The Chateau d'Argol (13 page)

The preparations for burial were quickly accomplished. The sun hid behind thick mists as Albert and Herminien, carrying Heide's fragile coffin on their shoulders, their wild locks horribly twisted by the last gusts of the tempest, slowly made their way to the graveyard on the shore. Strangely silent was their funereal journey—through an unreal and feathery mist that clung to all the asperities of the ground, muting the sound of their footsteps and the monotonous crackings of the wooden planks so hastily assembled. They came to the far end of the bay and Albert, putting his mouth to Herminien's ear, in a few brief words spoken in a hissing, hollow, and suddenly lifeless voice, reminded him by what an unerring and now particularly sinister coincidence the place of Heide's grave had been long ago
designated.
They once more read the inscription on the stone, and Herminien acquiesced in silence. They dug the grave, they lowered the coffin into its humid bed, then Albert, scooping up a handful of dry sand and leaning over the grave in an attitude of grim meditation, let the warm grains slowly filter through his fingers like a liquid of death, and the delicate bullets could be heard rebounding on the varnished planks with a mournful resonance.

The evening found Albert and Herminien together in the great drawing-room where all the lamps, burning for them alone in a dazzling illumination as for a deathly
celebration
, threw light into the farthest corners of that vast room. And for the first time Herminien brought up the subject of his coming departure, and speaking as of a now irrevocable
decision
, he represented it as determined by the singular circumstances in which death had visited the castle, and particularly by the heavy responsibility which he, Herminien, more than anyone, had indubitably incurred by bringing to these solitary and lugubrious regions a person for whom their relationship, without even taking into account its adventurous and hardly definable character, had certainly always borne the particularly striking mark of (and he oddly insisted on the word)
ill-luck
, constantly confirmed. And although he put forward his reasons in order, and in a matter-of-fact tone that appeared now fiercely ironic, he was not unaware that the air of resignation scarcely tinged with regret, even of
indifference
, with which Albert received them in all their tedious development, concealed without a doubt some secret reticence, difficult to probe and that left a growing uneasiness floating in the air during the rest of the evening which Herminien, nevertheless, seemed anxious to prolong, as though to study a little longer—and with a concentrated passion usually only aroused by a question of life and death—Albert's still, pale face: but behind that white brow, luminous and impassive in the fantastic flickerings of the countless candles, nothing was now legible. At last they separated and sought their chambers in the upper storeys of the castle.

Sleep did not come to Herminien. The moon had hardly begun to flood the sky with all its splendour, when he went to sit at the window on a white stone bench. Marvellous was the forest in its silver sparkling, in its still and slumbrous sweetness. The river seemed strangely near, shining under its luminous meshes of mist. Yes, calm was Argol under its stars, buried in its meshes of mist, and all enfolded in itself, floating through space with its bewitched and translucid air. And yet, that calm night, that sweet night was the night of the
great departure
, for Herminien's eyes could not lie. Before separating in the great drawing-room they had exchanged a solemn promise—and Herminien shuddered at its fabulous majesty.

For a long time he sat thinking of his youth, of all the years he had known Albert, when between them had been woven those
unavowable
bonds whose noose this night was about to strangle them, to unite them. When still only boys—at a time when the most abstruse, the most perplexing problems of theology attracted them with a singular passion—Albert used to call Herminien his
lost soul.

In the very middle of the long December night, down the deserted stairs, through the deserted rooms where the candles were burnt out, where the candles were overturned, he left the castle in a traveller's attire. Very rapidly (for he hastened through the cold night) his steps turned toward the magic avenue which Albert and Heide had followed on a fatal day. The folds of his cloak flapped around him like wings, and behind him and in his brain, in those regions of the brain where the exacerbated senses hold sway, footsteps echoed deep in the icy night—his footsteps? Out of the night they came toward him—and, as though he had always expected them, he recognized them. But he did not look back toward the mysterious traveller. He did not look back. Quickly he started to run down the middle of the avenue, and the footsteps
followed.
And out of breath now, he felt that they were about to overtake him and, in the omnipotent weakness of his soul, he felt the icy flash of a dagger gliding between his shoulder blades like a handful of snow.