Still unraveling the tangled thread of this skein of hallucinatory tales, this is what had happened between the departure of the so-called Comte for Brest and the discovery of his cadaver in Kawchmôr:
The director of the English college, confounded by the proofs that the revelatory letters brought, had confessed everything, or at least that of which he could not be unaware—that Mademoiselle Anne-Herminie-Luce de Saint-Ylan, the Comtesse’s foster-sister, was, in fact, really the fruit of a sin committed by a Hugon de la Goëlwec, his own brother, with the wife of a simple gamekeeper. And that was the reason for the marriage, contracted subsequently by the poor squire of Saint-Ylan—for money, it cannot be denied—with the gamekeeper’s widow, who had murdered him. Certainly, in the formalities that had to be arranged in order that the squire’s adoption of the child could take place, there had been irregularities—frauds, even—but the priest had absolutely refused to confess anything more
Furious then, and beside himself, according to the storytellers, the Comte had returned secretly to the manor, had terrorized the Comtesse, throwing the letters in her face and boasting of having forced the priest into a full confession. The Comtesse, losing her head, had renounced the further continuation of the lie; and, in the vein of confession—the Comte having had his suspicions in that regard anyway—had revealed the worst of her secrets regarding the birth of their son, who was not the Comte’s.
On which the Comte, intending to kill her, had taken up a weapon and attacked his wife, who ran away—but the son, then aged eleven, had arrived. He admired his charming and tender mother, with whom he still lived, having been brought up in the house. On the other hand, he had no great attachment to his father, the Comte being bad-tempered and almost always absent. Acting on a perfectly natural impulse, his heart riving his arm, the child had leapt to the aid of his beloved mother, against the armed enemy threatening her, and had tried to take the weapon off him. An atrocious and brief struggle had begun, in front of the mother, who had almost fallen into a swoon.
The Comte had retreated, without being aware of it, toward a low window, and had stumbled, his heels having tripped on the sill. The backward fall had been so sudden, and the disappearance of the Comte into the void so fantastic, that the Comtesse and her son had not even had time to utter a scream.
When the poor woman, fallen into complete unconsciousness after the catastrophe, came round, the son was kneeling beside his mother’s bed. Without summoning anyone, he had carried her to the bed himself, loosened her clothing and bathed her with a damp cloth; then, seeing that she was breathing and that her heart was beating—almost imperceptibly, but manifesting life—he had knelt down to pray beside the woman he called his “saint.”
The Comte, having fallen in the dark into the fracas of the rising tide through that long narrow window, like a loophole open over Kawchmôr, must have made a formidable leap toward the water, plunging into the mud even so, to be tossed about there, unable to extract himself because of the violent eddies, to be drawn out to sea by the ebb-tide and then brought back—a few tides later, assuredly—by a new flow. For what the narrators had forgotten to mention was that the body had been found in the state of a shipwreck-victim who had spent quite a long time in the water.
That would have been sufficient to render less acceptable the legend of the return after a week’s absence. Reasonable mariners, having seen the cadaver, would not have thought for a minute that he had been tossed by the waves for only twelve hours—but the tellers of these tales were not reasonable mariners, nor, especially, men with empty stomachs. They were Bretons, with an imagination ever in love with epics, legends and fairy tales. They were of that race which once drank, from the springs of chivalric romance, the heady wine of the most beautiful chimerical adventures, and who drink today, with the same crazed avidity, the inferior wine of ballads and even the coarse befuddling wine of romans feuilletons. Doubtless the inventors of all those tall tales concerning the proprietors of the manor of Kairnheûz have heads thickened by that, not to mention their bowls of cider and even eau-de-vie.
The research being completed, the few nuggets of certain truth that it is necessary to retain from this medley of confusion are, firstly, that which concerns Mademoiselle de Saint-Ylan, secondly the aversion of the son for his father, and, very probably, the final drama whose last scene was the tragic death of the Comte.
What it would have been interesting to reconstitute, if one had the necessary documents, is the long romance from which that frightful and possible last scene of the final drama emerged. Possible, certainly, for the son was aware, in spite of still being a child, of his mother’s martyrdom with respect to the Comte. Not in detail, of course, the Comtesse having been discreet regarding her suffering, especially in front of her son; but he would have to have been devoid of affection, instead of steeped in it, not to have penetrated, in spite of himself and in spite of her, the secret of the tears in which the poor and plaintive creature’s youth faded away. And from that came his aversion, almost hatred—even though he did not admit it to himself—for his father, that victim’s torturer.
The first years of the union had been happy, though. Both rich, handsome and young, the spouses had everything that could be desired, and their honeymoon had been almost as insolent as a triumphant sun—but it had been quickly and permanently eclipsed behind frightful clouds, only swept away momentarily by the fortunate breeze of the initial tenderness.
The Comte had two vices, frequent in men of his class, especially in the provinces, where those vices are transmitted by a long heredity: he was a drunkard and a gambler. He had quickly returned to those two emetics of gentlemanliness, in which all he had of pride and dignity was drowned and burned at the same time in drink and the candles of green baize tablecloths.
In a few years, the two fortunes had melted away and been swallowed up, even that of the Comtesse, who was initially too weak with respect to a man she adored and of whose base deceits she was unaware. For the Comte, once ruined, became one those unscrupulous knights of industry whom the aristocracy of the 18th, and even previous centuries furnished in abundance, capable of anything in order to acquire what as necessary to “take the bank.” Thus, going from one moral collapse to another, he had come to demand, in scenes of violence the money of which he had need, and which he extracted from the Comtesse by force, from the little that she had been able to save from her inheritance, finally put aside.
There was, therefore, in the present-day legends of the accursed manor, some truth at least regarding the attempts at extortion made upon the Comtesse by her husband, with regard to the old story of the family of which Mademoiselle de Saint-Ylan had once been the fruit. That one of these scenes had occurred, therefore, in which blackmail had degenerated into straightforward, even physical, threats, was by no means astonishing—nor that the son, having chanced to witness it, might have intervened, in a brave impulse, to defend his threatened mother. Certain information is lacking to establish the exactitude of that version, but one can, in all justice, consider it plausible.
It is also necessary to admit the hypothesis, doubtless hazardous, of an agreement after the fact between the mother and the son, she so weak and gentle and he so young, scarcely out of childhood, to keep the terrible secret—not only never to betray it, but to invent the lie with which, according to this hypothesis, they had masked the truth. For the version confessed by the mother and confirmed by the son, in the course of the enquiry required by the circumstances, had been this: a sharp difference of opinion had arisen between the two spouses and had rapidly turned into an argument on the part of the Comte, who was drunk. When the son ran to help his mother, who had called out to him, the father had tried to flee, doubtless ashamed, and in a sort of alcoholic fit, had leapt out of the window.
That version had been believed, without the examining magistrate even trying to raise an objection. The exemplary life of the Comtesse, her character of Christian resignation, the age of the son and, o
n the other hand, the well-known detestable “machinations”—as the enquiry put it—of the Comte, a drunkard and gambler, having three-quarters ruined his wife after squandering his own wealth, had all concurred in rendering the family version plausible and incontestable. No one among the honest folk, and even the others, of their society had dreamed of casting the slightest shadow of suspicion upon the two, not actors but victims of the drama.
It had required the imagination of petty individuals, gossips, storytellers, scandal-mongers and unwitting slanderers—and that the imagination in question be Breton and overheated by strong cider, whipped up by the alcohol of apples and congested by the remembrance of old ballads and the reading of current romans feuilletons—for the story, already so tragic and somber, to become part of the black imbroglio of adventures that was called, on late evenings between puff on pipes, “the horrors of Kairnheûz.”
It nevertheless remained the case that the proprietors of the manor, living in the “terrible heap of stones” amid the horrors of the surrounding woods, the heath and Kawchmôr, and especially the memories of the catastrophe, the image of which had to haunt them, could scarcely maintain a joyful and smiling attitude. One would have been surprised, almost shocked, to encounter such an attitude, so little in harmony with the location, the environment, the very name of the place, and their own history. One would have reproached them for it, instinctively, if such a sinister past had not weighed upon their present.
It seemed that it did weight upon them, and heavily. The manor had residents worthy of it, its ruins mirrored in the yellow sheen of the marshes of Kawchmôr, its two woodlands mingling heir darkness, its mysterious health that walled the steel bar of the sea, its massive tower, its bleak façades with the half-open eyes and its abandoned grounds invaded by wild plants. Those residents, in addition to the Comtesse, were an old gardener and his wife, who were reminiscent of a household of gravediggers, an even older gamekeeper, who gave the impression of mostly protecting phantoms and appeared to be one himself, and, finally, the cook and her daughter, the chambermaid, both of whom gave the impression of silent nuns muffling their footsteps as they walked.
As for the Comtesse herself, still dressed in full mourning then, almost withered, her face very pale with its two large and exceedingly soft eyes, a smile of melancholy resignation frozen on her lips and giving them a bitter twist, she was the veritable soul of the sad manor—a slightly weary, extenuated soul, ready to take flight soundlessly. She had already lost the air of the days when her beloved son had lived with her, whose presence had brought her perpetual comfort and obliged her to live. For the two years that he had been at Brest, a cadet on the Borda, only seeing him on rare days of leave and during vacations, she had let herself fall into total languor, and it seemed obvious that that, at the conclusion of that languor, her soul would depart as the same time as her soon departed to be a naval officer.
It was his tutor, Abbé Denis Gasguin, and her cousin, the director of the English college, who had decided the young man on that noble and beautiful profession. He, it must be admitted, in spite of his profound affection for his mother, had directed his ambitions toward it with pleasure. The adventurous ardor of his Breton blood drove him toward the sea, where so many atavistic memories sang and called to him.
All the same, this vacation being the last that he would spend here before embarking for two years, he had not brought a light heart to it, as one can imagine. His passion for the sea could not extinguish the affection and almost religious gratitude with which he loved the woman who loved him so much.
He had arrived with tears in his eyes. He had found his mother readier than ever to take flight for the eternal beyond. She had tried to smile in order that the two of them should not to weep too much right away.
“Come on,” she said. “Come for a walk in the grounds, in the virgin forest of the poor ‘Mourner in the Sleeping Wood’;37 she will show you a new little beast that she has had in her thickets since his morning.”
And the young Comte, having seen Geneviève, who was in one of her depressed moods, could not help thinking: My God! What an ugly little thing!
He had not said it aloud, but Geneviève had understood what he was thinking nevertheless. She had remained still, confused, slightly humiliated, entirely steeped in vague melancholy and sudden fear, before the unbenevolent welcome of the young man with the arrogant expression and the tall woman in mourning, like an apparition.
That happened in the corner of the grounds where the two dark woods met, near the ruins, above Kawchmôr. And that was the first sensation experienced by Geneviève on her first day in her paradise.
XVI
Does one ever know exactly of what a memory is made? What analysis is subtle enough to reconstitute all the elements, even when one feels certain of possessing the essential element? How can the new imprints amalgamated on the most ancient print with the backcloth of the palimpsest be discerned? Around that initial point, how many successive acquisitions have come from wherever and whenever, before and even during the crystallization whose definitive shape they sometimes determine?
To be sure, the first sensation experienced by Geneviève on her first day in her paradise seems to have been painful, and the wound ought to have left a scar in her memory. Far from it! It was something like a perfume that it left there, a strong, sweet and penetrating perfume on which Geneviève still intoxicated herself with joy—as much today, and perhaps more, than then, for the soon-to-be-old woman of almost thirty-three as to the twenty-year old girl of yore; an intoxication as abrupt and as powerful as the day when Geneviève found herself alone with Aunt Line, after the introduction to the young Comte. For, as soon as she thought about her two months in paradise, it was on that precise moment that her dream first alighted, like a bird perching on the edge of its nest in order to take flight among the marvels of the nascent world. And the most marvelous of those marvels, the flower of that incessantly resuscitated April that nothing could wither, consisted imperturbably of a memory expressed in this form:
How we loved one another at first sight!
Geneviève, however, neither in her thirteenth year nor at any other time, had never been pretentious or coquettish, and that day she was less so than ever. But the first sensation of her first day in her paradise was engraved very clearly and very deeply in her memory, such as we have scrupulously reported it—which is to way, without anything that could authorize an interpretation similar to that of today.
What, in sum, did it amount to? This: no exchange of words between “her” and “him”; a disobliging thought read in the eyes of the arrogant young man, in the presence of the tall black-clad woman; and that in a corner of the grounds where the junction of two dark woods overlooked the muddy gulf of Kawchmôr; then immobility, confusion, humiliation, a hint of melancholy and fear—and that was all.
And those were the essential elements of which the memory was made, whose translation became that phrase in the liquor of joy, the warm, balsamic and intoxicating exhalation:
How we loved one another at first sight!
It must be said, moreover, in order to get to the heart of the matter right away, that neither twenty years ago, nor at any other time, had Geneviève given that statement the meaning that anyone else would have looked for therein—and, it goes without saying, she was incapable of seeing it there, today more than ever, even by subconsciously putting it there. In her naïve mathematical mind, there was a sort of equation in which “she” and “he” were the two terms, nothing more.
Thus, at least, was how she had explained it, many times, to Aunt Line, who, as can be imagined, would not hear of it, and always reduced that disguised avowal by the “mathegician”—as she put it—to the simplest and most human formula:
“In short, you’d like to marry him, wouldn’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Married or not, what does it matter?” Geneviève invariably replied. “That’s not what it’s about at all—not at all.”
To which, in a nervous tone, she added: “What a pity you aren’t a bit of a ‘mathegician’ like me, Aunt Line! You’d understand, being so intelligent—you’d understand what I mean.”
“In that case,” the old woman riposted, “why don’t you explain it to your father or Yvernaux? They’re what you’re said.”
“But it’s also something other than mathematics,” Geneviève always ended up confessing, with a sigh.
“What? Let’s try to find it. Let’s try!”
Aunt Line had often concluded in that manner. Geneviève had never wanted to try, though. She preferred to savor the intoxication of her memory without knowing to what she owed it. She dreaded losing it by trying to analyze it. At the most, one day, she had consented slightly, and had then recovered one very tiny fact, which it was infinitely sweet for her to remember, although she was not certain of it—not absolutely certain. Oh, a very tiny, very tiny fact, besides, but by which, in sum, her first sensation of her first day in her paradise had been modified almost as soon as she had experienced it.
That very tiny, very tiny, fact, that trivial fact, that almost nothing, was that the arrogant young man, as he went away with that almost scornful expression of indifference, had turned round after taking a few paces, and had darted at her—yes, at her—a furtive glance, and then a vague smile.
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