One of the dreams of Arsène was not really a dream, but a recollection, strangely mingled, at the last, with nightmare.
It seemed to him that he was a child again, and that he was standing before an enormous rosebush, covered with large dark-red roses. He must have been very young, for he was only vaguely conscious of intense white sunlight, grass, arbors, a swan-filled pool, rose walks and great trees. Somewhere, there was a white old wall, the back of his father’s house. Even in the dream, now, he felt a deep pang of sadness and nostalgia. He felt the silence, as he had not felt it as a child, and saw the long blue shadows of the trees, and heard the thin sweet callings of birds. He did not know why the rosebush, with its large red flowers, fascinated him so. It was not that he liked these particular roses, for their darkness and secretive thickness of petal revolted him. Moreover, they had no scent, and he had always had a peculiar love for perfumes.
It was very hot, in that country garden, and the sun was too whitely brilliant. It burned on his head and shoulders. But for some reason, he did not return to the purple cool of the house. He had seen his young mother weeping that morning. He could not bear to see her in tears, so he had run out here, and remained, though his nurse had called him several times. He felt sullen and full of inexplicable hatred.
He heard the murmuring of voices, and glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, to the left, there was a long yew walk, and the voices came from the passageway. One of the speakers, he knew, was his father. The other was both strange and a stranger. Arsène felt his childish rage and aversion rising at the thought of that stout and elegant man, Monsieur the Archbishop of Paris. His black garments, the white ruffles at his neck and wrist, his round red face with its syrupy wet sly smile, and his little fiery blue eyes, were all repulsive to the child. The archbishop had patted him on the head only an hour ago, had studied him shrewdly, had shaken his head with a fond but sorrowful sigh. “Ah, sad, sad,” he had muttered. “But not too late, Monsieur le Marquis du Vaubon.” He rolled the title unctuously on his tongue, and with a certain significance.
“I trust not,” Arsène’s father had replied, with a furtive and uneasy smile on his dark, fox-like face. He was a nervous and very thin man, restless, capricious and distrustful. He did not look directly at Arsène when he spoke. But he rarely looked directly at anyone with his glittering, ball-like black eyes. His nervousness manifested itself in his almost constant dry sniffing, his jerking head, his crooked meaningless smile, his manner of rubbing his right ear with one sallow forefinger, his twitching shoulders, and his rapid, disjointed walk. He dressed with almost too fastidious an elegance, but his legs were stringy, with knobbed knees, and his wrists were bony. There was a febrile quality about him, a certain incoherence of attitude, which aroused suspicion in others. His voice was high, and sometimes broke ignominiously, his features were long and unprepossessing, with a thin wide mouth and receding chin. His tempers were unpredictable, hysterical and womanish, and so he was both feared and despised by his household. When he laughed, his laughter had a note of shrill hysteria in it, and a meaninglessness. It was also very unexpected, and was aroused by the most inexplicable things which did not cause laughter in others. Moreover, he was abnormally suspicious. He suspected everyone of falseness, hypocrisy, knavery, plottings and meannesses, or, in the matter of servants, of thievery and slyness. He suspected his young wife less than he suspected anyone else, but even she, poor pretty creature, was not exempt from his accusations at times.
Even when he was very young, Arsène knew that his father lived in a chronic condition of universal hatred and terror and suspicion. Because of this, he had few visitors. The family was immured behind the white walls. Sometimes, Armand went to Paris, secretly, but always alone. His wife, Sabina, never accompanied him, though Arsène knew she was Paris-born. Arsène wondered, as a child, what caused his father’s constant and active fear. Later, he knew that some were born this way, and lived their lives like rats watching, glittering-eyed, from a hole. From the first, he smiled at his father, and despised him for his causeless terror. He hated his elegance, his simpering mannerisms, his capricious and violent tempers, so feminine in their unreason, his sickly sentimentality which rose from his self-pity and self-adoration. Even when he was hardly more than a babe, Arsène knew that his father felt himself a victim of all mankind, a martyr both to imagined physical delicacy and the viciousness and plottings of other men. Every man was either a rascal or a fool, and he, Armand, had to be eternally on his guard lest he be betrayed. Arsène could not recall that he had ever shown true kindness or compassion to a single soul, except his wife, and even then it was tempered with watchful falseness and amorous exigencies.
Undeceived by his father, and never forbearing to show his childish aversion on every occasion, though tempering this aversion with the respect of a child for its sire, Arsène was yet his father’s favorite, and his great pet. Perhaps it was because in coloring and in a certain vehemence of manner on occasion, the child resembled him. For his younger son, Louis, who was fair, blue-eyed and nervously silent, like his mother, he had only indifference, and a sharp irascibility. It was Armand’s opinion that Louis lacked spirit and fire, two attributes which he considered he, himself, possessed in large quantity. Arsène’s fits of temper and violence pleased him, assured him that the child was of a valorous and aristocratic temper. And, like many men of his kidney, Armand was given to capricious spasms of demonstrative affection, when in less nervous moods. Louis and his mother, Sabina, shrank from them with uncontrollable fear and timidity, whenever they were infrequently offered, but Arsène, who was less sensitive of temperament, and possessed, even in childhood, by a certain cynicism, endured them with composure. This further endeared him to his father, who showed his maudlin gratitude by spoiling and lavish gifts. As a result of copious neglect of discipline, Arsène developed his naturally haughty, selfish and overbearing faults to a prodigious degree, and with them, his increasing contempt for his father. Had he not also possessed a strange sense of justice, a humorous disposition, an odd independence and cold logic of mind, he would have become insufferable, and one of those pampered young wretches who make life untenable for more gentle folk.
He had only a vague suspicion of the meaning of the presence of the Archbishop de Paris this morning, in this Huguenot household. He had heard his mother cry only last night, on one of the rare occasions of her revolt against his father: “I shall not have the monster in this house of my father’s, my father who died at La Rochelle! I shall not have his memory defamed, or his ghost uneasy in its grave!”
“You forget, Madame, that I am your husband,” Armand had replied coldly, yet with the ominous note of hysteria in his voice which never failed to cow the gentle Sabina. “You forget that men have reasons for what they do, which women cannot comprehend.”
“I comprehend that you are ambitious,” Sabina answered, with stern tears.
Armand had been silent a moment, and she thought he would say nothing, in contemptuous indifference to her. And then all at once he had burst out into incoherent cries, and had gestured violently.
“Madame, have you thought how much longer I can endure life in your accursed Gascony, among your peasants?”
Then Arsène had seen terror in his mother’s large blue eyes. She had risen, putting her hand to her cheek, as though consumed with incredulous fright. But her whisper had been low, unbelieving:
“You would sacrifice the memory of your father, and mine—these two who fought together and gave up everything—for ambition? You would compromise with the devil, and give worship to the fiend?”
Armand had looked about him uneasily, and had wet his jerking lips. For a moment, he had seemed ashamed, and uncertain. Then he spoke furiously, and Arsène knew that the fury was partly for himself: “You speak like a traitorous fool! Henry of Navarre has said: ‘Paris is worth a mass!’ Am I less than that great king?”
Sabina had looked at him for a long moment, and had stood there, tall, slender and beautiful, and her eyes were blue lightnings.
“It is not for Paris, it is not for France, that you would betray our fathers. It is for yourself, for your mean ambitions, for your pride, for your longing for favor and gaiety and a return to a corrupt court, and a smile from that foul demon, Richelieu. I have long known this. I can say nothing to dissuade you, I know. But beware the maledictions of the dead!”
She had raised her trembling white hand then, as if to curse him, and had stood there, shaking but unafraid, and filled with proud hatred and scorn. Between the profuse and tumbling masses of her golden curls, her face quivered with a pale light.
Armand had left her presence, infuriated. The Archbishop had come, but had delicately refused Armand’s invitation to occupy a suite at the château. He and his entourage were uncomfortably established at the mean little tavern in the village, whose proprietor, a Huguenot himself, was overwhelmed by the honor, and dusted off his plaster images and crucifixes, which he had hidden scornfully in his garret, and placed them in conspicious places throughout the house. Then he had assiduously studied old broken prayer-books, relics of his youth, and was seen to cross himself frequently and assertively on every occasion, to the bewilderment, but gratification, of his devout wife. “Only a fool,” he said, “wears the same coat in every weather.”
The stout and elegant Archbishop, who always considered the prejudices of those he intended to seduce, did not drive up to the château in his gilded carriage the next morning. Nor did he wear his more elaborate garments. He walked to the château, climbing the dusty, stone-strewn road in solitary humility, though had any one been present to observe him, he would have seen the Archbishop stop frequently to wipe his florid brow and curse with more color than restraint. He was, to all appearances, a humble and reverent abbé, coming to call upon some recalcitrant sinner out of Christlike gentleness and sad concern. The heat and dust of the summer morning did nothing to soothe his temper, but his smile was fixed and gentle on his rotund countenance when he observed Armand du Richepin waiting for him at the gates, unable to conceal his nervous excitability.
They had walked then, in the garden, murmuring assiduously together.
“You can be sure, my dear Marquis, that His Eminence will not hold the sins of the fathers against their sons,” said the Archbishop. “I have already told him of your invitation, though he inquired, naturally enough, why you had not come to Paris to see me. Permission would have been granted easily, upon your application.”
Armand muttered something unintelligible. He was miserably ill at ease. The lessons of his youth, the admonitions and warnings of his father, still influenced him, and he felt only suspicion and fear of his visitor. But more than these, in his febrile ambition, he wished to please, to conciliate. Whenever his resolution faltered he had only to glance at the white bare château, and over the burning countryside which he hated. Miserable, horrible place of exile! To a temperament like his, which could be happy only in the midst of approving fellows, which achingly longed for excitement and gaiety and the intrigues of courts and the presence of many lovely women, the quiet life of a country gentleman was obnoxious, unendurable. In his childhood and boyhood, he had lived in La Rochelle, and the memory of gaiety, lightness and laughter and bustling streets was a burning nostalgia in him.
Arsène, though very young, dimly knew these things, for he had immense intuition of a shrewd rather than a subtle kind. He tried to be indifferent, and scornful, but he was excited, nevertheless. He had the soul of an adventurer, and the peace of quietness of his rural life had begun to gall him, and he was frequently conscious of a loneliness that the presence of his gentler brother did nothing to dispel. He knew that in a moment the Archbishop and his father would discover him, waiting there, and that again the Archbishop would pat him on the head, and sigh, smilingly, over him.
Now, in his dream, he was waiting there. But all at once, the dream began to darken, the hot air to chill. A great terror seized him. Some Horror was approaching through the yew walk. He could not move. He could only tremble and try to move legs paralyzed and heavy with nightmare. The Horror was coming closer. He heard the tolling of a mighty bell, slow and deathly. It was the tolling for the dead. Now a wind blew, violent and frightfully cold. It blew through his body, but aroused fire in his flesh, rather than chill. He struggled against the incubus, but he could not move. He cried out. He heard the murmuring voices, closer to him, and he shrieked aloud. And woke.
His first consciousness was of immense pain, flaming and enveloping. He had a faint memory that his screaming voice had been hoarse and painful. His throat was swollen, choking with phlegm, transfixed with burning blades of steel. His right arm, when he tried to move it convulsively in his extremity, could not be lifted. Darkness and sparks of red lights floated before his eyes.
So intense had been his memory, and his nightmare, that he expected to see his father’s face, and the countenance of the Archbishop when he could see clearly. But, by wavering candlelight, he saw old François’s concerned features bent over him, the shadow of a pale female face, and the faces of two strangers, one an old man, and the other young. The memory of recent events had not yet risen to the surface of his consciousness. He could only stare blindly, out of his fever, his breath struggling with agony in his tortured throat. Then, dimly, he remembered François Grandjean, and the girl, Cecile. He looked at them, speechlessly. He was still lying on the straw pallet in the miserable kitchen, and he was alternately deathly cold and flaming hot.
“The wounds are well enough,” murmured the strange old man. “You have done excellently, François.”
“Thank you, dear abbé,” said François. “But it is the throat that disturbs me. He woke before dawn, yesterday, delirious and fevered, unaware of his surroundings. I thought it his wounds, but when I heard his crying voice, I knew it was some disease that had seized him. He became rapidly more ill, and that is why I called you, knowing your skill in these matters.”
Arsène heard these words as from a tremendous distance, so that they had a hollow echo in his ears. They thought him still delirious. He saw the old men, and the young one, move aside. The girl, in her poor garments, knelt beside him, and applied some unguent to his throat on a rag. It stung, and it smelled vilely. He struggled to move, to speak, and his voice was the voice of a stricken erow. He saw the girl’s young face, shrinking but compassionate, and very beautiful. She was only a child, but she understood suffering, and her expression was mature with grief.
“We must lift him and carry him to Cecile’s bed. A poor bed, but better than this pallet,” said François. “He cannot remain here, on the cold floor, with his fever. Would you consider him dying, abbé?”
The old abbé hesitated, looked sorrowfully at the stricken man. His face became anxious. “It is in the hands of God,” he murmured. “You say you do not know his name, or his condition?”
“No. I have told you how he came to be here. But, it is evident that he is not of our kind. His garments, his sword, his manner of speaking. He is a great gentleman, of some sort. He told me his name is Arsène, but would say nothing else. One can understand his suspicions, and reserve.”
The old abbé sighed. “Have you considered what might happen to you, and Cecile, if he died on your hands?”
“I have considered,” replied François, calmly. “But I know no one to call, no one to identify him. And if there is danger to us, in sheltering him, in allowing him to die unknown, then we must trust to God. The Cardinal’s guard was pursuing him. Inversely, should we call the Captain of the King’s Musketeers? It is evident he is no musketeer, no soldier. He was a fugitive. How can we trust the King’s men, then? Would they be kinder to a Huguenot gentleman, though it is evident that he is one? I know nothing about him.”
“He may be a criminal,” said the abbé, with hesitation.
François shook his head, but he said: “And, if so, must we throw a dying man into the gutter? Suffering has call upon our compassion, no matter the sufferer.”
“You humble me, François,” said the abbé with humility. “But I was thinking of you, my friend.”
The three men, the old and the young, lifted Arsène in their arms. At this moment, he screamed again in his agony. They bore him to Cecile’s chamber, and laid him on her bed. He became faintly conscious that they had removed his garments, that he was wearing a coarse white shirt, and that his legs were bare. He must have swooned again, for when he opened his eyes he was conscious of wet hot cloths being applied to his swollen and choking throat. The old abbé was ministering to him, and the girl stood beside him, a steaming iron pot in her hands into which the abbé kept dipping his cloths.
“I trust he has nothing contagious,” said François, who stood at the foot of the bed.
“We must only pray,” said the abbé, sighing. “But I have seen little children die of this, strangling. He has a young man’s strength, however.”
Arsène’s icy feet became aware that a hot comforting stone lay between them. He was shaken by chill, consumed by fire. His toes eagerly sought the comfort of the stone. They had piled blankets, tattered and dusty, upon him.
“No one must guess at his presence in your house,” said the abbé. “I know a physician, but in this case we can trust no one. We must do what we can for him, and pray for him.”
François was holding a candle. It was night. The candlelight flickered over the leprous ceiling with its cracked plaster, and the dripping walls. The abbé continued his ministrations. Arsène, overcome with weakness and nausea, closed his eyes, which ached abominably. He gave himself up to sole consciousness of his throat, which seemed to be closed inexorably. His breath struggled to reach his lungs, struggled to leave it. He could hear the frantic laboring of his smothered heart. There were twining ropes in his throat, and he tried to cough them loose. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“I am dying,” he thought, with complete detachment. His mother would be overcome. Ah, no, his mother, the pretty Sabina, was dead, these ten years, of grief and loneliness. Would his father, that lying, terrified hypocrite, be grief-stricken? Or would he feel a welcome, if miserable, relief? Relief that he would be called upon for no more frenzied concealment, for hasty falsehoods, for placating and pleading and promising? Arsène smiled to himself, with scornful compassion. He had been a burden, a strain, upon his father, who still slavishly adored him. Now, his death would be a release from terror. But he would grieve. At the thought of that womanish sorrow, Arsène’s compassion lost its overtone of contempt, and became sad and regretful. He had never felt sadness for his father before. He did not think of his brother, Louis, at all.
Now, all at once, he was alone, and there was only a peculiar grating sound in the dank chamber. It was some moments before he knew it was his own breathing. The stone was hot against his feet. The pain was a little less in his throat. He fell into a deep sleep.