The Thibaults (101 page)

“Pater noster, qui es in ccelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.

“Fiat voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra!’

M. Thibault had ceased tossing to and fro and was gazing up at the Abbé. His lips began quivering and a wry look settled on his face, the look of a child who is on the brink of tears. His head swayed slowly this side and that, then sank onto the pillow. Gradually the sobs, which sounded like suppressed guffaws, grew fewer, ceased altogether.

Meanwhile the Abbé had gone up to the nun.

“Is he in much pain just now?” he asked in a low voice.

“Not much. I’ve just made an injection. Usually the pain doesn’t come back till after midnight.”

“Good. Leave us alone now. But please ring up the doctor,” he added with a gesture that seemed to imply: “I can’t work miracles!”

Quietly Sister Céline and Adrienne left the room.

M. Thibault seemed almost unconscious. Before the priest had come he had sunk thus several times into a sort of coma. But these welcome lapses never lasted long; abruptly he came back to the surface, where panic lay in wait for him, and once more with a new lease of strength began the desperate struggle.

The priest guessed that the lull would be brief; he must make the most of it while it lasted. He felt the blood coming to his head; of all the duties of his calling, ministration to the dying was the one he dreaded most.

He went up to the bed.

“You are suffering, my friend. You are going through an hour of bitter trial. Do not try to fall back on yourself, but open your heart to God.”

M. Thibault turned towards his confessor, and there was such anguish in his look that the priest’s gaze faltered. For a moment the sick man’s eyes darkened with anger and malevolent contempt. Only for a moment. The look of dreadful fear came back almost immediately. And now it was so terrible in its intensity that the priest could not face it, and turned away.

The dying man’s teeth were chattering; he was muttering feebly: “Oh, dear me! Oh, dear me! I’m so frightened.”

The priest pulled himself together.

“I have come to help you,” he said in a gentle voice. “First, let us pray. Let us invoke God’s presence in ourselves. Now, my friend, we will pray together.”

M. Thibault cut him short. “But … but …! Don’t you see? I’m … I’m at the point …” He dared not affront death by naming it.

Frantically his eye ranged the dark corners of the room. Was there no help, none anywhere in all the world? The shadows were deepening, deepening round him. From his lips came a scream that jarred the silence, and to the priest was almost a relief. Then, with all his might, he shouted:

“Antoine! Where’s Antoirie?” The Abbé made a vague gesture. “No, I don’t want you. Antoine!”

The priest changed his methods. Drawing himself up, he gazed sadly down at the furious face on the pillow, and with a sweeping gesture, as if he were exorcizing a man possessed, blessed him a second time.

His calmness was the last straw for M. Thibault. Propping himself on an elbow, despite the agony the effort cost him, he shook his fist.

“Ah, the swine! The ruffians! And now you and your claptrap— I’ve had enough of it.” Then a despairing sob broke from his lips. “I’m … I’m dying, dying, I tell you! Will no one help me?”

The Abbé gazed down, and did not contradict him; convinced though the old man was already that his end was near, the priest’s silence came as a final blow. Shaking from head to foot, feeling what little strength remained ebbing away, unable even to keep back the saliva dribbling down his chin, he kept on repeating in a tone of pitiful entreaty, as though perhaps the priest had not heard him, or had failed to understand:

“I’m dying. I’m dy-ing.”

The Abbé sighed, but made no gesture of denial. It is not always the truest charity, he thought, to lavish vain illusions on the dying; when the last hour is actually at hand, the only remedy against the terrors that invest it is not to deny its onset—against which the body, warned by instinct, is already up in arms—but to look death in the eyes, and be resigned to meet it.

He let some seconds pass, then, mustering his courage, said in clear, even tones:

“And supposing it is so, my friend. Is that a reason to be so terribly afraid?”

The old man fell back onto the pillow, as if he had been struck in the face.

“Oh, dear me!” he whimpered. “Oh, dear me!”

All was lost now; the storm had broken, sweeping him from his last foothold; there was no refuge anywhere, he was sinking, sinking …! And the last gleam of consciousness served only to reveal the black gulf of non-being. For other people death was a vague notion that did not touch them personally, one more counter in the common coin of words. For him it was the Now and Here, the one thing real— himself! Dazed and dilated, his eyes peered into the sheer abyss; then very far away, on the other side of nothingness, he saw the priest’s face, the face of a living man, denizen of another world. He was alone, cut off from the world of men. Alone with his fear, plunged in the nethermost depth of loneliness.

Through the stillness came a voice, the priest’s.

“Reflect! It was not God’s will that death should steal on you unawares,
sicut latro
, like a thief in the night. Surely then, you should prove yourself worthy of this grace—for a grace it is, and the greatest God can bestow on us, miserable sinners—that on the threshold of eternal life a warning should be granted.”

From an infinite distance M. Thibault listened to the words that, like weak waves fretting a rock, beat on the brain that fear had turned to stone, and for a moment, by mere force of habit, his mind sought refuge in them, in the idea of God. But the impulse died still-born. Eternal Life, Grace, God—the words had lost all meaning, dwindled to futile sounds that had no relevance to the terrible reality.

“Let us thank God,” the Abbé continued. “Blessed are those whom He snatches from their earthbound cravings; blessed are those who die in the Lord. Let us pray, my friend. Let us pray together, with all our hearts, and God will help you in your time of trouble.”

M. Thibault swung his head round. Under his terror a vestige of rage was seething still. Had he been able, how gladly he would now have crashed his fist into the priest’s face! Blasphemies rose to his lips.

“God? What’s that? What help? It’s sheer nonsense when you come to think of it. Isn’t it He, precisely, whose will it is that I …?” The words choked in his throat. “What help can I expect of Him, tell me!” he shouted furiously.

His taste for controversy had come back to him so strongly that he forgot that his agony of mind had made him deny God just a moment before. “Ah, why should God treat me thus?” he groaned.

The Abbé shook his head. “Remember the words of the
Imitation of Christ
: ‘In the hour when thou deemest thyself very far from Me, then it is often I am nearest thee.’ ”

M. Thibault pondered. After some moments’ silence he turned to his confessor; and now he made a gesture of distress.

“Abbé, Abbé!” he pleaded, “Do something—pray—anything at all! Surely it can’t be possible that I …? Save me, oh, save me!”

The Abbé drew up a chair to the bed, sat down, and clasped the swollen hand, the least pressure on which left a pale imprint.

“Ah,” the old man cried, “you’ll see what it’s like, my friend, one day—when your turn comes!”

The priest sighed. “No one can say: ‘I shall be spared temptation,’ but I pray God to send me, in the hour of death, a friend who will help me to overcome my weakness while there is yet time.”

M. Thibault shut his eyes. The movements he had been making had irritated the bed-sores in the small of his back, and they were smarting like fire. He stretched himself out in the bed; now and again a feeble groan escaped his clenched lips: “Oh, dear me! Oh, dear me!”

“Consider now!” the priest began in his measured, melancholy tones. “You, as a Christian, knew well this life on earth must end. ‘
Pulvis es
…’ Had you forgotten that this mortal life does not belong to us? You are protesting now; as if you were being robbed of something that was yours in your own right. Yet you knew our lives are only lent us by our Maker. It may be that the hour has come when you shall be required to pay your debt; how ungrateful it would be, my friend, to haggle!”

Through his half-opened eyelids M. Thibault shot a malevolent glance at the priest. Then, very slowly, his gaze roamed round the room, pausing on all the things he recognized so easily despite the feeble light, things that were his, that he had seen—seen and possessed—so many and many a day.

“To leave all that?” he murmured. “No, I don’t want to.” A sudden tremor shook the old body. “I’m afraid.”

Compassionately the priest bent towards him.

“Our Divine Master, too, endured the agony and bloody sweat. And He, too, for a brief moment, doubted His Father’s love, and cried, saying: ‘
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
? My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ Think, my friend; is there not a remarkable analogy between your sufferings and those of our Divine Master? But Jesus in His hour of trial took new strength in prayer. With all the fervour of His love he cried: ‘O my Father, here am I. Father, I trust in Thee. Father, I yield to Thee. Not as I will be done, but as Thou wilt.’ ”

The Abbé felt the swollen fingers quiver. After a pause, he continued in the same tone.

“Have you reflected that for centuries, nay, for thousands of centuries, our poor human race has been working out its destiny on earth?” Then, realizing that such arguments were too vague to serve his end, he fell back on precise examples. “Only think of your own family, your father, your grandfather, and your ancestors—of all those men who went before you, lived and struggled, hoped and suffered like you; and all of them irrevocably, one following the other, at the hour appointed from the beginning, returned whence they came. ‘
Reverti unde veneris, quid grave est
?’ Is it not a comforting thought that all creation, every one of us, returns to the bosom of the Heavenly Father?”

“Yes,” M. Thibault groaned. “Only … not yet!”

“How can you complain? Only think—how many of those men I spoke of enjoyed your advantages? You have had the privilege of reaching an age denied to many. God has shown you mercy in granting you so long a life in which to work out your salvation.”

M. Thibault shuddered. “That’s just what is so terrible!”

“Terrible, yes. But you have less right than many another to feel fear.”

Roughly the old man withdrew his hand.

“No!” he exclaimed.

“Indeed you have.” The Abbé’s voice was gentle, consoling. “I’ve watched you at work, my friend. Always, with all your heart, you have aimed at something higher than worldly gain. You have loved your neighbour, fought the good fight against poverty and sin. You have lived the life of an upright man, and death should have no terrors at the close of such a life.”

“No,” the dying man repeated hoarsely.

When the Abbé tried to clasp his hand again, he freed himself angrily. The priest’s remarks had touched him to the quick. No, he had not aimed at something higher than worldly success. On that score he had deceived everybody, including the priest—and himself, too, almost always. In reality he had spared no effort to shine in the eyes of men. All his motives had been vile, wholly vile—under the surface. Selfishness and vanity. A thirst for riches, for ordering others about. A display of generosity, to win honours, to play a specious part. Sins of the flesh, hypocrisy, a whited sepulchre—ah, the falsehood of it all! If only he could wipe the slate clean, make a fresh start! That “life of an upright man”—he was heartily ashamed of it. He saw it now as it had really been. Too late. The day of reckoning had come.

“A Christian like you …”

M. Thibault could not contain himself. “Keep quiet, you! I, a Christian? I’m no Christian. All my life I’ve—I’ve aimed at … what? ‘Love of my neighbour’? Nonsense! I’ve never known what it is to love—anybody, anybody in the world.”

“My poor friend!” the Abbé murmured. He was expecting M. Thibault to accuse himself once more of having driven Jacques to suicide. But no, not once in these latter days had the father thought of his missing son. All he could conjure up at present was much remoter phases of his past: his youth consumed with ambition, his start in life, his early struggles, first distinctions—sometimes, too, the honours he had earned in middle age. The last ten years had already faded out into the mists of oblivion.

Despite the twinge it cost him, M. Thibault raised an arm.

“It’s all your fault!” he burst out passionately. “Why didn’t you warn me, while there still was time?”

Then anger yielded to despair, and he burst into tears. Like ghastly laughter, sobs convulsed his body.

The Abbé bent towards him.

“In every human life there comes a day, an hour, a fleeting moment, when suddenly God deigns to reveal Himself as a real presence and extends His hand to us. Sometimes that moment comes after a life of sin, and sometimes at the close of a long life which has passed for Christian. Who can say? Perhaps it is tonight that God, for the first time, holds out His hand to you.”

M. Thibault’s eyelids lifted. In the twilight of his mind a certain confusion had grown up between God’s hand and the human hand, the priest’s, beside him. He put forth his hand to grasp it.

“What must I do?” he panted. “Tell me what to do!”

His tone had changed; the panic terror at death’s advent had gone out of it. He spoke as one who asks a question that can be answered; already tempered with contrition, the fear that still persisted in his voice could be dispelled by absolution.

God’s hour was approaching.

But, for the priest, this was of all hours the hardest. He communed with himself for a while, as he did in the pulpit before beginning a sermon. Though he had given no sign of it, M. Thibault’s reproach had stung him to the quick. For many years he had had spiritual charge of this proud nature; how far had his influence been effective? How had he fulfilled his task? Well, there was still time to make good the lapses—on both sides. He must lay hold of this poor, wavering soul, and guide it back to the Redeemer’s feet.