III
When the plates were full, the tramp started to swallow his soup greedily in quick following spoonfuls. The Abbé was not hungry now, so he trifled with the delicious soup, leaving the bread at the bottom of the plate. He asked suddenly:
“What is your name?”
The man laughed, glad to be satisfying his hunger.
“Unknown father,” said he, “I have no surname except my mother’s family name, which you have probably not forgotten. On the other hand, I have two Christian names, which, by the way, certainly do not suit me: Philippe Auguste.”
The Abbé turned pale and asked with a strangled voice:
“Why were you given those Christian names?”
The vagabond shrugged his shoulders.
“Surely you can guess why. After leaving you, Mamma wanted to make your rival believe that I was his child, and he did believe it until about my fifteenth year. Then I grew too much like you. He repudiated me, the scoundrel! I had been given the two Christian names, Philippe Auguste, and if I had had the luck not to be like anybody, or simply to have been the son of a third unknown ne’er-do-well, I should now be known as the Viscount Philippe-Auguste de Pravallon, the recently acknowledged son of the Count of that name, a senator. As for me, I christened myself ‘No Luck.’ ”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because there were discussions in my presence, and violent they were, you may be sure. Ah! that is the sort of thing that teaches you life.”
A still more painful and stricken feeling than he had yet suffered in the last half-hour oppressed the priest. It was the beginning of a form of suffocation that would grow worse and worse until it killed him, caused not so much by the things he was told as by the way they were told, and by the brutish face of the outcast that gave emphasis to them. Between this man and himself, between his son and himself, he began to feel that swamp of moral filth that works as a deadly poison on certain beings. This was his son? He could not believe it. He wanted every proof, every possible proof; he must learn all, hear all, listen to all, and suffer all. Again he thought of the olive-trees surrounding his little house, again he murmured: “Oh, God help me!”
Philippe-Auguste had finished his soup, and asked:
“Is there no more to eat, Abbé?”
The kitchen being outside the house in an annex, Marguerite could not hear the curé’s voice, so he warned her of his needs by a few strokes on a Chinese gong that hung behind him on the wall.
He picked up a leather hammer and struck the round metal plaque several times. At first a faint sound escaped from it, which grew gradually and, gaining in weight, turned into the vibrating, sharp, violent, horrible, strident clamour of beaten copper.
The servant appeared. Her face was drawn, she glared at the scoundrel as if, with the instinct of a faithful dog, she felt a presentiment of the drama that was hanging over her master. In her hands she held the grilled fish, which sent out a delicious odour of melted butter. The Abbé divided the fish from head to tail and offered the back fillet to the child of his youth.
“I caught it a short time ago,” he said, a remnant of pride hovering in his distress.
Marguerite stayed in the room.
The priest continued:
“Bring some wine, good wine, some of the white wine of Cape Corsica.”
She succeeded in hiding her disgust but he was obliged to repeat sternly:
“Now then, two bottles.” For when he offered wine to a guest—an unusual pleasure—he always offered himself a bottle too.
Philippe-Auguste said, beaming:
“A jolly good idea. I have not had a meal like this for a long time.”
The servant came back in two minutes’ time. Two minutes that had seemed as long as a twofold eternity to the Abbé: the desire to know everything was scorching his blood and consuming it like hellfire.
The bottles were uncorked, and still the servant lingered with eyes fixed on the young man.
“Leave us,” said the curé.
She pretended not to hear.
He repeated, with a certain harshness:
“I ordered you to leave us alone.”
Whereupon she left the room.
Philippe-Auguste ate the fish greedily, while his father, watching him, became more and more surprised and distressed at the degradation he saw in the face so like his own. The morsels that the Abbé Vilbois lifted to his lips refused to pass his contracted throat, and he chewed them slowly, casting about in his mind for the most urgent of the questions that crowded upon him.
He ended by saying:
“What did she die of?”
“Of lung trouble.”
“Was she ill long?”
“About eighteen months.”
“How did she get it?”
“No one knows.”
A silence fell upon them. The Abbé was lost in thought. He felt troubled by many things that he wanted to know, for since the day of his violent attack upon her, he had heard nothing. It was true that he had not wanted news; he had resolutely buried all memory of her and of his days of happiness. But now that she was dead, he felt a sudden violent desire to know everything, a jealous desire, almost a lover’s desire.
He resumed:
“She was not alone, was she?”
“No, she was still living with him.”
The old man shrank within himself.
“With him, with Pravallon?”
“Of course.”
The man who had been betrayed calculated that the very woman who had deceived him had lived over thirty years with his rival.
Almost in spite of himself, he stammered:
“Were they happy together?”
The young man replied, grinning:
“Well, yes, though there were ups and downs. It would have been all right but for me. I have always spoilt everything.”
“How’s that, and why?” said the priest.
“I have already told you. Because he believed I was his son until I was about fifteen. But he was no fool, the old man, he himself discovered the likeness, and then there were rows. He accused Mamma of landing him in a mess. Mamma retorted: ‘Am I to blame? When you took me, you knew quite well that I was the other’s mistress.’ The other being you.”
“Oh, so they talked about me sometimes?”
“Yes, but they never mentioned your name when I was present, except at the end, the very end. The last days when Mamma knew she was done for. They had no confidence in me.”
“And you … did you soon learn that your mother was living an irregular life?”
“What do you think? I am not a fool, you bet, I never was. You guess these things directly, as soon as you know something of life.”
Philippe-Auguste was pouring out one glass of wine after another. His eyes lighted up, intoxication quickly followed his long fast. The priest noticed this and was going to make him stop drinking, when he remembered that drink made men reckless and talkative, so he took the bottle and refilled the young man’s glass.
Marguerite brought in the dish of chicken and rice. As she placed it on the table, she fixed her eyes on the tramp, then indignantly said to her master:
“Just look how drunk he is, your Reverence.”
“Leave us alone and go away,” said the priest.
She went out slamming the door.
He asked:
“What did your mother say about me?”
“The usual thing that is said about the man you leave; that you were not easy to live with, a worry to a woman, and that you would have made her life very difficult with your ideas.”
“Did she say that often?”
“Yes, sometimes in a roundabout way so that I should not understand, but I guessed what had happened.”
“And you, how were you treated in the home?”
“Me? Very well at first, but very badly later on. When Mamma saw that I was a spoilsport, she chucked me out.”
“How?”
“How! Quite easily. I played some pranks when I was about sixteen, so the idiots put me into a reformatory to get rid of me.”
He put his elbows on the table, resting his cheeks on his hands, and quite drunk, his wits upside-down in drink, he suddenly felt that irresistible wish to talk about himself that turns a drunkard into a drivelling braggart. He was smiling prettily with all a woman’s charm. The Abbé recognised the perverse charm of the boy’s smile, he not only recognised it, he also felt the spell of the charm—hateful but caressing—that had conquered and ruined him in the past. For the moment the child was more like his mother, not in feature, but in the alluring and insincere expression of his face, and more especially in the attraction of that misleading smile that seemed to open a door on all the incredible baseness of his nature.
Philippe-Auguste continued:
“Well, well! I have had a life, I have, ever since I left the reformatory, a curious life for which a novelist would pay a large sum. Really, old Dumas with his Monte Cristo never imagined stranger adventures than have happened to me.”
He was silent, thinking things over with the philosophical seriousness of the meditative drunkard, then he said slowly:
“If you want a boy to turn out well, no matter what he has done he should never be sent to a reformatory, because of the people he has to mix with. I had a jolly good idea, but it failed. One night about nine o’clock I was wandering around with three pals, all four of us rather the worse for drink, on the main road near Folac ford, when what should I see but a carriage full of people asleep!—the man who was driving and his family; they lived at Martinon and were returning home after dining in town. I seized the horse by the reins and forced it on to the ferryboat, then pushed the boat into the middle of the river. That made a noise, and the driver woke and, not able to see anything, whipped up his horse. Off it went and jumped into the stream with the carriage. They were all drowned! My pals informed against me. At first they laughed like anything as they watched me at work. We never thought it would turn out so badly. All we had hoped for was a bath, something to laugh about.
“Since that I have done worse out of revenge for the first joke, which, I must say, did not deserve punishment. However, there is nothing worth telling. I will only tell you about my last trick because I know that will please you. I paid him out for you.”
The Abbé looked at his son with terrified eyes and stopped eating.
Philippe-Auguste was going on with his story.
“No,” the priest said, “not now, presently.”
Turning round, he struck the strident Chinese cymbal and made it cry out.
Marguerite came at once.
Her master gave his orders so harshly that she bowed her head, afraid and docile:
“Bring us the lamp and all that is still to be put on the table; after that you must not come back unless I strike the gong.”
She went out, came back again and put a white china lamp on the tablecloth, a big piece of cheese, some fruit, and then left the room.
The Abbé said with determination:
“Now I am listening.”
Quite undisturbed, Philippe-Auguste filled up his plate with dessert and filled his glass with wine. The second bottle was nearly empty although the curé had not touched it. The young man, his mouth sticky with food and drink, stammering, resumed:
“The last one, well, here you are. It is pretty bad. I had returned home … where I stayed in spite of them because they were afraid of me … afraid of me. … Ah! You must not annoy me. … You know … they were living together and yet not together. He had two homes, he had, one the senator’s, the other the lover’s. But he lived at Mamma’s more than he did at his own home, because he could not do without her. Ah! … she was shrewd, she was knowing, Mamma … she knew how to hold a man, she did! She had taken him body and soul, and she kept him to the end. What fools men are! Well, I had returned and gained the mastery over them because they were afraid of me. I know my way about when necessary, and as for spite, cunning, and violence, I am anyone’s match. Then Mamma fell ill and he settled her in a beautiful place near Meulan in the middle of a park as big as a forest. That lasted about eighteen months … as I have already told you. Then we felt the end approaching. He came from Paris every day, he was full of grief, no doubt about it, real grief.
“Well, one morning they had been jabbering for nearly an hour, and I was wondering whatever they could be chattering about so long, when they called me; and Mamma said:
“ ‘I am on the point of death, and have something I want to tell you, in spite of the Count’s opinion’—she always called him the Count when she spoke about him—‘it is the name of your father, who is still alive.’
“I had asked for it more than a hundred times … more than a hundred times … my father’s name … more than a hundred times … and she had always refused to tell me. … I even think that I struck her one day to make her talk, but it was no use. And then, to get rid of me, she said that you had died penniless, that you were a good-for-nothing, an error of her youth, a maiden’s slip, any old thing. She told the story so well that I swallowed it whole, the story of your death.
“As she was saying: ‘It is your father’s name,’ the other, who was sitting in an armchair, repeated three times, just like this:
“ ‘You are wrong, you are wrong, you are wrong, Rosette.’
“Mamma sat up in bed. I can still see her with the red spots on her cheeks and her bright eyes, for she loved me in spite of all; she said to him:
“ ‘Then do something for him yourself, Philippe.’
“When talking to him she always called him ‘Philippe’ and me ‘Auguste.’
“He started shouting out like a madman:
“ ‘For that blackguard, never, for that rogue, that jailbird, that … that … that …’
“He called me all kinds of names just as if he had done nothing else all his life except look for names for me. I nearly lost my temper, when Mamma bade me be quiet, and said to him:
“ ‘Then you want him to die of hunger, as I have nothing to give him.’
“He replied, not at all worried:
“ ‘Rosette, for thirty years I have given you thirty-five thousand francs a year, that makes over a million. Because of me you have led the life of a rich woman, a well-loved woman, and, I dare to add, a happy woman. I owe nothing to this blackguard who has spoilt our last years together, and he will get nothing from me. Useless to insist. Let him know the name of the other one, if you wish. I am sorry, but I wash my hands of the matter.’
“Then Mamma turned towards me. I said to myself: ‘God … I am going to get my own father back … ; if he has any cash, I am a saved man. …’
“She continued:
“ ‘Your father, the Baron of Vilbois, is now known as the Abbé Vilbois, curé of Girandou: near Toulon. He was my lover when I left him for this man.’ She then told me everything except how she had tricked you about her pregnancy. But, there it is, women never tell the truth.”
He sniggered, unconcerned, displaying all his vileness. He went on drinking and, with a still smiling face, continued:
“Mamma died two days … two days later. We followed her coffin to the grave, he and I … wasn’t it comical! … eh! … he and I … and three servants … that was all. He was weeping like a cow … we were side by side … you would have said it was Papa and Papa’s dear boy.
“Then we went home. Only the two of us. I said to myself: ‘I must be off, without a halfpenny.’ I had just fifty francs. What could I do to pay him out?
“He touched my arm and said:
“ ‘I want to speak to you.’
“I followed him to his study. He sat down before his table and plunged into tears, said that he would not treat me as badly as he had told Mamma he would; he begged me not to worry you. … As for that, that is our business, yours and mine. … He offered me a thousand-franc note … a thousand … a thousand … what could I do with a thousand francs … me … a man like me? I saw there were lots more in the drawer, a whole heap. At the sight of all that paper, I felt I wanted to do for someone. I held out my hand to take his gift, but instead of accepting his charity I sprang upon him, threw him down, strangling him until his eyes bulged out, then when I saw the end was near I gagged and trussed him, undressed him and turned him over, then … Ah! … Ah! Ah! … I jolly well paid him out for you! …”
Philippe-Auguste coughed, choking with joy; the boy’s lip curled with ferocious gaiety and reminded Abbé Vilbois of the smile of the woman for love of whom he had lost his head.
“After?” he said.
“After … Ah! Ah! Ah! … There was a big fire in the grate … it was December … in cold weather … she died … Mamma … a big coal fire … I took up the poker … made it all hot … you see … I made crosses on his back, eight, ten, I don’t know how many, then I turned him over again and made the same number on his belly. Wasn’t it funny, eh, Papa! That is how convicts were marked in the old days. He wriggled like an eel … but I had gagged him well, he could not make a noise. Then I took the notes—twelve of them—with my own that made thirteen … but they brought me no luck. Then I made off telling the servants not to disturb the Count until dinnertime as he was asleep.
“I was sure he would say nothing about it from dread of exposure, as he was a senator. But I was mistaken. Four days later I was pinched in a Paris restaurant. I got three years in jail. That is why I could not come and see you sooner.”
He was still drinking and spluttering and could hardly pronounce one word clearly.
“Now … Papa … Papa curé! Isn’t it funny to have a curé for a papa! … Ah! Ah! must be kind, very kind to the darling boy, because darling boy is out of the common … and he played a lovely trick … didn’t he? … a lovely one … on the old man …”
The same feeling of rage that had maddened Abbé Vilbois in that final scene with the mistress who had betrayed him, seized him now towards this abominable wretch.
He who, in God’s name, had dealt out forgiveness to many shameful secrets whispered in the privacy of the confessional, was pitiless, merciless towards himself, he had ceased to call upon an all-merciful Father to help him, for he understood that no protection from heaven or earth could save anyone so afflicted with misfortune.
All the fire of his passionate heart and of his stirring blood, subdued by the discipline of his station in the Church, awoke in an irresistible revolt against this wretch—his own son—against this likeness to himself, and more to that unworthy mother who had conceived the boy in her own likeness—and, more than all, against the fatality which had riveted this scoundrel to his paternal foot like the fetters of a galley-slave.
He saw, he foresaw all this in a flash of clear-sightedness, shocked from his twenty-five years of pious tranquillity and rest into action.
Suddenly aware that he must take a high tone with this criminal and terrify him at the first words, he said through teeth clenched with anger, taking no account of the drunken state of the wretch:
“Now that you have told me all about it, listen. You must go away tomorrow morning. You must live in a place that I will choose and that you may not leave without my permission. I will make you a small allowance, just enough to live upon, for I have no money. If you disobey me once, this arrangement will come to an end and I will deal with you …”
Although stupefied by wine, Philippe-Auguste understood the threat, and the criminal within him rose instantly to the surface. Hiccuping, he spat out some words:
“Ah! Papa, no use trying it on with me. … You are a curé … I’ve got you in my power … you will take it quietly, like the others.”
The Abbé started, the muscles of the old Hercules were aching to seize the bully, to bend him like a reed, and show him that he must submit to authority.
Pushing the table against the boy’s chest, he shouted:
“Take care, take care. … I am afraid of nobody, not I.”
Losing his balance, the drunkard rocked on his chair, then feeling that he was going to fall and that he was in the priest’s power, with a villainous look on his face he stretched out his hand towards a knife that was lying on the cloth. Abbé Vilbois noticed the movement and gave the table a violent push that sent his son head over heels on to the floor, where he lay on his back. The lamp rolled along the ground and went out.
For a few seconds a thin tinkle of glasses jingling against each other sounded through the darkness, then the creeping of soft bodies over the stone floor, then silence.
With the crash of the fallen lamp, black night, swift and unexpected, had fallen upon the two, leaving them dazed as in the presence of some unspeakable horror.
The drunkard, crouching against the wall, never stirred; the priest remained on his chair, plunged in the blackness of the night that was gradually swallowing up his anger. The veil of darkness thrown over him stayed his anger and brought his furious outburst of temper to an end; other ideas took their place, black and sad as the darkness around him.
Silence reigned, a silence as dense as that of a closed tomb, in which nothing seemed to live or breathe. Not a sound came from without, no sound of wheels in the distance, no sound of a dog barking, not even the rustle of a slight breath of wind among the branches or the tapping of a twig against the walls.
The silence dragged on; it might have been an hour. Then suddenly the gong rang. It rang as if struck by a single hard stroke, sharp and loud, followed by a curious noise of something dropping and of an overturned chair.
On the alert, Marguerite rushed to the room, but on opening the door she drew back in terror of the impenetrable darkness. With pounding heart, and trembling all over, she called out in a low voice, panting for breath:
“Your Reverence, your Reverence.”
There was no answer, not a sound.
“My God, my God, what have they done, what has happened?”
She dare not go in nor dare she go back to fetch a light: she was seized with a wild desire to run away, to escape, to scream, although her limbs shook so violently that she could hardly stand. She repeated:
“Your Reverence, your Reverence, it is I, Marguerite.”
Suddenly, in spite of her fear, she felt she must save her master. One of those sudden fits of bravery that occasionally give women strength to perform heroic deeds filled her soul with the recklessness of terror, and running back to the kitchen, she fetched her lamp.
She stopped just inside the room. The first thing she saw was the vagabond lying against the wall, asleep or apparently asleep, then she saw the broken lamp, then under the table the black feet and black stockinged legs of Abbé Vilbois, whose head must have knocked the gong as he fell over on to his back.
Breathless with fright, her hands trembling, she repeated:
“My God, my God, what is the matter?”
As she stepped forward slowly, taking small steps, she slipped on something greasy and nearly fell down.
Leaning forward, she saw a red liquid trickling over the red flags and spreading around her feet; quickly she ran towards the door, sure that what she had seen was blood.
Mad with terror, she fled from the place and, throwing aside the lamp so that she might see nothing more, she rushed out of doors in the direction of the village. She lurched along, knocking against the trees, with eyes fixed on the distant lights, screaming at the top of her voice.
Her shrill cries pierced the night like the sinister call of the common owl, and she screamed without ceasing: “The tramp … the tramp … the tramp …”
When she reached the nearest houses, scared men came out and gathered around her, but she was too excited to answer their questions; she had completely lost her head.
Finally they understood that some accident had happened at the curé’s, and made up a party to go to his rescue.
The little pink-coloured house in the middle of the olive orchard was invisible, black in the deep, silent night. Ever since the one light from the illuminated window had gone out like a closed eye, the house had been drowned in shadow, lost in the darkness, undiscoverable to those not familiar with the countryside.
Lights were soon moving about over the ground, through the trees, in the direction of the house, throwing long, yellow rays on the burnt grass, and on the distorted trunks of the olives that looked like unreal monsters, like serpents of hell all twisted and misshapen. The beams projected in the distance suddenly showed up something whitish and vague in the darkness, then the low, square wall of the little house turned pink in the lantern-light. The lanterns were carried by the peasants, who accompanied two gendarmes with revolvers, the village constable, the mayor of the village, and Marguerite supported by some of the men, as she was in a state of collapse.
They hesitated for a minute in front of the still open, nightmarish doorway, but the inspector seized a lantern and entered, followed by the others.
The servant had not lied. The blood, now congealed, spread over the flags like a carpet. It had reached along as far as the vagabond, staining a leg and a hand.
Father and son were asleep. One, with cut throat, slept the everlasting sleep, the other slept the sleep of the drunkard. The two policemen threw themselves upon the latter and had handcuffed him before he awoke. He rubbed his eyes, stupefied, besotted with wine; when he saw the priest’s corpse he looked terrified, having no idea what had happened.
“Why ever did he not run away?” said the Mayor.
“He was too drunk,” replied the inspector.
They all agreed with him: it never occurred to anyone that Abbé Vilbois might have caused his own death.