In Gallows-Tree House, everything was sad and grandiose. Its name immediately brought to mind the primitive cruelties of feudal justice; its four dark avenues echoed with an ocean-swell of lamentations; black swans swam among the broken reeds of its moat; menacing hemlocks and a host of yellow flowers opened their petals like deadly suns.
The house itself had walls the colour of a stormy sky, a roof creased by grooves like a ploughed field, arched and narrow trifoliate windows. Its tower was discrowned, having fallen prey to a formidable ivy which clung to it with the perpetual tenacity of life.
Having climbed the steps and entered by the great door, one passed into its vast rooms, high-ceilinged and cold, decorated with oak panelling intricately carved with all manner of verdure. There one could see all over again the languid reeds of the moat, its gloomy flowers and hemlocks, sheltering with their icy shadow the regal walk of the dispirited swans. There were no carpets, only mats of straw; dogs slept here and there, with their noses between their paws.
There was also a most curious spectre to which I had never really become accustomed: a tame heron, which roamed freely between the rooms, rapping with its beak until the doors were opened.
This funereal creature was always present; it followed us in to every meal, foraging in the bowl where its food was thrown. At regular intervals it made a clicking noise like a loose tile blown across a roof by the wind. It was called “the Missionary”, because it resembled, by virtue of its oblique and paternal expression, a certain Capuchin friar who had come to say mass in the house – and whose death, which followed unexpectedly a few days after, had coincided with the appearance of the bird. It had been found on the moat by a gamekeeper, wounded by a rifleshot.
The slightly ridiculous story of the bird had amused me when my host told it to me on the first evening I passed at Gallows-Tree House, even though there was no hint of jocularity in his tone. On the following day, however, I began to find the Missionary unsettling, not so much by virtue of its ugliness as by virtue of its assurance – the certainty with which, it seemed, the creature made itself at home, as if it were the mistress of the household or if it really had come in to accomplish some supernatural mission. No one ever scolded it, no one ever shut it in; as soon as its beak clattered against a door, someone got up to open it, and if all of us went out together, the bird would pass through at the head of the company, with the solemn air of one no less important than the Capuchin, as incorruptible and as gently pitiless as an ancient judge.
Privately, I gave this “Missionary” another name: Remorse.
One evening, when we had got up from the table, having dined on venison while supping cider perfumed with juniper, I ran into the bird near the door. Impatiently I said to it, under my breath: “Go on then, Remorse!”
“Why do you not call him the Missionary?” the Marquis de la Hogue demanded brusquely of me, seizing me by the arm. He was staring at me with eyes animated by an emotion that I believed at first to be anger, but which was actually terror.
He added in a tremulous voice which broke upon the words, as if to reveal, in spite of his best efforts, some secret: “How did you know that he is called Remorse? Who told you that?”
And it was by virtue of that one word, which I happened to let fall because I was nearly as troubled in my own mind as Monsieur de la Hogue, that I assured myself of being taken into his closest confidence.
When we entered the room where we talked in the evenings, the bird was standing on one leg before the fireplace, its beak beneath its wing, basking in the heat of the burning logs. I sat down in a wooden armchair like a cathedral stall. In order to resume the conversation, I said, “Is it asleep?”
“It never sleeps!” replied Monsieur de la Hogue – and, indeed, I perceived the coldly ironic eye of the ancient judge, incorruptible and gently pitiless, fixed upon me. It held a glimmer fiercer than the light of the hearth, like the dim sparkle of a star reflected in a frog-pond.
“It never sleeps,” Monsieur de la Hogue went on. “Nor do I, any longer. My heart, at least, never sleeps. I am familiar with drowsiness, but I am a stranger to unconsciousness. My dreams are simply the continuation of my waking thoughts, and in the morning my thoughts take up the thread again so naturally that I do not remember having ceased to dwell in full intellectual clarity for a single hour in thirty years. And what do I dream about in this fashion, during all the interminable hours of my life? Of nothing – or rather of negations; of that which I have not done, that which I will not do, that which I could not do, even if my youth were given back to me. For that is my nature; I am one who has never been active, who has never lifted a finger in order to accomplish a desire or a duty. I am a lake unrippled by any wind, a forest undisturbed by any sound, a sky untroubled by any hurrying cloud.”
He fell silent for a few moments after this somewhat solemn declamation, then continued: “Do you know my life-story? No, you are too young – and in any case, what the world knows about me is not the real me. I have never told my own story, and were it not for that whim of chance or providential perspicacity which led you just now to pronounce a word – a name! – which admittedly frightened me, I would reveal no more to you this evening than I have ever revealed to anyone else. Here, though, is my confession.
“I was but eight years old ?when my mother brought back from a journey in distant parts a little girl, who was about the same age as myself. She was our cousin, at least in name, and the death of her parents had left her as perilously alone in the world as a she-lamb lost at night in a wood. This adorable child was spoiled by everyone, looked upon as an ideal little sister for me, who would perhaps in time be an obvious fiancée: an angel fallen from the stars, for my eternal consolation.
“By the time I was twelve years old, with the precocious heart of a vigorous boy grown up among farming folk, I already loved Nigelle with a passion so infinite that it had neither the power to increase nor to decrease, until the day when I lost it forever. She loved me too, with equal ardour; I knew that, and the avowal of her love that she made me when she was dying taught me nothing but the extent of my own wickedness.
“As soon as a certain power of reason was granted to my childish brain I conceived an attitude to life which was peculiar and – as I think now – criminal. One day I plucked a rose, whose piquant perfume had caught me up and whose crimson smile had filled me with the desire to make it my own. But when I had wandered for a while along the garden paths, with my plucked and forgotten rose clutched between my fingers, I saw that in less than an hour it had completely faded and withered away, sorely wounded by the shafts of the sunlight – and I came to the conclusion that no matter how much one desires roses, one must not pluck them.
“And when Nigelle appeared before me, I extrapolated my conclusion: no matter how much one desires women, one must not pluck them.
“Many ideas besieged my consciousness in the train of that primordial discovery. By slow degrees, a whole philosophy of life emerged: an entire nirvanic religion was elaborated within my vainglorious and feeble head. One day, I was able to summarise it in a single phrase:
“One must remain on the threshold.
“A few books had assisted me – certain ascetic writings, a summary of Plato, digests of German metaphysics – but for all practical purposes my doctrine was my own. I became very proud of it and I resolutely set forth into the darkness of inaction.
“I determined to consummate none but the simplest of acts, restricting myself rigorously to those which, because they promised me no exceptional pleasure, could not in any way let me down. I had violent desires; I indulged them; I revelled in them; I gorged myself upon them. My heart expanded to the point of containing the world. Desiring everything, I had everything; but I did not possess it in the same fashion as one who held between his own hands the two little trembling hands of another. I took everything, but nothing was given to me; I had everything – but all without love!
“Not until much later, at a certain solemn moment, did I come to understand the real meaning of love. Before that moment, my vanity had given me the illusion of love and I was perfectly happy, proud to have escaped the disenchantment which was born in every accomplished act. But even on that day, even now that I know the truth, having been instructed by pain, it would have been impossible for me to pluck the rose. What good would it have done?
“This frightful refrain resounds ceaselessly within my head, and it has never been more insistent than now.
“Nigelle and I lived side by side for twenty years. Every day she became sadder and more timorous, intimidated by my fortune, the poor soul who possessed nothing but the ripe harvest of her blonde hair. And I, meanwhile, became more and more arrogant and indestructibly mute.
“I loved her as much as it is possible to love, but I took my love no further than the threshold.
“That threshold I never crossed; neither did my shadow, nor even the shadow of my heart, ever walk in the palace of love.
“Hospitable and loving, that door was always open – but I turned my head aside when I passed it by, in order to contemplate my own desire, in order to speak with my own desire, in order to commit to the asylum of my desire those dreams that I wished to leave unrealised.
“Cross the threshold? And what then? That palace was probably no more than one of many – but the palace of my dreams was unique, and once having dwelt therein, no one could any longer see the others.
“She died for love of me – of me, who loved her with a passion that I still do not hesitate to call infinite. She died saying to me: I love you! But I made no reply.”
The heron changed its feet, and clacked its beak in passing it from the left wing to the right wing; its bleak and ironic eye now stared at Monsieur de la Hogue.
“You think,” my host continued, “that bird is rather ugly and rather ridiculous, don’t you?”
“Rather dismal, that is all.”
“Ridiculous and dismal. I support it as a kind of penance. It frightens me, and it makes me suffer, and that is what I require of it. You must understand that if it pleased me to wring its neck, I would very speedily do so!”
“Do you really think so?” said I. “Wring the neck of Remorse?”
“I have considered it,” replied Monsieur de la Hogue. “But what good would it do? There is no significance at all in that ridiculous and dismal creature that I have not given to it voluntarily. I have only to renounce it for it to be as inert as any stuffed bird. Do you take me for a helpless victim of its inanity? Do you take me for a fool?”
The old man got up, shook the long grey hair which ran over his pale and wrinkled cheeks; then, abruptly becoming calm, he let himself fall again into his armchair.
He repeated, very softly and with a hint of mockery: “I suppose that you don’t take me for a fool?”
As I looked back at him I smiled, and mechanically extended my hand towards the plumage of the immobile bird – but he started to his feet again, saying: “Do not touch the Missionary!”
He pronounced these words in the voice which Charles I might have used in saying to that indiscreet person as he mounted the scaffold: “Do not touch the axe!”