The Eternal Adam and other stories (13 page)

The old man concealed this circumstance
from everyone, even from his daughter; but from that time his health rapidly
declined. There were only the last oscillations of a pendulum, which goes
slower when nothing restores its original force. It seemed as if the laws of
gravity, acting directly upon him, were dragging him irresistibly down to the
grave.

The Sunday so ardently anticipated by
Gerande at last arrived. The weather was fine, and the temperature inspiriting.
The people of Geneva were passing quietly through the streets, gaily chatting
about the return of spring. Gerande, tenderly taking the old man’s arm, directed
her steps towards the cathedral, while Scholastique followed behind with the
prayer-books. People looked curiously at them as they passed. The old
watchmaker permitted himself to be led like a child, or rather like a blind
man. The faithful of Saint Pierre were almost frightened when they saw him
cross the threshold, and shrank back at his approach.

The chants of high mass were already
resounding through the church. Gerande went to her accustomed bench, and
kneeled with profound and simple reverence. Master Zacharius remained standing
upright beside her.

The ceremonies continued with the majestic
solemnity of that faithful age, but the old man had no faith. He did not
implore the pity of Heaven with cries of anguish of the ‘Kyrie’; he did not,
with the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’, sing the splendours of the heavenly heights; the
reading of the Testament did not draw him from his materialistic reverie, and
he forgot to join in the homage of the ‘Credo’. This proud old man remained
motionless, as insensible and silent as a stone statue; and even at the solemn
moment when the bell announced the miracle of transubstantiation, he did not
bow his head, but gazed directly at the sacred host which the priest raised
above the heads of the faithful. Gerande looked at her father, and a flood of
tears moistened her missal. At this moment the clock of Saint Pierre struck
half-past eleven. Master Zacharius turned quickly towards this ancient clock
which still spoke. It seemed to him as if its face was gazing steadily at him;
the figures of the hours shone as if they had been engraved in lines of fire,
and the hands shot forth electric sparks from their sharp points.

The mass ended. It was customary for the
‘Angelus’ to be said at noon, and the priests, before leaving the altar, waited
for the clock to strike the hour of twelve. In a few moments this prayer would
ascend to the feet of the Virgin.

But suddenly a harsh noise was heard.
Master Zacharius uttered a piercing cry.

The large hand of the clock, having reached
twelve, had abruptly stopped, and the clock did not strike the hour.

Gerande hastened to her father’s aid. He
had fallen down motionless, and they carried him outside the church.

‘It is the death-blow!’ murmured Gerande,
sobbing.

When he had been borne home, Master Zacharius
lay upon his bed utterly crushed. Life seemed only to still exist on the
surface of his body, like the last whiffs of smoke about a lamp just
extinguished.

When he came to his senses, Aubert and
Gerande were leaning over him. In these last moments the future took in his
eyes the shape of the present. He saw his daughter alone, without a protector.

‘My son,’ said he to Aubert, ‘I give my
daughter to thee.’

So saying, he stretched out his hands
towards his two children, who were thus united at his death-bed.

But soon Master Zacharius lifted himself up
in a paroxysm of rage. The words of the little old man recurred to his mind.

‘I do not wish to die!’ he cried; ‘I cannot
die! I, Master Zacharius, ought not to die! My books – my accounts! -’

With these words he sprang from his bed
towards a book in which the names of his customers and the articles which had
been sold to them were inscribed. He seized it and rapidly turned over its
leaves, and his emaciated finger fixed itself on one of the pages.

‘There!’ he cried, ‘there! this old iron
clock, sold to Pittonaccio! It is the only one that has not been returned to
me! It still exists – it goes – it lives! Ah, I wish for it -I must find it! I
will take such care of it that death will no longer seek me!’

And he fainted away.

Aubert and Gerande knelt by the old man’s bedside and prayed together.

Several days passed, and Master Zacharius,
though almost dead, rose from his bed and returned to active life under a
supernatural excitement. He lived by pride. But Gerande did not deceive
herself; her father’s body and soul were for ever lost.

The old man got together his last remaining
resources, without thought of those who were dependent upon him. He betrayed an
incredible energy, walking, ferreting about, and mumbling strange,
incomprehensible words.

One morning Gerande went down to his shop.
Master Zacharius was not there. She waited for him all day. Master Zacharius
did not return.

Gerande wept bitterly, but her father did
not reappear.

Aubert searched everywhere through the
town, and soon came to the sad conviction that the old man had left it.

‘Let us find my father!’ cried Gerande,
when the young apprentice told her this sad news.

‘Where can he be?’ Aubert asked himself.

An inspiration suddenly came to his mind.
He remembered the last words which Master Zacharius had spoken. The old man
only lived now in the old iron clock that had not been returned! Master
Zacharius must have gone in search of it.

Aubert spoke of this to Gerande.

‘Let us look at my father’s book,’ she
replied.

They descended to the shop. The book was
open on the bench. All the watches or clocks made by the old man, and which had
been returned to him because they were out of order, were stricken out
excepting one: —

Sold to M. Pittonaccio, an iron clock, with bell and moving figures:

sent to his château at Andernatt.

It was this ‘moral’ clock of which
Scholastique had spoken with so much enthusiasm.

‘My father is there!’ cried Gerande.

‘Let us hasten thither,’ replied Aubert.
‘We may still save him!’

‘Not for this life,’ murmured Gerande, ‘but
at least for the other.’

‘By the mercy of God, Gerande! The château
of Andernatt stands in the gorge of the ‘Dents-du-Midi’, twenty hours from
Geneva. Let us go!’

That very evening Aubert and Gerande,
followed by the old servant, set out on foot by the road which skirts Lake
Leman. They accomplished five leagues during the night, stopping neither at
Bessinge nor at Ermance, where rises the famous château of the Mayors. They
with difficulty forded the torrent of the Dranse, and everywhere they went they
inquired for Master Zacharius, and were soon convinced that they were on his
track.

The next morning, at daybreak, having
passed Thonon, they reached Evian, whence the Swiss territory may be seen extended
over twelve leagues. But the two betrothed did not even perceive the enchanting
prospect. They went straight forward, urged on by a supernatural force. Aubert,
leaning on a knotty stick, offered his arm alternately to Gerande and to
Scholastique, and he made the greatest efforts to sustain his companions. All
three talked of their sorrow, of their hopes, and thus passed along the
beautiful road by the waterside, and across the narrow plateau which unites the
borders of the lake with the heights of the Chalais. They soon reached
Bouveret, where the Rhone enters the Lake of Geneva.

On leaving this town they diverged from the
lake, and their weariness increased amid these mountain districts. Vionnaz,
Chesset, Collombay, half-lost villages, were soon left behind. Meanwhile their
knees shook, their feet were lacerated by the sharp points which covered the
ground like a brushwood of granite; – but no trace of Master Zacharius!

He must be found, however, and the two
young people did not seek repose either in the isolated hamlets or at the
château of Monthay, which, with its dependencies, formed the appanage of
Margaret of Savoy. At last, late in the day, and half dead with fatigue, they
reached the hermitage of Notre-Dame-du-Sex, which is situated at the base of
the Dents-du-Midi, 600 feet above the Rhone.

The hermit received the three wanderers as
night was falling. They could not have gone another step, and here they must
needs rest.

The hermit could give them no news of
Master Zacharius. They could scarcely hope to find him still living amid these
sad solitudes. The night was dark, the wind howled amid the mountains, and the
avalanches roared down from the summits of the broken crags.

Aubert and Gerande, crouching before the
hermit’s hearth, told him their melancholy tale. Their mantles, covered with
snow, were drying in a corner; and without, the hermit’s dog barked
lugubriously, and mingled his voice with that of the tempest.

‘Pride,’ said the hermit to his guests,
‘has destroyed an angel created for good. It is the stumbling-block against
which the destinies of man strike. You cannot reason with pride, the principal
of all the vices, since, by its very nature, the proud man refuses to listen to
it. It only remains, then, to pray for your father!’

All four knelt down, when the barking of
the dog redoubled, and someone knocked at the door of the hermitage.

‘Open, in the devil’s name!’

The door yielded under the blows, and a
dishevelled, haggard, ill-clothed man appeared.

‘My father!’ cried Gerande.

It was Master Zacharius.

‘Where am I?’ said he. ‘In eternity! Time
is ended – the hours no longer strike – the hands have stopped!’

‘Father!’ returned Gerande, with so piteous
an emotion that the old man seemed to return to the world of the living.

‘Thou here, Gerande?’ he cried; ‘and thou,
Aubert? Ah, my dear betrothed ones, you are going to be married in our old
church!’

‘Father,’ said Gerande, seizing him by the
arm, ‘come home to Geneva, – come with us!’

The old man tore away from his daughter’s
embrace and hurried towards the door, on the threshold of which the snow was
falling in large flakes.

‘Do not abandon your children!’ cried
Aubert.

‘Why return.’ replied the old man sadly,
‘to those places which my life has already quitted, and where a part of myself
is for ever buried?’

‘Your soul is not dead,’ said the hermit
solemnly.

‘My soul? O no, – its wheels are good! I
perceive it beating regularly -’

‘Your soul is immaterial, – your soul is
immortal!’ replied the hermit sternly.

‘Yes – like my glory! But it is shut up in
the château of Andernatt, and I wish to see it again!’

The hermit crossed himself; Scholastique
became almost inanimate. Aubert held Gerande in his arms.

‘The château of Andernatt is inhabited by
one who is lost,’ said the hermit, ‘one who does not salute the cross of my
hermitage.’

‘My father, go not thither!’

‘I want my soul! My soul is mine -’

‘Hold him! Hold my father!’ cried Gerande.

But the old man had leaped across the
threshold, and plunged into the night, crying, ‘Mine, mine, my soul!’

Gerande, Aubert, and Scholastique hastened
after him. They went by difficult paths, across which Master Zacharius sped
like a tempest, urged by an irresistible force. The snow raged around them, and
mingled its white flakes with the froth of the swollen torrents.

As they passed the chapel erected in memory
of the massacre of the Theban legion, they hurriedly crossed themselves. Master
Zacharius was not to be seen.

At last the village of Evionnaz appeared in
the midst of this sterile region. The hardest heart would have been moved to
see this hamlet, lost among these horrible solitudes. The old man sped on, and
plunged into the deepest gorge of the Dents-du-Midi, which pierce the sky with
their sharp peaks.

Soon a ruin, old and gloomy as the rocks at
its base, rose before him.

‘It is there – there!’ he cried, hastening
his pace still more frantically.

The château of Andernatt was a ruin even
then. A thick, crumbling tower rose above it, and seemed to menace with its
downfall the old gables which reared themselves below. The vast piles of jagged
stones were gloomy to look on. Several dark halls appeared amid the debris,
with caved-in ceilings, now become the abode of vipers.

A low and narrow postern, opening upon a
ditch choked with rubbish, gave access to the château. Who had dwelt there none
knew. No doubt some margrave, half lord, half brigand, had sojourned in it; to
the margrave had succeeded bandits or counterfeit coiners, who had been hanged
on the scene of their crime. The legend went that, on winter nights, Satan came
to lead his diabolical dances on the slope of the deep gorges in which the
shadow of these ruins was engulfed.

But Master Zacharius was not dismayed by
their sinister aspect. He reached the postern. No one forbade him to pass. A
spacious and gloomy court presented itself to his eyes; no one forbade him to
cross it. He passed along the kind of inclined plane which conducted to one of
the long corridors, whose arches seemed to banish daylight from beneath their
heavy springings. His advance was unresisted. Gerande, Aubert, and Scholastique
closely followed him.