All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have prevented it all!
We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them. We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our real existence is, than poor little André Corbin, who has just broken his legs for us over again!
[Illustration]
And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power, latent in the sub-consciousness of man—unheard of, undreamed of as yet, but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the most easily amusable person in the world—interested in everything that interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about very common and earthly topics—her homes and refuges, the difficulties of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments—in all of which I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that occurred there—in all of which I became interested myself because it interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew, every detail of the life there—the name, appearance, and history of almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I never ceased to marvel.
One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she paid therein the flesh, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes. I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health, etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest—so healthy, so happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph byStrlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each other's arms.
* * * * *
Strange to relate, this happiness of ours—so deep, so acute, so transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection—was not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough. No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell ("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us both when together.[A]
[Footnote A:Note.—Several of these letters are in my possession.MADGE PLUNKET.]
Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish of either—we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries were ours—and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and elation as belong only to the morning of life—and such a love for each other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our seeming sleep—the glories of our common dream.
And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance and separation—a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or waking, was so short.
How different things might have been with us had we but known!
We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the first—boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife—and yet have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
Children might have been born to us! Sweet children,beaux comme le jour, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as their mother.
And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience, all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief, ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and thorough comprehension! Ah, yes … that hungry love, that woful pity, which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am (though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit of life, never, never, never!
Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence, except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and a Prince Charming were watching over them.
All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring to wish for more.
* * * * *
Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all our thoughts and energies in a new direction.
[Illustration]
Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so—a quaint, original, but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion, for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as familiar to me as "God save the Queen."
As I listened with rapt ears and closed eyes, wonderful scenes passed before my mental vision: the beautiful white-haired lady of my childish dreams, leading a smallfemalechild by the hand, and that child was myself; the pigeons and their tower, the stream and the water-mill; the white-haired young man with red heels to his shoes; a very fine lady, very tall, stout, and middle-aged, magnificently dressed in brocaded silk; a park with lawns and alleys and trees cut into trim formal shapes; a turreted castle—all kinds of charming scenes and people of another age and country.
"What on earth is that wonderful tune, Mary?" I exclaimed, when she had finished it.
"It's my favorite tune," she answered; "I seldom hum it for fear of wearing away its charm. I suppose that is why you have never heard it before. Isn't it lovely? I've been trying to lull you awake with it.
"My grandfather, the violinist, used to play it with variations of his own, and made it famous in his time; but it was never published, and it's now forgotten.
"It is called 'Le Chant du Triste Commensal,' and was composed by his grandmother, a beautiful French woman, who played the fiddle too; but not as a profession. He remembered her playing it when he was a child and she was quite an old lady, just as I rememberhisplaying it when I was a girl in Vienna, and he was a white-haired old man. She used to play holding her fiddle downward, on her knee, it seems; and always played in perfect tune, quite in the middle of the note, and with excellent taste and expression; it was her playing that decided his career. But she was like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' for this was the only thing she ever composed. She composed it under great grief and excitement, just after her husband had died from the bite of a wolf, and just before the birth of her twin-daughters—her only children—one of whom was my great-grandmother."
"And what was this wonderful old lady's name?"
"Gatienne Aubéry; she married a Breton squire called Budes, who was agentilhomme verriernear St. Prest, in Anjou—that is, he made glass—decanters, water-bottles, tumblers, and all that, I suppose—in spite of his nobility. It was not considered derogatory to do so; indeed, it was the only trade permitted to thenoblesse, and one had to be at least a squire to engage in it.
"She was a very notable woman,la belle Verrière, as she was called; and she managed the glass factory for many years after her husband's death, and made lots of money for her two daughters."
"How strange!" I exclaimed; "Gatienne Aubéry! Dame du Brail—Budes—the names are quite familiar to me. Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de Monhoudéard et de Verny le Moustier."
"Yes, that's it. How wonderful that you should know! One daughter, Jeanne, married my greatgrandfather, an officer in the Hungarian army; and Seraskier, the fiddler, was their only child. The other (so like her sister that only her mother could distinguish them) was called Anne, and married a Comte de Bois something."
"Boismorinel. Why, all those names are in my family too. My father used to make me paint their arms and quarterings when I was a child, on Sunday mornings, to keep me quiet. Perhaps we are related by blood, you and I."
"Oh, that would be too delightful!" said Mary. "I wonder how we could find out? Have you no family papers?"
I. "There were lots of them, in a horse-hair trunk, but I don't know where they are now. What good would family papers have been to me? Ibbetson took charge of them when I changed my name. I suppose his lawyers have got them."
She. "Happy thought; we will do without lawyers. Let us go round to your old house, and make Gogo paint the quarterings over again for us, and look over his shoulder."
Happy thought, indeed! We drank our coffee and went straight to my old house, with the wish (immediate father to the deed) that Gogo should be there, once more engaged in his long forgotten accomplishment of painting coats of arms.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and we found Gogo hard at work at a small table by an open window. The floor was covered with old deeds and parchments and family papers; and le beau Pasquier, at another table, was deep in his own pedigree, making notes on the margin—an occupation in which he delighted—and unconsciously humming as he did so. The sunny room was filled with the penetrating soft sound of his voice, as a conservatory is filled with the scent of its flowers.
By the strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think, have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with me—for what true democrat, however intolerant of such weakness in others, ever thinks lightly of his own personal claims to aristocratic descent, shadowy as these may be!
He was fond of such proverbs and aphorisms as "noblesse oblige," "bon sang ne sait mentir," "bon chien chasse de race," etc., and had even invented a little aphorism of his own, to comfort him when he was extra hard up, "bon gentilhomme n'a jamais honte de la misère." All of which sayings, to do him justice, he reserved for home consumption exclusively, and he would have been the first to laugh on hearing them in the mouth of any one else.
Of his one great gift, the treasure in his throat, he thought absolutely nothing at all.
"Ce que c'est que de nous!"
Gogo was coloring the quarterings of the Pasquier family—la maison de Pasquier, as it was called—in a printed book (Armorial Général du Maine et de l'Anjou), according to the instructions that were given underneath. He used one of Madame Liard's three-sou boxes, and the tints left much to be desired.
We looked over his shoulder and read the picturesque old jargon, which sounds even prettier and more comforting and more idiotic in French than in English. It ran thus—
"Pasquier (branche des Seigneurs de la Marière et du Hirel), party de 4 pièces et coupé de 2.
"Au premier, de Hérault, qui est de écartelé de gueules et d'argent.
"Au deux, de Budes, qui est d'or au pin de sinople.
"Au trois, d'Aubéry—qui est d'azur à trois croissants d'argent.
"Au quatre, de Busson qui est d'argent au lyon de sable armé couronné et lampassé d'or," And so on, through the other quarterings: Bigot, Epinay, Malestroit, Mathefelon. And finally, "Sur le tout, de Pasquier qui est d'or à trois lyons d'azur, au franc quartier écartelé des royames de Castille et de Léon."
Presently my mother came home from the English chapel in the Rue Marboeuf, where she had been with Sarah, the English maid. Lunch was announced, and we were left alone with the family papers. With infinite precautions, for fear of blurring the dream, we were able to find what we wanted to find—namely, that we were the great-great-grandchildren and only possible living descendants of Gatienne, the fair glassmaker and composer of "Le Chant du Triste Commensal."
Thus runs the descent—
Jean Aubéry, Seigneur du Brail, married Anne Busson. His daughter,Gatienne Aubéry, Dame du Brail, married Mathurin Budes, Seigneur deVerny le Moustier et de Monhoudéard.
—————————————^—————————————/ \
Anne Budes, Dame de Jeanne Budes, Dame duVerny le Moustier, married Brail et de Monhoudéard,Guy Hérault, Comte married Ulricde Boismorinel. Seraskier.
Jeanne François Hérault de Otto Seraskier, violinist,Boismorinel married married Teresa Pulci.François Pasquier de laMarière.
Jean Pasquier de la Marière Johann Seraskier, M.D.,married Catherine married Laura Desmond.Ibbetson-Biddulph.
Pierre Pasquier de la Marière Mary Seraskier, Duchess of(aliasPeter Ibbetson, Towers.convict).
We walked back to "Magna sed Apta" in great joy, and there we celebrated our newly-discovered kinship by a simple repast, out ofmyrépertoire this time. It consisted of oysters from Rules's in Maiden Lane, when they were sixpence a dozen, and bottled stout (l'eau m'en vient à la bouche); and we spent the rest of the hours allotted to us that night in evolving such visions as we could from the old tune "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," with varying success; she humming it, accompanying herself on the piano in her masterly, musician-like way, with one hand, and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.
By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared—"la belle verrière de Verny le Moustier"—she was more distinct than the others; no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and also because her individuality was so strongly marked.
And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Hérault, Comtesse de Boismorinel (néeBudes), while the small child Jeanne de Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Marière) listened with dreamy rapture.
And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized 'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a small child.
Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history, and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in existence.
The turreted castle of my childish dreams, which, with the adjacent glass-factory, was still called Verny le Moustier, was one of these. She found it in the possession of a certain Count Hector du Chamorin, whose grandfather had purchased it at the beginning of the century.
He had built an entirely new plant, and made it one of the first glass-factories in Western France. But the old turretedcorps de logisstill remained, and his foreman lived there with his wife and family. Thepigeonnierhad been pulled down to make room for a shed with a steam-engine, and the whole aspect of the place was revolutionized; but the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows and alders, many of them dead.
It was called "Le Brail," and had given its name to my great-great-grandmother's property, whence it had issued thirty miles away (and many hundred years ago); but the old Château du Brail, the manor of the Aubérys, had become a farm-house.
The Château de la Marière, in its walled park, and with its beautiful, tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from Angers to Le Mans.
The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of Hérault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.
[Illustration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]
Most of such Budes, Bussons, Héraults, Aubérys, and Pasquiers as were still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely have cared to claim kinship with such as I.
But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon by thenoblesseof the court and Versailles, as were all the provincial nobility, they held their own well in their own country; feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling and making love and intermarrying; and blowing glass, and growing richer and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their glass into space, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.
Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.
It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress when she was a bride.
Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds, farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne,la belle Verrière(also nicknamedla reine de Hongrie, it seems) still lingered in the county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in everybody's mouth.
She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own—a typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite musician to boot.
Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our race—Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!
[Illustration]
During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to participate in every incident of it.
We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours before; now the old château as it was a hundred years ago; dim and indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray, misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy but silent shadows moving about—silent, because at first we could not hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding Gatienne, was faintly audible.
Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the Abbaye de Verny le Moustier—all this more than a hundred years ago—the pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint shadows on the shadowy garden-path.
Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot, but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means. Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very short time—that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
I may as well state here that a few months later she received from Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin that had once belonged tola belle Verrière, and which Count Hector had found in the possession of an old farmer—the great-grandson of Gatienne's coachman—and had purchased, that he might present it as a New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
* * * * *
To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we could our own immediate progenitors close by—as Gogo and Mimsey, as Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne de Boismorinel (who married François Pasquier de la Marière). It was her father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were called out of nothingness into life.
Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined that I had composed them myself—little impromptus of my own. And lo, again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical, was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain where all the cobwebs are.
[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
And these cobwebs?
Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors, windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions, village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal" to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long dead and buried and forgotten!
Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in self-research many will succeed in reaching them—perhaps even more easily and completely than we have done.
It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former obtuseness, so distinct are they.
Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
But let him becomeexpectantof certain other notes; for instance, of the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim, latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience of this life.
We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again—a strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
A questionable privilege, perhaps.
But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the telegrams of "our special correspondents" in theTimes, and taste her nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.
Thus we tookla belle Verrièreby turns, and she saw and heard things she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."
And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us, and as many great-great-grandfathers.
Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at their backs.
Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the blood of his foe?
Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world well lost?
* * * * *
That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of discretion which the reader will appreciate.
But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear), and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind, is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's imagination—merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in a dream—even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief, irresponsible existence at once!
* * * * *
Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose; that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out of—nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into—nirvana, till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers; saying, as he does so—
"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"
And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and retire—"Hélas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! … Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness, when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity. May it never quite go out—it need not! May you ever be able to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verrière de Verny le Moustier) may smell sweet and blossom in the dust—a memory pleasant to recall—to this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as filial love and ancestral pride can make them….
And oh! lookingbackward(aswedid), be tender to the failings of your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their long buried hearts should one day be revealed toyou! Their faults are really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood, so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will soon, thanks to
"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"
* * * * *
Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours—worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
* * * * *
And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense—mere common-sense—it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education. I am but a poor scribe!
Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been devoted to the following out of this slender clew—with what surprising results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well—the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.—which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier—and the more difficult to leave.
What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have seen—actually seen—de nos propres yeux vu—Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive, unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory for ages and ages yet to come!
It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to foretell the past and remember the future all in one!
To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul—slim and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him! Europe at his feet—the throne—Waterloo-St. Helena—the Iron English Duke—the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!
"O corse à cheveux plats, que la France était belle Au soleil de Messidor!"
And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday! we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) … and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight—silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths….
And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution, mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described, and making us smile through our tears!
Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an eye-witness to contradict you!
And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of Louis XIV!
What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not attended—where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen—while we sat by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal command! and laughed aloud under his very nose—the shallow, silly, pompous little snob—and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a nineteenth-century regalia!
Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet, river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace; tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and gibbet-close, and what not all!
And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious, over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Molière in one of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven) Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fénélon, and the good Lafontaine—those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French childhood!
And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigneand Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat atRonsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed withFrançois Villon—in what enchanted slums! …
François Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets of to-day—ye would-be translators and imitators of that never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortalBallade des Dames du Temps jadis!
And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them too, or some of them—those fair ladieshehad never seen, and who had already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year,les neiges d'antan!Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very learned Héloïse, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abélard (a more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,
"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecté en ung Sac en Seine…."
Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female loveliness has gone up, even in France! Evenla très sage Héloïswas scarcely worth such a sacrifice as—but there! Possess your soul in patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time, with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any historical records yet!
Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.
Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the kindness of Governor——) I have drawn over again from memory the sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt their execution leaves much to be desired.
Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no less than two months' unremitting labor.
As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals. For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached—namely, the sum of the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had died without issue and were mere collaterals.
[Illustration: "THE MAMMOTH."]
We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.
The Mammoth!
We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and eventhroughhim where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts with awe—blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph—merely thetype, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at all, every one of whom(exceptis excipiendis)was necessarily an ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.
There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye—almost perceive a suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.
Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I! With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have sketched his likeness—with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the present day.)
Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we have been so fortunate as to discover.
* * * * *
And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story of my bereavement—a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead, can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt), but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general diner-out—blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and the world.
During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw her as she chose to appear in our dream.
Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were always twenty-eight or thereabouts—at our very best. We had truly discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the buoyancy of children and their freshness.
Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less sensible of its flight.
There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only too often, and our minds were as one.
She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been summoned away to my jail.
And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch, but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows, and all the wonders it contained.
Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there, and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for its young.
With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!
[Illustration: "WAITING"]
Ah me! the recollection!
* * * * *
At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was fulfilled.
I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there was no door any longer—nothing but a blank wall….
I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison life again.
This happened several times during the night, and when the morning dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came (attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man, almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.
Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and fought like the maniac I was.
When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not,I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.
I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I, who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had never even dreamed of.
I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had beencommon talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess ofTowers, had met her death at the ——— station of the MetropolitanRailway.
A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals. She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the engine came by.
She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.
So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.
* * * * *
I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in large quantities—and then, thewaking!
I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had one fixed idea—that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick or a button or a piece of common packthread.
I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive….
* * * * *
I had lost all wish to dream.
At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil—only once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussée de la Muette, and by the fortifications.
It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic was my impatience.
When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne—a kind of Temple Bar.
It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de laPompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gayrepas de noceswas being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the green-grocer, with Félicité Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers' house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo were of the party—the latter, indeed, beingpremier garçon d'honneur, on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male guests before the ball began.
In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to be hired—Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead past, so life-like and real and pathetic—it "split me the heart" to see them!
A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux. They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered before, how I came to see it all from the outside—from another point of view than Gogo's.
Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said,"Bonne chance!"and went trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning—
"Il était un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigué…."
I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to the last verse—
"Si cette histoire vous embête, Nous allons la recommencer,"
I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and look about me.
I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were playing rounders—la balle au camp—from which I concluded it was a Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on (which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a whole one.
I knew them all, and the twopions, or ushers, M. Lartigue andle petit Cazal; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or interesting in the least.
Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically killing time by a game ofbouchon—knocking sous off a cork with other sous—great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the long-dead players.
Close by was a small wooden shed, orbaraque, prettily painted and glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mère Manette and Grandmère Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about business, and would not give credit for a centime—not even to English boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world. How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They sold many things: nougat,pain d'èpices, mirlitons, hoops, drums, noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors, neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old and worn and gray-my face badly shaven—my hair almost white. I had never been old in a dream before.
I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus (which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne—my heart was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness, the scaffoldings barely removed—some of them still lying in the dry ditch between—and smiled to think how these little brick and granite walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later (twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin my legs were! and how miserably clad—in old prison trousers, greasy, stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed—and what boots!
[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a headerà la hussardeoff those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see themareonce more, very badly.
This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it, and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth trying, anyhow.
I got up and dragged myself to themare. It was deserted but for one solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat motionless on the bench by the old willow.
I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged, with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent eyes were following me.
Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
* * * * *
I ran to her—I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap, and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me as one soothes a child.
After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray, and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her well—she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was awed—and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been mended—old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while with all her might in silence.
At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for, and I said so.
She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old circuit is broken, and can't be restored—not yet!"
We tried again hard; but it was useless.
She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes from grave to gay—all that made everything she said so suggestive of all she wanted to say besides.
"Gogo, I knew you would come. Iwishedit! How dreadfully you have suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not be any more; we are going to change all that.
"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back, even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
"Nobody has ever come back before.
"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
"I have come a long way—such a long way—to have anabboccamentowith you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I could, I couldn't makeyouunderstand. But you will know some day, and there is no hurry whatever.
"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already;yourshare of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think ofthatagain—you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and seemed to settle herself for a good long talk—anabboccamento!
* * * * *
Of all she said I can only give a few fragments—whatever I can recall and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words—herwords—and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty, and despair into patience and hope and high elation."