Ishmael : a novel

Front matter

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Emory University Library i 1

Contents

CHAf.

i. ' The Harvest is Past, the Summer is Ended '

ii. 'Her Feet go Down to Death'

Chapter II

When that outer door shut with its sonorous clang, Sebastien had a feeling as of freedom and safety suddenly recovered. The dark man was gone. Those sinister eyes, which had so often contemplated him with a moody look, were on the outside of the house. While the man was inside, the boy had lived in ever-present dread of him and of that darkling look. He was gone now, and the manner of his departure meant that he was gone for ever.

Sebastien crept through the half-open door into his mother's bedroom, a little white figure in a nightgown. He crept across the thick Aubusson carpet, and squatted down on the edge of the estrade upon which his mother's bed stood— a regal bed, tall, splendid, draped with amber satin and heavy old Flanders lace.

How beautiful the room was in the soft light of the shaded lamp ! Sebastien had never entered it till to-night. Among the mysteries and secrets of that house this room had been the most mysterious. Sebastien had never dared to cross the threshold of that door. He had seen his mother emerge, radiant and beautiful, like a goddess from a temple ; but the temple was not for his feet to enter, and the boy — petted in one hour, thrust angrily aside in the next — had lost all the natural audacity of childhood.

But to-night his mother was in trouble, and he wanted to comfort her if he could. He clambered upon the bed, and put his arms round her, and kissed her wet cheek. She murmured some broken words, and then dropped into a heavy sleep, disturbed now and again by a groan or a little cry as of pain. The boy slipped gently from her side, and sat on the estrade, with his head leaning against the bed, and looked wonderingly round the room.

Yes, it was very beautiful : a room modelled upon that old stately pattern of Versailles in the days of the great king ; a miniature reproduction of that room in which the mighty Louis lay dying, with Madame de Maintenon and all his courtiers watching the last flicker of that expiring light. Dressing-table, with scattered trinkets amidst a litter of ivory brushes, silver hand-mirror, cut-crystal bottles, fans, jewel-caskets, sachets : wardrobe with doors of marqueterie and ormolu, one door half open and revealing the heaped-up satins and cashmeres on the shelves within. Everything was costly and more or less artistic, and the mistress of all this finery lay there like a log. sleeping off the fumes of wine.

The days that followed that night were the happiest days of S^bastien's childhood. His mother and Lisette went off to the sea next morning, carrying the boy with them. It was August, and divine weather. They stayed at Dieppe, at an hotel facing the sea, and sat upon the beach half the day, and drove about the country the other half, and dined together in a pretty little room with a balcony overlooking the sea ; and after dinner S^bastien went to bed and slept soundly, steeped in fresh air and sunshine, and the bliss of fancying himself beloved by his mother ; while Madame Caradec and Lisette went to the casino, where the lady gambled and the maid looked on.

These halcyon days lasted for about a fortnight, by the end of which time Madame Caradec had spent or lost all her money. She went back to Paris, expecting to find her lover subjugated by this hard treatment, unable to endure life without her, and ready to grovel at her feet for pardon. Instead of this state of things, she found an auctioneer's bill posted against the walls of her bijou villa. Minions of the law were in possession of the splendours that had been nominally hers. The door of the fairy palace in the wood was shut against her for evermore.

The blow was sharp, and went home. Still in the zenith of her charms Madame Caradec had believed until this moment that her power over her slave was limitless. From the day of her arrival at Bourbon, beautiful, triumphant, happy in her escape from a husband she hated, and in her union with a lover she adored, Laurent Deschanel, the rich Creole, had been her devoted admirer. He had followed her like her shadow, had endured all the arrows of an insolent tongue, and all the outrages which a proud and passionate woman, doubly sensitive on account of her false position, her blighted name, could heap upon the man who dared to assail her constancy, to try to tempt her from the lover for whom she had sacrificed home and country. She had laughed at his love, and the sordid temptations which he offered — a settlement — jewels — a jjosition such as Lucien Rochefort could never give her.

Then came the bloody close of her brief day of bliss ; and she was alone in a remote colony, without a friend, without a counsellor, outlawed by her sin, and almost penniless: Laurent Deschanel seized his opportunity. A month after Lucien's death, when Madame Caradec had tasted the cup of bitterness and desolation, he came to her in a new character — he came as consoler, adviser, friend. He offered her his purse just as she was beginning to feel the horror of being penniless in a strange land. She received him with scant civility, but accepted the use of his purse ; and six months afterwards she left the

16 Ishnael

island, where her presence was a scandal, as Laurent Deschanel s mistress. The man adored her, but he was a creole, with all the creole vices. They led a life of sensuous ease, of frivolous pleasure, recognising no higher law than their own fancy, no higher aim than the enjoyment of the hour. Their life, for the most part, had been made up of quarrels and reconciliations, and many of those quarrels had been every whit as violent as that last dispute after which Monsieur Deschanel had cried ' Good-bye for ever.' Coralie fancied this quarrel would end as the others had ended, and that Laurent would be all the more her slave because of that fortnight of severance. He would have discovered the emptiness of life without his idol.

Madame Caradec did not know that her slave had for some time past been somewhat weary of his chains, and that an ido who takes too much fine-champagne and chartreuse, and has fits of gloom and nervous crises of passionate despair in her cups, bewailing the bitterness of Fate and the loss of honour, is apt to pall upon her worshipper. She woke from a dream of despotic power to find herself an outcast, friendless in the streets of Paris, face to face with stern reality for the first time in her life. Mistress and maid put their heads together, and, after much driving to and fro in a hired carriage, they found lodgings in a somewhat tawdry hotel in the rue St.-Honore. The rooms were expensive, the furniture was gaudy, and Sebastien saw his small figure, in a velvet tunic and lace collar, reflected at every angle in the tall looking-glasses which adorned the room. It seemed to him as if the chief furniture of the apartment consisted of looking-glasses and ormolu clocks. He heard the monotonous tick, tick, tick on every side, go where he would. The street was narrow, and the heavily-draped windows let in the gloom of a dull, gray evening. Everything was different from the lovely little house in the wood yonder.

' Mamma,1 cried Sebastien, hanging on his mother's satin gown, ' when are we going home again ? '

' Never ! ' she answered, angrily, with hoarse, thickened accents, which the boy knew too well — her evening voice. ' We have no home.'

After this came other changes. They seemed to be always removing to new lodgings. Lisette managed everything Madame seldom left her room till late in the afternoon. At

one time they occupied an apartment in the Champs-Elysees

pretty little rooms with low ceilings, an entresol looking into a small garden where Sebastien could play in his lonely, dreary fashion, very tired of solitude and confinement. On fine evenings he went out with Lisette, and saw the lamps and heard the music in a garden near, and played with strange children, while

Lisette conversed with her numerous friends. His mother was seldom at home of an evening. He saw less of her now than even under the Deschanel dominion, severe as that regime had been.

Strange faces came and went across the shifting scenes of Sebastien 's life at this period — faces which never grew friendly or welcome to him. There was a stout elderly man, with a gray moustache, who seemed to have some kind of authority, and with whom Sebastien's mother had terrible quarrels, which recalled the scene in the villa. He disappeared when they left the Champs-Elysees ; and now their lodgings got shabbier and shabbier, until Sebastien, after having been awakened suddenly out of his sleep one night, huddled hastily in his clothes, and hurried off in a fiacre, awoke in the gray winter light to a wretched, bare-looking little room with whitewashed walls. He had never seen such a room in his life before. It was like a cell in a prison. There was no furniture but a narrow iron bedstead and a rush-bottomed chair. He got up and stood upon the chair to look out of the window, and turned sick and cold at the sight of the yard below him. He was on a sixth story. Long rows of windows faced him on the other side of a quadrangle : shabby windows with every variety of blind or curtain — with clothes hanging out to dry — with all those signs of humble poverty which were new to Sebastien.

He took fright suddenly. "Why had he been brought to such a place ? Appalling stories of child stealers, wherewith Lisette had beguiled the weariness of long winter evenings, flashed across his mind. He had been stolen — last night when he was too sleepy to be quite sure who carried him downstairs and put him in the fia ere — and brought to this dreadful place, a prison for stolen children. He was going to rush out of the room in a panic, when he heard a familiar voice close \rj. It was Lisette singing the last popular refrain, ' Faut pas farmer Vceil,' in her Porte St. -Martin voice, close by. Yes, Lisette was in the adjoining room, with which the door of his little cell, or closet, communicated. He rattled at the door, which was bolted, and Lisette opened it and admitted him to a bare-looking room with a few poor sticks of furniture, a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, a tawdry gilt clock that had long left off going, a round table, and a wretched little bed in a corner. There was a smaller room within, for Madame C'aradec, who must have her den in which to sleep half the day. There was a coffee-pot on a black iron stove, which projected into the room, and there were some preparations for breakfast, scanty enough, on the table. Everything had a barren, poverty-stricken look. Sebastien did not know that his mother and her confidential servant had lived on credit as long

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18 Islimacl

as tradesmen would trust them, and that this sudden plunge into abject poverty was the natural result of exhausted credit. To Sebastien the change appeared unnatural. But Sebastien was not a pampered child. He was not accustomed to have his comfort studied, his wishes gratified. He had been flung about like a ball all his little life, put here or put there, caressed or thrust aside, as suited the convenience of his owners. And now he ate his breakfast of a roll without any butter, and a cup of coffee, without venturing to question Lisette about the sudden change in his surroundings.

As the time went on the boy grew accustomed to this squalid life. It was a long, long winter— joyless days, dismal nights, for his mother and Lisette were never at home of an evening. He spent those long evenings in utter solitude, locked in the bare, cheerless room, listening to all the sounds of the huge, uncleanly barrack in which he lived— sounds of brawling, strife, drunken fury, drunken mirth ; cries of murder sometimes, and the crash of furniture thrown over, the dull thud of a cruel blow ; children squalling, naked feet pattering along the brick-floored passage; vulgar voices singing vulgar songs, whistling, screaming, laughter; and now and then, for variety, a visit from the police.

So the boy passed his tenth birthday, steeped in ignorance —for Lisette had long ago abandoned her feeble attempts at tuition — and very weary of his first decade of existence.

His mother and her companion had found an occupation for their evenings at a theatre in this wretched quarter — a theatre frequented by workmen and their womenkind, and where the entertainment was of the strongest order. Madame Caradec's beauty and Lisette's impudence were their only recommendations for the dramatic profession. Madame was engaged as a showy figure in a fairy spectacle. She had but to stand where she was put — a nymph draped in spangled gauze in a tinsel grotto. Lisette, the brighter and cleverer of the two, was entrusted with a speaking part, and sang her half dozen couplets, in the approved style, ' with intention.'

Sdbastien was not allowed to go to the theatre where his mother was engaged. It was to him a mystery, but he heard the two women talk of it as they sat late into the night drinking some yellow liquid, which looked like melted gold, in their glasses, and which they spoke of laughingly by all kinds of strange names. Sebastien used to hear them talking late into the night from the little iron bedstead in his cell. He had too little air and exercise in the long dreary day to sleep well at night.

Life went on after this fashion all through the winter. On Sundays Madame Caradec slept till evening, or else rose rather earlier than usual and went out with Lisette, dressed in her best gown, for a day's pleasure. S^bastien never knew where they went, or what their pleasures were, save from their disjointed talk after these revels about the dishes they had eaten and the wine they had drunk. His mother's best gown and bonnet had a slovenly air now. The satin was frayed, the sleeves were worn ragged at the edges. The Indian shawl had lost its beautiful colouring, and had been darned in ever so many places by Lisette, who now dressed as well as her mistress with the cast-off finery that had been flung to her in days gone by. A good deal of this finery had gone to 'my aunt,' but enough was left to make the maid as much a lady as Madame.

Spring came. March winds — bitter, biting winds, which seemed to work their own will in the great bare barrack, with its endless corridors and its hundred rooms, carpetless boards, bricked passages, a house that was old before it had lost its air of raw newness, woodwork shrunk, panels of the doors split, staircase walls green with dirt and grease. Every one who rubbed against the wall seemed to leave the taint and smear of a sordid existence behind : every one who mounted the stairs left the print of dirty boots.

There were no shutters, no curtains, no draperies to shut out the cold. The east wind shrieked and whistled in the passages as in a mountain glen. Madame Caradec complained that a villainous cough, which had fixed its claws upon her at Christmas, would never be any better so long as she lived in that infected hole. She was very angry when Lisette suggested that the cough might go if she would leave off drinking brandy.

' Why do you drink it yourself if it is poison ? ' she asked.

' I only take a taste now and then to keep you company,' answered Lisette ; which was not true, although there is no doubt the maid was much more sober than the mistress.

The bleak March made Madame's cough much worse. It grew so bad that she was obliged to give up her engagement — her twenty francs a week — at the theatre, her Sundays' feastings on the boulevard or in the suburbs.

Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes brilliant with hectic light. She was no fit occupant for a tinsel grotto, for Juno's peacock car, or the palace of the fairy queen. Lisette, who had developed some talent in the soubrette line, was now the only bread-winner, and her thirty francs a week did not go very far. Before that month of March was over everything that could be taken to my aunt had been so taken, even to Madame Caradec's last satin gown and Indian shawl, and the large Leghorn bonnet with its marabout plumage. She had only a peignoir left ; but as she hardly ever rose from her bed now, this did not much matter.

She was sorely ill, and suffered a great deal. While Lisette was at the theatre, Sebastien used to sit by his mother's bed for hours, deeply sorry for her, full of silent pity. He gave her brandy when she asked for it if there was any there to give. Who could refuse her the only thing that seemed to give her relief from that terrible oppression, that labour and pain in every breath she drew 1 The boy understood dimly, from Lisette's talk, that it was wrong to drink brandy ; but he knew that sick people must have physic, and this yellow stuff, which shone and sparkled in the glass, seemed the only physic that was of any use to his mother. A doctor came in once or twice a week and looked at her, and went through certain formalities with a stethoscope, and took his fee of a couple of francs, and went away again, without having been of any more use than the organ-grinder down in the street below, grinding the same airs from the ' Dame Blanche ' and the ' Domino 2*Toir ' over and over again on certain days of the week.

One day, when the doctor had paid his visit, Lisette followed him into the corridor, and came back a few minutes afterwards with her wicked little Parisian face all blotted with tears — that audacious countenance which had so many grimaces for the blouses in the pit and gallery yonder. Sebastien asked her why she was crying, but she frowned at him and pointed to the bed for her only answer ; and he knew that she was sorry for his mother, whose breathing was so painful, and whose hands and face scorched him when he caressed her. There were two red fever-spots on her hollow cheeks, and her eyes shone like glass.

Later in the evening, when Lisette had put on her cloak and bonnet to go to the theatre, Sebastien heard her talking with one of her gossips in the corridor.

' She will die,' said Lisette, ' and who is to pay for her funeral ? She was born a lady, poor thing. It would be hard if she were taken away upon the poor people's common bier to be nunc into their common grave.'

' Is there no one '? ' asked the neighbour.

' There are three or four. I have written to them all. One

answered— he who once thought gold too common for her that

she might starve or rob for ought he cared. Another sent me twenty louis at the beginning of her illness, but told me not to trouble him again. Another gave no answer. There is onlv the husband left. I think, perhaps, he would pay for the funeral for the sake of being sure he had got rid of her.'

' Why don't you write to him 1 '

' She would be so angry,' murmured Lisette.

' How can that matter ? She will be dead before he can answer your letter.'

The neighbour was right. Lisette wrote to Raymond Caradec, of Pen-Hoel, by the next day's post ; and Coralie was dead before her husband came in person to answer her handmaid's letter.

She was lying on her shabby bed in the wretched lodging, two tall wax candles burning -on the little table beside her pillow, and a little spray of box lying between them. They had folded her hands upon her breast, and laid a cheap little metal crucifix and a twenty sous rosary above them. All the taint and soil of her sins had vanished from the marble face. It was almost as beautiful as the day she came out of her convent school to plight her faith to Raymond Caradec. His youth came back to him, all the fervour and hope of that day, as he stood looking down at his dead wife in the chilly, gray March afternoon, amidst the sordid surroundings of the workman's quarter, bare walls, dirt, squalor. He, the proud bearer of a good old name, the dishonoured husband, knelt down and touched the marble hand with his lips. He had hated her while she lived ; but pity melted the ice at his heart : the awfulness of death was stronger than anger or revenge.

He said a prayer, dipped his finger in the holy water beside the bed, crossed himself, and went back to the sitting-room, where Lisette and Sebastien stood waiting for him. The boy's pale face turned towards him wistfully as if entreating for a father's kindness.

Caradec hardly glanced at his son. He took out his purse and unfolded three or four bank-notes, which he handed to Lisette.

'There is money for the funeral. Let it be simple but decent,' he said ; ' and let there be no name on the coffin or the headstone. Initials and a date will be enough. She will be buried at Montmartre, of course 1 '

' That is nearest,' said Lisette.

' And the nearest is best. Why loiter on the last stage of a journey?' said Caradec, with a saturnine smile. 'The boy will go back to Brittany with me.'

Sebastien put his arms round Lisette's neck. After all, she was the only friend he had ever known since he parted from his sailor friends on the steamer — she had nursed him when he was sick, she had amused him when he was well : all he had ever known of motherly care was that which he had received from her.

' May not she go with us ? ' he asked.

' No, child ; there is nothing for Mademoiselle to do at Pen-Hoel ; and such an accomplished young person would not like to be buried in a country chateau,' answered the Count, scoffingly.

He had a carriage at the door. Lisette put Sebastien s poor little wardrobe into a small valise, and the three went downstairs together, the workmen whom they met on the stairs, the women and children at their open doors— all staring at the tall, dark gentleman who had such a grand look, and who was leading the shabby, out-at-elbows little lad down the dirty stair by the collar of his threadbare jacket. Everybody wanted to know what it all meant. Lisette had ample entertainment^ offered her by her gossips when she went upstairs again. A ' goiitte' here, and another ' goutte ' there, would she but only talk her fill, and tell all that could be told about the handsome corpse lying in the candle-lit room yonder, and the handsome gentleman who had just gone downstairs.

CHAPTER III Monsieur Caradec and his son left the rue Jean-Jacques

Rousseau that evening by the Malle Poste for Brest, quite the

rapidest way of travelling in those days. They sat side by side

in the coupe, with one other traveller, and travelled all that

night and all the next day. It was in the twilight of a cold

spring evening that Sebastien saw the towers and pinnacles of

Mont St.-Michel stand darkly out against the yellow sunset

sky, and the gray sea deepening to purple towards the distant

horizon. The whole of the journey had been full of interest to

him. His young limbs had been cold and cramped half the

time ; but his young eyes had devoured the landscape, his

young soul had drunk deep of delight. The trees and fields,

the hills and valleys, the winding streams and dark mysterious

woods — all these were new to the young captive of the citv, who

had longed with a passionate longing for escape from the "blank

and drear monotony of stone walls, dirt, and squalor. That

house in the Faubourg Montmartre had hung upon him like a

nightmare, had crushed his young spirit, dulled his young blood.

What ineffable rapture, then, to be borne swiftly along these

dewy country roads, to see the river shining under the stars, to watch the moon rushing among the clouds — he never suspected it was the clouds that went so fast, and not the moon — to hear the kine lowing in their willowy pastures — the village cock crowing as the mail-cart drove past farms and cottages in the sunrise ! "What a delight to descend at the village inn for a hasty snatch of food, a cup of coffee, a crust of bread and butter, and then up again and away ! — the post-cart stops for neither king nor kaiser — and so, and so, till in the deepening dusk they alighted at the bottom of the hill crowned by the turrets and gable ends of Pen-Hoel.

After this came a life of solitude and abandonment almost as complete as that of the fairy palace in the wood near Passy. The Count had taken his boy back to the chateau because it was the easiest way of disposing of him, not for any love that he bore to S^bastien. What love could he feel for a boy who seemed to him the incarnation of past wrongs ? His own son, yes ; but it was of Coralie he thought when he looked at the boy, albeit Sebastien was a true Caradec — dark-eyed, tall, broad-shouldered, with marked features, and a proud carriage of the head.

Raymond let his son run wild, saw as little of him as possible, and thought he had done his duty to the boy in the way of education when he had engaged the services of the village priest — a benevolent old man, born in the peasant class, and no marvel of erudition — as Sebastien's tutor. Father Bressant was horrified when he found that, at eleven years of age, Sebastien could neither read nor write, and the first year of his tuition was devoted to these elements of all learning and the Church catechism. In the second year the cure taught his pupil a little Latin, and the history of France as made and provided by the historians of Port-Eoyal. The hours given to study were of the shortest, for Sebastien chafed against the confinement within four walls. His wild, free life satisfied all the longings of his nature. He rode, he fished, he shot and hunted with, the instinct of a born sportsman. He had hardly a friend of his own class, but he made friends for himself of gamekeepers and peasants, of poachers and fishermen, of smugglers and coastguardsmen. He spent many a night far afield under the stars, engaged in some kind of sport, and crept into the house at daybreak before any of the servants were astir. The wanderers of the countryside, the pillawer with his little cart of foul rags, the peddler with his pack, the colporteur with his case of books — he conversed with all these, and was at home with them at once. He talked with them of that great city which they visited now and again, full of wonder and respect for its splendours, and which he knew and loathed.

By the time lie had been two years at Pen-Hoel he loved the place and its surroundings with an intense love. There was not a bank or a coppice, a willow or a waterpool, a clump of Spanish chestnuts or an old wall feathered over with fern-fronds, which S6bastien did not know by heart. The gardeners and farm labourers, the grooms and gamekeepers, and all the villagers around loved him. He was as a king among them. If there had been need of a new Vendee, Sdbastien Caradec could have raised a regiment. All the countryside would have flocked to the sound of his drum. Everybody loved the bold, frank, handsome, open-handed boy, except his father. Raymond Caradec could not forgive his son for the traitorous blood in his veins, for his involuntary share in the past. He had been his mother's companion in her vicious career — in her dfyringolade. He had drunk of the cup of her pleasures, perhaps basked in the luxury of sin. The Count had never dared to question his son as to that past history. There were hideous pages in the boy's life which he shrank from opening. But sometimes, on those rare occasions when the father and son were alone together, Raymond Caradec would fall into a reverie, seeing with his mind's eye that past life with all its loathsome details — feasting, revelry, fine clothes, a thick, hot mist of wine-fumes and lamplight clouding the atmosphere of a gaudily-furnished saloon. Friends had told him something of his wife's existence in Paris — the money she had squandered, the train she had led. He asked no questions ; he winced at the sound of his wife's name. But there are people who will put their finger-tips upon gaping wounds by way of friendship ; and Raymond Caradec knew whnt manner of life the dead woman had lived. He associated his innocent son with all that horror and shame. What blessing could he hope from a boy reared in such iniquity ? Yet there were times when the boy's frank outlook and noble face impressed him in spite of himself, and he was almost kind to his son. Unhappily, these intervals of fatherly feeling were of the rarest.