The Secret of Sarek Part 16

Veronique did not smile, but she pressed him against her and said:

"No, my poor dog, all's not well; on the contrary, all's as bad as it can be. No matter: we must live, mustn't we, and we mustn't go mad ourselves like the others?"

The necessities of life obliged her to act. She went down to the kitchen, found some food and gave the dog a good share of it. Then she went upstairs again.

Night had fallen. She opened, on the first floor, the door of a bedroom which at ordinary times must have been unoccupied. She was weighed down with an immense fatigue, caused by all the efforts and violent emotions which she had undergone. She fell asleep almost at once. All's Well lay awake at the foot of her bed.

Next morning she woke late, with a curious feeling of peace and security. It seemed to her that her present life was somehow connected with her calm and placid life at Besancon. The few days of horror which she had pa.s.sed fell away from her like distant events whose return she had no need to fear. The men and women who had gone under in the great horror became to her mind almost like strangers whom one has met and does not expect to see again. Her heart ceased bleeding. Her sorrow for them did not reach the depths of her soul.

It was due to the unforeseen and undisturbed rest, the consoling solitude. And all this seemed to her so pleasant that, when a steamer came and anch.o.r.ed on the spot of the disaster, she made no signal. No doubt yesterday, from the mainland, they had seen the flash of the explosions and heard the report of the shots. Veronique remained motionless.

She saw a boat put off from the steamer and supposed that they were going to land and explore the village. But not only did she dread an enquiry in which her son might be involved: she herself did not wish to be found, to be questioned, to have her name, her ident.i.ty, her story discovered and to be brought back into the infernal circle from which she had escaped. She preferred to wait a week or two, to wait until chance brought within hailing-distance of the island some fis.h.i.+ng-boat which could pick her up.

But no one came to the Priory. The steamer put off; and nothing disturbed her isolation.

And so she remained for three days. Fate seemed to have reconsidered its intention of making fresh a.s.saults upon her. She was alone and her own mistress. All's Well, whose company had done her a world of good, disappeared.

The Priory domain occupied the whole end of the island, on the site of a Benedictine abbey, which had been abandoned in the fifteenth century and gradually fallen into ruin and decay.

The house, built in the eighteenth century by a wealthy Breton s.h.i.+p-owner out of the materials of the old abbey and the stones of the chapel, was in no way interesting either outside or in. Veronique, for that matter, did not dare to enter any of the rooms. The memory of her father and son checked her before the closed doors.

But, on the second day, in the bright spring suns.h.i.+ne, she explored the park. It extended to the point of the island and, like the sward in front of the house, was studded with ruins and covered with ivy. She noticed that all the paths ran towards a steep promontory crowned with a clump of enormous oaks. When she reached the spot, she found that these oaks stood round a crescent-shaped clearing which was open to the sea.

In the centre of the clearing was a cromlech with a rather short, oval table upheld by two supports of rock, which were almost square. The spot possessed an impressive magnificence and commanded a boundless view.

"The Fairies' Dolmen, of which Honorine spoke," thought Veronique. "I cannot be far from the Calvary and Maguennoc's flowers."

She walked round the megalith. The inner surface of the two uprights bore a few illegible engraved signs. But the two outer surfaces facing the sea formed as it were two smooth slabs prepared to receive an inscription; and here she saw something that caused her to shudder with anguish. On the right, deeply encrusted, was an unskilful, primitive drawing of four crosses with four female figures writhing upon them. On the left was a column of lines of writing, whose characters, inadequately carved in the stone, had been almost obliterated by the weather, or perhaps even deliberately effaced by human hands. A few words remained, however, the very words which Veronique had read on the drawing which she found beside Maguennoc's corpse:

"Four women crucified . . . . Thirty coffins . . . . The G.o.d-Stone which gives life or death."

Veronique moved away, staggering. The mystery was once more before her, as everywhere in the island, and she was determined to escape from it until the moment when she could leave Sarek altogether.

She took a path which started from the clearing and led past the last oak on the right. This oak appeared to have been struck by lightning, for all that remained of it was the trunk and a few dead branches.

Farther on, she went down some stone steps, crossed a little meadow in which stood four rows of menhirs and stopped suddenly with a stifled cry, a cry of admiration and amazement, before the sight that presented itself to her eyes.

"Maguennoc's flowers," she whispered.

The last two menhirs of the central alley which she was following stood like the posts of a door that opened upon the most glorious spectacle, a rectangular s.p.a.ce, fifty yards long at most, which was reached by a short descending flight of steps and bordered by two rows of menhirs all of the same height and placed at accurately measured intervals, like the columns of a temple. The nave and side-aisles of this temple were paved with wide, irregular, broken granite flag-stones, which the gra.s.s, growing in the cracks, marked with patterns similar to those of the lead which frames the pieces of a stained-gla.s.s window.

In the middle was a small bed of flowers thronging around an ancient stone crucifix. But such flowers! Flowers which the wildest imagination or fancy never conceived, dream-flowers, miraculous flowers, flowers out of all proportion to ordinary flowers!

Veronique recognized all of them; and yet she stood dumbfounded at their size and splendour. There were flowers of many varieties, but few of each variety. It was like a nosegay made to contain every colour, every perfume and every beauty that flowers can possess.

And the strangest thing was that these flowers, which do not usually bloom at the same time and which open in successive months, were all growing and blossoming together! On one and the same day, these flowers, all perennial flowers whose time does not last much more than two or three weeks, were blooming and multiplying, full and heavy, vivid, sumptuous, proudly borne on their st.u.r.dy stems.

There were spiderworts, there were ranunculi, tiger-lilies, columbines, blood-red potentillas, irises of a brighter violet than a bishop's ca.s.sock. There were larkspurs, phlox, fuchsias, monk's-hoods, montbretias. And, above all this, to Veronique's intense emotion, above the dazzling flower-bed, standing a little higher in a narrow border around the pedestal of the crucifix, with all their blue, white and violet cl.u.s.ters seeming to lift themselves so as to touch the Saviour's very form, were veronicas!

She was faint with emotion. As she came nearer, she had read on a little label fastened to the pedestal these two words.

"Mother's flowers."

Veronique did not believe in miracles. She was obliged to admit that the flowers were wonderful, beyond all comparison with the flowers of our climes. But she refused to think that this anomaly was not to be explained except by supernatural causes or by magic recipes of which Maguennoc held the secret. No, there was some reason, perhaps a very simple one, of which events would afford a full explanation.

Meanwhile, amid the beautiful pagan setting, in the very centre of the miracle which it seemed to have wrought by its presence, the figure of Christ Crucified rose from the ma.s.s of flowers which offered Him their colours and their perfumes. Veronique knelt and prayed.

Next day and the day after, she returned to the Calvary of the Flowers.

Here the mystery that surrounded her on every side had manifested itself in the most charming fas.h.i.+on; and her son played a part in it that enabled Veronique to think of him, before her own flowers, without hatred or despair.

But, on the fifth day, she perceived that her provisions were becoming exhausted; and in the middle of the afternoon she went down to the village.

There she noticed that most of the houses had been left open, so certain had their owners been, on leaving, of coming back again and taking what they needed in a second trip.

Sick at heart, she dared not cross the thresholds. There were geraniums on the window-ledges. Tall clocks with bra.s.s pendulums were ticking off the time in the empty rooms. She moved away.

In a shed near the quay, however, she saw the sacks and boxes which Honorine had brought with her in the motor-boat.

"Well," she thought, "I shan't starve. There's enough to last me for weeks; and by that time . . ."

She filled a basket with chocolate, biscuits, a few tins of preserved meat, rice and matches; and she was on the point of returning to the Priory, when it occurred to her that she would continue her walk to the other end of the island. She would fetch her basket on the way back.

A shady road climbed upwards on the right. The landscape seemed to be the same: the same flat stretches of moorland, without ploughed fields or pastures; the same clumps of ancient oaks. The island also became narrower, with no obstacle to block the view of the sea on either side or of the Penmarch headland in the distance.

There was also a hedge which ran from one cliff to the other and which served to enclose a property, a shabby property, with a straggling, dilapidated, tumbledown house upon it, some out-houses with patched roofs and a dirty, badly-kept yard, full of sc.r.a.p-iron and stacks of firewood.

Veronique was already retracing her steps, when she stopped in alarm and surprise. It seemed to her that she heard some one moan. She listened, striving to plumb the vast silence, and once again the same sound, but this time more distinctly, reached her ears; and there were others: cries of pain, cries for help, women's cries. Then had not all the inhabitants taken to flight? She had a feeling of joy mingled with some sorrow, to know that she was not alone in Sarek, and of fear also, at the thought that events would perhaps drag her back again into the fatal cycle of death and horror.

So far as Veronique was able to judge, the noise came not from the house, but from the buildings on the right of the yard. This yard was closed with a simple gate which she had only to push and which opened with the creaking sound of wood upon wood.

The cries in the out-house at once increased in number. The people inside had no doubt heard Veronique approach. She hastened her steps.

Though the roof of the out-buildings was gone in places, the walls were thick and solid, with old arched doors strengthened with iron bars.

There was a knocking against one of these doors from the inside, while the cries became more urgent:

"Help! Help!"

But there was a dispute; and another, less strident voice grated:

"Be quiet, Clemence, can't you? It may be them!"

"No, no, Gertrude, it's not! I don't hear them! . . . Open the door, will you? The key ought to be there."

Veronique, who was seeking for some means of entering, now saw a big key in the lock. She turned it; and the door opened.

She at once recognized the sisters Archignat, half-dressed, gaunt, evil-looking, witch-like. They were in a wash-house filled with implements; and Veronique saw at the back, lying on some straw, a third woman, who was bewailing her fate in an almost inaudible voice and who was obviously the third sister.