Читать книгу The Sin of Monsieur Antoine - George Sand - Страница 8

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Before the peasant, who had continued to nibble at his bread with a thoughtful expression, was prepared to begin, the young man thanked Monsieur Antoine warmly for his narrative and for his generous interpretation of Monsieur Cardonnet's course. Without admitting that he was in any way connected with that gentleman, he seemed to be deeply touched by the judgment of his character which the Comte de Châteaubrun expressed, and he added:

"Yes, monsieur, I believe that by seeking the best side of things one goes astray less often than by doing the opposite. A determined speculator would be parsimonious in the details of his undertaking, and then one would be justified in suspecting his rectitude. But when we see an intelligent and active man pay handsomely for labor——"

"One moment, if you please," interposed the peasant. "You are upright men and noble hearts; I am glad to believe it of this young gentleman, as I am sure of it in your case, Monsieur Antoine. But, meaning no offence, I will venture to tell you that you see no farther than the end of your nose. Look you. I will suppose that I have a large sum of money to invest, and that my purpose is not to obtain simply a fair and legitimate return from it, as it is right for everybody to do, but to double or treble my capital in a few years. I am not foolish enough to announce my purpose to the people I am forced to ruin. I begin by wheedling them, by making a show of generosity, and, to remove all distrust, by making myself appear, if need be, a brainless prodigal. That done, I have my dupes where I want them. I have sacrificed a hundred thousand francs, I will say, on those little wiles. A hundred thousand francs is a deal of money for the province! but, so far as I am concerned, if I have several millions, it's simply the bonus that I pay. Everybody likes me; although some laugh at my simplicity, the greater number pity me and esteem me. No one takes any precautions. Time flies fast and my brain still faster; I have cast the net and all the fish are nibbling. First the little ones—the small fry that you swallow without anyone noticing it; then the big ones, until they have all disappeared."

"What do you mean by all your metaphors?" said Monsieur Antoine, shrugging his shoulders. "If you go on talking figuratively, I am going to sleep. Come, hurry, it's getting late."

"What I mean is plain enough," continued the peasant. "When I have once ruined all the small concerns that competed with me I become a more powerful lord than your ancestors were before the Revolution, Monsieur Antoine! I govern over the head of the laws, and while I have a poor devil locked up for the slightest peccadillo, I take the liberty to do whatever pleases me or suits my convenience. I take everybody's property—with their daughters and wives thrown in, if they take my fancy—I control the business and supplies of a whole department. By my skill I have forced down the price of crops; but, when everything is in my hands, I raise prices to suit myself, and, as soon as I can safely do it, I obtain a monopoly and starve the people. And then it's a small matter to kill off competition; I soon get control of the money, which is the key to everything. I do a banking business on the sly, wholesale and retail. I oblige so many people, that I am everybody's creditor and everybody belongs to me. People find out that they no longer like me; but they see that I am to be feared, and the most powerful handle me carefully, while the small fry tremble and sigh all about me. However, as I have some intelligence and cunning, I play the great man from time to time. I rescue a few families, I contribute to some charitable organization. It is a method of greasing the wheel of my fortune, which rolls on the more rapidly for it; for people begin again to have a little esteem for me. I am no longer considered kind-hearted and foolish, but just and great. From the prefect of the department to the village curé and from the curé to the beggar, everyone is in the hollow of my hand; but the whole province suffers and no one detects the cause. No other fortune than mine will increase, and every modest competence will shrink, because I shall have dried up all the springs of wealth, raised the price of the necessaries of life and lowered that of the superfluities—just the reverse of what should be. The dealer will find himself in trouble and the consumer too. But I shall prosper because I shall be, by virtue of my wealth, the only resource of dealer and consumer alike. And at last people will say, 'What in heaven's name is happening? the small tradesmen are stripped and the small buyers are stripped. We have more pretty houses and more fine clothes staring us in the face than we used to have, and all those things cost less, so they say; but we haven't a sou in our pockets. We have all been frantic to make a show and now we are consumed by debts. But Monsieur Cardonnet isn't responsible for it all, for he does good and, if it weren't for him, we should all be ruined. Let us make haste and do something for Monsieur Cardonnet; let him be mayor, prefect, deputy, minister, king, if possible, and the province is saved!'

"That, messieurs, is the way I would make other people carry me on their backs if I were Monsieur Cardonnet, and it is what I am very sure Monsieur Cardonnet intends to do. Now, tell me that I am wrong to look askance at him; that I am a prophet of evil, and that nothing of what I predict will happen. God grant that you may be right! but for my part I can feel the hail coming in the distance, and there is only one hope that sustains me; it is that the stream will be less foolish than men; that it will not allow itself to be bridled by the fine machines they put between its teeth, and that some fine morning it will give Monsieur Cardonnet's mills a body blow that will sicken him of playing with it, and will induce him to take his capital and its consequences and carry it somewhere else. Now, I have said my say. If I have formed a hasty judgment, may God who has heard me forgive me!"

The peasant had spoken with great animation. The fire of keen insight darted from his blue eyes, and a smile of sorrowful indignation played about his mobile lips. The traveller examined that strongly-marked face, shaded by a heavy grizzly beard, wrinkled by fatigue, by exposure to the air, perhaps by disappointment as well; and, despite the pain that his language caused, he could not help thinking him handsome, and admiring, in the facility with which he bluntly expressed his thoughts, a sort of natural eloquence instinct with sincerity and love of justice; for, although his words, of which we have failed to express all the rustic homeliness, were simple and sometimes vulgar, his gestures were emphatic and the tone of his voice commanded attention. A feeling of profound depression had taken possession of his hearers, while he drew without any artifice, and unsparingly, the portrait of the pitiless and persevering rich man. The wine had had no effect upon him, and every time that he raised his eyes to the young man's face, he seemed to look into his very soul and sternly question him. Monsieur Antoine, although slightly affected by the weight of the wine he was carrying, had lost nothing of his harangue, and submitting as usual to the ascendancy of that mind, of stouter temper than his own, he heaved a deep sigh from time to time.

When the peasant had finished, "May God forgive you, indeed, my friend, if your judgment is at fault," he said, raising his glass as an offering to the Deity: "and if you are right, may Providence avert such a scourge from the heads of the poor and weak!"

"Listen to me, Monsieur de Châteaubrun, and you too, my friend," cried the young man, taking a hand of each of his companions in his own, "God, who hears all the words of man, and who reads their real sentiments in the depths of their hearts, knows that these evils are not to be dreaded, and that your apprehensions are only chimeras. I know the man of whom you speak; I know him well; and, although his face is cold, his character obstinate, his intellect active and strong, I will answer to you for the loyalty of his purposes and the noble use he will make of his fortune. There is something alarming, I agree, in the firmness of his will, and I am not surprised that his inflexible manner has caused a sort of vertigo here, as if a supernatural being had appeared in the midst of your peaceful fields. But that strength of purpose is based upon moral and religious principles, which make him, if not the mildest and most affable of men, the most rigidly just and the most royally generous."

"So much the better, deuce take it!" rejoined the châtelain, clinking his glass against the peasant's. "I drink to your health, and I am happy to have reason to esteem a man when I am on the point of cursing him. Come, don't be obstinate, old fellow, but believe this young man, who talks like a book and knows more about the subject than you and I do. Why, he says that he knows Cardonnet! that he knows him well! what more do you want? He will answer for him. So we need not worry any more. And now, friends, let us go to bed," continued the châtelain, delighted to accept the guaranty of a man of whom he knew nothing at all, not even his name, for a man of whom he knew little; "the clock is striking eleven, and that's an undue hour."

"I am going to take my leave of you," said the traveller, "and continue my journey, asking your permission to come soon to thank you for your kindness."

"You shall not go away to-night," cried Monsieur Antoine; "it is impossible, it rains bucketfuls, the roads are drowned, and you couldn't see your own feet. If you persist in going, I never want to see you again."

He was so urgent and the storm was in fact so fierce that the young man was fain to accept the proffered hospitality.

Sylvain Charasson—that was the name of the page—brought a lantern, and Monsieur Antoine, taking the traveller's arm, guided him among the ruins of the manor-house in search of a bedroom.

All the floors of the square pavilion were occupied by the Châteaubrun family; but, in addition to that small wing which was intact and recently restored, there was an enormous tower on the other side of the courtyard, the oldest part, the highest, the thickest, the most impervious of the whole pile, the rooms which it contained, one above another, being arched with stone and even more solidly constructed than the square pavilion. The band of speculators who had purchased the château several years before for purposes of demolition, and had carried away all the wood and iron to the last door-hinge, had found nothing to demolish on the lower floors, and Monsieur Antoine had had one floor cleaned and closed, for use on the rare occasions when he had an opportunity to entertain a guest. It had been a great display of magnificence on the poor fellow's part to replace the doors and windows and put a bed and a few chairs in that apartment, which was not necessary for the accommodation of his family. He had made the effort cheerfully, saying to Janille: "It isn't everything to be comfortable yourself; you must think about being able to give your neighbor shelter." And yet, when the young man entered that dismal feudal donjon, and found himself, as it were, confined in a jail, his heart sank, and he would gladly have followed the peasant, who went, as his custom was, to lie on the fresh straw with Sylvain Charasson. But Monsieur Antoine was so pleased and so proud to be able to do the honors of a guest chamber, despite his poverty, that his young guest felt bound to accept for his lodgings one of the frowning prisons of the Middle Ages.

However, there was a good fire in the huge fireplace, and the bed, which consisted of a mattress of oat-chaff with a thick quilt spread upon it, was not to be despised. Everything was cheap and clean. The young man soon drove away the melancholy thoughts that assail every traveller quartered in such a place, and, despite the rumbling of the thunder, the cries of the night-birds and the roar of the wind and rain, which shook his windows, while the rats made furious assaults upon his door, he was soon sound asleep.

His sleep, however, was disturbed by strange dreams, and he had a sort of nightmare just before dawn, as if it were impossible to pass the night in a place stained with the mysterious crimes of feudal days without being made the victim of painful visions. He dreamed that Monsieur Cardonnet entered the room, and as he struggled to get out of bed and run to meet him, he made an imperative sign to him not to stir; then, coming to him with an impassive air, he climbed on his chest, paying no heed to his groans and giving no indication upon his stony face that he was aware of the agony he caused him.

Crushed beneath that terrible weight, the sleeper struggled in vain for a space that seemed to him more than a century, and he had the death-rattle in his throat when he succeeded in rousing himself. But, although the day was beginning to break, and he could see everything in the tower distinctly, he remained so completely under the influence of his dream that he fancied that he still saw that inflexible face before his eyes and felt the weight of a body as heavy as a mountain of brass on his crushed and sunken chest. He arose and walked around the room several times before returning to bed, for, although he was anxious to make an early start, he was overcome by an unconquerable feeling of prostration. But his eyes were no sooner closed than the spectre recurred to his determination to stifle him, until, feeling that he was at the point of death, the young man cried out in a broken voice: "Father! father! what have I done to you, and why have you determined to murder your own son?"

The sound of his own voice woke him, and, finding that he was still pursued by the apparition, he ran to the window and opened it. As soon as the cool outer air entered that low room, in the atmosphere of which there was something lethargic, the hallucination vanished, and he dressed in haste, in order to leave the place where he had been the plaything of such a cruel fancy. But, notwithstanding all his efforts to think of something else, he could not shake off a feeling of painful disquietude, and the guest-chamber of Châteaubrun seemed to him even more dismal than on the night before.

The dull, gray light enabled him at last to see the whole of the château from his window.

It was literally nothing but a heap of ruins, the still magnificent ruins of a seignorial abode built at different periods. The courtyard, overgrown with weeds, through which the infrequent going and coming of a family reduced to the strict necessaries of life had worn only two or three narrow paths, from the large tower to the small one, and from the well to the main entrance, was surrounded opposite his window by crumbling walls which could be recognized as the foundations and lower courses of several buildings, among others a dainty chapel, of which the pediment, with a pretty rose-window surrounded by festoons of ivy, was still standing. At the end of the courtyard, in the centre of which was a large well, rose the dismantled skeleton of what had once been the principal abiding-place of the lords of Châteaubrun from the time of François I. to the Revolution. This once sumptuous edifice was now naught but a shapeless skeleton, open on all sides, a strange mass of ruins to which the crumbling away of the interior partitions imparted an appearance of enormous height. Neither the towers in which the graceful spiral staircases were enclosed, nor the great frescoed rooms, nor the beautiful mantels of carved stone had been respected by the hammer of the demolisher, and some few vestiges of this splendor, which they had been unable to reach, some fragments of richly decorated friezes, some garlands of leaves carved by the skilful craftsmen of the Renaissance, and an escutcheon bearing the arms of France crossed by the baton of bastardy—all of fine white stone, which time had not yet been able to darken—presented the melancholy spectacle of a work of art remorselessly sacrificed to the brutal law of necessity.

When young Cardonnet turned his eyes toward the small pavilion occupied by the last scion of a once wealthy and illustrious family, he felt a thrill of compassion as he reflected that there was in that pavilion a young woman whose ancestresses had had pages, vassals, fine horses and packs of hounds, whereas this inheritress of a ghastly ruin was destined perhaps, like the Princess Nausicaa, to wash her own linen at the fountain.

As he made this reflection he saw a little round window on the upper floor of the square pavilion open gently, and a woman's head, supported by the loveliest neck imaginable, lean forward as if to speak to some one in the courtyard. Emile Cardonnet, although he belonged to a generation of myopes, had excellent sight, and the distance was not so great that he could not distinguish the features belonging to that graceful blond head, whose hair the wind tossed about in some confusion. It seemed to him what in fact it was, an angel's head, arrayed in all the bloom of youth, sweet and noble at the same time. The tone of the voice was fascinating and the pronunciation was remarkably elegant.

"So it rained all night, did it, Jean?" she said. "See how full of water the courtyard is! All the fields I can see from my window are like ponds."

"It's a regular deluge, my dear child," the peasant, who seemed to be an intimate friend of the family, replied from below, "a genuine water-spout! I don't know whether the worst of the storm broke here or somewhere else, but I never saw the fountain so full."

"The roads must be all washed out, Jean, and you had better stay here. Is father awake?"

"Not yet, Gilberte, but Mère Janille is up and about."

"Will you ask her to come up to my room, my old Jean? I have something to ask her."

"I will go at once."

The girl closed the window without apparently noticing that the traveller's window was open and that he was standing there looking at her.

A moment later he was in the courtyard, where the rain had transformed the paths into little torrents, and he found Sylvain Charasson in the stable, cleaning his horse and Monsieur Antoine's, and discussing the effects of such a terrible night with the peasant whose Christian name Emile Cardonnet had learned at last. The night before, this man had caused him a sort of indefinable uneasiness, as if there were something mysterious and fateful about him. He had noticed that Monsieur Antoine had not once called him by name, and that, on several occasions when Janille had been on the point of doing so, he had warned her with a glance to be careful. They called him only friend, comrade or old fellow, and it seemed that his name was a secret which they did not choose to divulge. Who could this man be, who had the outward aspect and the language of a peasant and who, nevertheless, carried his gloomy anticipations so far, and his severe criticism to such a point.

Emile strove to enter into conversation with him, but to no purpose; he was even more reserved than on the preceding day, and when he was questioned concerning the damage done by the storm, he replied simply:

"I advise you to lose no time in starting for Gargilesse if you want to find any bridges across the stream, for in less than two hours there'll be a most infernal dribe there."

"What do you mean by that? I don't understand that word."

"You don't know what a dribe is? Well, you will see one to-day and you'll never forget it. Good-day, monsieur; be off at once for your friend Cardonnet will be in trouble before long."

And he turned away without another word.

Impelled by a vague feeling of alarm, Emile hastily saddled his horse himself, and said to Charasson, tossing him a piece of money:

"Tell your master, my boy, that I have gone without taking leave of him, but that I shall come again soon to thank him for his kindness to me."

He was riding through the gateway when Janille came running up to detain him. She insisted on waking Monsieur Antoine; mademoiselle was dressing; breakfast would be ready in a moment; the roads were too wet; it was going to rain again. The young man, with many thanks, succeeded in escaping from her hospitable attentions, and made her also a present, which she seemed very glad to accept. But he had not reached the foot of the hill when he heard a horse trotting behind him, his great, heavy feet just razing the ground. It was Sylvain Charasson, mounted on Monsieur Antoine's mare, with no other bridle than a rope halter passed between the animal's teeth, riding hastily after him. "I am going to guide you, monsieur," he cried, as he passed him; "Mademoiselle Janille says you'll kill yourself, as you don't know the roads, and that's the truth too."

"All right, but take the shortest road," replied the young man.

"Never fear," rejoined the rustic page, and, plying his clogs, he urged the hollow-backed mare into a fast trot, her huge stomach, stuffed with hay unmixed with oats, presenting a striking contrast to her thin flanks and bony chest.