Chapter III: How I Continued My Journey (2)

He was pale, but calm and resolute. Thenceforth he did not make a single mistake, and the Spaniards were thoroughly beaten. It was a fine sight to see the enthusiasm of the on-lookers: some uttered a thousand cries of joy and threw their bonnets in the air; others pressed his hands, calling him the honour of their country. If he had repelled an invasion, I doubt whether he would have received more lively or more sincere congratulations. The disappointment of the losers added still more to the brilliance of his victory.

“We’ll have other matches, my good fellow,” he said to the Aragonese with a tone of superiority; “but I’ll give you a handicap.”

I could have wished that M. Alphonse had been more modest, and I was almost pained at the humiliation of his rival.

The Spanish giant felt the insult keenly. I saw him turn pale under his sunburnt skin. He looked at his racket gloomily and set his teeth; then, in a choked voice, he said almost inaudibly, “_Me lo pagarás_.”

M. de Peyrehorade’s voice disturbed his son’s triumph; my host, much surprised not to find him presiding over the harnessing of the new barouche, was still more surprised to see him all in a sweat, racket in hand. M. Alphonse ran to the house, washed his hands and face, put his new coat and patent-leather shoes on again, and five minutes later we were off at a brisk trot on the way to Puygarrig. All the tennis-players of the town and a great number of on-lookers followed us with cries of joy. The strong horses which drew us had difficulty in keeping ahead of those intrepid Catalans.

We were at Puygarrig, and the procession was about to set out for the mayor’s office, when M. Alphonse struck his forehead, and said to me in an undertone:

“How stupid of me! I’ve forgotten the ring! It’s on the finger of the Venus, the Devil take her! What ever you do, don’t mention it to my mother. Perhaps she’ll not notice anything.”

“You could send somebody,” I said.

“Bah! My man is staying behind at Ille. And those fellows here, I don’t much trust them. Twelve hundred francs worth of diamonds! That would be a temptation to a good many of them. Besides, what would they think here of my absent-mindedness? They’d make fine fun of me. They’d call me the statue’s husband.... I just hope nobody steals it from me! Fortunately the idol has put a fear on my rogues. They don’t dare go within arm’s length of it. Bah! It doesn’t matter; I’ve got another ring.” The two ceremonies, civil and religious, were performed with due pomp; and Mademoiselle de Puygarrig received a little Paris dress-maker’s ring, never suspecting that her bridegroom was making the sacrifice of a love-token to her. Then we sat down to table, where we drank, ate, even sang, all at great length. I felt for the bride in the coarse merriment which was resounding about her; still, she kept a better countenance than I had expected, and her embarrassment had nothing either of awkwardness or affectation about it.

Perhaps courage comes with difficult situations.

The breakfast having terminated when it pleased Heaven, it was four o’clock; the men went to walk in the park, which was magnificent, or to watch the Puygarrig peasant-girls dancing on the château lawn arrayed in their holiday clothes. In this way we spent some hours. Meanwhile the women were very busy with the bride, who was making them admire her wedding-presents. Then she changed her dress, and I noticed that she covered up her fine hair with a cap and a feathered hat, for women are in a great hurry until they have assumed as soon as possible the ornaments which custom forbids them to wear as long as they are unmarried.

It was almost eight o’clock when they set about starting for Ille. But first there was a pathetic scene. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig’s aunt, who had been a mother to her, a very aged and very devout woman, was not to go to town with us. At her niece’s going away she made a touching address to her on the duties of a wife, a discourse which resulted in a torrent of tears and never-ending embraces. M. de Peyrehorade compared this parting to the Rape of the Sabines. We set out, however, and on the way we all did our utmost to distract the bride and make her laugh; but in vain.

At Ille supper was waiting us, and what a supper! If I had been disgusted at the coarse merriment of the morning, I was still more so at the equivocations and pleasantries of which the bridegroom and, above all, the bride were the objects. The bridegroom, who had disappeared for an instant before sitting down to table, was pale and icily serious. Every other minute he took a draught of old Collioure wine, almost as strong as brandy. I was beside him, and I felt obliged to warn him:

“Take care! They say that wine....”

I told him some nonsense or other to put myself on a level with the other guests.

He nudged me with his knee and, in an undertone, said to me:

“When we rise from table ..., let me have a word with you.”

His grave tone surprised me. I looked more attentively at him, and I noticed the strange alteration in his features.

“Do you feel unwell?” I asked him.

“No.”

And he fell to drinking again.

Meanwhile, amid shouts and clapping of hands, a child of eleven, who had slipped under the table, showed the company a pretty white and pink ribbon which he had just unfastened from the bride’s ankle. That was called her garter. It was at once cut in pieces and distributed to the young people, who decorated their buttonholes with it, after an old custom, which is still maintained in some patriarchal families. This caused the bride to blush to the whites of her eyes.... But her distress was at a height when M. de Peyrehorade, having called for silence, sang her certain Catalan verses, impromptu, he said. Here is the sense of them, if I understood it aright:

“What is this, my friends! Has the wine which I have drunk made me see double! There are two Venuses here....”

The bridegroom suddenly looked round with an air of alarm which made everybody laugh.

“Yes,” pursued M. de Peyrehorade, “there are two Venuses under my roof. The one, I found in the earth, like a truffle; the other, descended from the skies, has just divided her girdle among us.”

He meant her garter.

“My son, choose which you prefer, the Roman Venus or the Catalan Venus. The rascal takes the Catalan, and his choice is the best. The Roman is black, the Catalan is white. The Roman is cold, the Catalan sets every one who approaches her on fire.”

This conclusion excited such a roar, such noisy applause and such resounding laughter, that I thought the ceiling was going to fall on our heads. Round the table there were only three solemn faces, the young couple’s and my own. I had a bad headache; and besides, for some reason or other, a marriage always depresses me. This one, besides, rather disgusted me.

The last couplets having been sung by the depute mayor--and very free they were, I ought to mention--we went into the drawing-room to witness the retiral of the bride, who was soon to be conducted to her chamber, for it was near midnight. M. Alphonse drew me into a window recess, and said, with averted eyes:

“You will laugh at me.... But I don’t know what is wrong with me.... I am bewitched! Devil take me!”

The first thought which came into my head was that he imagined himself threatened with some misfortune similar to those mentioned by Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné:

“The whole Empire of Love is replete with tragic histories, etc.”

“I thought that sort of accidents never happened except to persons of intelligence,” I said to myself.

“You’ve drunk too much Collioure, my dear Monsieur Alphonse,” I said to him. “I warned you.”

“Yes, perhaps. But this is something much more dreadful.”

His voice was broken. I really thought he was drunk.

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

“What! Has it been taken away?”

“No.”

“Then you have it, have you not?”

“No ... I ... I can’t get it off that devil of a Venus’s finger.”

“A fine story! You’ve not pulled hard enough.”

“Not at all.... But the Venus.... She has closed her finger.”

He stared at me with a haggard face, supporting himself by the window-fastening to keep himself from falling.

“A pretty tale!” I said to him. “You have pushed the ring too far on. You’ll get it off to-morrow with pincers. But take care not to spoil the statue.”

“I tell you no! The Venus’s finger is turned in, crooked in; she has her hand clenched, do you understand?... She is my wife, it seems, since I have given her my ring.... She won’t give it back now.”

I felt a sudden shiver, and for an instant my flesh crept. Then a great sigh that he gave sent a reek of wine over to me, and all my emotion disappeared.

“The silly fool,” thought I, “is quite drunk.”

“You are an antiquary, sir,” the bridegroom added in a lamentable tone; “you know about those statues ... perhaps there is some spring, some devilment, that I don’t know about.... Would you go and see?”

“Willingly,” I said. “Come along with me.”

“No, I’d rather you went alone.”

I went out of the drawing-room. The weather had changed during supper, and the rain was beginning to fall heavily. I was about to ask for an umbrella, when a thought arrested me. I should be a great fool, I said to myself, to go and verify what a drunk man had told me! Besides, he perhaps wished to play some ill-natured joke on me to make me a laughing-stock for those good provincials; and the least that would result to me from it would be to get soaked to the skin and catch a bad cold.

From the door I cast a glance at the statue all running with water, and I went upstairs to my room without returning to the drawing-room. I went to bed; but sleep was long of coming. All the scenes of the day presented themselves to my mind. I thought of that young girl, so lovely and so pure, left to the mercy of a brutal drunkard. “What an odious thing,” I said to myself, “a marriage of convenience is! A mayor puts on a tricolour scarf, a parson a stole, and there, the most respectable girl in the world is handed over to the Minotaur! what can two beings who do not love each other have to say to each other at a moment such as this, a moment which two lovers would purchase at the price of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen coarse? First impressions are never effaced, and I am sure of this, that that M. Alphonse will richly deserve to be hated....”

During my monologue, which I have shortened considerably, I had heard a great deal of coming and going in the house, doors opening and shutting, carriages driving away; then I seemed to have heard the light steps of a number of women on the stair, making for the end of the corridor opposite to my room. It was probably the bride’s attendants taking her to bed. In course of time they had gone downstairs again. Madame de Peyrehorade’s door was shut. How anxious and uneasy that poor girl must be, I thought! I turned about on my bed in a bad temper. A bachelor cuts a foolish figure in a house where a marriage is being held.

Silence reigned for some time; then it was broken by heavy steps climbing up the stair. The wooden treads cracked loudly.

“The brute!” I exclaimed. “I’ll wager he’s going to fall on the stairs.”

All became quiet again. I took a book to change the course of my thoughts. It was a statistical account of the department, graced with a memorandum by M. de Peyrehorade on the druidical monuments of the Prades hundred. I fell over at the third page.

I slept badly, and woke several times. It might be about five o’clock in the morning, and I had been awake twenty minutes or more, when the cock crew. Day was about to dawn. Just then I heard distinctly the same heavy steps, the same cracking of the stair, that I had heard before falling asleep. It struck me as strange. I yawned and tried to think why M. Alphonse was rising so early in the morning. I could imagine no likely reason. I was about to close my eyes again, when my attention was excited anew by a strange trampling, with which the ringing of bells and the sound of doors being noisily opened soon mingled; then I made out confused cries.

“My drunk friend has set the house afire somewhere!” I thought, as I jumped down out of bed.

I dressed in a hurry and went out into the corridor. From the opposite end came cries and lamentations, and one heart-rending voice dominated all the others--” My son! My son!” It was evident that some calamity had happened to M. Alphonse. I ran to the nuptial chamber: it was full of people. The first thing that met my view was the young man half-clad, stretched across the bed, the frame of which was broken. He was livid and motionless. His mother was weeping and crying at his side. M. de Peyrehorade was busy, rubbing his temples with eau-de-Cologne, or holding smelling-salts to his nose. Alas! his son had been dead for a long time. On a sofa at the other end of the room was the bride, writhing in horrible convulsions. She was uttering inarticulate cries, and two strong servants had the utmost difficulty in holding her.

“Good God!” I exclaimed, “whatever has happened?”

I went up to the bed and raised the unfortunate young man’s body; it was already stiff and cold. His clenched teeth and his blackened face gave evidence of the most frightful agony. It was only too plain that his end had been violent and his death-struggles terrible. Yet there was no trace of blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt, and on his chest I saw a livid mark, which was continued round his ribs and back. One would have thought that he had been crushed in a band of iron.

My foot trod upon something hard on the carpet; I stooped down, and saw the diamond ring.

I drew M. de Peyrehorade and his wife into their room; then I had the bride taken there.

“You have still a daughter,” I said to them, “you owe her your care.” Then I left them alone.

There seemed to me no doubt that M. Alphonse had been the victim of a murder, the perpetrators of which had found means to let themselves in to the bride’s room at night. Yet those bruises on his chest and their circular direction puzzled me considerably, for a stick or an iron bar could not have produced them. All at once I remembered to have heard that the bravos of Valencia make use of long bags of leather, stuffed with fine sand, to knock down the persons whom they have been paid to kill. I immediately remembered the Aragonese muleteer and his threat; at the same time I scarcely dared to think that he had taken such a terrible revenge for a harmless joke.

I went about the house, searching everywhere for traces of breaking in, without finding them anywhere. I went down to the garden, to see whether the murderers could have got in from that side; but I found no certain traces there. Besides last night’s rain had so soaked the earth that it could not have retained any very sharp impression. All the same, I observed some footprints deeply imprinted in the ground; they were in two contrary directions, but in the same line, starting from the corner of the hedge beside the tennis-court and ending at the house-door. They might have been made by M. Alphonse when he went to look for his ring on the statue’s finger. On the other hand, the hedge at that place was not so close as elsewhere; that must have been the spot where the murderers crossed it. Passing and repassing before the statue, I halted for a moment to look at it. This time, I confess, I could not contemplate its expression of ironical wickedness without fear; and, my head full of the horrible scenes which I had just witnessed, I seemed to behold an infernal deity applauding the misfortune which had overtaken that house.

I got back to my room and remained there until midday. Then I went to inquire for my hosts. They were a little more composed. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig--I ought to say M. Alphonse’s widow--had recovered consciousness. She had even spoken with the public prosecutor from Perpignan, who was then on circuit at Ille, and that official had taken her deposition. He asked for mine. I told him what I knew, and did not conceal my suspicions about the Aragonese muleteer. He ordered him to be arrested at once.

“Have you learned anything from Madame Alphonse?” I asked the public prosecutor, when my deposition had been written and signed.

“That unhappy young lady has gone out of her mind,” he said to me with a sad smile. “Out of her mind! Quite out! Here’s her story.

“She had been in bed, she says, for some minutes, with the curtains drawn, when the door of her room opened, and some one came in. Madame Alphonse was then on the far side of the bed, with her face to the wall. She did not move, being sure that it was her husband. An instant later the bed groaned as if it was loaded with an enormous weight. She was very much afraid, but did not dare to turn her head. Five minutes, ten minutes perhaps--she could form no notion of the time--passed thus. Then she made an involuntary movement, or rather the person who was in the bed made one, and she felt the contact of something as cold as ice, these are the expressions she used. She buried herself in the far side of the bed, trembling in every limb. Shortly afterwards the door opened a second time, and some one entered, who said, ‛Good evening, my little wife.’ Very soon after, the curtains were drawn aside. She heard a smothered cry. The person who was in the bed beside her sat up, and seemed to stretch forward his arms. She turned her head then ... and saw, she declares, her husband on his knees at the bed-side, his head level with the pillow, in the arms of a sort of greenish giant who was hugging him with violence. She says, and she has repeated it to me a score of times, poor woman! ... she says that she recognized ... can you guess? The bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue.... Since it came into the neighbourhood, every one dreams about it. But to resume the unhappy madwoman’s story. At that sight she lost consciousness, and probably she had already lost her reason some time before. She is quite unable to say how long she continued in her faint. When she came to herself, she still saw the phantom, or the statue, as she always calls it, motionless, its legs and the lower part of its body in the bed, its bust and arms stretched over, and in its arms her husband, without movement. A cock crew. The statue then got out of the bed, let fall the corpse, and went out. Madame Alphonse tore at the bell-pull, and you know the rest.”

They brought up the Spaniard; he was calm, and defended himself with much coolness and presence of mind. To be sure, he did not deny the saying which I had heard; but he explained that all he meant by it was that, next day, when he was rested, he would have won a tennis-match from his conqueror. I recollect that he added:

“When an Aragonese is affronted, he does not wait till the next day to avenge himself. If I had thought that M. Alphonse meant to insult me, I would have given him one in the belly with my knife on the spot.”

They compared his shoes with the footprints in the garden; his shoes were very much larger.

Finally the innkeeper, with whom the man had lodged, affirmed that he had spent the whole night rubbing and dosing one of his mules that was sick.

Moreover, this Aragonese was a man of good reputation, well known in the neighbourhood, to which he came every year on his business. So they released him and made their excuses to him.

I forgot the deposition of a servant, who had been the last to see M. Alphonse in life. It was at the moment when he was about to go upstairs to his wife, and, calling the servant, he had asked him with an air of anxiety, if he knew where I was. The servant answered him that he had seen nothing of me. M. Alphonse then heaved a sigh, and remained speechless for more than a minute, then he said, “_Well, I declare, the devil must have taken him away too!_”

I asked this man whether M. Alphonse had his diamond ring when he spoke to him. The servant hesitated about answering; at last he said that he thought no, but that he really had not paid any attention.

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

While questioning this man I felt something of the superstitious terror which Madame Alphonse’s deposition had spread all through the house. The public prosecutor looked at me with a smile, and I took good care not to say anything more.

Some hours after M. Alphonse’s funeral, I made ready to leave Ille. M. de Peyrehorade’s carriage was to take me to Perpignan. In spite of his weak condition, the poor old man insisted on accompanying me to the gate of his garden. We crossed it in silence, he dragging himself along painfully, leaning on my arm. At the moment of our parting, I cast a last look on the Venus. I could well foresee that my host, although he did not share the terror and hatred with which it inspired a part of his family, would wish to rid himself of an object which would remind him unceasingly of a fearful calamity. My intention was to get him to promise to place it in a museum. I was hesitating about how to broach the matter, when M. de Peyrehorade mechanically turned his head in the direction in which he saw me looking fixedly. He caught sight of the statue, and at once burst into tears. I embraced him, and, without venturing to say a single word to him, got into the carriage.

Since my departure I have not learned that the slightest fresh light has been shed upon this mysterious catastrophe.

M. de Peyrehorade died some months after his son. By his will he bequeathed to me his manuscripts, which I shall perhaps publish some day. I have found no trace whatever among them of the paper dealing with the inscriptions on the Venus.

_P.S._--My friend M. de P. has just written to 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 down and made into a bell, and in this new form it is doing duty at the church of Ille. But, adds M. de P., it would appear that ill luck pursues the owners of that bronze. Since this bell began to ring at Ille the vines have twice been frosted.

THE STORY OF A WHITE BLACKBIRD
ALFRED DE MUSSET