Volume 20 — CLARISSA MIRABEL (1906) (continued 2)

The walls of the old town had hardly come in sight before such a mass of people was to be seen on the road that the horses were obliged to slacken their pace. They surrounded the carriage and gazed with strained attention into the open windows; women lifted up their children that they, too, might see the famous Madame Mirabel. She did not seek to escape the general curiosity; with the happy smile of a bride she sat there, her fine black brows lifted high on her forehead.

On the stroke of ten President Enjalran, who was to preside at the trial, appeared in the overcrowded hall, and after the reading of the lengthy indictment Bastide was summoned to the hearing.

Firm as if cast in bronze he stood before the judge's table. His answers were cool, terse, and clear. From beginning to end he now saw through the senseless fable, woven of stupidity and malice. By a biting sarcasm he showed his unutterable contempt of all the accusations against him, thus placing the counsel assigned to him at the last moment, with whom he stubbornly refused to confer, in no slight embarrassment.

Now and then he turned his glance toward the tall, church-like windows, and when he caught sight of a bird that had alighted on the sill and dug his yellow bill into the feathers on his breast, he lost his self-command for a moment and his lips parted in pain.

His examination lasted but a short time. It was only a matter of form, for his fate was sealed. With Bach, Colard, and the other accomplices, Monsieur d'Enjalran's task was easy; their testimony was petrified, as it were. Bousquier had died in prison. Of the others, each one sought to grab at a little remnant of innocence; they produced the impression of men crushed and wholly bereft of will-power. A sensation was created by old Bancal, who became hysterical during his examination, and then, protesting his innocence, behaved like a madman. The humpbacked Missonier grinned when the question of his presence at the murder was discussed; he had become brutalized by his long imprisonment and the repeated examinations. Little Madeleine Bancal behaved like an actress, and greeted her acquaintances and patrons in the audience by throwing them kisses. Rose Feral turned deadly pale at the sight of the bloody rags on the Judge's table, and could not utter a word. Madame Bancal remembered that Monsieur Fualdes was dragged into her house by six men, that he was made to sign a number of papers, crisscross, as she said. The day following, she had found one of these bills, made out upon stamped paper, but as it was stained with blood, had burned it. More than that she positively refused to confess, met all questions with a stolid silence, and declared finally that whatever else she knew she would confide to her confessor alone.

The witnesses testified placidly the most incredible things. Their memory was so good that they recollected the hour and minute of the merest trifles, which are forgotten from one day to the next. In night and fog they had seen and recognized people, their features, their gestures, the color of their clothes. They had heard speaking, whispering, sighing, through thick walls. A beggar by the name of Laville, who used to sleep in Missonier's stable, had heard not only the organ-grinders but also four men carrying a burden, something like men dragging a barrel. Bastide Grammont laughed repeatedly at statements which he declared to be shameless lies. When the Bancal woman began her testimony he remarked that since it came so late he had expected that the old woman would be delivered of it with still greater difficulty. To another witness he represented, in a vibrating voice, how the hand of Heaven rested heavy upon her, and reminded her of the awful death of her child. He was like a fencer whose opponent is the mist; nobody, indeed, replied to him, he stood alone, the contradictions which he believed he had demonstrated remained there, that was all. At first he was self-confident and maintained his composure, looked firmly into the witnesses' faces; then he felt as if his sense for the significance of words were leaving him, not alone for his own but for that of all the words in existence, or as if the ground were giving way under him and he were falling irresistibly from space to space into an awful, infinite, boundless void. His mind refused to work; he asked himself, horrified, whether this was still life, dared call itself life; Nature's glorious structure seemed to him ravaged like a wall rent by a storm, the speaking mouth of all these people struck him as nothing but a chasm convulsively and repellently opening and shutting, darkness invaded his spirit, he burned with a feeling of shame, he felt ashamed in the name of the nameless God, ashamed that his body was molded like that of these creatures around him. He had loved the world, had once loved the people in it; now he was ashamed of them. It pained him to think that he had ever cherished hopes, buoyed up his heart with promises, that sunshine and sky had ever been able to lure from him a joyful glance, sportive words a smile; he wished he had, like the stone by the wayside, never betrayed what he felt, so that he might not have been doomed to bear witness before his own branded, scourged, unspeakably humiliated self. Thought alone seemed offensive enough to him, how much more so what he could have said; it was nothing, less than a breath. What could he depend upon? what hope for? They had no faith, not even in his scorn, not even in his silence. And Bastide locked himself up, and looked into the dawning countenance of Death.

It was already growing dark when the King's evidence, Madame Mirabel, was finally summoned to the court-room, and the whole tired assemblage started up convulsively like a single body. She entered, and in spite of the close air of the room, she seemed to be shivering. She trembled visibly on taking the oath. Monsieur d'Enjalran urged her to testify in accordance with the truth. In a strange, uniformly dull tone, yet speaking rather hurriedly, she repeated the statement that she had made before the examining magistrate. An oppressive silence pervaded the hall, and her voice, in consequence, grew steadily lower. She knew now a multitude of details, had seen the long knife lying on the table, had seen Bancal and Colard bring in a wooden tub, and the lawyer Fualdes sitting with bowed shoulders near the lamp, writing. She had also seen the mysterious stranger with the wooden leg, and noticed that Bach and Bousquier unfolded a large white cloth. To the question why she had appeared in men's clothes, she gave no reply. And when, with fingers convulsively clasped, head bowed, her slender body bent slightly forward, writhing almost imperceptibly, as if in the clutches of an animal, yet with that blissful, sweet smile which lent her countenance an expression of subdued madness, she related with bated breath how Bastide had embraced and kissed her in the dark adjoining room, he sprang up suddenly, wrung his hands in despair and made a few hurried steps until he stood at Clarissa's side. His heavy breathing was audible to all.

The presiding officer rebuked him for his behavior, which he designated as indelicate, but Bastide cried in a firm, ringing voice: "Before God, who hears me and will judge me, I declare that it is all an awful lie. I have never as much as touched that woman or set eyes upon her."

Clarissa turned as white as chalk. It seemed to her as if she had but just now heard the clinking of the shattered mirror which she had dashed to the floor after the dance. When the prosecuting attorney asked her to continue, she remained silent; her eyes rolled and her whole body shook convulsively.

"Speak out!" exclaimed Bastide, addressing her, and indignation almost choked his voice, "speak! Your silence is even more ruinous to me than all the lies."

Clarissa lifted her eyes to him and asked with curious emotion: "Do you really not know me, Bastide?"

"No! no! no!" he burst out, and looking upward he muttered in distress: "She is demented."

Within a second's space Clarissa grew fiery red and again deathly pale. And turning toward Bastide once more, she exclaimed in a terrible tone of reproach: "Oh, murderer!"

The public applauded. Clarissa reeled, however; an usher of the court hurried to her side and caught her in his arms, a number of ladies left their places and busied themselves about her, and half an hour elapsed before she regained consciousness; but her appearance was as changed as if she had suddenly aged by twenty years. Monsieur d'Enjalran tried to continue the examination, but she answered only in incoherent words; she did not know; it was possible; she did not wish to contradict. Bastide Grammont had resumed his seat in the prisoner's dock; immeasurable distress and consternation were pictured on his countenance. His counsel bade Clarissa, since she had spoken, to continue. "I adjure you, Madame, make yourself clear," he said; "it depends upon you whether an innocent man shall be saved or shall be sent to the scaffold." Clarissa remained silent, as if she had not heard; in her breast there surged, like morning mist over the waters, a consoling and captivating image. Counselor Pinaud now turned to her with a severe exhortation; she was not to think she could make her assertions at will and suppress what she wished. The prosecuting attorney spoke up for her, saying that the cause of her silence was known; she herself had asserted that she entertained a conviction the grounds of which she could not state; it should suffice that she had uttered what was of the greatest importance; nay, he declared, moreover, that any further urging would be improper. He had not concluded his speech when Clarissa interrupted him; raising her right arm she said in solemn protest: "I have taken no oath."

Bastide Grammont looked up. Shaking off his stupor, he raised himself slowly and began in a voice all the more affecting by its calmness: "Prison walls do not speak. And yet the time will come when they will find a voice and will proclaim the secret means which have been employed to force all these wretches to make lies a shameful bulwark of their lives. Fualdes was not my enemy, he was only my creditor. If covetousness had misled a man otherwise decent and moderate, if it had armed his hand, I would never, for all that, have raised it against a defenseless old man. If you want a sacrifice, take me; I am ready, but do not mingle my lot with that of this brood. My family, who have always dwelt in the country, and have followed the customs and simple ways of rural life, are disgraced. My mother weeps and is crushed. Judge whether I, who am plunged in this sea of misfortune, can still cherish a love of life. I loved freedom once, I loved animals, the water, the sky, the air, and the fruits of the trees; but now I am dishonored, and if there were a future before me it would be sullied with shame, and the time would have an ill taste. Is it a court of justice before which I have been summoned? No, it is a hunt, the judge has become a hunter and prepares the innocent one to be a tidbit for the rabble. I ask no longer for justice, it is too late to mete out justice to me, too late, were the crown of France itself to be offered to me. I surrender myself to you to destroy me, your conscience will be loaded with that burden. One guilty man makes many, and your children's children will for this flood the living world with disgrace."

A paralyzed silence succeeded these words. But suddenly there burst forth an indescribable tumult. The public and the jurors arose and clenched their fists at Bastide Grammont, screamed and howled in wild confusion, Monsieur d'Enjalran's exhortation dying away unheard. And just as suddenly a deathly silence ensued. A faint, long-drawn cry which arose in the din, and now continued its plaintive note, petrified the faces of the listeners. All eyes tourned toward Clarissa. She felt the glances showering down upon her like the beams in a falling building.

Her heart was aflame with a desire for expiation ...

The speech of the public prosecutor gathered together once more the weapons of hatred which Rumor had forged against its victims; with cunning skill, he painted the night of the murder in such colors that the horror of it seemed to live for the first time, Bastide's advocate, on the other hand, contented himself with high-sounding phrases; he waxed warm, his listeners remained cold. While he was speaking there was a shoving and pushing in the rear of the hall; some of the ladies shrieked, a fair-sized dog ran through an opening in the bar, looked around him with glistening eyes, and, giving a short bark, crouched at Bastide's feet. Deeply moved, he laid his hand on the animal's neck, and motioned the usher, who wanted to remove it, back with a commanding gesture.

When the court retired for consultation, no one dared speak above a whisper. A woman sobbed and she was told to be quiet; it was the Benoit girl, Colard's sweetheart. She had wound her arms about the poor wretch's shoulders and her tear-stained face expressed but one desire—to share his fate. A relative of Bastide approached him in order to speak to him; Bastide shook his head and did not even look at the man. A sort of drowsiness had settled on his countenance—at any rate, words no longer carried any weight in his ears. Yet it happened that he lifted his eyes once more and after coursing through illimitable space they met those of Clarissa. Now the strange woman did not strike him as so strange. He heard, again the sound of her voice when she called him murderer; was it not rather a cry for help than an accusation? and that beseeching look, as if invisible hands were clutching at her throat? and that most delicate form so singularly free from indications of her age, quivering like a young birch in autumn?

Two lonely shipwrecked beings are driven by the currents of the ocean to the same spot, coming from opposite ends of the earth, unable to abandon the plank upon which their life depends, unable even to grasp each other's hands simply driven by the gradually dying wind to unknown depths. There was something weird in their mutual feeling of compassion. Yet Bastide's pained and gloomy astonishment gave way to the dreamy intoxication of fatigue, and the watchful eyes of his dog appeared to him like two reddish stars between black tree-tops. He heard the sentence of death when the court returned; he had risen, and listened to the words of the presiding judge; it sounded like the splashing of raindrops on withered leaves. He heard himself say something, but what it was he hardly knew. He saw many faces turned toward him in the dim light, and they gave him the impression of worm-eaten and decaying apples.

The verdict concerning the other accused persons was not to be announced until the following day. The crowds in the hall, in the entrances, and on the street, dispersed slowly. When Clarissa passed through the corridor every one stepped timidly aside.

She had learned that Bastide was not to be taken back to Rodez, but was to remain in the prison at Alby. She thereupon dismissed the carriage that was waiting for her, betook herself to an inn near by, where she asked for a room, and wrote a letter to her father—a few feverishly agitated sentences: "I know no longer what is truth and what is falsehood; Bastide is innocent, and I have destroyed him, though my desire was to help him; Yes and No are in my breast like two extinguished flames; if I were to return whence I came I should suffer a continual death; for that reason and because people live as they do, I go where I must." It was already past midnight when she asked to speak to the host. She requested him to send the letter in the morning to Château Perrié by a reliable messenger; she then asked the startled man to sell her a small basket of fresh fruit. The host expressed a polite regret that he had nothing more in his storeroom. Passionately urgent, she offered him ten, twentyfold its value and threw a gold piece on the table. "It is for a dying person," she said, "everything depends upon it." The man gazed anxiously at the pallid, gleaming countenance of the distinguished looking woman and pondered, declaring finally that he would rouse his neighbor, and bidding her wait. Left alone, she knelt down by the bedside, buried her face in the pillows and wept. After half an hour the host returned, carrying a basket full of pears, grapes, pomegranates, and peaches. Shaking his head, he followed her with his eyes as she hastened away, and held the sealed letter, which he was to forward, inquisitively up to the light.

The streets were desolate and bathed in shadowy moonlight. The windows of the little houses were blinking drowsily; under a gateway stood the night-watchman with a halberd and mumbled like a drunken man. In front of the low prison building there was an open space; Clarissa seated herself on a stone bench, and, as there was a pump near by and she felt thirsty, drank her fill. The softly swelling outlines of the hills melted almost imperceptibly into the sky, and behind a depression in the landscape a fire-light was glowing; she seemed to hear, too, on listening intently, the ringing of bells. The whole world was not asleep, then, and she could link her anxious heart to human concerns once more. After a time she rose, stepped over to the building, set the basket of fruit on the ground, and knocked with the knocker at the gate. It was a long while before the door-keeper appeared and gruffly demanded what she wanted. "I must speak to Bastide Grammont," she declared. The man made a face as if a demented person had waylaid him, growled in a threatening tone and was about to bang the door in her face. Clarissa clutched his arm with one hand, and tore the diamond brooch from her breast with the other. "There, there, there!" she stammered. The old man raised his lantern and examined the sparkling jeweled ornament on all sides. Clarissa misinterpreted his grinning, anxious joy, thought he was not satisfied, and gave him her purse into the bargain, "What is in the basket?" he inquired respectfully but suspiciously. She showed him what it contained. He contented himself with that, thought she was most likely the mistress of the condemned man, and, upon locking the door, walked on in front of her. They descended a few steps, then crossed a narrow passage. "How long do you wish to stay inside?" asked the keeper, when they had reached an iron door. Clarissa drew a deep breath and replied in a whisper that she would give three knocks on the door. The old man nodded, said he would wait at the head of the stairs, opened the door cautiously, handed the woman his lantern and locked the door behind her.

Inside Clarissa clung to the wall to give her riotous pulses time to subside. The room seemed moderately large and not altogether uninhabitable. Bastide lay on a pallet along the opposite wall, asleep and fully dressed. "What a stillness!" thought Clarissa shuddering, and stole softly to the bedside of the sleeping man. What quiet in that countenance, too, what a beautiful slumber, thought she, and her lips parted in mute sorrow. She placed the lantern on the floor where its light would strike his face, then she knelt down and listened to his steady breathing. Bastide's mouth was firmly closed, his eyelids were motionless, a sign of dreamlessness; his long beard encircled cheeks and chin like brown brushwood, his head was thrown slightly backward, and his hair shone with a moist gleam. Gradually the peace of his countenance passed into Clarissa too; all words, all signs which she had brought with her vanished, she determined to do nothing more than place her gift by his bed and depart. Accordingly she emptied the basket, and started and paused every time she heard but a grain of sand crunch under her feet. When she had laid out all the fruit and passed her hand tenderly over each, she grew more and more peaceful and calm; she felt herself so strangely bound to death that she dismissed the thought of leaving this room with a feeling akin to fear, and prepared to do what possessed her so strongly, with a composed assurance. A desire to kiss him arose within her, and she actually bent down toward him, but a commanding awe arrested her, more even than the fear that he might awake. Her body twisted and turned, she embraced him in spirit and felt as if she were freed from the earth, like a pearl dropped from a ring. She then rose quietly, walked softly to the other side of the room, stretched herself on the floor, took a small penknife and opened the veins in both wrists by deep cuts. Within a quarter of an hour she sighed twice, and the hand of Death sought in vain to wipe the enraptured smile from her pallid lips.

Bastide still slept on, that abysmal sleep where total oblivion chains and numbs body and spirit. Then he began to dream. He found himself in a spacious, secluded chamber, the centre of which was occupied by a richly decked table. Many people were seated around it; they were carousing and having a merry time. Suddenly all eyes were turned to the middle of the table, where a vessel of opaque blue glass, which had not been there before, now stood. What was in the glass receptacle? what could it signify? who brought it? was asked in muffled tones. Thereupon an uncanny silence ensued; all gazed now at the blue vessel, now, with sullen suspicion, at each other. All at once, the jovial revelers of a few moments ago arose and one accused the other of having placed the covered dish on the table. A violent clamor now arose, some drew their poniards, others swung chairs about, and meanwhile a slim, nude girl's figure was seen to emerge, like white smoke, from the vessel on the table. Bastide knew the face, it was that of the false witness Clarissa; with snake-like glistening eyes she gazed at him, always only at him. All the men followed her glance and they hurled themselves upon him. "You must die! You must die!" resounded from hoarse throats, but while they were still shouting their voices died away, the shadowy arms of the false witness stretched themselves out and divided one of the walls, exposing to view a blooming garden, in the centre of which stood a scaffold hung with branches laden with ripe fruit. Bastide was a boy once more; slowly he strode out, Clarissa's hands waved above him and plucked the fruit, and his fear of death was dulled by their intoxicating perfume, which, like a cloud, filled the entire hall, nay, the entire universe.

Here he awoke. His first drowsy glance fell upon the flickering light of the lantern, the second upon a huge pear, which, yellow as a rising moon, lay at his bedside. In dazed, joyous astonishment he grasped it, but on raising it to his lips noticed that it was stained with blood. He was startled, thought he was still dreaming. Beyond the windows the gray light of dawn was already spreading. Now he caught sight of the other fruit, gorgeous and abundant, as if paradise had been pillaged. But all was stained with blood ... A little rivulet of blood, divided into two streams, trickled over from the corner of the wall.

And Bastide saw ...

He tried to rise, but his unfinished sleep still paralyzed his body.

Bitter and wild grief wrung his breast. He longed no more for the day which awoke so drearily outside; weary of his own heart-beats and perfectly sure of what had happened and must happen, he yearned for the final end. He desired no special knowledge of the consummated fate of the being on the other side of the cell, who, dominated by mysterious spirits, had trust herself into his path—no knowledge of men and what they built or destroyed. Man was an abomination to him.

And yet when his glance fell upon the splendid fruit once more, he felt the woe of all creation; he wished at least to close the eyes of the giver. But just then the keeper, grown suspicious, turned the key in the lock.