Clinging to him, the priest brokenly pronounced an extravagance of blessings.
The abbé, exhausted but shining with hope and peace, accompanied him some distance through the fetid alleys. When Arsène took leave of him, he glanced back, The abbé, framed by the walls of the narrow alley, lifted his hand in silent blessing.
At midnight, Arsène returned with several members of Les Blanches. He had appealed to them artfully. They, like himself, were members of the powerful aristocracy, and he was none too sure that he could enlist their sympathies in aiding one who had murdered another member, however noxious. So, he had told them that this was a youth, a Huguenot, who was hunted for his convictions, and his attempts to arouse the inhabitants of his quarters against the priests.
But when he arrived, he was paralyzed with horror. The whole quarter was ablaze with fire. The abbé’s house was destroyed, a gutted ruin with the walls agape to the stars. The alleys were crowded and jostling with gaping and stunned men and women, gasping and blinking and weeping in the thick smoke of their burning dwelling-places. Gendarmes, on horses, with bared swords and with pistols in hand, had herded the people against the walls, and had commandeered a number of men to put out the fires. Their horses reared and trampled and screamed in the red and flickering light.
It was a long time before Arsène could find his voice to question the officer in charge of the gendarmes, who touched his hat respectfully, and showed his wonder at this invasion of a large and armed group of gentlemen. Then Arsène learned that only two hours before his own arrival, a body of the gendarmery had been given orders to take the house of the renegade priest by assault, to demand the deliverance of a certain murderer and brigand into the hands of the police. The priest, barricaded with his nephew in that house, guarded by seething masses of men and women armed with clubs and stones, had refused to give up the murderer peaceably. The gendarmes had attacked. They had been assaulted by the miserable wretches of the quarter. Five gendarmes had been killed. Scores of the wretches had died. In despair, the gendarmes had set fire to the house, believing that the smoke and flames would force the priest, the wounded man, the nephew and the two guardians, into the alleys. But, it seemed they preferred to die in the fire.
They had died. In the meantime, the fire had spread in that crowded quarter. The animals had been subdued. That was all, Monsieur. A deplorable incident, but what could one do with such cattle?
Arsène looked speechlessly at the flames, at the wild black faces of the people. A slow sick dread, enormous and overpowering, filled him, overcoming even his grief for the heroic abbé.
“It was a renegade and evil priest,” continued the officer. “He had been unfrocked, for just reasons. However, he had a nephew, a young man of intelligence, who well understood the wickedness of his uncle. He had come to us, today, telling us of an hour when the house was least guarded. There was a large reward, offered, and he sensibly chose to take advantage of it. He was to give us a signal, when we might attack. But first, he was to enter the house, leaving the doors unlocked behind him, which he could easily do, the priest trusting him. He appeared at the window, and gave the signal. Unfortunately, a crowd had already gathered, from the walls and the gutters. When we attacked the house, they attacked us, with the sad results you see, Monsieur. We were forced to fire the house.
“There was a horrible incident. The nephew appeared at the door, seeking to escape the fire. But on the threshold, the priest, like a demon, appeared behind him. He had discovered, certainly, his nephew’s part in this. He seized the young man with his fiendish arms. He pulled him back into the flames, closed the door behind him, and locked it. We saw his face for an instant—” The officer shuddered. “It was a devil’s face, Monsieur. It was a mad face.”
“My God!” cried Arsène. His comrades, puzzled and watchful, closed in about him on their horses, and glowered down at the captain, who was intimidated.
But Arsène looked at the funeral pyre of the Abbé Mourion, who had given up his life, the life of his beloved nephew, in one last act of despairing and heroic defiance against an evil life, an evil world, and an evil fate. It was a piteous defiance, which had wrought nothing of good, had been useless.
But all at once, Arsène’s heart paused momentarily in its beating. Was it indeed useless? Or did fires like this, rising from the lives of such men, have portent in them for the world?
CHAPTER XXXIX
Monseigneur de Pacilli knew well that the most powerful impulses in the human heart are evil, that men are naturally turned to lust,-hatred, avarice, cruelty and revenge. Once, by meticulous mathematical calculation, drawn from the evidences of history, he had proved unimpeachably that it would take a thousand pious and virtuous priests a thousand indefatigable days to impress a single man with gentleness, mercy, justice and love, and to impress him so strongly that it would require exactly twelve hours before an equally indefatigable group of seducers could turn him from his former teaching. “But by the end of that twelve hours, the man, fortified by his natural evil impulses and emotions, would be forever immune to the teachings of the thousand pious and virtuous priests,” the priest had sagaciously concluded. “The Prince, therefore, mindful that in a millennium and a half the human race has been exposed to Christianity for short and fitful periods, and never at any time sedulously wooed by my hypothetical thousand pious and virtuous priests during the thousand hypothetical days, comprehends that it needs only one hour of exhortation to evil to cause a man to forget his Christian teachings and become as he was: a furious and pestilential beast, moreover a beast operating fully and completely in his evil, which is his natural spiritual state.”
Imbued as he was with the irrefutable strength of his knowledge of the foulness which is mankind, he had no doubts of the ultimate outcome of the seduction which he practiced among the peasants of the estates of the Comte de Vitry. But his cool and logical mind studied the effects of the seduction he had sowed with detachment and scientific interest. Would it take an hour of active seduction, a day, a week or a month? Calculating that the average peasant was about thirty years of age, that he had, since childhood, been taught Christian precepts on an average of one hour a day, the priest speculated that one week was sufficient to cause that peasant to revert to his normal temperament. But, as astronomers calculate deviations in the movements of planets caused by the influence of other planets, so de Pacilli was forced to calculate deviations in the normal conduct of these peasants, caused by the benign and noble influence of the Comte de Vitry. Moreover, proceeding on astronomical theories, he was further compelled to realize that as planets differ in deviations in proportion to their inherent weights, so men deviate in speeds in returning to their normal natures in exact proportion to the effect absorbed by them individually from their teachers. Some, he perceived, would return with great acceleration; others would be slower. Carefully calculating then, with icy and logical figures, he came to the conclusion that ten days would suffice, thus bringing into his sphere of influence those who would return to normal evil in two days, and those within twelve days.
He concluded his calculations without cynicism, without acrid comment in himself. These were mathematical facts, demanding no bitter reflections.
But, at the end of ten days, he was forced to realize that it would take fourteen days. He toiled over his figures; they totalled ten days. But fourteen days, despite the figures, were inexorably indicated.
At the end of fourteen days, he had completely seduced even those most devoted to the Comte, most grateful to him, and most dependent upon him. Even those, the older ones, with long memories of previous oppression and suffering, succumbed in two weeks. De Pacilli, however, was irritated. Figures, after long application, inevitably revealed irrevocable conclusions, which neither God nor Satan could refute. Therefore, his own figures were wrong. After two endless nights of new calculations, he came to the conclusion that it would need a thousand and four days on the part of the thousand tireless and devoted pries
ts to impress a single man, instead of the original thousand days. Ah, that was it! Calculating on this revised basis, the figures led to the fourteen-day conclusions. He was satisfied. He slept peacefully.
He allowed the fourteen days of complete seduction to pass. After all, furies, like wines, must age suitably, to gather depth, flavor, and potency. At the end of thirty days, allowing for those unamiable deviations, he knew the peasants were ready. He rose on the proper morning, knowing that his task was done.
That night, the Comte de Vitry and his mistress, Madame duPres, arrived at the château. Paul was never a suspicious examiner of the countenances of others, seeking for evidences of disaffection, treachery, or wickedness. Had he done so, he would have noticed that the servants in the château were surrounded by an atmosphere of suspense, that their eyes shifted evilly before his candid gaze and smile, that there were whisperings, imprecations and shaken fists in the corridors, that several spat upon his passing, that a spirit of wickedness, portentous danger, and brooding violence hovered over the château.
Madame duPres felt all these things, however. Uneasily, she locked the doors of her chamber, and lay in her bed, listening for hours. Was it her imagination, or did she hear shufflings and mutterings in the corridor outside her door? Was there a flare of a torch in the garden below? She rose, and crept to the window. Then she uttered a wild and terrible cry.
The gardens, the grounds, were filled with a frightful horde of men and women, armed with clubs and stones. Torchlights glimmered on their faces. Even as the woman screamed aloud, the nearer ones hurled their torches through open windows, and advanced upon the château, shrieking foul and infuriated curses.
The doors went down before them.
CHAPTER XL
Monsigneur knew that there were only two kinds of men who could not be easily shaken in a profound conviction: a fool and a wise man. The fool had no wit to combat argument, and no reason with which to reflect upon it. The wise man was usually too egotistic to admit any logic in an argument which challenged the final result of his own previous and exhaustive researches.
As he was such a sagacious and astute and subtle man, his conclusions about Crequy and François Grandjean would have been startling to any one less brilliant. For he had concluded that Grandjean was a fool, and Crequy a wise man. He had attempted, on numerous occasions, to seduce both, but all his artfulness was in vain. Grandjean, like so many dignified men of integrity and honor, unfortunately silenced the priest immediately, when he suspected that the latter was coming to him with implied contempt of the Comte de Vitry. The old man had been indignant. Had he been wise, he would have listened, and so perhaps might have helped to avert a terrible tragedy. So, like all men of rigid integrity, he demonstrated his immense folly, his lack of foresight, and subtlety. Had he been wise enough to have in his character a touch of dishonor and deviousness, he would have written to the Comte in warning. But, in his folly, he forebore to do this.
Crequy, the wise man, was not approached by the priest again after that one interview in the tavern. For, after long meditation, de Pacilli had come to the shrewd conclusion that here was no man who hated the Comte, but a man who loved him, and wished to protect him. Therefore, he warned the leaders of the growing disaffection not to speak of the Comte in the tavern, and to urge those who had begun to listen to them to refrain, also. But he did not explain why.
Thus it was that Crequy, the wise man, and Grandjean, the fool, were almost completely unaware qf the vicious fury which was growing among the peasants. But towards the last, Crequy, with his peasant’s sensitiveness to other peasants, began to sniff an evil stench in the winds that blew from field and vineyard. He began to investigate, with great caution. But he found nothing. Nevertheless, his suspicions grew, and now they embraced the priest.
He decided to speak to the Comte when the latter returned to the château. “But,” he exclaimed in ferocious despair to his niece, Roselle, “that saintly imbecile will not listen to me! He will remember that I have often urged upon him the foulness of this cattle, and will laugh gently in my face.”
As the Comte and his mistress arrived late at night, the village was unaware that they had come. But, after they had dined, Madame duPres had called a servant to her, and sent him with a missive to de Pacilli. The priest, then, rising from the table where he had been writing, wrapped himself in his cloak and sped in shadowy darkness from door to door. He knew that men’s wits and men’s consciences are at the lowest ebb at midnight, especially if they had been summarily aroused from bed.
He returned to his house. It was no part of his plan that he be on hand to witness the results of his seduction. That part was done. He had finished the fifth of his voluminous books; the final pages were before him. The others were already in the hands of his superiors in Paris. He began to gather up his few belongings, to place them in a portmanteau. His work was complete. Now his agile and profound mind, dismissing Chantilly, went on to other matters.
Once or twice, as he glanced through his narrow windows, he saw the furtive and distant flare of torches, the hoarse humming of the awakening village. He shrugged. He was not interested. But all at once, an animal prescience caused his spine to prickle. He crept out of his house, and made his way through back alleys to his little church. The doors were always open. But that prescience warned him again. He shot the bolts, slipped like a black shadow in the moonlight, which fell through the high pointed windows, to the altar.
He stood before the altar, and gazed at its flickering, eternal red light. He did not light a candle. He stared at the altar, his face pale and masklike in the spectral moonlight. What did he think, as he meditated there before the crucifix? None could know. But momentarily the mask became more inscrutable, more marblelike in texture and expression.
After a long time, he went behind the altar, and examined a small thick door set in the wall. He opened that door with the rusty key which was in the lock and peered down into the thick and stygian darkness. A flight of stone steps led down into an unused crypt. The priest heard the trickle of water from far below, and smelled the dank and fetid odor of all underground and hidden places. The stench came up like a miasma, poisonous and stifling. He covered his nose hastily with his fine linen kerchief, and closed the door. Nevertheless, he did not lock it. Moreover, with satisfaction, he examined the door. It was of heavy wood, reinforced with iron, and set closely in its aperture. He sat down near it, his hands motionless on his knees, and stared imperviously, and like a stone image, at the crucifix. No one could have seen him in that pattern of black and silver which laced and fretted the little church. He was one with the blackness; his pale marble face was one with the moonlight.
Paul de Vitry, mentally and physically exhausted, retired early. Madame did not, as usual, annoy him with her perpetual poutings and importunities. He was weary of her, and she knew this. He avoided her as much as possible on all occasions. But he was too kind-hearted to dismiss her, with a stipend, as other men did. He had the cowardice of the gentle-souled: he could not endure wounding any creature, however foolish, tedious or repellent. He consoled himself with the hope that she might weary of him in turn, and abandon him. So far, the hope had not been justified. She clung to him with stubborn tenacity. But he knew that in that tenacity there was no real affection, and only avarice and resentment. However, he hoped that she might eventually tire of his gentle remoteness and indifference, and seek warmer pastures. In that event, he intended to dower her handsomely. In the meantime, she was to him an old woman of the sea, clinging stubbornly to his weary back and weighing him down.
He said good night to her with his accustomed thoughtfulness and gentleness, and urged her to retire early in order to recover from their tiresome journey. But for some reason, she seemed reluctant to leave him. Her beautiful face was unusually pale; her manner uneasy and restless. She invented excuses to keep him with her. At last, worn down by his own chronic sadness and weariness, he tore himself away with more curtness tha
n ordinary.
He lay in his bed a long time, gazing blindly before him, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the shadows of silver moonlight which spangled the molded ceiling. He followed, mechanically, the movements of the draperies at his windows, stirring in the soft and scented night wind. He listened, without real awareness, to the clamor of crickets in the damp grass outside those windows. Once a nightingale sang with piercing and bitter sweetness to the moon, and Paul’s heart contracted on a spasm of poignant anguish. But there was no other sound in the moonlight darkness.
The moon wheeled eastward. The trees began to rustle uneasily. Now Paul, through his window, saw the sudden brilliant flashing of the cross on the steeple of the church, as it caught the moon’s argent rays. The wind became heavier with the odors of earth, grass, flower and tree. Yet, strangely, the profound silence seemed to increase.
Tears suddenly rose to Paul’s tired eyes, and he closed them, sighing. The weight on his heart became too terrible for endurance. His whole being was engulfed in tides of suffering, despair, weariness and nameless grief. Existence had become for him a dry and windless desert, in which he wandered, parched and lost and full of exhaustion. All hope had gone from him; all his innocent joy in living had forever departed. He had lost faith in his fellows, that faith conceived in his own ingenuousness and purity of spirit, and like others of his kind, there was no consolation for him, no cynical philosophy, no shrug of fatalistic and humorous acceptance. Out of that lost faith, in many men, came hatred. But there was no seed of hatred in his heart. He could feel only sorrow and complete deathly despair. To him, all men had become treacherous beasts, prowling lustfully.
He had lost love. He had loved the young Cecile Grandjean with a passion unknown to most men. Others might say to themselves: “This is but an obscure peasant wench, and there are thousands more of her pattern.” But to one so innocent, so single-hearted, so ingenuous as Paul de Vitry, there was no other woman. He had never heard of the aphorism that all women are the same in the dark. The lusts of the flesh had never been overly strong in him. The thin strata in him, which was almost womanish in its character, was capable only of devotion and eternal fidelity.
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