Peter Ibbetson Part 34

The Chateau de la Mariere, in its walled park, and with its beautiful, tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from Angers to Le Mans.

The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of Herault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]

Most of such Budes, Bussons, Heraults, Auberys, and Pasquiers as were still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely have cared to claim kins.h.i.+p with such as I.

But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon by the _n.o.blesse_ of the court and Versailles, as were all the provincial n.o.bility, they held their own well in their own country; feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling and making love and intermarrying; and blowing gla.s.s, and growing richer and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their gla.s.s into s.p.a.ce, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.

Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.

It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress when she was a bride.

Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fas.h.i.+on; old doc.u.ments, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds, farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verriere_ (also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in everybody's mouth.

She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite musician to boot.

Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to partic.i.p.ate in every incident of it.

We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours before; now the old chateau as it was a hundred years ago; dim and indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray, misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding Gatienne, was faintly audible.

Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would be in the midst of a charming old-fas.h.i.+oned French family group of shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees against what still remained of the ancient b.u.t.tresses and walls of the Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint shadows on the shadowy garden-path.

Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!

Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot, but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means.

Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely daughters, all pressing on "la belle d.u.c.h.esse Anglaise" peaches and apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.

For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in five minutes as though she had known them for many years.

I may as well state here that a few months later she received from Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin that had once belonged to _la belle Verriere_, and which Count Hector had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a New-year's gift to her descendant, the d.u.c.h.ess of Towers.

It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!

To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as Monsieur le Major, and the rest.

The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne de Boismorinel (who married Francois Pasquier de la Mariere). It was her father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could manufacture little c.o.c.ked-hats in colored gla.s.s; she had lived again in me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.

I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were called out of nothingness into life.

Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo, again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical, was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain where all the cobwebs are.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]

And these cobwebs?

Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.

Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors, windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions, village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.

That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"

to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long dead and buried and forgotten!

Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more easily and completely than we have done.

It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former obtuseness, so distinct are they.

Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.

But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.

By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim, latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience of this life.

We also found that we were able not only to a.s.sist as mere spectators at such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a s.p.a.ce (though never both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and const.i.tuting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.

At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

A questionable privilege, perhaps.

But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.

Thus we took _la belle Verriere_ by turns, and she saw and heard things she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."

And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us, and as many great-great-grandfathers.

Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at their backs.

Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the blood of his foe?

Which of them all, pa.s.sionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world well lost?

That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further attempt at such transfusion of ident.i.ty, for sacred reasons of discretion which the reader will appreciate.

But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear), and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind, is to my mind a foregone conclusion.

It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the th.o.r.n.y path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief, irresponsible existence at once!

Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the opposite s.e.x for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose; that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!