The Chateau d'Argol (12 page)

DEATH

S
OON
HERMINIEN
'
S
HEALTH
seemed completely restored, and once more he and Albert engaged in those interminable conversations, resumed not from force of habit alone but above all because of the irritating pleasure afforded by the knowledge that between them there now existed a forbidden subject. For Albert—while Heide, whom he saw only at rare intervals and whose life, now completely vegetative and as though consumed by a fanatical love, was spent almost entirely in the twilight of her own room, remained an ever-living presence in his heart—these conversations, although their content remained perfectly insignificant, soon became the object of a daily
anguish
which would strike his heart with a sudden shock whenever in one of the corridors could be heard the reverberation of his friend's nonchalant step. And yet never had their thoughts seemed more vigorously lucid, more unerring and profound their analyses whenever abstruse questions of philosophy, and more particularly of aesthetics, arose between them. But, sometimes, having reached the heart of a complicated discussion, the sound of their mingling voices would seem brusquely suspended, their thoughts would ebb like the waves of the sea suddenly driven back to their profoundest depths, and their glances cross with the silent glitter of steel.

Meanwhile, one by one, the days went by, taking with them the last vestiges of Herminien's illness, and for Albert the now fatal hour of Herminien's departure approached; for he
could no longer
be separated from Herminien, and with all the power of his mind, he hailed, like a flood of refreshing waters, the advent of the denouement in which his own life and death would be at stake, but which would instantly terminate the atrocious tension that had ravaged his whole body ever since his walk through the forest. And the days that fled, ever shorter and shorter, ever darker and darker, lent to Herminien's presence, ever more uncertain, an agonizing and mournful charm, and this black and fraternal angel, this Visitor of the dark cloak who was bathed in such a fatal mystery, and whose departure must remove forever any chance of
knowing
, Albert would now willingly have forced to stay with the irony of cries, tears and the most ardent supplication.

In the course of these familiar and listless conversations, it was soon disclosed that the long days Herminien had spent away from Argol had been employed in researches—extremely precise and meticulous, and which had led him to explore completely forgotten files of the archives of Brittany—on the history of the castle and the circumstances of its construction, which seemed to go back to the remote period of the Norman invasions and the incomparably bloody battles the Bretons, then recently landed in this melancholy country, had waged against the invaders. These discoveries—which included in particular a detailed plan of the original construction—an extremely rare document which he had been permitted to take out of a museum for a brief period—seemed convincing, and on a leaden afternoon of December which promised in advance a day of complete idleness, Herminien, with singular insistence, suggested to Albert that they should verify the existence of a secret passage whose
entrance
alone was clearly indicated by references in the parchment, as though its
destination
must, at all costs, be kept secret, and of which no recollection remained in the memory of the servants, all of them old inmates of the castle, no trace in the numerous legends familiar to all the peasants of this region whose perturbing centre was Argol.

They went down to the great drawing-room which the murky pallor of the sky filled with a dreary dusk, still further darkened by the heavy silken draperies which Albert, going over to the window, for a moment drew aside. Thick clouds rushed across the sky, heralds of a tempest which, from all indications, seemed imminent, and the wind filled the naked woods with a furious, continuous hissing. The atrocious desolation of these boundless spaces suddenly pierced his heart with the chill of steel. Meanwhile Herminien, having taken some mason's tools out of a bag, began to tap the thick walls in the place where the secret aperture was indicated on the plan, and soon both of them, with a strange, absorbed attention, were listening to the blows on the smooth wall, whose echo seemed to reverberate through the most remote corridors of the castle like an awaited dagger blow. For a long time they pursued their search in vain but, suddenly, as Herminien's fingers, feeling for some interstice in the wall, inadvertently pressed the head of a large copper nail that secured the rods holding the long draperies, the startling click of some secret mechanism was heard, and one of the panels decorating one end of the wall, sliding open without effort, revealed a yawning black orifice within. A breath of cold air blew in their faces, and Herminien, seizing one of the copper candelabra standing on a nearby console, beckoned Albert to follow him.

In the hazy and flickering light of the candle Herminien held, it was evident from the dilapidated state of the place thus revealed, that this subterranean passage, accomplice of some secret and criminal love, had from time immemorial been left to slow decay. Great masses of heavy rubble fallen from the narrow vault, lay scattered on the ground, and on every side the flaking walls, betraying throughout the persistent humidity of the climate, appeared to be covered with a whitish efflorescence. The peculiar odour of wood that has for a long time been enclosed in a damp place, assailed their nostrils. Meanwhile, as they made their way with some difficulty through masses of fallen plaster and debris hanging down from the mouldering beams, Albert pointed out, with a feeling of uneasiness, that the long spiderwebs imprisoning the dust of ages in their meshes, and whose unbroken web
should
have stretched across the entire width of the vault, as though torn by some recent passage,
hung
down along the walls, draping them with their sordid folds and leaving in the middle of the vault an inexplicably free space.

The direction of the passage was at every moment changed by sharp turns, so that it was not long before they were completely lost. However, it soon became evident after they had climbed several flights of decayed and crumbling stairs which at intervals blocked the vault, that the exit would be found in one of the upper storeys of the castle. But only an impenetrable silence on Herminien's part greeted this remark proffered by Albert, with a passionate eagerness hardly warranted by the, on the whole, insignificant character of the observation, and whose accent surprised Albert himself. Soon they came face to face with a wall made of rude oaken timbers, and Albert's heart began to beat with an emotion that curiosity alone could not altogether explain, while Herminien's fingers groped in the darkness with meticulous haste, and quickly found the mechanism which controlled this final issue. The heavy oak panel slid back without a sound, and Albert and Herminien found themselves in Heide's chamber. At this late hour of the declining day, an almost total obscurity reigned throughout the room filled with the redolence of a penetrating perfume which floated around the furs and white draperies, while on every object lay the seal of so secret an intimacy that Albert and Herminien hesitated as though on the threshold of some forbidden sanctuary.

The bed, toward which Albert's glance now turned, in the traces of infinitely graceful and voluptuous curves, bore the recent imprint of a woman's body which still seemed to be crushing it with its rich and omnipotent splendour, with the ravishing weight of its weary limbs—and his whole body was seized with a horrible trembling. For a long time they remained silent. Had Albert then turned from the depths of his anguish toward Herminien, he might perhaps have seen flitting across his friend's lips a cunning smile whose indubitable and scabrous
insolence
revealed the consciousness of his imperturbable self-possession, seeming to confirm that singular detachment shown by him, in the course of this exploration, toward all those details which he had observed with the
sang-froid,
of a spectator who foresees with complete lucidity the outcome in advance. Little by little total darkness took possession of the room, and the reddish flickerings thrown by the candle now near its end, lighted it as for a vigil to which the prolonged silence added a character of intolerable solemnity. And when once more they entered the subterranean passage, its sordid darkness seemed to bring to both of them a feeling of unexpected
relief.

For Albert, the evening passed in sombre silence. Vainly he sought oblivion in the cool darkness of his pillows—the nitrous atmosphere, increasing with the approach of the December storm, thick and suffocating, chased away all thought of sleep, and half reclining he remained for a long time listening to the drumming, which seemed startlingly close, of the rain drops on the window-pane, as though indefatigably driven out of the profound night now shaken to its depths by the furious gusts of wind. No, such a night was not meant for sleep! With a hand that shook with fever, he lighted a candle standing on the table by his side, and, suddenly, out of the darkness at the far end of the room, reflected in the high crystal mirror loomed his enigmatic image.

The change that had come over his physiognomy in the course of these last few weeks had now assumed an almost terrifying character, and his strong constitution seemed to be completely undermined by the effects of a disease whose symptoms pointed to none of the ordinary maladies. His dilated nostrils, whose diaphanous membranes gave to his expression such an air of lofty spirituality, now had a waxy consistency that seemed to betray a slow wasting away of the living tissue. A bitter line showed at the corners of his mouth. But above all, his eyes, which burned with a tremulous glow like that of a beacon in their hollow orbits, as though transfigured by the expression of a constant
fear
far surpassing all other horrors, and whose profound ravages attested to its indubitably familiar character now reflected in the depth of that mirroring obscurity, suddenly struck him with such horror and disgust that, seizing the copper candelabrum, with demented fury he hurled it against the glass, which shattered into a thousand pieces and lay scattered over the floor. Then in the inky darkness, like a bubble of poisonous gas, from the depth of his memory rose the recollection of that tortured night, and on the festive, the magnificent bed all adorned in its white draperies, glimpsed for an instant in the flickering candle light, appeared Heide's naked image that he had evoked from the fresh contours of her overwhelming imprint, and beside her like a sombre and unleashed angel, surrendering himself to all the frenzy, all the petrifying bliss of sacrilege, it seemed to him that Herminien with a terrible fixity kept his eyes riveted on the dazzling wound—and suddenly everything around them seemed to vanish—and between him and this atrocious and hypnotic couple the humid gulfs of night seemed suddenly to roll back, tearing open a fathomless and boundless space, and hurling him always farther away, forever cut off, forever alone, forever separated, without any possibility of appeal, of pardon, or redemption, far from what he now knew would
never again
exist. "Never again." Out of his delirium he pronounced the words in a half whisper, and the sound of his voice as though coming from a stranger's mouth—so deeply was he plunged in the absorbing intensity of his vision—suddenly completely roused him.

With a meticulous deliberation, with movements suddenly of a disconcerting precision, strangely in contrast to his recent demented gesture, seeming to indicate a second state similar to that of a sleepwalker, he rose and dressed completely. For a moment he pushed open the sashes of the lofty windows and, leaning on the window bar, clasped in both his hands his forehead bathed in sweat, and the soul of Herminien, suddenly fraternal and reconciled, seemed to come toward him on the breath of the tempest, and touched his forehead with an icy coldness, with an appeasement beyond that of death itself. Out of a chest he took a finely chased dagger and, with a mad smile, for an instant tried the sharp edge on one of his fingers; then, closing the window as though regretfully on the yellow illumination of the storm now at its height, and with rapid steps, through the deserted corridors he made his way to the great drawing-room. With an odd and almost solemn slowness, the secret panel glided back without effort under his fingers.

Long hours later, out of a heavy and dreamless slumber, he was aroused by cries reverberating through the entire mass of the castle, and seeming of such an alarming and abnormal urgency—waking him out of a sleep almost as profound as that of drunkenness—that he was brought to a half-consciousness of the significant
lapse of time
that had passed for him outside his room and, his heart suddenly suffocated by a supreme anguish, he threw his cloak hastily over his shoulders and hurried to Heide's chamber. Heide was dying, and the pallor on the faces around her made it evident that all succour was now in vain. Near her a vial, still half-full of a dark liquid, showed to what a potent remedy she had turned in order to flee a life whose last tie, the only one she was willing to recognize as valid, had been broken for her that night, and in a manner so fatal and so unlooked for. And her face, buried in her pillows, and which she had covered with her bloodless hands in a gesture of impotent and childish protection, revealed, even before the slow advent of the longed-for death, in the anguish of a terrible haste, that she had already sought the invincible oblivion of her tortures in the rivers of a
night
without stars and without a tomorrow, which seemed now to be covering her on all sides with a surprising peace and under an immense thickness. And from Albert's eyes and from his throat, in the utterly unexpected horror of this ultimate gesture, that seemed appallingly to bear witness against him before God and man, poured the bitter and fiery tempest of the tears and sobs of damnation. With his hands, with his lips buried in the folds of her robe of innocence, in the midst of demented kisses he endeavoured to warm her cold face and, wildly throwing himself on the bed, in a mournful embrace would have wrested her body, already submissive, subjugated and yielding, even in its most secret molecules and already governed by laws eternally different, from the stern and final suzerainty of death—then uttering a prolonged and savage cry, he fainted.