IV
THE RETURN
EDITH sat up on the edge of the bed and propped her chin in her hand while she watched Maurice finish his dressing. He had set the lamp on the floor, with a shade that threw the light downward, so that it should not bother her.
“Why do you get up so early?” she asked him in a sleepy voice, her eyes half opened.
“I can’t sleep any more. It’s almost morning.”
He blew out the lamp. A meagre light began presently to filter through the blinds.
“It’s night, Maurice.”
“Don’t you see a little daylight?”
“That isn’t day. There’s a moon.”
“Rest a little while yet, Edith. You’ve time enough.”
“Yes. I’m so tired, so deliciously tired.”
She let herself fall back on the pillow, and closed her eyelids. Even in sleep there was still an air of passion about her. He came up to the bed and bent over her in the fitful light that came in through the window, looking long at her face.
“This little flame of love that lighted up my life,” he thought, “is put out for me now. I shall no longer see it burning, I can’t see the blood flowing through her cheeks, nor the gleam of her teeth through her parted lips, hardly the curve of her mouth, the line of her nose, the dark mass of her hair with all its perfume. And her body is lost to me——”
He was growing tender over her, dangerously so. The temptation came to him to stay. He bent over and brushed her forehead, of which he could feel the sweet warmth with his lips. She smiled vaguely, keeping her eyes closed. He left her there and went out.
In the corridor of the hotel he met only a waiter, who yawned as he polished the floors, and paid no attention to Maurice’s appearance. A hand-bag was all the baggage he carried, an overcoat and a cane.
The shortest road to the railway station at Orta leads across the Sacred Mountain. The moonlight, which was growing pale before the threats of day, penetrated in fear and mystery through the half-leafless woods. Between the tall trunks of the pines and larches its beams fell upon the dead leaves that strewed the ground, and rested on the façades of the little chapels. When Maurice reached a point opposite the fifteenth chapel he raised his head and stopped. The slender columns stood out quite white, one or another of them throwing its reflection in a black shadow against the wall.
He mounted the steps and turned to take in the familiar landscape with a last glance. The well-curbs and the clear outlines of some of the sanctuaries rose round him like apparitions. He could see opposite him the dark mountains, and portions of the lake on either side the hill. Even at this distance he could no longer see the Belvedere Hotel, which was hidden by the hillside, though it was just this that he was looking for. These stones he trod on, these trees and chapels, all these vague outlines which the sun would presently restore in their full values, he would bear away with him in his memory. So long as he should have the power to remember them he should see them all in his mind’s eye, not for their own particular grace, but subordinated as scenes and accessories for one principal figure. Even at a distance, this chief figure, this unique flower of his youth, still exerted its fascination over him. Instead of fleeing from it, fleeing without a backward look, he stood motionless in this place that Edith had so loved, where she had longed to be with her roses in her hands, the evening of their anniversary, that last day of their happiness.
In their room there she was sleeping still, deliciously tired. In an hour, in two hours, perhaps sooner, when she rose to come and join him, she would find his cruel letter on the dressing-table, telling her in tender words that the moment for their separation had come. She would not understand it quite at once. The papers enclosed in the envelope would tell her more. They were the hotel bill, paid and receipted, some banknotes, and a receipt for the money deposited in her name with the International Bank of Milan, the sum completed by Margaret Roquevillard’s cheque which Maurice had endorsed to her. By these she would see what it was that had come between them and broken her sway. The family which she had vanquished was recapturing her lover. She would give a great cry of sorrow then. However far away he might be from her, he should hear her cry resounding in his ears....
In the woods the moonlight was losing itself in the light of morning. The hour was passing. He leant against one of the columns, and could not make up his mind to go.
“Where did I get the courage,” he asked himself, “to break her heart and mine? She is there, quite near me yet. If I go back again she’ll never know. Her waking will be sweet and easy. But no, I shall never see her again. There are ties that love cannot obliterate. Happiness, I can understand it now, is not one’s right. I wound her, yet I love her. The wrong she did me was involuntary. I don’t remember anything but having felt life near her, of having lived it near her each minute to the full; and yet I can’t stay near her now any more. Do you remember our first days, Edith? You gave me some flowers the first evening. And then you gave me your lips, as sweet as flowers, and were glad to give them. When you said to me, ‘I will be yours, but yours alone, when you want me,’ I could feel even then your caresses that made you one flesh with mine. Because you are too sensitive to love’s touch, because even now when I am going to make you suffer, I tremble for your frailty, tremble for the future, oh, Edith, don’t think I love you less. When I realise that for that very thing in you I may lose you one day, Edith, I ought not to think this of you, yet perhaps I love you all the more. What memories shall you keep of me? Between two autumns our love has run its course. You preferred this autumn season, when nature’s mood is high. I found its gold again in your eyes, and its fever in your arms. I discovered enthusiasm in it, and desire. Now it is like the chrysanthemums in the cemetery at Orta for me. It covers Death. Yes, death, you understand. I have not said good-bye to you, yet all is over for us. It is like death for us. You will weep as you have been used to do. You’ll talk, you’ll walk, you’ll be for others a living creature, a being of grace and youth: but for me, who shall know nothing more of you, you will be as if you had died. It might be better if you were dead indeed: you would not curse me—curse me who love you, and who must choke our love——”
The whistle of a train caught him back brutally from this state of desperate reflection, in which little by little his will was losing force. Had he waited too long here? No, that must be the express which comes down to Novare, and which gets in a few minutes before the up train to Domodossola. The opportune summons resolved him in his last decision. He left the chapel, crossing the woods at a run and reaching the railway station in a few moments. On the mountains the day was growing brighter, and the moon had begun to efface itself in space. He bought a ticket for Corconio, a station quite near Orta, but in a direction opposite that to which he must travel, his idea being to hinder Edith’s search should she try to overtake him. On the way he would pretend that he had made a mistake.
As far as Omegna the railway follows the height above the little lake. In the railway carriage Maurice seated himself so as to ride backwards, and leaned over the door so that his gaze might take the impress of these places that had so belonged to him. In the rising daylight the waters of the lake wrinkled and quivered lightly. The trees of the peninsula showed him their tapering trunks and the play of their branches. Here he had known happiness. The train left Omegna. In vain he tried to see Orta Novarese still, to retain in his eyes, in his heart, the look of this land from which he fled. The seconds which made the distance grow fell like stones in a whirlpool—one by one he heard them.
An hour later he arrived at Domodossola, a little Italian town perched among the high Alps, bathed by the green and rapid Rosa above Lago Maggiore. From here the stage between Italy and Switzerland, by way of the Simplon Pass, made its regular departures. With good teams of horses and well-posted relays, it covered the sixty-four kilometres between the Vale of Ossola and the valley of the Rhone in a dozen hours.
The journey costs about one louis, and to acquit himself fully of any debt to Edith Maurice had almost exhausted his own resources. He had consulted the time-tables. By way of Turin the fare was too dear. When he should have paid the third-class rate from Orta to Domodossola, and from Brieg to Chambéry, he should have left in his pockets, according to his calculations, nothing but the price of three or four very modest meals. It was truly the return of the prodigal son. He bore without displeasure the penury which made him one with the humble workmen with whom he shared the compartment. It distracted him from his pain by its shabby trials. Besides, it gave him no real concern. He knew how nice people sometimes managed their little economies to afford their carriage and expensive houses at Brieg. At the head of the pass, the hospice of the Simplon, like the one at the Grand St. Bernard, gave free hospitality to the poor who crossed the mountain, and even tourists were not ashamed to profit by it. His neighbour from Piedmont, who knew the country, ended up by instructing him on the subject. “The hospice is always open,” he said. “Day and night, night and day. At night you just go in and find a room on the first floor, without saying anything to anybody.”
Thus the difficulties of the journey were made simple. He would go through the Simplon on foot, and sleep at the hospice.
At Domodossola, the extreme end of the line, he got out of the train, and started out proudly by the side of the diligence, which stood in front of the station, and, once filled with passengers, started off at a trot, the ardour of the five horses very fresh at the beginning of the interminable ascent. The guard took a good look at this well-dressed young man with a satchel in his hand who was not afraid to use his shoes. He brought his team to a stop, cracked his whip to attract attention, and with a gallant gesture, as if he were offering a lady some bouquet, he pointed to a vacant seat in the coupé.
“Thanks,” replied Maurice. “I’m going on foot.”
“Impossible! Impossible with a gentleman’s legs. And so far. I’m sure the Signorina is waiting for you.”
“No one is waiting for me,” said Maurice.
“Oh, so much the worse. A good fire, a warm soup and a wife are nice things to find when you get home.”
He gathered up his reins and shook up his horses again, the carriage soon pulling out of sight. Maurice continued on his way alone. Slowly he drew higher above the valley. Before he entered the various gorges of the Alps he turned again, and gathered in the last grace of the Italian country. It flowered above the sinuous plain of the Tosa and on the wooded slopes; even the abrupt declivities, which some golden thickets decorated, profited by it. In the sunlight it was clear that this country tried to please in spite of its mountain rigours. The peasant women coming down to mass—it was a Sunday—wore coloured kerchiefs, which fell in a point down their backs, with short and many-coloured skirts. The women first saluted the passersby, with a gentle good-day, which gave the young man a tender feeling of accord with them.
He had an impression as of going voluntarily into exile. Was not Edith his native land? Edith! She would be waking at this hour, she would know. And he walked more briskly, to tire himself and forget his grief.
He had divided the sixty-four kilometres of the crossing into three stages—Isella eighteen, the Pass twenty-two, Brieg twenty-four. He counted on lunching at Isella, reaching the Pass, an altitude of two thousand metres, to dine and sleep at the hospice, and descend to Brieg the next morning, in time to catch the train from Lausanne and Geneva which made connections at the frontier for Savoy. Monday, at six in the evening, he should be in Chambéry.
Isella, at the head of a verdant little valley, is the last Italian village before you come to Switzerland. Here you have truly the impression of saying a melancholy farewell to Italy. Built lengthwise along the borders of Napoleon’s route, it is enclosed between two natural high walls of four or five thousand feet, but one has only to look backward and see prairies and groups of trees, like a shaft of light across the mountains. The bells of the stage-coach, which relays at Isella, and the proceedings of the customs officers, who are as proud and smart as soldiers and bear the majestic title of Financial Guards, were formerly the only excitements of the little burg; but in August, 1898, began the work on the new iron route scooped out across the Alps. As if by enchantment the population quadrupled. Workmen’s cities were built, with little villas and gardens for the engineers and overseers. Alberghi and tratorie multiplied themselves, with announcements of the glory of the Simplon, and advertisements of a sparkling asti.
As the day was Sunday, all this floating population was afoot. Bells were sounding the letting out of high mass when Maurice arrived. He passed a procession of women coming home with prayer-books in hand, while the men devoted themselves to bowling, and from each public-house sounds of guitars and harmonicas issued forth with the smell of cooking. Maurice ate for a modest sum in a shabby-looking osteria, in company with noisy comrades. Instead of profiting by the daylight and leaving abruptly—night in November falls so fast—he lingered improvidently, as if he preferred the vulgarest noisiness to solitude. He could not make up his mind to cross the frontier. It was the material symbol of his break, and he clung desperately to his love. Even in this smoky room, whose deafening noise, by keeping him from thinking, allayed his misery, it seemed to him he still lived in distant communication with Edith.
A little before the gorges of Gondo, with its roaring cascades, he came upon the stone that marked the dividing line between the two countries. Once past it, he was conscious of a shadow that fell across his heart, before even he could pick out the bit of thin earth between the rocks where the path led. Raising his head, he could see the last rosy light fading from the sky. Night, which came upon him much sooner than he had counted on in his itinerary, prevented him from taking the short cut by which the long climb round Algoby is avoided. He arrived very late and tired at the village of Simplon, where he had supper and got some rest.
When he took up his journey again complete darkness and silence waited for him outside the inn door. He accepted them as the natural companions of his dreary voyage. He was fulfilling a duty: outward conditions mattered little to him. Had he not killed his happiness with his own hands, and must not murderers expiate their sins? The moon was on the wane, and did not show herself till eleven o’clock, as he neared the summit of the path. In the moonlight he could see that he was alone in a deserted and desolate amphitheatre, covered with snow that made all objects look alike. He could not even hear the sound of his own footfalls. His shadow kept him company fitfully, now lengthening out, now growing thin, appearing and disappearing.
Out of breath and with weary limbs, he searched the horizon for some sign of the hospice. Could he have passed it farther back without noticing it? He was so tired he could not judge of distances any more. And, after all, what was the use of so much effort? He had only to let himself sink down by the roadside. In the snow he could sleep or die with equal ease. It would be the end of thinking, of tramping.
“Edith!” he murmured aloud.
At the sound of his own voice he stopped, startled as if some one had called to him. Was it not she who called him once again, the last time? He was going to join her painlessly. Already he was no longer conscious of his limbs. He would slip away toward her, as gently as the moon’s rays fell upon the snow. The excess of his fatigue, the cold, the rarity of the air, not less than his despair, gave him hallucinations. In this stage of exhaustion from cold one who stops is lost. He could no longer put one foot before another. He was only a broken mechanism.
“Edith!” he called again.
And he smiled. No suffering touched him. It was so simple to sit down and wait. In front of him, toward the right, the glaciers of Monte Leone flashed and trembled, as if some movement animated them. It seemed to him that the whole white landscape was displacing itself, moving back toward Italy. He felt a kind of exquisite beatitude in his torpor. The instinct of self-preservation, or his curious watching for the mirage, made him keep his eyes opened, though sleepiness was heavy on them; yet he had no more desire to stir. The silence of the mountain, accentuated by the snow and moonlight, filled all space, rising even to the stars.
In this shifting of the landscape through which he slipped away there was an arresting moment when his satchel fell, relinquished mechanically by his hand. The movement that he made to pick it up broke the spell. He knew his danger from the difficulty he had in moving his limbs at all.
“But here, I’m going to die,” he said to himself sharply. “All alone here in this waste.”
To die! Edith, toward whom he had fancied he was going back, disappeared immediately from his thoughts, like a siren into the depths of the sea, and in her place appeared the country of his childhood, the hillside of La Vigie, and his family.
“They are waiting for me.”
Was it a talisman against death, this call of his earliest years, which usurped with signs of strength the temptation to make an end of things, the desire for annihilation? His youth helped him, and he recovered gradually some energy, lifting his feet one after the other as if he pulled them out of clinging soil that held them fast. He dragged himself, rather than walked, for a few yards further. He was afraid now, and hardened himself against the danger that he felt present at his side, coming with him step by step in the solitude, like an enemy watching for him to falter. He knew that there were board shelters at intervals through the pass to protect travellers from tempests or the cold. To find one of these was the limit of his ambition. And then suddenly he perceived at the base of Monte Leone a feeble ray that hardly glowed in the too clear night. Quite small and crowded against the enormous mass of the mountain, it was the hospice at last, its door always wide open; there was even a lamp to designate it. The moment he saw the light he was saved. He never took his eyes from its encouraging beacon. Soon the building took on its real proportions, high and large, built of great blocks of freestone. At last he climbed the steps and went in. Some dogs, from the bottom of a distant kennel, sounded his arrival, but in the hall, where the moonlight filtered in, he came across no one. Would they leave him in distress at their very door? He would have lain down there on the stones in his weariness had not the instructions of the man from Piedmont recurred to his memory:
“At night you go in and find a room on the first floor without saying anything to anybody.”
He climbed the staircase, tried a first door, which was closed, then a second, which opened to him. He found himself in a plain but comfortable chamber, furnished with a bed with clean sheets and a generous supply of blankets, a dressing-table, a commode, two or three chairs and a carpet. At the sight of this outfit he smiled with pleasure. They had even carried foresight as far as to place on the commode, in such a way as to attract the traveller’s attention, a flask of rum, a glass and a bowl of sugar. The liquor warmed his blood. At twenty-five danger is easily forgotten.
“I’m quite at home here, like a burglar,” he said pleasantly, quite disposed to take life at its new value. But the reflection made him start. Like a thief, indeed. Had he not been convicted of theft? The recollection of this shame spoiled his pleasure, and he got into bed hastily. The thick blankets communicated a comforting warmth to him, and his fatigue was so great that he went to sleep at once, without stopping to think that it was the first night he had passed away from Edith, and outside of Italy, since he had left his father’s house.
The next day he awakened too late for making the descent to Brieg. The monks, learning of his voyage on foot, kept him for a day, and regaled him with the best they had. He declined to take the stage-coach, though his pride prevented him from revealing his reasons. He was making a journey of rest, distraction, almost of forgetfulness, he said. In his Thebaid, lost at an altitude of two thousand yards, he exhibited the gaiety of a child, interrupted from time to time, though rather rarely, by sudden fits of sadness. He ate like an ogre, took walks round the approaches of the hospice to stretch his stiffened legs, petted the long-coated, shaggy dogs in their kennels, admired the effects of the sunlight on the glaciers and the variety of the little snow crystals, expressed more than once his desire to stay a longer time in the mountains, and went to bed early. No one would have guessed that he had just left the most beloved of mistresses, and was going back to France to give himself up as a prisoner. In the midst of the greatest sorrows there are unexpected oases like these, to keep our feeble nature from dwelling upon the idea of sorrow, even if there were not that brute instinct of self-preservation to keep us up despite ourselves.
Tuesday, at four in the morning, after having breakfasted on a little bread and cheese, which the father whose duty it was to look out for travellers had insisted upon his taking away from the table the evening before, he set out from the hospice. He saved half the food, and took it with him in case he should need it on his journey; for he was not sure that he should have more than the price of his ticket after the additional meal that he must take in the village of Simplon. No one was up yet in the hospice. He left as he had come, in secret. The door was wide open, as it had been on the night of his arrival. Outside he stepped into complete darkness, instead of the moonlight for whose friendly company he had hoped. He could feel snow even before he had descended the steps.
He must make haste, for the descent would be less easy if it snowed. In the road he turned to take a farewell look at the dark building in the shadow. He stepped fearlessly forth now toward the future, and with more strength. The peace of the mountain, the quiet of the monks, had soothed his heart without his being conscious of it. He was going forth deliberately to recapture that place in his home which the accident of his great passion had lost for him. The stroke of luck to which he owed his safety had at the same time restored him to himself. He was going back to normal life as boldly and romantically as one usually leaves it, and he savoured his sacrifice with an almost amorous warmth of appreciation.
The snow must have been falling for several hours, for it was already deep in the path. He went on in constant fear of losing his way along the precipices. The path led through two or three tunnels cut out of the rock a little beyond the summit of the pass. The obscurity of these tunnels was so intense that he was blinded as in the depths of some cavern. He held his cane forward in his right hand, his left arm, with the satchel, stretched out, and went along tapping. He plunged at each step into the puddles of water that dripped through the rocks, and could feel the rush of the outer air at the other end long before he got his sight again.
Such obstacles as these along the road only hardened his courage. Young people must have tests; they seek out love more from the eager desire of living than from voluptuous fancy. Maurice did not suffer from his losses, though he had lost everything, and was leaving his happiness behind him, reduced to the status of a beggar. He struggled bravely against the cold and snow, the night and fear, but the combat kept him warm.
Day spread round him gradually, but he profited little by it, for the white mist of falling snow-flakes flowed round him like the sea around an island. This route he travelled, so picturesque on clear days, with its view of the Bernese Alps, the Aletsch glacier, the magnificent and varied spurs of the Rhone valley, seemed to him like a road cut through hills of cotton-wool. Sometimes a pine tree, laden with hoar-frost, would loom up at the path’s edge, ten steps away from him, having passed which he would search for some other landmark and go on. Tediously and monotonously he came at last to Brieg. It was the end of the heroic period of his journey.
The day in the railway carriage was long and uncomfortable, in spite of the nearer and nearer approach to his native countryside. He left the train about six in the evening at Viviers, which is the station next to Chambéry. A foolish fear of being recognised and arrested when he should arrive at Chambéry suggested this plan to him. He set out for home on foot, therefore, from Viviers by the Aix road. It passed the Calvary of Lemenc, which rose above him at one point, and he stopped near it, thinking of his love.
“Edith,” he sighed.
It came over him how far these days had separated him from her already, and, as he still loved her, he grieved within himself for his cruelty to her. He moved nearer to the railing that protected the rock-hewn road along the hillside. The lights of Chambéry shone out, and he took his bearings.
His impulse was to go to his mother first, but he found the graveyard closed, and could not get in. From there by various back routes he reached his father’s house. A clock struck eight. He was chilled and hungry: where should he go if not home? With beating heart he pressed the bell. A new maid opened the door for him, and instead of entering freely, he had to ask admittance formally, like a stranger.
“Miss Roquevillard?” he asked, his voice sounding indistinctly in his own ears.
He was left waiting in the vestibule, and felt crushed, tempted to flee away, no matter where. What strange force had taken him by the shoulders and thrust him forward even to his father’s door?
In a moment Margaret appeared and threw herself into his arms.
“You, Maurice! Is it really you?”
He stiffened rigidly to keep back his tears, as she added softly:
“I have been expecting you since yesterday.”
She led him to the dining-room, and he gave himself over to her care, cast down and helpless. The table had not yet been cleared away.
“Is father well?” he asked at last, a little fearfully.
“He shut himself up in his study after dinner,” answered Margaret, “to work, while I was undressing little Julian. I’ll go and tell him.”
“No, Margaret, please don’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then—has he changed much?” he murmured, after a heavy silence.
“Yes.”
He was hungry, but he dared not eat the things which she went and got for him herself in the kitchen. She understood, and when she saw he did not notice, she hurried away to her father in his study.
“Father, he’s here!” she cried.
Mr. Roquevillard, bent over a brief, raised his head. abruptly, with an involuntary movement; but in a moment he had got possession of himself again.
“He’s been very late about coming back.”
“Won’t you see him, father?” she begged. “He’s so unhappy.”
Mr. Roquevillard reflected a moment.
“I’ll go to see him to-morrow, in the gaol,” he answered, with an effort, “to arrange about his defence. Not this evening.”
And as Margaret looked disappointed, he drew her to his breast.
“You attend to him,” he said. “If he’s tired, see that he gets some rest. To-morrow’s time enough for him to go and give himself up.”
“Father, forgive him. For mamma——”
“Some day, Margaret, I hope that he’ll deserve my forgiveness. Just now, so soon, I can’t forget the wrong he did to us in going away. I want him to understand this and realise it fully. He must, for the sake of our past and for his own future. But don’t cry, Margaret. I have not ceased to love him. I’m glad he’s come back.”
Later, quite a little while later, in the silence of the night, Mr. Roquevillard left his room, and crept with stealthy steps to Maurice’s door. His hand shading the flame of his candle, he listened for a moment to the light and regular breathing that he could scarcely hear. A thin smile lit up his forceful features that had been so ravaged by his sorrow.
“He’s here. That’s the essential thing. I’ll save him, and with him all our race——”