They got up the next day after a sleepless night. An early visitor, Augustin de Rougeterre, was waiting for them. He felt a slight frisson as he greeted them. He had not grown used to their double presence; every time he saw them, he felt the breath of which the prophet speaks pass over him.
“I’ve come to talk business,” he said. “We’re proposing to extend our enterprise…”
He wanted to talk about airplane manufacture, to which he had patriotically dedicated part of his fortune, and with which he had associated Madame and Pierre de Givreuse. The business was profitable—more so than he wished. “We’re increasing the capital by a third,” he said. “I wanted to ask your opinion…”
“It’s entirely in conformity with yours!”
“I’d also like, since you’ve undertaken scientific studies…” He stopped, slightly alarmed, as he was every time he referred to their past. “At least, I’d like one of you…to supervise a subsidiary branch near Granville…”
“That will be me,” said Philippe. “I’m leaving the château for a few months, to devote more time to my career…”
The Comte looked at him suspiciously, as if vaguely scandalized. “You’re going your separate ways?”
“We’d resolved to do so before you came.”
Augustin hesitated, pensively. “I didn’t dare advise you to do it,” he said, finally. “I’ve thought about it more than once.”
They had gone into the dining-room. The table was set; it lacked nothing but coffee and milk. Madame de Givreuse and Valentine were late.
“You’ll have to repeat a sort of apprenticeship in life,” Rougeterre went on. “Each of you will have to get used to acting on his own account.”
8 a.m. chimed on the old clock; a chambermaid passed along the hallway. “Victorine!” called Pierre. “Has Madame not come down?”
“Yes, Monsieur, but…”
She did not have time to finish. Rapid footsteps were heard and Madame de Givreuse came in, her features in distress. “Valentine has disappeared!” she exclaimed.
“That’s impossible!” cried Pierre and Philippe. “She can’t have disappeared!”
Their consternation was greater than their astonishment; although they could guess the motive that the young girl had to be obeying, they could not understand the abruptness of her action.
“It is indeed impossible,” said Rougeterre. “Valentine can’t have disappeared like that; she probably went out early and has been delayed on the way back, for one reason or another.”
Madame de Givreuse shook her head. “I thought that too, Augustin—but she never went to bed! She must have gone out during the night or very early.”
“That’s more serious,” said the Comte, looking suspiciously at the two young men. “That young woman has always seemed to me to be incapable of acting without consideration.”
Pierre and Philippe did not try to hide their emotion. As is only natural, when a person’s actions are suddenly in contradiction to her character, they feared the worst…and even the worst of all, irreparable…
“She must at least have left a letter,” Rougeterre went on, impatient with the others’ silence.
“We’ve searched—we didn’t find anything,” said Madame de Givreuse, faintly. She loved Valentine with an affection outweighed only by her affection for Pierre. She had thought she knew everything about the young woman, who was unable to dissimulate, let alone lie.
“There are too many mysteries in this house,” Augustin muttered between clenched teeth. Aloud, he added: “All the same, nothing can make me believe that she left without a reason.” He alternated his gaze between Pierre and Philippe, his eyes gleaming with curiosity and reprobation.
“Undoubtedly,” said Pierre, looking the Comte in the face, “but no one has done anything or said anything—knowingly—that could have offended Mademoiselle de Varsennes.”
“All right!” groaned Rougeterre. “Let’s stop trying to understand and let’s not lose any more time. We have to find her!” He was a man of action; he proposed a series of steps. Philippe, assisted by the gardener, was to explore the beach; Pierre would go to Avranches and the Comte to Granville. Madame de Givreuse would send servants to the neighboring villages and to ask Savarre—who knew the country thoroughly and had a numerous staff at his disposal—for his help.
V.
Valentine had spent a tragic night. The evening, however, had been almost calm. When she retired to her room, she initially experienced a fairly gentle relaxation. It seemed to her that she had recovered, that her agitations had been a waking nightmare and that she had exaggerated the situation strangely.
She was not sleepy; she took a book from her small library; it was François le Champi.6 It was some time since she had read it. She took pleasure in those naive lives, lost in the depth of the countryside. She read continuously, almost avidly, to the point at which Madeleine was crossing the shaking bridge, carrying Champi in her arms…
Suddenly, she felt that sudden hastening of her heartbeat that recalls us to our troubles. She put down the book and watched three midges that were flying around the electric light-bulb. A terrible malaise, dull at first, spread from her diaphragm throughout her being. With painful clarity, she saw Philippe’s silhouette again; she heard the four lines that he had murmured at the window. She repeated the lines without being able to remember the last two exactly, and tried for a few minutes to reconstitute them.
What was intolerable was that she could not understand why she was so troubled. She was not in the habit of analyzing her sensations and was perhaps not very good at it. She was suffering from a sort of mystical fear. That fear had abruptly increased and was continuing to grow; in spite of herself she saw something supernatural in the afternoon scene. All of this whirled around in her head without her being able to glimpse an outcome. Imprisoned in her intuition, she had no clear ideas, but was all the more impressed…
Several times, she tried to resume reading, but the book soon fell from her hands and the black dream recommenced, without result.
That lasted for several hours. She was worn out with fatigue, but was afraid to go to bed. Towards midnight, she sat down in an armchair in front of the window in order to breathe in the fresh air; then she was seized by torpor and fell asleep.
When she awoke it was near dawn; two large stars were setting over the ocean. Valentine shivered. She was feverish; her temples were red and her hands icy. She looked at things in astonishment. A mist filled her brain; everything within and around her was exaggerated. Mechanically, she picked up a mantle.
She went through the overgrown garden, exited by a side gate and found herself on the road just as a melancholy glow mingled with the moonlight. It is certain that she only had a restricted consciousness of her actions. The fever was increasing; her heart and pulse were beating desperately.
She walked through the bracken and grass for some time. The dawn exaggerated the clouds and filled them with its fugitive light. Then a red furnace rose up amid the apple-trees. Mademoiselle de Varsennes continued walking. The fever sustained her and wearied her at the same time. She paused several times and turned in the direction of the château, but an indefinable will impelled her on her way again.
This went on for several hours. When she reached Avranches the Sun was already high in the sky. She headed for the church, went in, and prayed discreetly. Then she stopped in a narrow street in front of an old stone house with a shingle roof. There was a knocker on the door. She rapped.
A woman with a triangular face, red-eyed and already old, came to open the door and uttered an exclamation: “It’s you, my dear child!”
“It’s me, Madeleine.”
They both stood there in surprise; then the hostess took the young woman into a little reception-room—or, rather, a parlor—furnished with low chairs with elongated backs, like those in church, an old oaken table, a carved chest that was somewhat reminiscent of a sarcophagus, and a large chest of drawers with copper handles.
Madeleine Faubert had been Valentine’s governess and first instructress. The aged spinster displayed as few faults as human make-up permits. Sincerely modest without being humble, constant and scrupulous, resigned and cheerful, thrifty and generous, sometimes stubborn, a little too secretive, sometimes irascible with respect to pride or egoism, her heart was an inexhaustible reservoir of compassion. She loved Valentine dearly, with a complex tenderness in which her own unsatisfied desires were concentrated: maternal instinct and a mysterious, infinitely pure love that nevertheless reflected the passions of which poverty, chance and circumstance had deprived her. Although as innocent at heart as a little child, she had a penetrating intelligence and experience; she understood sentiments of which she had no personal knowledge. She was the only person to whom Valentine dared to tell everything.
Madeleine studied the young woman without appearing to. She saw her blue-tinted eyes, her feverish cheeks and the distress expressed by her entire person. She pressed her visitor’s hands with fingers that were as slender and delicate as Valentine’s, but whose joints rheumatism was beginning to inflame slightly. “What’s the matter, dear Marquise? One would think that you had a fever.” She took the young woman’s pulse and observed its precipitate pace.
“Yes, I think I have a fever—and I’m so very tired, Madeleine.”
Madeleine had sat her down on one of her church chairs with a hard, stiff back. She sensed that she ought not to ask any more questions. She waited patiently, with the gentle self-composure of women who know how to listen and console.
“Oh, Madeleine!” the adolescent sighed. “Why am I so unhappy? That’s nothing—one has every right to be unhappy, when there is so much pain in France…but not like this…not like this!” Her eyes were full of tears. “I have no idea whether you’ll be able to understand…I don’t understand myself…perhaps I’m mad. I’ve run away from the château…out of fright…”
“Fright!” exclaimed Madeleine, gripped by the combative spirit that she felt on behalf of others. “No one has taken the liberty…?”
“Oh! No one, my dear. No one has done me any wrong…or even said anything…”
Madeleine scrutinized the pale face closely. In a lower voice, the young woman said: “Perhaps you’ve guessed, Madeleine, what I’ve thought about during his absence?”
“I’ve guessed it, little Marquise. That’s fine…it’s what I’ve wished for.”
“I’m sure that I loved him already, before his departure…but not completely. It’s as if that absence was necessary…and I thought that he…”
“You can be sure of it!”
“When they came back…”
The instructress started. “The other one wasn’t coming back.”
“Exactly. But how can one tell? It’s impossible to detect the slightest difference between them. You know that…”
“That’s true. The resemblance is striking.”
“It’s frightening! I was gripped by it immediately… gripped by one of those revelations that make one so sick at heart. You can’t know, Madeleine…I waited for him with so much fervor...I was so impatient and so happy…and suddenly, it’s him, and it isn’t him…there’s another, who is the same…”
“Yes,” said the old spinster, pensively. “I hadn’t thought…of that. Yes, that must be disturbing.”
It was as if a fog dissipated in the young woman’s mind. So many dark sensations, so many intuitions, until then indefinable, seemed to have been clarified by the fever.
“It wasn’t at all like a familiar resemblance. It was a revelation—a thunderbolt…the destruction of a personality. I spent several days in a veritable bewilderment. Everything was dying within me—at least, I thought so. Then it came back. My dream tried to revive. It lived again. I made an immense effort to accomplish an abstraction of the other one—Philippe—and to isolate Pierre. I thought I was succeeding in that, in spite of a persistent anguish, a dark presentiment. There was one beautiful moment, on the sea-shore, among the wild rocks, where we had a memory in common. There, I thought that the threat was defeated…our eyes had found one another again…but when Philippe rejoined us…how can I put it? It was exactly the same gaze…and, I’m fearfully certain, the same love!”
“The same love!” Madeleine repeated, pensively. She understood. A fraction of Valentine’s disturbance infected her own soul.
“My God!” sighed the young woman. “Again, that’s nothing. I thought that one of the loves would fade away, sooner or later…and that that would be sufficient in itself to create a profound difference between them…but in my overexcited mind—is it even in my mind, or rather in my entire being?—a new misery was born. Until then, I could at least distinguish Pierre and Philippe in terms of their past. One of them had lived with me before the war, our memories overlapped…oh, I still believe that, for how could it be otherwise? But a sentiment stronger than any reasoned conviction developed—that, by some witchcraft or other, Philippe’s memories are the same as Pierre’s. I tried hard to reject it, but the sentiment increased incessantly, seemingly receiving proof after proof, by virtue of a word, a gesture, or any one of the thousand insignificant actions of life. Was I mad? I asked myself that continually.
“Yesterday, all three of us went with Madame de Givreuse to Jacques Berleux’s farm—you know, the farm of olden days on the far side of the abandoned village. Philippe and I were left alone while Madame de Givreuse and Pierre were discussing business matters with the farmer. I retained a very dear memory of an hour spent in the room in which we found ourselves. It was almost the same time of year. Suddenly, as before, a bird began to sing, and Philippe recited four lines of verse—the same ones that Pierre had recited at the same window. I was seized by a veritable terror…which increased last night.”
There was a pause. Madeleine was increasingly affected by the young woman’s “atmosphere.”
“Is it possible,” Valentine whispered, “for the memories of one man to be communicated to another?”
“Telepathy,” suggested Madeleine. “Besides, dear child, why shouldn’t those lines have come into Philippe’s mind quite naturally.”
“In front of that very window? And in circumstances so similar to those that had led Pierre to recite them? That would be a prodigy!”
“Would you care to tell me what the lines were?”
“I don’t recall the third and fourth exactly, but something like these:
“The branch is gilded by the Sun
“And bows down to shelter
“The buds that are about to open
“For the bird that is about to sing…
“There can’t be many people who know those lines!”
“That’s true. Take note, however, that they concern a bird that is about to sing. Now, both times they were recited before you, a bird was singing. Two minds that resemble one another as much as those of Pierre and Philippe might be subject to the same invocation. It’s extraordinary, but not supernatural…”
“If only you were right!”
“I am right, Marquisette! You have to believe me, and set your mind at rest. What must they be thinking back there?”
“My God!” groaned the young woman. “It’s intolerable that I should cause Madame de Givreuse any anxiety. What shall I do?”
“Simply send a message. As I can’t leave you alone, Madame de Givreuse will come here. I think I’ll be able to make her understand…”
“It’s so difficult. The slightest allusion might distress everyone…”
“I’m not thinking of telling her the simple truth—or of allowing her to guess…”
The horn of a motor car sounded in the street. The two women looked out of the window. A limousine was drawing to a halt.
“It’s Pierre!” exclaimed Valentine, fearfully. “Or Philippe!”
“I’ll take care of him.” Madeleine opened a door hurriedly and ushered Valentine into a minuscule dining-room. Two blows of the knocker resounded in the h
allway.
The visitor’s features seemed almost rigid, but his eyes betrayed a dark anxiety. Mademoiselle Faubert introduced him into the little parlor. He looked around feverishly.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Have you seen Mademoiselle de Varsennes? She…”
“She’s here,” Madeleine replied, calmly.
A nervous smile played upon the young man’s lips. “Thank God!” he sighed. “We were afraid that…on the way, though, I had a presentiment that she would have sought refuge with her dearest friend!” The last words caused Madeleine to conclude that she was in the presence of Pierre. “I don’t ask to see Mademoiselle de Varsennes…” he went on, timidly.
“She’s very tired.”
“There’s no place in the world where she’d be safer than here. I’ll go telegraph my mother.”
There was a short pause. Each of them looked at the other with ardent and anxious curiosity.
“It’s impossible for me to leave her alone,” said Madeleine, finally, in a low voice. “Otherwise, I’d go to see Madame de Givreuse.”
“Perhaps my mother might come here?”
“Of course she may. I think that would be useful.”
Pierre hesitated, then said: “Mademoiselle de Varsennes isn’t ill?”
“No.”
He understood that he should not insist. “When would you like my mother to visit you?” he murmured.
“As soon as possible.”
“In that case, I think you’ll see her this morning.”
Madeleine had scrutinized Pierre’s physiognomy attentively. She had seen multiple nuances of emotion pass through it, but no astonishment. Does he know, then? she wondered. Or at least suspect?
He seemed to want to ask something else, but he did not dare, and withdrew.
Madeleine was thoughtful. She understood Valentine’s indefinable suspicions now.
The Givreuse Enigma Page 7
