The Salzburg Tales (40 page)

It was July in the year 1788. The chestnuts were dark and the fruit-trees heavy with leaves and fruit. One had split in halves in the night, loaded to the ground with apricots which strewed the lawn in a Danaân shower. It was too hot for anyone to walk far, except in the two twilights, and the overseer was obliged to give two hours' respite in the middle of the day. The peasants rested then in the shade near their work. Jean would throw himself on the ground as soon as the castle bell rang at midday, fall asleep instantly, and after half an hour,
wake up and make off somewhere in the park or woods. The others slept heavily, or tossed, distressed by flies, or talked largely with the bravura of the south.

Isabella, restless too, went out from the castle many a hot noonday. The birds with full throats choired in the rank woods, the sun shot down triangular funnels to dapple the earth, and there was no human sound but the crackle of a wain climbing the yellowbearded hill. All slept. In the hedged Wilderness, left with intent in a corner of the chestnut park, Jean slept under a cataract of dreams, in which figured the rough mosses, the lights inconstantly piercing the trees, and the beatitudes of sleep itself, for in those parts sleep is clapped upon the sleeper like a Helm of Darkness, which renders the dreamer invisible to himself, but the rest of the world wonderfully visible. Jean wore a blue tunic, and his yellow waxed sabots stood beside him under a thorn bush. So says the legend.

One day after he had thus lain for a while he woke. The wood still trembled in the heat, the air was still filled with the tumult of sounds, the birds' song, the stream's song and the noise of sleep departing four-footed through the air. A quiet fell then, and he saw coming towards him, unawares, the Marquise, wandered from her attendants, dressed in a blue dress, buxom, with forehead, breast and arms gilded by the sun, and dark refulgent eyes. When she looked at him, he rose, bowed almost ceremoniously, smiled, his large white teeth appearing in his brown face like almond flesh in its shell, and he began turning through the Wilderness in a circle, weaving the bushes and trees in a fillet, with handsprings and tumbling. Jean approached again, and sitting on his haunches, began to whistle softly, calling the birds. They answered, hopped, whirred and came with murmurings nearer, filled the bushes and trees, and began to dart their heads, little, round and dark as musical crotchets, inquisitively from rough trunk and airy spray. Isabella stood stockstill in the shade, and the birds, torn between curiosity and fear, skipped about, drops of light and blots of shadow.

The silence among men, the glare of the mighty archangel riding in the sky, the tufts of leaves turtle-doving in the ceiling of
the trees, the velvety air, the little cherubs flown round them in a host, almost transported these poor souls. The birds had a moment of doubt, and the wood had fallen silent; but suddenly a bird's note, high, trilling and unmusical broke out through the leaves. At the same moment they looked at each other with tears. The sun moving, now fell on the Marquise, once more gilding her, and the birds burst out in a full piping. Isabella's nurse called her in the distance, and the bell was heard, bringing the workmen back to work. The stream, as if glad to be left alone, cried louder, and the sun shone in more silver solitudes. As they left the grove by different paths, the sound of birds fell behind them. The Marquise suddenly remembered Jean's antics and looked round; Jean turned another somersault, a bird on a bush near at hand squeaked and flew, a cuckoo began gently to sway and call in the topmost thick, and they came out of the edge of the park. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

The next day both our friends went to the same Wilderness, and so perhaps for a fortnight. Then Jean, who had begun all this out of a quaint benevolence, perhaps, noted for the first time a wheel of lustrous lights which turned with his gambols through her eyes during their midday hours; and her nose, chin and mouth, preponderant, fleshy and overtly voluptuous. He felt a curious sickness beginning in the pit of his stomach. The next day he absented himself, and Isabella was found standing on the edge of the customary glade, weeping. She cunningly refused to say a word about it, went to inspect the trench that afternoon, stood at its side, melancholy, for a moment, cast one covert glance in Jean's direction, and feeling disconcerted by his naked sweating back, his bare feet planted in the muck, and the pellets of dirt flying out of the ditch, went away.

Is it improbable that a delicately-bred lady loved a man of the common people, and one not even handsome? Who shall explain these things; misalliance is common, and ladies of high rank have been happy with peasant husbands. For our ladies here, and to me, it seems a very strange thing; but it is said in those things, there is a sufficient reason, or perhaps the woman is too simple for her station,
and the man superior to his. Yet if it were natural, the sight could not be so disagreeable to us as it is; and these stories of misalliance would not always have such a dismal end. This one has too.

The Marquis had his own troubles. The towers of Castelreal were too thick and tall, they looked like braggarts stuffed with provender, who defied those that should never be defied, the infinitely wretched and hopeless. His modern methods seemed invented to irritate and degrade these poor peasants of mediæval mind and life. Then, it could not be denied, the Marquis had speculated heavily in grain, and the rust which had attacked the crops in the previous year and ruined half the province, had only made him richer, and raised the value of his vast stocks. Now there was burning round him, metaphorically and physically, a flame of resentment: haystacks and a field of wheat had burned and the peasants could hardly be induced to lend a hand to extinguish the fire. In the village last mid-Lent a personage disguised as a gipsy, who offered to tell the Marquis's fortune, had recited in a hollow voice, “When the red stallion tramples your fields at night, when your wheat turns black from despite, when under the Pheasant's sign, new wine's added to old wine, when learning manners, peasants like Dooks, eat with— pitchforks and reaping-hooks, Trouble's rife! Run for your life!”

“What nonsense!” said the master.

“And two sous' worth of wisdom,” said the upposed gipsy, for two sous he had received. Afterwards the master saw in this an incendiary's threat, and gave the owner of the wine-shop “The Pheasant Pie” a bad hour looking for his gipsy. He communicated with the gendarmerie of B——, the nearest town, and kept a watch round the castle at night.

At the end of July, on an evening of full moon, the Marquis and his wife arrived by coach from B——where they had been entertained, and after passing through the village, now garlanded for a fête, and embellished by a fine sunset, reached the castle in time to receive guests for dinner. At a certain moment of the evening, cousin Raymond thought it amusing to lead the Marquise and the
younger guests out into the Great Place to admire the booths and installations for the fête. The villagers and peasants were admitted on this occasion to the Court of Honour of the Castle, which adjoined the village square at a distance of a hundred metres, to gaze at the worn turrets, the primitive arcade supporting a clumsy arcature on the interior wall, and the flagstones stained by torchlight.

The Marquise, pleasant in her simplicity, smiled at the village cocks in sashes and curls who murmured their base compliments as she passed, and soon disappeared to her bed. Only in the early morning, her nurse looking into her room found it strewn with her evening clothes, her bed smooth, and her cloak gone.

Messengers hurried out after the guests now far on their way, or already home, and servants, going through the sleeping village, monotone, garlanded, under the full moon, urgently called to the villagers, who presently appeared at their windows, almost naked in the midsummer heat. All the early hours, flares passed along the country ways, and lanterns hopped about haystacks and orchards. By the river they did a lugubrious fishing, but only caught the skylarking moon, jolly with embonpoint, bobbing like a dolphin in the currents.

The next two nights a beacon burned all night on a tower of Castelreal to attract the Marquise, if she were wandering. On the third day the Marquis, returning from B——, saw like a vision, Isabella, rosy, calm and smiling, exercising her dogs along the roads, with two silent servants following her. She said she had slept in the fields, and fed from the orchards; but the servants said she had been well tended.

The Marquis often passed the night over his accounts, his architect's plans, and the journals from Bordeaux and Paris. In order to clear his estate of the insanitary hovels in which his peasants lived, he intended to build several new villages, with cottages with brick flooring, drainage, and in proper alignment. The proposal aroused bitter opposition among the peasants, who pretended that the rents he would charge would be too high. The rents were modest, but perhaps they were right: a small sum to a Marquis is an outrageous
price to a peasant. He intended to place one of these villages in “the place called Gaspard”, which, at a distance of three kilometres from the chateau, had been used by the older lords of the demesne for pheasant shooting. At the moment, however, he was otherwise engrossed, and he had put off the affair from day to day.

One early morning he passed from his library through the serpentine corridor leading to his wife's apartment. The leaded windows of the corridor looked straight down the eastern face and over the plain, which now seemed, in the waning moon, glaucous and horrid as the damp flank of a monster. He observed a lantern crossing the gardens, which lighted momently a woman's rough cloak and a peasant's trousers, and after flickering about in the vines at the foot of the cliff, disappeared from sight. The Marquis supposed that a couple of lovers had made of his vines their bed curtains, and somewhat amused, passed on, hoping for a little counsel from his wife, whose nature seemed to change at sunset and become serener and wiser, as if a superior spirit guided her ingenious, consoling form till daylight. Tonight her bed lay open without an imprint. He knew she had not left the castle, which was well guarded now, and thinking she was sleeping with her nurse, he went away. Half-way along the corridor he heard a sound in her room; when he returned and looked in, he saw Isabella with shut eyes, her hair still banded, lying on her bed, simulating sleep.

“My wife, where were you? I was looking for you.”

She did not stir.

“Why were you with your nurse so late? Are you ill?”

Isabella opened upon him her large eyes, tranquil and almost superhuman at this hour, as if dilated with belladonna. “No, I am not ill: I am very well.”

“Where were you?”

“I was—lonely.”

“Are you lonely, Isabella?”

“No, no, not now,” she said hastily, and loosening her braided hair, shut her eyes.

The next night the moon was yet higher when he stepped that way, and the fields of wheat beyond the river showed up in pale bands like hair. On the orchard path below the wall, the two peasants were climbing once more, clinging to the bushes and fruit-trees, as if they would have their shapes confounded with them. His wife's apartment was locked. On the third following night, when the moon was on the horizon and all was dark below, he entered her room, and finding her absent, he called the nurse and tried with her all the closets, cupboards and corners of the apartment to see where his wife hid at night; and, with their candles casting cross-eyed bleary glances at this and that, they counted her clothes to see if she had taken hat or cloak. Finding nothing missing, the Marquis sent the nurse to bed, and kicked a box angrily against the wall. An echo came from within the wall. Here was another cupboard overlooked before. The door was concealed by a large tapestry representing flowers and fruits, and by two sections of panelling. The door, which opened inwards, was locked and immovable.

All this had taken time, and the Marquis sat down wearily on the same box to await his wife's return. There he sat with a hundred stretchings, cracking his joints, yawning, snapping his fingers and making exclamations half aloud. He was almost asleep when he heard footsteps near. They stopped dead like a dream, and through a yellow five minutes of candlelight he waited. Nothing more! He went through the antechamber and investigated the angles of the corridor, even passing into his own rooms. When he returned he found his wife stretched on her bed. He tried the secret locked door and found it still locked. He raised his candle towards the ceiling, but found no trapdoor there! He sat down by his wife's pillow, patience on a monument, and after some time he heard her say: “What is it, Emile? What do you want?” and he looked down into her large indescribably lively eyes, as strange as animals of another order, living creatures that might fly up suddenly in the dark, like bats or birds.

“Where have you been? What do you do at night?”

She shook her head. Exhausted, he said no more for this night, and sank into sleep, to dream he was wandering in a forest of snakes. The Marquise slept thereafter with a little maid by her side to prevent her sleepwalking.

She was ill at ease, idle and discontented since her adventures. She lost appetite and colour; she complained bitterly because she was never alone, and of the dogs and guards in the castle precincts. The autumn came and she was full of fancies; she bought innumerable pieces of embroidery which she threw in a drawer, coaxed Raymond to send to Paris for a purple silk dress for her (he added to it the gift of a bottle of vervain); then she wanted to go to Bordeaux for the opera season, and bought a ring and a new dog. Finally the nurse went running to the Marquis and told him that his own private tree would bear fruit.

The Marquis one day forsook his harvesting fields and his works and took the old path to “the place called Gaspard.” After ascending a half-wooded hill, he paused and looked over the valley, sombre under a sky where flocculent clouds streamed pell-mell. On the path, which now declined on the farther side, he came to a signpost with the word Gaspard. The path insinuated itself through an exceedingly thick bushland, and continued along the crest or higher slopes of the hills, with occasional glances below into the rich and darkening valley. The ground was almost bare of plants, owing to the thick tissue of the branches; dried fungi hung on the trunks, and new colonies, fulvous, gold and leopard-spotted, sprung from the new season's rains, trooped in the hollows.