J Oi 2189 B32 H53 UB. Y INIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 6^ -^ H^3 D'Aurevilly thc13iabolist By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES. THE lid is lifting. Not the alcoholic lid, but the literary lid. Mars has pried the top off. Beneath, Continental literature is taking a squint at America, and we, on the other hand, are beginning to display a healthy curiosity about the great writers of the continent that pro- duced man-sized literature. Russia, France, Italj', Spain and Belgium are no longer only the picnic gi'ounds of the Chi- cago tourist. Their lives have heretofore been roimded in a Baedeker. To tlie left, the famous Steppes, ladies and gentlemen; to the right, Paris, home of Louis the Fourteenth ; to the south you will perceive Italy, janitor of the Coli- seum and Pompeii, which you have all heard about; that is Spain, where the Alhambra — and so forth. ■^niis is passed. The Continental mas- ters are being translated and eaten a I' America! ne — all in a lump, en casserole, scrambled. But though we get indiges- tion of the wit and develop a cerebral corporation, the thing is good. It sounds the knell of the Great British Literary Superstition. It will result in a second declaration,' of independence — this time against the literary oligarchs of Oxford and Cambridge. James Huneker and Ed- gar Sail us were right — there are men in Continental Europe who can write as well as Emerson and a little better than Macaulay! There was Barbey D'Aurevilly, for in- stance. Among Americans he is probably the least known of the great French wri- ters of the last centurv. The Louis Li- D'Aurevilly's Th-e Story Without a Name, translated and introduced by Edg^ar Sal- tus. A beautiful literary combination — D'Aurevilly and Saltus. It is Ritz-Carl- Ibn fare served in plates of jade by nuns in red. It is like reading tbe Book of Job with an introduction by Thomas a Kem.piSi or Don Quixote, with a foreword by Hamlet. I believe that Saltus could have done all that Barbey did; but that Barbey could not have done what Sal- tus did. Saltas's sense of humor is so catastrophic that it swallows up hell; Barbey's sense of hell was so acute that it swallowed up Barbey. Saltus can kid the Furies, josh Parabrahma, and loop- the-loop with the Eternal Return; but Barbey — supremely great artist that he was — is always doing the fee-fi-fo-fum stuff with priests and sleep walkers, crim- son curtains and human hearts (in one oi his stories in Les DiahoUques husband and wife play parlor baseball with a^ child's heart) . As George Moore is a Frank Harris who can write, so Barbey D'Aurevilly plaj'ed Boswell to Satan. He was the observ^ed of all on the Boulevards. He al- ways appeared, in his curious Beau Nash get-up, between the 5 o'clock absinthe and Ihe overture to "The Bohemian Girl" — (is thero one?' Maybe it is "Fra Diavolo" I was thinking of) . He wrote tremendous thrillers in a garret for Stendhal's limited edition of human beings— the Appercep- tive Eight, scattered throughout the world in all time, who spend their years on psy- chical Battery benches scanning the ar- rival of a Leviathanful of ahead-of-the- times geniuses. D'Aurevilly's Les Diaholiqties are starky Hiorrible. They dish up the depths. After dreading them you are hell proof. If Poe, fDante; Hoffmann and Baudelaire ever meet \:\ the cenacle of the tomb, they will prohnbly elect Barbey D'Aurevilly, if not president of their club, then chief angel bouncer. He had monstrous ideas and mirific words in which to embed them. He took the serpents^ -frojn. the heads of the Furies and put them into magnificent ibow cases on the Boulevard — he mean- while headed for a Duchess. "The Story Without a Name" is one of his greatest masterpieces. A town buried in the mountains — the Pit of the human heart and the Pendulum of fatal- ity above it. A priest, a girl who is a somnambulist, a religious mother, a baby born of the priest and the sleepwalker, the suicide of the girl — pins in the heart and the reversion of the priest to type — theft and other incidentals of human na- ture. But no bare outline of the story can give any idea of its power, its stark, mhuman terror, its atmosphere of un-j wholesome damnation. Succubus is the heroine and an Immanent lago the hero. The introduction by Edgar Saltus was done with a diamond dipped in ichor. THE STORY WITHOUT A NAME W6Jt Copyright, 1919, by BRENTANO'S Barbey D'Aurevilly WE usually get what we want, if we know how to want it, but we get too the consequences. Balzac wanted fame. The strumpet came and killed him. Barbey d'Aurevilly wanted obscurity and acquired it so amply that when I presented an earlier translation of The Story Without a Name, a local critic, who contrived to be both com- plimentary and amusing, said I had in- vented Barbey and that the vile story was my own vile work. Inique mais folichon. The Story Without a Name is a mas- terpiece in duo-decimo. Very soberly told, it is unexceeded in fiendishness, [5] OOCT/fl r^r-tTk Introduction except by the Huns and the Conte cruel that Villiers told of the fervent Inquisi- tion. Another man overboard. Out- side the cenacle — w^here he is much overrated — Villiers de I'lsle Adam is remarkably unknown. But that story of his w^ill live when French is a dead language. It may be that Salammbo will survive it. Personally, I would rather have written Salammbo than own New York. For second choice I would take Villiers' little horror and, for third, Barbey's. Barbey's other novels are more col- ored and less poignant. It is not given to every writer to surprise an unsuspect- ing- reader in bed and make him shriek with fright. Barbey did it once and once is enormous. Twice would be excessive. Sacrilege and sorcery, shapes of sin, les vieux castels, th^s^, to- [6] Introduction gether with cognate accessories, he manipulated in an atmosphere charged with shivers and occasionally with chic. Here and there the chic is circumambi- ent. In the odor of that opopanax you might fancy that if he ever stopped writing, it was because of imperative intrigues with incandescent duchesses who, save for him, would be ice. As a matter of fact, his main diversion con- sisted in exchanging the time of day with his concierge. I would give a red pippin to have seen him at it. Otherwise his life was very enviable. He wrote for himself — which is the only way to write — and for thirty-six un- known friends. That is the ideal. Too fair though. Bourget, always perti- nacious, ferreted him out, turned him into copy. [7] Introduction "At the hour when, the curtains drawn, the candles hghted, this alchemist elaborates his work, little he cares whether or not it will interest you. You, the future reader, are ab- sent from his mind. Is there without a world of vulgar sensations and commonplace destinies? He knows nothing of it. He is absorbed in his characters. Yes, in the literal meaning of the word, his characters, for he has projected them from his brain, as Jupiter projected Minerva, engendered and nourished by the purest sub- stance of his being." If I did not know that Bourget wrote the foregoing, I would suspect him of it. Barring only Georges Ohnet, I know of no French writer who has succeeded so perfectly in being both emphatic and banal. Besides, as my friend Willy somewhere remarked: "Quand Ohnet mord c'est pour longtemps." Ohnet is very satisfying. In reading him you realise that nowhere, at any time, has there been anything worse. Bourget [8] Introduction lacks that distinction. He gives the im- pression that there may be. something- worse and yet manages to leave you wondering. Paul de Saint-Victor strums a differ- ent guitar. Hugo said it was a joy to write a book which Saint-Victor would write about. Barbey said nothing. He preferred to be ignored. Here is the s:uitar. fe ' "In Barbey d'Aurevilly's work there is some- thing brutal and exquisite, violent and tender. It is like the philters that sorcerers brewed in which were asphodels and vipers, tiger's blood and honey. Never has language been raised to a prouder paroxysm." One may wonder what a proud par- oxysm is, but otherwise the image leaps. Barbey wrote on a piano. You might guess it, precisely as you might guess that Hugo wrote in a pulpit. [91 Introduction Hugo lifted the pulpit to where all of this world and portions of the next could see it. Barbey turned the piano into a palette. After Balzac it was as- sumed that no one could startle a printer. Balzac wrote on proof-sheets, rewrote the proofs, made abracadabras of them and ran in debt for the costs. He owed as much as Dumas made. Dumas was prince of the pen — without at all being- lord of language — and Balzac the galley-slave. Fame has her forms. Barbev's method was more ornate. On his piano were inks — gold, blue, red, green, black. Every emotion has its color, every note in music has. Rim- baud, a poet — one of the poetes maudits — sang a sonnet about the colors of the vowels. Unphilosophic persons who get in a temper may not see red but [lo'] Introduction psychically they radiate it. The aura of the jealous shows not green but yel- low. The aurse of sweethearts and swains are blue. What recent occult- ism has discovered, Barbey divined. According to the emotion that he de- picted he used the corresponding ink. It was certainly ornate. Yet, as no one except his printer saw the rainbows, it was perhaps also insane. The rain- bows had another charm. I have ex- amined a few of them. Not a correc- tion in the lot. They were painted with a pen that ran. An ability to write in that fashion may indicate the genius, but hardly the purist. Geniuses often write badly and as much the better for them. Bal- zac is atrocious. It is only in inferior artists that you get what young ladies call style. Style consists in sandpaper, [11] Introduction the choice of words and in so manipulat- ing both that occasionally the words seem to leap, laugh and explode. Grammar is an adjunct, not an obli- gation. No grammarian ever wrote a thing that is fit to read. Barbey's sentences are none the less canonical. How, without revision, he managed it, is conjectural only on the supposition that he rehearsed them, at the top of his lungs, as Flaubert did, be- fore putting them down. In a minor matter, he had another similarity with Flaubert. A minor matter may be mo- mentous. Any conversation with a stranger gave him a pain in the stom- ach. He was shy and yet, through an agreeable contradiction, superb or so re- garded himself. The leveled eyeglass, the curl of the lip, the easy insolence, the attitude which it pleased him to affect, [12] Introduction all that was modeled after Brummel whose cigarette stumps he had pocketed. Zola called him a clown. Well, why not? A clown is often brilliant, which Zola never was. Moreover, Barbey's sentences in addition to being canonical are often profound, and any profundities of Zola could play tag on the head of a pin. But Zola had his hour. During it he was Jupiter Feuilletonant. As such, homage was indicated. All he got from Barbey was an ignoring stare. In return, Zola ridiculed him, laughed at his clothes, at his garret. Perhaps aft- erward he wished he had held his pen. In a cafe that Barbey frequented, Valles, the mad anarchist, shouted: "We want the heads of a hundred thou- sand imbeciles." Negligently Barbey 3^awned: "Zola's ought to suffice." At that, some one cut in: "He will be [13] Introduction astonished when he hears it." Now for the superb. Barbey raised his eyeglass: "Since civilization began, men such as I, have been created to astonish men such as he." A trifle too superb per- haps, but finer than Zola's brickbats. Barbey came by it naturally. Villiers was more or less authentically comte and claimed a more or less authentic descent from a problematic crusader. But if I have the facts correctly, Barbey descended from one of the numbered Louis' of France. Nowadays, the blood of kings — unless you can take it away from them — is not much to boast of. Yet, at the time, it produced the superb which Barbey and Villiers paraded. Apart from that, Barbey was Gautier in black. Gautier was a poet, and if I bring that coal to Newcastle it is only that with it [14] Introduction I may note that a poet is not a human being. I lived with one once — but not twice. There are towers of jade to which the muse may come but from which sanity departs. Gautier's en- thusiasms were very violent. They were splendid, lavish and noisy. He too had a palette. On Barbey's piano there was ink of every color. Gautier used but one. It was gold. But was it with ink that he wrote? The first Francis of France wrote with a dia- mond, which is the proper pen for a sovereign. In the Emaux et Camees Gautier commends a humming-bird's feather. I doubt that he ever tried one but I suspect that, drunk every morn- ing, as a poet should be, with the nectar he had sipped in dream, he kept a cup of it before him. What Barbey's brew was, Saint-Victor has told. [15] Introduction There is a deeper antithesis. Gautier was pagan. Before him was the joy of Hfe. Barbey was a CathoHc. Behind him was the fear of hell. Gautier went to Spain and afterward wrote about Russia. Whether he went there is un- certain. He said he had and he be- lieved it. Huysmans passed an evening at Henry's bar — around the corner from the rue de la Paix — and believed he had been in London. But if Gautier omitted to go to* Russia, he made himself at home in the Pays des songes. Barbey followed him to that realm, strange and unique, which all of us interpret tem- peramentally and which each must visit alone. Back of the doors that close be- hind our birth crouch shapes beautiful or diabolic, shapes fashioned perhaps in our anterior lives.. In the land of dreams they greet us. Occultists say [16] Introduction that these shapes are not figments of fancy but actual entities that move and have their being as, in the gulfs of sleep, many of us do move and have our being, on another plane. It is hazardous to argue with an occultist. The only safe way is to agree. But real or unreal, the shapes that Gautier met had mouths of many tunes. Apart from inflammatory duchesses, those that Barbey saw were silent. They came clad in grey or else blood-red, with faces cicatrised and ashen. They fed him sorrow with a long spoon. They fed him horror also. I think he enjoyed it. Madmen have a point of view that interests them and which, I am sure, is very enviable. Barbey'o enjoyment induced anthropo- phobia which, in his case, was not an aversion to humanity but a desire to be undisturbed at his piano, alone with [17] Introduction the hypnogogic hallucinations that it evoked. At the time, he too had had his hour. In age he resembled Dante, not phys- ically merely, but figuratively. He also had been in hell. But in his youth he stood for Balzac's portrait of Lucien de Rubempre. Fame ogled Lucien and the hussy made eyes at Barbey. On the boulevards he was Somebody. As he passed before the terraced cafes, you knew it. "Regarde un peu! C'est Bar- bey d'Aurevilly!" He was worth it. If you had not known better you would have said: ''Mais non, c'est d'Orsay!" The same air, if you please : the same costume ; the blue coat, high-collared, gold-buttoned, short-waisted, long-tailed: the skin- tight trousers; the curled-brim beaver; the jeweled cane, the jeweled snuff-box, [18] Introduction the fob, the neckcloth, that air! — and the insolence on the tip of the tongue. Not so long ago, either. I saw him at a moment when, just across the Channel, there were Gaiety Girls, a gardenia in your buttonhole and the inflated pro- prieties of the Victorian regime. In that fashion he promenaded, al- ways alone. Meanwhile something had happened. It is said that in the temple of Zeus Lycasos, men lost their shadow, their future as well. Villiers may have ventured there. He disappeared. He was gone for years, though where no one knew. Barbey also executed a fugue, perhaps to the Cevennes, where this horrible story, the Story without a Smile, occurred. But meanwhile something had happened, some incident that contrived to be catastrophic. It drove him away, not omitting to put a [19] Introduction mark on him and more profoundly than Brummel — whom he had known — put another. It made him seek what the soHtary ever do seek, obscurity. He courted it, as imbeciles court fame. Thereafter it was only at his garret in the rue Rousselet — a garret furnished, I was told, in buhl and ormulu, the rickety remnants of early ease — it was only there that fame presumed to knock. At Caen, when Brummel enter- tained, his servant bawled: "The Duchess of Devonshire! His royal highness, the Regent! My lord Avan- ly!" To the phantom guests Brum- mel bowed, aired his wit. Barbey had no servant. It was he who opened the door and to guests nobler than those that appeared at Caen. Fame came and with her Love, sister [20] Introduction visions, indistinguishably fair, indis- tinguishably false. On the threshold, with lips that said, Drink me! with arms that cried. Take us! before him they stood. The door closed on them. Bar- bey was back at his piano, disdainful of either, indifferent to both, a host still, but the host of wraiths brain-created and not desire-born. Gautier had a ballet in his mind. Bar- bey a morgue. Of the two, I like Bar-, bey best, not because he is superior — he is not — but because affection does not always go with the river. Besides, it is easy enough to like an author whom you have read, though, by the same token, it is easier still to loathe him. Georges Ohnet makes me vomit. Gautier had two daughters. One married Catulle Mendes; the other, Emile Bergerat. Mendes wrote a hun- [21] Introduction dred novels and not a single book. Ber- gerat wrote one book, and if you can obtain a copy, you will get glimmers of the charm made man which Gautier was. Barbey had daughters also, daughters of dream, born on a piano which was a palette. Nowadays, like Bergerat's book, they are mainly o. p. Books have their destinies, ^schylus dedicated his tragedies to Time. Time, always the gentleman, acknowledged the com- pliment by storing in camphor as many of them as the fates and the fathers allowed. Barbey, more subtly, I think, dedicated his wares to Art. Time passes, nations crumble, only art sur- vives. There are sunetoi who still swear by ^schylus. His sublimity is too antique for me. But I can and do admire Barbey, whose art, which en- [22] Introduction dures, has in it the malignity of the gargoyles of Notre Dame — monsters leaning from the turrets that they may mark across the ages the sameness of the joys and griefs of man. What but monsters could be compelled to do that? Barbey created a brood that differs from the griffons and chimeras of Our Lady, yet only in this, the litter is alive and therefore more horrible. The effect, very comforting in itself^ achieved its purpose. Popularity never annoyed him, fame he let pass by. Gautier's karma was fairer — or more vulgar, according to the point of view. He was the torch of an epoch of which Barbey is now the ghost. Edgar Saltus. New York, February, ipip. [23] THE STORY WITHOUT A NAME The Story Without a Name ONE day just prior to the French Revolution, in a village at the foot of the Cevennes, between vespers and evening service, a Capuchin was preaching. The church was dim, and the dimness was heightened by the mountains that surrounded it, which embraced it, and which about the ulterior houses rose sheerly into space. The descent was a circular pathway twisted like a corkscrew. The moun- tains were very green ; there were rush- [27] The Story Without a Name ing streams, and silver bubbles, and trout so plentiful that you could catch them with the hand; but in regard to situation no village v^as ever more desolately placed. A man's birthplace is like his mother, he is supposed to love her whether she is worthy or not. Were it otherwise, human beings to whom the open is a necessity could never have remained in a pit such as that. Merely the desire to breathe would have sent them over the mountain walls. I lived there nearly a month; during that time I was like a crushed titan, physically overwhelmed by the impression which those moun- tains gave. Even now, in thinking of them, I feel their weight on my heart. The inhabitants reminded me of miners living in the under-earth, and again of those captives of earlier cloisters who [28] The Story Without a Name prayed, year in, year out, forgotten in shadowy crypts. As for the village, I might compare it to a pen-sketch in China ink, a collec- tion of old houses blackened by age. But it possessed a peculiarity of its own, the blackness became blacker, a black on black, one which the perpendicular shadows of the enveloping heights in- creased. It resembled nothing so much as a prison where light never enters, where the walls are too steep for the sun to scale. Sometimes at high noon I could not catch a glimpse of day. It is a place where Byron should have writ- ten his Darkness; it is a place where Rembrandt might have created that ef- fect of his, the absence of light, or rather it is there he could have found it. In summer, when the inhabitants look up at the blue garret window that hangs [29] The Story Without a Name a thousand feet above them, they are not wholly sure whether the day is fair or not. On this particular day, however, the window was not blue; it was gray. Clouds had closed the aperture. The bottle was corked. The entire population was then at church, an austere edifice, built in the the thirteenth century, in which — the sombre twilight aiding — not even lynx eyes, had there been any, could have read a word from the prayers. As is customary, the candles had been extin- guished at the beginning of the sermon, and the congregation, huddled together like tiles on a roof, were as invisible to the preacher as he, separated and afar in the pulpit, was invisible to them. But though they could not see very clearly, at least they could hear. It is only in the choir, runs the proverb, that Cap- [30] The Story Without a Name uchins talk through the nose. The Cap- uchin who was preaching then had a voice which was not alone vibrant, but resonant enough to announce the most terrible dogmas of the Church. He was then announcing them. He was preach- ing of hell. Everything about the church, the severity of the style, the approach of night that entered in waves, profounder and more insistent each moment, lent to the speech of the speaker an extraor- dinary relief. The statues of the saints, veiled in the draperies with which they are covered during Lent, were like mysterious phantoms, motion- less in their niches; and the preacher, whose indistinct silhouette swayed across the white column against which the pulpit leaned, seemed a phantom also. You would have said, a specter [31] The Story Without a Name preaching to ghosts. Even the thunder of his voice, powerful in its actuality though it w^as, and yet which appeared to belong to no one, seemed to fall from above. The impression of it all was so thrill- ing, the attention so great, the silence so absolute, that when, for a moment, he stopped to draw breath you heard from without the sob of rillets trickling along the mountain-sides, adding to the melan- choly of shadows the malancholy of waters displaced. The eloquence which the preacher displayed must surely have been height- ened by the ambient influences that I have described. In listening to it every ear was turned, every head was bowed, save two, the heads of a mother and daughter. That evening, after the ser- mon, the preacher was to sup with them ; [32] The Story Without a Name they were curious to see him, and they bent forward in an effort to catch a glimpse of their guest, lost in the penumbra of the arch. It may be remembered that, in those days, strangers, members of some distant order, preached during Lent throughout the parishes of France. These wandering servants of God, the people, with the unconscious poetry which is theirs, called the Swallows of Lent. And when one of them alighted in hamlet or city a nest was made for him in the foremost mansion of the place, a form of hospitality which rich and religious households gratefully dis- pensed, and which, in the provinces where life is monotonous, lent a peculiar interest to the preacher, who each year brought with him that aroma of the unknown and the faraway which the [33] The Story Without a Name isolated love to inhale. The most rapid seductions that the chronicles of love recount are those accomplished by- travelers who have merely passed, and of whom that passing constituted the unique attraction. The monk who was fulminating then on the terrors of hell hardly seemed apt to sow anything else than the fear of God. And as he fulminated he did not know, nor did the two women who were trying to catch a glimpse of him know, that the hell he preached he was to leave in their hearts. But that evening as they left the church, their pardonable if provincial curiosity was unsatisfied. They had not caught a glimpse of the terrible preacher of a, terrible creed; and con- cerning him they had no remarks to make, except regarding his ability, [341 The Story Witliout a Name which seemed to them very great. As they wrapped themselves in their furs, they told each other that they had never heard a better sermon. Both were fervent believers, and both, according to the sacramental expression, pious as saints. They were called the Ladies de Ferjol. That evening they returned home quite animated. Heretofore, dur- ing Lent, they had seen and entertained many a preacher; there had been Pre- montres, Genovefains, Dominicans, and Eudists, but a Capuchin never. No one of that mendicant order of St. Francis, of which the costume — and costumes al- ways more or less preoccupy women — is so poetic and picturesque, had ever passed that way. Mme. de Ferjol, who had traveled, had seen it before; but her daughter, who was only sixteen, knew no other Capuchin than the one which [35] The Story Without a Name on the corner of the mantel in the din- ing-room served as barometer — the charming, old - fashioned barometer, which, like so many other charming things, exists no more. The monk who presently caused him- self to be announced, and who then en- tered the room where the ladies awaited him, did not in the least resemble the Capuchin that hooded himself in stormy weather and unhooded himself in fair. He was of a different type from the one invented by the charming imagination of our fathers. In the France of olden time, even in days of faith, there was much hilarity over both priest and monk, but espe- cially over the latter. Later, in a less fervent epoch, the wicked and witty regent who laughed at everything said to a Capuchin who called himself un- [36] The Story Without a Name worthy of his calling, "But what the deuce are you worthy of if you are not worthy of being a Capuchin?" The eighteenth century, which disdained his- tory, as Mirabeau did, a disdain that his- tory will repay as it has already repaid Mirabeau, forgot that Charles V had been a Capuchin, and during its entire span covered the order with ridicule and epigram. The Capuchin who appeared that evening before the Ladies de Ferjol was manifestly not made for either ridicule or epigram. He was about thirty: tall, robust, imposing. He wore a short beard curled like that of Hercules, rather dark, the color of bronze. The world admires pride, and his expression, which asked no indulgence because of his cloth, had in it nothing of the volun- tary humility of his order. Neither had [37] The Story Without a Name his attitude. Merely in stretching his hand he had the air of one commandine: respect. And what a hand it was! — a hand so superb that the whiteness of it, issuing from the wide sleeve, startled; a hand royally beautiful that stretched imperially for alms. As is customary in the homes of the devout, the servant, Agathe Thousard by name, had already given him water for the feet, and they now shone in their sandals like marble, sculptured by Phid- ias. To the ladies he bowed very dis- tantly, after the Oriental fashion, the arms crossed on the breast, and as he bowed, no one, not even Voltaire, would have jested at him. The red buttons of the Cardinalate were never to star his robe, but he looked worthy to bear them ; and as the ladies curtsied it occurred to them that the voice that they had [38] The Story Without a Name heard falling from the pulpit through the increasing shadows of night was exactly suited to the man. It being Lent, and this priest of ab- stinence having come to represent and preach it, they offered him the usual Lenten repast, string-beans cooked in oil, celery salad, beets mixed with an- chovies, tunny-fish, and stewed oysters. Therewith was a bottle of Chateau du Pape, but that, though it was a Catholic wine, he refused. Of the food, however, he ate heartily, and to his hostesses he seemed, while devoid of affectation, fully possessed of the dignity and severity of his cloth. The hood, which on entering the room he threw back on his shoulders, disclosed a neck that might have be- longed to a Roman proconsul, and an enormous cranium polished as a mirror and circled with a coronet of hair, which [39] The Story Without a Name was bronzed like his beard, and curled as it. The members of his order, who are mendicants in the name of Christ, are never anywhere out of place, religion having placed them on a footing of equality with the notables of the earth, and his manner was that of one accus- tomed to the best society. In spite of this he was not sympathetic to either of his hostesses. To their thinking he was lacking in the affable simplicity which other priests who had been their guests had displayed. He was imposing, and yet he indisposed. He made them un- comfortable, ill at ease, though how or why they were unable to decide. In the chill of his eyes, in the expression of his mouth, there was an audacity startling and significant. He looked [40] The Story Without a Name like a man of whom you say: He is capable of anything. One evening, when a sort of familiar- ity had sprung up between him and the gentlewomen, Mme. de Ferjol, who had been scrutinizing him from beneath the shade of the lamp, murmured, reflec- tively: "Father, I wonder what you would be if you were not a priest?" Apparently the remark amused him. He smiled, but what a smile ! Mme. de Ferjol never forgot it, and later, it stabbed her heart with a horrible con- viction. As a matter of fact, his physiognomy was little in harmony with the humility of his calling, yet during the forty days which he passed in the house, and in spite, too, of the remark that involun- [41] . The Story Without a Name tarily had escaped her, Mme. de Ferjol had not a fault to find with him. In speech, in bearing, in everything-, he was irreproachable. "He would be better off in La Trappe than in a monastery," Mme. de Ferjol said to her daughter when they were alone, and the conversation turned on the monk and the audacity of his ex- pression. For La Trappe, because of the silence which is observed there, and the severity of its regulations, is, in the opinion of the world, particularly adapted to those who have a crime to expiate. Mme. de Ferjol was gifted with great penetration, and although for years she had been highly devout, yet the benev- olence that religion inculcates in no wise prevented her from exercising her pene- tration, which, parenthetically, was that . [42] The Story Without a Name of a woman of the world. She was in- telligent, quite able to appreciate the eloquence which Father Riculf dis- played — a mediaeval name that fitted him perfectly ; and yet the eloquence at- tracted her as little as did the man. It was the same way with her daughter, whom that eloquence frightened. To the two gentlewomen the elo- quence and the man were equally dis- tasteful, so much so even that they did not confess to him. The other women of the village fairly doted on him, and during the entire time that he was among them his confessional was thronged. His hostesses were the only ones who remained away, an abstention that surprised their neighbors. But at church, as at home, these ladies seemed to have discovered about him a mys- terious and isolating circle, and at [43] The Story Without a Name the circumference of that circle they stopped. It may be, through the intuition which we all possess, they divined that he was inimical to their happiness. 44 II THE Baroness de Ferjol cared little for the hamlet in which she lived. She was born elsewhere, in Normandy, and her parents were people of rank. It was her marriage, one purely of love, that had thrown her in what, when thinking of the horizons and luxuriant landscapes of her birthplace, she dis- dainfully described as an ant-hole. The man she loved had brought her there, and for years that love had moved the mountains back and bathed the valley with increasing light. Born Jacqueline - Marie - Louise d'Olonde, she had been captivated by the baron, then a captain of an infantry [45] The Story Without a Name regiment which, during the last years of the reign of Louis XVI, was quar- tered at St. Sauveur as a guard against a possible attack by the English. The camp was but a small one, and those who saw it are dead long since. My grandmother was one of the latter; its officers she had sumptuously enter- tained, and during my childhood she often spoke of the camp with that ac- cent old people have when speaking of things they have seen. The Baron de Ferjol she had known very well. He had danced with Mile. d'Olonde in the best houses of St. Sau- veur at a time when there was much dancing going on, and he had turned the young woman's head completely. He was, my grandmother declared, very handsome. He wore a white uni- form, with collar and facings of blue. [46] The Story Without a Name He was fair, moreover, and women think that blue is particularly suited to blonds. The surprise of my grandmother on learning that he had turned Mile. d'Olonde's head had not therefore been very great. He had turned it so com- pletely even, that the young woman, who was considered pride itself, con- sented to an elopement. Mile. d'Olonde was an orphan. The society in which she moved, and which to this day has changed but little, was orderly, moral, religious, Jansenist even. As a consequence, the scandal which her elopement created was terrific; her guardians had no choice; they consented to her marriage with the baron, who thereupon took her away to the Ce- vennes, where his home was. Unfortunately, the baron died young. [47] The Story Without a Name He left his wife in the depths of a moun- tain funnel which he had widened by his presence and his love, and of which the walls, tightening in on her, threw an- other black veil over a heart already in black. With a courage of her own she remained in that pit. When the sky passed from her heart she did not try to ascend the suffocating mountains in an effort to find another above her head. She crouched in the gulf and grief of widowhood. For a moment she thought of return- ing to Normandy, but the memory of her elopement, and the scorn which might be her greeting prevented. She had no wish to wound her wings against casements that she herself had broken. Practical, as every Norman is, she cared little for the beauty of externals. Where there was none, its absence was [48] The Story Without a Name unnoticed. There was nothing dreamy about her, her disposition was not one to be affected by such a thing as home- sickness. By nature she was both firm and equable, but her temperament was ardent. That indeed her marriage had only too clearly shown. The ardor, however, was concen- trated, and when after the death of her husband she flung herself into religion, suddenly she became severe. The melancholy hamlet in which she was entombed seemed to her quite as fit to live in as to die in. The over- hanging mountains that shadowed it suited her perfectly well. When a pic- ture is dreary the frame should be dark. At the age of forty the Baroness de Ferjol was a tall, slim brunette, who seemed interiorly illuminated by an un- seen fire, one that burned beneath cin- [49] Tlie Story Without a Name ders in the marrow of her bones. Women admitted that formerly she had been handsome — but not attractive, they added, with that pleasure which such attenuations usually procure. But her beauty, that had been disagreeable to other women merely because it was overwhelming, was buried with the man she had loved. When he died she ceased to think of it. He was the one mirror in which she had admired her- self, and in losing him who had been to her the universe, she reconveyed the ardor of her love to her child. But the modesty which ardent temperaments frequently possess had prevented her from displaying to her husband the vio- lence of the passion which he had aroused; and in the same manner she concealed her affection from her child, whom she loved more because she was [50] The Story Without a Name the child of her husband than because she was her own; in fact, because even in maternity she was more wife than mother. With perfect unconsciousness and with an entire absence of affectation, Mme. de Ferjol exhibited to her daugh- ter, and for that matter to everyone else, a sort of rigid majesty, which her daughter, as everyone else, was forced to endure. When you saw her, the un- sympathetic ascendancy which she pos- sessed was instantly understood. Her figure, which was that of a matron; her proud and chiseled features; the black coils of her hair, which on the temples were nearly white, rendering them aus- terer and almost cruel, and which in their unpitying gray seemed to have claws to cling with and rest there among the resisting coils of black — in all this [51] The Story Without a Name there was something too imperious, too despotic, too Roman for her to have been otherwise than as she was. The sight of her was enough to draw an ex- clamation from the most ordinary ob- server, but to a painter or a poet that wan widow would have recalled the mother of Spartacus or the mother of Coriolanus. And — mark the stupidity of fate! — the woman who possessed this energetic and desolate appearance, who seemed created to tame the haughtiest of rebels, and in the name of their fathers command heroes at war, had absolutely nothing to do save educate and bring up a poor little innocent girl. There was indeed nothing more in- nocent, nothing more girlish, than Lasthenie de Ferjol. She was then just emerging from childhood. All her life she had lived in the hamlet, without [52] The Story Without a Name leaving its sunless humidity once. She was the lily of the valley, the lily that loves the shadov^s, and grows best in the corners of garden walls where the sun never shines. Lasthenie had all the purity of that white flower, and some- thing of its mystery also. In character and physiognomy she differed entirely from her mother. On seeing her you wondered that such fragility could come from such force. Her face was one that the world considered pretty rather than beautiful, a subject of which the world knows nothing; she was slim-waisted and for her age well developed, a com- bination noticeable in accomplished women. Her hair was as fair as her father's — the ideal baron who after a fashion of the hour sometimes put pink powder in his own — a little eccentricity that afterwards, at the beginning of the [53] The Story Without a Name present century, the Abbe Delille, in spite of his ugliness, which was atro- cious, adopted for himself. But Lasthe- nie had no other powder than that which is natural to the plumage of the mel- ancholy and tender dove. Beneath her hair, her eyes, framed in the dead-white of her skin, shone as large and as bril- liant as certain mirrors., which, because perhaps of their depth and purity, re- flect a shimmer of green. And these eyes, pale gray-green — the color of the leaf of the willow, lover of the waters — were veiled with long, dark, gold lashes, that rested wearily on the por- celain of her cheek. Everything about her resembled them. The languor of her bearing was the languor of those lashes. In my life I have known but one person who possessed that languid charm, and never shall I forget her. [54] The Story Without a Name She limped, and divinely. Lasthenie did not limp, but she seemed to. She had the fascination of women who do limp slightly, and whose limp sways the gown with adorable undulations. Briefly, then, in all her being she exhaled that heavenly weakness before which men of strength and heart bend the knee. She loved her mother, but she feared her. She loved her as certain believers love God, tremblingly. Mme. de Ferjol had never shown, and never could show, that abandonment of confidence which mothers whose tenderness overflows in- spire in their children. And with this mother, imposing and mournful, who seemed to live in and share the silence of her husband's tomb, unrestraint and confidence were impossible. And so it came about that Lasthenie, [55] The Story Without a Name thus repelled, lost herself in dream; and in the depths of a cup whose rim was a mountain-chain, she lived, deluged with shadows, alone with thoughts which, unlike the mountain-chain, had no zig- zag path whereby an ascent could have been effected. She hid her thoughts and feelings, and yet she was artless, though to have found that artlessness you would have had to seek it among the wellsprings of her being, where it bubbled as water bubbles when a hand is plunged beneath the surface. No one had ever thought of plunging into Lasthenie's soul. Her mother adored her, the more perhaps because she resembled the man whom she had so wholly loved. She enjoyed her in silence, she feasted on her with- out saying a word. Had her piety been a little less fervent, a trifle less rigid, [56] The Story Without a Name she would have eaten her up with kisses, and in the warmth of caresses a heart naturally timid might have unfolded like a bud. But in restraining herself, she restrained her daughter. She held her hand like a wall against the source of those sentiments that seek their rest in a mother's heart, and which, not find- ing it, flow back. To our own misfortune the law which governs hearts is crueller than the law that governs things. Once the hand that made the wall and opposed the ex- pansion is withdrawn, the source, freed from the obstacle, begins to flow anew, more impetuously than before; but to the heart there always comes a moment when sentiments absorb themselves and disappear, just as blood in mortal wounds ceases to flow through the open flesh. And even then blood can still [57] Tlie Story Without a Name be drawn, while sentiments too long re- strained coagulate. In this manner, although mother and daughter had never been separated, al- though in the little details of life they always acted in concert, and although they loved each other dearly, they were alone, isolated in an isolation shared jointly. Mme. de Ferjol, who was strong by nature, and who in the hallu- cinations of memory had ever before her the man whom she had loved with a de- gree of passion that seemed culpable to her now, felt the isolation less than Lasthenie. With Lasthenie it was different. She had no past. Her dormant faculties were about to awake, and the isolation made her suffer — vaguely, it is true, and more as an indisposition might than ac- tual pain. Yet that was because every- [58] The Story Without a Name thing within her still was vague. Then, too, from the cradle up to the present hour of her life, more or less she had al- ways suffered. The misery of life con- sists in becoming accustomed to certain things. And Lasthenie had become as accustomed to the melancholy of her iso- lated childhood as she had to the melan- choly of the land in which she was born, one which dropped upon her its pitiful ray of Hght, and shut out the horizon with its mountainous walls. She had become accustomed to these things just as she had become accustomed to the melancholy solitude of her home. For her mother, who was rich, and belonged to an epoch in which classes that were to disappear had not yet ceased to exist, saw very Httle of the hamlet, where, so far as society went, there was really nothing for a woman like herself. [59] The Story Without a Name When she had come there with her husband, she was so intoxicated with happiness that she would not have stirred for the world. It seemed to her then that some of the happiness would be taken from her, that it would be pro- faned, did she permit herself to be drawn into contact with others. And when that happiness passed with the passing of the man whom she adored, she asked consolation of no one. She lived alone without manifesting any af- fectation of solitude or of grief; civil to everyone, but civil with that chill which dismisses without appeal, yet which is without harshness, and does not wound. The little hamlet understood it per- fectly. Mme. de Ferjol was too much above the common run for anyone to be annoyed at an attitude which the death of her husband sufficiently explained. [60] The Story Without a Name It was taken for granted that she lived only for her daughter; and, knowing the mother to be rich, the possessor of a large estate in Normandy, it was ru- mored that when the daughter was of marriageable age she would go back with her to where her estate and fortune were. In the neighborhood there were no suitable suitors for Mile, de Ferjol, and in the event of marriage no one believed that Mme. de Ferjol would consent to a separation from a daughter from whom she had never separated, and whom, even when the question of education arose, she had not permitted to enter the convent of the neighboring town. Mme. de Ferjol attended to her daugh- ter's education herself. She taught her all she knew, which was little. But in those days the instruction of young girls [61] The Story Without a Name of good families was limited to noble sentiments and fine manners, with which they got along very well. Once in society they divined everything with- out having learned a thing. Nowadays they are taught everything, and under- stand nothing. Mme. de Ferjol, con- vinced that, in being near her, Lasthe- nie would always possess the sentiments and the manners of her rank, directed her daughter's attention to the worship of God. Tender by nature, endowed with a soul that was tenderness itself, Lasthenie turned to religion naturally. In prayer she sought to express those things concerning which her mother never asked; yet in the confidences she gave to an altar she could not forget the possibility of confiding to one who had suffered her to make no confidences at all. And it was perhaps because of that [62] The Story WitJiout a Name that religion failed to bring her the de- light it gives to those that have unques- tioning faith. There w^as in her some- thing more, or something less, than that which is requisite to those who are happy only in God and through Him. She filled every duty of a Christian with the simplicity of perfect faith; she fol- lowed her mother to church, with her visited the poor, partook of communion with her; and yet none of these things placed on the dead white of her fore- head the ray of light that belongs to youth. Disturbed by the melancholy which the girl exhibited, and which in view of the purity of her life seemed inex- plicable, now and again Mme. de Ferjol would ask: "Is it because you are not fervent enough?" [63] The Story Without a Name Instead of the doubt and severity of that question, if the mother had only taken the child in her arms and let her there pour out all that was in her mind, her eyes, and heart, it would have been better for both of them. But that she did not do; she resisted even the tempta- tion; and as Lasthenie knew no one but her mother, there was no one in whom she could confide. Her soul was suf- focating, and at the time when this story begins the pity of it is that she did not die of that suffocation. [64] Ill TEN o'clock in the morning. Lent was almost over. It was the day before Easter, and the Ladies de Ferjol, after assisting at the service and the washing of the altars, had returned to their home. The house was in the center of a little square that alone separated it from the church. The church itself was of the thirteenth century; its frontal was Ro- manic, crushed in, so to speak, and with an energy that recalled the barbarian who flung himself fiat on his face before the cross of our Lord. The square was paved with cat's-heads — triangular stones; and it was so small that these [65] The Story Without a Name ladies, who haunted the church, could, when it it rained, cross without an um- brella. The house in which they lived was an immense edifice of no particular style, built subsequent to the church. The ancestors of the Baron de Ferjol had occupied it for generations, and as a consequence it was sadly out of date. It was antique and uncomfortable, one of those habitations at which architects jeer, and the possessors decline to part with unless actual want compels. The black corners of dilapidated homes where perhaps the ghosts of progenitors crouch, where childhood has played and age has come, cry out against such sac- rilege. Mme. de Ferjol, who was born else- where, might have readily rid herself of the building, but she had preferred to keep it. There were the traditions of [66] Tlie Story Without a Name her husband's family to be respected, and besides, as in the City Celestial, this gaunt, gray, haggard house held for her walls of gold, walls that were indestruct- ible, aglow with glitter, built by Love in days of Delight. It was with the idea of sheltering the progeny, in whose multiplication our forefathers took a religious pride, that the vast house was originally built; but now, since death had come, and its sole occupants were two women, lost in its immensity, it seemed vaster than before. It was cold, too, uninviting, imposing indeed, because it was spacious, and space makes a house magnificent as it does a landscape; yet, such as it was, it interested everyone that visited it. The ceilings were remote, the corridors in- tersected, and it had a stairway steep as the stairs of a clock tower, and so broad [67] The Story Without a Name that fourteen horses could mount its hundred steps abreast, a feat that had been accompHshed, it was said, during the war of the Chemises Blanches and Jean Cavalier. This gigantic stairway seemed to have been built for another house. It was perhaps all that remained of some castle that had fallen to pieces, one per- haps which the misfortunes of the hour and of the people who inhabited it, pre- vented from being re-erected on the plan of its primitive magnificence. It was there that Lasthenie, without companions of her age, without the games she might have shared with them, separated from all things by the grief and forbidding piety of her mother, passed the long hours of her joyless childhood. It may be that the empti- ness of that immense stairway made her [68] Tlie Story Without a Name feel more keenly the other emptiness of an existence which a mother's love should have filled; and it may be — like those predestined to misfortune w^ho torment themselves while awaiting the torment to come — it may be that the girl loved to mingle the weariness of that spacious stairway with the weari- ness of her empty youth. Generally speaking, Mme. de Ferjol left her room in the morning and did not return until night, a circumstance which might have led her to fancy that Lasthenie was amusing herself in the garden; whereas, in reaHty, the child sat hour after hour, forgotten on the dumb, sonorous stair. A hand on her cheek, the elbow on her knee, in that attitude which the genius of Albert Diirer gave to the figure of Melancholy, she sat congealing in the [69] The Story Without a Name stupor of dream as though in a vision she had seen her Destiny ascend and re- descend those terrible stairs. Surely if places have an influence, then this gloomy mansion — which looked like an immense bat that had fallen w^ith wings outstretched at the foot of the mountains against which it lay — must have added a shadow of its own to the other shadows from which the immaculate forehead of the girl emerged. In so far as Mme. de Ferjol was con- cerned her own melancholy could not have been increased. The influence of the place could not affect a bronze oxid- ized by grief. After the death of her husband, who had always lived largely and well, she plunged into reHgion to cool her heart. Every trace of luxury disappeared. The horses and carriages [70] The Story Without a Name were sold, the servants dismissed — all, in fact, save one, Agathe, who had grown old in her service, and who had come with her from Normandy. This change gave the gossips of the village something to cackle over. Mme. de Ferjol was accused of avarice. But presently the accusation fell of itself. The good that she did for the poor, though done secretly, became known, and at last, little by little, there came to the gossips a confused understanding of the beneficence and good quahties which this gentlewoman, who had with- drawn into retirement and the dignity of grief, really possessed. At church — and she was seldom seen elsewhere — a respectful curiosity surrounded her; and there, majestic in appearance, gar- mented in long, black robes, motionless, among the tumbling arches and squat [71] The Story Without a Name pillars of the rough Romanic edifice, she looked as might some former Mer- ovingian queen that had issued from the tomb. And, after a fashion of her own, she was a sort of queen. She reigned un- consciously, without even wishing to, over the entire hamlet, which was not, it is true, a kingdom. But at least she reigned; and if, unlike the former kings of Persia, she was not invisible to her subjects, she resembled them by the dis- tance she put between herself and the little world in which she lived, but with which she had nothing in common. Easter that year was in April, and the Saturday preceding it happened to be one of those workdays which in the provinces are almost solemn. A year's linen had to be laundered. Since dawn, [72] The Story Without a Name Agathe and a washerwoman had been hard at work. The garden paths be- hind the house were draped with sheets and napkins that floated, swollen by the breeze. As they dried they were carried into the dining-room and there left in heaps for the Ladies of Ferjol, when they returned from mass, to fold and arrange. That was a thing which no one else was permitted to do. Mme. de Ferjol took a real Norman pleasure in linen, one that her daughter shared; and, long before, she had begun on the superb trousseau which she was to give to Lasthenie on her bridal-day. So soon therefore as they reached home they immediately sought the din- ing-room, and at the table, one in front of the other, they set their aristocratic hands to work. And as they worked [73] Tlie Storjj Without a Name Agathe appeared with a flood of dry linen, which she dropped before them Hke an avalanche. "St. Agathe!" she cried — an expres- sion of hers, the name of her patron saint — "there's a lot for you! White, isn't it ? And dry ! And it smells good, too. More than both Madame and Mademoiselle can fold before dinner. But there! the dinner to-day can wait. Neither of you is ever hungry, and the Capuchin has gone. Yes, indeed, and for good. That's the way these Cap- uchins go, without so much as a word to those that have lodged them." Old Agathe, who had been young once, and handsome too, had accom- panied her passionate mistress at the time of her scandalous elopement, and it was just that, together with having nursed Mile, de Ferjol and remained in [74] The Story Without a Nartie what she called a marmot's hole, which gave her the right to speak freely. "Why, Agathe," said Mme. de Ferjol, severely, "what do you mean? Father Riculf gone! Don't you know that this is Good Saturday, and that at ves- pers to-morrow he is to preach on the Resurrection?" Agathe was an old maid, and by the Norman accent which she had never lost, the Norman bonnet which she still wore, you could see that she was ob- stinate. "I can't help it — I know what I am talking about," she answered. "The beadle came asking for him this morn- ing; there was a crowd at his confes- sional awaiting absolution for the com- munion to-morrow. But I couldn't give him to the beadle, could I? At day- break I met him on the stairs, he had [75] The Story Without a Name his hood over his head, and in his hand was the staff which usually he leaves behind his bedroom door. He passed me straight as an I, without a word, his eyes lowered, and my opinion is his eyes are worse when they are lowered than when they are not. I knew he couldn't have taken his staff to go to mass, a step from here, so I followed on his heels, to see where he was going. Well, he took the highway at the foot of Big Calvary, and I can tell you, if he has kept up the same gait, he is far away now, he and his sandals." 'It is impossible!" Mme. de Ferjol exclaimed. "He cannot have gone." ''Like the smoke of my kitchen," Agathe insisted, "and with as little noise." And it was true. He had really gone. But the fact of the matter, which none [76] The Story Without a Name of them knew, was this, that Capuchins always depart in that fashion. They ofo as death and Christ come — hke thieves. You enter their room some morning, and they have evaporated. It is their custom and their poetry. Chateaubriand, who knew what poetry is, says of them: ''The next day they were sought, but they had vanished Hke the holy apparitions that sometimes visit the heart and home of man." At that time neither Chateaubriand nor his Genie du Christianisme existed; moreover the previous guests of the Ladies de Ferjol had been both less poetic and less severe; outside of the church they were men of the world, in- capable of leaving a host without some courteous word of thanks and apprecia- tion. But the Ladies de Ferjol cared too [77] The Story Without a Name little for the Capuchin to be annoyed, as Agathe was, by the silent abruptness of his departure. He had gone, had he? Well, let him go. During the time that he had been with them he disappointed them more than he had pleased. Such were their thoughts. But Agathe felt more deeply. To her, Father Riculf represented that inexplicable thing which is called Antipathy. "We are well rid of him," she mut- tered; then, correcting herself, she added: "It may be wrong of me to speak of a man of God like that, but, all the same, I can't help it; I have a poor opinion of him. And think of the difference between him and the others that have been here, pleasant all of them, apostolic and indulgent! There was that Prior, don't you remember, ma- dame? He was here two years ago. [78] The Story Without a Name How nice he was! All in white, like a bride, even to his shoes. Father Riculf resembles him as a wolf resembles a Iamb." "You should not judge anyone," said Mme. de Ferjol, gravely. It was for her conscience sake, no doubt, that she spoke in this way, and perhaps also she reproached herself for the same thing which she blamed in her servant. "Father Riculf is a priest whose elo- quence and faith are incontestable. Since he has been here he has not said or done a single thing that anyone could find fault with. You have no right, Agathe, to think ill of him. Has she, Lasthenie?" "No, mamma," Lasthenie's pure voice replied. "But don't scold her. You and I have often said that there was something perplexing about him, some- [79] The Story Without a Name thing that we could not define. Why was it? We have not thought ill of him perhaps, but we did not trust him. You would not confess to him any more than I would." "And we have both been wrong per- haps," Mme. de Ferjol replied. "We might both have done better. In re- fusing for groundless reasons to kneel at his feet we condemned him in our hearts, a thing that we had no right to do." "Ah!" the young girl naively ex- claimed, "as for me I never could. He impressed me with a dread that I could not overcome." "He talked of nothing but hell. Al- ways it was on the tip of his tongue," panted Agathe, as though trying to jus- tify the fear which the young girl ex- pressed. "No one has ever talked so [80] The Story Without a Name much about it. He damned us all. I knew a priest years ago in Normandy; they called him Father Love, because he only preached of paradise and the love of God. Father Riculf will never be known by that name." "There!" said Mme. de Ferjol, who wished the conversation to end because it was uncharitable — "there! be quiet! If Father Riculf were to come in now — for I cannot believe that on the eve of Easter he can have gone away — he would find us gossiping about him, which is not right. As for you, Agathe, since you think he is not here, go up to his room; you may find his breviary somewhere, and that will show that he has not gone." Agathe started on her errand at once. The two ladies said nothing further con- cerning the enigmatic Capuchin, of [81] The Stori) Without a Name whom they knew Httle, and of whom they feared to think too much. Slowly they resumed the interrupted task. It was a simple picture of home life that these two ladies presented. The room was vast and high-ceiled, about them were hillocks of white linen, which, as Agathe had said, smelled good, and exhaled the perfume of dew and of the hedges on which the linen had dried. The ladies were silent, but attentive to their work. Now and then, to fold a sheet rightly, they looked for the hem, each held a half and struck it with the hand. The hands of each were beauti- ful, and each had a particular beauty. Lasthenie, that lily of the valley, deli- cious in a dark-green gown that made her pale and melancholy face look like a flower in its leaves, and Mme. de Fer- [82] The Story Without a Name jol, in her black gown and widow's cap, her hair whitened about the temples less by years than by grief — each had a beauty of her own. Suddenly Agathe reappeared. "He must have gone," she said. "I have looked everywhere and found but this, and whether he left it on purpose or forgot it when he went, I, for one, don't know." And on the sheet which the ladies were folding she placed a heavy rosary such as Capuchins wear at the girdle. It was of ebony, and in the middle, to separate the black beads, was a death's head in yellow ivory, a color that made the head seem still more skull-like, and gave it the appearance of having been disinterred long ago. Mme. de Ferjol stretched a hand, [83] The Story Without a Name raised the rosary with respect, and, after examining it, put it down before her daughter. But Lasthenie, as she picked it up, felt her fingers twitch, and dropped it. ''Keep it for yourself, mamma," she murmured. Instinct! Instinct! The flesh is sometimes wiser than the mind. Yet at that moment Lasthenie could not have told why her charming fingers had trembled. As for Agathe, she afterward believed that the rosary which the hands of the terrible Capuchin had held, and on the beads of which he had left his influence, was like the gloves that are mentioned in the chronicles of the days of Catherine de Medici. She had never heard of them, of course, but she believed that the rosary was contagiously poisoned. [84] IV BY midday It was evident that Agathe was right. The Capuchin had really gone. The crowd that waited about his confessional waited In vain; and when between vespers and evening service the village priest was obliged to replace him and preach the Resurrection in his stead, the entire hamlet considered It outrageous. But the Impression which his abrupt depar- ture caused did not last. After all, what does? The rain of days that drips drop by drop upon us carried it away, just as In autumn the rain disperses the leaves on which it falls. The monotony which he had interrupted returned, and [85] The Story Without a Name presently the Ladies de Ferjol ceased to mention him. Whether they thought of him or not, who shall say? In this story without a name there are many obscurities. At the same time the im- pression which this man, once seen, pro- duced, was unforgettable; the more so even because no one could explain why he could not be forgotten. The fact, however, remained. During the entire time that he had been the guest of these ladies, he had shown himself distant and respectful, and in his daily relations with them he had manifested both tact and breeding. But of himself never a word did he utter. Where was he born? What had his life been? How was he educated? These subjects Mme. de Ferjol touched upon, and like a true woman of the world ceased to touch upon when she saw that he was [86] The Story Without a Name as marble is, cold, impenetrable, pol-. ished. She could see the Capuchin in him, and nothing else. The Capuchins were no longer then what they had been. Their order, sub- lime in its Christian humility, had lost something of that sublimity. There were evil days ahead. The incredulous epicurism of the century had enervated creeds and customs. Orders renowned for their holiness no longer possessed that austerity which rendered them im- posing even to the impious. In the town where Mme. de Ferjol danced her first contredances with the adorable baron, she remembered meeting a Cap- uchin whose beauty was so noticeable that it was impossible not to notice it, Capuchin though he were, and who, while he had come, as Father Riculf had, to officiate during Lent, exhibited [87] The Story WitJiout a Name in the garb of poverty and renunciation the affectations of a dandy. It was rumored that he was of noble birth, a fact which may have rendered a set of people who could be severe enough in their way, more or less indulgent to a scandalous Capuchin who perfumed his beard and who beneath his frock wore silk instead of haircloth. Mme. de Ferjol, at that time Mile. d'Olonde, had met him in society, where he flirted in the corners with this woman and with that, and whispered to them behind the fan. But though many a year since then had added to that general corruption which was to dissolve the solid bronze of France, and pour it like mire into the decanter of the Revolution, Father Ri- culf in no wise resembled that love-mak- ing Capuchin. He exhaled none of the [88] TJie Story Without a Name vices of the day. He seemed mediaeval, like his name. The antipathy which he inspired in Mme. de Ferjol and in her daughter was without apparent cause. Whether, after he had gone, they thought of him, it is difficult to say ; and yet it is difficult to fancy that they did not. He was a mystery to them, and, of all things, mystery is the one which disturbs the imagination most. You who wish to be loved by those that love you, never let yourself be wholly known. Even in your kisses let there be a secret. While Father Riculf was the guest of the Ladies de Ferjol he was a mystery to them, but when he went he must have been a greater one yet. When he was with them they could fancy the mo- ment would come in which the mystery would be explained, but once gone he re- mained indecipherably an enigma. [89] The Story Without a Name And from beyond not a ray! To the Ladies de Ferjol no light was vouch- safed, even retrospectively, on the Ca- puchin who, of a morning, had left their life and house, as of an evening he en- tered it, without, when he came, men- tioning whence he had come, or, when he went, mentioning whither he was go- ing. It was like the text in the Bible: "Tell me whence he came, and I will tell you whither he has gone." But that they could not do; he had not told them. Presumably he belonged to some dis- tant monastery, and wandered, like all of those of his calling, from one end of France to the other. In the villages ad- jacent to the hamlet that he had shaken with his eloquence no one had seen him. In the streets no one had turned to look at a man who could go nowhere with- out attracting- attention — a man who in [90] The Story Without a Name a tattered robe was magnificence itself, one who looked the very Emperor of Poverty. No doubt he had gone to some faraway land in order perhaps to be forgotten. And yet wheresoever he wandered he must have sown a profound remembrance of his passing, a remem- brance which, by the expression he had, might readily become destructive. Had he left such a memory anywhere ? Apparently he was young, but there are hearts terribly old in beings that seem still youthful; and if up to that time he had left none elsewhere, was he to leave one in the soul of that poor Lasthenie de Ferjol, who trembled like a leaf be- fore him, and to whom his departure brought a feeling of deliverance and re- lief? To her he had always been what young girls who have antipathies call [91] The Story Without a Name their "nightmare" ; and if Lasthenie had not so called him it was because both in person and in speech she lacked the strength. She was charming, yet fragile, pos- sessing as it were the fatality of her weakness; and she was relieved at the departure of one who, without rhyme or reason, had impressed her like a loaded gun in a corner. The gun was no longer there. She was glad of it, and yet in her face no sign of the joy of that deliverance was visible. For some little time there had come between her long eyebrows, ordi- narily sad though placid, the furrow of inexplicable horror and unknown dread. Now and then the purity and melan- choly of her forehead would suddenly contract into wrinkles. Mme. de Ferjol never noticed them. Agathe did. [92] The Story Without a Name The latter's instinctive dislike of the Capuchin brought her a sagacity which the mother lacked. Had she been an Italian she would have believed in the evil eye; she would have thought of that mysterious jettatura, by which the pas- sionate Italians, who believe only in love and hate, explain any misfortune which they do not understand. But Agathe was Norman, and the supersti- tions of her country were of a different kind. She believed in witchcraft, in in- visible spells, and she suspected Father Riculf of being capable of casting one, and of having cast one on Lasthenie. Why on Lasthenie, who was sweetness and innocence personfied? Precisely for that reason, just because she was sweet and innocent, because the demon who does evil for evil's sake, hates par- ticularly innocence, and being a fallen [93] The Story Without a Name angel, is jealous of those who remain in the light. To Agathe, Lasthenie was an angel who on earth had never ceased to inhabit the light of heaven. It was under this idea of a ''spell" that the old woman carried away the black rosary and its death's head, which Las- thenie's fingers had touched and shrunk from, and treated it like a holy relic that had been profaned. Fire purifies every- thing, and piously she burned it. But the "spell" which she imagined was still efifective. It had come from hell, where everything is burning, and, like a burn that burrows and sears in the flesh, she fancied it burrowing and searing in Las- thenie's soul. At the table, from behind Mme. de Ferjol's chair, where she stood, a napkin in one hand, a plate in the other, she watched Lasthenie, who had [94] The Story Without a Name ceased to eat, and whose face grew paler day by day. The deHcate beauty of the child had begun to fade. It was barely two months since Riculf had gone, yet the evil he had brought to the house was visibly at work. The diabolic seed which Agathe fancied he had sown was commencing to sprout. It was, how- ever, by no means extraordinary that Lasthenie should seem melancholy. She had always been so. Born in a pit that Agathe detested, in a place where at high noon it was hardly daylight, and where she dwelt with a mother who thought only of the husband she had lost, and who never gave her a word of tenderness, why, Agathe reflected, with- out me that darling wo.uld have never smiled. Never would she have shown [95 1 The Story Without a Name her pretty teeth. But it is not the blues that are affecting her, it is a spell, and a spell is death. Such were Agathe's ruminations. "Are you suffering, mademoiselle?" she would ask, quaking with uneasiness she could not always hide ; "are you suf- fering?" And Lasthenie with her pale lips would always answer that she was not. It is a way young girls have, of denying that they suffer when they do. And Lasthenie evidently was suft'ering. Her eyes were hollow. The lily of the val- ley of her skin was bruised, and on her opal forehead the furrow between the brows was not that of a dream which passes; it expressed something more. Her life, externally, had not changed; it was the same round of household duties, the same needlework in the em- [96] The Story Without a Name brasure of the same window, the same visits with her mother to church, and the same walks with her along the moun- tain slope. These walks as a rule were taken late in the afternoon, and from the vesperal promenades the ladies rarely returned until they heard the An- gelus rising under their feet and mount- ing toward them from the depths of the little valley where the black Romanic church crouched and sounded what Dante has called the agony of the dying day. They descended then into the enshadowed hamlet and sought the tomb-like church, where it was their custom, every evening, to pray before supper. At times, when Mme. de Ferjol for one reason or another remained at home, Lasthenie would walk alone. There was no imprudence in that. The slopes [97] The Story Without a Name were safe, and their safety came of their isolation. Strangers and vagabonds rarely passed through a hollow that was closed in on every side, and where, like a race of troglodytes, there dwelt a sed- entary population, of whom many, en- chanted by the somber enchantment of their prison, had never crossed the mountain walls. It was on the other side of the slopes that travelers passed, and, with them, the mendicants and prowlers of every kind whom it might be dangerous for a young girl to meet. But on the valley side there was no one to be feared. Besides, the Ladies de Ferjol were almost superstitiously re- spected. Lasthenie could have called by name each one of the little goatherds who guarded their charges in the aerial pasturages, each of the women who went at evening to the sloping meadows [98] TJie Story Without a Name where the cows were milked, and each of the trout-fishers as well. She knew them all, and they knew her. Then, too, Mme. de Ferjol was seldom long separated from her daughter. She re- joined her the more easily because, knowing which way she was going, it was easy to see her afar, on some slope. For that matter, even from the windows of the gaunt gray house whose only per- spective was the mountains before them, Lasthenie was generally in sight. One evening Lasthenie returned earlier than usual, greatly fatigued and more changed than before. The change was not one which only a watchful ob- server would have noticed, it was a change that was haggard and hard, one that was visible to everyone. To Agathe, who indefatigably inquired how she was, she no longer denied that she [99] The Story Without a Name suffered, only she could not explain what it was. ''I don't know what is the matter with me," she would say. Her mother, lost as she was in her de- votions and in the memories of her hus- band that devoured her life, thus far had noticed nothing. But that evening she did. Lasthenie, who was to have been met by her mother on the moun- tain - side after prayer, went to the church, unable to wait longer. When she entered, her mother was kneeling before the confessional, and she dropped on a bench behind her, worn out with fatigue. The darkness of the church, dark at its brightest, was momentarily increas- ing. The windows gave no light. But when Mme. de Ferjol left the confes- [100] The Story Witliout a Name sional it was not yet the hour for supper, and finding Lasthenie near her, she re- marked that the morrow was a saint's day, and asked her why she did not then prepare herself, that they might partake of the communion together. Lasthenie shook her head, she did not care to, and remained where she was while her mother prayed. She was ut- terly weary, and at the moment there had come to her that indifference that weariness brings. The refusal to confess astonished Mme. de Ferjol, who, fearing to en- counter a resistance which would have irritated her, did not insist. She ac- cepted it as an added cross. Her annoy- ance, nevertheless, was -extreme, for her will was as absolute as her faith, and as they left the church together and re- [ 101 ] The Story Without a Name turned to their home, Lasthenie felt her mother's arm tremble with repressed emotion on her own. On the way, neither spoke. At the corner of the square was a blacksmith, whose forge sent through the open door a tongue of flame; this they crossed, and Lasthenie was so white that that red light, which red- dened the entire square, could not red- den her pallor, at that moment extreme. ''How pale you are!" said Mme. de Ferjol; ''what is the matter?" Lasthenie answered that she was tired. But when, as usual, they were seated opposite each other at the table, Mme. de Ferjol's black eyes became blacker as she scrutinized her daughter, and Lasthenie felt that her mother was angry at her refusal. She did not un- [102] The Story Without a Name derstand, nor could she understand, that she had driven into her mother an impression that the latter was to find again like a nail, and on which she was to hang a terrible suspicion. [103] y THE next day Mme. de Ferjol sent Agathe for the doctor. "Ah!" the servant, with her custom- ary frankness, exclaimed, "Madame sees then that Mademoiselle is ill. I could have told her so long ago, and would have, if Mademoiselle hadn't forbidden me, and said she didn't want to worry her mamma about an indisposition which would go of itself. But it has not gone all the same, and I shall be glad to see the doctor, although . . ." She did not say all she might have, for, superstitious as she was, she did not believe that the doctor would be of much service. Nevertheless, she ran off for [104] The Story WitJiout a Name him at once, and presently he came. He questioned the girl, but gathered little from her answers. Mile, de Ferjol said merely that she felt a weariness and dis- gust of all things. "Even for God?" her mother bitterly threw at her. It was a question she could not with- hold, so annoyed was she at the girl's refusal of the communion. Lasthenie, who never complained, made no answer, but the question sounded in her ears like a prophetic threat of the future; she felt that her mother's piety might one day become cruel. Whether or not the physician under- stood what Mile, de Ferjol's condition was, he gave no hint to the mother. Any uneasiness he might have had he kept to himself, with the idea perhaps [ 105 ] TJie Story Without a Name of waiting until the girl's vague symp- toms became more pronounced; at the same time he spoke of the complications common enough in young girls of Las- thenie's age, and recommended for her care and diet rather than medicine. "All that is bosh," sniffed Agathe. "Care and diet won't cure Made- moiselle." And, as a fact, there was no improve- ment in the singular malady which seemed to consume her. She became more listless, and the nausea increased. "So you want me to tell you what I think?" Agathe said to Mme. de Ferjol one day when they happened to be alone. The dinner was over, and Lasthenie, to whom the sight of food was distress- ing, had gone to her room, that she might rest awhile on the bed. [106] The Story Without a Name "Here is a whole month that the doc- tor has been coming, and for nothing. Three days ago he was here," she con- tinued, violently. "What I think is that Mademoiselle has more need of a priest to exorcise her than of a doctor who does no good." Mme. de Ferjol stared as though she fancied her suddenly attacked with madness. But the immense eyes of the mistress did not in the least frighten the serv- ant. "Yes, madame, a priest who can undo the devilish work of that Capuchin." Mme. de Ferjol's eyes flashed. "What? do you dare to " "Yes, madame," Agathe intrepidly retorted, "I believe that Satan has passed this way, and that he has left what he leaves wherever he goes. [107] The Story Without a Name When he can't damn the soul, it is the body he besets." Mme. de Ferjol made no reply. She put her head in her hands and rested her elbows on the table, from which Agathe had already removed the cloth. She was as religious as her servant, much more so even, and what the woman had said pierced her heart like an arrow. In a moment she looked up: "Leave me alone for a while." Then her frightened face sank again into her hands, and Agathe retreated, backwards, the better to judge the efifect she had produced by the thunder of a single word. Mme. de Ferjol was not superstitious, neither was she a mystic in the Christian sense of that term, but her faith was profound. What Agathe had said im- pressed her deeply. It was not that [ "ios ] The Story Without a Name she would have denied the physical manifestations and visible influence of him w^hom the Holy Writ entitled the Evil Spirit. She believed in these things, calmly, doctrinally, in the exact measure that the Church, who is the mother of all prudence and the enemy of all frivolity, authorizes us to believe. Agathe's opinion impressed her there- fore, but to a lesser degree than it would have impressed one whose imagination was more exalted than her own. It conveyed to her an idea of which Agathe had no inkling. The woman within her, one who after fifteen long years still yearned for the husband she had lost, revealed to her things which Agathe, in the celibacy of her heart and taciturnity of her senses, could hardly divine. Mme. de Ferjol believed, just as Agathe did, that Satan has in his [109] The Story Without a Name service incarnations that are terrible; but by her own experience she knew what Agathe did not, that of them all, Love is the most terrible. And abrupt- ly, in a lightning-flash, there came to her the thought that love was perhaps her daughter's disease. Her face was still in her hands, but her eyes — the eyes we all of us have to look down into the night of our souls — were fixed on that sudden thought. Yet, there being no decent society in the neighborhood, no attrac- tive young men, and as she and her daughter passed the days in the solitude of an empty house, at once out of the night of her own soul surged the image of the incomprehensible Capuchin who had sprung into their lives and van- ished. As for the horror that Lasthenie had invariably exhibited for that frightful [110] The Story Without a Name sphinx who for full forty days had dwelt impenetrably at her side, did it not show that she was not in love with him? Not at all. It showed, on the contrary, that she might love him madly. Women all know that. Even when their feminine instinct does not divine it, passion teaches. How often fear or hatred is the beginning of love! And what is horror but the union of fear and hate raised to their highest power? "She feels toward you as she might to a spider," said a mother one day to a man that loved her daughter. A month after that humiliating speech the poor mother was far from suspecting the culpable and hidden bliss with which the daughter let that spider suck from her heart its last drop of virgin blood. Lasthenie had trembled before the mysterious Capuchin, but if a woman [111] The Story Without a Name has not trembled before a man, never will she love him. Mme. de Ferjol herself had trembled at the irresistible white soldier who had carried her off as Boreas carried off Orythia. She had only to remember her past to fear for her daughter's future. "If Lasthenie knows what is the mat- ter with her," she reflected, "she hides it." The mother recalled that when she had loved she too had hidden it. For love readily turns to falsehood; it is vo- luptuous to glue to a burning face a mask that will devour it, and which shows, when it drops, the scar that nothing can hide. When Mme. de Ferjol looked up again she was calm, but she was determined to know the cause of her daue:hter's '«3' [112] The Story Without a Name illness. To the doctor she gave no fur- ther thought. It was for her to dis- cover. Once more she accused herself of her life's sin, that of being always more wife than mother. God continued to punish her; and that, she reflected, she deserved. Later, when Lasthenie returned from her room and took her seat in the embrasure of the window where both of them sewed, she would have been frightened had she seen her mother's eyes; but she did not see. There was never any tenderness there to attract her own, and so she did not seek them. After a momentary silence, Alme. de Ferjol, who was mending some linen, looked up. "How do you feel?" Lasthenie bent over her work. "Bet- [113] The Story Without a Name ter," she answered; but from her eyes there fell, perpendicularly and without touching the cheek, two heavy tears. Mme. de Ferjol, her needle in the air, watched them fall, and she saw two others fall, larger and heavier than the first. "Then what are you crying about? for you are crying," the mother asked, in a voice that was both a reproach and an accusation. Lasthenie dried her eyes with the back of her hand. She was pale as a ghost. "I don't know, mamma ; it is physical, I think." "I too think it is physical," Mme. de Ferjol replied, laying stress on each word. ''Why should you cry? Why are you so miserable? Why are you unhappy?" [114] Tlie Story Without a Name The burning black eyes of the mother, transfixing the fair, wet eyes of the girl, dried them at once. Lasthenie absorbed her tears. The two needles went to work. Again there was silence. The scene was short but threatening. They had both leaned over the edge of that abyss — lack of confidence — which separated them, and they said nothing more that day. Silence became permanent between them; and what is there sadder, more sinister even, than the intimacy of two people who have ceased to speak? In spite of her resolutions, Mme. de Ferjol, who feared to know, did nothing, and several dumb days passed. But finally, one sleepless night, in thinking of the silence that bowed them one in front of the other, oppressing both with an uneasiness which in itself was fright, [115] The Story Without a Name Mme. de Ferjol became ashamed of her weakness. "If she is a coward," she cried, "so be it! I am not." She rose from the bed and took a lamp which burned all night in order that when sleepless she might see the crucifix that hung in her alcove and pray with greater fervor. Only now, instead of praying to it, she tore it violently from the wall, and took it with her as a supreme resource against the maledic- tion she was going to seek, and which she was going to find. It was needful to her to end at once the insupportable anxiety that beset her, and, all in white, like a specter, she entered her daugh- ter's room, the crucifix in one hand, the lamp in the other. She was fright itself, yet fortunately there was no one there to frighten. [116] Tlie Story Without a Name Lasthcnie scarcely seemed to breathe; she had sunk into a dreamless sleep, that inanimate slumber which is like unto death, and which at night over- takes those who during the day have suffered greatly. Mme. de Ferjol held the lamp above her head and let the trembling light fall from her trembling hand. Then lowering it she held it close to the sleeping child whose secret she sought to discover. Then at once she cried in horror: "I was right; I see it in her face." A cry, parenthetically, which Las- thenie did not hear, and which if she had she would not have understood. "Yes," she continued, "I see it." Putting the lamp on the table, with one quick movement she lifted the cruci- fix over the face of the girl and held it as she might have held a hammer with [117] The Story Without a Name which she intended to crush what was there. For a second only she held it so. Instead of falling on the sleeping girl she turned the crucifix and struck herself, violently, with the frenzied de- sire to inflict on herself a ferocious and fanatic punishment. The force of the blow was such that the blood spouted, and the noise of it awoke Lasthenie, who, seeing the light, the blood that flowed, and that mother of hers striking herself with a cross, cried out in terror. "Ah ! you cry out now, do you !" Mme. de Ferjol with brutal irony exclaimed. "You did not cry out when " She stopped, fearful of what she was about to say, hesitating at what she thought. But in a moment she found new courage. "Hypocrite! You knew how to be quiet, to hide everything, to cover it all [118] The Story Without a Name up. You did not cry out, but your sin now cries out in your face, and every- one will hear it as I do. You did not know that there is a sign which tells all and never deceives, an accusing sign, and that you have it!" Lasthenie, startled and terrified, un- derstood nothing of what her mother said, and at the sight of the horrible vision she might have gone mad perhaps, had not a swoon protected her. But, pitiless for the swoon of which she was the cause, the implacable mother aban- doned her daughter fainting on the bed, and, falling on her knees, the crucifix in her upraised hands, she prayed aloud, kissing the crucifix as she prayed, and tearing her lips with its nails. ''My God, forgive me! Forgive me her sin, which I share, for I have not watched her enough. Like the ungrate- [119] The Story Without a Name fill disciples in the Garden of Geth- semane I have fallen asleep, and the traitor came while I was sleeping. Let my blood, O Lord, be the expiation of her sin and of mine." She struck herself again, on the breast, on the forehead, and the blood gushed forth. "Let your Cross be the means of my torture, Lord God of Mercy." Sinking, she fell, overwhelmed at her sin and at the fear of eternal damnation. [120] VI WHEN Lasthenie recovered con- sciousness, her mother was lying on the floor, her face gkied to the cruci- fix. The movement the girl made, the moan which she uttered in coming to, aroused the mother from her prostra- tion, and drawing herself up to her full height, she towered over her daughter, her forehead still bleeding. "You shall tell me all," she declared, imperiously. "I insist on knowing. Tell me, and at once, to whom, in this solitude where we live — live like re- cluses — and where there is not a man of your station — to whom have you given yourself?" [121] The Story Without a Name Again Lasthenie moaned; yet, too weak to answer, she stared, haggardly, with the stupidity of astonishment. "There! I have had enough of comedy, enough of your silence, enough of your lies. Don't pretend that you do not understand me, for you do," con- tinued the mother, who was no longer a mother, but a judge, and a judge pre- pared to become an executioner. Insulted in her modesty and inno- cence, revolting at so much cruelty and blind injustice, the poor girl sobbed in agony. ''Mother, mother," she implored, ''what is it you wish me to say? What are you angry at? What have I done? I don't rmderstand at all what you mean except that it is something dreadful. You are killing me; I shall lose my [122] The Story Without a Name senses; and with your horrible expres- sions and your bleeding forehead, you seem to have lost them yourself." Violently, with the back of her hand, Mme. de Ferjol wiped her forehead. "Let it bleed," she interrupted. "If it bleeds, it is for you, ungrateful child. But don't tell me that you don't under- stand. It is a lie. You know well enough what is the matter with you. All women do; merely on seeing each other they know. I am not a bit sur- prised that you refused to confess the other night." At last the enervated girl grasped the full portent and infamy of the accusa- tion. "Mother," she moaned, "you know what you say is impossible. I am ill, I am suffering, but my illness is not [123] The Story Without a Name caused by the horrible thing you imagine. I see no one but you and Agathe; I never leave you." "You go to v^alk alone on the moun- tain," Mme. de Ferjol, with a look of atrocious penetration, insinuated. In the degradation of such a suspicion Lasthenie clasped her hands. "Mother, you kill me. Angels of heaven, be merciful to me! You at least know what I am!" "Don't invoke the angels; 3^ou have driven them away; they no longer hear you," said Mme. de Ferjol, blindly in- credulous of the innocence which pro- claimed itself with such despairing candor. Continuing more violently than before: "Don't add sacrilege to your falsehood," she cried; and brutally added: "You are lost, you are dishon- ored; deny it or not, it is the same in [124] The Story Without a Name the end; you are dishonored, you are lost. But by whom? Tell me at once who it is. Who is it? Who is it?" she repeated; and seizing the girl by the shoulder she shook her so cruelly that she threw her back on the pillow. There the poor child lay, whiter than the pillow itself. She had fainted again, but Mme. de Ferjol was as unmoved by the second swoon as by the first. She had asked God's forgiveness for her daughter's sin and her own lack of vigilance, and in her anger was capable of trampling the girl under her feet. Seated at the bedside of the child whom twice she had turned into a corpse, she let her recover her senses as best she might. The pride which re- ligion had not conquered rebelled in her heart at the insupportable idea that [125] Tlie Story Without a Name a man, an unknown, one of the lower classes no doubt, had clandestinely dis- honored her daughter. The name of that man she wanted. When Lasthenie opened her eyes, she saw her mother bending over her as though she were seeking that name on her lips. ''His name, his name!" she called, her eyes flashing with a devouring glare. "Ah, hypocrite! I'll tear that accursed name from you if I have to dig it, with your child, from your entrails." But Lasthenie, overwhelmed by all the abominations of the night, instead of answering her mother, gazed at her through two big, empty eyes that seemed to be dead. And they were dead, those beautiful eyes and so remained forever without a glimmer through the tears of which they [126] Tlie Story Without a Name shed torrents. Mme. de Ferjol learned nothing from her daughter that night, nor did she learn anything from her later on. But it was with that night for starting-point that they entered into the infernal life which thereafter they led, one that is without parallel in the somberest situations of tragedy. From that time it became really a story without a name, a drama, suffocating and suffocated, between two women of the same blood, who loved each other nevertheless, who had never been sepa- rated, but of whom, in the bonds of con- fidence, one had never been a mother, nor the other a child. It was a drama soul to soul, deep- reaching, prolonged, mysterious, one in which the mystery had to be increased that Agathe might not know of the ig- nominy which Mme. de Ferjol was [127] The Story Without a Name more anxious even than her daughter to hide; for at that time Lasthenie did not beHeve what her mother had said. In the novelty of her sensations she thought herself attacked by some un- familiar complaint, that her symptoms w^ere deceptive, that the error of her mother was monstrous, a thing to be rebelled against; yet, as she writhed beneath the insult, the dishonoring blow did not make her bend the head; hers was the sublime obstinacy of innocence ; and because she did not resemble her mother who in her place would have roared like a lioness, she said to her, with the gentleness of a lamb that lets its throat be cut: "Some day how sorry you will be to have made me suffer so!" But the day of which she spoke never came. Yet many were the days that [128] The Story Without a Name came to that pitiless mother who would not forgive, who never spoke of forgiv- ing, and to that girl who staked her honor on remaining unforgiven. The days passed, long, despairful, black. Only there was one more despairful than the others, one that Lasthenie had not expected, one in which the interior shiver of the child, announcing its life, told her that it was she and not her mother who was wrong. They were sitting as usual in front of each other in the embrasure of the window, devoured equally by the same dumb pain, their feverish hands at work. A ray of the sun entered like wind through a hole — that hole above them which the peaks of the mountains made — and in the gloomy room dropped on their necks a guillotine of light. Suddenly, with an involuntary cry, [ 129 ] The Story Without a Name Lasthenie put her hand to her side. At the cry, and still more at sight of the inexpressible desolation which swept over her face, already profoundly dis- consolate, her mother, who seemed to read through her, instantly understood. "You felt it, didn't you?" she hissed. "You are sure at last. You won't say no to me any more — that stupid no of yours. It is here, isn't it?" and she placed her hand where Lasthenie had her own. "But who put it there? Tell me, I insist." With the eternal question once more she stabbed her daughter, and the latter, overcome now as with a lightning- stroke by the sudden revelation which showed her mother to be right, utterly undone by the certainty of her misfor- tune, shook her head wildly, and an- swered that she did not know; an in- [130] The Story Without a Name excusable reply that angered her mother as nothing had angered her before. Thus far Mme. de Ferjol had imagined it was shame that sealed her daughter's lips. But the shame had been drunk. There was no motive now for further concealment. "If you won't tell me," she announced, measuredly, ''it is because there is some- thing more shameful than your own shamelessness — your shame of the man to whom you gave yourself." The suspicion that had come to her before concerning the Capuchin re- turned, not as it had to Agathe, who be- lieved in spells, but as it might to a woman like herself, who believed in the sorceries of love, and who had been a victim of them. But that suspicion of a crime which to her was the greatest of all, since a priest was the culprit, she [131] The Stori) Without a Name put from her, but more out of respect for the character of the man of God than through any faith in the innocence of her daughter. Her own experience had taught her what a fragile thing virtue is. Yet, afraid in her frightened anxiety to utter the suspicion that tortured her, she began again with her eternal ques- tions to massacre the despairful girl, al- ready half killed by her incomprehen- sible condition. But in vain; Lasthe- nie made no other answer than that of silence and of tears. Mme. de Ferjol was not a woman to be disarmed or outwearied. Lasthe- nie's silence and tireless tears were interrupted with the indefatigable blows of questionings. Whenever they were alone the torture recommenced, and at present they were almost always alone. Their lifelong tete-a-tete became more [132] The Story Without a Name absolute than it had ever been. The emptiness of their great house and the jostling mountains seemed to unite in an effort to bring them into stricter in- timacy than before. Formerly, when Agathe had finished her work, she joined the Ladies de Ferjol in the room where they passed the monotonous rou- tine of their existence. There she sat and knitted. But since Mme. de Ferjol had learned the secret of Lasthenie's dis- order, she used the first pretext that came to her to keep Agathe out of the way. She feared her keen eyes, and she feared too the tears that her daugh- ter could not stanch, and which flowed hour-long on her hands as she worked. "For shame's sake," she admonished her once when the servant was not pres- ent, "don't cry before Agathe. You are able to hold your tongue; you should [133] The Story Without a Name be able to contain yourself. For all your dainty airs, you are strong enough. Your health may be poor, but vice has given you strength. I am only your mother; your sin I share, since I could not prevent you from committing it, but Agathe is a respectable woman, and if she merely suspected v^^hat I knov^ she would despise you." On that point she insisted constantly, and made use of a servant's scorn not only to humiliate Lasthenie still more, but through its repetition to force the girl to tell that name which she would not ^give. Mme. de Ferjol was well- versed in invective, and were it possible it would have gladdened her to find something lower than a servant's con- tempt to hurl in her daughter's face. Agathe adored Lasthenie, and had the hideous truth been told her, there would [134] Tlie Story Without a Name have been no scorn in her heart. Scorn to the proud is what pity is to the lowly, and in Agathe's soul was a tenderness that years had not altered. Lasthenie was well aware of that. "Agathe is not like my mother," she told herself; "she would not despise me, she would not reproach me; she would pity me." And, in the misfortune that over- whelmed her, time and again she longed to throw herself in the arms of one who had been her nurse, the confidante of her childhood's griefs. But her mother prevented her. Mme. de Ferjol's as- cendancy over her daughter had always been irresistible, but latterly it had be- come terrifying. When Agathe was present she medusa'd the girl with her eyes; and as for Agathe, when she looked over her spectacles at the two [135] The Story Without a Najjie women who in their silent desolation sat facing each other, needle in hand, she did not dare to utter a word. Her opin- ion had not changed, but since Mme. de Ferjol had shrugged her shoulders at it, she kept it to herself. By way of explanation of the pallor, the fainting fits, and tears of the girl, whom the mother said was nervous, Mme. de Fer- jol had invented a complaint of which the local physician, in his ignorance, understood nothing, but for which she had prescriptions sent her from Paris. It was easier, after all, to keep Las- thenie out of the way of a physician who would have known what was the matter the moment he looked at her, than to separate her from Agathe. But then, she reflected, was it pos- sible to conceal Lasthenie's condition much longer? It was terrible enough [136] The Story WitJiout a Name as it was, but would not the symptoms become presently so marked that even Agathe, whose innocence made her blind, would see them? Mme. de Fer- jol thought of these things, of others as well, and for the moment she wondered whether it might not be better to sup- press Agathe, and, despite her affection and devotion, send her back to Nor- mandy. In that event the very fact of dismissing Agathe would relieve her of any outward need of another servant. The neighbors were respectful indeed, but they were inquisitive and malicious. Once guarded against their gossip, she and her daughter could live alone in the servantless house like two souls in some pit of hell. That was her perspective. But the horrible problem that she con- stantly propounded was how she was to act later on. As yet she could form [137] The Story Without a Name no decision. Though she never now spoke to her daughter, except to ask the eternal question which still re- mained unanswered, she too shrank from an avowal that dishonored the name that she bore so proudly, and to herself she kept repeating, "What shall I do? What shall I do?" Day in, day out, at every moment, even while she prayed, Mme. de Ferjol put to herself that question. She thought of it at church, before the tabernacle, before the communion-table, which she had forsaken. Jansenist that she was, she believed that since her child's sin she had ceased to be worthy to approach it. At all times and places she was the prey of the problem and of the uncertainty which was eating her life. Her anxiety was such that it made her head swim, and that anxiety, joined [138] The Story Without a Name to the inconsolable grief of her daugh- ter's fall, made her treat the latter with an anger and a resentment that were well-nigh ferocious. Yet still the greater sufferer was Las- thenie. Mme. de Ferjol was certainly most miserable. She suffered in her motherly and womanly pride, in her conscience, and even in that strength for which we pay atrociously high; for the psychologically strong have neither the relief nor the sedative of tears; their sobs are suffocated. Nevertheless she was a mother, injured and insulted, and Lasthenie was but her daughter, the ob- ject of her eternal reproach, the victim whom sh6 crushed with the now un- deniable evidence of a sin which she called a crime. In the abominable in- timacy that existed between them, surely then it was Lasthenie who suf- [139] The Story Without a Name fered most. In unhappiness there is a moment, similar to that which comes in happiness, when there is no longer a possible chronicle, when that which is untenable is left to the imagination to divine. To Lasthenie that moment had come. She was unrecognizably changed, to such a degree that those who had thought her charming would never have believed that this was what was left of the fair demoiselle de Ferjol. She frightened, all lily of the valley th^t she was. The Rosalind of Shaks- pere had gone, and with her the pal- lor she had had, and which is the beauty of tender hearts. She was but a sallow mummy, a strange mummy too, one that continually wept, and whose flesh, instead of withering, grew softer, bruised and rottened with tears. She suffered horribly, and it was pitiful to [140] TJie Story Without a Naine see her drag her weighted waist about. She would have hid it perpetually in the floating folds of her peignoir. But that her mother would not permit. She forced her to church, thinking no doubt that its influence would do her good, that it would be of benefit to her wicked heart, and force from it perhaps the se- cret that it held. "You are not ill enough yet," she would say, with scornful severity. "In God's holy house you must ask His for- giveness." To take her there, it was she who dressed her, not Agathe. It was she who, as they left the house, wrapped her daughter's head in a thick veil, to hide what she had seen, a veil so thick that the girl might have smothered in it, a veil that would have concealed leprosy itself. But it was not the face alone [141] The Story Without a Name that had to be concealed; there was the waist, which would have told the story to the least observing; and to prevent that, she laced Lasthenie's corset her- self, tightly, so that it hurt. Some- times, under the pressure of her mother's hand, involuntarily the girl would groan, whereat the mother, exasperated at the obstinate silence which withheld that name, would hiss in her ear that those who sin must suffer. "Perhaps you are afraid I will kill it," she said once, when the girl seemed to suffer from the lacing more than before. "You needn't; the children of crime are strong." [142] VII IN the midst of these ferocities there came a moment when the mother, outraged indeed, but yet not wholly pitiless, stopped the torture she was in- flicting on her child. It may be she felt that, however culpable the girl might be, she herself was going too far. It may be that she was touched at the sight of a face that had been delicious, but which was now but a faded flower; or, again, it may have been but a ruse on her part to surprise the secret which that fragile girl had the strength to keep hidden. Mme. de Ferjol knew what love is. "She must love him madly," she de- [ 143 1 The Story WitJiout a Name cided; and she changed her tactics. The ferocity vanished; she became tender and motherly. ''Lasthenie, my child," she said, one day, "listen to me; you are killing your- self with grief, and you are killing me; you are damning your own soul, and you are damning mine. Concealment is falsehood, and in the humiliating comedy I play to hide your shame I share that falsehood with you. A word from you would replace you, per- haps, in the arms of him whom you love. Tell me his name. Perhaps he is not so low but that you may marry him. Las- thenie, my dear Lasthenie, I am sorry I have been so hard with you. I had not the right to be so, I have never told of myself. You, like everyone else, know but one thing of me, that I adored your father and eloped with him; but [144] The Story Without a Name you do not know, nor does anyone else, that I, like you, my poor child, was cul- pable and weak. When I was married I was in the same condition that you are. In the happiness of my marriage, the weakness was hid; I blushed at it, but to God alone. Your sin, perhaps, is the punishment and expiation of my own. God has terrible retaliations. I married your father; he was my divin- ity; but God is a jealous God. He will have no one preferred to Him, and He punished me in taking my husband away, and in making you repeat what I did. Now, why should you not marry the man you love? — for you do love him. If you did not adore him as I adored your father, you would not con- ceal his name." She stopped. The effort to say what she had must have been immense, but [145] The Story Without a Name she said it. She had not recoiled before the humihation of admitting her parity to her daughter. It was her last re- source, the ultimate hope of earning the secret she burned to know. But the effort was futile. Lasthenie remained unmoved. Broken in spirit, outworn by useless denials, she listened to her mother, as she listened now to ever3^thing, without answering a word. To her mother's reproaches, to her ob- jurgations and anger, she had become insensible as a corpse. The confession affected her as little as the abuse had done. Whether or not she remained silent because of her present inability to prove her innocence, who shall say? But one thing is certain, Mme. de Fer- jol's sudden tenderness, the appealing confession which she had made, the endeavor to obtain the girl's confidence [146] The Story Without a Name by means of an avowal which placed them both on the same footing, came too late. Besides, the girl's incomprehen- sible condition and the anguish of it had made her almost an idiot. For a long time she had believed that something else was the matter with her. She re- membered the torture inflicted on an unfortunate girl in the neighborhood who was thought to be enceinte, and who remained, long after the natural time, enceinte with a horrible tumor. Lasthenie — and here is the tragedy of it all — Lasthenie had hoped for a tumor as she hoped for God. "It will be my revenge," she thought. • But that hope she had lost. She could doubt no longer. The child had moved within her, .and in moving had awaked in her heart something which perhaps was maternal love. [147] The Story Without a Name ''Won't you speak now, Lasthenie?" Mme. de Ferjol continued, caressingly. "Won't you speak to me as freely as I have spoken to you? You should not be afraid of a mother who has been as weak as you; and who can save you," she added, "in giving you to him whom you love." But even physically Lasthenie did not seem to hear. She was deaf; she was dumb. Her mother watched her, ready to inhale the answer that did not come. "My little girl, do be good; tell me who it is." Mme. de Ferjol took one of Lasthenie's inert hands in her own and tried to draw her daughter to her. But that also must have come too late. They were sitting then in the em- brasure of the window where they al- ways sat. The girdling mountains that shadowed the house increased the [148] The Story Without a Name dreariness of the room, and against the brown oak that covered the walls Las- thenie was as white as a plaster medal- lion. Mme. de Ferjol bent sadly over her needle, but Lasthenie's work had fallen from her discouraged hands; she sat upright, motionless as a statue — a statue of infinite desolation. Her lovely eyes, once so fresh and pure, were ruined by tears. There were red circles about them which the burn of the tears had made and kept there; and the eyes themselves, which had begun to chafe as though it were blood that they had shed, expressed nothing, not even de- spair. Lasthenie was about to pass into something deeper than the abstraction of a lunatic, she was falling into the va- cancy of idiocy. With a pity into which terror mingled, the mother contemplated the disaster [149] The Story Without a Name of her daughter's face. She had never told her she was pretty; the austerity of her creed prevented anything w^hich might tend to exalt a personal pride; but at heart she had been glad of the girl's good-looks. Nov^, though her ap- pearance broke her heart, she could see the hideousness of idiocy forming it, a death in life. Many believe that the body dies before the soul takes flight, but there are instances in v^Ahich life re- mains long after the soul has departed. Night overtook them where they sat. "Come and pray God to unseal your heart and lips, and give you the strength to speak," said Mme. de Ferjol, at last. Indifferent to God as to everything else, Lasthenie remained seated. Mme. de Ferjol was obliged to take her by the wrist, upon which, automatically, the girl yielded. [150] The Story Without a Navie Suddenly the mother raised the girt's hand. ''What is this?" she cried. "Have you lost your father's ring, or do you think yourself no longer worthy to wear it?" The misfortune that had overwhelmed these two women was so vast that neither of them had noticed that the ring was missing. Lasthenie, who had ceased to under- stand anything, looked at her hand and stretched the fingers as a lunatic might have done. "Have I lost it?" she murmured. She spoke as though she were issuing from a dream. "Yes," answered Mme. de Ferjol, whose eyes had become black again and implacable — "yes, it is lost as you are. You gave it to him to whom you gave yourself." [151] Tlie Story Without a Name 'At once the tenderness vanished. The loss of her husband's ring seemed worse than* the loss of her daughter's honor. That evening and the day after Agathe searched for the ring every- w^here. Lasthenie's hand had become so thin that it might easily have slipped from her unnoticed; but the ring was not found, a fact which prevented Mme. de Ferjol from again feeling the slightest compassion. From then on she became frankly cruel. That evening the church was neg- lected. Had they gone there Mme. de Ferjol would have taken with her the suspicion that had haunted her at in- tervals, a suspicion which by reason of her daughter's invincible silence held her like a vise. Since she will not tell me his name, [152] Tlie Story Without a Name she reflected, it is because she cannot marry him; and immediately the thought of that frightful Capuchin, whose name she would not have dared to utter to her daughter, nor even to her- self, sprang at her. Even the letters of the name alarmed her, and to assemble those letters and pronounce them in a whisper seemed to her a sacrilege. For it was a sacrilege to think ill of a priest who, while he dwelled at her side had appeared, irreproachable. That which made her tremble to think of, but of which she thought nevertheless, might have seemed possible to another, yet never to her. "Dear Lord," she cried, in her prayers, "let it not be he." Besides, she reasoned with herself, when could this crime against God and her daughter have been committed? [153] The Story Without a Name He had never seen either of the two women in the absence of the other. He had turned his room into a cell, and save at meal-time never left it. It was ab- surd therefore to imagine what she did. And yet, in spite of its evident absurd- ity, the suspicion which she banished as a suggestion from hell returned always and more infernally insistent than be- fore. It possessed her, hallucinating her with terrifying visions, and plung- ing her into silences as deep as those of Lasthenie; and did she by any chance turn for a moment from the absorbing abstraction of which she vainly prayed God to deliver her, at once there surged before her another vision, as powerful and imperious as the former, the vision of fleeting time ! It was fleeting indeed, pitilessly even, and presently it would tell the entire [154] The Story Without a Name hamlet of the shame of the Ladies de Ferjol. There was but one thing left for them, to go away and disappear. Mme. de Ferjol saw no one, but one morning, as Agathe was on her way to market, she told her to say that all three were to return to Normandy. The prospect not only of leaving the hole in which for nineteen years she had suf- focated, but of again feasting her eyes on her native pasture lands, was the one thing calculated to make Agathe a little less unhappy. Lasthenie's condition, which she still believed the work of the demon, had made her wild with grief, the more so because she felt there could be no remedy against it. But the good news cheered her a little. A change of air, Mme. de Ferjol said, had become necessary to Lasthenie, and what air could be better than that of Normandy? [ 155 ] The Story Without a Name These explanations, which covered the real one, Agathe neither discussed nor examined; she accepted them with joy and confidence. She was homesick for her native land. But from her, as from everyone else, Mme. de Ferjol wished to guard her daughter's secret. For that matter it was her own as well. In her conscience she felt that Lasthenie's condition dishonored her as much as it did her child; and to conceal that dis- honor there was nothing of which she had not thought save an act which, in the present state of our miserable lives, might readily be called the crime of the nineteenth century, Mme. de Ferjol was too upright, too religious, to con- sider even for a moment's space any of the forms of infanticide. Save that, Mme. de Ferjol had knocked against every angle of the [156] Tlie Story Without a Name terrible question. Plan after plan she made and relinquished. She thought of losing herself and her daughter in the immensity of Paris, and she thought too of taking her to some foreign city. She was rich, and with money, every- thing, even to appearances, may be saved. But what excuse had she for going off with a sick daughter no one knew whither, and leaving behind an old and devoted servant, one who had accompanied her at the time of her scandalous elopement, and from whom, out of gratitude, she had then sworn never to part, happen what might? Besides, the adoption of such a plan would certainly have made Agathe sus- pect the shame of a girl whom all her Hfe she had believed an angel of inno- cence and purity; and that, Mme. de Ferjol wished at any cost to avoid. It [157] The Story Without a Name was then the idea occurred to her of re- turning to Normandy. After twenty years of absence she felt that she must be entirely forgotten, that those whom she had known in her youth had either died or departed. Then, too, the plan had another advantage: Agathe would be too occupied with her recovered home to discover the secret which was to die between her daughter and herself. The solitude to which she looked for- ward was of a different kind from that which the hamlet offered. In Nor- mandy she would not live in either a city or a village, but in her own old Chateau d'Olonde, a castle situated in a corner of the unfrequented tract that lies between the Channel coast and the peninsula of Cotentin. At that time there was no highway there. The castle was protected by the wretchedness of [158] Tlie Story WitJiout a Name the cross-roads, and, during a part of the year, by the southwest winds, which blew the rain upon it as on the home of some misanthrope built behind inac- cessible by-paths. It was there, like moles, that these two Shames could hide. Mme. de Ferjol had resolved that even on the* fatal day no physician should be called. Her own hands would suffice, she told herself; and each time she did a shiver caught her, and from the depths of her heroic and miserable being a voice cried: "But afterwards? What of the child? Must you not hide it too as you hide the mother?" Then at once she would begin again at the problem which strangled her like a noose. But there was no time to be lost. It was impossible to wait any [1591 The Story Witkotit a Name longer; there was but one thing to be done — to get away from the hamlet that stared in her face. Whereupon Mme. de Ferjol, with that feeling common to those who anticipate a calamity that they cannot avert, consoled herself as best she might in the hope that at the last moment something would occur to save her, and threw herself, with her daughter, into the postchaise that car- ried them off. [160] VIII THIS nameless story of a mysterious domestic tragedy which fell, no one knew whence or, how, on two women, who while hid in the shadow of a cistern were yet visible to the eye of Fate, occurred coincidentally with the formation of another shadow, one that mingled with and darkened the first — the shadow of the crater that suddenly opened beneath the feet of France. When Mme. de Ferjol left her ham- let the French Revolution had begun, but it was not sufficiently advanced to interfere, as it would have later, with the journey she was taking. That jour- ney was long and painful. Lasthenie [161] The Story Without a Name suffered horribly. The roads were not then what they have since become, and the jolting postchaise tortured her so that every evening a stop was made at an inn, not for a relay, but for the night. A hearse could not go slower, the postillions disdainfully remarked, and in so doing spoke better than they knew. The carriage they drove contained al- most a corpse. At each lurch of the coach, Lasthenie was on the point of fainting, and that devil who lurks in ambuscade in the best and strongest hearts never failed on such occasions to inspire Mme. de Ferjol with a sinister hope. "If only she would have a " But the woman's piety strangled the hope even before it was fully expressed. She was closer to her daughter there than in the embrasure of their window. [ 162 ] The Story Without a Name Yet they spoke as little as before. What had they to talk of? Everything had been said. Absorbed in themselves neither thought of looking from the window. They had no curiosity in the landscape, in the passers, in anything. The long hours went by in a silence worse than reproach; they were pitiless to each other, atrocious, both of them, in their resentment. For they were embittered now, one at her inabihty to extract anything from the obstinate and stupid chill who was her own, and who sat there with her, knee to knee; the other at the injustice and cruelty of her mother. The long journey across France was an agony to them both; to Agathe as well, for Lasthenie's sufferings made her suffer too. She had the same idea con- cerning her darling's disorder; it was [ 16.' ] The Story Without a Name not one for human remedies; exorcism alone could dissolve the spell; and she had said as much to Mme. de Ferjol, who, in spite of her profound faith, had shrugged her shoulders, a reply which to Agathe in her piety was incompre- hensible. Once back in Olonde, how- ever, she knew what she would do. Of all worships in Normandy, the most an- cient is that of the Blissful Thomas de Bivelle, confessor of St. Louis the King. And Agathe intended to walk bare- footed to the tomb of that holy man, who could easily add Lasthenie's recov- ery to the many other miracles he had worked. If then she were not cured, Agathe determined to ask a priest to ex- orcise the spell. For, in spite of her ab- solute devotion to the Baroness de Ferjol, and the familiarity with which she addressed her, Agathe was afraid of [164] The Story Without a Name the imposing woman who closed her mouth with a word, sometimes with a silence; and she did not dare to presume to offer further advice. At last, after many days, Olonde was reached. If anything could have acted on Lasthenie's dulled imagination it would have been the splendor and gaiety of the sunlight which fell upon her as she alighted from the coffin-like coach. Had her soul been left to her it would have been deliciously inundated by the brilliancy of a sky such as, from her mountain cave, she had never seen be- fore. But she was too weak to appre- ciate the charm of that sudden douche of light. The sun that day gave to the leaves and the hedges — which the rain had brushed and the wind had polished — the glitter and sheen of emeralds. Normandy is the Erin of France, but an [165] The Story Without a Name Erin rich, cultivated, worthy to bear the color of happy and realized hope; where- as the Erin of Great Britain has only the right to the livery of despair. Unfortu- nately, all this affected no one but Agathe. Mme. de Ferjol had broken the last tie that held her to earth. In leaving the tomb of her husband, in which she too expected to be placed, her one thought had been to save her daughter's name. To exterior impres- sions she was as unconscious as Las- thenie. They had both become in every sense unnatural; they knew it and it terrified them. They loved each other still, but an involuntary hatred had begun to filter venemously into that love, corrupting and embittering it as a poison corrupts a well. It was with these sentiments, and [166] The Story Without a Name with the* indifference of people to whom life has nothing to offer, that they estab- lished themselves in their refuge, the abandoned Chateau d'Olonde, which they had reached without notifying any- one, and where they wished to remain unknown. Unassisted, Agathe made the old castle almost habitable for them. Rejuvenated by the enchanted oxygen of her natal land she sufficed unto her- self, and spared- them the slightest trouble. The shutters she left tightly closed, but to air the musty halls and chambers she opened the windows be- hind them. She dusted and she rubbed the furniture, which cracked with the weight of age; from the closets she took the piled and yellowed linen; she made the beds and heated them, delivering them from that sepulchral impression which old linen that has lain long un- [ 167 ] The Sto?\ij Without a Name aired exhales. In spite of the three people who had come there, exteriorly the castle was unchanged. To the peas- ants who passed it, and who paid no more attention to it than if it had never existed, it was empty still. They had always seen it there; with its barred shutters they were familiar; the excom- municated appearance which it pos- sessed had ceased to impress them; and when they passed that way they give no heed to the singularity of a castle inhabited by a silence that resembled death. The tenant-farmers of Olonde lived too far from the castle to be aware of what was happening there. Agathe was forty years old when she disappeared with her mistress, and the twenty years of her absence had changed her appear- ance so completely that there was no [168] The Story Without a Name one in the market-place to recognize her. To the peasants she was merely an old woman of their own class, who paid cash and held her tongue. The Normans are taciturn, and so distrustful that they make no advances until advances are made to them. They attend to their own business and not to the affairs of others. As a consequence Agathe was not embarrassed by any inquisitive curi- osity. The roads that led to the castle were rarely used, for the castle itself was beyond the highways that led to the vil- lages of Denneville and St. Germain- sur-Ay. The entrance to it was a great rusted gate, provided with an interior shutter that cut off any view of the court; but beyond the castle, in an angle of the garden wall, was a little low door, and it was that which Agathe used when she went to market. On returning, and [169] The Stori) Without a Name before putting the key in the lock, she looked around carefully like a thief. Her precautions were needless; there was never anyone about. In accordance with her intention, Mme. de Ferjol created there a greater solitude than the one she had left, one that was not solitude alone, but captivity as well, but against which Lasthenie made no effort at revolt. The idea of honor, as the world accepts it, occupied much less space in her virginal and weakened mind than in that of her mother, but always she had been obedient, and now she was too wholly demoralized to complain. Agathe, in her fanatic love for the young girl, whom she never could have suspected of a purity that was not immaculate, was not at all surprised at this mysterious and [170] The Story Without a Name prodigious isolation. It seemed very natural that Mme. de Ferjol should be unwilling to have anyone see what a ruin Lasthenie was, or to have anyone say, That is what the noble Demoiselle d'Olonde has brought back from her scandalous elopement. Meanwhile she busied herself with her plan of a pil- grimage to the tomb of the Blissful Thomas of Bivelle, and of the exorcism which was to follow, if her prayers were unanswered. Mme. de Ferjol was therefore unhindered by her daughter or by Agathe, without whose aid indeed she could not have created the cloister that she had. For Olonde was a cloister, but without chapel or services, a thing that added to Mme. de Ferjol's remorse. Even veiled she could not have gone to mass in the neighboring [ 171 1 The Story Without a Name parish, for at that particular time it was dangerous to leave Lasthenie alone for a minute. "I must sacrifice to her/' she resent- fully reflected, "even the duties of reli- gion" — duties that v^ere weightier to that Jansenist than to anyone. "She damns us both." This intensity in religion it is neces- sary to understand in order to appreciate what the woman sufl^ered, for she did sufifer, and acutely. The castle, which I have compared to a nunless and chapel- less cloister, soon became to Lasthenie and herself as suffocating as the post- chaise, which had affected them like a coffin. Happily — if such a word can be used in a story like this — happily, about the castle there was space enough to breathe in. The walls of the unculti- vated garden were sufficiently high to [172] The Story Witliout a Name conceal the two recluses when they cared to take a few steps in the open air. Soon, however, Lasthenie left the garden to itself. She preferred to lie on the lounge, which her mother occupied at night. For, like a jailer — worse even, for in prison the jailer is not always present — Mme. de Ferjol never left her side. Lasthenie lived with hers, a jailor tenaciously silent now, but omni- present and implacable. Mme. de Fer- jol had adopted an attitude which gives some idea of the strength of her char- acter. She said nothing to Lasthenie; she no longer reproached her. She un- derstood at last the impossibility of con- quering a girl who was at once so weak and so firm, and that firmness was an example to her. The silence, which be- tween them had always more or less ex- [173] The Story Without a Name isted, at this time became absolute. It was the silence of two corpses in the same bier, but of two corpses that were not dead, who, within the four dumb planks of a coffin, saw and touched each other. The funeral silence was the most insupportable of all the things they underwent. Prayer is not, as St. Martin has said, the breath of the soul. The soul's breath is untrammelled speech, the full expression of a thought, whether of love or of hate, of prayer or blasphemy, of cursing or benediction. Whoso is con- demned to silence is condemned to be suffocated and yet not to die. It was to that which these women in their de- spair had condemned themselves. To each the silence of the other was death. INIme. de Ferjol, whose faith nothing [174] The Story Without a Name could alter, still spoke to God. She threw herself on her knees before her daughter and prayed to Him in implor- ing undertones. But Lasthenie ad- dressed God as seldom as she addressed her mother, and smiled even — an evil smile, one that was vaguely scornful — at the sight of her mother kneeling in prayer at her side. The injustice of her mother had taken from her all belief in the justice of God. Agathe, whom Mme. de Ferjol kept at arm's length, did not dare to come with her work into that room where no one spoke; and, although beside herself with anxiety because of Lasthenie, she was glad nevertheless to resume possession of the places and things she knew so well, and she busied herself with the household duties which her mistress [175] The Story Without a Name seemed to have entirely forgotten. Without Agathe, who fed them as in- fants and lunatics are fed, they would have perhaps both died of hunger ab- sorbed in devouring thoughts. [176] IX ONE evening Mme. de Ferjol no- ticed certain symptoms that fore- tokened an early deliverance, and though the crisis had been long awaited, its attendant dangers alarmed her as they had not done before. They were solemn and menacing, and her untrained hands might easily render them tragic and mortal. By force of will she mastered her nerv- ousness and prepared for the task. Las- thenie's sufiferings left no room for doubt. During the night she was deliv- ered. A little before, her mother mut- tered: "Bite the sheets so as not to cry out; try to have that courage." [177] The Story Without a Name Lasthenie had it: she did not utter a single cry; and even if she had it would have disturbed no one in that house, to which night could not add a silence greater than it possessed by day. The only person who might have heard was Agathe, but she occupied a room at the other end of the castle, a precaution which Mme. de Ferjol's prudence had long since devised. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, during one moment the fear that comes of uncertainty beset her. She was sure she was alone with her daughter, and yet with beating heart she crept and opened the door. She fancied Agathe crouching there. Such a thing was absurd; but no matter, she opened the door with that sinking of the heart which visits those who are not sure whether a specter may not surge out of the gaping black of night. In her case [178] The Story Without a Name the specter would have been Agathe. Trembling, her eyes dilated, she peered down through the shadows of the cor- ridor; there was no one; and trembling still she returned to the bed where her daughter writhed in agony. The infant must have been exhausted by the sufferings of its mother. It was stillborn. Mme. de Ferjol, who had reproached herself for hoping for a cer- tain accident which the jolting vehicle might have caused, and thereby saved her daughter's future, could not help being glad at a death for which no one was to blame. She thanked God for the loss of a child whom in thought she had lugubriously christened Tristan; she blessed providence for taking it from her before its birth. She and her daughter too were spared new shames and fresher griefs. For to her also it was a deliv- [179] The Storif Without a Name erance. Death had freed her from a child whom she would have had to hide during its lifetime as she had hid it in its mother, and who, living, would have impurpled Lasthenie with that blush of shame v/hich bastards put on their mother's cheeks. "There is your crime and its expia- tion!" Lasthenie looked at the child with eyes that were as dead as it, while through her broken body a shiver passed. "It is happier than I am," she mur- mured. Mme. de Ferjol was watching her face, searching for a look of tenderness, which it astonished her not to find. There was horror there, the eternal hor- ror to which fate seemed to have dedi- cated the girl, but nothing of that which [ 180 ] TJie Story Without a Name explains and absolves, no trace of love, nor yet of maternal affection. Invol- untarily ]\Ime. de Ferjol had counted on that supreme moment, but she had cotmted in vain; the mystery of Las- thenie's soul was impenetrable. At that hour there v^ere certainly many women in the world giving birth to the fruit of illegitimate love, but was there one, was there another, whose destiny resembled Lasthenie's? one on whom night and fear and death piled a triple shadow, in order that a nameless child of some nameless story might be forever hid? It was a night of agonies, and there was still another to be endured ; the child happily was dead, but its body was there, and that last vestige of shame Mme. de Ferjol knew must disappear. Lasthenie had fallen asleep. Mme. de Ferjol took the corpse, and, rolling [181] The Story Without a Name it in one of the swaddling-clothes at which she had worked during the silent hours she had passed at her daughter's side, she left the girl and the room, lock- ing the door behind her as she went. Presently she was in the garden; an old spade was there, she remembered, and with it, in an angle of the wall, she dug a grave for the child, hurriedly, her hands trembling and humiliated. "I bury it as though I had killed it," she thought; and with the fright of guilt she stamped down the earth on what might have been her grandchild. Then she returned to the room, where Las- thenie still slept. When the latter awoke she asked no question. She appeared to have forgot- ten the child. Mnie. de Ferjol noticed this, and waited, wondering whether she would speak of it first. But, mon- [ 182 ] The Story Without a Name strous as it may seem, she neither spoke of it then or later on. Only her tears flowed continuously, as before, and when at last she was sufficiently recov- ered to leave her bed, she seemed as ill as she had been at first. There was the same weakness, the same pallor, the same stupor, the same self-concentra- tion, the same frightened expression, the same dementia. The dishonoring blow which her mother had dealt at her inno- cence, joined to the inexplicability of her condition, had put a wound in her that still bled, one that would never heal. Mme. de Ferjol, reassured by the knowledge that the secret of her daugh- ter's dishonor was now a thing of the past, became gentler, and, being a Chris- tion, charitable and lenient too. Her customary irritability disappeared. The irreparable was to her like [183] The Story Without a Name death, a thing to be accepted. But with Lasthenie it was different. She declined to acept the irreparable. Of the two women it was the weaker who showed the greater strength. Her rela- tions with her mother she did not alter, neither did she raise her head. She was pitiless. That dagger which resent- ment is she kept in the wound it had created. Agathe, who during the time the girl was in bed had hoped for some favor- able change in her disorder, seeing now, by her languor and unceasing tears, that the prospect of amelioration was slight, returned to her former belief in the devil and his spells, and asked permis- sion to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Blissful Thomas de Bivelle, a per- mission which Mme. de Ferjol accorded. Agathe started off barefoot, with that [184] The Story Without a Name faith of mediaeval pilgrims which, in spite of the progress of contempo- raneous incredulity, still abides in Nor- mandy. Four days later she returned, but sadder than when she started. The miracle that she had demanded in the security of her perfect faith seemed to her now remote, perhaps unobtainable. For, on approaching Olonde, there in the moonlight she had found a coffin stretched across the road. She had tried to move it, and could not, and sud- denly it had disappeared. In the super- stitions of the land, in which she firmly beHeved, an experience such as that was an evil omen, the presage of coming death. The next day, however, Lasthenie seemed to her a trifle better than before, and had it not been for the apparition [185] The Storij Without a Name she would have attributed the sUght amelioration to the pilgrimage. She told Mme. de Ferjol all the circum- stances of her journey, but said nothing about the coffin. *'What is the use?" she reflected. ''She would not believe me." But Mme. de Ferjol did believe in prayer, and in the miracles which prayers produce, and she told Agathe that Lasthenie already felt better for those that had been offered for her at the tomb of the saint. *'I intend to go to mass myself pres- ently," she added. Now, Agathe had not missed one, and she had excited no more curiosity in the church than she had in the market- place. To the assistants she was but one peasant more. But what was pos- [186] The Story Without a Name sible to Agathe was impossible for her mistress. So soon then as Mme. de Ferjol felt that the time had come when she could attend holy worship, she experienced a sensation, not of joy, for the condition of her daughter made her far too melan- choly for that, but of something that dilated her heart, so long and so hor- ribly compressed. In the native com- mon-sense which had never deserted her, and in her appreciation of the realities of life, she knew that now she and her daughter must abandon the incognito which thus far they had preserved. In consequence she gave Agathe certain in- structions. She told her to tell the tenantry of her arrival, to explain that she had come because of her daugh- ter's health, to whom a change of air [187] The Stoni Without a Name was necessary, and to add that until her daughter was fully recovered she could receive no one. These precautions were needless. It was not a time when people received or made visits. The Revolution was gal- loping like a fever, the crisis of delirium was at hand. The two miserable chatelaines of Olonde overcome by the domestic trag- edy of which their dwelling was the theater, knew absolutely nothing of the political tragedy which was about to have France for stage. Mme. de Ferjol talked of going to mass. In a moment there would be none for her to attend, nor one of those altars to kneel at which are the columns where every broken heart should lean. [188] X WHEN Mme. de Ferjol appeared at mass in one of the parishes adjacent to 0.1onde, she did not cause as much of a sensation as she might have caused at another time. The rumor of the Revolution dominated everything, and even in Normandy, where common- sense is a birthright, it brought with it enthusiasm or fright; it turned all heads, preparatory perhaps to amputating them. As a consequence Mme. de Fer- jol, whose elopement had been well-nigh forgotten, created little attention. Her chateau, which for years had dozed on the side of the highway where its three turrets were planted, opened its eyes, or [1891 The Story Without a Name rather its shutters, again, and thq ;white headdress of Agathe was seen in the windows once more. The wooden shut- ters that barricaded the gateway dis- appeared, and to the infrequent passers the Httle details of Hfe seemed to have noiselessly returned to the castle that had been dead. But the fact that Mme. de Ferjol occupied it was practically as unnoticed as her arrival. The solitude was undisturbed. She lived in that tete-a-tete with her daughter which was to be the latter's life, and which now no other presence than that of Agathe dis- turbed. There is no marriage possible for Las- thenie, the mother often reflected. For how could she say to a man who might love her enough to marry her, and who in marrying her would believe her to be a young girl — how could she say that [190] The Story Without a Name Lasthenie was a widow, and a widow incapable of emerging from the abjec- tion of her widowhood? How was she to confide the dishonor of her daughter to the man who came to ask her hand? Honesty, loyalty, religion, every one of the divine atoms which went to the making of that woman, rose in rebellion at the thought; and of all the thoughts that crucified her, that one was not the least poignant. In her present prostra- tion and languor, Lasthenie was neces- sarily incompetent to inspire any other sentiment than that of pity; but she was young, and what powerful elixirs there are in youth! what wonderful resources it possesses! Only, under penalty of infamy, there is no recourse against the necessity of telling the truth. And it was that knowledge of infamy which bound the existence and the destiny of [ 191 ] The Storij Without a Name the mother to the destiny and existence of the child, condemning them in their isolation to live face to face, alienated forever. The supposition that some day a man might love the girl was but a dream, one, however, which added a grief of its own to those sorrows which fate had already inflicted. During the terrible night which I have related Mme. de Ferjol had searched in vain in her daughter's face for a single sign of love. There had been none, there was to be none; Lasthenie was destined to die without loving or being loved. Her lost beauty she never recovered, and although when Agathe returned from her pilgrimage Mme. de Ferjol told her that the girl was better, and so told her perhaps because she hoped such was the case rather than be- lieved it, yet, as the days and months [192 1 The Story Without a Name passed over the girl's once charming head, and bowed it more and more, hope went and belief as well. Anyone who had known the circumstances would have said that the accouchement, of which she might have died and did not die, had caused some rupture of the spinal column, for afterwards her back was bent. And when she and her mother appeared in church, merely at sight of them it was understood that Mme. de Ferjol would receive no one, the better to care for her daughter's health. The general opinion was that the girl she dragged with her she would not drag long. She might have done so, however, had not the Revolution in its sacri- legious apogee suddenly closed the church's door. There was no reason now to hide Las- [193] The Storjj_ Without a Naine thenie from the physicians, and at Mme. de Ferjol's request several of them came to Olonde, but in the girl, feeble now in mind as in body, they detected merely one of those marasms of which the cause is impenetrable. Alone in the universe Mme. de Ferjol knew that cause. It was the girl's sin, she told herself, and it was of that she would die. Jansenist as she was, she had a firmer belief in God's justice than in his pity; and, to her thinking, it was divine jus- tice that had bent that delicious form which the arms of a man had embraced. And convinced that the girl would not escape the punishment of her sin, Mme. de Ferjol watched her falling day by day, deeper into the mysterious disease that was killing her, as one watches the remnants of a demolished palace turn into dust. Tn spite of the girl's conduct, [194] The Story Without a Name in spite of her refusal to acknowledge her guilt, in spite of the severity of her own creed, in spite, in fact, of every- thing, Mme. de Ferjol suffered in the suffering of her daughter; only she did not express that sympathy to Lasthenie, who for that matter was no longer capable of understanding even what sympathy was. The malady from which she suffered, and which discon- certed the physicians so well, that, after suggesting moxas, they declared it in- curable, this malady was not of the body alone, but of the soul. It possessed her entirely. Her reason, which had brushed very close to idiocy, turned the little light that was left to it toward the shadows of lunacy. But her silence was her safeguard. She was dying, as she had lived, without speaking. All day she would sit, speechless, unoccupied, [195] The Story Without a Name motionless, her head against the wall, without a word even for Agathe, who drowned herself in tears, and bemoaned the absence of that resource on which she had counted, a priest to exorcise her darling. For the priests had fled, the Revolution was at its height, a thing which was known at Olonde, only be- cause there was no priest to exorcise Lasthenie. The fact in itself is unique. There, in that little Chateau d'Olonde, which the Revolution spared, and which with its three turrets still endures, were three women unhappy enough, in the nest of misery in which they crouched, to forget everything which did not con- cern them. While the blood of scaffolds inundated France, the three martyrs of an ill-fated life saw only that which flowed from their hearts. It was during this forgetfulness of the [196] The Story Without a Name forgotten Revolution that Lasthenle succumbed, carrying with her to the tomb her secret — what Mine, de Ferjol thought was her secret. There had been nothing to warn anyone that the end was so near. She was not different that day from the day previous and the "days before that. Mme. de Ferjol and Agathe had not noticed in her face, which had been despairfully pale so long, nor in the expression of her eyes, nor yet in the weakness of her body, anything to make them, think she was about to die. As a rule there was no need to watch her. They left her, her head against the wall of the room which she had chosen, and came and went through that house in which two things were invariable, Mme. de Ferjol praying, and Agathe weeping, each in a corner. On that day [197] The Story Without a Name they found her exactly as they had left her, in the same place, her head against the wall, her eyes wide open — but dead, her soul departed, that poor soul of hers which was hardly a soul at all. At that spectacle Agathe threw herself at the knees of her darling, embracing them passionately, and rolling on them, as she sobbed, her old grief-stricken head. But Mme. de Ferjol, who contained her emotion better, slipped her hand under the breast of her whom she had often called by a name that fitted her well, "little girl," in order to discover whether the heart that had beaten had ceased to beat, and there felt something. ''Blood, Agathe!" Her voice was horrible as she spoke. On her fingers were a few drops. Agathe tore herself from the knees she was embracing, and together they [198] The Story Without a Name opened the waist. Horror seized them. Lasthenie had killed herself, slowly, little by little, each day a fraction more, with pins. They drew out eighteen stuck in the region of the heart. [ 199 ] XI TWENTY-FIVE years later Mme. de Ferjol, who had survived her daughter, and whom, as she said of her- self, nothing could kill, was dining one evening with the Count de Lude, a rela- tive of hers, and parenthetically one of the most charming hosts in St. Sauveur, where, as may be remembered, there had been plenty of dancing before the Revo- lution, and where she herself had danced with the white officer, her black angel who put her in mourning for the rest of her life. At that time dancing had ceased. Autre temps, autre maeurs! But dining had not. In place of contre- dances were large repasts. It was at one of these that Mme, de Ferjol assisted. [200] Tlie Story Without a Name Doubly aged by grief and by years, severer in piety than ever, almost a saint — if a pitiless saint there can be — it was surprising enough to find her amid the gaiety of a dinner-table. She was there, however. Endowed, as has been seen, with an unusual strength of char- acter, inimical to any form of affecta- tion, she had re-entered the world to which she belonged — long after the death of her daughter, it is true — but she had re-entered it, and had renewed her relations with a simplicity and so- briety of her own. Buried in her heart was the memory of the unforgettable secret which her daughter had died without revealing, and that memory was as a cancer to her; she hid it, she gave no sign, but it gnawed ceaselessly at her breast. No one had ever suspected what she knew of her daughter's life, [201] The Story Without a Name but what made her suffer most was not what she knew, but what she did not know. Was she ever to know? She had no hope of it. Meanwhile, in- wardly despairful, outwardly composed, she continued to live. She was but a ruin, but a ruin like the Coliseum; one that had its grandeur and its majesty. At the end of the table where she sat there was less laughter and loud talking than at the other. Her seriousness commanded respect. The dinner itself was lively and agreeable, though the guests were terribly mixed. It offered in epitome a portrait of society such as the Revolution and the Empire had made it, a reunion, as the Count de Lude put it, of the three classes. The clergy was represented, the nobility, and the third estate. Between the Marquise de Limorre, an aristocrat to her finger-tips, [202] Tlie Story Without a Name and the Marquis de Pont-1 'Abbe, whose title was as old as the hills, was a Nor- man peasant, a superb-looking fellow, be it said, who had got rid of his native uncouthness and had become an authen- tic Parisian bourgeois. And there, be- tween the marquis and the marquise, the bourgeois spread a white waistcoat, like a silver escutcheon between its two sup- ports; of which one, the marquise, was the unicorn, and the other, the marquis, the greyhound. Each year he came to St. Sauveur on a vacation, for he enjoyed the leisures of wealth; wealth which he would willingly have lost solely for the pleasure of regaining it. He was bored. He had a special complaint, the home- sickness of the retired merchant. In trade he had been a grocer, but a grocer of the highest class. He had been a grocer to His Majesty Napoleon, [203] The Story Without a Na7iie Emperor and King, in the fairest days of the latter's glory, and his shop, which disappeared with the others on the Place du Carrousel, stared for ten years with- out blinking straight into the eyes of the Tuileries — which has gone too. All imperial grocer that he was, he had neither the name nor the appearance of a tradesman. He had a name that would have suited a general — Bataille. In appearance Providence had made him one of the handsomest men of an epoch, when almost every man was superb, men whom David and Gericault have painted, perhaps for our humiliation. Among the cooks he was known as the good- looking grocer of the Carrousel. His name fitted his looks. His bearing was so miHtary that at night, with his claque and cloak he surprised the sentinels into saluting him, as they salute a general; [204] The Story Without a Name and that salute he returned Hke a gen- eral, with a gravity and a pompousness which delighted his friends. For a mo- ment he was really the general, but one who rebecame a grocer at once. He had no brains, he had not an idea in his head, a fact which at the age of sixty per- fectly explained his excellent health. But he was shrewd, as a Norman ever is. The fall of the Empire did not in- jure him; he abdicated from his shop as Napoleon from the Empire, only, unlike the latter, there was no return from Elba. He died very peacefully in 1830 of cholera. Such was the individual whom chance and revolutions had placed at the din- ner-table of the Count de Lude, in front of Mme. de Ferjol. On that day, in honor of his host, he wore his finest ap- parel, a blue coat with gold buttons, [205] The Story Without a Name white knee-breeches, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes. He had been always aware of his good looks, and his good looks were not impaired by his tailor; he was relatively still young, strong, supple, and fair with that fairness that recalls the Scandinavian origin of the Normans, but which was apparent not in his hair, which was white as the wing of an albatross, but in his skin and its fresh coloring. His style was neither good nor bad; he had none. Where would he have got any? from the cooks to whom he had sold ponies of brandy every morning? In this respect his ig- norance was like that of M. de Corbiere, who put his tobacco-spotted handker- chief on the King's desk. Bataille would not have put his, a silk one, scented at that, on the Count de Lude's table, but he had put his snuff-box there, [206] The Story WitJiout a Name a very handsome one, with a miniature on it of his son, a horrid little beast, who did not in the least resemble his father, and whom his father affectionately en- titled Battalson. It was in connection with this snuff- box, passed to one of the guests who had asked to examine the miniature, that the Marquis de Pont-l'Abbe caught sight of an emerald on the little finger of the hand extended before him. ''See here, Bataille," he exclaimed; "you must be deuced vain to wear a ring of such beauty and value. Where in the world did you get such a mar- vel?" Bataille laughed. "You could never guess. Fifty thousand crowns to twen- ty-five louis that you can't." "What nonsense!" Pont-l'Abbe in- credulously retorted. [207] The Story Without a Name "Try and guess, then," answered Bataille. The old marquis reflected for a mo- ment, and sought, but probably did not find, a supposition decent enough to hazard before such a redoubtable dev- otee as Mme. de Ferjol, who, in the eternal gnawing of the cancer which was eating her heart, paid no attention whatever. "Well," said Bataille, at last, '1 took it from a robber. I gave him the change for his coin. The robber was robbed. It was odd enough. Would you like to hear how it happened?" "Yes," answered the Count de Lude; "tell us the story; it will help us on with the Chambertin." [208] XII 4 4TT runs rather far back," said -■- Bataille, "for at that time the Emperor was not yet Emperor, nor was I his grocer." The Empire was so great that it made even grocers proud, and Bataille spoke with an air of imperial pride. "Barras then was chief; under him, at the head of the police, was Fouche, who, as you know, subsequently became minister of justice, but in those days, what with the Jacobins and Chouans, he had all he could attend to. The police he commanded was not for civil pur- poses, but political; the government ranked ahead of Paris. None of you [209] The Story Without a Name gentlemen who were then in the prov- inces or abroad can fancy what Paris was the day after the Revolution. It had ceased to be a capital; it was not even a city, it was a cavern. Except in the neighborhood of the Palais Royal not a street lamp was to be seen. The Revolution had turned them into gib- bets. The darkness swarmed with cut-throats; there was danger every- where. Unless you were armed to the teeth you were safe only at home. And even then! However — "I lived at that time on the corner of the Rue de Sevres, in a shop which, when I pass it, I always look at now. The iron bars on the windows have an interest for me. I will tell you why. One night when I had shut up early, and had gone to sleep in a room over the shop, I was awakened by a curious [210] The Story Without a Name sound. It was a noise like that of saw- ing, and I said to myself, 'There are thieves downstairs.' I called my assist- ant, who slept in the loft, and we went down on tip-toe. I was right; it was thieves. They were sawing the shutter, and when we got there, they had made a hole in it about twice the size of the inside of a hat. Through that hole a hand was stretched; it had seized one of the bars and was trying to loosen it. The hand alone was visible; the man to whom it belonged was behind the shut- ter, and there were others with him, for I heard them whispering together. An idea struck me. I mentioned it to my assistant, a young fellow from here, from Benneville, who was sturdy as an oak, and not awkward either, as you shall see. He understood me at once, jumped at the hand, and grasped it with [211] The Story Without a Name both his own with a grip that was Hke a vise for that hand, which I then bound firmly to the bar with a cord that I had taken from the counter. " 'You won't work any more, my beauty,' I said laughingly. The bandit was secure enough, and I chuckled be- forehand at the face he would pull when he saw me the next morning. We then went upstairs again, I to my bed, my assistant to the loft. But I did not sleep very well. I kept listening in spite of myself. Presently I thought I heard the fall of departing steps. I was afraid to look out; the brigands might have fired in my face, and I did not want to be disfigured." At this Bataille smiled with an air of vanity, and showed his white teeth. "Besides, I knew that on the morrow I should have my revenge, and that [212] The Story Without a Name sweet thought killed me to sleep." The grocer had succeeded in interest- ing the well-bred aristocrats who sur- rounded him; they looked at him, smil- ing no longer at his fine head, the beauty of which they envied perhaps, nor even at his earrings, which he had worn since boyhood, and which, in giving him the air of an old postilion, revenged them for his good looks. "But on the morrow," he continued, "there was another tune to sing. You can understand, gentlemen, that I was up early, and that when I got into the shop my first look was for that devil of a hand. I knew very well that it was tied fast, that it could not budge; I had bound it that way. But at the first glance I almost tumbled over with as- tonishment; instead of being swollen, puffed, purple, black even, as I had ex- [213] The Story Without a Name pected it would be because of the strangulation of the cord with which I had tied it, and which I bound so tight that it cut the flesh — instead of that it was as colorless as though not a drop of blood had circulated in it. It seemed exhausted, white and limp as the hand of a woman. I ran to the door, and, opening it, I looked. Instead of a man, there was a pool of blood " Bataille was not eloquent. In his childhood he had been a shepherd, and in talking he had eccentricities of speech which I have suppressed. But had he been eloquent, I give you my word he could not have produced a greater ef- fect. His listeners had forgotten him, they were thinking of the robbers who had cut their accomplice's wrist and dragged him away. "Brave fellows, all the same," said de [214] The Story Without a Name Lude, who was energetic, and who would have done as much himself. *'I went back to the shop," Bataille continued, and for a while I looked at the hand, which had been sawn at the fore- arm, probably with the saw that had sawn the shutter. It was a curious hand, one, I can assure, that did not look like the hand of a bandit; and it was then that I noticed a ring. The stone had slipped around on the inside of the finger; and that stone, my lord marquis, is the emerald before you. It is too handsome for me, I admit. It is not every day that I wear it, and when I do, it is only with the idea that through some chance I may meet the person to whom it belonged, and learn who the robber was." Bataille had told his story, and he had buried under it the jests of the old [215] Tlie Story Without a Name marquis. He cut him out, as the Eng- lish say. The guests — there were fully twenty at the dinner which the Count de Lude had called a reunion of three classes — the guests were all curious about the emerald; they asked to see it, and it passed from hand to hand. At last it reached the guest who sat at Mme. de Ferjol's left, the abbot of a monastery that had been built in the forest of Brlc- quebec. It happened that, in passing through St. Sauveur, the Count de Lude had asked him to dinner, in honor of Mme. de Ferjol, the saint of the coun- try; and he had placed him at table be- side her. Of the guests that were present this abbot, Father Augustin by name, and Mme. de Ferjol were the only ones who were indifferent to the emerald that was [216] The Story Without a Naine performing its little circular journey; and, without looking at it, Father Au- gustin accepted it from his neighbor, the Count de Kirkeville, and with the grav- ity of a man who, in spite of himself, is doing a frivolous thing he offered it to Mme. de Ferjol. But Mme. de Ferjol, graver even than he, did not take it ; her eyes, however, haughtily inattentive, fell upon the emerald by chance, and at once, as though struck by a bullet, she first screamed, then fainted. She had recognized her husband's ring, the one she had given to Lasthenie. The astonishment of the guests equal- ed perhaps her own, but the respect which she commanded was so great that none of those who were present ever mentioned the incident. Concerning that sudden swoon of hers, which had [217] The Story Without a Name every appearance of covering a drama, nothing was said. On recovering she returned to Olonde and began looking again into the gaping cancer in her heart. There was a new crevice in it now; her daughter, the daughter of a de Ferjol, had loved a thief. ''Lord God!" she cried, "will this never end? Is this agony inexhaust- ible?" With a tragic gesture she tore hair by handfuls from her hollowed temples, and threw herself, crucified as she was, before the crucifix. Agathe, her servant in grief, now eighty-five years of age, and who, if one could live on grief, might readily live to be a hundred, entered the room where she lay, and with the voice of a specter murmured: [218] The Story Without a Name "The Reverend Father Abbot of the Trappe of Bricquebec begs to see your ladyship." "Show him in." [219] Xlli As the prelate entered, Mme. de Fer- jol rose to her feet. . He bowed to her with manifest respect, but he seemed nervous, ill at ease. In the haste in which he hd come to Olonde, it was clear that he had a duty to perform. Mme. de Ferjol motioned him to be seated, but he remained standing, '"Madame," he began, at once, "I have brought you the ring which you recog- nized as your own, and I have come to tell you," he added, solemnly, "the name of the man who lost it — with his hand." As he spoke he offered her the ring. But she did not take it. At the moment it was impossible for her to touch the [220] The Story Without a Name jewel. It had been profaned, sullied, ten times over; and, moreover, it had come from the amputated hand of a thief. She trembled from head to foot. 'The name — " she stammered. "Yes," the prelate interrupted, "the name of the man who ruined your life, whom you must have often cursed, who in religion was known as Father Riculf, of the Holy Order of the Capuchins, and who, during Lent, lodged at your house twenty-five years ago." Mme. de Ferjol grew pale as a ghost; she felt her strength departing, but, svmimoning all her energy, she prepared to ask the question on which her whole life depended. Her dark eyes, beneath which Lasthenie had always lowered her own, were fixed on the prelate. ' "Have you only that to tell mc?" she asked. [221] The Story Without a Name "I have everything to tell you," he answered, "for he, on the cinders on which members of our order die, and on which, at peace with God, he died a few days ago, told me, in the last hour, with the crucifix at his lips, that he alone was guilty, and that your daughter was inno- cent of the sin." "It was I, then!" cried Mme. de Fer- jol. In a lightning-flash her entire life unfolded. "It was I !" With incomparable dignity the prel- ate interrupted her again: "It is not for me to judge you, ma- dame. I am but the bearer of a message which must be grateful to a soul as pure as your own, that your daughter was innocent, that the guardian angel of her life was ever at her side, gazing at her with immaculate and immortal eyes." He stopped, astonished that no sigi} [ 222 ] The Story Without a Name of joy was visible in the woman's face. The remorse that was there, remorse for having believed Lasthenie guilty, and of slowly and tragically killing her because of it, he did not understand. ''Father," she muttered, "the message comes too late. It was I that killed my child. The priest, in whose guilt I could never believe, did worse than that in taking her in his sacrilegious arms. But he did not kill, he sullied her; he left me to kill her, and kill her I did. By my daughter's death I consummated the crime which he began." With that she lowered her head. She was self-condemned. The prelate saw that her heart was breaking, and he had that pity for her which she had not had for her daughter. He sat down and with divine charity again addressed her. He told her that her suffering was un- [ 223 ] The Storji Without a Name necessary, that she was the victim of an error of which it was impossible for her not to have been the victim; and then he told her all. Concerning certain mysterious facts, science at that time possessed only su- perficial and inexact data. To-day, if we know more, it is merely that they exist. Like Lady Macbeth, Lasthenle had been a somnambulist. It may be that Mme. de Ferjol had never read Shakes- pere. In one of her accesses, which were so infrequent that neither her mother nor Agathe was aware of them, Lasthenie had left her room and sat on the great stairway where so many of her waking hours had been passed; there Riculf dis- covered her, and, tempted by the demon of solitary nights, accomplished the [224] TJie Story Without a Name crime, of which the unfortunate girl, in the ignorance of sleep, had been wholly unconscious. But why, the crime ac- complished, had he taken the ring? Was he already the thief which he after- wards became? Who shall say? In the nature of man there are mysteries which as yet are unexplained. Somnambu- lists sometimes make presents, though that proves nothing. For my part I knew one — a young girl — who gave a ring to a man guilty of the same crime as Riculf, and who afterwards, volun- tarily, though with an unconquerable dread, married the horrible betrothed of her sleep. Mme. de Ferjol had never heard of somnambulism. What the prelate said stupefied her; she was medusa'd by the malignity of the man who had entered her life and her daughter's like a vam- [225] The Story Without a Name pire, and who, falling from the mon- strous to the ignominious, had sunk to the pettiness of theft. It was here that the blue blood she had in her revolted, and the thought of the theft became more insupportable than the crime. For the moment she hesitated to believe in that final turpitude which sullied her daughter twice over. But the prelate assured her that the amputated hand of the robber had really been that of Riculf, who, as it appeared, had become one of the foremost bandits of the day. When Agathe met him on the stairway that had been the spectator of his crime he was on his way to every vice. They were all of them cooking then in the pot in which the Revolution bubbled over on the world. It was an hour when the Church herself had need of persecu- tion and the revivifying blood of [226] The Story Without a Name martyrs. Years later Riculf had come one evening to the monastery of Bric- quebec. His despair was great; his re- pentance such as only visits the strong. "If you drive me away," he said to the abbot, "you send me back to the hell from which I come." "I and my brethren," the prelate con- tinued, "remembered that La Trappe is the refuge of criminals unpunished by men, and in the name of celestial char- ity we opened our door to him and shut it against the justice of the world. Father Riculf was one of those who are excessive in all things. He endured for years among us in the most expiating penitence." "And died like a saint, I suppose," Mme. de Ferjol indignantly interjected. But in a moment she was calmer, and less insultingly she asked: [227] The Story Without a Name "Father, do you think that such a man can enter heaven?" Solemnly the benignant prelate an- swered: "For years he lived, as he died, in that hope." "If he is in heaven, I do not v^ant to be there with him," exclaimed Mme. de Ferjol, with a blind obstinacy that fully expressed her indignant rage. But the abbot, though deeply wound- ed, was too charitable to forsake the pitiless. He returned more than once to Olonde, endeavoring as best he might to lead her back to more Christian sentiments. In this he failed. She resisted his persuasions. In the knowledge that her child was innocent, a hatred of the Cap- uchin who had sullied her enveloped her and confiscated to its own profit the higher sentiments of her creed. God, [ 228 ] The Story Without a Name it may be, had forgiven, but she could not. Hatred possessed her wholly. The prelate tried to soften her, and, with that emollient oil which the good Samaritan used on him who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, he en- deavored to soothe the ulcer that ravaged in her heart. But the effort was vain. Mme. de Ferjol was inflex- ible. The memory of hospitality vio- lated by a priest whom she called a Judas, heightened her hate, and from it — this is a thing which every passionate nature will appreciate — a horrible de- sire came, a curiosity which she felt she must satisfy. Mme. de Ferjol was well informed in all religious observances. She knew that the Trappists are buried without a coffin, that they remain exposed, the face unveiled, in an open grave, and that over [229] The Story Without a Name the body each day a spadeful of earth is thrown until it is' covered by that six feet of clay which suffices to us all. Her desire was to see once again the ab- horred Riculf, to gorge her eyes on the spectacle of his corpse. Hatred is like love; it must see. He died, she reflected, but recently. The face of the elect is not like that of other men. When their tomb is opened their calm yet radiant expression shows that they died in the odor of sanc- tity. I will see if this scoundrel, who may have duped the abbot with his re- pentance, as he duped me with his holi- ness, has the face of the elect. One day, without a word to Agathe, she went to Bricquebec. Women are not allowed within the walls of a Trap- pist monastery save on certain festivals, and then only in the church; but the [230] The Story Without a Name cemetery, situated always in an adjacent field is open to everyone. It was there that Mme. de Ferjol went. What she sought was easily found. There was no one in the cemetery, and amid the long grass she discovered a re- cent grave, which she knew must be that of Riculf. She approached the edge and looked down. In her eyes was that ex- pression which hatred shares with love, a longing to devour. The corpse was there. In spite of the handfuls of earth strewn on it, the face of a man was still visible, and, in spite of years, in spite of the beard that had grown white, in spite of the sightless eyes which worms were eating, she recognized it at once; and the worms she envied; she would have liked to have been one of them. The audacious mouth, which had startled her before, and on which God with his own [231] The Story Without a Name hand had placed a warning, she recog- nized as well. Standing beside the grave, forgetful of the time that passed, her eyes sank into the hated mouth that was rottening there, as the sun sinks in the horizon. The sun was behind her, and her shadow, lengthened by it, fell into the tomb, her black gown reddened by its rays. Suddenly another shadow" fell beside her own,, and a hand rested on her arm. She trembled and turned. It was the abbot. *'You?" he said, with less astonish- ment than gravity — "you, niadame?" "Yes," she answered, with a voice that trembled too; "I wanted to slake my hate." "Madame," the prelate interrupted, "you are a Christian but what you say is unchristianlike. To stare at the dead [232] The Story Without a Name with eyes of hate is profanation, and to the dead respect is due." "To him, never!" she cried. "A mo- ment ago I was about to get down into his grave and trample him under my feet." "Poor woman !" the prelate murmured to himself, "she will die unrepentant of feelings that are too absolute for this Hfe." And, for that matter, she did die shortly after, in that sublime impeni- tence which the world may admire, but which we cannot. [233] D liiiinnm^Mmn '^^'^'°^'AL LIBRARY FACILITY .. '""'""Ill A A 000 315 549 6