III
As soon as dinner was over, Chantal took me by the arm. It was the hour for his cigar, a sacred hour. When he was alone, he went out into the street to smoke; when he had someone to dinner, he took them to the billiard room, and he played as he smoked. This evening they had lit a fire in the billiard room, since it was Twelfth Night; and my old friend took his cue, a very slender cue which he chalked with great care; then he said:
“Now, sonny.”
He always spoke to me as if I were a little boy: I was twenty-five years old but he had known me since I was four.
I began to play; I made several cannons; I missed several more; but my head was filled with drifting thoughts of Mademoiselle Pearl, and I asked abruptly:
“Tell me, Monsieur Chantal, is Mademoiselle Pearl a relation of yours?”
He stopped playing, in astonishment, and stared at me.
“What, don’t you know? Didn’t you know Mademoiselle Pearl’s story?”
“Of course not.”
“Hasn’t your father ever told you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, well, that’s queer, upon my word, it’s queer. Oh, it’s quite an adventure.”
He was silent, and went on:
“And if you only knew how strange it is that you should ask me about it today, on Twelfth Night!”
“Why?”
“Why, indeed! Listen. It’s forty-one years ago, forty-one years this very day, the day of Epiphany. We were living then at Roüy-le-Tors, on the ramparts; but I must first tell you about the house, if you’re to understand the story properly. Roüy is built on a slope, or rather on a mound which thrusts out of a wide stretch of meadow land. We had there a house with a beautiful hanging garden, supported on the old ramparts. So that the house was in the town, on the street, while the garden hung over the plain. There was also a door opening from this garden on to the fields, at the bottom of a secret staircase which went down inside the thick masonry of the walls, just like a secret staircase in a romance. A road ran past this door, where a great bell hung, and the country people brought their stuff in this way, to save themselves going all the way round.
“Can you see it all? Well, this year, at Epiphany, it had been snowing for a week. It was like the end of the world. When we went out on to the ramparts to look out over the plain, the cold of that vast white countryside struck through to our very bones; it was white everywhere, icy cold, and gleaming like varnish. It really looked as if the good God had wrapped up the earth to carry it away to the lumber room of old worlds. It was rare and melancholy, I can tell you.
“We had all our family at home then, and we were a large family, a very large family: my father, my mother, my uncle and my aunt; my two brothers and my four cousins; they were pretty girls; I married the youngest. Of all that company, there are only three left alive: my wife, myself, and my sister-in-law at Marseilles. God, how a family dwindles away: it makes me shiver to think of it. I was fifteen years old then, and now I’m fifty-six.
“Well, we were going to eat our Twelfth Night dinner and we were very gay, very gay. Everybody was in the drawing room waiting for dinner, when my eldest brother, Jacques, took it into his head to say: ‘A dog’s been howling out in the fields for the last ten minutes; it must be some poor beast that’s got lost.’
“The words were hardly out of his mouth when the garden bell rang. It had a heavy clang like a church bell and reminded you of funerals. A shiver ran through the assembled company. My father called a servant and told him to go and see who was there. We waited in complete silence, we thought of the snow that lay over the whole countryside. When the man came back, he declared he had seen nothing. The dog was still howling: the howls never stopped, and came always from the same direction.
“We went in to dinner, but we were a little uneasy, especially the young ones. All went well until the joint was on the table, and then the bell began to ring again; it rang three times, three loud long clangs that sent a thrill to our very fingertips and stopped the breath in our throats. We sat staring at each other, our forks in the air, straining our ears, seized by fear of some supernatural horror.
“At last my mother said: ‘It’s very queer that they’ve been so long coming back; don’t go alone, Baptiste; one of the gentlemen will go with you.’
“My uncle François got up. He was as strong as Hercules, very proud of his great strength and afraid of nothing on earth. ‘Take a gun,’ my father advised him. ‘You don’t know what it might be.’
“But my uncle took nothing but a walking-stick, and went out at once with the servant.
“The rest of us waited there, shaking with terror and fright, neither eating nor speaking. My father tried to comfort us. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘it’ll be some beggar or some passerby lost in the snow. He rang once, and when the door wasn’t opened immediately, he made another attempt to find his road: he didn’t succeed and he’s come back to our door.’
“My uncle’s absence seemed to us to last an hour. He came back at last, furiously angry, and cursing:
“ ‘Not a thing, by God, it’s someone playing a trick. Nothing but that cursed dog howling a hundred yards beyond the walls. If I’d taken a gun, I’d have killed him to keep him quiet.’
“We went on with our dinner, but we were still very anxious; we were quite sure that we hadn’t heard the last of it; something was going to happen, the bell would ring again in a minute.
“It did ring, at the very moment when we were cutting the Epiphany cake. The men leaped to their feet as one man. My uncle François, who had been drinking champagne, swore that he was going to murder it, in such a wild rage that my mother and my aunt flung themselves on him to hold him back. My father was quite calm about it; he was slightly lame too (he dragged one leg since he had broken it in a fall from his horse), but now he declared that he must know what it was, and that he was going out. My brothers, who were eighteen and twenty years old, ran in search of their guns, and as no one was paying any attention to me, I grabbed a rook rifle and got ready to accompany the expedition myself.
“It set off at once. My father and my uncle led off, with Baptiste, who was carrying a lantern. My brothers Jacques and Paul followed, and I brought up the rear, in spite of the entreaties of my mother, who stayed behind in the doorway, with her sister and my cousins.
“Snow had been falling again during the last hour and it lay thick on the trees. The pines bent under the heavy ghostly covering, like white pyramids or enormous sugar loaves; the slighter shrubs, palely glimmering in the shadows, were only dimly visible through the grey curtain of small hurrying flakes. The snow was falling so thickly that you couldn’t see more than ten paces ahead. But the lantern threw a wide beam of light in front of us. When we began to descend the twisting staircase hollowed out of the wall, I was afraid, I can tell you. I thought someone was walking behind me and I’d be grabbed by the shoulder and carried off; I wanted to run home again, but as I’d have had to go back the whole length of the garden, I didn’t dare.
“I heard them opening the door on to the fields; then my uncle began to swear: ‘Blast him, he’s gone. If I’d only seen his shadow, I wouldn’t have missed him, the b⸺!’
“The look of the plain struck me with a sense of foreboding, or rather the feel of it in front of us, for we couldn’t see it; nothing was visible but a veil of snow hung from edge to edge of the world, above, below, in front of us, to left of us and right of us, everywhere.
“ ‘There, that’s the dog howling,’ added my uncle. ‘I’ll show him what I can do with a gun, I will. And that’ll be something done, at any rate.’
“But my father, who was a kindly man, answered: ‘We’d do better to go and look for the poor animal: he’s whining with hunger. The wretched beast is barking for help; he’s like a man shouting in distress. Come on.’
“We started off through the curtain, through the heavy ceaseless fall, through the foam that was filling the night and the air, moving, floating, falling; as it melted, it froze the flesh on our bones, froze it with a burning cold that sent a sharp swift stab of pain through the skin with each prick of the little white flakes.
“We sank to our knees in the soft cold feathery mass, and we had to lift our legs right up to get over the ground. The farther we advanced, the louder and clearer grew the howling of the dog. ‘There he is!’ cried my uncle. We stopped to observe him, like prudent campaigners coming upon the enemy at night.
“I couldn’t see anything; then I came up with the others and I saw him; he was a terrifying and fantastic object, that dog, a great black dog, a shaggy sheepdog with a head like a wolf, standing erect on his four feet at the far end of the long track of light that the lantern flung out across the snow. He didn’t move; he stared at us with never a sound.
“ ‘It’s queer he doesn’t rush at us or away from us,’ said my uncle. ‘I’ve the greatest mind to stretch him out with a shot.’
“ ‘No,’ my father said decidedly, ‘we must catch him.’
“ ‘But he’s not alone,’ my brother Jacques added. ‘He has something beside him.’
“He actually had something behind him, something grey and indistinguishable. We began to walk cautiously towards him.
“Seeing us draw near, the dog sat down on his haunches. He didn’t look vicious. He seemed, on the contrary, pleased that he had succeeded in attracting someone’s attention.
“My father went right up to him and patted him. The dog licked his hands; and we saw that he was fastened to the wheel of a small carriage, a sort of toy carriage wrapped all round in three or four woollen coverings. We lifted the wrappings carefully; Baptiste held his lantern against the opening of the carriage—which was like a kennel on wheels—and we saw inside a tiny sleeping child.
“We were so astonished that we couldn’t get out a single word. My father was the first to recover: he was warmhearted and somewhat emotional; he placed his hand on the top of the carriage and said: ‘Poor deserted thing, you shall belong to us.’ And he ordered my brother Jacques to wheel our find in front of us.
“ ‘A love-child,’ my father added, ‘whose poor mother came and knocked at my door on Epiphany night, in memory of the Christ-child.’
“He stood still again, and shouted into the darkness four times, at the top of his voice, to all the four corners of the heavens: ‘We have got him safe.’ Then he rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder and murmured: ‘Suppose you’d fired at the dog, François?’
“My uncle said nothing, but crossed himself earnestly in the darkness; he was very devout, for all his swaggering ways.
“We had loosed the dog, who followed us.
“Upon my word, our return to the house was a pretty sight. At first we had great difficulty in getting the carriage up the rampart staircase; we succeeded at last, however, and wheeled it right into the hall.
“How comically surprised and delighted and bewildered mamma was! And my poor little cousins (the youngest was six) were like four hens round a nest. At last we lifted the child, still sleeping, from its carriage. It was a girl about six weeks old. And in her clothes we found ten thousand francs in gold, yes, ten thousand francs, which papa invested to bring her in a dowry. So she wasn’t the child of poor parents … she may have been the child of a gentleman by a respectable young girl belonging to the town, or even … we made innumerable speculations, and we never knew anything … except that … never a thing … never a thing. … Even the dog wasn’t known to anyone. He didn’t belong to the district. In any event, the man or woman who had rung three times at our door knew very well what sort of people my parents were, when they chose them for their child.
“And that’s how Mademoiselle Pearl found her way into the Chantal house when she was six weeks old.
“It was later that she got the name of Mademoiselle Pearl. She was first christened Marie Simone Claire, Claire serving as her surname.
“We certainly made a quaint entry into the dining room with the tiny wide-awake creature, looking round her at the people and the lights, with wondering troubled blue eyes.
“We sat down at the table again, and the cake was cut. I was king and I chose Mademoiselle Pearl for queen, as you did just now. She hadn’t any idea that day what a compliment we were paying her.
“Well, the child was adopted, and brought up as one of the family. She grew up: years passed. She was a charming, gentle, obedient girl. Everyone loved her and she would have been shamefully spoiled if my mother had not seen to it that she wasn’t.
“My mother had a lively sense of what was fitting and a proper reverence for caste. She consented to treat little Claire as she did her own children, but she was none the less insistent that the distance between us should be definitely marked and the position clearly laid down.
“So as soon as the child was old enough to understand, she told her how she had been found, and very gently, tenderly even, she made the little girl realise that she was only an adopted member of the Chantal family, belonging to them but really no kin at all.
“Claire realised the state of affairs with an intelligence beyond her years and an instinctive wisdom that surprised us all; and she was quick to take and keep the place allotted to her, with so much tact, grace, and courtesy that she brought tears to my father’s eyes.
“My mother herself was so touched by the passionate gratitude and timid devotion of this adorable and tenderhearted little thing that she began to call her ‘My daughter.’ Sometimes, when the young girl had shown herself more than commonly sweet-natured and delicate, my mother pushed her glasses on to her forehead, as she always did when much moved, and repeated: ‘The child’s a pearl, a real pearl.’ The name stuck to little Claire: she became Mademoiselle Pearl for all of us from that time and for always.”