“That is bad. You must keep your word of course, because favoritism to anybody is wrong. But these saints do not understand this; they build all upon Heaven’s favoritism: and these holy persons are stronger than we, precisely because they are immune to such clear seeing as we are cursed with.”
“But your powers of sending and perverting and blighting and so on,” he said,—“are none of these to be enlisted in my favor?”
“Not against Hoprig,” she replied, “for the elect have that invincible unreason and stupidity against which alone our powers are feeble. No, my dearest, I cannot aid you. For these saints are stronger than we are: and in the end, whatever grounds they may afford us for contempt or for laughing at them, they conquer us.”
It was in some sort a relief to know there was not hope anywhere. Florian spoke now with more animation. “No, Marie-Claire. Even at the last let us adhere to logic! These saints do not conquer; they destroy us, that is all. The ruthless power of holiness is strong enough for that, but it is not strong enough to hold me, not for one instant, in subjection.”
“Ah, and must you still be playing, dear boy that was, at being a most tremendous fellow ?” she said, still smiling very tenderly. “Heaven will destroy you, then: and this is the hour of your return, the hour which I once prophesied, the hour which comes—so unportentously!—to end our living. So let us not waste that hour in quibbles.”
“You are so practical,” he lamented, “and with all that is lovable you combine such a dearth of admirable sentiments. In brief, you are Puysange.”
She said pensively: “You were not lonely in my little time of happiness. You would not ever have been lonely with me.”
“Have you divined that also, Marie-Claire? Yes, it has been lonely. I have had many friends and wives and mistresses. Perhaps I have had everything which life has to give—”
Florian sat looking moodily at two queer drawings done in red and black upon the plaster of the walclass="underline" one represented a serpent swallowing rods, the other a serpent crucified. Beneath these drawings was a dark shining stone, and in its gleaming he saw figures move.
Florian turned, and said without any apparent emotion: “But I have lived quite alone, with no comprehension of anyone, and with so much distrust of everybody! And now it is too late.”
She considered this: she spread out her hands, smiling without mirth. “Yes, it is too late, even with me. Nothing is left, where all was yours once, Florian. I seem a husk. I do not either love or hate you any longer. Only,”—again that dark blind staring puzzled over him,—“only, it is not you who wait here in this fine black suit.”
That made him too smile, and shrug a little. “It is what remains of me, my dear,—all that remains anywhere to-day. Such is the end of every person’s youth and passion. I sometimes think that we reside in an ill-managed place. For look, Marie-Claire!” He waved toward the window, made up of very small panes of leaded glass, through which you saw the first vaporous green of the low fruit trees and much sunshine. “Look, Marie-Claire! spring is returning now, on every side. That seems so tactless.”
But Marie-Claire replied, with more tolerance: “That is Their notion of humor. I suppose it amuses the poor dears, so let us not complain.”
Then they fell to talking of other matters, and they spoke of shared small happenings in that spring of eighteen years ago, talking quite at random as one trifle reminded them of another. The son of Marie-Claire, young Achille Cazaio, was away from home in the way of business: for at seventeen he had just set up as a brigand, and he was at this time only a hopeful apprentice in the trade through which he was to prosper and to win success and some fame. So they were undisturbed; and Florian that day saw nothing of the stripling bandit, whom gossip declared remarkably to resemble his half-uncle.
And Florian stayed for some while in this neat sparsely furnished room. He was content. At the bottom of his mind had always been the knowledge that by and by he would return to Marie-Claire. Such events as had happened since he left her, and the things that people had said and thought and done because of him, and in particular the responsibilities with which he had been entrusted,—his dukedom, his wives, his order of the Holy Ghost, a whole chateau to do with whatever he pleased,—were the materials of a joke which he was to share with his sister some day, when the boy that had left her came back after having hoodwinked so many persons into regarding him as mature and efficient and unprincipled and all sorts of other amusing things. Marie-Claire alone knew that this fourth Duke of Puysange was still the boy who had loved her; and her blind gazing seemed always to penetrate the disguise.
Well! he had come back to her, to find that both of them were changed. The fact was sad, because it seemed to him that boy and girl had been rather wonderful. But it did not matter. Probably nothing mattered. Meanwhile he was again with Marie-Claire. It was sufficient to be home again, for the little while which remained before his destruction by that pig-headed and meddlesome Hoprig. And Florian was content. …
Toward mid-day Florian parted with his sister for the last time. He found it rather appalling that neither she nor he was moved by this leave-taking.
Then he reflected: “But we are dead persons, dead a great while ago. This is the calm of death.”
He saw that this was true, and got from it the comfort which he always derived from logic.
Nevertheless, he went back very softly, and he peered through the door he had left not quite closed. Marie-Claire now knelt before the dark polished stone in whose gleaming moved figures.
“Lalle, Bachera, Magotte, Baphia—” she had begun—
Florian shrugged as, this time, he really went away from the house of oak and plaster. He knew whom she invoked. But that did not matter either. And in fact, for Marie-Claire to pass from him to that other was profoundly logical.
25. The Gander That Sang
FLORIAN followed the brook. Florian went hillward, walking upon what seemed a long-ruined roadway. As he went upstream, the brook was to his left hand: to his right was the hillside thick with trees. Florian, whose familiarity with rural affairs was limited, was perforce content to recognize among these trees the maples, the oaks, the pines and the chestnuts.
“Only, I should by every precedent, now that I go to inevitable destruction, be observing everything with unnatural vividness,” he reflected: “and to have about me so many familiar looking but to me anonymous trees and bushes makes my impression of the scenery quite unbecomingly vague.”
Midges danced vexatiously about his face, and now and again he slapped at them without gaining the least good. So much of the ruined roadway had collapsed into the brook, in disorderly jumbles of stones and clay and splintered slate, that what remained was very awkward to walk on: your right foot was always so much higher up the hill than your left. All was peculiarly still this afternoon: it startled you, when, as happened once or twice, a grasshopper sprang out of your way, rising from between your feet with vicious unexpected whirrings. That did not seem wholly natural, in April.
Florian came at last to a log hut beside three trees. Here then was the hermitage of Holy Hoprig, wherein Florian was to encounter the unpredictable. Florian regarded this hut with disfavor. He had never thought to be destroyed in such an unimpressive looking building.
He shrugged, he loosened Flamberge in the scabbard, he went forward, and he pushed open the door. “Now if only,” he reflected, “I had the height and the imposing appearance of Raoul!” Florian made the most of every inch; and entered with the bearing becoming to a Duke of Puysange.
The hut was unoccupied, save that in one corner was a cage painted brown; and inside this sat, upon a red silk cushion, a large gander.