THE PAVILION OF SALUCE
Since my mother's death, my father had not lived in the château. He was
too grand to let it, so it was placed in the hands of a caretaker. It
was a gloomy house, dating from 1572, but the pavilion was the
pleasantest place in the world. It was situated in the woods of the
château, woods adjoining the forest of Sénart. It had six rooms, and was
surrounded by a deep moat. A drawbridge gave access to it; and by
touching a lever the drawbridge would rise; and you were as completely
isolated from the world as though you were surrounded by a wall of iron.
The water in the moat, fed by some unknown source, was very dark and
still and deep, reflecting with photographic perfection the treetops of
the wood and the fern-fronds of the bank. The water never varied in
height, and, a strange thing, was rarely, even in the severest weather,
covered with ice. It had a gloomy and secret look.
"Joubert," I remember saying once, as I looked over the rail of the
drawbridge at the reflections on the oily surface below, "has it ever
drowned a man?"
"Which?" asked Joubert.
"The water."
That was the feeling with which it inspired me, and I never lingered on
the bridge when I was alone. And I was often alone now, for Joubert,
having extracted my parole d'honneur to be of good behaviour and not get
into mischief or bolt back to Paris, spent most of his time at the
château, where the caretaker had a pretty daughter, or at the cabaret at
Etiolles, Lisette, the old woman who did our cooking and made our beds,
being deputed deputy-gaoler.
The weather had the feeling of early spring, though in the forest, half
stricken by autumn, the leaves were falling--falling to every touch of
the wind. Where the forest of Sénart began, and the woods of the château
ended, the frontier was marked by a thin line of wire easy for a child
to slip under. Then one felt free, free as the cock pheasant whose
corkscrew-sounding voice echoed from the liquid twilight of the drives,
free as the wind in the tree tops. The great pine forest of Lichtenberg
had a voice. You would hear the wind rising and passing over its leagues
of perfumed branches, and dying away, and rising and dying away--ever
the same voice filling and deserting the same vast silence. But here, in
the forest of Sénart, the tongue of the beech spoke a different language
to that of the fir and the larch. There were open spaces, swathes of
sunshine, forest pools like lost sapphires, where the bulrushes painted
their forms on the water-surface, blue with the reflection of the autumn
sky.
These woods, whose echoes had once answered to the hunting-horn of Le
Roi Soleil, were haunted, but not by the ghost of Pan. Rousseau had once
botanised in them, and M. de Jussien, in his coat of ribbed Indian
satin, his lilac silk vest, and white silk stockings of extraordinary
fineness, had here filled his herbal with the vicris hieracioides and
the cerastium aquaticum so dear to his herboristic heart. Pompadour had
wandered where the rabbits played now; and the glades, shot through with
sunlight and draped in the muslin of the morning mist, were the
backgrounds beloved of Fragonnard for his wreaths of flying drapery, his
fêtes champêtres, and his sylvan scenes.
The forest keepers all wore a state uniform. Fanchard, the one who lived
nearest to us, an old soldier and a crony of Joubert's, would take me
with him whilst he set his traps; and there were gypsies that haunted
the clearings, real children of Egypt these, lineal descendants of
Hennequin Dandèche and Clopin Trouillefou.
On the evening of our sixth day at the pavilion, a visitor arrived. It
was my father. He had left his carriage in the road at the gates of the
château, and had come to the pavilion on foot.
I was at supper when he arrived. He ordered another plate, and a bottle
of wine; he was gay, excited, his eyes were brilliant, and he seemed
quite to have forgotten my escapades in Paris, for he never referred to
them. He had only come for an hour, to see how I was getting on, so he
said; but he stayed three, for after supper he called Joubert, and they
both went out into the night.
These two old soldiers must have had something very important to say to
one another, for they were gone an hour or more. When they returned, my
father beckoned me to him and kissed me, and bade me good-night; then,
as if something had suddenly occurred to him, he said to Joubert:
"Patrick can come down to the road and see me off. Come, both of you,
and bring a lantern."
Joubert lit a lantern. The night was black as black velvet, and the
lantern only showed Joubert's legging-clad legs as he marched before us
down the gravel of the drive.
The carriage was standing in the road. My father kissed me, got in, and
drove away.
Just as the vehicle moved off, he looked out of the window, and the
light of the lantern which Joubert was holding up struck his face. What
a reckless, daring, jolly face it was, that face I was destined never to
see again!
"What did father want to say to you, Joubert?" I asked as we returned to
the pavilion.
"What did he want to say?" cried Joubert, whose temper seemed sharper
than usual. "Why, that the price of cabbages has gone up. What else
would he have to say to me at this hour of the night? Mordieu! If I
could be there!"
"Where, Joubert?"
But Joubert did not reply.
Next morning the fine weather still held, and I was up at dawn. It was
no trouble to get up early when one lived in the pavilion. The birds
wakened one; and, then, the forest!
In the very early morning, the forest, like the sea, is full of tender
lights. Shadows and trees are equally unsubstantial, the rides are
wreathed in vague mists, the last star has not quite faded from the sky,
and the voice of the thrush comes from the glens as in the story of
Vitigab, crying: "Deep--down deep--there somewhere in the darkness I see
a ray of light." The hollow tapping of the woodpecker comes from the
beech glades, whilst the rabbits shake the dew from their fur, and the
rustle of the stoat comes from the ferns; a nut falls, and, looking up,
you see against the sky, where the treetops are waving in the palest
sapphire air, the squirrel, the sweetest of all wood things.
You observe one another and he is gone, and the wind draws up from
leagues away like the rustling of a silken skirt, till, suddenly, the
whole forest draws breath. You can hear it waking from its slumber just
as at dusk you can hear it falling to sleep; for the forest is a living
thing, a thing that breathes and speaks and has its dreams.
I was out early this morning, for I was going to breakfast with
Fauchard. I passed the glades where the rabbits were sporting, chasing
each other in circles smoothly and for all the world like toy rabbits on
wheels and driven by clockwork. I passed the pools where the bulrushes
stood up out of the mist, and nothing spoke of water save the splash of
the frog, or the ripple of the water-rat swimming.
Fauchard was waiting for me. We had breakfast--a simple enough repast,
consisting of coffee, biscuits, and cheese--and then we started off to
visit the traps and see what they had caught.
When Fauchard had collected his harvest of stoats and moles, killed two
snakes, and shot a marauding cat, it was late morning; the sun was well
over the treetops, and it was time for me to return home.
"Take that path," said the ranger. "Turn neither to the right nor left,
and it will lead you straight as an omnibus to the pavilion."
I bade him good morning, and, taking the path indicated, I set off. It
was not a drive; in fact, it was so narrow in parts that the hawthorn
bushes growing in this part of the wood nearly met; the fern in places
nearly blocked the way. It was warm, and very silent.
When I paused now and then to listen, I could hear nothing except the
buzzing of wasps and flies. The ground in places was boggy, the path, it
seemed to me, had not been used for years. Stories of murderers and
goblins occurred to my mind and made me press on all the faster.
I had turned past a clump of alders when before me I caught a glimpse of
someone going in the same direction as myself--a boy of my own age, to
judge from his height, but I could not see what he was dressed in, or
whether he was a gypsy or a woodranger's child, for he was always just
ahead of my sight at the turnings, glimpsed for a moment and then gone.
I halloed to him to stop, for his company would have been very
acceptable in that lonely place, but he made no reply. I ran, and
pausing out of breath, I heard his footsteps running, too; then they
ceased, as though he were waiting for me. It was like a game of
hide-and-seek, and I laughed.
I walked softly and as quickly as I could, hoping to surprise him.
Then, at the next turning, I saw him. He was amidst the bushes on the
right; his head just peeped over the tops of them, and--he was a child
of about my own age, and extraordinarily like little Carl.
Filled with astonishment, not thinking what I did, I ran through the
bushes towards him, calling his name.
Then I remember nothing more.