NEW BODIES FOR OLD

NEW BODIES
FOR OLD
BY
MAURICE RENARD
NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1923
By MAURICE RENARD
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATION

To H. G. Wells:

I beg you, Sir, to accept this book.

Of all the pleasures that its writing gave me, that of dedicating it to you is assuredly not the least.

I conceived it under the inspiration of ideas that you cherish, and I could have wished that it had come nearer to your own works than it does, not in merit—that would be an absurd pretension—but, at any rate, in that pleasant quality shown in all your books, which allows the chastest minds, as well as those that exact the greatest realism, to have communion with your genius—a communion which the ablest people of our time can acknowledge without feeling its charm lessened by such considerations.

But when Fortune for good or ill allowed me to discover the subject of this allegorical novel, I felt bound not to set it aside because of a few audacities which a faithful rendering involved and which an arrest of development alone—that is, a crime against the literary conscience—could avoid.

You now know—you could have guessed as much—what I should like people to think of my work, if by chance any one did it the unexpected honor of thinking about it at all. Far from desiring to arouse the creature of instinct in my reader and amuse him with scandalous descriptions, my work is addressed to the philosopher anxious for Truth amid the marvels of Fiction and for Orderliness amid the tumult of imaginary Adventures.

That, Sir, is why I beg you to accept it.

M. R.

CONTENTS

NEW BODIES FOR OLD

NEW BODIES FOR OLD

INTRODUCTION

It all happened on a certain winter evening more than a year ago, after the last men’s dinner-party I gave to my friends in the little house which I had taken furnished in the Avenue Victor Hugo.

As my projected move was nothing more than the gratification of my vagrant fancy, we had celebrated my house-unwarming as joyfully as we had celebrated the warming of yore, and the time for liqueurs having come (and also the time for jokes) each of us did his best to shine—more especially of course, that naughty fellow Gilbert, Marlotte, our paradoxical friend, the “Triboulet” of our band, and Cardaillac, our licensed wizard.

I cannot remember now exactly how it came about, but after an hour spent in the smoking-room, somebody switched off the electric light, and urged us to have some table-turning; so we grouped ourselves in the darkness round a little table. This “somebody” (please observe) was not Cardaillac; but perhaps he was in league with Cardaillac—if indeed Cardaillac was the guilty party.

We were exactly eight men in all, eight skeptics versus a little insignificant table which had only one stem divided off at the end into three legs, and whose round top bent under our sixteen hands placed on it in accordance with occult rites!

It was Mariotte who instructed us in these rites. He had at one time been an anxious inquirer about witchcraft, and familiar with table-turning, though merely as an outsider, and as he was our customary buffoon, when we saw him assume the direction of the séance, every one just let himself go in anticipation of some excellent clowning.

Cardaillac found himself my right-hand neighbor. I heard him stifle a laugh in his throat and cough. Then the table began to turn.

Gilbert questioned it, and to his obvious stupefaction it replied by dry cracklings like those made by creaking woodwork, and corresponding to the esoteric alphabet.

Mariotte translated in a quavering voice.

Then everybody wanted to question the table; and in its replies it gave proof of great sagacity. The audience became serious; one did not know what to think. Queries leapt to our lips, and the replies were rapped out from the foot of the table, near me—as I fancied—and towards my right.

“Who will live in this house in a year’s time?” asked in his turn he who had proposed the spiritualistic amusement.

“Oh, if you question it about the future,” said Mariotte, “you will only get back thumping lies, or else it will hold its tongue.”

“Oh, shut up,” interposed Cardaillac. The question was repeated—“Who will live in this house in a year’s time?”

“Nobody,” said the interpreter.

“And in two years’ time?”

“Nicolas Vermont.”

All of us heard this name for the first time.

“What will he be doing at this very hour on the anniversary of to-day? Tell us what he is doing—speak.”

“He is beginning ... to write here ... his adventures.”

“Can you read what he writes?”

“Yes ... and also what he will write.”

“Tell us the beginning, just the beginning.”

“Am tired—alphabet too tedious—Give typewriter ... will inspire typist.”

A murmur went round in the darkness. I rose and went to fetch my typewriter, and it was placed upon the table.

“It’s a ‘Watson,’” said the table. “I won’t have it. Am a French table. Want a French machine ... want a ‘Durand.’”

“‘A Durand?’” said my neighbor on the left, in a disillusioned tone. “Does that brand exist? I don’t know it.”

“Nor I.”

“Nor I.”

“Nor I.”

We were much vexed at this untoward circumstance, when the voice of Cardaillac said slowly:

“I use nothing but a ‘Durand,’ would you like me to fetch it?”

“Can you type without seeing?”

“I shall be back in a quarter of an hour,” said he—and he went out without answering.

“Oh, if Cardaillac is going to take it up,” said one of the guests, “we shall have a merry time.”

However, when the lights were turned up, the faces seemed sterner than one would have expected. Mariotte was quite pale.

Cardaillac came back in a very short time—an astonishingly short time, one might have said. He sat down in front of the table facing his “Durand” machine, and darkness was once more established. Suddenly the table declared: “No need of others.... Put your feet on mine ... type.”

One heard the tapping of the fingers on the keys.

“It’s extraordinary!” exclaimed the typist-medium, “It’s extraordinary! My hands are writing of their own accord.”

“What bosh!” whispered Mariotte.

“I swear they are, I swear it,” said Cardaillac.

We remained a long time listening to the tapping of the keys which was every now and then broken by the ringing of the bell at the end of the line and the rasping of the carriage. Every five minutes a sheet was handed to us. We decided to retire to the drawing-room and to read them aloud as Gilbert, getting them from Cardaillac, handed them to us.

Page 79 was deciphered in the morning light and the machine stopped.

But what it had typed seemed to us exciting enough to make us beg Cardaillac to be good enough to give us the sequel.

He did so. And when he had passed many nights seated at the little table with his typing keyboard, we had the complete story of M. Vermont’s adventures.

The reader shall now be told them.

They are strange and scandalous; their future scribe is bound not to think of printing them. He will burn them as soon as they are finished; so that, had it not been for the complaisance of the little table, no one would ever have turned the leaves. That is why I, convinced of their authenticity, consider it piquant to publish them beforehand.

For I hold them to be “veridical,”—as the elect call it—although they have some of the characteristics of wild caricature, and rather resemble an art-student’s funny sketch penciled by way of commentary on the margin of an engraving representing Science herself.

Are they possibly apocryphal? Well, fables are reputed to be more seductive than History, and Cardaillac’s will not seem inferior to many another one.

My hope, however, is that “Dr. Lerne” is the truthful account of real happenings, for in that case, since the little table uttered a prophecy, the tribulations of the hero have not yet begun, and they will be running their course at the very time that this book is divulging them—a very interesting circumstance indeed.

At any rate I shall certainly know in two years’ time if M. Nicolas Vermont lives in the little house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Something assures me of it in advance—for how can one accept the idea of Cardaillac—a serious-minded and intelligent fellow—squandering so many hours in composing such a fable? That is my principal argument in favor of its truthfulness.

However, if any conscientious reader desires to find reasons for the faith that is in him, let him betake himself to Grey-l’Abbaye. There he will be informed about the existence of Professor Lerne and his habits. For my part I have not got the leisure for that, but I entreat any one who may undertake the search to let me know the truth, being myself very desirous of getting to the bottom of the question whether the following tale is a mystification of Cardaillac’s, or was really typed out by a clairvoyant table.

CHAPTER I
NOCTURNE

The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The shadow of the motor-car was fleeting on ahead of me and getting longer every moment.

Ever since the morning, people had been looking at me with anxious faces as I passed, just as one looks at a scene in a melodrama. With my leather helmet which gave me the look of a bald skull, my glasses like port-holes, or the eye-sockets of a skeleton, and my body clothed in tanned skin, I must have seemed to them some queer seal from the nether regions, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing from the sunlight towards the night, in order to enter therein.

And to tell the truth, I had almost a soul like that of one of the Lost; for such is the soul of a solitary traveler who has been for seven hours at a stretch on a racing-car. His spirit has something like a nightmare in it; in place of thought, an obsession is settled there. Mine was a little peremptory phrase—“Come alone, and give notice”—which, like a tenacious goblin, worried my lonely mind, overstrained as it was with joltings and speed.

And yet this strange injunction “come alone and give notice,” doubly underlined by my Uncle Lerne in his letter, had not at first struck me excessively. But now that I was obeying it—being alone and having given notice—and rolling along towards the Castle of Fonval, the inexplicable command insisted, so to speak, on displaying all its strangeness. My eyes began to see the fateful expression everywhere, and my ears made it sound in every noise in spite of my efforts to drive away the fixed idea. If I wanted to know the name of a village, the sign-post announced “Come alone”; “Give notice” followed in the wake of a bird’s flight, and the engine, unresting and exasperating, repeated thousands and thousands of times: “Come alone, come alone, come alone, give notice, give notice, give notice.” Then I began to ask myself the wherefore of this wish of my uncle, and not being able to find the reason, I ardently longed for the arrival which should solve the mystery, less curious in reality about the doubtless commonplace answer, than exasperated by so despotic a question.

Fortunately I was drawing near, and the country growing more and more familiar spoke so clearly of the old days, that the haunting question relaxed its insistence. The town of Nanthel, populous and busy, detained me, but on coming out of the suburbs I at last perceived, like a vague and very distant cloud, the heights of the Ardennes Mountains.

Evening draws on. Desiring to reach the goal before night I open out to the full. The car hums, and under it the road is engulfed in a whirl; it seems to enter the car to be rolled up in it, as the yards of ribbon roll themselves up on a reel. Speed makes its hurricane wind whistle in my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes riddle my face like small shot, and all sorts of little creatures patter on my goggles.

Now the sun is on my right; it is on the horizon; the acclivities and declivities of the road, raising me up and sinking me down very quickly, make the sun rise and set for me several times in succession. It disappears. I dash through the dusk as hard as my brave engine can go—and I fancy that the 234 XY has never been excelled. This makes the Ardennes about half an hour away. The cloudy offing is already putting on a green tinge, a forest color, and my heart has leapt within me. Fifteen years! I have not seen those dear great woods for fifteen years—they were my old holiday friends.

For it is there, it is in their shadow that the château hides in the depths of an enormous hollow.... I remember that hollow very distinctly and I can already distinguish its whereabouts—a dark stain indicates it. Indeed it is the most extraordinary ravine. My late aunt, Lidivine Lerne, who was fond of legends, would have it that Satan, furious at some disappointment, had scooped it out with a single blow of his gigantic hoof. This origin is disputed. In any case the metaphor gives a vivid picture of the place, an amphitheater with precipitous walls of rock, with no other outlet than a large defile opening on the fields. The plain in other words penetrates into the mountain like a gulf of the sea; it there forms a blind-alley, the perpendicular walls of which rise as it spreads, and whose end is rounded off in a wide sweep. The result is that one gets to Fonval without the least climb, although it is right in the bosom of the mountain. The park is the inner part of the circle, and the cliff serves as a natural wall, except in the direction of the defile. This latter is separated from the domain by a wall into which a gateway has been let. A long avenue leads up to it, straight, and lined with lime trees. In a few minutes I shall be in it ... and soon after I shall know why nobody must follow me to Fonval—“come alone and give notice”—why these orders?

Patience. The mass of the Ardennes cleaves itself into clumps. At the rate I am going, each clump seems in motion; gliding rapidly; the crests pass one behind the other, draw near or draw off, seem lower and then rise again with the majesty of waves, and the spectacle is incessantly varying like that of a titanic sea.

A turn in the road unmasks a hamlet, I know it well. In the old days, every year, in the month of August, it was before that station that my uncle’s carriage, with Biribi in the shafts, awaited my mother and me. We used to go there for the holidays. All hail Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is only three kilometers distant now. I could go there blindfold. Here is the road leading straight to the place, the road which will soon plunge into the woods and take the name of Avenue.

It is almost night. A peasant shouts something at me—insults probably. I’m accustomed to that. My hooter replies with its threatening and mournful cry.

The forest! Ah, what a potent perfume it has for me—the perfume of the old-time holidays! Can their memory bring any other odor than that of the forest? It is an exquisite odor.... I should like to prolong this festival of scent.

Slowing down, the car goes on gently. Its sound becomes a murmur. Right and left the cliff walls of the wide gully begin to rise. Were there more light, I should be coming into sight of Fonval at the end of the straight line of the avenue. Hullo! What’s up?...

I had almost upset; the road had unexpectedly made a bend.

I slackened off still more. A little further on another bend—then another....

I stopped.

The stars one by one were beginning to shed their luminous dew. In the light of the Spring evening I could see above me the high mountain-crests, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I tried to back, and discovered a bifurcation which I had not noted in passing. When I had taken the road to the right, it offered me after several windings a new branching-off—like a riddle; and then I guided myself in the Fonval direction according to the lie of the cliffs that ran towards the château, but new cross-roads embarrassed me. What had become of the straight avenue?... The thing utterly puzzled me.

I switched on the head-lights. For a long time by the aid of their light I wandered among the criss-crossing of the alleys without being able to find my way, so many various offshoots joined the open places, and so balking were the blind-alleys. It seemed to me I had already passed a certain birch-tree. Moreover the cliff walls always remained at the same height; so that I was really turning in a maze and making no advance. Had the peasant of Grey tried to warn me? It seemed probable.

None the less, trusting to chance, and piqued by the contretemps, I went on with my exploration. Three times the same crossing showed in the field of light of my lamps, and three times I came on that same birch-tree by different roads.

I wanted to call for help. Unfortunately the hooter went wrong, and I had no horn. As for my voice, the distance which separated me from Grey on the one side and Fonval on the other would have prevented its being heard.

Then a fear assailed me ... if my petrol gave out!... I halted in the middle of a cross-road and tested the level. My tank was almost empty. What would be the good in exhausting it in vain evolutions! After all, it seemed to me an easy thing to reach the château on foot through the woods.... I tried it. But wire-fences hidden in the bushes blocked the way.

Assuredly this labyrinth was not a practical joke played at the entrance of a garden, but a defensive contrivance to protect the approaches of some retreat.

Much out of countenance, I began to reflect.

“Uncle Lerne, I don’t understand you at all,” thought I. “You received the notice of my arrival this morning, and here am I detained in the most abominable of landscape-gardens.... What fantastic idea made you contrive it? Have you changed more than I thought? You would hardly have dreamt of such fortifications fifteen years ago.”

... “Fifteen years ago, the night, no doubt, resembled this one. The heavens were alive with the same glitter, and already the toads were enlivening the silence with their clear short cries, so pure and sweet. A nightingale was warbling its trills as that one now is doing. Uncle, that evening of long ago was delicious too. And yet my aunt and my mother had just died, within eight days of one another, and the sisters having disappeared, we remained face to face, one a widower, and the other an orphan—you, uncle, and I.”

And the man of those far-off days stood before my mind’s eye as the town of Nanthel knew him then, the surgeon already celebrated at thirty-five for the skill of his hand and the success of his bold methods, and who in spite of his fame, remained faithful to his native town—Dr. Frédéric Lerne, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the “Ecole de Médecine,” corresponding member of numerous learned societies, decorated with many divers orders, and—to omit nothing—guardian of his nephew, Nicolas Vermont.

This new father whom the Law assigned me I had not met often, for he took no holidays and only passed his summer Sundays at Fonval. And even these he spent in work—ceaseless and secret work. On those days his passion for horticulture, suppressed all the week, kept him shut up in the little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids.

And yet, in spite of the rarity of our meetings, I knew him well and loved him dearly.

He was a sturdy man, calm and sober, rather cold perhaps, but so kind. In my irreverent way I called his shaven face an “old wife’s face,” and my jesting was quite misplaced, for sometimes he would turn it into an antique visage, lofty and grave, and sometimes into one of delicate mockery (“Regency” style). Among our modern shavelings my uncle was of the few whose head and face by their nobility prove their legitimate descent from an ancestor draped in a toga, and a grandfather clothed in satin, and would allow their scion to wear the costumes of his ancestors without putting them to shame.

For the moment Lerne appeared to me decked out in a black overcoat rather badly cut, in which I had seen him for the last time—when I was setting out for Spain. Being a rich man, and wishing me to be one too, my uncle had sent me into the cork business as an employee of the firm Gomez & Co. of Badajoz.

And my exile had lasted fifteen years, during which the position of the Professor had certainly become better, to judge by the sensational operations he had performed, the fame of which had reached me in the depths of Estremadura.

As for me, my affairs had come to grief. At the end of fifteen years, despairing of ever selling safety-belts and cork on my own account, I had just returned to France to seek another trade, when Fate procured me that of an independent man. It was I who won the lucky number for a million francs, the donor of which wished to remain incognito.

In Paris I took comfortable rooms, but without luxury. My flat was convenient and unpretentious. I had the bare necessaries plus a motor-car and minus a family.

But before founding a new family, it seemed to me the right thing to renew relations with the old—that is to say with Lerne, and I wrote to him.

Not but what after our separation a regular correspondence had been established between us. At the beginning he had given me wise advice and had shown himself pleasantly paternal. His first letter indeed contained the announcement of a Will in my favor hidden in the secret drawer of a desk at Fonval.

After the rendering of his accounts as guardian our relations remained as before. Then, suddenly, his messages became different in character, and grew fewer and fewer, their tone becoming that of boredom, then of annoyance. The matter was commonplace, then vulgar, and the phrasing awkward; the very writing seemed to alter. Each time he wrote, these things became more marked, and I had to limit myself every 1st of January to sending my best wishes. My uncle replied with a few scribbled words.... Wounded in the only affection I possessed, I was much afflicted.

What had happened?

A year before this sudden change—five years before my return to Fonval and my wanderings in the labyrinth—I had read in the “Epoca”:

“We have received the news from Paris that Professor Lerne is saying good-by to his patients in order to devote himself to scientific research begun in the hospital of Nanthel. With this aim that excellent physician is retiring to the neighborhood of the town in the Ardennes, to his château of Fonval which has been arranged for that purpose. He is taking with him among others, Dr. Klotz of Mannheim and the three assistants of the Anatomisches Institut founded by this latter at 22, Friedrichstrasse, which has now closed its doors—when shall we have results?”

Lerne had confirmed this event to me in an enthusiastic letter, which, however, added nothing to the bald facts in the paragraph. And it was a year later on, I say again, that the change in his nature had taken place. Had twelve months of work ended in failure? Had some bitter disappointment so gravely affected the Professor that he should treat me like a stranger and almost as if I were a bore?...

In defiance of his hostility I wrote respectfully and with the utmost possible affection from Paris the letter in which I told him of my good fortune, and I asked his leave to pay him a visit.

Never was invitation less engaging than his. He asked me to give him warning of my arrival so that he might order a carriage to go and fetch me from the station. “You will doubtless not remain long at Fonval,” he added, “for Fonval is not a gay place. We are hard at work. Come alone and give notice.”

But, Heavens! I had given notice and I was alone!—I who had considered my visit as a duty! Well, well, that was merely a piece of stupidity on my part.

And I gazed in bad humor at the star of light on the roads where the exhausted head-lamps were casting no brighter an illumination than a night-light.

Without doubt I was going to pass the night in that sylvan jail; nothing would get me out of it before day. The toads of the pool in the Fonval direction called me in vain; vainly the steeple clock of Grey rang out the hours to tell me of the other resting-place—for belfries are really sonorous lighthouses—I was a prisoner.

A prisoner! It made me smile. Long ago how frightened I should have been! A prisoner in the Ardennes! At the mercy of Brocéliande, the monstrous forest which with its cavernous shade held a world in darkness between its boundaries, one being at Blois and the other in Constantinople! Brocéliande! that scene of epic tales and puerile legends, country of the four sons of Aymon and of Hop-o’-my-Thumb, the forest of druids and goblins, the wood in which Sleeping Beauty fell into slumber while Charlemagne kept watch! What fantastic stories had not its thickets for a stage—were not the trees themselves living persons? “Oh, Aunt Lidivine,” I murmured, “how well you could give life to all those nonsensical tales every evening after dinner! The dear lady! Did she ever suspect the influence of her stories? Aunt, did you know that all your astounding puppets invaded my life by passing through my dreams? Do you know that a flourish of enchanted trumpets still sounds in my ears sometimes; you who made my nights at Fonval resound with the oliphant of Roland and the horn of Oberon?”

At that moment I could not check a movement of vexation; the head-lamps had just gone out after an agonized throb. For a second the darkness was total, and at the same time there was such a profound silence that I could well believe I had suddenly become blind and deaf.

Then my eyes gradually became unsealed, and soon the crescent moon appeared, shedding its snowy light on the cold night. The forest became lit up with a frozen whiteness. I shivered. In my aunt’s lifetime it would have been with terror; I should have beheld in the darkness, where the vapors were creeping, dragons wallowing and serpents gliding. An owl flew off. I should have considered that bird the winged helm of a paladin—an enchanted paladin. The birch tree, standing straight up, shone with a lance-like gleam. An oak tree—a son perhaps of the magic tree which was the husband of the Princess Leélina—quivered. It was huge and druidical—a bunch of mistletoe hung on its main branch, and the moon cut through it with a shining sacred sickle.

Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness, and at nightfall I only ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was, I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond, the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a château) peculiar even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real language.

That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight.... We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!” We were landing in Palestine—“Montjoye and St. Denis!”—I suffered on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated me;—I learnt in it two things—enthusiasm and geography....

But often the other characters were represented. That made it more real. I remembered then—for every child has a Don Quixote in him—I remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in search of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I discovered it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.

My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rôle I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist, hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited by the story which my aunt had just finished, I knew the garden was peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated, hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar.

At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish, leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood—all too empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters.

I had just reached this point in my reverie, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all—and then the sleeping calm returned.

Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the château; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them.

And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me.

One could not mistake its spreading antlers, the height of its neck and the delicacy of its ears; it was a stag of ten. But hardly had I perceived it than it made off in a sudden volte-face. Then—had it gathered itself in to spring?—its body seemed to me strangely low and paltry, and was it a mere reflection?—seemed to me to be of a white color. The animal disappeared in a twinkling, and its little galloping steps died quickly away.

Had I at the first glance taken a goat for a stag? Or had I at the second glance taken a stag for a goat? To tell the truth, I was much interested and puzzled; so much so that I asked myself whether I were not going to resume the soul of the child I had been at Fonval.

But a little reflection made me realize that hunger, fatigue and sleepiness, helped out by moonshine, may easily cause one’s eyes to be deceived, and that a ray falling on an object and transforming it is no unwonted phenomenon.

I rather regretted it; for, having lost my terror of the mysterious, I had still kept my love for it. I am one of those who are sorry that “Philosophy has clipped an angel’s wings,” and yet I cannot let a mystery remain a mystery for me.

Now this beast was really a very extraordinary beast.

Wandering as it was through the incomprehensible labyrinth of the wood, it seemed to me an elusive riddle in a problem, and my curiosity was aroused.

But utterly wearied as I was, I soon fell asleep pondering detective ruses and subtle logical methods of investigation.

I awoke at dawn, and immediately I had a glimpse of a possible end to my imprisonment.

Not far from where I was, some men, hidden by the underwood, were walking and talking. Their steps came and went like those of the stag(?) treading, doubtless the same winding ways. At one moment they passed, still hidden, a few paces away from my car, but I could not understand their conversation—it seemed to be in German.

At last they stood before me at the very place where the animal had appeared. There were three of them, and they were bending down as if they were following a trail. At the spot where the beast had turned, one of them uttered an exclamation and made a gesture as if they should go back. But they perceived me and I advanced towards them.

“Gentlemen,” said I smiling my best, “could you kindly show me the way to Fonval? I have lost myself.”

The three men looked at me without replying, in an inquisitive and shy way.

They were a very remarkable trio.

The first possessed on the top of a massive and squat body a round and calamitously flat face, the thin pointed nose on which, as if it had been shoved into it, made the disc into a sundial.

The second had a military air and was twisting his mustache, which was on the German imperial model, and his chin stuck out like the toe of a boot.

A tall old man with gold spectacles, gray curly hair and an unkempt beard, made up the trio. He was eating cherries in a noisy way, as a bumpkin eats tripe.

They were obvious Germans, doubtless the assistants from the Anatomisches Institut.

The tall old man spat out in my direction a salvo of cherry-stones, and in the direction of his comrades, one of those Teuton phrases, in which a hail of shrapnel-like words mingles with other nameless noises.

They exchanged in their own way some remarks which resembled so many broadsides, without paying the least attention to me, and then after cleverly imitating with their mouths the sound of a battle going on beside a waterfall—having held a council, in fact—they turned on their heels and left me astounded at their rudeness.

But I had to get out of that fix somehow or other. My adventure became hourly more ridiculous. What was the meaning of all this? What comedy was I playing? Was I being made a fool of? I was furious. The would-be secrets I had fancied I scented now seemed to me mere childishness caused by weariness and the dark. The thing was to get away—to get away at once.

Raging and without reflection I made the contact which set the car going, and the 80 horse-power engine started to work in the bonnet with the humming of a hive of bees. I seized the starting lever—and then a great guffaw of laughter made me turn round.

With his cap over his ears, in blouse of blue, and with his letter-bag on his shoulder, hilarious and triumphant, a postman came on the scene.

“Ha, ha! I told you last night that you would lose your way,” said he in a drawling voice.

I recognized my villager of Grey-l’Abbaye, and bad temper prevented me answering him.

“It’s to Fonval you want to go, is it?” he went on.

I cursed Fonval in some very profane language in which I consigned it and its inhabitants to the Devil.

“Because,” went on the postman, “if you are going there, I’ll show you the way. I am taking the letters there. But make haste, I have double load to-day; for this is Monday and I don’t come on Sunday.”

While saying this, he had drawn his letters from his bag, and was arranging them in his hand.

“Show me that,” I cried sharply, “Yes, that yellow envelope.”

He looked me up and down distrustfully and then let me look at it from a distance.

It was my letter—the announcement of my arrival, which followed it by a night, instead of preceding it by a day!

This untoward circumstance absolved my uncle and drove away my rancour.

“Get in,” I said. “You shall show me the way and then ... we shall have a talk!”

The car set off in the freshness of the morning.

A mist was just melting away, as if the sun after whitening the dark had still to dissolve it, and as if this faint fog, now almost nothing, were a portion of the darkness remaining in the form of vapor, an evanescent remainder of the night within the day, the vanishing specter of a vanished phantom.

CHAPTER II
AMONG THE SPHINXES

The car slowly wound its way among the twists and turns of the labyrinth. Sometimes in presence of a cluster of roads the postman himself hesitated for a moment.

“Since when have these zigzags taken the place of the straight avenue?” I asked.

“Four years ago, Sir—about a year after the settling in of Mr. Learne in the château.”

“Do you know the meaning of them? You may speak freely. I am the professor’s nephew.”

“Oh, well, he’s ... he’s, well an eccentric man.”

“What sort of unusual things does he do?”

“Oh, well, nothing. One hardly ever sees him. That’s just the funny part of it. Before he took this higgledy-piggledy into his head, one met him often. He used to walk about in the country, but ever since then ... well, he does take the train to Grey once a month.”

So all my uncle’s eccentricities came to a head at the same epoch; the maze and the different style of his letters coincided as to date. Something at that time had profoundly influenced his mind.

“And what about his companions?” I went on, “the Germans?”

“Oh, as for them, Sir, they are invisible. Moreover, although I go to Fonval six times a week I do not remember when I last clapped eyes on the park. It’s Mr. Lerne himself who comes to the gate for his letters. Oh, what a change! Did you know old John? Well, he’s gone, and his wife too. It’s as true as I’m talking to you, Sir. No more coachman, no more housekeeper ... no more horses.”

“That’s been so for four years, you say?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Tell me, postman, there’s game about here, is there not?”

“Faith, no. A few rabbits, two or three hares—but there are too many foxes.”

“What, no roe-deer? no stags?”

“Never.”

And now I felt a strange thrill of joy.

“Here we are, Sir!”

After a final bend, the road did open out on the old avenue of which Lerne had kept this little bit. It was fringed by two rows of limes, and from the end of the two rows they formed, the door of Fonval seemed to be coming towards us.

In front of it, a carriage-sweep in the shape of a half moon widened the avenue, and beyond that one saw the outline of the blue roof of the château against the green of the trees, and the trees themselves standing out on the somber flanks of the gully.

In the midst of the wall which joined the cliffs on either hand stood the door with its tiled porch. It had aged, and the stone of the lintel was worn away; the wood of its panels was worm-eaten and crumbling into powder here and there; but the bell had not changed. Its sound came from my distant boyhood, so bright and clear that I could have wept at it.

We waited for a few moments.

At last some wooden shoes clattered.

“Is that you, Guilloteau?” said a voice with a trans-Rhenish accent.

“Yes, Mr. Lerne.”

Mr. Lerne! I looked at my guide with eyes wide with wonder—What! Was that my uncle speaking like that?

“You are early,” went on the voice. There was the metallic sound of moving bolts; then the door was opened ajar, and a hand was passed through it.

“Give me them.”

“Here they are, Mr. Lerne. But there is some one with me,” said the postman in an insinuating and timid way.

“Who is it?” cried the other—and in the fissure formed by the hardly opened door, he appeared.

It was my uncle Lerne. But life had laid hand on him, had made him much older, and turned him into this wild unkempt individual whose straggling gray hair covered his shabby clothes with dirty grease. He seemed smitten with premature old age, and there was an unfriendly gleam in the evil eyes which he fixed on me, from under their knitted eyebrows.

“What do you want?” he asked me rudely.

He pronounced the words like a German.

I had a moment of hesitation. The fact was that his face could no longer be compared to that of a kind old woman; it was a Sioux visage, hairless and cruel, and at the sight of it I experienced the contradictory sensations of recognizing it and not recognizing it.

“But, Uncle,” I stuttered finally, “it’s I.... I have come to see you—according to leave given by you. I wrote to you; but my letter ... here it is! my letter and I arrive together. Excuse my carelessness.”

“Ah, you should have told me. It is I that ask pardon of you, my dear nephew.”

A sudden change this! Lerne showed eagerness to welcome me! he blushed and seemed confused and almost servile. This embarrassment, misplaced with regard to me, shocked me.

“Ha ha! you’ve come with a mechanical carriage,” he added. “Hum, there’s a place to put it in, isn’t there?”

He opened both folding-doors.

“Here one has often to be one’s own servant,” he said, while the old hinges creaked.

Thereupon he burst into an awkward sort of laugh. I could have wagered, looking at his perplexed expression, that he had no desire to do so, and that his thoughts were far away from joking.

The postman had taken his leave.

“Is the coach-house still there?” I said, pointing to the right at a brick building.

“Yes, yes. I did not recognize you because of your mustache—hum! Yes, your mustache. You hadn’t one long ago ... had you? Well, and how old are you?”

“Thirty-one, uncle.”

At the sight of the coach-house my heart stopped.

The dog-cart was moldering there, half buried under logs, and there, as in the neighboring stable which was full of odds and ends, the spider webs were hanging whole or in shreds.

“Thirty-one, already,” went on Lerne in a vague and obviously distracted manner.

“But, Uncle, say tu and toi to me, as long ago.”

“Ah, yes, dear ... Nicolas, eh?”

I was very ill at ease, but he did not seem more at his ease than I was. My presence clearly annoyed him.

It is always an interesting thing for an intruder to learn why he is so,—I seized my valise. Lerne observed my gesture and seemed to form a sudden resolve.

“Let it be—let it be, Nicholas,” he said in a tone of command. “I’ll send to fetch your luggage shortly. But first we must have a talk. Come for a walk.”

He took my arm and drew me towards the park. He was still reflecting, however.

We passed near the château. With few exceptions the shutters were closed. The roof in many places was sinking in, sometimes even broken, and the moldy walls from which the whitewash had disappeared in large flakes here and there showed their masonry. The plants in boxes still surrounded the house, but, to tell the truth, for several winters no one had thought of putting the verbenas and orange-trees and laurels under cover. Standing in their battered and rotten tubs they were all dead. The sandy carriage-drive, of yore so carefully raked, might have imagined itself a second-rate meadow, there was so much grass growing there mingled with nettles and hemlock. It was like the castle of “Sleeping Beauty” on the Prince’s arrival. Lerne, clinging to my arm, walked without further talk.

We got to the other side of the dreary pile, and the park lay before our eyes. A jumble. No more baskets of flowers, no more wide, sandy paths like winding ribbons. Except just in front of the château, the lawn—which had been metamorphosed into a paddock fenced with wire and given up to some cattle to feed in—had been encroached on by the valley which had relapsed into its wild state. The garden was no more than a great wood with open spaces and green paths in it. The Ardennes had reassumed their usurped domain.

Lerne thoughtfully filled an immense pipe with feverish fingers, lit it, and then we went under the trees into one of the alleys that were like long caves.

Once more I saw the statues and with a disillusioned eye, the statues which a former master of Fonval had erected in profusion. Those magnificent dumb personages of my dramas were as a matter of fact wretched modern figures, suggested to some commercially-minded magnate of industry of the Second Empire by Rome or Greece. The tunics of concrete swelled out into crinolines, the drapery of the cloaks was like that of a shawl, and the divinities of the woods—Echo, Syrinx, Arethusa—wore low chignons which filled their bag-like nets—in the Benoiton manner. Those hideous representations of exquisite fantasies, of forest charms transmuted into Dryads, were to-day more passable in their mantles of virgin-vine and clematis, although certain heroes were no more than ivy-clad figures of fun, and although a mere moss-clad attitude represented Diana.

After walking for some time, my uncle made me sit down on a bench of stone covered with a coat of lichen, under the shade of flourishing hazels.

A little crackling sound made itself heard in the bower right over our heads.

Lerne jumped convulsively and raised his head.

It was merely a squirrel watching us from the top of a branch.

My uncle darted a ferocious glance at it, fixing it as if he were taking aim at it; then he began to laugh in a reassured sort of way.

“Ha, ha, ha! it’s only a little ... thing,” said he, unable to find the word.

“Really,” thought I within myself, “how queer one may become as one gets old. Environment, I know, is the cause of many evolutions; one adopts the ways and manner of speech of one’s familiars in spite of oneself; the surroundings of Lerne might suffice to explain why my uncle is dirty, expresses himself ill, speaks with a German accent and smokes that huge pipe.... But he has ceased caring for flowers, he no longer looks after his property, and at this moment looks extraordinarily nervous and preoccupied. If one adds to that the happenings of last night, it all seems something less than natural.”

Meanwhile the Professor looked at me in a disconcerting way, and eyed me up and down as if here were sizing me up and had never seen me before. I began to lose countenance. A fierce debate was going on within him which was reflected on his face. Every moment our looks crossed, but at last they met, and joined, and my uncle, not being able to hold his peace any longer appeared for the second time to make up his mind.

“Nicolas,” he said, patting me on the thigh, “I am a ruined man, you know.”

I understood his plan, and was revolted.

“Uncle, be frank with me; you want me to go!”

“I want you to go! What an idea!”

“I am quite sure of it. Your invitation was rather discouraging, and your welcome hardly hospitable. But, uncle, you must have a very short memory if you think me avaricious enough to have come here merely for your money. I see you are no longer the same—your letters indeed made me fear that—and yet it utterly bewilders me that you should have thought of this clumsy subterfuge intended to drive me away. For during these fifteen years I have not changed. I have never ceased venerating you with my whole heart, and have deserved better at your hands than those icy epistles and, above all, better than this insult.”

“There, there! Gently!” said Lerne, much annoyed.

“Moreover, if you want me to go, just say the word and I’m off. You are no uncle of mine now.”

“Don’t talk such blasphemous nonsense, Nicolas.” He said that in a tone of such alarm that I tried intimidation.

“And I shall inform against you, uncle, you and your acolytes and your mysteries.”

“You are mad, you are mad. Hold your tongue. There’s an idea for you!”

Lerne began to laugh loudly, but I don’t know why, his eyes frightened me, and I regretted my phrase.

He went on.

“Look here, Nicolas, don’t get excited! You are a good fellow. Give me your hand. You shall always find in me your old uncle who loves you. Listen, it’s not true; no, I am not ruined, and my heir will certainly get something—if he acts as I desire. But, as a matter of fact, I think he would do better not to stay here.... There’s nothing here to amuse a man of your age, Nicolas; personally I am busy all day long.”

The Professor might talk as he liked now. Hypocrisy showed itself in every word; he was nothing but a contemptible Tartuffe; he was fair game. I determined not to leave till I had completely satisfied my curiosity. So, interrupting him, I said in a tone of deep dejection:

“There you are making use of the inheritance business again to make me decide to leave Fonval. You have clearly no trust in me.”

With a gesture he deprecated the idea. I went on:

“No, allow me to remain in order that we may renew our acquaintance. We both need to do so.”

Lerne knitted his eyebrows, then he said in a mocking tone:

“You insist on renouncing me?”

“No; keep me beside you, otherwise you will hurt my feelings deeply; frankly,” this in a bantering tone, “I should not know what to think.”

“Stop,” rejoined my uncle with energy, “there is nothing wrong to suspect here—far from it.”

“No doubt. All the same, you have secrets—as you have every right to have. If I speak to you of them, it is because I must resign myself to assure you that I shall respect them.”

“There is only one! A single secret. And its aim is noble and salutary,” said my uncle sententiously and with animation: “One only, I tell you—that concerning our work; a blessing to humanity—glory too and gold! But we must have silence assured us. Secrets! Everybody knows we are here, that we are working. The newspapers have said so—there is no secret in that.”

“Keep calm, uncle, and tell me how I am to behave in your house. I am entirely at your disposal.”

Lerne resumed his inward debate:

“Well,” said he, raising his brow, “it is agreed. Such an uncle as I have always shown myself towards you cannot possibly drive you away. That would be belying all my past. Remain then, but on the following conditions:

“We are pursuing researches here that are about to come to their fulfillment. When our discovery is a fait accompli the public will hear of it in its entirety. Till then, I do not wish it to be informed of uncertain attempts whose revelation might raise up rivals capable of anticipating us. I do not doubt your discretion, but I prefer not to put it to the test, and I entreat you in your own interests not to try to surprise any secrets, rather than to be obliged to hide them. I say, ‘in your own interests’; not merely because it is easier not to pry than to hold one’s tongue, but also for the following reasons: Our business is a commercial one at bottom. A man of business like you will be very useful to me. We shall become rich, nephew—millionaires! But you must let me forget the instrument of your fortune in peace, you must show yourself a man of tact and respectful of my orders—in a word, the man I want as an associate. You must know, I am not alone in this enterprise. They might make you repent of your acts, if you transgressed the rule I am laying down for you—cruelly repent—more cruelly than you imagine. So practice indifference, my dear nephew. See nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing, in order that you may become very, very rich—and remain alive!”

“Oh, indifference is not so easy a virtue at Fonval. There have been things going about here since last night which should not be here and only find themselves here through some bit of carelessness.”

At those words an unexpected rage seized Lerne. He flung out his fists and growled: “Wilhelm! Fool! Ass!” What I now felt sure of was that the secrets were considerable and would give me fine surprises were they discovered. As for the doctor’s promises, and his threats, I did not believe in either, and his speech had neither aroused covetousness nor fear in me—the two passions that my uncle wished to make my counselors to obedience. I rejoined coldly:

“Is that all you ask of me?”

“No. But the next prohibition is of another kind, Nicolas. You will be presented to somebody in the château; it is a young girl I rescued....”

I made a movement of surprise, and Lerne guessed my imputation.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, “she is like a daughter—nothing more. But her friendship is precious to me, and it would be painful to me to see it lessened by a sentiment which I can no longer inspire. In short, Nicolas,” he said quickly and with a certain shamefacedness, “I ask you to swear not to pay court to my protégée.”

Astounded at such a degraded view, and still more so at such a want of delicate feeling, I told myself, however, that there is no jealousy without love any more than there is smoke without fire.

“What do you take me for, uncle? It is sufficient that I am your guest.”

“All right—I know my physiology and how to use it. May I trust you? You swear it? Very well.”

“As for her,” he added with a crafty smile, “I am easy for the time being. She has lately seen my way of treating suitors. I advise you not to make trial of it.”

Having got up, with his hands in his pockets, and his pipe between his teeth, Lerne looked me up and down in a jocular and provocative manner. This physiologist inspired me with an unconquerable aversion.

We continued our walk round the park.

“Ah, by the way, do you know German?” said the Professor.

“No, uncle; I only understand French and Spanish.”

“No English either? That’s not much for a future merchant prince. You have not been taught much, I fear.”

“Tell that to the Marines, uncle,” said I to myself. “I had begun to keep wide open those eyes you commanded me to keep shut, and I saw just then that your satisfied expression gave your words the lie.”

We reached the end of the park by way of the foot of the cliffs and came in front of the château which seemed stretching its two wings towards us and dominating the underwood with its ruinous façade.

And it was at this exact moment that my eye was caught by an abnormal bird, a pigeon, which was wheeling in the air, and flew upwards with ever-narrowing and giddy circles.

“Just look at those roses on that long branch of briar; they are pretty and interesting,” said my uncle. “Left to grow wild, they have become dog-roses again.”

“What a curious pigeon!” I said.

“Just look at those flowers,” insisted Lerne.

“One would think there was a drop of lead in its head. That happens sometimes when one is out shooting. It will tower and tower, and then fall from as high as possible.”

“If you don’t watch your feet, you will fall head over heels into the thorn-bushes. It’s a breakneck place, this, nephew.”

This useful bit of counsel was growled out in a menacing tone that sounded strangely out of place.

Then the bird attained the center of its spiral and began not to mount, but to come down with wild tumblings, and whirling over and over. It hit a rock not far from us and fell, an inert thing, into the thick herbage.

Why did the Professor suddenly become more restless? Why did he hasten his steps? That is what I was asking myself, when the big pipe fell from his mouth. Having dashed forward to pick it up I could not restrain a look of stupefaction; he had snapped it off sharp with a furious bite.

The scene ended with a German word—doubtless an oath.

As we returned in the direction of the château we saw running towards us a fat woman who seemed bursting out of her blue apron.

She was evidently unused to such athletic exercise and it went against the grain, for it shook her dangerously, and as she trotted along, she kept herself together by means of her arms and hands as if she were pressing some precious, huge and unwieldy burden against her person. At the sight of us, she stopped all of a piece—a thing that seemed almost an impossibility—then she seemed to want to retrace her steps. However, she came on with a guilty look on her kindly face, a look as of a school-girl caught in a fault. She awaited her fate.

Lerne scolded her:

“Barbe! What are you doing here? You have forgotten. I forbade you to go beyond the paddock. I’ll end by sending you packing, Barbe, after punishing you—you know.”

The fat woman was very much afraid. She tried to bridle, made a mouth as if she were going to lay an egg with it and excused herself—she had, from her kitchen, seen the pigeon fall and thought she might brighten up the bill of fare with it. “You always have the same dishes to eat.”

“And then,” she added stupidly, “I did not think you were in the garden, I thought you were in the lab....”

A brutal slap in the face interrupted her on that syllable—the first syllable of “labyrinth,” as I imagined.

“Oh, uncle!” I cried indignantly.

“Look here, you! Hold your tongue, or off with you! That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

Barbe was terrified and no longer wept. Her suppressed sobs made her hiccup. She was very pale, and on her cheek the bony hand of Lerne remained printed in red.

“Go and take this gentleman’s luggage from the coach-house and put it in the lion-room.”

(This room was on the first story of the western wing.)

“Won’t you give me my old room, uncle?”

“Which was that?”

“Which? Why, the one on the ground floor, the yellow room, in the East wing, you know.”

“No. I use that one,” he said sharply. “Off with you, Barbe.”

The cook decamped as fast as she could.

On our right the pond was lying there stagnant. Our silent passage flung its shadow into it, and it looked there like a dream in a lethargy.

My astonishment was growing every moment. However, I kept myself from seeming too much surprised at the sight of a new and spacious building of gray stone built against the cliff. It consisted of two blocks separated by a courtyard. A high wall pierced with a carriage-gate, at the moment shut, hid it from one’s eyes, but the clucking of fowls escaped from it, and a dog, having scented us, raised his voice.

I flung out a plummet at a venture:

“You’ll take me over your farm, won’t you?”

Lerne shrugged his shoulders:

“Perhaps,” he said. Then turning towards the house, he shouted:

“Wilhelm, Wilhelm!”

The German with the face like a sundial opened a little window and the Professor apostrophized him in his mother-tongue, so violently that the poor fellow trembled all over.

“By Jove!” I said to myself. “It’s owing to him and his inadvertence that there are going about outside since last night, things that should not be there—that’s certain.”

When the execution was over, we went round the paddock. It contained a black bull and four cows of various kinds, the whole lot of whom, for no particular reason, followed after us. My dreadful relative began to joke:

“Nicolas, let me introduce you to Jupiter; and here is the white Europa, the dun-colored Io, the fair-skinned Athor, and Pasiphaë clad in her robe of milk stained with ink, or ink stained with milk—whichever way you prefer.”

This reference to libertine mythology made me smile. To tell the truth, I should have seized the first pretext to have a laugh; I had physical need of it. I also felt a hunger so intense that to satisfy it seemed the only question of any interest. The château was the one and only attraction. It was there I should eat! And the attraction it exercised on me almost made me fail to examine the hothouse, its neighbor.

That would have been a pity. They had added two halls of glass to it which flanked the original rotunda with their domed naves. Under its lowered outer blinds the building seemed to me to form a whole that was “perfect of its kind.” It suggested something between a Crystal Palace and a glass melon-bell; it had quite a grand and out-of-the-way appearance, if I may so say.

A hothouse of this kind in this thicket! I should have been less astonished to find a love-philter in a monastery!

In the days of my late lamented aunt, the lion-room was reserved for guests. It had—it still has—three windows, with deep recesses as deep as alcoves. One of them looks out in the direction of the conservatory and has a balcony attached; the second opens on the park; I saw the paddock from it and further away the pond, and between the two that summerhouse which once was Briareus. The third window faces the eastern wing; from there I saw the window of my old room—shut—and the whole façade of the château blocking the view on the left.

I felt as if I were in an hotel. Nothing there recalled anything to me. A Jouy wall-paper stained with damp from the wall and hanging loose in one corner, covered the walls with a host of red lions each with a cannon ball fixed under its paw. The bed curtains and window curtains showed, in distortion, the same subject. Two pictures balanced one another: The Education of Achilles and The Rape of Deianeira, in which the damp spotted the faces of the four subjects with red and dappled the cruppers of the Centaurs, Chiron and Nessus; there was also rather a fine Norman clock which looked like a coffin set on end, the emblem and at the same time the measures of Time—and the whole furnishing of the room was commonplace and out-of-date.

I splashed my face with cold water and put on clean linen with pleasure. Barbe brought me, without knocking at the door, a plate of coarse broth, and made no reply to my condolences on her inflamed cheek; then she waddled out of the room like a gigantic sylph.

There was no one in the drawing-room—unless shades are people. O little black velvet armchair with your two yellow tassels, hideous piece of squat puffiness, so well termed a crapaud, could I behold you again as of yore without imagining seated on your toad-like form the shade of my anecdotal aunt? And you, my mother’s chair—an austerer one, and one I cannot jest about—will she not always be in my memory leaning over your back as long as you shall be an armchair, if indeed you ever really were one?

Not a detail was altered. From the unspeakable white paper on the walls down which hung garlands of flowers trussed like sausages, to the hangings of sulphur-colored damask draping their fringed basques in a row, the work of the former owner—a contemporary of the crinoline—had admirably stood the effect of time. A swollen stuffing puffed out the sofas single and double, and nothing had succeeded in deflating the inflamed chairs or the blistered settees.

From the wainscot smiled down on one all my dead and gone ancestors: my great-great-grandfathers in chalk, my grandfathers in miniatures, my father a schoolboy in daguerrotype; and on the mantelpiece (duly petticoated with puffed-out fringed flounces) a few photographs were sticking to the mirror. A large-sized group claimed my attention. I took it up to look at it more carefully. It represented my uncle surrounded by five gentlemen and a big St. Bernard dog. The group had been taken at Fonval; the wall of the château made the background, and a rose-laurel in a tub figured in the picture. An amateur’s work and unsigned. Lerne beamed with kindness and mental energy, resembling, in a word, the savant I had expected to find. Of the five men, three were known to me, the Germans; I had never seen the two others.

Then suddenly the door opened without my having the time to replace the photograph. Lerne was ushering in a young woman.

“My nephew, Nicolas Vermont—Mademoiselle Emma Bourdichet.”

Mlle. Emma had apparently been undergoing one of those sharp lectures that Lerne distributed so prodigally. Her frightened expression showed that. She had not even the courage to make the conventional grimace usual in cases of constrained amiability, and merely made an awkward sort of bow.

As for me, after bowing, I dared not raise my eyes for fear my uncle should read my soul in them.

My soul? If by soul one means (as is generally meant) that ensemble of faculties which result in man’s being a little above the other animals, I think I had better not compromise my soul in this matter.

Oh, I’m not unaware that, if all loves, even the purest, are originally animal desires, esteem and friendship sometimes add themselves thereto to ennoble the relations of man and woman.

Alas! If some Fragonard wished to commemorate our first interview and, in the 18th century manner, depict Love as presiding over it, I should advise him to study a certain little Eros with goat’s feet and thighs, a faun-like Cupid unsmiling and wingless; his arrows should be wooden and in a quiver made of bark, and should be dripping with blood; he might indeed pass under the name of Pan. He is Love universal, Pleasure that is unintentionally fecund, the Master of Life who takes equal heed of lairs and eyries, beasts’ dens and bridal beds.

Are there degrees of femininity? In that case, I never saw a woman who was more a woman than Emma. I shall not describe her, having scarcely noted more in her than an abstraction and not an object. Was she beautiful? No doubt; most assuredly desirable.

Yet, I do remember her hair. It had the color of fire, a dull red—possibly dyed—and the image of her body passes even now through my dead passion. It would have put all flat-figured ladies to shame.

Well, this adorable creature was at the height of her charm.

The blood beat against my brain pan, and suddenly a fierce jealousy possessed me. In truth I should willingly have given up this girl, provided no one else should touch her ever. From unpleasing, Lerne now became odious to me. I should remain now—at any price.

Meanwhile we did not know what to say. Thrown off my balance by the suddenness of the incident, and wishing to hide my confusion, I stuttered out anyhow:

“You see, uncle, I was just looking at that photograph.”

“Ah, yes! Me and my assistants, Wilhelm, Karl, and Johann. And this is Macbeth, my pupil. It’s very like him. What do you think of it, Emma?”

He had put the photograph under his ward’s eyes and pointed out to her a man close-shaven in the American way, slim, short and young, with a distinguished bearing, who had his hand on the back of the St. Bernard dog.

“A handsome, intelligent fellow, eh?” said the Professor in a mocking voice. “The ace of Scots!”

Emma never changed her look of terror. She articulated with difficulty:

“His Nelly was very amusing with her performing-dog tricks.”

“And Macbeth,” said my uncle in a jesting voice. “Was he amusing?”

There were symptoms of tears coming, and I saw Emma’s chin quiver. She murmured:

“Poor Macbeth!”

“Yes,” said Lerne to me by way of answer to my puzzled looks, “Mr. Donovan Macbeth had to give up his duties as a result of some unfortunate occurrences. May Fate spare you such unhappiness, Nicolas!”

“And the other?” I asked, in order to turn the conversation. “The other one, he with the brown mustache and whiskers, who is he?”

“He’s gone, too.”

“Dr. Klotz,” said Emma, who had drawn near us and was regaining her calm. “Otto Klotz; oh, as for him....”

Lerne silenced her with a terrible look. I do not know what punishment she foresaw, but a spasm rendered the poor girl rigid.

Hereupon Barbe introduced slantwise half of her opulent form and murmured that lunch was on the table.

She had only set three places in the dining room; the Germans, I fancied, must live in the gray buildings.

The lunch was gloomy. Mlle. Bourdichet never ventured a word, ate nothing, and so I could not make out what was the matter, terror making all creatures alike.

Besides, sleepiness was overwhelming me. Immediately after dessert I asked leave to go to bed, begging to be allowed to sleep till the next morning.

Once in my room, I immediately began to undress. To tell the truth my journey, the night and the morning had worn me out. All those riddles, too, worried me, first because they were riddles and then because they presented themselves so confusedly. I felt as if I were enveloped in smoke wherein riddling sphinxes kept turning their vague faces towards me.

My braces were just going to be flung off—and were not flung off.

In the garden Lerne was making his way towards the gray buildings accompanied by his three assistants.

“They are going to work in there,” said I to myself. “That’s clear. I am not being watched; they have not had time to take many precautions; uncle is persuaded I am asleep. Nicolas, this is the time for action, now or never. But what to start with? Emma, or the secret? Hum ... the little girl is utterly gorgonized to-day.... As for the secret....”

Having put on my coat again, I went mechanically from window to window.

There between the wrought-iron stanchions of the balcony the Conservatory showed its mysterious additions. It was shut, forbidden, attractive.

I went out stealthily and noiselessly, like a wolf.

CHAPTER III
THE CONSERVATORY

Once outside, and without cover, it seemed to me that everything was spying on me; so I flung myself headlong into a little wood near the conservatory; then through the thorn and creepers I made my way towards my objective.

It was very warm. I advanced with great difficulty and taking thousands of precautions to avoid scratches and tell-tale rents.

At last the conservatory with its central dome and one of its bulging flanks loomed large before me. It was a side view that first presented itself. I thought it would be wise to reconnoiter it before leaving the shelter of the wood.

What struck me immediately was its appearance of cleanliness, its perfect upkeep; not a paving-stone of the encircling footway displaced, not a brick of the foundation broken; the blinds which were well fastened had all their laths, and in the narrow open spaces of their shutters the window-panes flashed in the sun.

I listened. No sound came to me from the castle or from the gray buildings. In the conservatory there was complete silence. One heard nothing but the vast hum of a burning afternoon.

Then I summoned up my courage, and approaching stealthily, I raised one of the wooden sun-blinds and tried to look through the panes; but I could see nothing; they had been smeared on the inside with a whitish substance. It seemed more and more probable that Lerne had diverted the conservatory from its original use, and now abandoned himself there to any other culture than that of flowers. The idea of microbe broths simmering under the warm light seemed to me quite a happy inspiration.

I moved round the glass house. Everywhere the same stuff smeared on the window-panes intercepted the view—rather thick stuff it appeared.

The ventilation windows stood open but beyond my reach. The wings had no doors, and one could not get into the central part from the back.

As I kept moving round scrutinizing the brick and the no less thick glass, I soon found myself on the château side opposite my balcony. This position being unsheltered was dangerous. I thought I should have to return to my bedroom, and give up the supposed palace of microbes without examining the front. I limited my investigation therefore to a most disappointed glance—a glance, however, which suddenly let me know that the mystery lay open to me.

The door was only pressed against the door-post, and the bolt which was quite free showed that some careless person had thought he had barred the door securely. Oh, Wilhelm, you priceless donkey!

The moment I entered, my bacteriological hypothesis was at once destroyed. A whiff of floral perfumes welcomed me—a moist and warm whiff with a touch of nicotine in it.

I paused in wonderment on the threshold.

No hothouse—not even a royal one—has ever given me that impression of riotous luxury which I at first experienced. In that rotunda in the midst of all those sumptuous plants, the first sensation was that of bedazzlement. The whole gamut of greens was played in a chromatic scale on the keyboard of leaves, amid the multi-colored tones of flowers and fruit, and on tiers which climbed up to the cupola those splendors surged magnificently upward.

But one’s eyes became accustomed to the sight, and my admiration grew somewhat less. Assuredly, however, for this Winter-Garden to arouse my admiration so immediately, it must have been composed of plants very remarkable in themselves, for in reality no attempt at harmony had brought about their arrangement.

They were grouped in disciplinary order and not in accordance with a spirit of elegance—like some Eldorado confided to the care of a gendarme. Their ranks separated themselves brutally from one another, like so many categories; the pots stood in military array, and each of them bore a label, which had to do with botany rather than with gardening, and gave evidence rather of science than of art. This circumstance gave one food for meditation. After all, could I admit for a moment that Lerne could possibly do gardening for pleasure?

Prosecuting my researches, I let my charmed eyes wander over all those marvels, incapable in my ignorance of naming any of them. I tried to do so, however, mechanically, and then that luxuriance, which on a cursory general look had shown a sort of exotic character, began to appear to me as it really was....

Incredulous, and a prey to a fever of curiosity, I looked at a cactus.

In spite of my want of expert knowledge, I could not be mistaken, but its red flower utterly puzzled me.... I looked at it minutely, and my perplexity only grew.

There was no possible doubt: this demoniac flower with its insolent look, this rocket which soared up green to break in fiery stars, was a geranium!

I went on to the next flower: three bamboo stalks rose out of the soil, and capitals which crowned their slim columns were—dahlias.

Almost afraid, breathing in the unnatural perfumes in short breaths, I looked questioningly at the place around me, and its miracle-like incoherence clearly showed itself.

Spring, Summer, and Autumn reigned there in company, and Lerne had doubtless suppressed Winter, which extinguishes flowers like flames. They were all there, and all fruits too, but neither flower nor fruit had grown on its own tree!

A colony of cornflowers garnished a stalk ceded by moss-roses, and which now waved about, a thyrsus thenceforward blue. An araucaria unfolded at the tip of its bristling branches the indigo-colored bells of the gentian, and along an espalier among nasturtium leaves and on the loops of its serpentine stalk, camelias and parti-colored tulips blossomed fraternally together.

Opposite the entrance-door, a clump of bushes rose up against the glass wall. The shrub which stood highest drew my attention. Pears were hanging from it, and it was an orange tree! Behind it two vine-stocks with branches worthy of the land of Canaan flung their garlands round a trellis; their gigantic clusters differed as their stocks; the one bore yellow fruit, the other purple—but each grape was a Mirabelle plum or a damson!

On the twigs of a miniature oak, on which several rebellious acorns were obstinately forming, one beheld walnuts and cherries rubbing shoulders. One of these fruits was an abortion: neither “chalk nor cheese” it was forming into a glaucous tumor streaked with pink—a thing monstrous and repellant.

Instead of cones, a fir tree was dotted with chestnuts like shining stars, and, moreover, it flaunted this strange contrast: the orange—that golden sun of Eastern orchards—and the medlar, which looks like a posthumous fruit of a tree that has died of cold!

Not far away there was a throng of still more fully developed miracles. Flora was elbowing Pomona, as the good Demoustier would have phrased it. Most of the plants that formed this crowd were strange to me, and I only remember the commoner ones, those that anybody knows the list of. I can still see an astounding willow which bore hortensias and peonies, peaches and strawberries. But the prettiest of all those hybrids was perhaps a rose tree with ox-eyes for flowers and crab-apples for fruit.

In the center of the rotunda a bush showed a mingling of leaves so dissimilar as those of the holly, the lime and the poplar. Having pressed them apart I satisfied myself that they issued all three from a single stem.

It was the triumph of grafting—a science that Lerne had for fifteen years been pushing to the verge of the miraculous, so far indeed that the results presented a somewhat disquieting spectacle. “When man sets his hand to Life, he makes monsters.” A kind of uneasiness troubled me.

“What right has one to upset Creation?” I said to myself. “Should one turn the ancient laws topsy-turvy? Can one play this sacrilegious game without high treason against Nature? If only those artificial things had been in good taste! But, devoid of real novelty, they were merely curious mixtures, a sort of vegetable chimeras, floral Fauns, half this and half that. On my honor, graceful or not, this kind of work is impious, and that’s the long and the short of it.”

Be that as it may, the Professor had toiled most laboriously to bring his work to so successful an issue. The collection vouched for that, and there were other signs that recalled the savant’s industry: on a table I perceived rows of bottles and an array of grafting-tools and gardening implements which glittered like surgical instruments. This discovery sent me back to the flowers, and looking into the matter I became aware of all their wretchedness.

They were plastered with various sorts of gum, bandaged and full of gashes which were like wounds, out of which oozed a suspicious juice.

There was a wound in the bark of the pear-bearing orange tree that formed an eye which was slowly shedding tears.

I was becoming quite nervous. Would one have believed it? I was assailed by a ridiculous anguish as I looked at the oak-tree (which had had an operation) because I fancied the cherries looked like drops of blood...! Flop! flop! Two ripe ones fell at my feet like the first drops of a thunder-storm.

I was no longer possessed of the calm necessary for reading the labels. They merely told me a few dates—and the fact that Lerne had covered them with Franco-German terms which had originally been illegible, and were rendered more so by erasures.

With my ears on the alert, and with my brow in my hands, I had to take a moment’s respite in order to gather my wits together, and then I opened the door of the right wing.

A little nave, as it were, stretched out before me. Its glass vault filtered the daylight and attenuated it to a bluish and refreshingly cool half-light. My steps rang out on the flagstones.

In this chamber there gleamed three aquariums, three tanks of glass, so pure that the water seemed to be standing of itself in three geometrical blocks.

The aquariums on the two sides of the hall held marine plants which did not seem to differ much one from the other. However, the rotunda had taught me with what method Lerne classified everything, and I could not believe that he had separated into two tanks things absolutely identical. So I watched the sea-weeds attentively.

Their tufts, on both sides of the place, formed the same submarine landscape. On the right, as on the left, arborescences of every color had fixed their rigid and bifurcated stems on the rocks; the sandy bottom was sprinkled with stars like edelweiss, and here and there sprung up sheaves of chalky rods, at the end of each of which a sort of fleshy chrysanthemum unfolded itself like a yellow or a violet flower. I cannot describe the host of other corollæ; they often resembled oily calices of wax or of gelatine; most of them showed an indefinable color in a vague outline, and sometimes they had no edges and were mere nuances in the midst of the water.

Bubbles escaped in thousands from an inside tap, and their tumultuous pearls raced madly along the foliage before they rose to burst on the surface. One would have thought, seeing them, that that aquatic garden had always to be drenched with air.

Recalling my schoolboy memories I grasped that the two sets of flowering things—differing merely in detail—were exclusively composed of polypi, those ambiguous creatures, such as coral or sponge, which the naturalist interpolates between vegetables and animals.

Their peculiar ambiguity is never devoid of interest. I tapped the left-hand trough.

Immediately an unexpected thing moved before me swimming by means of contraction; it was like an opaline Venetian goblet which had remained malleable; a second crossed over the first; they were two jelly-fish. Meanwhile the tapping of my fingers had set other things moving. The yellow and purple tufts of the anemones went back into their calcareous sheaths, then rhythmically unfolding, emerged again; the rays of the star-fish and sea-urchins stirred lazily; grays and reds and saffrons swayed about, and, as if under the influence of an eddy the whole aquarium became alive.

I tapped on the right-hand trough. Nothing budged.

This was proof positive; this separation of the polypi into two receptacles gave me a clearer understanding of the connection which, joining the animal and the vegetable, makes man akin to the blade of grass. At this meeting-place of the two organized kingdoms, the creatures on the left—active—were at the foot of their scale, and those on the right—inactive—at the top of theirs; the former were on the way to becoming beasts, the latter had finished being plants.

Thus, the gulf which seems to separate those two extreme poles in the world is reduced, as far as structure goes, to slight divergences, almost invisible—a less striking difference than that between the wolf and the fox which are, however, brothers.

Now, this infinitesimal difference in organization which Science, however, regards as unsurmountable, since it separates inertia from spontaneous movement—this difference Lerne had bridged! In the basin at the end of the room, the two species were grafted on to one another. I noted there a gelatinous sort of leaf of the immobile order, grafted on to a mobile stem, and now moving about too. The grafts adopted the condition of the plant into which they were inserted; penetrated with a life-giving juice, their indifference changed to animation, and the activity of the other was paralyzed through sucking in the ankylosis.

I would willingly have passed in review the various applications of this principle; but a medusa tied with a hundred knots to some seaweed or other struggled violently in its mossy net, and I turned away in disgust.

This last stage in grafting in spite of difficulties completed the profanation in my eyes, and I looked away into the blue shadow for less disagreeable sights.

The Professor’s apparatus stood ready for him. There was a whole chemist’s shop on a dresser. Four tables with clear glass tops alternated with the aquariums, and bore on them an arsenal of knives, pincers and tweezers.

No! Lerne had no right to do this! It was as infamous as a butchery! More so indeed! And his odious performances on virgin Nature offered at one and the same time the horror of a murder and the ignominy of a violation!

As I was yielding to this righteous indignation, a noise arose. Some one was knocking.

Ah! my hell beyond the grave will be to hear that little insignificant tapping. In a flash I felt every nerve in my body. Some one was knocking!

In a bound I was in the rotunda, and my face must have been terrible to see, for instinctively the dread of an adversary made me assume a look of ferocity.

Nobody on the doorstep—nobody in the park—I went in again.

The noise began once more. It was coming from the yet unexplored wing. Losing my head, I dashed towards it without realizing my rashness, or the risk of finding myself face to face with the danger, and so excited, that I banged my head against the door, as I opened it with a violent pull.

Nervous exhaustion had brought me down to this condition of weakness. And I ask myself to-day whether it had not to some extent given me hallucinations and made me fancy things to be more bizarre than they really were.

An intense light flooded the third hall and helped me at once to recover my assurance. On a dresser there was a cage upside down which was knocking about with a rat inside it, as in a prison. When the rat jumped, the cage jumped; hence the noise. At the sight of me, the rodent became quiet. I attached no importance to this little episode.

This place, which was less orderly than the others, looked like an ill-kept hothouse. But towels stained with blood and thrown on the ground, lancets lying anyhow among half empty test-tubes, all this told of recent work and might serve as an excuse for the confusion.

I began my investigation.

The first two witnesses to appear did not give me much information. These were some very humble plants in their china pots. Their names in um or us have gone from my memory, a thing I deplore, for they would give my tale more authoritativeness, and more resonance. But who, at the mention of their ordinary names, could fail to represent to himself a tuft of plantain and a tuft of hare’s-ear?

The former was, it is true, of an exceptionally long and supple sort. As for the latter, it had nothing distinctive about it, and, like its fellows, it conscientiously counterfeited a dozen great ear-lobes. On two of its hairy, silvery leaves and on one of the twigs of the plantain below it, a bandage showed like a bracelet of white cloth which tar (apparently) stained brown.

I sighed a sigh of relief. “Good,” said I to myself, “Lerne has inoculated them. This is only a repetition of what I have already seen, or rather an early, timid and simple essay, a stage on the road to the rotunda, as it is a stage on the way to the atrocities of the aquarium. I might have begun here, gone on to the central garden of Eden, and finished off by the polypi. Thank God, I have seen the worst.”

So ran my thoughts, when the twig of the plantain twisted about like a worm!

At the same time a mass of shining gray gave a jump which betrayed its presence behind the dresser. There lay in the midst of a pool of blood a rabbit with silvery fur. It had just expired, and had nothing in the way of ears but two bleeding holes.

The presentiment of the reality made me break out into a sweat. It was then I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two grafted leaves like ears, I perceived they were hot and quivering.

A recoil sent me up against the dresser. My hand stiff with disgust tried to shake off the feeling of that contact as it would that of a hideous spider; it knocked violently against the rat’s cage, which fell.

At once the rat bounded towards the middle of its cage, biting and rolling about with mad fury ... and my staring eyes went continually from the plantain to the animal, from the twig quivering like a thin black snake to the rat which had no tail.

Its wound had healed, but the poor beast bore traces of another experiment which it dragged about in its somersaults—a sort of loosened girdle, which still, however, kept fixed in its place a piece of greenery that had been inserted into its slashed flank!

This growth seemed to me to have withered. So Lerne was mounting the scale of Being. He was now grafting together the higher animals and all kinds of plants! Infamous and great, my uncle inspired me with disgust and admiration, such as one might feel for a maleficient deity.

His works, however, seemed to me less estimable than repulsive, and I had to do violence to myself to force myself to prolong my visit.

It was worth it, even if it was merely a figment of the brain. What remained for me to learn surpasses the nightmare of a madman. Frightful, assuredly, but comic too in a way—grotesque, sinister.

Which of the sufferers inspired most horror? The guinea-pig, the frog or the trees?

The guinea-pig, perhaps was the least extraordinary. Its pelt may have been green only as the result of the green reflection from all those plants. That may be so.

But the frog! But the trees! What was one to think of them?

The frog was green as grass and had all its four legs forced into the soil, planted in the middle of a pot like a vegetable with four roots, its eyelids closed, its aspect dull and mournful.

As for the date trees—at first they had given no sign of motion, and I am certain there was no wind blowing—then, when they did move, it was in all directions. Their leaves swayed very gently—I thought I heard something, but I could not swear to it—yes, the trees swayed and came closer at every moment; suddenly they gripped one another with all their green fingers and embraced convulsively. Was it in wrath or in lust? For battle or for love? I know not. The gestures are much alike.

Beside the frog a vase of white porcelain was full of a colorless liquid in which was steeped a Pravoz syringe. A similar vase and syringe had been placed near the trees, but here the liquid was brown and curdling. I concluded that they were sap and blood.

The date trees had let go of each other, and my trembling hand advanced towards them. I could feel, under the soft warm bark pulse-beats that made it rise and fall with rhythmical cadence.

Since then I have said to myself that one may feel ones own pulse when feeling that of others, and I was doubtless feverish; but at the moment could I doubt my senses?... Besides, what follows in no wise impeaches my lucidity then; it would on the contrary plead in its favor. I do not know whether intensity of recollection in a doubtful case of hallucination is an argument for or against a morbid state; but at any rate I remember very intensely the picture of those monstrosities rising out of the medley of linen wrappings and bottles among the scattered instruments of steel.

Was there nothing more to see? I rummaged in the corners—no, nothing more. I had followed step by step my uncle’s work and in the rational order of their ascending scale.

I got back to the château without let or hindrance and regained my bedroom. There the hectic vigor which had been supporting me quite failed me. Vainly I tried, as I undressed, to recapitulate my campaign. It was already assuming the appearance of a bad dream and I no longer believed in it. Could the vegetable kingdom really mingle with the animal? What an absurdity! If plant-polypi are almost animal-polypi, what can an insect and a leaf, for example, have in common? Then I felt a sharp pain in the thumb of my right hand: a little white pustle ringed with pink was budding there. In my journey through the woods something had stung me. But I was unable to say whether it was the vengeance of a nettle or of an ant. This made me feel the possibilities of things, and that I had not to accept them as having been realized by my uncle. My reflections were as follows:—

“To sum up, Lerne has tried to amalgamate vegetables and animals, and to make them exchange their vitalities. His methods, judiciously progressive, have succeeded. But are they aims in themselves, or only a means to something else? What is he trying to reach? I cannot see how those experiments can have practical applications that a financier might exploit. So, they are not ends in themselves. It seems to me that they tend to something more perfect which I can vaguely divine without fully perceiving. My head is full of woolly headache—Come, let me see!... Perhaps the Professor is carrying on at the same time other researches converging to the same point as these, a knowledge of which would make the final object clear. Come, come! Logic, logic. On the one hand.... Oh, Lord I am tired—On the one hand I have seen vegetables grafted together, on the other hand my uncle has begun mixing up plants and beasts ... ah, I give it up.”

My exhausted mind refused to reason any more. I saw in a confused way that in his study of grafting he had neglected a whole branch of the subject, or at least that the hothouse was not its theater. My eyelids grew heavy. The more I tried to induce or deduce the more I got confused. The apparition of the preceding night, the gray buildings, and Emma came to aggravate my distraught condition with anxiety, curiosity and desire. In short, never had a feather pillow been the haunt of such a welter of ideas.

A riddle!

Yes, indeed, a riddle! And yet, though the sphinxes were all round me, through the dim vapor which was now less thick I clearly distinguished them. And as one of them had a pleasing face and a youthful figure, I fell asleep smiling.

CHAPTER IV
HOT AND COLD

Qui dort dîne. My slumber lasted till the next morning.

And yet I never rested so ill. The bruised feeling caused by a day spent in a motor-car came over my loin-muscles, and for long I felt in them the ricochets of ghostly jolts and the twists of spectral skids. Then I was visited by dreams in which a world of miracle came to life. Brocéliande, the Shakespearean forest, began to move; in the press of it trees walked along arm in arm; a birch tree which looked like a lance made me a speech in German, and I could hardly hear it, for many of the flowers were singing, plants yelped insistently, and great trees every now and then howled aloud.

On my awakening, I remembered this hullabaloo with a phonographic exactitude—so much so, that I was alarmed about it, and I was angry with myself for not having made a full examination of the conservatory; a less hasty and calmer study of it would doubtless have enlightened me. I severely condemned my undue haste and my nervous condition of the day before. But why not make up for it? Perhaps it was not too late?

With my hands behind my back, and a cigarette between my lips, with no particular aim in my steps, I passed in front of the conservatory, as if I were merely taking a stroll.

It was locked.

So, I had missed the one chance of learning the truth, yes, I felt, the one and only chance. Oh, donkey, donkey!

In order not to arouse suspicion, I had passed the forbidden place without pausing, and now an avenue led me towards the gray buildings. Through the grass which covered it, a beaten path bore witness to frequent passings to and fro.

After following the track for some time, I saw my uncle coming to meet me. No doubt he had been on the watch for my coming out. He was quite cheery. His discolored countenance, when he smiled, was now like his young face of long ago. This affable expression restored my equanimity. My escapade had passed unperceived.

“Well, my boy,” said he in almost a friendly way, “I bet you are of my way of thinking. It is not a cheerful place. You will soon be weary of your sentimental sojourn at the bottom of this stewpan!”

“Oh, uncle, I have always loved Fonval, not for the scenery, but as a venerable friend, an ancestor, if you like. It is one of the family. I have often played, you know, on its lawns and among the branches of its trees; it’s a godfather that has dandled me on its knee—like—like you, uncle.”

“Yes, yes,” said Lerne evasively. “All the same you will soon have had enough of it.”

“Not at all. The park of Fonval is my earthly paradise.”

“There you are right. It’s just that,” he said laughingly, “the forbidden tree grows in its inclosure. Every hour you will come up against the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge which you must not touch. It’s dangerous. In your position I should go out for a run in your mechanical carriage. Oh, if Adam had only had a mechanical carriage!”

“But, uncle, there is the labyrinth!”

“Oh,” cried the Professor gayly, “I’ll accompany you and guide you. Besides I am anxious to see one of those what d’-you-call-ems working.”

“Automobile, uncle.”

“Ah, yes, automobile,” and his Teutonic accent gave the word, which is a slow-moving one as it is, an amplitude, a weight, a monumental immobility.

We were going side by side towards the coach-house. There was no denying that my uncle had made up his mind to endure my intrusion with courage. Nevertheless his persistent good temper only vexed me. My projects of indiscretion seemed less legitimate to me. Perhaps I should have abandoned them altogether at that moment, had not my desire for Emma driven me to wish ill to her despotic jailor. Besides, was he sincere? And was it not merely to incite me to keep my plighted word that he said to me on arriving at the improvised garage:

“Nicolas, I have reflected a great deal. I really do think you might be very useful to us in the future, and I desire your further acquaintance. Since you want to remain here for some days, we shall often have talks. In the mornings I do not work much; we shall employ them in going about either on foot, or in your car, and in conversation. But don’t forget your promises.”

I nodded assent. “After all,” thought I, “it really seems as if he wanted one day to publish the solution to the problem. Why should it not be legitimate enough, though the operations that are to procure it are not so? It’s them he wishes to hide until the result comes; he expects the éclat of the latter to excuse the barbarity of the former and to obtain his pardon—if only the end does not betray the means, and the means can remain forever unknown. On the other hand, might Lerne not be afraid of competition? Why not?”

I was ruminating on all this as I emptied a little tin of petrol into the tank of my excellent car, a tin which propitious Chance had allowed me to find in the boot.

Lerne got in beside me. He pointed out to me a straight road that skirted a cliff of the defile, a surreptitious cross-road ingeniously concealed. I was astonished at first that my uncle should have pointed out this short cut to me, but, after all, was he not showing me how to get away, and was not this au fond what he most desired?

Oh, the dear uncle! He must have lived a very secluded or very absorbed life, for he was pathetically ignorant of all that concerns motor-cars. His was the sort of ignorance savants have with regard to sciences in which they are not specialists. My physiologist was not strong on the subject of mechanics. He hardly suspected the principle of this docile, supple, silent and speedy engine of locomotion which roused his enthusiasm.

At the edge of the forest:

“Let us stop here, please,” said he. “You must explain this machine to me. This is where I usually end my walks. I am an old eccentric. You shall go on by yourself afterwards, if you like.”

I began my demonstration, and I perceived that the hooter, only slightly damaged, could be repaired in a turn of the hand. Two screws and a piece of wire restored its deafening power. Lerne, at the sound of it, beamed with ingenuous delight. I went on with my lecture, and as I talked, my uncle listened to me with increasing attention.

In truth the thing deserved attentive interest. During the preceding three years, if motor engines had but little changed in the essentials of their structure and in that of their principal organs, fittings on the other hand had progressed, and the materials employed were employed more judiciously. Thus, in the construction of my car, whose only woodwork was the racing-seats, no wood had been employed. My 80 horse-power affair formed a little luxurious and neatly furnished workshop all of cast iron and steel, of copper and aluminum. The great invention of the day had been applied to it—I mean that it did not rest on four pneumatic tires, but on spring-wheels which were wonderfully elastic. Nowadays that seems quite a matter of course; but a year ago my iron fellies caused much surprise.

But the most remarkable thing about my 234 XY, when you come to think of it, was, I think, that improvement which engineers obtained so slowly that one did not see it growing day by day—I mean its automatism.

The first horseless machine was encumbered with levers, pedals, handles and wheels necessary for its guidance, and with taps and grease-valves to turn, which were indispensable for the functioning of the engine. Now, each generation of motor-cars has dispensed with these more and more completely. One by one, almost all those handles have disappeared which require the incessant intervention of man. In our days, by means of its organs which have become automatic, the mechanism controls the mechanism. A chauffeur is no more than a pilot; once going, his machine keeps up its own energy; once awake, it will only fall asleep again at the word of command. In short, as Lerne bade me note, the modern motor-car enjoys properties that a spinal cord might confer; it enjoys instinct and reflex actions. Spontaneous movements take place in it along with the voluntary movements caused by the intelligence of the driver, who becomes as it were the brain of the vehicle. It is from this intelligence that the orders for definite actions go, transmitted by the metallic nerves to the steel muscles.

“Moreover,” said my uncle, “the resemblance between this machine and the body of a vertebrate animal is striking.”

Here Lerne was entering his own domain. I lent an attentive ear, and he went on:

“We have here the nervous and muscular systems represented by the striker-rods, the driving-gear and the cranks. And the châssis, Nicolas, what is it but the skeleton into which the tenants insert themselves like tendons? Blood, the vital element, circulates in those copper arteries in the form of petrol. The carburetor breathes; it’s a lung; instead of combining air with blood, it mixes it with the vapor of the petrol, that’s all! This hood resembles a thorax in which life beats rhythmically—our joints move in the synovia as those swivel-joints in oil. Under the shelter of the resisting skin of the case is the tank, a stomach that grows hungry and is replenished. Here, phosphorescent like those of cats, but as yet void of sight, are eyes, its lamps; its voice is the hooter; and—but I need not go into further details. In a word, Nicolas, the only thing wanting to your car is brain, which you sometimes supply; having that it would become a great deaf beast, blind, insensitive and sterile, without the sense of taste or of smell.”

“A regular collection of infirmities,” I said, bursting into a loud laugh.

“Hum!” rejoined Lerne, “in other respects the motor-car is better off than we. Think how the water cools it; what a remedy against fever! And then what a time the engine can last, if it is wisely used! It can be mended indefinitely—it can always be cured; have you not just restored speech to its maw? You could replace an eye just as easily!”

The Professor was getting excited:

“It’s a powerful and terrible body,” he cried, “but a body that allows itself to be clothed—it has armor which increases the power of the wearer beyond all expectation, a cuirass that multiplies its force and speed. Why, you inside it are like the Maritans of Mr. Wells in their tripod cylinders! You are nothing but the brain of an artificial monster that it makes one giddy to think of.”

“All machines are like that, uncle.”

“No. Not so completely. But for the form (which no animal resembles of course) the automobile is the most congruous automaton ever contrived. It is more made in our image than the best mannikin wound up by a key, the most human of puppets. For under their anthropomorphic envelope those mannikins hide a mere roasting-jack organism, which one would not compare with the anatomy of a snail. Whereas here....”

He drew back a step and regarded my car with a look of tenderness:

“What a superb creature,” he exclaimed, “and how great is man!”

“Yes,” said I to myself, “there is a deal more beauty in a thing we create, than in all your sinister joining of flesh and wood that are both from of old. But it’s not bad on your part to have admitted it.”

Though it was late, I went on to Grey-l’Abbaye to replenish my stock of petrol, and though he was a creature of routine, Lerne, infatuated with automobilism, passed beyond the traditional limit of his walks and insisted on accompanying me.

Then we resumed the way to Fonval. My uncle, with all the ardor of a neophyte, bent over the bonnet in order to listen to the pulsations within the metal frame, then he took to pieces one of the oil-valves. All the time he kept questioning me, and I had to inform him of the smallest details of my car, details which he assimilated with an incredible accuracy.

“I say, Nicolas, sound the hooter, will you? Now—go slow—stop—start again—quicker—that will do—put on the brake—back now—stop—it’s colossal!”

He was laughing. His cloudy face seemed almost beautified. Seeing us one would have said we were excellent friends. In fact we were so then perhaps. And I fancied that perhaps, thanks to my “two-seater,” Lerne might one day confide in me.

He preserved this gayety till our return to the château; the proximity of the mysterious workshop did not affect it; it only disappeared in the dining room. Then suddenly Lerne’s brow darkened. Emma had just come in. And the husband of my aunt Lidivine seemed to have effaced himself with my uncle’s smile, only an irritable old savant remaining between his two guests. I then felt how little his future discoveries mattered in comparison with this woman, and that he wanted to acquire glory and wealth only in order to keep the charming girl by his side.

Assuredly he loved her just as I did, and with the same fierce desire.

Barbe came and went as she waited on us more or less anyhow. We were silent. I avoided looking at Emma, being persuaded that my looks would have resembled kisses and that my uncle would have divined them.

She, now quite at her ease, pretended indifference; and with her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table, her bare arms showing out of her short sleeves, she gazed through the windows at the meadows whose inhabitants were lowing.

I should have liked to gaze at the same sight as my bien-aimée; this distant and sentimental communion would have satisfied one; but unluckily the meadows were not visible from where I sat, and my eyes wandered idly about, none the less noting the whiteness of her bare arms and the unwonted heaving of her bodice.

As I was interpreting this unwonted emotion on her part in my favor, Lerne, hostile and taciturn, broke up the party. He ordered Emma off to her room and giving me a book bade me go and read in the shade of the forest.

I had but to obey. “Bah,” I said to myself, “in spite of his exhortations, he is more to be pitied than I am.”

The happenings of that night cooled my pity most notably.

The incident troubled me all the more that it did nothing to lighten the darkness of the mystery; in itself it seemed incomprehensible. This is what it was:

I had peacefully fallen asleep with my mind dwelling on Emma, and the delightful hope she inspired; but sleep instead of bringing me pleasant dreams, brought back the absurdities of the preceding night, the moaning and barking plants. The intensity of the sound kept increasing in my dream, and at last it became so acute, so real, that I suddenly woke up.

Sweat was drenching my body and my hot sheets. The echo of a recent cry was just dying on my tympanum. It was not the first time I heard it. No—in the labyrinth I had heard it before, that cry, far away in the direction of Fonval.

I raised myself on my hands. A ray of moonlight lit my room. I could hear nothing. Only from the old-fashioned clock came any sound—that of Time’s sickle. My head fell back on the pillow.

Then suddenly, with a shuddering of my whole being, I buried myself in the blankets with my fingers in my ears. The sinister howling was rising from the park into the night, a sinister, unearthly howling. It was indeed that which I had heard in my nightmare; my dream had mingled with reality.

With a superhuman effort I arose, and it was then that I heard yelpings—a sort of stifled yelpings, very much stifled.

Well, after all, it might all be proceeding from a dog’s throat, hang it!

Nothing to be seen from the window on the garden side except the plane tree and the other trees drowsing in the moonlight.

Then the howling began again on the left, and from the other window I saw what seemed to me for a moment to explain everything.

Some distance away a starved-looking dog was standing with its back towards me. It was a huge animal, and it had laid its front paws on the closed shutters of my former bedroom, and every now and then uttered a loud long wail. The other barkings—the stifled ones—replied to him from the inside of the house; but were they really yelps? Had my ears deceived me? It sounded more like the voice of a man trying to imitate the voice of a dog. The more I listened, the more that conclusion forced itself on me. Yes, certainly there could be no mistake; how could I have hesitated? It was quite clear—some practical joker in my bedroom was amusing himself with teasing the poor brute.

And he succeeded in doing so; for the animal gave signs of increasing exasperation. He modulated his howling in the most extraordinary manner, making it sound like a cry of despair. Finally he scratched the shutters with rage and bit them. I heard the crackling of the wood between his jaws.

Suddenly the beast became motionless, its hair bristling. There was a brusque and violent outburst in that room. I recognized my uncle’s voice but could not catch the meaning of his reprimand. Immediately the joker was silent. But—and how to account for this amazing circumstance?—the dog whose frenzy should have been appeased, was now beside itself; its backbone bristled up like that of a wild boar. Growling, it began to follow the wall of the château, till it reached the main door.

Just as it reached it, Lerne opened it.

Fortunately for me I had, in caution, not raised my window curtain. His first look was towards my window.

In a low voice, with restrained wrath, the Professor lectured the dog, but he did not come forward, and I perceived he was afraid of it. The other came nearer, growling, with its eyes flashing from under its great brow. Lerne then spoke aloud:

“To your kennel, you dirty brute!” (Then came some words in a foreign tongue.) “Get away,” he went on in French; and as the animal still came on—“Do you want me to knock your brains out? Eh?”

My uncle seemed to be losing his wits. The moon heightened his pallor. “He’ll be torn to bits,” I said to myself, “he has not even a riding-switch.”

“Go back, Nell, go back.”

Nell? So it was the St. Bernard bitch belonging to the Scot.

And then came a stream of foreign words which to my complete astonishment made me realize that my uncle knew English.

His invectives resounded in the silence of the night.

The dog gathered itself together; it was just going to spring when Lerne, at the end of his resources, threatened it with a revolver and with the other hand pointed out the way he wanted the beast to go.

Now, it has happened to me, when out shooting, to see a dog run away when a gun is leveled at it; he knows its deadly power. That this should happen in presence of a pistol seemed to me decidedly less ordinary. Had Nell already experienced the effect of the weapon? That was a plausible theory; but I fancied that she had understood the English—English being Macbeth’s tongue—rather than my uncle’s revolver.

She calmed down, as at the voice of Orpheus, cowered and with her tail between her legs, made for the gray buildings which Lerne was pointing out to her. He ran after the hound, and the darkness swallowed them.

In my clock the imperishable Harvester mowed down several minutes.

In the distance a door banged noisily. Then Lerne came in again.

That was all.

So there were at Fonval two beings whose existence had till then been unsuspected by me; Nell, whose pitiful appearance hardly showed her to be happy, Nell, abandoned doubtless by her master in a hasty flight—and the practical joker. For this latter could not, in reason, be either of the two women or one of the Germans; the nature of the joke betrayed its author’s age. Only a child could divert itself at the expense of a dog. But nobody to my knowledge lodged in that wing.

“Ah,” Lerne had said to me, “I am using your room.” Who, then, lived in it?

I was determined to find out somehow. If the hidden presence of Nell in the gray buildings invested them with a new interest, mysterious as they already were, the closed rooms of the château became yet another center of attraction.

At last my objectives were clearing.

And as the prospect of hunting down the secret made me quiver with excitement, a presentiment warned me that I should do well to pursue it to the death, and so defy Lerne’s first command before breaking the second.

“Let me find out first what it is all about,” said my conscience; “there is something wrong. After that, I can attend to the baggage in peace.”

Why did I not follow my own advice? But conscience speaks in a very low voice, and who can hear it when passion begins to blare?

CHAPTER V
“THE MADMAN”

A week later on, I was in ambush behind the door of my former bedroom—the yellow one—with my eye to the keyhole.

Oh! it was not easy, or it did not appear so. Never had the left wing of Fonval been so jealously closed, even in the days when the monks had been cloistered there.

How had I got in there? In the simplest manner possible.

The Yellow Room is reached by the central hall—where every one could walk if he liked—by a series of three rooms. The hall joins on to the drawing-room, then comes the billiard-room, which opens into the boudoir, and finally this boudoir opens, on the right, into the Yellow Room, which lies back towards the park.

Now, on this day, before profiting by an increased freedom, I tried, one by one, in the lock, keys which I had stolen from other doors here and there. I had no confidence. Suddenly the lock yielded. I opened the door, and I saw in the half light made by the closed shutters, the whole suite of rooms.

I recognized as I went from threshold to threshold the special odor of each—each a little more musty than in the old days—the sort of odors that the Past would exhale, if one could travel in its dust.

I followed on the tips of my toes a track on which many boots had left their mud—now dry. A mouse ran over the drawing-room carpet. On the billiard-table, the ivory balls—red and white—formed an isosceles triangle. Mentally I calculated the stroke, the amount of screw I should put on, and the place where I should hit the second ball, then I found myself in the boudoir itself. The clock, which had stopped, pointed to twelve. I felt myself very receptive. But, hardly had I had the leisure to see the shut door of the Yellow Room, than a sound brought me back hurriedly into the hall.

It was no jesting matter. Lerne worked in the gray buildings, but he knew that I was in the château, and on such occasions, it was his custom to come in suddenly to watch me. It seemed to me prudent to put off the enterprise.

An hour’s liberty was indispensable to me, so I evolved the following stratagem:

The next day I went in my car to Grey-l’Abbaye, and I there bought several articles of toilet, and hid them in a bush in the forest, not far from the Park.

On the day after that, after lunch, Emma heard me say:

“I am going to Grey this afternoon. I am going to get some articles I need. If I cannot get them there, I shall push on to Nanthel. Have you any commissions to give me?”

Fortunately, they had none, otherwise everything would have come to grief.

By this means I could go out for a quarter-of-an-hour, and bring in my purchases from the bush, as if I had gone to make them in the village.

Now, one might reckon on the journey from Fonval to Grey and back taking about an hour-and-a-quarter, so I had an hour at my disposal.

I go out, leave my car in the thicket not far from the hiding-place in the bushes, then come into the garden again over the wall. The ivy on one side, and the trellis on the other, made it easier. Keeping close to the castle wall, I reached the hall.

And now, I am in the drawing-room, with the door carefully shut behind me. In case I might need to make a dash, however, I thought it prudent not to turn the key, and now I am spying, with my eye to the lock of the yellow chamber.

The keyhole was a large one. It made a sort of loop-hole through which a keen air was blowing—and what do I see?

The room was dark and cut into layers by the shutters. A slanting ray seemed to be supporting the window with its column, and the motes of dust were dancing about in it as the worlds dance about in space.

On the carpet the laths of the shutters projected their lines. Here was a den! A gypsy lair! Here and there, clothes on the ground. A plate with scraps, and near it a piece of filth. One would have said it was a hermit’s haunt.

Ah! and what was that which moved on the bed? There he is, the recluse! It’s a man! He was lying face downwards amongst the disorder of the bolster and the quilt, with his head leaning on his arms. He had on only a nightshirt and trousers. His beard was of several weeks’ growth, and, like his hair, which was rather short, was almost of a whitish-yellow.

Ever since that cry the other night, my head had been full of whimsies. No, I had never seen that puffy, dirty face—that podgy body.

His eyes seemed kindly enough—stupid, but good and endearing. Um! What a curious indifference in his face! He must be a lazy chap, though.

The prisoner was snoozing, badly, it seemed. The flies were annoying him. He drives them away with a sudden clumsy gesture of his hand. His indolent eye follows their flight between his snoozes, and sometimes, seized with a fit of anger, and making his lips smack together with a sudden movement of his head, he tries to snap up the insects that irritate him so as they pass by.

The madman! There is a madman in my uncle’s house!! Who could he be? My eyelids touched the keyhole. My eye became frozen. The other one, taking its turn of duty, is rather short-sighted. I saw very badly. My line of sight was rather narrow. Good God! I have hit the door and made a noise. The madman has jumped up! How small he is! Hallo! here he is coming towards me! Suppose I were to open the door? Ah! Now he is throwing himself on the floor and sniffing and growling. Poor fellow! It is a sad sight.

He had guessed nothing. Crouching in the track of the sunray, and all striped with the shadow of the shutters, I could more easily examine him.

His hands and face were spotted with little rosy stains, like old scratches. One would have said that he had been fighting.

Ah! but this is graver. A long purple scar goes under his hair, from one temple to the other, round the back of his head. It is very likely the scar of a wound.

The poor fellow has been ill-treated. Lerne has made him undergo some horrible treatment, or he is wreaking some vengeance on him. Oh! the brute!

Immediately an association of ideas worked in my brain. I remembered the Indian profile of my uncle, the unusual locks of Emma,—those of the madman which are so yellow, and the green fleece of the rat. Can Lerne be trying to graft hairy scalps on bald scalps? Can that be the enterprise?—and immediately I see that my idea is absurd. Nothing corroborates it, and then (this is a clinching argument) the madman has not been scalped, as in that case his scar would have described a complete circle. Why should he not have gone mad simply through a fall on the back of his head? At any rate, he is not a dangerous lunatic. He is harmless. He has rather a nice expression. His eyes now shine with a sort of intelligence. I am sure if I questioned him gently he would answer. Suppose I tried.

Only a bolt closed the door on my side. I drew it deliberately, but before I got into the Yellow Room, the recluse dashed forward, head downwards—passed between my legs, knocked me down, and then escaped, with those dog’s yelps which the other night had made me take him for a practical joker.

I was disconcerted by his agility. How could he make a fool of me that way? And what a strange idea, that of running between my legs!

In spite of the suddenness of the adventure, just as quickly as he made me fall, I got on my legs again, dazed and astonished. Here is a lunatic let loose—a madman who will ruin me! “Oh! Nicolas, my boy, you are done for, done for! There is not the shadow of a doubt about it. Would it not be better to take French leave than chase the fugitive? What good can it do now? Ah! But Emma and the secret! Oh, damn it all! Let’s try and catch him!” and I am after the Unknown.

I hope he won’t go near the gray buildings. No, thank goodness, he is taking the opposite direction! None the less, anybody can see us.

The Deserter goes gamboling along in high spirits, and plunges in the wood. Thank heaven, the creature is no longer barking, and that is always something. Is that somebody? No, it is a statue. I must gain on him as soon as possible. If he only takes the wrong turn, we shall be spotted, and it is all up with me. How cheerful he seems, the brute! Curse him! If he goes on in this line, we shall be round the Park, and the chase will pass under the front of the gray buildings—under the very windows of Lerne.

A blessing on the trees which still hide us. Quick.... That drawing-room door which I have left open! Quick! Quick....

But the fellow did not know he was being chased. He did not look behind him. His bare feet were hurting him and keeping him back. I am gaining on him....

He has stopped and is sniffing the breeze; now he is off again; but I have got nearer. He has jumped into the bushes on the left, towards the cliff—so do I. I am only ten yards off, now. He dashes through the brambles without heeding their thorns. I follow in his wake. The branches are lashing at him, and the thorns are hurting him. He is moaning. Well, why does not he thrust them aside? He could easily avoid their clutches. The cliffs are not far away. Now we are making straight for them. On my honor! My quarry seems to know perfectly well where it is going. I see his back now and again. I must track him by the crackling of the branches.

At last I see his narrow head again, against the rocky path. Silently I glide up. Another second, and I shall be upon him, but an unexpected action of his makes me pause at the edge of the clear space which encircles me, and of which the cliff forms one side.

He is on his knees, scratching furiously at the soil. The task tortures his nails, so that he whines as he did a moment ago amongst the thorns of the hawthorn and the bramble.

The earth flies from behind him up to me; his rigid hands working with force and rapid motion. He digs away, groaning with pain, then, ever and anon, plunges his nose into the hole as deeply as he can, snorts, shaking his head, and resumes his task.

The scar is now fully visible to me, it is like a livid crown. Oh! I do not mind his madness. Now’s the time. Jump on him, and carry him off!

I come out of the thicket stealthily. Hallo! somebody has already been digging here! A heap of earth, which has become gray, shows that my yellow-haired gentleman is only resuming some old bit of work. Well! Well!

I bend my legs and get ready to jump.

The man then utters a grunt of pleasure, and what do I see in the hole he has made—an old shoe that he has just unearthed! Ah! poor humanity!

I jumped. I have got him, the rascal. Good Lord! he turns round and thrusts me away, but I shall not leave go. It is queer how awkward he is with his hands.

Ah! would you bite, you devil!

I grasp him hard enough to break his bones. He has never done any wrestling, that is clear, but I have not got the better of him yet. Ah! I have made a wrong step! it is the hole....

I am walking on the old boot. Horror! There is something in it—something which is fastening it to the ground. I am beginning to pant. “Nothing fits a foot like a shoe.”

I must have done with this. The moments are golden.

Each clasping the other, my adversary and I are face to face, in front of the rock, gasping—equally matched.... Ah! an idea. I opened my eyes terribly wide, as if it were a matter of subduing a child, or a beast. I put on the dominating look of a master, whereupon, the other let go of his hold, quite tamed, and repentant—and if he is not licking my hands in token of obedience!

Ah, well! Come along.

I drag him away. The shoe is an elastic one, and stands up with its toe in the air. It has not that lamentable look of worn-out shoes that have been thrown away on the road, but it is more repulsive. What fixes it on the ground is deep in the soil. One can only see the end of a bit of knitting. Can it be a sock?

Trot along, my friend!

My companion remains docile, thanks to my masterful glances, and we run as hard as we can.

Good Heavens! What will have happened in the castle during this expedition?

Nothing whatever had happened, as a matter of fact.

But, as we got into the hall, I heard Emma and Barbe talking on the floor above. They were beginning to come down the stairs, when the drawing-room door shutting, as we went in, ended my alarms—only to give me new ones.

How, now that the poor lunatic was back in his room, how was I to get out without being observed by one or other of the women?

Stealthily creeping back on tiptoe to the drawing-room, I listened, with my ear to the panel, to distinguish in which direction the two intruders were moving, but suddenly I recoiled into the middle of the room, demented, looking for shelter of some kind, such as a screen, and gasping like a drowning man....

A key was rattling in the lock. Was it my key, left in the door, and stolen during my absence? Not at all. Here is my key, in my waistcoat pocket! I put it there, when I first came in.

Well, then, what could it be?

The verdigrised handle slowly turned. They were coming in. Who? The Germans? Lerne?

Emma! Well, she could only see an empty room. One of the great damask curtains stirred, perhaps, but she did not remark it.

Barbe stood behind her. The girl was saying softly: “Stay in there and watch the garden. Do what you did the other day: that was all right. As soon as the old man comes out of the Laboratory, warn me by coughing.”

“It is not he who worries me,” replied Barbe, obviously afraid. “He is quite easy in his mind at this moment, I assure you. We shall not see him before night, but as for that Nicolas, that is another pair of shoes. He is coming on!”

So the gray buildings were called the Laboratory, and it was for using that word that the Professor had silenced the servant with a slap. I was beginning to know more.

Emma went on in an irritated tone:

“I tell you again, there is no danger. It is not the first time, is it?”

“Ah! but that Nicolas was not there.”

“Come, do what I tell you.”

Not quite resigned, Barbe went off to keep watch. Emma remained for a few instants listening.

Beautiful! Oh, she was beautiful! Like the very demon of unlawful love, and yet she was but an outline against the shining rectangle of the door—a motionless shadow, but a shadow as supple as a movement. For Emma in repose, always seemed as if she had paused in the middle of a dance, and was even continuing it through some strange spell, so completely did the sight of her make a harmony—that harmony of the wanton bayaderes, whose only miming is love-making, and who cannot move in their undulating, quivering motions, without shaking their locks, nor make the least little gesture without a suggestion of voluptuousness.

Life was boiling in my veins! My senses whirled. It was like a tide of passion rising from out the depths of the ages.

Emma! In the madman’s room! Heavens! With that brute! The wretched girl! I could have killed her.

You will say that I did not know anything, that my suspicions were groundless.

Ah, then, you do not know that impulsive gait, that sly and hungry look of women who are going stealthily to a sweetheart.

It maddened me. The pretty girl, as she hastened to this ignoble scene, brushed the curtain with the swish of her skirt. I stood before her barring the path.

She gave a gasp of terror. I thought she was going to faint. Barbe showed her great round eyes, and fled in panic. Then, like a fool, I gave the reason for my exploit.

“Why are you going to that madman’s room?” My words sounded artificial, broken.

“Tell me—Why? In God’s name, tell me?”

I had flung myself upon her, and twisted her wrists. She gave a humble moan of complaint, and swayed in my grasp.

I squeezed the soft, firm flesh of her arms, as if I were throttling two doves, and bending over her agonized eyes, I said:

“Well, tell me why?”

She looked me up and down in defiance, and then said:

“Well, what about it? You know perfectly well that Macbeth was my lover. Lerne gave you to understand that in my presence on the day of your arrival.”

“Is that Macbeth—that madman?”

Emma did not reply, but her astonishment informed me that I had made another mistake in showing my ignorance.

“Have I not the right to love him?” she went on. “Do you think you are going to prevent me?”

I shook her arms as if they were bell-ropes.

“Do you still love him?”

“More than ever—do you understand?”

“But he is a brute beast.”

“There are madmen who think they are gods. He sometimes imagines he is a dog. His lunacy is, perhaps, therefore less grave, and after all....”

She smiled mysteriously. One would have said that she wanted to drive me wild.

Then followed a scene I dare not describe.

Well, Barbe made an untimely, but fortunate entrance, coughing as loudly as she could.

“Here is Monsieur coming.” Emma dashed from my arms. Lerne was terrorizing her once more. “Off with you! Make haste,” she said. “If he knew, you would be done for, and I, too, most likely. Oh, do go! Go, my little duck! Lerne sticks at nothing.”

I felt she was speaking the truth, for her dear cold hands were shivering in mine, and her mouth was stuttering with terror.

Still under the excitement of an imbecile happiness, which increased my strength and agility tenfold, I climbed the trellis, hand over fist, and jumped down on the other side of the wall.

I found my car in its garage of greenery. I piled in my parcels as fast as I could. I was ridiculously happy. Emma should be mine, and what a mistress she would make!—a woman who had not recoiled before the duty of bringing to a friend, now become a repulsive thing, the consolation of her visits.

But now it was I who was favored, I was sure of that. How could that Macbeth love her? Nonsense! She had lied to me merely to rouse my passions. She merely had pity on him.

But now, when I came to think of it, how had madness come upon the Scot, and why was Lerne keeping it secret? My uncle maintained that Macbeth had gone away. Then why did he keep poor Nell in prison? I understood her sorrow at the window, and her rancor against the Professor. Some drama had taken place in her prison, in which Lerne, Emma and Macbeth were the personages—a drama which was the result of some grievous fault, indeed, no doubt; but what was the drama? I should soon find out. A woman has no secrets from her lover, and that is what I was going to be.

My joy generally manifests itself in the form of a song. If I remember rightly, I hummed the air of a Spanish dance as I went along, and I only interrupted it suddenly because the remembrance of the old shoe, now full of sinister meaning intruded on my reflections, as the Red Death rises menacing in the midst of a ball.

Instantly my cheerfulness drooped. The sun went down in the depth of my thoughts. All things became dark, suspicious and threatening. There was a great revulsion within me, the most dreadful guesses appeared certainties and even the image of Emma faded away.

A prey to the terrors of the unknown, I re-entered that dungeon-castle and that garden-tomb, where the beautiful Demon awaited me, standing between a madman and a corpse.

CHAPTER VI
NELL—THE ST. BERNARD

Some days passed without any event which could satisfy either my love or my curiosity. Had Lerne grown suspicious of me, and contrived to have all my time taken up?

In the morning, he would invite me to accompany him—one day on foot, and another in the motor-car. During those outings we would talk at random of scientific matters, and he would question me as if he really wished to judge of my capabilities.

With the motor-car we used to cover much ground. In our walks, my uncle usually took the road which led straight to Grey. He would often stop, the better to hold forth, and never went beyond the skirts of the wood. Often in the midst of a dissertation or a jest, after we had started walking or driving, Lerne would suddenly go back, distrusting the people he had left at Fonval.

He also organized my afternoons for me; sometimes I was charged with a message for the town or the village, sometimes forced to go off by myself on some errand. I had either to fill up my tank without question, or put on my walking boots.

Lerne always watched me go, and at nightfall, standing on his doorstep, he exacted from me an account of my day. As the case might be, I had either to give a report of what I had done, or describe places.

Now, my uncle was not, as a rule, familiar with places, it is true, but I could not tell which ones, and so any made-up story would have been dangerous. I therefore conscientiously explored the forest and the countryside from dawn to dusk.

And yet, I should have liked to go to Emma’s room. I had calculated its place in the topography of the castle by the number of windows which were, or were not shut, and I knew them all thoroughly.

The whole left wing always remained closed. In the right wing, the ground floor, and, of the six bedrooms above, only three remained open for daily use. Mine was in the projecting part of the building, and, at the other end, the room of my Aunt Lidivine opened on the central corridor, and communicated with Lerne’s, so that Emma must have succeeded my aunt in my aunt’s own bed. The very thought of it maddened me, and I waited impatiently for the opportunity I sought.

But the Professor was keeping watch!

Under his pitiless tyranny, I saw Mlle. Bourdichet only at meal-times. We both put on a detached air. I now ventured to look at her, but I did not dare to speak to her. She persisted in a most absolute silence, so much so, that, in absence of conversation, I had to judge of her nature by her bearing, but I must admit that, however gross may be the human functions of feeding oneself on dead beasts and withered plants, there are two methods of eating. This lady thought nothing of taking the chicken bone, or cutlet bone in her fingers, and every time she gave herself up to this pleasure, I fancied I should hear her say, “My little duck,” in her plebeian voice.

Between Emma and me, Lerne fidgeted about. He crumbled the bread, and dallied with his fork, and suppressed anger would make him bring down his fist on the cloth till the cups and glasses rattled.

One day, by mischance, my foot knocked against him. The Doctor suspected this innocent foot of light behavior. He attributed to it telegraphic intentions, and, persuaded that it had communicated through its toe some pedestrian and stealthy love-sign, he decreed at once that Mlle. Bourdichet was feeling unwell, and would thenceforth take her meals in her own room.

So two passions occupied my thoughts—hatred of Lerne, and love of Emma, and I resolved on the most audacious plans to satisfy them both. It so happened that on that very day, my uncle said to me suddenly that he wanted to take me in the car to Nanthel, where he had business. I fancied I saw a chance of escape from his vigilance.

The next day was a Sunday, and Grey was celebrating the Feast of its Patron Saint. I should know how to profit by that!

“With pleasure, Uncle,” I said. “We shall start in the car, barring accidents.”

“I should prefer to go in the car to Grey, and then take the train to Nanthel. That will be the surest way.”

That suited my book admirably.

“Very well, uncle.”

“The train starts from Grey at 8 o’clock. We shall come back by the 5.13. There is none before that.”

On arriving at the village, we heard a noise of bustle, with, every now and again, the lowing of cattle. A horse neighed, and some sheep were bleating.

I had some difficulty in making my way across the Square of Grey-l’Abbaye, which had now been turned into a Fair, and was swarming with a good-tempered and slow-moving crowd.

In the spaces between the shooting galleries, and other shabby booths, they had inclosed the cattle which were for sale. Rough hands were calculating the weight of udders, were opening jaws by which a beast’s age can be read, slipping their hands along their muscles to judge of their condition, and so on.

The horse dealers were talking big, and between two rows of patient peasants, grooms were trotting about heavy cart-horses, and riding-whips were cracking all round.

The first man drunk that day, stumbled up, addressing me as “Citizen.”

We went straight on in the semi-silence of this Ardennes Market. The village inn was already full of people, singing, and not yet fighting. The church-bells were ringing their chimes of warning, and in the center of the Square, a little white building, decorated with greenery, showed that the Municipal Band would soon be adding its very simple strains to the hubbub of the fête.

When we got to the station (this was the moment I had chosen to act), I said:

“Uncle, shall I accompany you in your rounds at Nanthel?”

“Certainly not. Why?”

“Well, Uncle, in my dislike for cafés, taverns and public-houses, I shall ask you to leave me here, where I shall wait for you just as easily as in the shop in Nanthel.”

My uncle replied:

“But, you are not obliged....”

“To begin with, I find the Grey Festival attracts me. I should like to watch the crowds a little longer. On such a day one gets the liveliest impressions of the manners of a people, and I feel, to-day, that I have the soul of an ethnologist.”

My uncle said, “You are joking, or else it is a mere whim.”

“In the second place, Uncle, whom could I trust with my car? The inn-keeper? The drunken tenant of a hovel full of clodhoppers in their cups? You surely do not imagine that I am going to leave a car worth twenty-five thousand francs, exposed for nine hours by the clock, to the tricks of a village on the spree! No, no, I prefer to watch my car myself.”

My uncle was not convinced of my sincerity. He wished to checkmate the little trick which I might be planning of going back to Fonval, either in my motor-car, or on a borrowed bicycle, with the intention of coming back to Grey in time for the 5.15—and that was just exactly the plan which I had thought of. The accursed savant nearly upset everything.

“You are right,” said he coldly, and he set his foot on the ground, and amid the crowd of holiday travelers in their Sunday best, raised the bonnet of the car, and looked at the engine minutely. I felt quite uncomfortable.

My uncle took out his knife—took the carburetor, and slipped some of the pieces into his pocket, and addressed me thus:

“There is your car, brought to a standstill,” said he, “but as you might make off in another way, I am going to give you something to do. On my return, you must show me the carburetor, completely restored, and fitted up with pieces of your own make. The blacksmith has not yet shut up his forge—he will lend you an anvil and vise; but he is a fool, and quite unable to help you. There will be enough there to keep you amused until 5.14.”

Perceiving that I did not seem to mind, he went on in a constrained tone:

“I must ask your pardon. Please do not doubt that, all this is only to assure your future by protecting the secret of our work. Good-by.”

The train carried him off.

I had let him talk without showing any signs of annoyance; and indeed, without feeling any, for, being but a poor chauffeur, detesting grease and scars on my hands, and obliged by my uncle’s will to do without a mechanic, I had brought with me, in the boot of my car, several spare pieces, amongst which, was a complete carburetor, ready to be put in its place. Ignorance stood me in better stead than professional skill, so I set to work at once, being in no wise disturbed, and merely anxious about the inmates of Fonval left to their own devices.

Presently, having garaged my car in a clump of trees, I climbed over the park wall, and I should have climbed straight to Emma’s room, if a melancholy barking had not sounded in the direction of the gray buildings.

“The laboratory! Nell!” This curious fact of a dog being chained up in a laboratory made me hesitate between the attractiveness of the mystery, and that of Emma; but this time, a sort of instinct of self-preservation aroused by the unknown, and the danger one attributes to it, was bound to carry the day.

I made my way towards the gray buildings. Besides, the Germans would no doubt be there, and their presence would prevent me from dawdling. So it was merely a matter of snatching a few minutes from love-making.

As I passed the Yellow Room, I put my ear to the shutters in order to assure myself that Macbeth was alone. He was so, a circumstance which filled my heart with a vast satisfaction.

Some white clouds were floating in a cold sky. The wind was coming from Grey-l’Abbaye, and brought me through the gorge the monotonous sound of the church bells. Endlessly they repeated the same three notes, thus performing the chime of the Arlésienne. I was gay! To this sacred accompaniment I whistled the melody played by the orchestra, and the juxtaposition of the two was like placing a modern statuette on a Gothic pedestal.

In front of the laboratory, on the other side of the road, there was a wood. I made tacks to reach it, having formed my plan of assault. In the middle of this wood, I used to possess an old friend—a fir tree. Its projecting branches formed a spiral staircase. It completely dominated the buildings. No laboratory could have been better placed, or more accessible, and in the old days I used to play there at being a sailor on the yard-arms.

The tree offered me a perch, rather short, no doubt, but still, well padded. On the upper branches, a relic awaited me, made of cords and rotten planks—the cross-trees! Who would have said that one day I, who used to spy out continents, archipelagoes—phantasies with some likelihood about them—should now be there as a spy for things so fabulously unreal? My glances turned towards the ground.

As I have said, the laboratory was composed of a courtyard between two blocks of buildings. The one on the left was pierced with large bay windows on its one story, and on its ground floor. It seemed to me to be merely two large rooms—one above the other. I only saw the higher one, which was elaborately equipped—an apothecary’s cupboard, marble tables covered with bulbs, bottles and retorts, cases (open), sets of polished instruments, and two indescribable pieces of apparatus of glass and nickel, which recalled nothing analogous, except, perhaps, vaguely, the round globes screwed to a stand on which café waiters lay their napkins.

The other block which was beyond my range, looked from the outside like an ordinary dwelling-house, and was evidently the place where the two assistants lodged.

But, what I had taken for a farmyard on the day of my arrival, took up all my attention.

What a miserable farmyard! Its walls were fitted with wire-netted compartments of various sizes, which rose, piled on one another, to an immense height.

In these lodges, each duly labeled, rabbits, guinea-pigs, rats, cats and other animals which I could not distinguish because of the distance, moved about painfully, or remained lying, half-hidden under the straw.

Some litter, however, was jumping about, but I could not perceive the cause. A nest of mice, I presumed.

The last cage on the right served as a hen-house. Contrary to custom, they had locked up the poultry in it.

Everything looked mute and melancholy. Four hens and a cock, of rare breed, were carrying on a more cheerful kind of life, and strutted about cackling on the concrete floor, pecking at it persistently, in the vain hope of discovering corn or worms.

In the middle of the yard there was a large hollow square of gratings. These were the kennels.

Between the two rows of compartments, like philosophers that were both Cynics and Peripatetics, dogs, with a resigned look, walked up and down—ordinary terriers, butcher’s lurchers, watch-dogs, bull-terriers, a ruffianly bulldog and mongrel bloodhounds—in fact, a whole pack of coarse, good-for-nothing-but-fidelity beasts.

They were roaming up and down, and gave this courtyard the appearance of the yard of a veterinary hospital. And this is where things took on a somber coloring. Of all those beasts very few seemed healthy. Most of them were wearing bandages—on the back, round the neck, on the back of the head, and more especially round the head. One hardly saw any of them through the grating, which did not wear a piece of white linen rolled up into a cap, hood or turban, and this procession of sorrowful dogs, with their absurd headdresses of linen bandages, and each with a label attached to its neck, was a most funereal sight to see.

Most of those poor wretches were smitten with some infirmity. One would fall on his muzzle at almost every step; another was limping; the head of a third was shaking and quivering like that of a palsied old man. A mastiff stumbled about, whining without apparent reason, and suddenly it would utter a loud death-like howl.

Nell was not there!

I perceived in a shady corner an aviary—silent and with no bird trying its flight. As far as I could make out, the occupants belonged to the commoner families of birds, and there were sparrows in great numbers. The greater portion of them, however, were a white-headed species, but I did not know enough of ornithology to recognize them from such a height.

The smell of carbolic came up to me.

Oh, for the scents of the farmyard, the cooing of pigeons on the moss-clad roofs, the cock’s cock-a-doodle-doo, the yelp of the dog tugging at its chain, the squadrons of geese with outspread wings! I kept thinking of you, in the presence of this lazar-house!

A sad farmyard, indeed, with its severe arrangement, and its patients ticketed like the plants in a hothouse.

Suddenly there was a bustling. The dogs went back to their kennels, and the poultry took refuge under a trough. Nothing budged again. The aviary and the cages seemed to contain nothing but stuffed beasts.

Karl, the German, with his Kaiser-like mustaches, had come out of the building on the left. He opened one of the compartments, thrust out his hand towards a ball of hair which was curled up in it, and drew out a monkey.

The animal, which was a chimpanzee, struggled. The assistant dragged it off, and disappeared with it by the way he had come. The mastiff gave a long howl.

Then began a bustling in the apparatus-room, and I saw that the three assistants had just come in. They stretched out the gagged monkey on the table, and fastened it solidly down; William thrust something under its nose.

Karl, with a morphia syringe, pricked the chimpanzee’s flank, then the tall old man, Johann, approached. He put his golden spectacles straight, with a hand which held a knife, and bent over the patient.

I cannot explain the operation so rapid was it, but in less than no time, the face of the chimpanzee was nothing but a hideous blur of red.

I turned away, sickened with a sense of discomfort—a discomfort caused by seeing blood. At last I turned my face back again. It was too late; the sun was striking on the windows, and I could not see for the dazzle; but in the courtyard, the dogs had left their boxes, and amongst them now Donovan Macbeth’s dog Nell was prowling about.

She was coughing. Her hairless skin no longer suggested the fine coat of a St. Bernard. The superb creature was nothing but a great carcass, whose leanness contrasted with the comparative plump shapes of her companions.

Nell, too, wore a bandage on the back of her neck. What had Lerne devised to make her suffer since the night of their adventure? What diabolical invention was he trying upon her?

Nell seemed to be reflecting; her very manner of walking suggested consternation. She held aloof from the other dogs, and when a certain bulldog accosted her in the way of gallantry, she started back with a look so fierce, and a hoarse cry so terrible, that the other hurried off to the depths of its lair, whilst the rest of the pack, put out of countenance, raised their bedizened heads.

The coy Nell went her way.

What was I doing, remaining there! In spite of my haste to shorten this reconnaissance, and betake myself to other pastimes, something held me back—something inexplicable in the behavior of this poor dog.

At this moment, a “quick-step” played by the band at Grey-l’Abbaye, reached Fonval on the wings of the wind. My fingers, of their own accord, beat time on the branches of my observation post, and I perceived that Nell had quickened her walk and was marching in time to the rhythm of the music!

I then remembered that, in talking of Nell, Emma had alluded to her performing-dog tricks. Was this a circus exercise taught by Macbeth to his St. Bernard? It did not seem to me that in the absence of the trainer such a dance could have been executed, and that an auditory sensation could arouse, in the case of an animal, those mechanical movements which have always been our prerogative, and are the result of habits more complex than those of instincts.

The music died away as the wind fell. The dog sat down, raised her eyes, and saw me.

“Good Heavens, she is going to bark and give the alarm...!” Not at all. She looked at me without fear or wrath—with eyes, the memory of which will always be with me—then shaking her great shaggy head, she began to groan gently, making a vague gesture with her paw, then she resumed her round, still murmuring, and casting furtive glances in my direction, as if she desired to make herself understood without drawing the attention of the Germans.

(This, of course, is a mere descriptive phrase, but one might, all the same, have imagined that the creature wanted to speak, so human were the inflections of her moans, which roughly formed a long, gutteral and monotonous phrase, in which there always occurred the syllables, “Mabet, Mabet.” The whole thing made a gurgling sound, rather like English words badly articulated.)

The entry on the scene of the three assistants put a stop to this curious phenomenon.

They crossed the courtyard, and all the dogs—Nell at the head—slunk to shelter. Wilhelm, as he passed, flung over the grating of the kennel a chunk of meat—the body of the monkey, skinned, the hairy part hanging attached.

It fell heavily. It was dead!

The Germans then went into the building on the right, whose chimney was smoking. Then, one by one, the dogs came and sniffed at the remains of the chimpanzee. The bulldog gave the first bite, and then came the whole pack, growling ferociously.

The muzzles of the lame ones were soon dyed red, as their gnashing teeth tore to bits this pitiful caricature of a child’s body. Nell, only, in front of her kennel, with her paws crossed, disdained the feast, and looked at me with her beautiful eyes. I fancied I had discovered why she was so thin.

Upon this, a window opened, through which I perceived a table set for three. The assistants were going to lunch in front of my wood. It was time for me to withdraw.

Here I committed an unpardonable piece of folly. I ought to have set out on my campaign against the old shoe—that was elementary. It appeared to me, wrongly, that I had made a supreme concession to prudence—that an elastic boot has many titles to be considered merely an elastic boot, and not a buried man—not even a buried body; and that, to a generous heart a pretty girl is more important than all knickknacks.

I reviewed all these reasons, with the result that I turned towards the château.

The bedroom of my Aunt Lidivine now served as a lumber-room. One would have said it was the wardrobe of a lady of fortune. Several wicker lay-figures covered with extremely elegant toilettes, formed a crowd of armless and headless coquettes. The mantelpiece and tables were like a dressmaker’s show-cases, where feathers and ribbons go to make up those tiny or huge contraptions, which only become pretty hats once they are on the head. A battalion of dress shoes were fitted on their trees, and a thousand feminine trifles were heaped up everywhere, in the midst of a delicate and suggestive aroma, which was the one Emma loved.

Poor dear Aunt! I should have preferred your room to have been still further profaned, and that Mlle. Bourdichet had made it hers, rather than to hear laughter in the next one—that of your husband; for this left one no illusions.

On my appearance, Emma and Barbe seemed stupefied. The girl immediately understood, and began to laugh. She was lunching in bed, and with a turn of the wrist, she twisted her flaming Bacchante hair into a knot.

I saw the outline of her arm through the sleeve, and she did not think of closing her nightdress.

A table covered with bottles and brushes had been pushed against the bed.

Barbe, who was serving her mistress, cut huge slices out of a ham. My first thought was that Barbe would be much in my way.

“And what about Lerne?” said Emma.

I reassured her. He would only come back at 5 o’clock. I guaranteed that. She gave that little cheerful cluck, which is the sob of joy.

Barbe, who was obviously devoted to her, got so uproariously delighted that her whole person took part in the festival.

It was half past twelve. We had four hours before us. I suggested that that was rather short, but “Let us have lunch, will you, dearie?” said she.

I had nothing better to do for the moment, because of Barbe, and I sat down face to face with her.

CHAPTER VII
THUS SPAKE MLLE. BOURDICHET

“Well, my dear,” she said, “now that we have got as far as that, it is no use trying not to begin again, but I entreat you, no imprudences—safety first! Lerne, you know, Lerne! Ah, you don’t know what dangers there are for you—you above all—you especially!”

I saw that she was brooding over the memory of tragic scenes.

“But what are the dangers?”

“That is just the worst of it, I do not know. I do not understand anything that is happening around. Anything! Anything! Except that Donovan Macbeth went mad because I loved him,—and I love you, too.”

“Come, Emma, let us be cool. We are allies now. Between us we shall find out the truth. When did you come to Fonval, and what has happened since?”

And then she told me her adventures. I reproduce them, stringing them together as best I can, to make them clearer, but as a matter of fact, her story was spread over a dialogue in which my questions guided the story-teller, who was ever ready to make digressions, and was loquacious in futilities.

Sometimes as we talked, a noise would interrupt our talk. Emma would sit up in terror of Lerne, and I could not prevent myself shivering, at the sight of her fear, for had there been an eye or an ear at the keyhole, the somber story would have been repeated in my case.

One way or another, I learned from Emma her origin and her early life. It has nothing to do with my story, and might easily be summed up in the phrase “How a foundling became a courtesan!”

Emma showed, during this confession, a sincerity which would have been called cynicism in the case of any one less candid.

With the same frankness, she went on:

“I got to know Lerne years ago. I was fifteen, and at the hospital at Nanthel. I had entered his service as a nurse? No! I had had a fight with my friend Léonie about Alcide, who was my man. Well, I am not ashamed of it! He is superb! He is a Colossus! My dear boy, he could chuck you about like a ball. My belt was too narrow a bracelet for him!

“Well, I got a blow with a knife—a nasty one, too. Just look!”

She flung off the coverlet, and showed me, near her shoulder, a livid triangular scar—the handiwork of the execrable Léonie.

“Yes, you may well kiss it,” she went on. “I nearly died of it. Your uncle looked after me, and saved me. I may well say that.

“At that time, your uncle was a fine fellow—not stuck-up. He often spoke to me. I thought that flattering. The head surgeon! Think of that! And he talked so well, too. He gave me long sermons, just as fine as any in Church, about my life: it was bad, I ought to change it, and so on, and so forth. And all this without having the least appearance of being disgusted with me, and so sincerely that I for my part, began to be disgusted with it myself, and not to wish for any more of the gay life, or any more Alcide. Illness, you know, that cools one’s blood; and Lerne said to me one fine day, ‘You are cured now, and can go away when you like, only it is not enough to have taken a good resolution—you must keep it. Will you come to my house? You shall be the laundry-maid, and you will earn your living far from your old companions, and all on the square, too,’ he said.

“All this puzzled me. I said to myself, ‘Oh, talk away. That is only a pretty speech to fool me. One does not offer to keep a woman for the love of art.’

“But all the same, Lerne’s kindness, his rank, his fame, and a certain kind of niceness in him, made me more grateful, and made it into a sort of affection, do you see, and I accepted his proposal, and all that might follow.

“Well, would you believe it! Not at all! There still was a saint on earth, and that was he. For a whole year he kept away from me.

“I had kept my journey secret, for the idea of Alcide finding me again kept me from sleeping.

“‘Oh, do not be afraid,’ said Lerne, ‘I am no longer the hospital surgeon, I am going to work at research. We are going to live in the country, and nobody will come to seek you there.’

“So that is how I was brought here.

“Ah, you should have seen the château and the park, gardens, servants, carriages, and horses—nothing wanting! I was quite happy.

“When we got here, the workmen were finishing off the additions to the conservatory and the laboratory.

“Lerne kept an eye on their work. He was always joking, and repeating, ‘Ah, we are going to work there, we are going to work there,’ in the same sort of a tone in which schoolboys shout out, ‘Hurrah for the holidays!’

“They fitted up the laboratory. Lots of boxes were put in it, and when all was finished, Lerne set off one morning to Grey in the dog-cart. The avenue was still straight at that time.

“I still see your uncle coming back with the five travelers and the dog which he had gone to get at the station—Donovan Macbeth, Johann, Wilhelm, Karl, Otto Klotz—you remember him—the tall dark fellow with the mustache?—and Nell. The Scot had joined the Germans at Nanthel. I think he must have known them before.

“The assistants put up at the laboratory, and Macbeth slept in a bedroom in the château—Dr. Klotz also.

“Klotz frightened me from the first, and yet he was a strong, handsome chap.

“I could not help asking Lerne where he had picked up that jail-bird! My question amused him very much.

“‘Oh, make your mind easy,’ he answered. ‘You are always imagining you see friends of M. Alcide. Professor Klotz has come from Germany. He is very learned. He is not an assistant, he is a collaborator, and will watch over the work of his three compatriots.’”

“Excuse me, Emma,” I said, interrupting her, “did my uncle speak German and English at that time?”

“Not much, I think. He tried every day, but it was not much good. It was only at the end of a year, and all of a sudden, that he managed to speak it fluently. The assistants knew a few French words, and Klotz rather more, as well as a little English.

“As for Macbeth, he only understood his own language.

“Lerne told me that he had agreed to take him at Fonval because the young man’s father asked him; he wanted his son to work for a time under Lerne’s directions.”

“Where was your room, Emma?”

“Near the laboratory. Oh, far away from Macbeth and Klotz!” she added with a smile.

“How did all those men stand towards one another?”

“They seemed good friends, but I do not know if they were really. I fancy that the four Germans were jealous of Macbeth. I saw nasty looks sometimes, but in any case, they can’t have hurt Donovan much, because his job was not in the laboratory, but in the château and the conservatory.

“His work at first was to swat up French from books. We used to meet often, because I was always coming and going in the house. He was always polite and respectful, to judge by the signs he made, of course, and I was obliged to be amiable, too.

“Those little bits of politeness, I am afraid, made him and Klotz hate each other; I soon saw that, but they both managed to hide their dislike wonderfully.

“Nell could not hide hers, and never missed a chance of growling at the German, and that was, to my thinking, only the smallest sign that a row was likely, but your uncle—he saw nothing, and I did not want to bother him with my complaints. I did not dare to do so, and on the other hand, I thought it rather good fun to make them jealous.

“All my promises to Lerne to be good could not stop me from being amused at the jealousy of those two, and I do not know what would have been the end of it, when everything changed all of a sudden.

“We had been here a year—that is four years ago now.”

“Ah, ha!” I cried.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing!”

“Well, it is four years ago that Donovan Macbeth went off to Scotland for a few weeks’ holiday with his people. The day after he had gone, Lerne left me in the morning. ‘I am going,’ said he, ‘to Nanthel with Klotz. We shall stay there a whole day.’

“At night Klotz came back alone. I inquired about Lerne, and he told me that the Professor had heard important news and had to go abroad, and that he would be away for about three weeks.

“‘Where is he?’ I asked again.

“Klotz hesitated, and at last said, ‘He is in Germany. We shall be by ourselves for that time, Emma.’

“He had put his arm round my waist, and was looking into my eyes.

“I could not understand how Lerne could do such a thing—to leave me without warning at the mercy of a stranger.

“‘How do you like me?’ asked Klotz, pressing me against him.

“I have already told you, Nicolas, that he was big and strong. I felt his muscles tighten like a vise.

“‘Well, Emma,’ he went on, ‘you are going to love me to-day, for you will never see me again.’

“I am not a coward. Between you and me, I have been caressed by hands which had just committed murder. I have been made love to in ways that were like murder. My first lover would have stuck a knife into you as soon as look at you. But Klotz was too awful. I shall never forget how frightened I was.

“I woke up late in the morning. He was gone. I have never seen him again.

“Three weeks passed. Your uncle never wrote; he stayed away longer still.

“He came back without notice. I did not even see him come in. He told me that he had made straight for the laboratory as soon as he got back. I saw him come out about mid-day. I was quite sorry for him, he looked so pale. He was bent double as if he were worried to death. He was walking slowly, as if he were following a hearse.

“What had he been told! What had he done! What trouble was he in?

“I asked him gently. He still spoke with the accent of the country which he had just come from.

“‘Emma,’ said he, ‘I think that you love me?’

“‘You know very well that I do, my dear benefactor. I am devoted to you, body and soul.’

“‘Do you think that you can love me with real love? Oh,’ said he, with a snigger, ‘I am no longer a young man, but....’

“What was I to say? I did not know. Lerne knitted his brows.

“He seized my two hands. His eyes were terrible.

“‘Now,’ cried he, ‘no more joking; no more little games, you are mine exclusively. I quite understood what was going on here, and that there were admirers hovering round you. I have got rid of Klotz, and as for Donovan Macbeth, be on your guard. If he does not stop, it is all up with him. Look out!’

“Then, Lerne, having got rid of the servants, took on this poor Barbe as his only domestic, and then he arranged the labyrinth and its roads.

“On the day arranged, Macbeth, in his turn, came back to the château, followed by his dog. He was surprised to see the forest all upside down.

“Lerne went up to him while he was still holding his luggage in his hand, and he quite dumbfounded him by such a violent lecture, and so evil a countenance, that Nell bristled up, put out her claws and began to growl.

“What was bound to happen, happened. Considering the age and position of our host, Macbeth and I should probably have ‘respected his roof,’ as they say, but it was only a question, now, of deceiving an angry tyrant. And we did.

“Meanwhile, the Professor became more and more absurd and irritable every day. He was living in an extraordinary state of excitement, never going out; working like a horse, genial, perhaps, but certainly ill.

“You ask me why I think so. I will tell you.

“His memory began to fail. He used to get strange fits of forgetfulness, and often asked me about things concerning his own past; he remembered nothing clearly except scientific matters.

“No more joking, that was true, and no more happiness with him!

“For a mere whim, Lerne would swear at me. For a suspicion, he would beat me. Not that I mind hard words or hard blows, but only from some one I love.

“I declared to this worn-out old creature that I had had enough solitude. ‘I want to be off,’ I said.

“Ah, my dear, if you had seen him. He fell at my knees and embraced them.

“What he said was, ‘Remain, my dear Emma, for two years more. Wait until then, and we will go away together, and you shall have the life of a queen. Have patience. I understand you are not made to be in this sort of position, as if in a convent. Take my word for it, I am making a vast fortune for you. Two more years, living like a little bourgeoisie, and then the life of an empress.’

“I was dazzled at the prospect, and remained at Fonval.

“But the years followed one after the other—the term was up, and no luxury yet. However, I waited and trusted, because Lerne was so confident, and so clever.

“‘Do not be downhearted,’ he said, ‘we are getting on. All shall happen as I prophesy. You shall have millions,’ and to cheer me up, he ordered for me, from Paris, every season, gowns and hats of all sorts, and many other knickknacks.

“‘Learn to wear them,’ said he, ‘learn your part, and rehearse the future.’

“I lived three years in this way. About this time Lerne’s great voyage to America took place. It lasted two months, for which time, your uncle had sent Macbeth back to his family, by way of a holiday.

“They came back on the same day.

“I think that the Professor and he had agreed to meet at Dieppe. Lerne was gloomy and angry. ‘You will have to wait a bit yet, Emma,’ he said.

“‘What is the matter?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it coming off?’

“‘They think that my inventions are not perfect enough; but there is nothing to be afraid of. I shall find what I want yet.’

“He resumed his researches in the laboratory.”

Once more, I interrupted Emma’s narrative.

“Excuse me,” I said, “did Macbeth work also in the laboratory at that time?”

“Never! Lerne gave him jobs to do in the hothouse, where he kept my poor friend a prisoner.

“Poor Donovan, he would have done better to have remained over yonder. It was for my sake that he came back from Scotland, and he tried to make me understand that in his jargon.

“‘For you, for you,’ was all he could manage to say.

“For me! Good heavens, what had he become ‘for me’ a few weeks later!

“Now listen! Here is where the madness comes in.

“That winter it was snowing. Lerne was taking a nap in the armchair in the little drawing-room—at least he was pretending to have a nap.

“Donovan gave me a glance. Pretending to go out to have a walk in the snow, which was falling, he went out by the hall. I heard him whistling a tune outside. He moved away. I went back to the dining-room to help the maid clear the table. Donovan joined me there, by the door opposite to that of the little drawing-room which we left open so that we could hear Lerne’s movements.

“He flung his arms round me. I embraced him. We had a silent kiss.

“Suddenly Donovan went green. I followed his looks. The door of the little drawing-room has a glass panel, and in that dim mirror, I saw Lerne’s eyes watching us.

“Then he was upon us. My knees gave under me. Macbeth is a little man. Lerne flung him to the ground. They struggle. Blood flows. Your uncle uses his feet and teeth and nails ferociously.

“I scream and tear at his clothes. Suddenly he picks himself up. Macbeth is in a faint, and then, Lerne gives a wild laugh, flings him over his shoulder, and carries him off to the laboratory.

“I keep shouting, and then I had a sudden idea.

“‘Nell, Nell!’ I cried.

“The dog came up. I pointed out the group to her, and she dashed off at the moment when Lerne was disappearing behind the trees with his burden. She disappeared also.

“I listen. She barks, and suddenly I can distinguish nothing more than the rustle of the snow.

“Lerne dragged me about by the hair. It required all my belief in his promise, and all his assurance of a glorious future, to stop me from running away that very day.

“But, having caught me deceiving him, he only loved me the more ardently.

“Days passed. I hardly dared hope that Macbeth had got off as easily as Klotz—and been sent away. Neither he nor his dog appeared again.

“At last the Professor ordered me to get ready the Yellow Room for the Scot.

“‘Is he alive, then?’ I asked without reflection.

“‘Only half,’ said Lerne, ‘he is mad. This is the sad result of your folly, Emma. First of all he thought himself God Almighty, then the Tower of London. At present he thinks he’s a dog. To-morrow he will suffer from some other delusion, no doubt.’

“‘What have you done to him?’ I cried out.

“‘Little girl,’ said the Professor, ‘nothing has been done to him, just you remember that, and bite your tongue if you ever think of gossiping. When I carried off Macbeth after our struggle in the dining-room, it was so that I might look after him. You saw he fainted. He injured his head badly in his fall. That caused a lesion, and then madness. That was all, you understand?’

“I said nothing more, because I was certain that if your uncle had not put an end to Donovan, his only motive was fear of the family, and the law.

“That evening they brought him back to the château—his head all wrapped in bandages. He did not recognize me.

“I still loved him, and I visited him secretly.

“He got better quickly. Being shut up made him put on fat. The Macbeth of the photograph, and the Macbeth of the Yellow Room, became very unlike each other, so much so, that you did not recognize him at first.”

“But tell me—you do not know anything about Klotz? What did my uncle do with him? You said a moment ago he had been sent away.”

“I was always certain he had been sent away. His behavior when he left, and that of Lerne when he came back from Germany, made me feel sure of it.”

“Has he a family?”

“I think he is an orphan, and a bachelor.”

“How long did Macbeth remain in the laboratory?”

“About three weeks or a month.”

“Was his hair always fair, before this happened?” I asked, still riding my hobby-horse.

She said, “Certainly, what an idea!”

“And what did they do with Nell?”

“The day after the quarrel, I heard her howling loudly, no doubt because they had separated her from her master.

“According to your uncle, whom I asked about it, she was with other dogs, in a kennel. ‘Her right place,’ added Lerne. She got out of it the other night—perhaps you heard her.

“Poor Nell, how quickly she found out Macbeth was gone. She often howls at night-time. Her life is not happy.”

“Tell me the end of it,” I said. “What is at the bottom of it? What is the truth? Do you believe in the madness which resulted from the fall?”

“How do I know? It is possible, but I suspect the laboratory contains horrible things, the very sight of which would drive any one mad. Donovan had never been in it. He must have seen some ghastly things.”

I then remembered the chimpanzee, and the horrible impression its death had made upon me. Emma might be right. The incident of the monkey strongly supported her hypothesis, but instead of trying to find the answer to each riddle in detail, should I not have gone back four years, to that critical moment when so many problems had started? Should I not have studied closely the mysterious period when so many doors had closed, in order to find the key which should open them all?

A little foot peeped from the coverlet, and lay, white and pink, on the pale yellow cover; it was smooth, and like a strange jewel in its case.

“Good gracious, my dear, can you really walk with that pretty little thing, with its nails polished like Japanese corals—this living ticklish jewel—that a mustache drives away.”

The little foot went back into its cover, but however dainty and tender and quick it was, it recalled another one to me by contrast—the one in the forest clearing—that sinister thing, which I now felt sure was a piece of dead flesh in the old shoe.

Suddenly it seemed to me that I was wandering alone in a night full of ambushes.

“Emma, suppose we run away!”

She shook her Mænad’s locks, and refused.

“Donovan proposed that to me. No, Lerne has promised me I shall be rich; besides, on the day you arrived, he swore he would kill me if I deceived him, or tried to escape. I found out long ago that he could fulfill his first threat, and I know now that he could carry out the second.”

“That is true. When he introduced us to one another, you had the shadow of death in your eyes.”

“Now,” she went on, “we can hide our love, but we could not hide our running away. No, no, let us stop where we are, and keep our eyes open. Let us be careful.”

Half-past four was striking on the clock when I left my mistress, in order to return to Grey-l’Abbaye.

CHAPTER VIII
RASHNESS

I made my way as fast as I could back to Grey. The fête was in full swing, and the crowd of merry-makers received me with impertinent remarks and jokes.

Five by the station clock! I profited by the time at my disposal to arrange things a little, so that my uncle might the more easily fall into the snare which he had spread with his own hands when he set me the task of repairing part of the machine of which I had a duplicate.

Having put on my blue overalls, dirtied my hands and face, taken out my tool-box, and turned everything in it upside down, I slightly dented the new carburetor, with light taps of a hammer, and dirtied it with blacklead. With a few scrapes of a file I succeeded in giving it the sort of rough look of a newly forged piece of metal.

The train came in. When Lerne touched my shoulder, I was endeavoring, with a great show of effort to screw up a nut which was already perfectly tight.

“Nicolas!”

I turned towards my uncle a face like a coal-heaver’s, putting on as harsh an expression as I could.

“I have just finished,” I muttered; “that was a nice trick of yours, getting people to work all for nothing.”

“Does it work all right again?”

“Oh, yes! I have just tried. You can see the engine is smoking.”

“Do you want the bits I carried away put back into the carburetor?”

“Oh, no! keep them as a remembrance of this happy day, uncle. Come, let us get in, I have had enough of standing about here.”

Frédéric Lerne was annoyed.

“You do not mind, Nicolas, do you?”

“Oh no, uncle, I do not mind.”

“I have my reasons, you know. Later on....”

“All right, if you knew me, however, you would not have been so much on your guard, but our agreement justifies all you did. I should have had no right to complain.”

He made a vague, evasive gesture.

“You are not angry, that is the main point. You understand how things are, don’t you?”

Evidently Lerne was afraid he had vexed me, and that, as a result of my annoyance, I might disclose the existence of important secrets at Fonval, even though I might not be able to inform the right people of their nature.

Weighing all the facts of the case, I felt that my presence as a stranger, free to depart when I liked, must have been a subject for constant alarm for my uncle. It seemed to me that in his place, had I been obliged to receive a third party because of his relationship with me, I should assuredly have preferred to make him my accomplice as soon as possible, so as to insure his discretion.

“After all,” thought I to myself, “why has my uncle not thought of it? Before the uncertain, and perhaps illusory date when Lerne is to initiate me, he will have to pass through a long period of torment while he exercises over me the double vigilance of an analyst and a police-officer.

“Suppose I were to anticipate his project? He would doubtless gladly hasten to give the information which is as sacred as a secret of the confessional, and which would unite the master and the pupil in the same plot.

“I do not see why he should take my advances badly, for in either of the two possible eventualities, that is, whether Lerne’s promises to initiate me into his enterprise are made in good faith or not, the situation to-day has only two issues—either my departure, with its threat of revelation, or my connivance.

“Now, Emma and the mystery tie me to the château, so I shall not go; there remains, therefore, a pretended complicity which would, moreover, have the advantage of allowing me to solve the puzzle—and who except Lerne could reveal it to my eyes, since Emma knows nothing about it, and since each solved problem, if I investigated it by myself, would only leave another one to follow?

“A sage diplomacy might certainly persuade my uncle to make speedy revelations; that is what he wants to do, but how to bring him to do it?

“What I must do is to insinuate that his secrets, however criminal they may be, do not terrify me, so that I shall have to pose as a man of resolution, who does not shrink from contact with crimes, and would not think of denouncing them, because, if need were, he would commit them himself. Yes, that’s it!

“But how to hit on a crime which Lerne might perpetrate, and which I might say is natural and harmless, and one which I would commit on the first occasion myself?

“Good heavens, Nicolas! Yes, his own wicked deeds! Tell him that you know one of the worst things he has done, and that you not only approve of it, but of others of the same sort, and that you are ready to help him in the matter. Then, after such a declaration, he will unbosom himself, and you will learn everything, with the intention of using this confidence, dictated by mere self-interest for your own ends. But let me be cunning. I shall only speak to my uncle when he is in a pleasant humor, and provided the evidence of the old shoe is not too damning.”

So I reasoned, as I took Lerne back to Fonval, but after my stormy afternoon, my ideas were not very brilliant.

Under the influence of my environment, I brooded over Lerne’s unproven crimes and I imagined them to be detestable and innumerable. I forgot that his work, carried on with such secrecy, and secure from risk of imitation, might well have an industrial aim. In my impatience to satisfy my curiosity and by reason of my exhaustion, this strategy seemed to me a brilliant idea.

I underrated the enormity of the fictitious avowal I should have to make before getting anything in exchange.

Further reflection would have indicated the danger to me, but adverse fortune would have it that my uncle, satisfied by my answer, and seeing me take things so well, affected the most surprising joviality. Never would an opportunity more suitable to my designs present itself, so I thoughtlessly seized it.

According to his custom, my uncle waxed enthusiastic over the car, and made me maneuver as I went through the labyrinth, and it was while twisting and turning about that I had been deliberating in the manner described.

“Marvelous, Nicolas, I tell you again, it is prodigious, this automobile! An animal—a real organized animal, and perhaps the least imperfect of all, and who knows to what pitch progress may lift it! A spark of life in it! A little more spontaneity! A touch of brain, and behold the most beautiful creature in the world! Yes, more beautiful than we are, perhaps, for remember what I told you—it is perfectible, and undying—two qualities of which the physical being of man is pitifully devoid.

“Our whole body renews itself almost entirely, Nicolas. Your hair!” (Why the devil was he always talking of hair?) Your hair is not the same as it was last year, for example. It comes up again, less brown, and older, and in smaller numbers, whereas the automobile changes its parts at will, and get young again each time, with a new heart, and new brains which have more cunning than the original parts.

“So that in a thousand years a motor-car, which never ceases to improve, will be as young as it is to-day, if it has been put to rights at the proper time, bit by bit.

“And do not tell me that it will not be the same car, since all its parts shall have been replaced. If you made that objection, Nicolas, what would you think about man, who, during this race to death, that he calls life, is submitting to just as ridiculous transformations, but all in the nature of decay.

“So that we must come to this strange conclusion—the man who dies old, is no longer he who was born. He who has just been born, and must succumb later on, will not die, at least, he will not die all at once, but progressively, scattered to the four winds of heaven in organic dust, during which long phase another being forms itself slowly in that place which is the place of the body.

“This other one, whose birth is imperceptible, develops in each one of us, without our knowledge, as the first one crumbles away. It supplants this latter day by day, and it is modified continually by the death and renewal of myriads of cells, of which he is himself the sum total. He it is who will be seen to die.

“I tell you, Nicolas, if the motor-car were by some miracle to become independent, man might pack his trunks. His era would be near its end. Compared with him, the motor-car would be queen of the world, as before him reigned the mammoth.”

“Yes, but this sovereign queen would always be dependent upon the mind of man.”

“That is a fine argument. Are we not the slaves of the animals, and even the plants which unceasingly rebuild our bodies with their flesh and their pulp?”

My uncle was so pleased with his paradoxes, that he shouted them out, and fidgeted about in his seat, and sawed the air in a frenzy, as if he were seizing ideas in armfuls.

“My dear nephew, what a splendid idea it was of yours to bring this car! It does buck me up wonderfully. I must learn how to drive the beast. I shall be the mahout of this fierce mammoth. Eh! Eh! Ah! Ha!”

At the moment of this outburst of hilarity, I was just finishing my reasoning, and it was the outburst which caused me to make my attack—and to commit my imprudence.

“How amusing you are, uncle! Your gayety cheers me up. I recognize you again. Why aren’t you always like this, and why do you distrust me—me, who, on the contrary—deserve all your confidence?”

“But,” said Lerne, “you know quite well I will give it to you when the time has come. I have quite decided on that.”

“Why not at once, uncle?”

And I plunged bald-headed into my folly. “Are we not made of the same stuff, you and I? You don’t know me! Nothing can astonish me, and I know more than you think! Yes, uncle, I share your opinions and admire your acts.”

Lerne, somewhat surprised, began to laugh.

“What do you know about it?”

“What I know is that one cannot trust to the law. One has to look after one’s own affairs. If some one happens to cross your path, the best way is to get rid of him yourself, and such a removal, if it is illegal, becomes legitimate. A chance incident has confirmed me in this.

“In short, uncle, if my name were Frédéric Lerne, Mr. Macbeth would not be living so comfortably. You do not know me, I tell you.”

By the Professor’s voice, when next he spoke, I perceived I had committed a blunder. He defended himself in a voice which, I observed, betrayed great weariness.

“Hallo!” said he, “this is something new. What an idea! Are you really as unprincipled as you make out? Well, so much the worse. As for me, I am not tarred with that brush, nephew. Macbeth is mad, but I had nothing to do with it. It is a pity you saw him. It is an ugly sight. The poor creature! I had to put him away. What nonsense, Nicolas! What are you going to invent next? It is a good thing, however, you have spoken to me about it. It has opened my eyes. Appearances are indeed against me. I was awaiting till the patient got better, before telling his people what had happened, so that they might be less affected by a misfortune whose signs were less obvious; but no, this timorous policy is too dangerous. My own safety requires that at the risk of hurting their feelings more, I must inform them. I shall write to them no later than to-night to come and fetch him. Poor Donovan! His departure will, I hope, disprove your suspicion, but you have disappointed me very much, Nicolas.”

I was greatly confused. Had I made a mistake, or had Emma lied to me? Or else, did Lerne want to lull my suspicions? However, it was, I had committed a great piece of stupidity, and Lerne, whether innocent or criminal, would bear me a grudge for having accused him falsely or otherwise.

I was defeated. All I had gained was a fresh doubt—this time in regard to Emma.

“In any case, uncle, I swear to you that it was only by chance that I discovered Macbeth.”

“If chance leads you to discover other reasons for maligning me,” replied Lerne harshly, “do not fail to inform me of it. I shall clear myself immediately. Anyhow, the strict observance of your word will prevent you from helping any chance which should favor your meeting with madmen ... or madwomen!”

We had arrived at Fonval.

“Nicolas,” said Lerne, in a gentler tone, “I have a great liking for you. I wish you well. Obey me, my lad.”

“Ah, he wants to soft-sawder me,” I thought to myself. “He is paying court to me now. Look out!”

“Obey me,” he went on, with honeyed sweetness, “and show by your reserve that you are already my ally; intelligent as you are, you must surely understand this fine point. The day is not far off, unless I am mistaken, when I shall be able to tell you about everything. You shall then see the magnificent things that I have dreamt of, and of which I destine a share for you.”

“Meanwhile, since you know about Macbeth’s absence—come, here is a sign of the good faith I ask of you. Come with me and visit him. We shall decide if he is strong enough to stand a railway journey, and the crossing.”

After a short hesitation I followed him into the yellow drawing-room.

The madman at the sight of him humped his back, and growling recoiled into a corner with a look of terror and a revengeful gleam in his eye.

Lerne thrust me in before him—I was afraid he meant to shut me in.

“Take hold of his hands and bring him into the middle of the room.”

Donovan allowed me to touch him. The Doctor examined him thoroughly, but obviously the scar attracted his greatest attention. In my opinion, the rest of the inspection was merely a sham for my benefit.