Part 32 (1/2)
”And a good one! be sure of that!” said she, in her jerky voice, her voice which resembled _another's_.
He went with her as far as the first of the stakes he had displaced, to point out the safe road to her, and when he saw her reach the edge of the swamp sixty feet beyond, he stooped and began to put the stakes in place one by one as he walked toward the firm ground.
When he reached the last, he sprang to his feet with haggard eyes.
Livette, with head thrown back, face turned toward the sky, eyes closed, mouth open, and gra.s.s mingled with her straying hair, was lying among the water-lilies, as if asleep, and in the throes of a bad dream. He also saw her two little clenched hands, above the water, clinging to the reeds.
Transformed for a moment to a statue, Renaud soon aroused himself, and, bending over Livette, put his hands under her armpits. The poor body, buried in the thick, black ooze, came slowly forth, torn from its bed like the smooth stalk of a lily.
When he had the poor body in his arms, inert and cold, perhaps dead,--the body of the poor, dear child, whose skirts, entangled in a net-work of long gra.s.ses, clung tightly to her dangling legs,--Renaud suddenly uttered a roar as of an enraged wild beast, and ran like a madman at the top of his speed to the nearest farm-house.
XXIII
THE PURSUIT
One forgives only those whom one loves; only those who love forgive.
Love at its apogee is naught but the power of inspiring forgiveness and bestowing it; and the social laws, which are of the mechanism of human justice, seem to have realized that fact, since they ignore the testimony of all those who would naturally be expected to love the culprit.
Sympathy is simply a laying aside--in favor of those we love--of the implacable severity which we use but little in dealing with ourselves, and which attributes to those who pa.s.s judgment an unerring wisdom which is not human, or a self-confidence which is too much so.
Livette, as she lay sick upon the best bed in the Icard farm-house, already had, in her sorrowing heart, an adorable feeling of indulgence for Renaud, which would have made the blessed maidens who laid the Crucified One in his shroud, smile with joy in the mystic heaven of the lofty chapel. She believed that she would die by her fiance's fault, and she pitied him. Forgiveness sooner or later redeems him who receives, and consoles him who accords it. In the sentiment of compa.s.sion is hidden the divine future of mankind.
Renaud was still ignorant of Livette's indulgence. Indeed, he could not deserve it until he had come to look upon himself as forever unworthy.
For the moment, he had not gone to the bottom of the h.e.l.l of evil thoughts.
When he found Livette half drowned in the _gargate_, his first impulse, born of true love and pity for her, in absolute forgetfulness of himself, lasted but an instant--but it had existed. Renaud at first suffered for her and for her alone.
His second impulse, almost immediate, and praiseworthy still, although there was a touch of selfishness in it, was to condemn himself, through fear of moral responsibility. Had he not with his own hand displaced the stakes that marked the path, with the idea, indefensible at best, that Rampal would be misled by that treacherous method of defence? Yes, almost immediately after he uttered his cry of agony, he shuddered with terror at the thought of the remorse that was in store for him, as soon as he felt that Livette was like a dead woman in his arms.
When he had given her in charge of the women at the main farm-house of the Icard farm, where there was great excitement over such an adventure at that time of day, he questioned two old peasant-women who knew more than all the doctors in the province. After doing what was necessary for Livette, they cheerfully declared that the poor girl would not die of it; they even said that it was ”nothing at all.” He did not even try to understand how she had come so far to fall into the trap!
She would not die! That was the essential thing at that moment. What a relief _to him_, for he was already accusing himself of his little sweetheart's death! He had been so afraid! And it turned out to be only a warning! G.o.d be praised, and blessed be the mighty saints who had performed such a miracle!
But the devil rejoiced when he looked into Renaud's conscience, for he saw the course his ideas were about to take, a course that would lead him from bad to worse.
Rea.s.sured as to Livette,--and as to himself,--he flew into a pa.s.sion with the accursed gitana, the indirect cause, at least, of all this misery.
”Ah! the beggar! I will kill her!--it will be easy to find her again.
She can't be far away--I will kill her!”
His wrath took full possession of him--he ran for his horse. Kill her!--kill her! Nothing could be more righteous.--And he went about it.
Poor Renaud! the victim of all the involuntary falsehoods which, starting from ourselves, one engendering another, sometimes render the best of us irresponsible and drive us on to disaster when pa.s.sion makes us mad.
This chain, often undiscoverable, of false but specious reasons with which men deceive themselves, each fitting into the last without violence, each explaining and justifying the one that follows it--leads insensibly to acts incomprehensible to him who is not able to follow it back, link by link. It is the chain of FATALITY, in which the links, consisting of trifling but suggestive facts, of decisive circ.u.mstances, unknown sometimes to the culprit, alternate with the fict.i.tious good motives he has invented for his own benefit in the reflex movements of his mind. To re-establish the logical sequence of facts, of sensations suddenly transformed into ideas, is the work of equity which reasons, or of love which divines. In default of tracing back the chain of insensible, imperious transitions, we find between the criminal who has long been an honest man and his crime, the abyss at sight of which fools and unthinking folk, filled with the pride of implacable sinners, never fail to exclaim: ”It is monstrous!” But if G.o.d, infinite Love, does exist, everything is forgiven, because everything is understood; there are, mayhap, simply the miserable wretches on one side, and divine pity on the other.
Yes, Renaud would have killed the sorceress, with savage joy, to avenge Livette. But was not that desire, which he deemed a praiseworthy one, simply a pretext for seeking her out again that same day, for seeing her once more?--That, at all events, is what the devil himself thought as he crouched on the floor of the crypt in the church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the spot occupied the day before by the dark-browed gipsies, beneath the shrine of Saint Sara.