Delphi complete works of.., p.331
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 331
“That is just what I want,” said Richard, blushing at his involuntary confession. Mérivet was alarmed, and said, with a vehement gesture which would have made the whole Boulevard des Italiens turn to look after him, but which passed unnoticed amid so many similar gestures on the noisy sidewalks of La Canebière:
“Why, you poor fellow, have you got no farther than that? To conceal your return, to try to surprise your wife. And I was fool enough to believe you were cured at last! Look you it would serve you right if, when you arrive—” But he had not the heart to finish in face of Richard’s emotion. “Well, a pleasant journey to you, foolish boy; and as you will see them before I do, embrace your mother and your wife for their old friend.”
It was not jealousy alone that impelled Richard to return home twenty-four hours earlier than he was expected. He was eager to press Lydie to his heart, but dared not confess it to Mérivet, and admit that, after he had endured separation from his wife for more than a year, to do without her another day seemed more than he could bear.
He arrived at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges in the morning, and an antique omnibus — not a regular conveyance — with a driver in a blue blouse and a thin-flanked, limping steed, undertook to transport him and his luggage to Uzelles. They went very slowly, at an honest marengote pace; and as the sun rose higher and the leather cushions of the old vehicle became heated and gave forth a sickening odor of food and tobacco, Richard took a seat on the box, beside the driver, whom a glass of white wine, taken at the corner of the Château-Fraye road, had made very talkative. He was a former trumpeter in the 3d Chasseurs, in the days when the Duc d’Alcantara commanded the regiment. A fine old fellow, the duke, who used to beat up the women wherever he went. Not to be wondered at that he had dried up the sap. It seemed that his boy, little Charles Six, was having all the fun he could, too. He went off, year before last, with the wife of a farmer thereabout; at the last fête at the Hermitage nothing else was talked about. Perhaps Monsieur le Voyageur might have heard about it.
Richard shook his head and did not speak again during the journey. After several fruitless attempts at conversation, the driver, hearing him humming between his teeth, concluded that his passenger liked music, and taking from under his box a battered bugle, covered with verdigris, he began to play all the bugle-calls of the 3d. Richard soon tired of all that blare of brass, which tortured his ears; moreover, as he approached his own home, the people whom he met on the cliff road recognized him and were surprised at his equipage. So he alighted after passing Draveil and plunged into the woods, while the omnibus went its way in the sunlight to the strains of martial music. In reality the driver’s chatter had aroused his evil impulse to arrive unexpectedly, at an unusual hour and by an unusual road.
“What is she doing? Is she thinking of me?”
That was the refrain to which he walked swiftly and noiselessly over the springy moss of a narrow path leading to the Chêne-Prieur. The noonday Angelus was ringing at the Little Parish Church, whose bell he recognized in the quivering heat of the plain. He was listening to the familiar note when he heard a crackling of branches near at hand, as if some one were hurriedly running away; at the same time there was a sound as of a tool thrown to the ground, and he saw a spade lying on one of the great anthills where eggs were gathered to feed the pheasants. Some marauder whom he had disturbed.
Thinking no more about it, he walked on, involuntarily quickening his pace as he approached his goal, and soon found himself at the rond-point of the Chêne-Prieur from which several paths radiated, and at the end of one of them he saw the gate of his own park. From where he stood, that gate, usually closed, seemed to him to be open, and he was surprised to see people passing to and fro. Men came running from the park and turned to the right into the forest, where he could distinguish a knot of people like a dark, moving spot in the light clearing. He walked in that direction, greatly puzzled by the ghost-like silence of the crowd. The whole countryside was there, Soisy, Draveil, keepers, gendarmes. What in heaven’s name was going on? Something lugubrious surely, for, just as he reached the spot, Foucart’s heavy van came jolting along in the ruts made by the charcoal carts.
“Here is Monsieur Richard,” some one said. The crowd at once made way respectfully, disclosing Jean Delcrous the magistrate, his clerk, and the physicians from Soisy and Draveil standing in a circle apart and talking in low tones with M. Alexandre, beside a lifeless form stretched out on the grass, of which only the legs in their long gaiters could be seen, the rest of the body being sheltered and hidden by a large yellow parasol.
“Ah! my dear Fénigan, this is horrible!” murmured the magistrate in his cold, official tone, as he gave his hand to Richard without the slightest indication of surprise at seeing him there. The other persons in the group greeted him with a terror-stricken air, but no one enlightened him as to the accident.
“Who is it?” he asked, as a suspicion suddenly flashed through his mind, driving the color from his lips and making his eyes gleam. Delcrous stared at him in amazement.
“What! you don’t know? — Why, it’s the Prince d’Olmütz; he has been dead, as we suppose, two or three days, and we have just been putting him back on the spot where Alexandre found him this morning, and in the same position.”
At the magistrate’s request, the clerk read to Richard in an undertone the narrative that he was then writing at the dictation of the former steward.
The prince left Grosbourg Friday evening after his dinner, and was not seen again until this Monday morning; but no one at the Château was troubled, especially the first two days, as he was accustomed to indulge in freaks of that sort. They were not alarmed until Sunday evening when the prince failed to appear at dinner, it being the nineteenth anniversary of his birth, to which the whole neighborhood had been invited. However, in order not to frighten the duchess, the salon was kept lighted very late and the young people danced a minuet they had learned for the occasion. Early on Monday morning, the general, who had not closed his eyes during the night, sent for M. Alexandre and informed him of his secret anxiety. M. Alexandre smiled at his first words.
“Why, my general, I saw M. Charlexis yesterday, I saw him day before yesterday.”
“Where in God’s name?” demanded the father joyfully.
“In the forest and always in the same place. In a corner of little Sénart near the Chêne-Prieur, where for a month past the prince has lain among the ferns every afternoon, under a big umbrella, waiting for — whom? — I have never had the curiosity to ask, but if my general wishes to know—”
“Not in the least. I am surprised simply that, as the field of his manoeuvres is so near, he doesn’t return to Grosbourg to ease his mother’s mind. If you see him to-day, I authorize you to intrude upon the secrecy of the assignation, and make that suggestion to him from me.”
M. Alexandre promised to do so, and as he was returning to Uzelles, it occurred to him, instead of waiting until afternoon, to go around through the forest, skirting the parks. When he reached the Fénigans’ gate an inexplicable impulse moved him to stoop and look away under the trees in the direction of the spot where the prince was usually to be found. Strangely enough, although it was barely eight o’clock in the morning, the umbrella was there, wide open, in the dew-laden grass, which is very high and thick in that neighborhood. The lover himself was there, asleep doubtless, for M. Alexandre called twice but obtained no reply. Thereupon—”
At that point the deposition stopped, and the clerk turned to Alexandre, who continued: “Thereupon, messieurs, I lifted the umbrella and saw something so frightful that I ran away, shrieking. Monsieur Richard’s gardeners heard me, people came from all sides, but until the authorities arrived from Corbeil, I allowed no one to approach the body or to touch or disturb anything.”
There was a murmur of approbation.
“Was he certainly dead?” queried Fénigan, a prey to an indescribable emotion in which there was even more relief than terror. The magistrate and his clerk exchanged a death-like smile.
“Not the shadow of a doubt — look for yourself,” said Delcrous, pointing to what had been the Prince d’Olmütz, the captor of hearts, the irresistible young man with the cavata, transformed into that hideous unnamable mass, a skull imperfectly cleaned, already skeletonized in spots, with fragments of bone picked clean, as white and highly polished as ivory, and jagged bits of flesh like bloody lace-work. In the ghastly cavities of the eyes and mouth, in the nostrils and the ears, and around the jaw, twisted by a last effort of the muscles, ants and maggots and worms swarmed in countless numbers. And that was what so many women had loved and caressed, what had made men mad with jealousy!
The curious crowd, which, in defiance of the handful of gendarmes, had followed Richard toward the body, recoiled in horror and dismay. Those who had seen told the others, with compassionate exclamations, homely images: “the head has holes in it like a lantern.” And as always, even in presence of the most horrible dramas, there was some stifled laughter. Suddenly silence was restored, the emotional silence of crowds, enveloped in this instance by the buzzing of the gnats in the light, by the rustling and swarming of all the vermin in the grass. At a sign from the magistrate, the dead-wagon came forward, brushing aside the low branches, and two gamekeepers laid the body upon it, one of them having the delicacy to cover the head with a handkerchief. In taking only those few steps the bearers’ blue jackets were all soiled with vermin and blood.
“Where are you going to have him taken?” Richard Fénigan asked Delcrous under his breath, forcing his voice to assume a sorrowful tone.
“To Grosbourg, by the towpath, to avoid giving the parents too severe a shock. Alexandre has undertaken to tell them. The d’Alcantaras have a family tomb on the estate, and the burial will take place at once. As for a judicial autopsy, I fancy that the two Æsculapiuses walking behind us are hardly capable of performing it alone. That mangled head disconcerts them. They incline to believe in a sudden death from congestion, a frequent occurrence in the family, which, they assume, came upon the young prince under his parasol. I am of their opinion; otherwise we must suppose a murder and the removal of the body to its usual posture under its usual shelter, which would be a refinement of ferocity; and for what object?”
As they conversed, they followed the wagon with its sad burden escorted by M. Alexandre and the gendarmes, along the narrow stony road lined with bramble-bushes, which skirts the Fénigan park. The crowd slowly divided into gossiping groups and was scattering among the paths through the woods, when Richard’s voice, suddenly rising above the sound of footsteps and the creaking of the wheels, shouted fiercely to the wagoner, who had taken his horse by the rein as if to turn and enter the park:
“Here! where are you going?”
Upon the man’s reply that by passing through his estate they would gain a good half hour, — that M. Alexandre had said so, Richard uttered an angry exclamation:
“Not on your life! I absolutely forbid it. Why does that vile blackguard interfere?” Delcrous started at the nervous excitement of the voice and gesture, which at once suggested to him a multitude of thoughts, almost suspicions; but he instantly discarded them on the simple reflection: “Oh! yes, his wife’s former lover; but it’s a long while since that came to an end, and the husband and wife were reconciled. And then, examining magistrates see assassins everywhere. As this is the first affair I have had to deal with, let us see if I cannot avoid that absurdity.” They arrived at the gate; he turned to give some instructions to his clerk, saluted the physicians, and, passing his arm familiarly through Richard’s, led him into the park: “Now, let us go and find your ladies. I promised them this morning that I would come and tell them what I could as soon as my task was done. — They told me, by the way, that they didn’t expect you until to-morrow.”
“True, but the idea of arriving a day earlier, and coming through the woods to surprise them, amused me. But I have had the surprise myself, and a most horrible one.”
His tone was sincere, as was the distressed expression upon that honest, healthy face, burned by the sirocco. The magistrate was angry with himself for the suspicion that had grazed him, and he was almost on the point of accusing himself aloud and apologizing, in the state of effusive delight in which he then was. “Certainly, my dear Richard, it is a terrible accident, but, — must I admit it? — I am so happy in another direction that it is very hard for me to — You have known of my plans concerning your cousin Élise? She has just sent a favorable reply, it seems, to Madame your mother, who could only say a few words to me just now in the confusion that reigned in the house. Ah! there are the ladies.”
Mme. Fénigan and Lydie had just appeared at the end of the path. It happened that they were both in the garden gathering roses early that morning, when the gardener’s wife came to them in a state of intense excitement to tell them of Alexandre’s ghastly find on the grass. The little scissors in Lydie’s hand had pursued their task — Mme. Fénigan noticed it particularly — without the slightest interruption, without even a quiver. She simply reflected, half aloud: “How fortunate that Richard has not returned!” following the thought with another, which she did not express: “After his threats to kill the prince, he would inevitably have been accused — I myself might have believed—” That idea haunted her; and when Delcrous, summoned from Corbeil, stopped for a moment at the Château, and she heard him discussing with his clerk the probability of its being an accident, she was on the point of congratulating herself aloud on her husband’s absence; but a mysterious instinct withheld her. Under these circumstances, the young wife’s alarm can be imagined when, about noon, she saw Richard’s trunk and valise in front of the Pavilion.
“They came by omnibus from Villeneuve,” said the gardener’s wife. “Monsieur Richard took the cross-road through the forest.”
Lydie felt as if she were dying as the conviction swept over her: “It was he who killed Charley.” She imagined the whole sudden, terrible drama. Her husband arriving a day earlier, in order to surprise her; the prince lying in wait near the gate; the meeting of the two men; a fit of rage and the murder. Certain details remained inexplicable; but that fact did not deter her, engrossed as she was by terror and admiration; for she admired him for having dared to do it, — that timid, feeble creature, that man-child whom she believed to be capable of naught but tears and lamentations. How passionately in love he must be, and how jealous! And amid her agony she was conscious of a wave of affection, of gratitude, a fever of blissful love, which increased in intensity when Richard appeared at a corner of the path, bronzed by the African sun, thinner than of yore, his eyes gleaming with joy, and in his whole being a something manly and determined, which she did not recognize.
Leaning on Lydie’s arm, and retarding her usual rapid gait, the mother cried out to her son from afar, throwing the words before her in her impatience: “What an idea, not to let us know! We were really very much frightened when we saw your traps, and nobody with them, — especially after this horrible story.”
“True, my poor darlings, I chose my day very badly.”
He interrupted himself to throw his arms around his mother’s neck, and in the same instant to press Lydie to his heart, being obliged to look for her face under a great pink hood. He felt that she was cold and trembling, and remarked upon it aloud. She did not reply, and Mme. Fénigan, realizing that they wished to be alone, walked ahead with Delcrous.
Richard, drunk with joy, hugged his wife’s arm as the poor man hugs his bread, as the drowning man clings to his plank; he stopped at every step to look at her, to question the lowest depths of her eyes. “Why do you tremble so? why are your hands and lips cold? My unexpected return may well have startled you, but that is all over now. Isn’t it rather the horror, the shock of this death?”
“Oh! no,” she replied, in a tone of such sincerity that it could not be mistaken.
But he insisted: “Come, you must tell me; I can listen to anything now.”
“He has been dead to me a long while, as you know. No, Richard, it isn’t that.”
“What is it, then? Aren’t you happy to see me? And yet your letters have been so affectionate!”
“I am more affectionate than they, my Richard, and very happy to be with you. Oh! very, very, — I swear.”
Shuddering more and more, she pressed close to him, with a concentration of her whole being, her lips mute, but trembling with a revelation or a question she dared not utter. And Richard formed all sorts of conjectures while talking of the indifferent things which are the first bond between hearts that have long been separated. At times his eyes flashed with a stormy light, little in keeping with the commonplace character of their conversation. Sinister suspicions, which he tried in vain to banish, haunted him as well, and ere long he was watching his wife with the horrified, fearful expression with which her eyes sought his.
Delcrous, the magistrate, walking in front with Mme. Fénigan, was delirious with joy on learning that Élise was ready to consent. He fancied himself on the eve of being married, thought about giving away his cats and his parrot, the whole of his bachelor’s family, and consulted Richard’s mother as to his future abode and the choice of witnesses. “Except for the distressing occurrence of this morning, I might have asked my illustrious friend, the Duc d’Alcantara.”
Mme. Fénigan’s contracted eyebrows warned him not to continue.
“You forget, Monsieur, that between Grosbourg and Uzelles there can be nothing in common. God knows that I wish them no ill after the blow that has come upon them, but we have been so unhappy through those people.”
“Forgive my awkwardness, Madame,” said Delcrous, with great earnestness; “it is due to my overflowing happiness.”
The stern eyebrows remained wrinkled. That word, “happiness,” seemed to them untimely, in such close proximity to that other mother across the river, whose son they were bringing home to her on the unwieldy dead-wagon. Luckily, their conversation was interrupted by the announcement that the examining magistrate was wanted at Grosbourg. Alexandre had come in the tilbury to fetch him, and was waiting on the road. Lydie’s emotion increased visibly at that news; and while the magistrate was making his excuses to his hosts, Richard wondered if she were not going to faint in his arms.
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