Chapter IX: Part THREE: The End of Lean Wisdom (1)

_“Ne point aller chercher ce qu’on fait dans la lune,
Et vous mesler un peu de ce qu’on fait chez vous,
Où nous voyons aller tout sans-dessus-dessous.”_

_21._

_Of Melior Married_

Now Florian returned to Bellegarde to face the disillusion appointed for every husband in passing from infatuation to paternity. His disenchanted princess now was hardly recognizable. Her face was like dough, her nose seemed oddly swollen; under and about the blood-shot eyes were repulsive yellow splotches. As for the bloated body, he could not bear to look at it. He was shaken with hot and sick disgust when he saw this really perfectly dreadful looking creature.

Perhaps, though, Florian reflected, he saw her through emotions which exaggerated every blemish unfairly. He knew all other pregnant women had seemed to him unattractive rather than actually loathsome. But here, here was the prize he had so long and fervently desired, the prize to gain which he had sacrificed those dearest to him in this world, and had parted with the comforting assurances of religion.... For, Melior, then, had flawless and unequalled beauty. So he had bought, at an exceedingly stiff price, this shining superficies, to learn almost immediately thereafter that she possessed not one other desirable quality. And now Melior had not even the thin mask of loveliness. Worse still, the beauty which he had worshipped since boyhood now existed nowhere. To purchase an hour or two of really not very remarkable entertainment, he had himself destroyed this beauty....

“My love,” said Florian, “now if only I were a conceited person, I would dare to hope that the long months since I last saw you have passed as drearily with you as with me.”

He kissed her tenderly. Even the woman’s breath was now unpleasant. It seemed to Florian that nothing was being spared him.

“Yes, that sort of talk is all very well,” replied Melior, fretfully. “But I do think that at a time when I have every right to expect particular attention and care, you might at least have made an effort to get home sooner, and not leave everything upon my shoulders, especially with all the neighbors everywhere pretending, whenever I come into the room, that they were not talking about your having killed your brother—”

“Yes, yes, a most regrettable affair! But what, sweetheart, has been going amiss at Bellegarde?”

“That is a pretty question for you to ask, with me in my condition, with all these other worries on top of it, about your friend Orléans. Because, knowing you as well as I do, Florian, and not being able to feel as you do that a prime minister is no more than a house fly or a flea,—and seeing quite well, too, how little you consider what my feelings naturally would be if they cut off your head—”

“Ah, but let us take one thing at a time, and for the present leave my head where it is. Do you mean that you have been unwell, my pet?”

“Have you no eyes in the head you keep talking about just to keep me upset! But I do not wonder you prefer not to look at me, now I am such a fright, and that is you men all over. Still, you might at least have the decency to remember who is responsible for it, and that much I must say.”

“But, dearest, I have both the eyes about which you inquire, and in those doubtless partial orbs you happen not to look a fright. So I cannot quite follow you. No, let us be logical! There is a slight pallor, to be sure—But, no! No, dear Melior, upon the whole, I never saw you looking lovelier, and I wonder of what you are talking.”

“I mean, you fool, that I am sick and miserable because now almost any day I am going to have a baby.”

Florian was honestly shocked. He could remember no precedent among his mistresses of anybody’s having put this news so bluntly: and when he recalled the behavior of his first wife in precisely these circumstances, he could not but feel that women were deteriorating. A wife endowed with proper sensibility would have hidden her face upon his shoulder, just as Carola had done, and would in this posture have whispered her awed surmise that Heaven was shortly to consign them a little cherub. But this big-bellied vixen appeared to have no sensibilities. “You fool, now almost any day I am going to have a baby!” was neither a loving nor a dignified way of announcing the nearness of his freedom.

But Florian’s plump face was transfigured, as he knelt before his Melior, and very reverently lifted to his lips her hand. He slipped a cushion under his knee, made himself comfortable, and, kneeling still, went on to speak of his bliss and of his love for her and of how sacred in his eyes appeared the marks of her condition. She listened: he could see that Melior was pleased; and he in consequence continued his gallant romanticizing.

For Florian really wanted to be pleasant to the woman; and was resolved politely to ignore even this last disillusionment, and to condone as far as was humanly possible, the lack of consideration through which this dreadful creature had now added to stupidity and garrulity even physical ugliness.

But while Florian was talking he could see, too, that the central diamond in the charmed ring that Melior wore was to-day quite black, like an onyx, so that he took care to keep it covered with his hand all the while he was talking about his adoration. Here was an appalling omen, a portent, virtually, of open conflict between Florian and his patron saint. The central stone of this ring had become as black and as bright and as inimical looking as though, he reflected, one of the small eyes of Marie-Claire Cazaio stared thence. This was a depressing sight: and it seemed to Florian quite vexingly illogical that the ring should change in this fashion when, after all, he was planning no harm against Melior.

When she had borne her child, he meant of course to carry out his bargain with brown Janicot,—a bargain that Florian considered an entirely private matter, and an affair with which Hoprig could not meddle without exhibiting absolute ill breeding. Then Melior would disappear, Florian did not know whither, to be sure, but her destination would be none of his selecting or responsibility. A really logical ring would not call that contriving any harm against Melior. Even Holy Hoprig must be reasonable enough to see that much. So Florian for the while put aside his foreboding, and assured himself that, with anything like fair luck, he was on the point of getting rid of this dreadful woman forever. The reflection spurred him to eloquence and to the kindliness which Florian had always felt to be due his wives in their last hours.

_22._

_The Wives of Florian_

Florian watched his Melior with a not unnatural care. She remained, to the eye, unperturbed, and was her usual maddening self throughout the evening: it seemed to him she must inevitably have noticed the changing of her ring; and in that event, he granted the woman’s duplicity at least to be rather magnificent.

For Melior talked, on and on and on,—with that quite insupportable air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness,—about Monsieur du Belloc’s new liveries, which were the exact color, my dear, of Madame des Roches’ old wig, the one she was wearing that day she drove in here in all that rain; and about how that reminded Melior of what a thunderstorm had come up only last Thursday without the least warning; and about how Marie-Claire had been looking at Melior again in that peculiar way and ought not to be permitted to raise storms and cast spells that dried up people’s cows.

Even so, Melior continued, milk was fattening and was not really good for you in large quantities, and, for one, she meant to give it up, though if you were intended to be fat you had in the end simply to put up with it, just as some persons got bald sooner than others, and no hair-dresser could help you, not even if he was as airy and as pleased with himself as that high-and-mighty François over at Manneville. Oh, yes, but Florian must certainly remember! He was the very skinny one whom she had in two or three times last autumn, and who had turned out to be a Huguenot or a Jansenist or something of that sort, so that, people did say, the dear old Bishop was going to take the proper steps the very instant he was out again. That was the trouble, though, with colds at his age, you never knew what they might lead to at the moment you were least expecting it—

So her talking went, on and on and on, while Florian looked at the woman,—who was repulsive now even to the eye,—and he reflected: “And it was for this that I intrepidly assailed the high place, and slaughtered all those charming monsters! It was for this that I have sacrificed poor Philippe and my dear Raoul!”

Bed-time alone released him from listening to her; but not from prudent watchfulness.

That night he roused as Melior slipped from their bed. Through discreetly half-closed eyelids Florian saw her take from the closet that queer carved staff which had once belonged to her sister Mélusine. Now Melior for a while regarded this staff dubiously. She replaced it in the closet. She took up the night-light from the green-covered table beside the bed, and she passed out of the room.

He lay still for a moment, then put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and followed her. Melior turned, with her lamp, at the second corridor, and went out into the enclosed Thoignet Court-yard, skirted the well, and so disappeared through the small porch into the Chapel. Florian followed, quite noiselessly. The paved court was chilly underfoot: as he went into the porch a spray of ivy brushed his cheek in the dark.

Inside the Chapel three hanging lamps burned before the altar, like red stars, but they gave virtually no illumination. Florian saw that Melior had carried her yellow lamp into the alcove where his earlier wives were buried. She knelt there. She was praying, no doubt, for the intercession of that meddlesome Hoprig. Florian was rather interested. Then his interest was redoubled, for of a sudden the place was flooded with a wan throbbing bluish luminousness. The effigies upon the tombs of Florian’s wives were changed; and the recumbent marble figures yawned and stretched themselves. Thus, then, began the unimaginative working of Hoprig’s holy ring, with a revamping of the affliction put upon Komorre the Cursed in the old nursery tale, Florian decided; and these retributory resurrections were rather naïve. He drew close his dressing-gown, and got well into the shadow of his great-grandfather’s tomb, the while that his four earlier wives sat erect and looked compassionately at Melior.

“Beware, poor lovely child,” said the likeness of Aurélie, “for it is apparent that Florian intends to murder you also.”

“I was beginning to think he had some such notion,” Melior replied, “for otherwise, of course, he would hardly be fetching home the sword Flamberge.”

She had arisen from her knees, and there was in the composure with which she now sat sociably beside the ghost of Carola, on top of Carola’s tomb, something that Florian found rather admirable. And he recalled too with admiration the innocence and the unconcern with which Melior had commented upon his having acquired such a delightfully quaint and old-fashioned looking sword....

“Yes, for, my dear,” said Carola, “you have permitted him to get tired of you. It was for that oversight he murdered all of us.”

“But I have no time to put up with the man’s foolishness just now, when I am going to have a baby,” said Melior, with unconcealed vexation.

“Go seek protection of St. Hoprig,” advised Hortense.

“And how may she escape,” asked Marianne, “when Florian’s lackeys are everywhere, and Florian’s great wolfhounds guard the outer courts?”

“She can give them the sweet-scented poison which destroyed me,” said Carola. “But all the gates of Bellegarde are locked fast; and how could anyone climb down the unscalable high walls of the outer fortress?”

“By means of the strong silken cord which strangled me,” answered Marianne.

“But who would guide her through the dark to sorcerous Morven?”

“The molten lead which was poured into my ear,” replied Aurélie, “will go before her glowing like a will-o’-the-wisp.”

“And how can she, in her condition, make so long a journey?”

“Let her take the fine ebony cane which broke my skull,” rejoined Hortense. “For now the cup of Florian’s iniquity runs over, and all the implements of his wickedness revolt against him.”

“Come now,” said Melior, “there has been a great deal of nonsense talked. But you have at last, poor ghost, suggested something really practical, and something that had occurred to me also. Yes, you are entirely right, and your suggestion is most sensible, though, to be sure, it can hardly be ebony: for now that I am quite certain about Florian I simply owe it to my self-respect to leave him before he murders me too, and the easiest way to do that of course is to use my unfortunate and misguided sister’s staff. But ebony, you know, is perfectly black—”

“Now of what staff can you be talking?”

“Why, but, my dear! As anybody at Brunbelois, even the veriest tidbits of children, could tell you, it was presented to Mélusine by one of the most fearful and ruthless demons resident in the Red Sea. It was the staff the poor darling always rode on. I do not, of course, mean him: in fact, I only saw him once, on a Saturday, when I was the merest child. And with all those scales, he could hardly expect anybody to call him a darling, even if you overlooked his having a head like a cat. Only much more so, of course, on account of his being larger. No, I meant that Mélusine rode on it—”

Now Florian was reflecting, “With what a lovely air of innocence she lied to me about that staff!” And Aurélie was saying, ineffectively, “Yes, but—”

“—Not as a steady thing, of course, but when she was about some particularly important enchantment, and wanted to make an impression. Mélusine was accomplished, and all that, and nobody denies it, but, if you ask me about being vain, then I can only say that, sister or not, I believe in being truthful. And as for leaving her things about helter-skelter, even the crown jewels—for Mélusine was the oldest of us girls, and Father always spoiled her quite terribly, and Mother never cared especially for dressing up,—why, we all know what clever people are in that way: and I need only say that I found this very staff stuck away in a cupboard, like an old worn-out broom—”

Said Marianne, “Yes, but—”

“—When I was getting my things together to leave Brunbelois. And, much as I hate to contradict anybody, it has a distinctly red tinge, so that it could not possibly be ebony. So, what with all the talk, and Hoprig’s suspicions about Florian, it simply occurred to me that this staff was not the sort of thing my dear father would care to be stirring up unpleasant old memories with, by seeing it, after all his trouble with Mélusine. For, even if Hoprig had been quite wrong, still, marriage, as I so often think, is really just a lottery—”

“Yes, but,” said Hortense, “but, but, but! one needs to know the charm that controls the staff—”

“My dear creature! But you are Hortense, are you not? Yes, I remember Florian told me all about you: and after the manner in which he has behaved to me, I am perfectly willing to believe that he misrepresented you in every way. Even if you used to make it a regular habit of flying at people’s throats like that, I know how many perfectly well meaning women simply do not realize what an annoyance it is for any one person to want to do all the talking—”

“I think so too, but—”

“Oh, I am not in the least offended, my dear. It is merely that, as I was telling you, Hortense, my sister Mélusine was one of the most potent sorceresses in the known world, and so utterly devoted to her art that hardly a day passed without at any rate a little parlor conjuring. And I used often to be playing in the corner with my building blocks and my dolls when she was at her practising. If I were to tell you half the things I have witnessed with my own eyes, you simply would not believe a word of it. Yes, Mélusine was quite accomplished, there is no denying that. And as I was saying, you know how children are, and how often they surprise you when you had no notion they were paying the least attention. Yes, as I often think, it is the littlest pitchers that have the largest ears—”

“If you know how the cantraps run, then, to be sure—”

“Why, but,” said Melior, now with her air of one who is dealing patiently with an irrational person, “but everybody knows if it is not the _Eman hetan_ charm, it has to be either the _Thout tout a tout_ or the _Horse and hattock_ one. And so, I do hope, you see my feeling in the matter. Because, of course, appreciating as I do the perfectly well-meant suggestions of every one of you, still nobody in my delicate condition exactly likes to go about sliding down ropes and poisoning the servants, not to speak of the dogs, who, after all, are not responsible for their master’s doings, and walking nobody knows how many miles in the dark. So I shall go to Hoprig more carefully, and quickly too, upon the demon’s staff, vexatious as it is not to be remembering his name. I distinctly remember there was a Z in it, because there always seemed to me something romantic about a Z, and that he had talons like an eagle; but it was not Bembo, or Celerri, or El-Gabal—No, it has quite gone out of my mind, but, in any event, I am much obliged to all of you. And no doubt it will come back to me the moment I stop trying to remember—”

Thus speaking, Melior arose from the tomb, and left the Chapel reflectively. A brief silence followed, a silence that was broken by Marianne. She said, “Poor Florian!”

“He had his faults of course,” assented Hortense, “but really, to a person of any sensibility—Do peep, my love, and tell me if my skirts are down properly—”

Now Florian came forward, as statelily as anybody can walk in bedroom slippers, just as his wives were settling back upon their various tombs.

“Dear ladies,” said he, “I perceive with real regret that not even death is potent enough to allay your propensities for mischief making.”

“Oh, oh!” they cried, each sitting very erect, “here is the foul murderer!”

“Parbleu, my pets, what grievance, after all, have you against me? Are you not happier in your present existence than when you lived with me?”

“I should think so, indeed!” replied Carola, indignantly. “Why, wherever do you suppose we went to?”

“I do not inquire. It is a question raised by no widower of real discretion: he merely inclines in this, as in most matters, to be optimistic. Yet come now, let us be logical! Is it quite right for you four to complain against me, and to harbor actual animosity, on account of what was in the beginning just the natural result of my rather hasty disposition, and in the end my quadruple misfortune? Do you, Carola, for example, honestly believe that, after having been blessed with your affection, I could ever be actually satisfied with Melior?”

“For one, I certainly see nothing in her. And I really do think, Florian—”

“Nor I, either,” said Aurélie, “nor could any rational person. And for your own good, I must tell you quite frankly, Florian—”

“Though, heaven knows,” said Marianne, “it is not as if any of us could envy the poor idiot for being your wife—”

“It is merely that one cannot help wondering,” said Hortense, “that even you should have had no more sense or good taste—”

So for an instant the sweet voices were like a choir of birds in fourfold descant: and they thrilled him with remembered melodies, vituperative and plaintive and now strangely dear. Then came the changing. All, Florian saw in that queer bluish light, were pitiably eager to talk about Melior, and to explain to him exhaustively just what a fool he had been, and how exactly like him was such behavior. But the magic of Hoprig’s revivifying ring was spent: and color and flexibility were going away from the pretty bodies, so that their lips could but move stiffly and feebly now, without making the least noise. It was really heart-breaking, Florian thought, to see these lovely women congeal into stone, and be thus petrified upon the verge of candors which would have completely freed their minds.

Then that strange throbbing bluish light was gone: and Florian was alone in the dark Chapel where only three dim lamps were glowing like red stars. An ordinary person would have estimated that this gloom did but very inadequately prefigure Florian’s future. But a Puysange knew perfectly where next to apply for help against any and all saints.

_23._

_The Collyn in the Pot_

Florian went from the Chapel to the secret chamber which nobody else cared to enter. At this last pinch he was resolved to enlist in his defence that power which was at least as strong as Hoprig’s power. So Florian carried with him wine and wafers.

He opened a wicker basket, wherein was an earthen pot. Inside this pot lay, upon strips of white and black wool, a small, very smooth dun-colored creature that had the appearance of a cat. Florian with a green-handled little knife pricked the end of his ring-finger until he got the necessary blood; and presently the Collyn of Puysange had opened her yellow eyes and was licking daintily her lips so as to lose no drop of the offering. Florian fed her also with the wine and wafers.

“Whither,” asked Florian then, “will the staff carry Melior?”

The Collyn answered, in a tiny voice: “To the hut which is between Amneran and Morven. For that hut is the outpost of romance, and is as near as the demon’s staff may dare approach to the hermitage of Holy Hoprig.”

“Where is that hermitage?”

“Upon Morven, upon the highest uplands of Morven, between a thorn-tree and an ash-tree, and beneath an oak-tree.”

“What is my patron saint doing in this place?”

“Master, I also keep away from these saints. But it is rumored that this Hoprig is now somewhat recklessly exercising the privileges of sainthood; that his doings are not very favorably looked down upon; and that the angels, in particular, are complaining because of his frequent demands on them.”

“That does not sound at all well,” said Florian, “and certainly there is no precedent for the wife of a Puysange consorting with people who annoy the angels.”

The Collyn yawned: and for a while she looked at Florian somewhat as ordinary cats regard a mouse-hole.

“Master, I would not bother about this last wife. Why should you count so scrupulously one woman more or less on the long list?”

“It is not the woman I wish to keep. Faith of a gentleman, no! But I must keep my plighted word.”

“Master,” said the cool and tiny voice, “you are thrusting yourself into a dangerous business. For this woman is now under Hoprig’s protection, and the powers of these saints are not to be despised.”

“That is true, but I must hold to my bargain with Monsieur Janicot. The pious old faith that made my living glad has been taken away from me, the dreams that I preserved from childhood have been embodied for my derision. I see my admirations and my desires for what they are, and this is a spectacle before which crumbles my self-conceit. The past, wherein because of these empoisoned dreams I stinted living, has become hateful: and of my hopes for the future, the less said the better. All crumbles, Collyn: but Puysange remains Puysange.”

“I wonder, now,” the cat asked, innocently, “if that means anything?”

“Yes, Collyn,” Florian answered: “it means that I shall keep my own probity unstained, keep honor at least, whatever else goes by the board. One must be logical. My quiet unassuming practise of religion and my constant love which once derided time and change—and in fact, the entire code of ideals by which I have lived so comfortably for all of thirty-six years,—appear to have been founded everywhere upon delusion and half-knowledge. Yet Helmas, I find, was truly wise. I also shall keep up my dignity by not letting even fate and chance upset me with their playfulness, and I shall continue to do what was expected of me yesterday. For the code by which I have lived contents me, or, rather, I am subdued to it. So I must go on living by it while living lasts.”

“Yet if this romantic code of yours be based upon nothing—”

“If I have wholly invented it, without the weaving into its fabric of one strand of fact,—why, then, all the more reason for me to be proud of and to cherish what is peculiarly mine. Do my dreams fail me? That is no reason why I should fail my dreams, which indeed, Collyn, have erred solely in contriving a more satisfactory world than Heaven seems able to construct.”

“And does all this, too, mean something?”

“A pest! it seems to mean at least my destruction, since it is an article of my code that a gentleman may not in any circumstances break his word. For the rest, I find that abstract questions of right and wrong are too deep for me, too wholly based upon delusion and half-knowledge, so I shall meddle with them no more. Good and evil must settle their own vaporous battles, with which I am no longer concerned.”

“To fling down your cards in a rage profits nobody.”

“But do I indeed rage? Do I speak bitterly? Well, for thirty-six years I have taken sides, and for thirty-six years I have been the most zealous of churchmen, only to find at the last that not one of my irregularities has been charged off. I can assure you, Collyn, that it is quite vexing to have the business credit of one’s religion thus shaken by the news that so much piety has ended with more debts than assets.”

The small predatory beast still waited warily: and never for an instant did her unwinking tilted yellow eyes leave looking at Florian.

“So many of you I have served! your father, and your grandfather, and all the others that for a brief while were here. And in the end you all come to nothing.”

“Ah, Collyn, if the life of a Puysange be of no account,—although that is an unprecedented contention, let me tell you,—then so much the more reason for me to shape what remains of that life to my own liking.”

Florian thought for a while. Florian shrugged. That was the deuce of listening to yourself when you were talking. Florian, who had come hither to purchase aid from the Collyn, had logically convinced himself, through this sad trick of heeding his own words, that Puysange must stand or fall unaided. Yes, vexing as it was, that which he had spoken with so much earnestness was really true.

“All these years,” said Florian, rather sadly, “you have lain here at my disposal, prepared to serve me in my need, with no small power. And I, unlike the others of my race, have bought of you nothing. What I have wanted I have taken, asking no odds of anyone, whether here or below. It is true I have made to Heaven some civil tenders, in the shape of good works and church-windows, just as I have been at pains to supply you with blessed wine and wafers. It seemed well in logic to preserve a friendly relation with both sides. For the rest, whatever I felt my life to lack I have myself fetched into it, even holiness and beauty, even”—Florian smiled,—“even Melior and Hoprig. It is perhaps for this self-sufficiency that I am punished in a world wherein people are expected to live and to act in herds because of their common distrust of the future and of one another. I do not complain; and I remain self-sufficient.”

“In fact, with me to aid you, master, you need lack for nothing.”

That was precisely what Florian had been thinking when he came hither. But Florian had since then been listening to that most insidious of counsellors, himself. He was utterly convinced; and one must be logical.

So Florian replied languidly:

“My dear creature! but I do not require your aid. Instead, I am come to declare you free from your long bondage to the house of my fathers. Yes, you are free, with no claim upon me, alone of all my race, since now that I renounce good I shall put away evil also. For I am Puysange: I dare to look into my own heart, and I can find there no least admiration for Heaven or for Heaven’s adversaries. It may be I am fey: I speak under correction, since that is not a condition with which I have had any experience. But it seems to me that gods and devils are poor creatures when compared to man. They live with knowledge. But man finds heart to live without any knowledge or surety anywhere, and yet not to go mad. And I wonder now could any god endure the testing which all men endure?”

At this sort of talking the Collyn purred.

“Master, you shall evade that testing, for you shall have unbounded knowledge. Ah, but what secrets and what powers I will give you, my proud little master, for a compact and a price.”

“No: I have no doubt the powers you offer are very pleasant, very amusing to exercise, and all that; but I have had quite enough of compacts.”

“I will give you the master-word of darkness, that single word which death speaks to life, and which none answers. I will give you the power of the crucified serpent, and the spell which draws the sun and the moon to bathe in a silver tub and do your will. There is wealth in that spell, the wealth which purchases kingdoms. And I will give you, who have smiled so long, the power to laugh. I will do more, my proud little master: for I will give you the bravery to weep—”

But Florian answered: “You cannot give me anything worthy of comparison with that which I once had, and now have lost. I had my dreams of beauty and of holiness. I had the noblest dreams imaginable. These dreams I have embodied as no other man has ever done before me: these dreams I have made vital things, and I have introduced them into my living, full measure. No, you can give me nothing worthy of comparison with what I have lost. And you are free. In all these years the one service I have asked of you, who have been so long the mainstay and the destroyer of Puysange, is now at the last to reveal to me the shortest way to my patron saint.”

“From these saints you will get a quick and ugly shrift: from me long years of ease and wisdom, master,—utter wisdom, and no more restless doubtings about anything.”

Florian felt of a sudden that this small fawning creature was loathsome: and just as suddenly, Florian too was weary of all things that are and of all that was ever to happen anywhere.

“No, Collyn, I repudiate your wicked aid; and I set you free, not really hating evil or good either. But I honestly prefer to owe allegiance to nobody except myself. Because of that preference I shall go undefended to yet another high place in quest of my embodied dreams,—now for a second time, and now with a somewhat different intent.”

“You march toward death and toward utter destruction, my proud little master, when even now my power might save you. There is no other power that would befriend you now, for you march up against Heaven.”

“Yes, yes! that is regrettable of course, it tends to establish a bad precedent. But it is my ill luck to be both a gentleman and a poet,—a poet who, I can assure you,” Florian said, hastily, “has never written any verses. That, at least, nobody can charge me with. Now to a gentleman destruction is preferable to dishonor: and to a married poet, Collyn, there are worse things than death.”

_24._

_Marie-Claire_

Florian left Bellegarde at dawn. For once, he did not travel in his favorite bottle-green and silver. Good taste suggested that a plain black suit with his best Mechlin ruffles, was the appropriate wear in which to court destruction. Thus clad, he girded on Flamberge, and set out as merrily as might be, afoot: no horse could come to the top of Morven, where once had stood the grove of Virbius.

Florian journeyed first to Amneran, and went to a very retired cottage built of oak and plaster upon a stone foundation. Here was his last hope of aid, and of succour which he might accept without any detriment to the pride of Puysange, for this was the ill spoken-of home of his half-sister, Marie-Claire Cazaio. She was alone at her spinning when he came into the room. He took her hand. He kissed it.

“You told me once, dear Marie-Claire, a long while since, that in the end I would come to you in an old garden where dead leaves were falling, and would kiss your hand, and tell you I had loved you all my life. I wonder, Marie-Claire, if you remember that?”

“I have forgotten,” she said, “nothing.”

“You were wrong as to the garden and as to the dead leaves. But in all else you were right. This is the end, Marie-Claire. And in the end I fulfill your prophecy.”

She looked at him, for no brief while, with those small darkened eyes which seemed to see beyond him. “Yes, you are speaking the truth. I had thought that when this happened it would matter. And it does not matter.”

“Only one thing has mattered in all our lives, Marie-Claire. I was at Storisende last week. I remembered you and our youth.”

“And were you”—she smiled faintly,—“and were you properly remorseful?”

“No. I have regretted many of my doings. But I can find nowhere in me any of the highly requisite repentance for those of my actions which people would describe as criminal. I suppose it is because we of Puysange are so respectful of the notions of others that we do not commit crimes rashly. We enter into no illegal turpitude until rather careful reflection has assured us of its expediency. I, in any event, have sometimes been virtuous with unthinking levity, and with depressing upshots: but my vices, which my judgment had to endorse before prudence would venture on them, have resulted well enough. So I can regret no irregularities, and certainly not the happiness of our far-off youth.”

Again Marie-Claire was in no hurry to reply. When she spoke, it was without any apparent conviction either one way or the other. “Our happiness involved, they say, considerable misdoing.”

This stirred him to mild indignation. “And is love between brother and sister a misdoing? Come, Marie-Claire, but let us be logical! All scientists will tell you that endogamy is natural to mankind as long as men stay uncorrupted by over-civilization. The weight of history goes wholly one way. The Pharaohs and the Ptolemies afford, I believe, precedents that are tolerably ancient. Strabo is explicit as to the old Irish, Herodotus as to the Persians. In heaven also Osiris and Zeus and I know not how many other supreme gods have, in cherishing extreme affection for their sisters, set the example followed upon earth by the Kings of Siam and of Phœnicia, and by the Incas of Peru—”

She shook that small dark head. “But, none the less—”

“—An example followed by the Sinhalese, the Romans of the old Republic, the Tyrians, the Guanches of the Canary Islands—”

“Let us say no more about it—”

“—An example, in short, of the best standing in all quarters of the globe. In the Rig-Veda you will find Yami defending with unanswerable eloquence the union of brother and sister. In Holy Writ we see Heaven’s highest blessings accorded to the fruit of Abraham’s affection for his sister Sarah, nor need I allude to the marriage of Azrun with her two brothers, Abel and Cain. And in the Ynglinga Saga—”

She laid her hand upon his mouth. “Yes, yes, you have your precedents: and in your eyes, I know, that is the main thing, because of your dread of being unconventional and offending the neighbors. We were not wicked, then, whatever our less well-read father thought: we were merely”—and here she smiled,—“we were merely logical in our youth. In any event, we wasted our youth.”

“Yes,” Florian admitted, “for I was then logical, but not sufficiently logical. I could, as easily at that time as later, have cured our father of his habit of meddling with my affairs. But I turned unthinkingly away from the contented decades of technical criminality which we might have shared. For I was in those days enamored of the beauty that I in childhood had, however briefly, seen: even while my body rioted, my thoughts remained bewilderedly aware of a beguiling and intoxicating brightness which stayed unwon to; and I could care whole-heartedly about nothing else.”

“I know,” she answered. “You were a dear boy. And it does not matter, now, that you went away from me, and played at being a man about whom I knew nothing and cared nothing. For old times’ sake my sending followed you to Brunbelois, and even there for old times’ sake I warned you. But you would not heed—”

“I cared for nothing then save the beauty of Melior. And now her beauty,” he said, with a wry smile, “is gone. And that also does not matter. For months her beauty has been the one thing about her I never think of.”

“She is flesh and blood,” said Marie-Claire, as if that explained everything. “It is a combination which does not long detain Puysange. What is this peril that you go to encounter to-day?”

“I go up upon Morven to keep my word as frankly and as utterly as I gave it; and thereby to be embroiled, I am afraid, in open conflict with my patron saint.”

“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 wall: 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 château 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.

“Do not disturb me,” said this bird, at once, “for I have had quite enough to upset me already.”

Florian for an instant stayed silent and somewhat confused. For this evidently was not the saint’s hermitage, and a talking gander seemed not wholly natural. Then Florian recollected that Morven had always been the home of sorcery. So Florian replied, with great civility, that he had not meant to intrude, but merely happened to be passing. And Florian then talked with this gander, who told of the quite disgusting scene he had witnessed when a woman, riding upon a magic staff, had come into the hut, and had there been delivered of a child.

“Children are not usually acquired so,” said the gander, “for as a rule, a stork brings them, and that is a much nicer method.”

“But where,” said Florian, “is now this honorarium?”

“I do not know what that means,” the bird replied, “but I do know that if it means anything objectionable it has almost certainly been in here to-day to annoy me.”

And the bird told of how a dove had come and had carried off in its beak the ring the woman had given it. He told how presently had come a fine looking man with a shining about his head, not flying but luxuriously riding through the air upon a gold cloud, with cherubs’ heads floating about him; and how the woman and the child had gone away upon this same cloud, surrounded by, the gander thought, extremely fretful looking cherubs.

“The whole affair has upset me very much,” said the gander, “for I was composing, and I can never bear to be interrupted.”

And the gander sang to Florian of the proper way in which children should be born and should live thereafter. About the glory of love and the felicities of marriage, about patriotism and success in business and about the high assurances of religion, the gander sang, and about optimism and philanthropy and about the steady advancing of every kind of social improvement. And of man that is the child and heir of God, and of the splendor of man’s works, and of the magnanimity of human nature, and of the wonder of man’s living upon earth, the gander sang also.

“Parbleu, but let us be logical about this!” said Florian. “Your art is very pleasing; but it embellishes a lazar-house with pastels. For human living is not at all like the song you have made concerning it.”

“So much the worse for human living,” the gander answered. “It does not bother me here in my cage. Besides, the purpose and the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my fellows with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies. So I do not mimic. I create.”

Florian looked at the gander for some while, and Florian sighed. This creature too had in it nothing of the realist, Florian reflected, and it preferred to live by its own code; but its æsthetic theories coincided with Hoprig’s. And the hermitage of that—somehow—ambiguous Hoprig was still to seek.

Florian left the imprisoned gander singing very gloriously, and Florian went now across Morven, that place of abominable fame. These uplands were thickly overgrown with a queer vine that had large oval leaves, the green of which was mottled with red, somewhat like the skin of snakes. Here also grew strawberry vines. As he walked this undergrowth was continually catching in the buckles of Florian’s shoes. Everywhere were inexplicable soft noises, and about his face danced a small cloud of midges.

There was no other sign of life except that once five large black and white birds rose from the ground immediately before him, seeming to rise from between his feet as the grasshoppers had done. This did not frighten Florian, exactly, but the suddenness of it, in this lonely place, gave him a shock not wholly delightful. These birds, he saw, had been feeding there upon the berries of a small bush, upon purple berries which were about the size of a wren’s egg, and whose outer sides had been pecked away by the birds, leaving the seeds exposed. All this was natural enough until you reflected that in these latitudes no bush produced berries as early as April.

Now toward twilight Florian came to clumps of big and vividly yellow toad-stools, which seemed fat and poisonous and very evil. He passed among these, breaking many of them with his feet, and reflecting that the tiny screams which appeared to be uttered by these broken, loathsomely soft things must be the cry of some other sort of queer bird hidden somewhere near at hand. And he presently saw the appearance of a man coming toward him, and about the head of this man was a shining, as Florian perceived from afar, and was so assured that this was Hoprig.