Chapter IV (3)

The bridegroom abruptly turned his head away with a terrified expression which made everybody laugh.

“Yes,” continued M. de Peyrehorade, “there are two Venuses beneath my roof. One I found in the earth, like a truffle; the other, descended from the skies, has come to share her girdle with us.”

He meant to say her garter.

“My son, choose whichever you prefer--the Roman or the Catalan Venus. The rascal chooses the Catalan, and his choice is wise. The Roman is black, the Catalan white. The Roman is cold, the Catalan inflames all who approach her.”

This deliverance caused such an uproar, such noisy applause and such roars of laughter, that I thought that the ceiling would fall on our heads. There were only three sober faces at the table--those of the bride and groom, and my own. I had a terrible headache; and then, for some unknown reason, a wedding always depresses me. This one, in addition, disgusted me more or less.

The last couplets having been sung by the mayor’s deputy--and they were very free, I must say--we went to the salon to make merry over the retirement of the bride, who was soon to be escorted to her chamber, for it was near midnight.

M. Alphonse led me into a window recess, and said to me, averting his eyes:

“You will laugh at me, but I don’t know what the matter is with me; I am bewitched! the devil has got hold of me!”

The first idea that came to my mind was that he believed himself to be threatened by some misfortune of the sort of which Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné speak:

“The sway of love is always full of tragic episodes,” etc.

“I supposed that accidents of that sort happened only to men of intellect,” I said to myself.--“You have drunk too much Collioure wine, my dear Monsieur Alphonse,” I said aloud. “I warned you.”

“Yes, that may be. But there is something much more terrible than that.”

He spoke in a halting voice. I concluded that he was downright tipsy.

“You remember my ring?” he continued, after a pause.

“Well! has it been stolen?”

“No.”

“Then you have it?”

“No--I--I can’t take it off that infernal Venus’s finger!”

“Nonsense! you didn’t pull hard enough.”

“Yes, I did. But the Venus--she has bent her finger.”

He looked me in the eye with a haggard expression, leaning against the window-frame to avoid falling.

“What a fable!” I said. “You pushed the ring on too far. To-morrow you can recover it with a pair of pincers. But take care that you don’t injure the statue.”

“No, I tell you. The Venus’s finger is drawn in, bent; she has closed her hand--do you understand? She is my wife, apparently, as I have given her my ring. She refuses to give it back.”

I felt a sudden shiver, and for a moment I was all goose-flesh. Then, as he heaved a profound sigh, he sent a puff of alcoholic fumes into my face, and all my emotion vanished.

“The wretch is completely drunk,” I thought.

“You are an antiquary, monsieur,” continued the bridegroom in a piteous tone; “you know all about these statues; perhaps there is some spring, some devilish contrivance that I don’t know about. Suppose you were to go out and look?”

“Willingly,” I said; “come with me.”

“No, I prefer that you should go alone.”

I left the salon.

The weather had changed while we were at supper, and the rain was beginning to fall violently. I was about to ask for an umbrella when a sudden reflection detained me. “I should be a great fool,” I said to myself, “to take any trouble to verify what an intoxicated man tells me! Perhaps, too, he is trying to play some wretched joke on me, in order to give these worthy provincials something to laugh at; and the least that can happen to me is to be drenched to the skin and to catch a heavy cold.”

I glanced from the door at the statue, which was dripping wet, and then went up to my room without returning to the salon. I went to bed, but sleep was a long while coming. All the scenes of the day passed through my mind. I thought of that lovely, pure maiden delivered to the tender mercies of a brutal sot. “What a hateful thing a _mariage de convenance_ is!” I said to myself. “A mayor dons a tri-coloured scarf, a curé a stole, and lo! the most virtuous girl imaginable is abandoned to the Minotaur! Two persons who do not love each other--what can they have to say at such a moment, which two true lovers would purchase at the cost of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen make a beast of himself? First impressions are not easily effaced, and I am sure that this Monsieur Alphonse well deserves to be detested.”

During my monologue, which I have abridged very materially, I had heard much coming and going about the house, doors opening and closing, carriages driving away; then I fancied that I heard in the hall the light footsteps of several women walking toward the farther end of the corridor opposite my room. It was probably the procession of the bride, who was being escorted to her bedroom. Then I heard the steps go downstairs again. Madame de Peyrehorade’s door closed.

“How perturbed and ill at ease that poor child must be,” I thought.

I turned and twisted in my bed, in an execrable humour. A bachelor plays an absurd rôle in a house where a marriage is being celebrated.

Silence had reigned for some time, when it was broken by heavy steps ascending the staircase. The wooden stairs creaked loudly.

“What a brute!” I cried. “I’ll wager that he will fall on the stairs!”

Everything became quiet once more. I took up a book in order to change the current of my thoughts. It was a volume of departmental statistics, embellished by an article from the pen of M. de Peyrehorade on the druidical remains in the arrondissement of Prades. I dozed at the third page.

I slept badly and woke several times. It might have been five o’clock, and I had been awake more than twenty minutes, when a cock crew. Day was just breaking. Suddenly I heard the same heavy steps, the same creaking of the stairs that I had heard before I fell asleep. That struck me as peculiar. I tried, yawning sleepily, to divine why M. Alphonse should rise so early. I could imagine no probable cause. I was about to close my eyes again when my attention was once more attracted by a strange tramping, to which was soon added the jangling of bells and the noise of doors violently thrown open; then I distinguished confused outcries.

“My drunkard must have set fire to something!” I thought, as I leaped out of bed.

I dressed in hot haste and went out into the corridor. From the farther end came shrieks and lamentations, and one heartrending voice rose above all the rest: “My son! my son!” It was evident that something had happened to M. Alphonse. I ran to the bridal chamber; it was full of people. The first object that caught my eye was the young man, half dressed, lying across the bed, the framework of which was broken. He was livid and absolutely motionless. His mother was weeping and shrieking by his side. M. de Peyrehorade was bustling about, rubbing his temples with eau de cologne, or holding salts to his nose. Alas! his son had been dead a long while.

On a couch, at the other end of the room, was the bride, in frightful convulsions. She was uttering incoherent cries, and two strong maidservants had all the difficulty in the world in holding her.

“Great God!” I cried, “what has happened?”

I walked to the bed and raised the unfortunate young man’s body; it was already cold and stiff. His clenched teeth and livid face expressed the most horrible anguish. It seemed perfectly evident that his death had been a violent one, and the death agony indescribably terrible. But there was no sign of blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt and found on his breast a purple mark which extended around the loins and across the back. One would have said that he had been squeezed by an iron ring. My foot came in contact with something hard on the carpet; I stooped and saw the diamond ring.

I dragged M. de Peyrehorade and his wife to their room; then I caused the bride to be taken thither.

“You still have a daughter,” I said to them; “you owe to her your devoted care.”

Then I left them alone.

It seemed to me to be beyond question that M. Alphonse had been the victim of a murder, the authors of which had found a way to introduce themselves into the bride’s bedroom at night. The marks on the breast and their circular character puzzled me a good deal, however, for a club or an iron bar could not have produced them. Suddenly I remembered having heard that in Valencia the _bravi_ used long leather bags filled with fine sand to murder people whom they were hired to kill. I instantly recalled the Aragonese muleteer and his threat; and yet I hardly dared think that he would have wreaked such a terrible vengeance for a trivial jest.

I walked about the house, looking everywhere for traces of a break, and finding nothing. I went down into the garden, to see whether the assassins might have forced their way in on that side of the house; but I found no definite indications. Indeed, the rain of the preceding night had so saturated the ground that it could not have retained any distinct impression. I observed, however, several very deep footprints; they pointed in two opposite directions, but in the same line, leading from the corner of the hedge next the tennis-court to the gateway of the house. They might well be M. Alphonse’s steps when he went out to take his ring from the finger of the statue. On the other hand, the hedge was less dense at that point than elsewhere, and the murderers might have passed through it there. As I went back and forth in front of the statue, I paused a moment to look at it. That time, I will confess, I was unable to contemplate without terror its expression of devilish irony; and, with my head full of the horrible scenes I had witnessed, I fancied that I had before me an infernal divinity, exulting over the disaster that had stricken that house.

I returned to my room and remained there till noon. Then I went out and inquired concerning my hosts. They were a little calmer. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig--I should say M. Alphonse’s widow--had recovered her senses. She had even talked with the king’s attorney from Perpignan, then on circuit at Ille, and that magistrate had taken her deposition. He desired mine also. I told him what I knew and made no secret of my suspicions of the Aragonese muleteer. He ordered that he should be arrested immediately.

“Did you learn anything from Madame Alphonse?” I asked the king’s attorney, when my deposition was written out and signed.

“That unfortunate young woman has gone mad,” he replied, with a sad smile. “Mad! absolutely mad! This is what she told me:

“She had been in bed, she said, a few minutes, with the curtains drawn, when her bedroom door opened and some one came in. At that time Madame Alphonse was on the inside of the bed, with her face towards the wall. Supposing, of course, that it was her husband, she did not move. A moment later, the bed creaked as if under an enormous weight. She was terribly frightened, but dared not turn her head. Five minutes, ten minutes perhaps,--she can only guess at the time--passed in this way. Then she made an involuntary movement, or else the other person in the bed made one, and she felt the touch of something as cold as ice--that was her expression. She moved closer to the wall, trembling in every limb. Shortly after, the door opened a second time, and some one came in, who said: ‘Good-evening, my little wife.’ Soon the curtains were drawn aside. She heard a stifled cry. The person who was in the bed by her side sat up and seemed to put out its arms. Thereupon she turned her head, and saw, so she declares, her husband on his knees beside the bed, with his head on a level with the pillow, clasped in the arms of a sort of greenish giant, who was squeezing him with terrible force. She says--and she repeated it twenty times, poor woman!--she says that she recognised--can you guess whom?--the bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue. Since she was unearthed, the whole neighbourhood dreams of her. But I continue the story of that unhappy mad woman. At that sight she lost consciousness, and it is probable that she had lost her reason some moments before. She could give me no idea at all how long she remained in her swoon. Recovering her senses, she saw the phantom, or, as she still insists, the statue, motionless, with its legs and the lower part of the body in the bed, the bust and arms stretched out, and in its arms her husband, also motionless. A cock crew. Thereupon the statue got out of bed, dropped the dead body, and left the room. Madame Alphonse rushed for the bell-cord, and you know the rest.”

The Spaniard was arrested; he was calm, and defended himself with much self-possession and presence of mind. He did not deny making the remark I had overheard; but he explained it by saying that he had meant simply this: that, on the following day, having rested meanwhile, he would beat his victorious rival at tennis. I remember that he added:

“An Aragonese, when he is insulted, doesn’t wait until the next day for his revenge. If I had thought that Monsieur Alphonse intended to insult me, I would have driven my knife into his belly on the spot.”

His shoes were compared with the footprints in the garden, and were found to be much larger.

Lastly, the innkeeper at whose house he was staying deposed that he had passed the whole night rubbing and doctoring one of his mules, which was sick. Furthermore, the Aragonese was a man of excellent reputation, well known in the province, where he came every year in the course of his business. So he was released with apologies.

I have forgotten the deposition of a servant, who was the last person to see M. Alphonse alive. It was just as he was going up to his wife; he called the man and asked him with evident anxiety if he knew where I was. The servant replied that he had not seen me. Thereupon M. Alphonse sighed and stood more than a minute without speaking; then he said:

“_Well! the devil must have taken him away, too!_”

I asked him if M. Alphonse had his diamond ring on his finger when he spoke to him. The servant hesitated before he replied; at last he said that he did not think so, but that he had not noticed particularly.

“If he had had that ring on his finger,” he added upon reflection, “I should certainly have noticed it, for I thought that he had given it to Madame Alphonse.”

As I questioned this man, I was conscious of a touch of the superstitious terror with which Madame Alphonse’s deposition had infected the whole household. The king’s attorney glanced at me with a smile, and I did not persist.

Some hours after M. Alphonse’s funeral, I prepared to leave Ille. M. de Peyrehorade’s carriage was to take me to Perpignan. Despite his enfeebled condition, the poor old man insisted upon attending me to his garden gate. We passed through the garden in silence; he, hardly able to drag himself alone, leaning on my arm. As we were about to part, I cast a last glance at the Venus. I foresaw that my host, although he did not share the terror and detestation which she inspired in a portion of his family, would be glad to be rid of an object which would constantly remind him of a shocking calamity. It was my purpose to urge him to place it in some museum. I hesitated about opening the subject, when M. de Peyrehorade mechanically turned his head in the direction in which he saw that I was gazing earnestly. His eye fell upon the statue, and he instantly burst into tears. I embraced him, and, afraid to say a single word, entered the carriage.

I never learned, subsequent to my departure, that any new light had been thrown upon that mysterious catastrophe.

M. de Peyrehorade died a few months after his son. By his will he bequeathed to me his manuscripts, which I shall publish some day, perhaps. I found among them no memoir relating to the inscriptions on the Venus.

* * * * *

P. S.--My friend M. de P. has recently written me from Perpignan that the statue no longer exists. After her husband’s death, Madame de Peyrehorade’s first care was to have it melted into a bell, and in that new shape it is now used in the church at Ille.

“But,” M. de P. adds, “it would seem that an evil fate pursues all those who possess that bronze. Since that bell has rung at Ille the vines have frozen twice.”

1837.

Transcriber’s Note

Minor printer’s errors were corrected by the transcriber; otherwise, as far as possible, original spelling and punctuation have been retained.

There were many errors in the ancient Greek in the printed text; some of these were introduced by the translator, and some were present in the French edition. In this file, as far as possible, the ancient Greek is identical to that of the English text as printed.

In this file, text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores.