angel spoke truth. Follow,
Monsieur."
He went off through the trees of a sudden, and I had much ado to keep
pace with him. He ran as one urged on by a sure sense of doom, looking
neither to right nor left. His mountain instincts had remained with him
when memory itself had closed around like a fog, leaving him face to face
and isolated with his one unconfessed point of terror. Swiftly we made
our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon
broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the
scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and
grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions--save
where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and
strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no
flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with
a whistle of alarm to vanish like a red shadow. All was melancholy and
silence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin. Storm, and
avalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year by
year, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction. The very
saplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookery
of crime.
We strode with difficulty in an inhuman twilight through this great dark
quickset of Nature, and had paused a moment where the thronging trunks
thinned somewhat, when a little mouthing moan came towards us on the
crest of a ripple of wind. My companion stopped on the instant, and
clutched my arm, his face twisting with panic.
"The Cascade, Monsieur!" he shook out in a terrified whisper.
"Courage, my friend! It is that we come to seek."
"Ah! My God, yes--it is that! I dare not--I dare not!"
He drew back livid with fear, but I urged him on.
"Remember the dream, Camille!" I cried.
"Yes, yes--it was good. Help me, Monsieur, and I will try--yes, I will
try!"
I drew his arm within mine, and together we stumbled on. The undergrowth
grew denser and more fantastic; the murmur filled out, increased and
resolved itself into a sound of falling water that ever took shape, and
volume, and depth, till its crash shook the ground at our feet. Then in
a moment a white blaze of sky came at us through the trunks, and we burst
through the fringe of the wood to find ourselves facing the opposite side
of a long cleft in the mountain and the blade's edge of a roaring
cataract.
It shot out over the lip of the fall, twenty feet above us, in a curve
like a scimitar, passed in one sheet the spot where we stood, and dived
into a sunless pool thirty feet below with a thunderous boom. What it may
have been in full phases of the stream, I know not; yet even now it was
sufficiently magnificent to give pause to a dying soul eager to shake off
the restless horror of the world. The flat of its broad blade divided the
lofty black walls of a deep and savage ravine, on whose jagged shelves
some starved clumps of rhododendron shook in the wind of the torrent.
Far down the narrow gully we could see the passion of water tossing,
champed white with the ravening of its jaws, until it took a bend of the
cliffs at a leap and rushed from sight.
We stood upon a little platform of coarse grass and bramble, whose fringe
dipped and nodded fitfully as the sprinkle caught it. Beyond, the sliding
sheet of water looked like a great strap of steel, reeled ceaselessly off
a whirling drum pivoted between the hills. The midday sun shot like a
piston down the shaft of the valley, painting purple spears and angles
behind its abutting rocks, and hitting full upon the upper curve of the
fall; but half-way down the cataract slipped into shadow.
My brain sickened with the endless gliding and turmoil of descent, and I
turned aside to speak to my companion. He was kneeling upon the grass,
his eyes fixed and staring, his white lips mumbling some crippled memory
of a prayer. He started and cowered down as I touched him on the
shoulder.
"I cannot go, Monsieur; I shall die!"
"What next, Camille? I will go alone,"
"My God, Monsieur! the cave under the fall! It is there the horror is."
He pointed to a little gap in the fringing bushes with shaking finger.
I stole gingerly in the direction he indicated. With every step I
took the awful fascination of the descending water increased upon
me. It seemed hideous and abnormal to stand mid-way against a
perpendicularly-rushing torrent. Above or below the effect would have
been different; but here, to look up was to feel one's feet dragging
towards the unseen--to look down and pass from vision of the lip of the
fall was to become the waif of a force that was unaccountable.
I had a battle with my nerves, and triumphed. As I approached the opening
in the brambles I became conscious of a certain relief. At a little
distance the cataract had seemed to actually wash in its descent the edge
of the platform. Now I found it to be further away than I had imagined,
the ground dropping in a sharp slope to a sort of rocky buttress which
lay obliquely on the slant of the ravine, and was the true margin of the
torrent. Before I essayed the descent, I glanced back at my companion. He
was kneeling where I had left him, his hands pressed to his face, his
features hidden; but looking back once again, when I had with infinite
caution accomplished the downward climb, I saw that he had crept to
the edge of the slope, and was watching me with wide, terrified eyes. I
waved my hand to him and turned to the wonderful vision of water that
now passed almost within reach of my arm. I stood near the point where
the whole glassy breadth glided at once from sunlight into shadow. It
fell silently, without a break, for only its feet far below trod the
thunder.
Now, as I peered about, I noticed a little cleft in the rocky margin, a
minute's climb above me. I was attracted to this by an appearance of
smoke or steam that incessantly emerged from it, as though some witch's
caldron were simmering alongside the fall. Spray it might be, or the
condensing of water splashed on the granite; but of this I might not be
sure. Therefore I determined to investigate, and straightway began
climbing the rocks--with my heart in my mouth, it must be confessed, for
the foothold was undesirable and the way perilous. And all the time
I was conscious that the white face of Camille watched me from above. As
I reached the cleft I fancied I heard a queer sort of gasping sob issue
from his lips, but to this I could give no heed in the sudden wonder that
broke upon me. For, lo! it appeared that the cleft led straight to a
narrow platform or ledge of rock right underneath the fall itself, but
extending how far I could not see, by reason of the steam that filled the
passage, and for which I was unable to account. Footing it carefully and
groping my way, I set step in the little water-curtained chamber and
advanced a pace or two. Suddenly, light grew about me, and a beautiful
rose of fire appeared on the wall of the passage in the midst of what
seemed a vitrified scoop in the rock.
Marvelling, I put out my hand to touch it, and fell back on the narrow
floor with a scream of anguish. An inch farther, and these lines had
not been written. As it was, the fall caught me by the fingers with the
suck of a cat-fish, and it was only a gigantic wrench that saved me from
slipping off the ledge. The jerk brought my head against the rock with a
stunning blow, and for some moments I lay dizzy and confused, daring
hardly to breathe, and conscious only of a burning and blistering agony
in my right hand.
At length I summoned courage to gather my limbs together and crawl out
the way I had entered. The distance was but a few paces, yet to traverse
these seemed an interminable nightmare of swaying and stumbling. I know
only one other occasion upon which the liberal atmosphere of the open
earth seemed sweeter to my senses when I reached it than it did on this.
I tumbled somehow through the cleft, and sat down, shaking, upon the
grass of the slope beyond; but, happening to throw myself backwards in
the reeling faintness induced by my fright and the pain of my head, my
eyes encountered a sight that woke me at once to full activity.
Balanced upon the very verge of the slope, his face and neck craned
forward, his jaw dropped, a sick, tranced look upon his features, stood
Camille. I saw him topple, and shouted to him; but before my voice was
well out, he swayed, collapsed, and came down with a running thud that
shook the ground. Once he wheeled over, like a shot rabbit, and, bounding
thwack with his head against a flat boulder not a dozen yards from me,
lay stunned and motionless.
I scrambled to him, quaking all over. His breath came quick, and a spirt
of blood jerked from a sliced cut in his forehead at every pump of his
heart.
I kicked out a wad of cool moist turf, and clapped it in a pad over the
wound, my handkerchief under. For his body, he was shaken and bruised,
but otherwise not seriously hurt.
Presently he came to himself; to himself in the best sense of the
word--for Camille was sane.
I have no explanation to offer. Only I know that, as a fall will set a
long-stopped watch pulsing again, the blow here seemed to have restored
the misplaced intellect to its normal balance.
When he woke, there was a new soft light of sanity in his eyes that was
pathetic in the extreme.
"Monsieur," he whispered, "the terror has passed."
"God be thanked! Camille," I answered, much moved.
He jerked his poor battered head in reverence.
"A little while," he said, "and I shall know. The punishment was just."
"What punishment, my poor Camille?"
"Hush! The cloud has rolled away. I stand naked before _le bon Dieu_.
Monsieur, lift me up; I am strong."
I winced as I complied. The palm of my hand was scorched and blistered in
a dozen places. He noticed at once, and kissed and fondled the wounded
limb as softly as a woman might.
"Ah, the poor hand!" he murmured. "Monsieur has touched the disc of
fire."
"Camille," I whispered, "what is it?"
"Monsieur shall know--ah! yes, he shall know; but not now. Monsieur, my
mother."
"Thou art right, good son."
I bound up his bruised forehead and my own burnt hand as well as I was
able, and helped him to his feet. He stood upon them staggering; but
in a minute could essay to stumble on the homeward journey with
assistance. It was a long and toilsome progress; but in time we
accomplished it. Often we had to sit down in the blasted woods and rest
awhile; often moisten our parched mouths at the runnels of snow-water
that thridded the undergrowth. The shadows were slanting eastwards
as we reached the clearing we had quitted some hours earlier, and the
goats had disappeared. Petitjean was leading his charges homewards in
default of a human commander, and presently we overtook them browsingly
loitering and desirous of definite instructions.
I pass over Camille's meeting with his mother, and the wonder, and fear,
and pity of it all. Our hurts were attended to, and the battery of
questions met with the best armour of tact at command. For myself, I
said that I had scorched my hand against a red-hot rock, which was
strictly true; for Camille, that it were wisest to take no early
advantage of the reason that God had restored to him. She was voluble,
tearful, half-hysterical with joy and the ecstasy of gratitude.
"That a blow should effect the marvel! Monsieur, but it passes
comprehension."
All night long I heard her stirring and sobbing softly outside his door,
for I slept little, owing to pain and the wonder in my mind. But towards
morning I dozed, and my dreams were feverish and full of terror.
The next day Camille kept his bed and I my room. By this I at least
escaped the first onset of local curiosity, for the villagers naturally
made of Camille's restoration a nine-days' wonder. But towards evening
Madame Barbière brought a message from him that he would like to see
Monsieur alone, if Monsieur would condescend to visit him in his room. I
went at once, and found him, as Haydon found Keats, lying in a white bed,
hectic, and on his back. He greeted me with a smile peculiarly sweet and
restful.
"Does Monsieur wish to know?" he said in a low voice.
"If it will not hurt thee, Camille."
"Not now--not now; the good God has made me sound. I remember, and am not
terrified."
I closed the door and took a seat by his bedside. There, with my hand
shading my eyes from the level glory of sunset that flamed into the room,
I listened to the strange tale of Camille's seizure.
* * * * *
"Once, Monsieur, I lived in myself and was exultant with a loneliness of
fancied knowledge. My youth was my excuse; but God could not pardon me
all. I read where I could find books, and chance put an evil choice in my
way, for I learned to sneer at His name, His heaven, His hell. Each man
has his god in self-will, I thought in my pride, and through it alone he
accepts the responsibility of life and death. He is his own curse or
blessing here and hereafter, inheriting no sin and earning no doom but
such as he himself inflicts upon himself. I interpret this from the world
about me, and knowing it, I have no fear and own no tyrant but my own
passions. Monsieur, it was through fear the most terrible that God
asserted Himself to me."
The light was fading in the west, and a lance of shadow fell upon the
white bed, as though the hushed day were putting a finger to its lips as
it withdrew.
"I was no coward then, Monsieur--that at least I may say. I lived among
the mountains, and on their ledges the feet of my own goats were not
surer. Often, in summer, I spent the night among the woods and hills,
reading in them the story of the ages, and exploring, exploring till my
feet were wearier than my brain. Strangers came from far to see the great
cascade; but none but I--and you, too, Monsieur, now--know the track
through the thicket that leads to the cave under the waters. I found it
by chance, and, like you, was scorched by the fire, though not badly."
"Camille--the cause?"
"Monsieur, I will tell you a wonderful thing. The falling waters there
make a monstrous burning glass, when the hot sun is upon them, which has
melted the rock behind like wax."
"Can that be so?"
"It is true--dear Jesus, I have fearful reason to know it."
He half rose on his elbow, his face, crossed by the bandage, grey as
stone in the gathering dusk. Hereafter he spoke in an awed whisper.
"When the knowledge broke upon me, I grew great to myself in the
possession of a wonderful secret. Day after day I visited the cave and
examined this phenomenon--and yet another more marvellous in its
connection with the first. The huge lens was a simple accident of curved
rocks and convex water, planed smooth as crystal. In other than a
droughty summer it would probably not exist; the spouting torrent would
overwhelm it--but I know not. Was not this astonishing enough? Yet Nature
had worked a second miracle to mock in anticipation the self-sufficient
plagiarism of little man. I noticed that the rays of the sun concentrated
in the lens only during the half-hour of the orb's apparent crossing of
the ravine. Then the light smote upon a strange curved little fan of
water, that spouted from a high crevice at the mouth of the shallow
vitrified tunnel, and devoured it, and played upon the rocks behind, that
hissed and sputtered like pitch, and the place was blind with steam. But
when the tooth of fire was withdrawn, the tiny inner cascade fell again
and wrought coolness with its sprinkling.
"I did not discover this all at once, for at first fright took me, and it
was enough to watch for the moment of the light's appearance and then
flee with a little laughter. But one day I ventured back into the cave
after the sun had crossed the valley, and the steam had died away, and
the rock cooled behind the miniature cascade.
"I looked through the lens, and it seemed full of a great white light
that blazed into my eyes, so that I fell back through the inner fan of
water and was well soused by it; but my sight presently recovering, I
stood forward in the scoop of rock admiring the dainty hollow curve the
fan took in its fall. By-and-by I became aware that I was looking out
through a smaller lens upon the great one, and that strange whirling
mists seemed to be sweeping across a huge disc, within touch of my hand
almost.
"It was long before I grasped the meaning of this; but, in a flash, it
came upon me. The great lens formed the object glass, the small, the
eyeglass, of a natural telescope of tremendous power, that drew the high
summer clouds down within seeming touch and opened out the heavens before
my staring eyes.
"Monsieur, when this dawned upon me I was wild. That so astonishing a
discovery should have been reserved for a poor ignorant Swiss peasant
filled me with pride wicked in proportion with its absence of gratitude
to the mighty dispenser of good. I came even to think my individuality
part of the wonder and necessary to its existence. 'Were it not for my
courage and enterprise,' I cried, 'this phenomenon would have remained a
secret of the Nature that gave birth to it. She yields her treasures to
such only as fear not.'
"I had read in a book of Huyghens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel--the great
high-priests of science who had striven through patient years to read the
hieroglyphics of the heavens. 'The wise imbeciles,' I thought. 'They
toiled and died, and Nature held no mirror up to them. For me, the
poor Camille, she has worked in secret while they grew old and passed
unsatisfied.'
"Brilliant projects of astronomy whirled in my brain. The evening of my
last discovery I remained out on the hills, and entered the cave as it
grew dusk. A feeling of awe surged in me as dark fell over the valley,
and the first stars glistened faintly. I dipped under the fan of water
and took my stand in the hollow behind it. There was no moon, but my
telescope was inclined, as it were, at a generous angle, and a section of
the firmament was open before me. My heart beat fast as I looked through
the lens.
"Shall I tell you what I saw then and many nights after? Rings and
crosses in the heavens of golden mist, spangled, as it seemed, with
jewels; stars as big as cart-wheels, twinkling points no longer, but
round, like great bosses of molten fire; things shadowy, luminous, of
strange colours and stranger forms, that seemed to brush the waters
as they passed, but were in reality vast distances away.
"Sometimes the thrust of wind up the ravine would produce a tremulous
motion in the image at the focus of the mirror; but this was seldom.
For the most part the wonderful lenses presented a steady curvature, not
flawless, but of magnificent capacity.
"Now it flashed upon me that, when the moon was at the full, she would
top the valley in the direct path of my telescope's range of view. At
the thought I grew exultant. I--I, little Camille, should first read
aright the history of this strange satellite. The instrument that could
give shape to the stars would interpret to me the composition of that
lonely orb as clearly as though I stood upon her surface.
"As the time of her fulness drew near I grew feverish with excitement. I
was sickening, as it were, to my madness, for never more should I look
upon her willingly, with eyes either speculative or insane."
At this point Camille broke off for a little space, and lay back on his
pillow. When he spoke again it was out of the darkness, with his face
turned to the wall.
"Monsieur, I cannot dwell upon it--I must hasten. We have no right to
peer beyond the boundary God has drawn for us. I saw His hell--I saw His
hell, I tell you. It is peopled with the damned--silent, horrible,
distorted in the midst of ashes and desolation. It was a memory that,
like the snake of Aaron, devoured all others till yesterday--till
yesterday, by Christ's mercy."
* * * * *
It seemed to me, as the days wore on, that Camille had but recovered his
reason at the expense of his life; that the long rest deemed necessary
for him after his bitter period of brain exhaustion might in the end
prove an everlasting one. Possibly the blow to his head had, in expelling
the seven devils, wounded beyond cure the vital function that had
fostered them. He lay white, patient, and sweet-tempered to all, but
moved by no inclination to rise and re-assume the many-coloured garment
of life.
His description of the dreadful desert in the sky I looked upon, merely,
as an abiding memory of the brain phantasm that had finally overthrown
a reason, already tottering under the tremendous excitement induced by
his discovery of the lenses, and the magnified images they had presented
to him. That there was truth in the asserted fact of the existence of
these, my own experience convinced me; and curiosity as to this alone
impelled me to the determination of investigating further, when my hand
should be sufficiently recovered to act as no hindrance to me in forcing
my way once more through the dense woods that bounded the waterfall.
Moreover, the dispassionate enquiry of a mind less sensitive to
impressions might, in the result, do more towards restoring the warped
imagination of my friend to its normal state than any amount of spoken
scepticism.
To Camille I said nothing of my resolve; but waited on, chafing at the
slow healing of my wounds. In the meantime the period of the full
moon approached, and I decided, at whatever cost, to make the venture on
the evening she topped her orbit, if circumstances at the worst should
prevent my doing so sooner--and thus it turned out.
On the eve of my enterprise, the first fair spring of rain in a drought
of two months fell, to my disappointment, among the hills; for I feared
an increase of the torrent and the effacement of the mighty lens. I set
off, however, on the afternoon of the following day, in hot sunshine,
mentally prognosticating a favourable termination to my expedition, and
telling Madame Barbière not to expect me back till late.
In leisurely fashion I made my way along the track we had previously
traversed, risking no divergence through overhaste, and carefully
examining all landmarks before deciding on any direction. Thus slowly
proceeding, I had the good fortune to come within sound of the cataract
as the sun was sinking behind the mountain ridges to my front; and
presently emerged from the woods at the very spot we had struck in our
former journey together.
A chilly twilight reigned in the ravine, and the noise that came up from
the ruin of the torrent seemed doubly accented by reason of it. The
sound of water moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impression
of something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment than
the drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in this
echoing gorge was appalling indeed.
For some moments I stood on the brink of the slope, looking across at the
great knife of the fall, with a little shiver of fear. Then I shook
myself, laughed, and without further ado took my courage in hand, and
scrambled down the declivity and up again towards the cleft in the rocks.
Here the chill of heart gripped me again--the watery sliding tunnel
looked so evil in the contracting gloom. A false step in that humid
chamber, and my bones would pound and crackle on the rocks forty feet
below. It must be gone through with now, however; and, taking a long
breath, I set foot in the passage under the curving downpour that seemed
taut as an arched muscle.
Reaching the burnt recess, a few moments sufficed to restore my
self-confidence; and without further hesitation I dived under the inner
little fan-shaped fall--which was there, indeed, as Camille had described
it--and recovered my balance with pulses drumming thicker than I could
have desired.
In a moment I became conscious that some great power was before me.
Across a vast, irregular disc filled with the ashy whiteness of the outer
twilight, strange, unaccountable forms, misty and undefined, passed, and
repassed, and vanished. Cirrus they might have been, or the shadows flung
by homing flights of birds; but of this I could not be certain. As the
dusk deepened they showed no more, and presently I gazed only into a
violet fathomless darkness.
My own excitement now was great; and I found some difficulty in keeping
it under control. But for the moment, it seemed to me, I pined greatly
for free commune with the liberal atmosphere of earth. Therefore, I
dipped under the little fall and made my cautious way to the margin of
the cataract.
I was surprised to find for how long a time the phenomenon had absorbed
me. The moon was already high in the heavens, and making towards
the ravine with rapid steps. Far below, the tumbling waters flashed in
her rays, and on all sides great tiers of solemn, trees stood up at
attention to salute her.
When her disc silvered the inner rim of the slope I had descended, I
returned to my post of observation with tingling nerves. The field of
the great object lens was already suffused with the radiance of her
approach.
Suddenly my pupils shrank before the apparition of a ghastly grey light,
and all in a moment I was face to face with a segment of desolation
more horrible than any desert. Monstrous growths of leprosy that had
bubbled up and stiffened; fields of ashen slime--the sloughing of a world
of corruption; hills of demon, fungus swollen with the fatness of
putrefaction; and, in the midst of all, dim, convulsed shapes wallowing,
protruding, or stumbling aimlessly onwards, till they sank and
disappeared.
* * * * *
Madame Barbière threw up her hands when she let me in at the door. My
appearance, no doubt, was ghastly. I knew not the hour nor the lapse
of time covered by my wanderings about the hills, my face hidden in my
palms, a drawn feeling about my heart, my lips muttering--muttering
fragments of prayers, and my throat jerking with horrible laughter.
For hours I lay face downwards on my bed.
"Monsieur has seen it?"
"I have seen it."
"I heard the rain on the hills. The lens will have been blurred. Monsieur
has been spared much."
"God, in His mercy, pity thee! And me--oh, Camille, and me too!"
"He has held out His white hand to me. I go, when I go, with a safe
conduct."
* * * * *
He went before the week was out. The drought had broken and for five days
the thunder crashed and the wild rain swept the mountains. On the
morning of the sixth a drenched shepherd reported in the village that a
landslip had choked the fall of Buet, and completely altered its shape.
Madame Barbière broke into the room where I was sitting with Camille, big
with the news. She little guessed how it affected her listeners.
"The _bon Dieu_" said Camille, when she had gone, "has thundered His
curse on Nature for revealing His secrets. I, who have penetrated into
the forbidden, must perish."
"And I, Camille?"
He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasing
the dying words of certain noble lips,--
"Be good, Monsieur; be good."