By EDITH WHARTON_Twenty-Three Stories by Twenty and Three Authors

From Xingu and Other Stories, by Edith Wharton.

“You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a

solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to

own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead

broke, and it’s going for a song—you ought to buy it.”

It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my friend

Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable

exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took

his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring

over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road

on a heath, and said: “First turn to the right and second to the left.

Then straight ahead till you see an avenue. If you meet any peasants,

don’t ask your way. They don’t understand French, and they would pretend

they did and mix you up. I’ll be back for you here by sunset—and don’t

forget the tombs in the chapel.”

I followed Lanrivain’s directions with the hesitation occasioned by the

usual difficulty of remembering whether he had said the first turn to

the right and second to the left, or the contrary. If I had met a

peasant I should certainly have asked, and probably been sent astray;

but I had the desert landscape to myself, and so stumbled on the right

turn and walked across the heath till I came to an avenue. It was so

unlike any other avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must

be _the_ avenue. The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great

height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel

through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most trees by name,

but I haven’t to this day been able to decide what those trees were.

They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen

colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for

half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an

avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol.

My heart beat a little as I began to walk down it.

Presently the trees ended and I came to a fortified gate in a long wall.

Between me and the wall was an open space of grass, with other grey

avenues radiating from it. Behind the wall were tall slate roofs mossed

with silver, a chapel belfry, the top of a keep. A moat filled with wild

shrubs and brambles surrounded the place; the drawbridge had been

replaced by a stone arch, and the portcullis by an iron gate. I stood

for a long time on the hither side of the moat, gazing about me, and

letting the influence of the place sink in. I said to myself: “If I wait

long enough, the guardian will turn up and show me the tombs—” and I

rather hoped he wouldn’t turn up too soon.

I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done it, it

struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with that great blind

house looking down at me, and all the empty avenues converging on me. It

may have been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my

gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a

brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the

grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of

littleness, of futile bravado, in sitting there puffing my

cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol—I was new to Brittany, and

Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before—but one

couldn’t as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long

accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to

guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and

deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol

suggested something more—a perspective of stern and cruel memories

stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the

present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the

sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. “Tombs in the chapel?

The whole place is a tomb!” I reflected. I hoped more and more that the

guardian would not come. The details of the place, however striking,

would seem trivial compared with its collective impressiveness; and I

wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.

“It’s the very place for you!” Lanrivain had said; and I was overcome by

the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that

Kerfol was the place for him. “Is it possible that any one could _not_

see—?” I wondered. I did not finish the thought: what I meant was

undefinable. I stood up and wandered toward the gate. I was beginning to

want to know more; not to _see_ more—I was by now so sure it was not a

question of seeing—but to feel more: feel all the place had to

communicate. “But to get in one will have to rout out the keeper,” I

thought reluctantly, and hesitated. Finally I crossed the bridge and

tried the iron gate. It yielded, and I walked through the tunnel formed

by the thickness of the _chemin de ronde_. At the farther end, a wooden

barricade had been laid across the entrance, and beyond it was a court

enclosed in noble architecture. The main building faced me; and I now

saw that one half was a mere ruined front, with gaping windows through

which the wild growths of the moat and the trees of the park were

visible. The rest of the house was still in its robust beauty. One end

abutted on the round tower, the other on the small traceried chapel, and

in an angle of the building stood a graceful well-head crowned with

mossy urns. A few roses grew against the walls, and on an upper

window-sill I remember noticing a pot of fuchsias.

My sense of the pressure of the invisible began to yield to my

architectural interest. The building was so fine that I felt a desire to

explore it for its own sake. I looked about the court, wondering in

which corner the guardian lodged. Then I pushed open the barrier and

went in. As I did so, a dog barred my way. He was such a remarkably

beautiful little dog that for a moment he made me forget the splendid

place he was defending. I was not sure of his breed at the time, but

have since learned that it was Chinese, and that he was of a rare

variety called the “Sleeve-dog.” He was very small and golden brown,

with large brown eyes and a ruffled throat: he looked like a large tawny

chrysanthemum. I said to myself: “These little beasts always snap and

scream, and somebody will be out in a minute.”

The little animal stood before me, forbidding, almost menacing; there

was anger in his large brown eyes. But he made no sound, he came no

nearer. Instead, as I advanced, he gradually fell back, and I noticed

that another dog, a vague rough brindled thing, had limped up on a lame

leg. “There’ll be a hubbub now,” I thought; for at the same moment a

third dog, a long-haired white mongrel, slipped out of a doorway and

joined the others. All three stood looking at me with grave eyes; but

not a sound came from them. As I advanced they continued to fall back on

muffled paws, still watching me. “At a given point, they’ll all charge

at my ankles: it’s one of the jokes that dogs who live together put on

one,” I thought. I was not alarmed, for they were neither large nor

formidable. But they let me wander about the court as I pleased,

following me at a little distance—always the same distance—and always

keeping their eyes on me. Presently I looked across at the ruined

façade, and saw that in one of its empty window-frames another dog

stood: a white pointer with one brown ear. He was an old grave dog, much

more experienced than the others; and he seemed to be observing me with

a deeper intentness.

“I’ll hear from _him_,” I said to myself; but he stood in the

window-frame, against the trees of the park, and continued to watch me

without moving. I stared back at him for a time, to see if the sense

that he was being watched would not rouse him. Half the width of the

court lay between us, and we gazed at each other silently across it. But

he did not stir, and at last I turned away. Behind me I found the rest

of the pack, with a newcomer added: a small black greyhound with pale

agate-coloured eyes. He was shivering a little, and his expression was

more timid than that of the others. I noticed that he kept a little

behind them. And still there was not a sound.

I stood there for fully five minutes, the circle about me—waiting, as

they seemed to be waiting. At last I went up to the little golden-brown

dog and stooped to pat him. As I did so, I heard myself give a nervous

laugh. The little dog did not start, or growl, or take his eyes from

me—he simply slipped back about a yard, and then paused and continued to

look at me. “Oh, hang it!” I exclaimed, and walked across the court

toward the well.

As I advanced, the dogs separated and slid away into different corners

of the court. I examined the urns on the well, tried a locked door or

two, and looked up and down the dumb façade: then I faced about toward

the chapel. When I turned I perceived that all the dogs had disappeared

except the old pointer, who still watched me from the window. It was

rather a relief to be rid of that cloud of witnesses; and I began to

look about me for a way to the back of the house. “Perhaps there’ll be

somebody in the garden,” I thought. I found a way across the moat,

scrambled over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden. A

few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the flower-beds, and the

ancient house looked down on them indifferently. Its garden side was

plainer and severer than the other: the long granite front, with its few

windows and steep roof, looked like a fortress-prison. I walked around

the farther wing, went up some disjointed steps, and entered the deep

twilight of a narrow and incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide

enough for one person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It

was like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the

shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the branches

hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry rattle; and at

length I came out on the grassy top of the _chemin de ronde_. I walked

along it to the gate-tower, looking down into the court, which was just

below me. Not a human being was in sight; and neither were the dogs. I

found a flight of steps in the thickness of the wall and went down them;

and when I emerged again into the court, there stood the circle of dogs,

the golden-brown one a little ahead of the others, the black greyhound

shivering in the rear.

“Oh, hang it—you uncomfortable beasts, you!” I exclaimed, my voice

startling me with a sudden echo. The dogs stood motionless, watching me.

I knew by this time that they would not try to prevent my approaching

the house, and the knowledge left me free to examine them. I had a

feeling that they must be horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet

they did not look hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and

they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if

they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked

at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their

busy, inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human

lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of starved and beaten

animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them

into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and

weary eyes the more preposterous the idea became. With the windows of

that house looking down on us, how could I have imagined such a thing?

The dogs knew better: they knew what the house would tolerate and what

it would not. I even fancied that they knew what was passing through my

mind, and pitied me for my frivolity. But even that feeling probably

reached them through a thick fog of listlessness. I had an idea that

their distance from me was as nothing to my remoteness from them. The

impression they produced was that of having in common one memory so deep

and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth either a growl

or a wag.

“I say,” I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb circle, “do

you know what you look like, the whole lot of you? You look as if you’d

seen a ghost—that’s how you look. I wonder if there _is_ a ghost here,

and nobody but you left for it to appear to?” The dogs continued to gaze

at me without moving....

* * * * *

It was dark when I saw Lanrivain’s motor lamps at the cross-roads—and I

wasn’t exactly sorry to see them. I had the sense of having escaped from

the loneliest place in the whole world, and of not liking loneliness—to

that degree—as much as I had imagined I should. My friend had brought

his solicitor back from Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat

and affable stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol....

But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted in the

study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the drawing-room.

“Well—are you going to buy Kerfol?” she asked, tilting up her gay chin

from her embroidery.

“I haven’t decided yet. The fact is, I couldn’t get into the house,” I

said, as if I had simply postponed my decision, and meant to go back for

another look.

“You couldn’t get in? Why, what happened? The family are mad to sell the

place, and the old guardian has orders——”

“Very likely. But the old guardian wasn’t there.”

“What a pity. He must have gone to market. But his daughter——?”

“There was nobody about. At least I saw no one.”

“How extraordinary! Literally nobody?”

“Nobody but a lot of dogs—a whole pack of them—who seemed to have the

place to themselves.”

Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knees, and folded her

hands on it. For several minutes she looked at me thoughtfully.

“A pack of dogs—you saw them?”

“Saw them? I saw nothing else!”

“How many?” She dropped her voice a little. “I’ve always wondered——”

I looked at her with surprise: I had supposed the place to be familiar

to her. “Have you never been to Kerfol?” I asked.

“Oh, yes; often. But never on that day.”

“What day?”

“I’d quite forgotten, and so had Hervé, I’m sure. If we’d remembered, we

never should have sent you to-day—but then, after all, one doesn’t half

believe that sort of thing, does one?”

“What sort of thing?” I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to the

level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: “I _knew_ there was

something....”

Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring smile.

“Didn’t Hervé tell you the story of Kerfol? An ancestor of his was mixed

up in it. You know every Breton house has its ghost-story; and some of

them are rather unpleasant.”

“Yes—but those dogs?”

“Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the peasants say

there’s one day in the year when a lot of dogs appear there; and that

day the keeper and his daughter go off to Morlaix and get drunk. The

women in Brittany drink dreadfully.” She stooped to match a silk; then

she lifted her charming, inquisitive Parisian face. “Did you _really_

see a lot of dogs? There isn’t one at Kerfol,” she said.

Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the back

of an upper shelf of his library.

“Yes—here it is. What does it call itself? _A History of the Assizes of

the Duchy of Brittany._ _Quimper_, 1702. The book was written about a

hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I believe the account is

transcribed pretty literally from the judicial records. Anyhow, it’s

queer reading. And there’s a Hervé de Lanrivain mixed up in it—not

exactly my style, as you’ll see. But then he’s only a collateral. Here,

take the book up to bed with you. I don’t exactly remember the details;

but after you’ve read it, I’ll bet anything you’ll leave your light

burning all night!”

I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it was

chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my reading. The

account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of the lord of Kerfol,

was long and closely printed. It was, as my friend had said, probably an

almost literal transcription of what took place in the court-room; and

the trial lasted nearly a month. Besides, the type of the book was very

bad....

At first I thought of translating the old record. But it is full of

wearisome repetitions, and the main lines of the story are forever

straying off into side issues. So I have tried to disentangle it, and

give it here in a simpler form. At times, however, I have reverted to

the text because no other words could have conveyed so exactly the sense

of what I felt at Kerfol; and nowhere have I added anything of my own.

It was in the year 16— that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of

Kerfol, went to the _pardon_ of Locronan to perform his religious

duties. He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his sixty-second year,

but hale and sturdy, a great horseman and hunter and a pious man. So all

his neighbours attested. In appearance he was short and broad, with a

swarthy face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a hanging nose and

broad hands with black hairs on them. He had married young and lost his

wife and son soon after, and since then had lived alone at Kerfol. Twice

a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a handsome house by the river,

and spent a week or ten days there; and occasionally he rode to Rennes

on business. Witnesses were found to declare that during these absences

he led a life different from the one he was known to lead at Kerfol,

where he busied himself with his estate, attended mass daily, and found

his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and water-fowl. But these

rumours are not particularly relevant, and it is certain that among

people of his own class in the neighbourhood he passed for a stern and

even austere man, observant of his religious obligations, and keeping

strictly to himself. There was no talk of any familiarity with the women

on his estate, though at that time the nobility were very free with

their peasants. Some people said he had never looked at a woman since

his wife’s death; but such things are hard to prove, and the evidence on

this point was not worth much.

Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the _pardon_ at

Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who had ridden over

pillion behind her father to do her duty to the saint. Her name was Anne

de Barrigan, and she came of good old Breton stock, but much less great

and powerful than that of Yves de Cornault; and her father had

squandered his fortune at cards, and lived almost like a peasant in his

little granite manor on the moors.... I have said I would add nothing of

my own to this bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt

myself here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate of

Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also

dismounting there. I take my description from a faded drawing in red

crayon, sober and truthful enough to be by a late pupil of the Clouets,

which hangs in Lanrivain’s study, and is said to be a portrait of Anne

de Barrigan. It is unsigned and has no mark of identity but the initials

A. B., and the date 16—, the year after her marriage. It represents a

young woman with a small oval face, almost pointed, yet wide enough for

a full mouth with a tender depression at the corners. The nose is small,

and the eyebrows are set rather high, far apart, and as lightly

pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese painting. The forehead is high

and serious, and the hair, which one feels to be fine and thick and

fair, is drawn off it and lies close like a cap. The eyes are neither

large nor small, hazel probably, with a look at once shy and steady. A

pair of beautiful long hands are crossed below the lady’s breast....

The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when the Baron

came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse, ordered another to be

instantly saddled, called to a young page to come with him, and rode

away that same evening to the south. His steward followed the next

morning with coffers laden on a pair of pack mules. The following week

Yves de Cornault rode back to Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants,

and told them he was to be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of

Douarnenez. And on All Saints’ Day the marriage took place.

As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to show that

they passed happily for the couple. No one was found to say that Yves de

Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it was plain to all that he

was content with his bargain. Indeed, it was admitted by the chaplain

and other witnesses for the prosecution that the young lady had a

softening influence on her husband, and that he became less exacting

with his tenants, less harsh to peasants and dependents, and less

subject to the fits of gloomy silence which had darkened his widowhood.

As to his wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her

behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her husband was

away on business at Rennes or Morlaix—whither she was never taken—she

was not allowed so much as to walk in the park unaccompanied. But no one

asserted that she was unhappy, though one servant-woman said she had

surprised her crying, and had heard her say that she was a woman

accursed to have no child, and nothing in life to call her own. But that

was a natural enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and

certainly it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that she

bore no son. Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a

reproach—she admits this in her evidence—but seemed to try to make her

forget it by showering gifts and favours on her. Rich though he was, he

had never been open-handed; but nothing was too fine for his wife, in

the way of silks or gems or linen, or whatever else she fancied. Every

wandering merchant was welcome at Kerfol, and when the master was called

away he never came back without bringing his wife a handsome

present—something curious and particular—from Morlaix or Rennes or

Quimper. One of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination, an

interesting list of one year’s gifts, which I copy. From Morlaix, a

carved ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had

brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarté, above

Ploumanac’h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by the nuns of

the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that opened and showed an

amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from Morlaix, again, a length of

Damascus velvet shot with gold, bought of a Jew from Syria; and for

Michaelmas that same year, from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round

stones—emeralds and pearls and rubies—strung like beads on a fine gold

chain. This was the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said.

Later on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to

have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable jewel.

The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time as far

as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife something even odder

and prettier than the bracelet. It was a winter evening when he rode up

to Kerfol, and, walking into the hall, found her sitting by the hearth,

her chin on her hand, looking into the fire. He carried a velvet box in

his hand and, setting it down, lifted the lid and let out a little

golden-brown dog.

Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature bounded

toward her. “Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!” she cried as she

picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her shoulders and looked at

her with eyes “like a Christian’s.” After that she would never have it

out of her sight, and petted and talked to it as if it had been a

child—as indeed it was the nearest thing to a child she was to know.

Yves de Cornault was much pleased with his purchase. The dog had been

brought to him by a sailor from an East Indian merchantman, and the

sailor had bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen

it from a nobleman’s wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to do,

since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen doomed to

hell-fire. Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for the dog, for they

were beginning to be in demand at the French court, and the sailor knew

he had got hold of a good thing; but Anne’s pleasure was so great that,

to see her laugh and play with the little animal, her husband would

doubtless have given twice the sum.

So far all the evidence is at one, and the narrative plain sailing; but

now the steering becomes difficult. I will try to keep as nearly as

possible to Anne’s own statements; though toward the end, poor thing....

Well, to go back. The very year after the little brown dog was brought

to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found dead at the

head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms to

a door opening on the court. It was his wife who found him and gave the

alarm, so distracted, poor wretch, with fear and horror—for his blood

was all over her—that at first the roused household could not make out

what she was saying, and thought she had suddenly gone mad. But there,

sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone dead, and

head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to the step below

him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face and

throat, as if with curious pointed weapons; and one of his legs had a

deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death.

But how did he come there, and who had murdered him?

His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing his

cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was

immediately questioned. In the first place, it was proved that from her

room she could not have heard the struggle on the stairs, owing to the

thickness of the walls and the length of the intervening passage; then

it was evident that she had not been in bed and asleep, since she was

dressed when she roused the house, and her bed had not been slept in.

Moreover, the door at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and it was

noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the dress she wore was

stained with blood about the knees, and that there were traces of small

blood-stained hands low down on the staircase walls, so that it was

conjectured that she had really been at the postern-door when her

husband fell and, feeling her way up to him in the darkness on her hands

and knees, had been stained by his blood dripping down on her. Of course

it was argued on the other side that the blood-marks on her dress might

have been caused by her kneeling down by her husband when she rushed out

of her room; but there was the open door below, and the fact that the

finger-marks in the staircase all pointed upward.

The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of

its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that

Hervé de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been

arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon

came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that

Lanrivain had formerly been on good terms with the lady of Cornault; but

that he had been absent from Brittany for over a year, and people had

ceased to associate their names. The witnesses who made this statement

were not of a very reputable sort. One was an old herb-gatherer

suspected of witchcraft, another a drunken clerk from a neighbouring

parish, the third a half-witted shepherd who could be made to say

anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not satisfied with

its case, and would have liked to find more proof of Lanrivain’s

complicity than the statement of the herb-gatherer, who swore to having

seen him climbing the wall of the park on the night of the murder. One

way of patching out incomplete proofs in those days was to put some sort

of pressure, moral or physical, on the accused person. It is not clear

what pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but on the third day, when

she was brought in court, she “appeared weak and wandering,” and after

being encouraged to collect herself and speak the truth, on her honour

and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer, she confessed that she had in

fact gone down the stairs to speak with Hervé de Lanrivain (who denied

everything), and had been surprised there by the sound of her husband’s

fall. That was better; and the prosecution rubbed its hands with

satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when various dependents living

at Kerfol were induced to say—with apparent sincerity—that during the

year or two preceding his death their master had once more grown

uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of brooding silence

which his household had learned to dread before his second marriage.

This seemed to show that things had not been going well at Kerfol;

though no one could be found to say that there had been any signs of

open disagreement between husband and wife.

Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down at

night to open the door to Hervé de Lanrivain, made an answer which must

have sent a smile around the court. She said it was because she was

lonely and wanted to talk with the young man. Was this the only reason?

she was asked; and replied: “Yes, by the Cross over your Lordships’

heads.” “But why at midnight?” the court asked. “Because I could see him

in no other way.” I can see the exchange of glances across the ermine

collars under the Crucifix.

Anne de Cornault, further questioned, said that her married life had

been extremely lonely: “desolate” was the word she used. It was true

that her husband seldom spoke harshly to her; but there were days when

he did not speak at all. It was true that he had never struck or

threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner at Kerfol, and when he

rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes he set so close a watch on her

that she could not pick a flower in the garden without having a

waiting-woman at her heels. “I am no Queen, to need such honours,” she

once said to him; and he had answered that a man who has a treasure does

not leave the key in the lock when he goes out. “Then take me with you,”

she urged; but to this he said that towns were pernicious places, and

young wives better off at their firesides.

“But what did you want to say to Hervé de Lanrivain?” the court asked;

and she answered: “To ask him to take me away.”

“Ah—you confess that you went down to him with adulterous thoughts?”

“No.”

“Then why did you want him to take you away?”

“Because I was afraid for my life.”

“Of whom were you afraid?”

“Of my husband.”

“Why were you afraid of your husband?”

“Because he had strangled my little dog.”

Another smile must have passed around the courtroom: in days when any

nobleman had a right to hang his peasants—and most of them exercised

it—pinching a pet animal’s wind-pipe was nothing to make a fuss about.

At this point one of the Judges, who appears to have had a certain

sympathy for the accused, suggested that she should be allowed to

explain herself in her own way; and she thereupon made the following

statement.

The first years of her marriage had been lonely; but her husband had not

been unkind to her. If she had had a child she would not have been

unhappy; but the days were long, and it rained too much.

It was true that her husband, whenever he went away and left her,

brought her a handsome present on his return; but this did not make up

for the loneliness. At least nothing had, till he brought her the little

brown dog from the East: after that she was much less unhappy. Her

husband seemed pleased that she was so fond of the dog; he gave her

leave to put her jewelled bracelet around its neck, and keep it always

with her.

One day she had fallen asleep in her room, with the dog at her feet, as

his habit was. Her feet were bare and resting on his back. Suddenly she

was waked by her husband: he stood beside her, smiling not unkindly.

“You look like my great-grandmother, Juliane de Cornault, lying in the

chapel with her feet on a little dog,” he said.

The analogy sent a chill through her, but she laughed and answered:

“Well, when I am dead you must put me beside her, carved in marble, with

my dog at my feet.”

“Oho—we’ll wait and see,” he said, laughing also, but with his black

brows close together. “The dog is the emblem of fidelity.”

“And do you doubt my right to lie with mine at my feet?”

“When I’m in doubt I find out,” he answered. “I am an old man,” he

added, “and people say I make you lead a lonely life. But I swear you

shall have your monument if you earn it.”

“And I swear to be faithful,” she returned, “if only for the sake of

having my little dog at my feet.”

Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes; and while

he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of the duchy, came

to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the _pardon_ of Ste. Barbe. She

was a woman of piety and consequence, and much respected by Yves de

Cornault, and when she proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste. Barbe, no

one could object, and even the chaplain declared himself in favour of

the pilgrimage. So Anne set out for Ste. Barbe, and there for the first

time she talked with Hervé de Lanrivain. He had come once or twice to

Kerfol with his father, but she had never before exchanged a dozen words

with him. They did not talk for more than five minutes now: it was under

the chestnuts, as the procession was coming out of the chapel. He said:

“I pity you,” and she was surprised, for she had not supposed that any

one thought her an object of pity. He added: “Call for me when you need

me,” and she smiled a little, but was glad afterward, and thought often

of the meeting.

She confessed to having seen him three times afterward: not more. How or

where she would not say—one had the impression that she feared to

implicate some one. Their meetings had been rare and brief; and at the

last he had told her that he was starting the next day for a foreign

country, on a mission which was not without peril and might keep him for

many months absent. He asked her for a remembrance, and she had none to

give him but the collar about the little dog’s neck. She was sorry

afterward that she had given it, but he was so unhappy at going that she

had not had the courage to refuse.

Her husband was away at the time. When he returned a few days later he

picked up the animal to pet it, and noticed that its collar was missing.

His wife told him that the dog had lost it in the undergrowth of the

park, and that she and her maids had hunted a whole day for it. It was

true, she explained to the court, that she had made the maids search for

the necklet—they all believed the dog had lost it in the park.

Her husband made no comment, and that evening at supper he was in his

usual mood, between good and bad: you could never tell which. He talked

a good deal, describing what he had seen and done at Rennes; but now and

then he stopped and looked hard at her, and when she went to bed she

found her little dog strangled on her pillow. The little thing was dead,

but still warm; she stooped to lift it, and her distress turned to

horror when she discovered that it had been strangled by twisting twice

round its throat the necklet she had given to Lanrivain.

The next morning at dawn she buried the dog in the garden, and hid the

necklet in her breast. She said nothing to her husband, then or later,

and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a peasant hanged for

stealing a faggot in the park, and the next day he nearly beat to death

a young horse he was breaking.

Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights, one by

one; and she heard nothing of Hervé de Lanrivain. It might be that her

husband had killed him; or merely that he had been robbed of the

necklet. Day after day by the hearth among the spinning maids, night

after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at

table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt

sure that Lanrivain was dead. She dared not try to get news of him, for

she was sure her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea that

he could find out anything. Even when a witch-woman who was a noted

seer, and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to the

castle for a night’s shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held

back.

The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves de Cornault’s

absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs.

Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat

and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by

the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them.

That evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found

the dog strangled on her pillow.

After that she said to herself that she would never have another dog;

but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at

the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of

him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled

food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted

him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound

strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and

resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never

bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheep-dog, a

brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow

of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Rennes, and she brought the dog in,

warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till her

husband’s return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman who

lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say

nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door,

and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up

on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next

morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she

heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest, and

went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her

room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow....

After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her loneliness

became almost unendurable. Sometimes, when she crossed the court of the

castle, and thought no one was looking, she stopped to pat the old

pointer at the gate. But one day as she was caressing him her husband

came out of the chapel; and the next day the old dog was gone....

This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court, or

received without impatience and incredulous comment. It was plain that

the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that it did not help the

accused in the eyes of the public. It was an odd tale, certainly; but

what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs, and that his

wife, to gratify her own fancy, persistently ignored this dislike. As

for pleading this trivial disagreement as an excuse for her

relations—whatever their nature—with her supposed accomplice, the

argument was so absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having

let her make use of it, and tried several times to cut short her story.

But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotised insistence, as

though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had forgotten

where she was and imagined herself to be re-living them.

At length the Judge who had previously shown a certain kindness to her

said (leaning forward a little, one may suppose, from his row of dozing

colleagues): “Then you would have us believe that you murdered your

husband because he would not let you keep a pet dog?”

“I did not murder my husband.”

“Who did, then? Hervé de Lanrivain?”

“No.”

“Who then? Can you tell us?”

“Yes, I can tell you. The dogs—” At that point she was carried out of

the court in a swoon.

* * * * *

It was evident that her lawyer tried to get her to abandon this line of

defence. Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had seemed

convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of their first

private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the cold daylight of

judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town, he was thoroughly ashamed

of it, and would have sacrificed her without a scruple to save his

professional reputation. But the obstinate Judge—who perhaps, after all,

was more inquisitive than kindly—evidently wanted to hear the story out,

and she was ordered, the next day, to continue her deposition.

She said that after the disappearance of the old watchdog nothing

particular happened for a month or two. Her husband was much as usual:

she did not remember any special incident. But one evening a pedlar

woman came to the castle and was selling trinkets to the maids. She had

no heart for trinkets, but she stood looking on while the women made

their choice. And then, she did not know how, but the pedlar coaxed her

into buying for herself a pear-shaped pomander with a strong scent in

it—she had once seen something of the kind on a gypsy woman. She had no

desire for the pomander, and did not know why she had bought it. The

pedlar said that whoever wore it had the power to read the future; but

she did not really believe that, or care much either. However, she

bought the thing and took it up to her room, where she sat turning it

about in her hand. Then the strange scent attracted her and she began to

wonder what kind of spice was in the box. She opened it and found a grey

bean rolled in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she

knew, and a message from Hervé de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home

again and would be at the door in the court that night after the moon

had set....

She burned the paper and sat down to think. It was nightfall, and her

husband was at home.... She had no way of warning Lanrivain, and there

was nothing to do but to wait....

At this point I fancy the drowsy court-room beginning to wake up. Even

to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a certain relish in

picturing the feelings of a woman on receiving such a message at

nightfall from a man living twenty miles away, to whom she had no means

of sending a warning....

She was not a clever woman, I imagine; and as the first result of her

cogitation she appears to have made the mistake of being, that evening,

too kind to her husband. She could not ply him with wine, according to

the traditional expedient, for though he drank heavily at times, he had

a strong head; and when he drank beyond its strength it was because he

chose to, and not because a woman coaxed him. Not his wife, at any

rate—she was an old story by now. As I read the case, I fancy there was

no feeling for her left in him but the hatred occasioned by his supposed

dishonour.

At any rate, she tried to call up her old graces; but early in the

evening he complained of pains and fever, and left the hall to go up to

the closet where he sometimes slept. His servant carried him a cup of

hot wine, and brought back word that he was sleeping and not to be

disturbed; and an hour later, when Anne lifted the tapestry and listened

at his door, she heard his loud regular breathing. She thought it might

be a feint, and stayed a long time barefooted in the passage, her ear to

the crack; but the breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be

other than that of a man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room

reassured, and stood in the window watching the moon set through the

trees of the park. The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon

went down the night was black as pitch. She knew the time had come, and

stole along the passage, past her husband’s door—where she stopped again

to listen to his breathing—to the top of the stairs. There she paused a

moment, and assured herself that no one was following her; then she

began to go down the stairs in the darkness. They were so steep and

winding that she had to go very slowly, for fear of stumbling. Her one

thought was to get the door unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape,

and hasten back to her room. She had tried the bolt earlier in the

evening, and managed to put a little grease on it; but nevertheless,

when she drew it, it gave a squeak ... not loud, but it made her heart

stop; and the next minute, overhead, she heard a noise....

“What noise?” the prosecution interposed.

“My husband’s voice calling out my name and cursing me.”

“What did you hear after that?”

“A terrible scream and a fall.”

“Where was Hervé de Lanrivain at this time?”

“He was standing outside in the court. I just made him out in the

darkness. I told him for God’s sake to go, and then I pushed the door

shut.”

“What did you do next?”

“I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard dogs snarling and panting.” (Visible discouragement of the

bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer for the

defence. Dogs again! But the inquisitive Judge insisted.)

“What dogs?”

She bent her head and spoke so low that she had to be told to repeat her

answer: “I don’t know.”

“How do you mean—you don’t know?”

“I don’t know what dogs....”

The Judge again intervened: “Try to tell us exactly what happened. How

long did you remain at the foot of the stairs?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“And what was going on meanwhile overhead?”

“The dogs kept on snarling and panting. Once or twice he cried out. I

think he moaned. Then he was quiet.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I heard a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is thrown

to them—gulping and lapping.”

(There was a groan of disgust and repulsion through the court, and

another attempted intervention by the distracted lawyer. But the

inquisitive Judge was still inquisitive.)

“And all the while you did not go up?”

“Yes—I went up then—to drive them off.”

“The dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Well——?”

“When I got there it was quite dark. I found my husband’s flint and

steel and struck a spark. I saw him lying there. He was dead.”

“And the dogs?”

“The dogs were gone.”

“Gone—where to?”

“I don’t know. There was no way out—and there were no dogs at Kerfol.”

She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above her

head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream. There was a

moment of confusion in the court-room. Some one on the bench was heard

to say: “This is clearly a case for the ecclesiastical authorities”—and

the prisoner’s lawyer doubtless jumped at the suggestion.

After this, the trial loses itself in a maze of cross-questioning and

squabbling. Every witness who was called corroborated Anne de Cornault’s

statement that there were no dogs at Kerfol: had been none for several

months. The master of the house had taken a dislike to dogs, there was

no denying it. But, on the other hand, at the inquest, there had been

long and bitter discussions as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds.

One of the surgeons called in had spoken of marks that looked like

bites. The suggestion of witchcraft was revived, and the opposing

lawyers hurled tomes of necromancy at each other.

At last Anne de Cornault was brought back into court—at the instance of

the same Judge—and asked if she knew where the dogs she spoke of could

have come from. On the body of her Redeemer she swore that she did not.

Then the Judge put his final question: “If the dogs you think you heard

had been known to you, do you think you would have recognized them by

their barking?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“Yes.”

“What dogs do you take them to have been?”

“My dead dogs,” she said in a whisper.... She was taken out of court,

not to reappear there again. There was some kind of ecclesiastical

investigation, and the end of the business was that the Judges disagreed

with each other, and with the ecclesiastical committee, and that Anne de

Cornault was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband’s family,

who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died

many years later, a harmless mad-woman.

So ends her story. As for that of Hervé de Lanrivain, I had only to

apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details. The

evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his family

influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and left soon

afterward for Paris. He was probably in no mood for a worldly life, and

he appears to have come almost immediately under the influence of the

famous M. Arnauld d’Andilly and the gentlemen of Port Royal. A year or

two later he was received into their Order, and without achieving any

particular distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his

death some twenty years later. Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by

a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a

narrow brow. Poor Hervé de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as I

looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the

Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate. After all, in the

course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved

romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal....