A truly appalling malaise had taken possession of Louis de Richepin like a black pestilence of the mind. Always, that cold and phlegmatic exterior had been the glacial shell over turbulent and disordered passions. Always, he had been the screaming prisoner behind ice-covered and silent walls. There are men who are born to solitude, and there are men who have it forced upon them, either by evil circumstance or by their own natures. Louis de Richepin was a curious victim of both these alternatives. Vain, proud and haughty, he suffered the consequences of these defects in the curse of an inordinately sensitive and suspicious temperament. He was repellent in manner and speech, enraging when he did not intimidate. The casual observer did not hear the groan behind the measured and indifferent words, or see the extended hand behind the stony and glancing eye. None suspected that anticipation of rebuff, a bewildered lack of comprehension of other men, and an abysmal fear, were the stones of the wall that enclosed him away from humanity.
He pursued his duties with his old methodical care, spoke as usual, moved as usual. But nothing stirred in him, in that black and empty grave which daily grew deeper and wider as the molten core cooled and turned to blowing ashes. Never having sought the company of others with true eagerness, for all his constant yearning, he now avoided contacts with other men as much as possible. He had once delighted in learned discussions with the Cardinal, and with other scholarly Jesuits. Now, in the midst of such discussions, the sickness would well up into his throat so that he retched, would be obliged to flee. He went no longer to the Bois de Boulogne to see Marguerite de Tremblant. For on the last innocuous occasion, the sickness had fastened upon him so that his agony had been too great for endurance and he had left her suddenly.
No one had ever suspected, or cared, that there had lived in him at one time a pure delight in the simplest manifestations of nature, that a breeze filled with perfume had had the power to plunge him into shy ecstasy, that often the mere passing of a silver cloud across the face of the moon had brought trembling tears to his eyes. And none knew now that he could look on all beauty with the glazed eyes of a dead man, with no response in his heart. The prisoner under the glacial shell was dying; he no longer implored and shrieked for help. Nor did he care, at last, whether help came or not. Sometimes, for hours, he would sit with his swimming head in his hands, conscious only of a dim and boundless pain as vast as eternity.
The siege of La Rochelle, his dearest wish, was about to begin, his dearest hatreds were about to be fulfilled. Yet he could not arouse himself to interest in them. In him was the final suffering instinct of the dying animal: to creep away into some solitary blackness of obscurity and expire soundlessly. On the few occasions when he was aroused to fury, it was the mechanical fury of an impersonal storm, or the lashing-out of a man tormented beyond endurance and striking blindly as a wounded dog bites in his extremity.
He spent hours on his knees, not praying, only enduring, his empty eyes fixed upon his crucifix, and from out his soul drifted the thin mist of the ashes that blew about in him. He received no comfort, expected none. The emptiness increased. He forgot everything.
At times, terror seized him briefly, and he would force himself to external acts, to speech, for there was an instinctive knowledge in him that his flesh would soon lose its limits of endurance and he would go mad or die. But these efforts to climb up the long and agonizing slope towards the light exhausted him. At last, he did not care whether he reached the light again or not.
All Paris was now aroused by the tragic and mysterious death of the Duc de Tremblant. His body was returned to his home, and he was buried with his illustrious forebears. Madame de Tremblant was prostrated, but she did not weep. Her daughters knelt about her, sobbing, in the cool blue twilight of Notre Dame, but she stared before her, drily. The great cathedral was filled to bursting. Louis de Richepin did not attend any of the masses for the dead man.
But several weeks later, he was overcome by an unfathomable impulse, and wrote a missive to Marguerite de Tremblant, whom he had not seen for a long time. It was a cold, but incoherent missive, in which he expressed his commiseration for her sorrow, and urged her to seek comfort in spiritual consolations. As he proceeded to write, his incoherence grew, his writing became illegible. When he had done, had forgotten he had written to her, and only gazed dully at the letter, he was trembling throughout his body, and was forced to fling himself upon his bed, to lie for sightless hours staring at the opposite wall.
The next day a messenger brought him a reply from the girl. He turned it over and over in his hands. Finally, he opened it. It was not for long moments that her words became coherent in his mind.
She began the letter without salutation, and ended without signature:
“Words of comfort and sympathy from a friend are received with gratitude. If this kind friend will appear at a certain spot known to him, at midnight, tonight, he will hear words of this gratitude in person, and a last farewell.”
After some dazed minutes, the import and strangeness of this missive finally pierced to the dulled consciousness of Louis de Richepin. He felt a slow but rising beat deep within the empty chaos of his being. A mysterious terror began to pervade him, and another emotion he felt had died forever. The word “farewell” began to imprint itself on his inner eye in letters of fire.
The spectral terror increased as the day passed. Now, he was no longer empty. An enormous restlessness, a prescience of agony, sweeped upon him. Everything darkened and changed before his eyes. The long interval of soundlessness and emptiness in which he had struggled in diffused torment, fell behind him like a black tunnel as he emerged into gathering storm. He felt no presence but the presence of Marguerite de Tremblant, and he exclaimed to himself: “How was it that I had forgotten her, that I could not think of her?”
As sunset approached, his anguish increased. Remembering the horrible agony of the last weeks, he dimly suspected that in some manner the girl had been involved in this, that his withdrawal from her had been the withdrawal of fear, that in his absenting himself lay the secret of his suffering. At intervals, as he waited for the night, he was caught up in a rapture which he dared not name. But the rapture increased, alternating with despair and anguish. Never having in all his life confronted himself fully, understanding and confessing in himself, he closed his eyes before the dazzling mirror remorselessly set up before him, fearing, as always, the truth. Now as his flesh burned, became heated, as the pounding of his heart communicated itself to all his veins and his arteries, he still would not understand, or confess.
Would the torturous hours never pass? The empty days had gone by like clouds, featureless and formless, but now they were endless corridors through which he rushed impatiently, sweating in his extremity. Life roared in on him like a fresh and virgin flood, tempestuous and violent. He could not endure its onslaughts.
At eleven o’clock that night, he, was waiting at the spot where so often he had met Marguerite de Tremblant. He heard the melancholy booming of the bell in the belfry of St. Cloud, and every tree in the Bois seemed to vibrate with the sonorous tones. There was only a faint moon. It made ghostly and stygian caves in the woods; the tips of the trees were silvered in the most spectral light against the black heavens. There were strange rustlings, faint breaths and murmurs in the underbrush, and formless shadows swept down upon the earth, from which a dank and ominous smell arose in heavy gusts. Louis de Richepin, chilled and weighted in spite of his fever, felt himself alone in an abandoned universe.
He tried to calm himself by seating himself upon the stones on which he and Marguerite had sat for so many warm summer mornings. But the stones were stones of fire. He would leap to his feet, striding back and forth in the black hollow formed by the surrounding trees, dried leaves crumbling and crackling under his foot, the cool wetness of the air blowing on his hot and tormented face. Sometimes he groaned softly to himself, striking his hands together at intervals. Now the trees had a leathery and slapping sound in the wind, and from the depths of the forest came the long wild notes of a melancholy bird, restless and sleepless. Once or twice he saw the phosphorescent eyes of small animals gleaming at him from the darkness, and they seemed to him full of malignancy and evil. Pale forms like apparitions drifted through distant aisles of black shadow, and he shuddered with superstitious fear. Paris slept behind him; not even the rumble of a carriage on cobbled streets, or the sound of a horse, disturbed that deathly silence.
As the hour wheeled towards midnight, his nameless agony of mind and soul increased. Blood pounded in his brain, leapt from his heart, made his knees tremble and sweat to burst from every pore. He felt himself drawing to some appalling climax, a climax still veiled and voiceless, but all the more terrible. The stillness and blackness about him did not calm or soothe him. He was the bursting and flaming heart of the forest, and it seemed to him that at length he must ignite those weighted and ominous trees.
There was no approaching sound of Marguerite de Tremblant as St. Cloud boomed out the midnight hour from its grating and iron throats, but Louis at length became aware that he was not alone. He saw a pale and floating oval before him, and halted in his tracks. The moon slid from behind a cloud, shot down long pallid beams into the enclosure, and he saw the slight form of the girl advancing towards him, clad in black, with a black mourning veil floating from her head. She stopped a pace or two from him, her hands clasped before her, and those hands gleamed like cold marble. He could not see her expression, but he felt that his own torment was on her face and in her heart, and when he seized her with a strangled sound of violence and clasped her in his arms, it was more a gesture of frightful compassion and despair than a gesture of love. Her heart beat against his own, in the same language of pain and grief, and the soft white arms about his neck were arms that pleaded for help.
One in suffering, they clung together in that silence and darkness, torn and distraught, voiceless and desperate. They sought to find refuge in each other, a hiding place from the enormity of life. Louis bent his head and pressed his lips against the girl’s quivering mouth, and she responded with feverish passion. Her hands clutched his body under his arms; she dropped her head to his breast, and, finding relief, sobbed aloud.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the stones. They sat together, as closely as possible, her head upon his shoulder, his arms about her.
The hot anguish began to recede, and with it came a heavy lassitude in which they sat without speaking. The night closed in upon them. They heard their own disordered breathing in the black silence.
“Ah, Louis, Louis!” murmured the girl, in a faint and mournful voice. “It is farewell. Why do I weep? I do not know. But tomorrow I leave for the convent in Amiens, where my aunt is abbess. Kiss me, Louis. Hold me. Let me forget for this night.”
When he kissed her again, he tasted the tears that fell from her eyes. He held her as he might have held a sinking child. Some bleeding wound opened in his heart, like a gaping flame.
“No,” he said, at last, “you cannot leave me, Marguerite.”
He listened to his own words, and a cold horror seized upon him. He repeated them in his mind. He said aloud: “I am a priest.”
She lifted one of his icy hands to her lips and pressed it there, and her cries were stifled against it. He kissed her hair through her veil, caught her to him. Now he sobbed aloud, without tears, but as a man sobs who cannot endure his mortal pain.
All at once the endless and empty torment of his days seemed to rise before him in visions lighted by infernal fire. All at once all the terrible hours of doubt, hatred, fury, madness, loneliness and yearning welded together in one upsurge like a devouring conflagration. He felt himself dying. He fell on his knees before the girl; he dropped his head in her silken lap, feeling the warmth of her young thighs under his cheek. His arms embraced her despairingly. For an instant her hands took his head as though to lift it away from her, and then she dropped it. She sat motionless and silent, staring blindly into the darkness.
He began to speak in a hoarse and tearing voice, and his head rolled upon her lap in torture:
“Have pity on me, Marguerite. Do you know I love you, my child? We have met here, often—it has been a dream, a nothingness. What has it been to you, also? A nothingness. But it has given me happiness. Do you know I have never been happy, Marguerite? Do you know there has been nothing for me in all the world, in all these years, but longing and pain, loneliness and sadness, doubt and fear? Who has cared for me, but you?
“Do you know why I entered the Church, my little one? Never have I had the courage to know until now! I sought peace in the Church, a stifling, a thoughtless tranquillity, because I found nothing in the world, in living. For me, there has been only repudiation, only scorn and disdain. Who has known me, or cared to know me, but you?”
He paused a moment. His voice came back to the girl in doleful echoes from the forest. It was a voice from the very depths of the hell of a man’s soul. She shuddered. She looked down upon him, and her hands pressed themselves to his cheeks in compassion and understanding.
Now his voice rose on the wave of his mounting agony, as at last the iron walls went down and the flood burst forth:
“What has the Church been to me? I see so clearly, now! Why did I not see before? I found no peace in it, for there is no God, Marguerite! There is only a devil, an Evil in the world! I found only malevolent faces in the Church, the malevolent faces of a universe of men. I listened to the plottings, and I told myself they were the plottings in the service of God. But there is no God, my little one, my darling. There is only nothingness, an eternal darkness. We are lost in a wilderness.”
His strange and incoherent words, bursting from his lips, filled all the forest with dread murmurings and cries, incomprehensible. The girl shuddered more and more. Wild terror possessed her. She caught his head to her breast and held it there, crying aloud. But, in spite of her youth and innocence, she knew that he was hardly aware of her except as a channel through which his torture roared, finding expression at last for a lifetime of confusion and appalling suffering. And some deep eternal awareness came to her, a lofty understanding and tenderness, for all her inexperience. She felt that terrible forms and faces were gathering breathless about them in that forest, listening dangerously to these revelations, and that they were waiting for revenge on one who dared to speak from out his soul at last:
“O Marguerite!” he cried. “Where can a man fly? Where is there hope, light and refuge in all this universe of horror? We look upon each other and ask ourselves: Does there live in this man, under his calm face and his lying words, the frightfulness that is in me? The same knowledge of nothingness and evil, of blackness and death, of pain and despair? Who can tell of the hatred which inspires one against the other, because of the silence of the secret, because we dare not speak? Marguerite, do you know how I have hated all other men, because of my agony? And now I know that we hate each other because of our mutual agony, because of our knowledge that there is no God, and we are lost in a pit from which we cannot escape!”
The warmth of her innocent breast beneath her black bodice at last heated his cold flesh. He felt her hands, such little tender hands, pressed against his cheeks, as a mother presses a wounded and suffering child.
“There is love,” she whispered. “Oh, my dearest one, there is always love. And who knows but what that love is God?”
She felt in herself the passionate nobility of suffering for another, the strength of that suffering. She desired nothing but to give this writhing man a moment’s peace, a moment’s alleviation. She could find no words that were not worn thin and featureless by the lips of shallow men, as coins are worn by thousands of anonymous hands. Where were there words that had not become hollow and shameful, maudlin and foolish? Her heart was opening in a wide wound of compassion and love, and no words but empty ones could rise to her lips. Incoherent whisperings rose from her throat. Her eyes overflowed with her tears. She sobbed in her helplessness.
But he had heard her. His rigidity did not relax, but he was silent, drawing her closer and closer to him. And now a golden wave flowed from her to him, as though she was a spring rising from the depths of life. The bright wave engulfed her in radiance, caught him in its fringes, drew him nearer to her beyond the barriers of flesh. She felt that their souls embraced in that dazzling light. She was overcome with joy.
“No,” she said, and now her voice was pure and soft and steadfast, “there is no death, my dear one. There is no darkness, but the darkness in our own eyes. There is God, beyond our knowing, but always waiting.”
She wondered if he had heard her. He said at last: “I am weary. I wish to die, to rest. I wish not to know, or feel, or be. I am tired of God. As He is tired of us.”
“Rest,” she murmured. “Rest, for a little while.”
She cradled him in her young arms, rocking back and forth, murmuring words against his forehead, his hair. A faint crooning sound came from her lips; her eyes were shining in the dark. She smiled a little, with infinite mercy and tenderness. She felt the mortal exhaustion in his flesh, but it could not hurt her now. She was stronger than it. Her joy increased.
Now he stirred. “Have pity on me, Marguerite,” he said, hoarsely. “I love you, as I never loved a thing before.”
“I love you,” she said.
She sat in silence as his hands rose to her breasts and moved over her body. Now the soundlessness and the darkness of the forest was thrilling with life. She could not move. She was a glowing and ecstatic image of fire, love, desire and compassion. Moons wheeled before her staring eyes; she heard strange harmonious crashings in her ears. Now the soft earth and grass was beneath her, and she saw Louis’ eyes bent over her, burning and filled with light stronger than the enveloping darkness. She reached up to him, encompassed him in arms filled with the strength of all life. All at once she knew that the price of such life, such rapture and joy, was death. But she knew also that this death would pass as the night passes, and there was the renewal of the morning.
She was not the seduced, the helpless. Some wild and passionate ecstasy welled up from her, some solemn knowledge and enormous surrender which was in itself strength and heavy with eternity. In giving herself up to him, she redeemed him, and granted him peace.
There was less of lust in that frenzied and convulsive embrace in which the wretched man grasped the girl than a wild and piteous hunger for human contact, for human warmth; the mad passion which had seized him was the primordial desire to escape from isolation and imprisonment into light and freedom. His spirit was obsessed with his hunger, and his desire, and thus his frenzy. He could not press himself close enough to her; he buried his lips in her bosom, in her neck, and arms and hair. He sobbed aloud in his ravening starvation. She felt his hot breath in her ear, against her soft flesh, and she smiled in the darkness.
When at last he was exhausted, he fell at once into a deep and profound slumber. The moon’s faint long beams penetrated the forest and lay upon his face. It was quiet and still, almost deathlike in its expression of peace.
The forest was weighted under the approaching dawn. Now the trees hung in cool silence over the little glade. The moon had sunken beyond the horizon of the world. The eastern sky turned to a faint and pulsating opal. The voices of awakening birds called from branch to branch. Not a wind stirred, but from the earth rose the sweetest and most poignant of scents, and the pale air turned to crystal.
Marguerite slept on her lover’s breast, her little hands still holding one of his. As the air brightened, she smiled in her sleep and turned to him. He lifted himself on his elbow to gaze down on her, to fill all his eyes and soul with the sight of her. The black veil had gone, was lost. Her copper curls were disheveled about her face, which was too bright, too luminous. Her parted lips glowed, and the fringes of her lashes were golden shadows on her cheeks. Her disordered bodice revealed the soft whiteness of her bosom and one shoulder, which was like a translucent pearl.
“My sweet love,” he whispered. Now the agony was gone from him; it had been replaced by a vast but strangely comforting sorrow and peace. He experienced no shameful and petty guilt, no regret, and no remorse. He had risen beyond these things. There was a sad joy in him, a speechless but all-pervading tenderness.
And now as he looked down at the frail body of this girl, he had some mysterious prescience that death was upon her. But there was no despair in him. He felt that a strange covenant, a promise, was granted to him. For the first time in his life he was aware of God, of life, of radiance and eternal rapture.
He looked about him at the forest, and his eyes were heavy with dreams, too vast for the narrow confines and patterns of thoughts and words.
She stirred, and her eyelids lifted. She smiled at him, and turned to him. He held her in his arms. “Do not leave me,” he whispered. “Oh, never leave me!”
“Never,” she said. “Never.”