LITMIR.BIZ

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‘Don’t you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?’

      A pause followed, and he asked:

      ‘And whom does the Paradou belong to now?’

      ‘Why, nobody knows,’ the doctor answered. ‘The owner did come here once, some twenty years ago. But he was so scared by the sight of this adders’ nest that he has never turned up since. The real master is the caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters in a lodge where the stones still hang together. There it is, see – that grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.’

      The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside with a layer of boards. The wide dry throats were black with brambles. A hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that stretched away behind him.

      The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring fixed in the wall.

      ‘And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes, quite alone,’ replied his uncle, adding, however, the next minute: ‘Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer girl, a regular savage. But we must make haste. The whole place looks death-like.’

      VIII

      The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy to the roof tiles. The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy quietude. When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden, which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.

      ‘What, are you up then, you humbug?’ exclaimed the astonished doctor.

      ‘So you were coming to bury me, were you?’ growled the old man harshly. ‘I don’t want anybody. I bled myself.’

      He stopped short as he caught sight of the priest, and assumed so threatening an expression that the doctor hastened to intervene.

      ‘This is my nephew,’ he said; ‘the new Cure of Les Artaud – a good fellow, too. Devil take it, we haven’t been bowling over the roads at this hour of the day to eat you, Jeanbernat.’

      The old man calmed down a little.

      ‘I don’t want any shavelings here,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re enough to make one croak. Mind, doctor, no priests, and no physics when I go off, or we shall quarrel. Let him come in, however, as he is your nephew.’

      Abbe Mouret, struck dumb with amazement, could not speak a word. He stood there in the middle of the path scanning that strange solitaire, with scorched, brick-tinted face, and limbs all withered and twisted like a bundle of ropes, who seemed to bear the burden of his eighty years with a scornful contempt for life. When the doctor attempted to feel his pulse, his ill-humour broke out afresh.

      ‘Do leave me in peace! I bled myself with my knife, I tell you. It’s all over, now. Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you? The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too! Well, it can’t be helped, people will be fools. It won’t prevent us from having a drink, eh?’

      He fetched a bottle and three glasses, and stood them on an old table which he brought out into the shade. Then, having filled the glasses to the brim, he insisted on clinking them. His anger had given place to jeering cheerfulness.

      ‘It won’t poison you, Monsieur le Cure,’ he said. ‘A glass of good wine isn’t a sin. Upon my word, however, this is the first time I ever clinked a glass with a cassock, but no offence to you. That poor Abbe Caffin, your predecessor, refused to argue with me. He was afraid.’

      Jeanbernat gave vent to a hearty laugh, and then went on: ‘Just fancy, he had pledged himself that he would prove to me that God exists. So, whenever I met him, I defied him to do it; and he sloped off crestfallen, I can tell you.’

      ‘What, God does not exist!’ cried Abbe Mouret, roused from his silence.

      ‘Oh! just as you please,’ mockingly replied Jeanbernat. ‘We’ll begin together all over again, if it’s any pleasure to you. But I warn you that I’m a tough hand at it. There are some thousands of books in one of the rooms upstairs, which were rescued from the fire at the Paradou: all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, a whole heap of old books on religion. I’ve learned some fine things from them. I’ve been reading them these twenty years. Marry! you’ll find you’ve got some one who can talk, Monsieur le Cure.’

      He had risen, slowly waving his hand towards the surrounding horizon, to the earth and to the sky, and repeating solemnly: ‘There’s nothing, nothing, nothing. When the sun is snuffed out, all will be at an end.’

      Doctor Pascal nudged Abbe Mouret with his elbow. With blinking eyes he was curiously observing the old man and nodding approvingly in order to induce him to talk. ‘So you are a materialist, Jeanbernat?’ he said.

      ‘Oh, I am only a poor man,’ replied the old fellow, relighting his pipe. ‘When Count de Corbiere, whose foster-brother I was, died from a fall from his horse, his children sent me here to look after this park of the Sleeping Beauty, in order to get rid of me. I was sixty years old then, and I thought I was about done. But death forgot me; and I had to make myself a burrow. If one lives all alone, look you, one gets to see things in rather a queer fashion. The trees are no longer trees, the earth puts on the ways of a living being, the stones seem to tell you tales. A parcel of rubbish, eh? But I know some secrets that would fairly stagger you. Besides, what do you think there is to do in this devilish desert? I read the old books; it was more amusing than shooting. The Count, who used to curse like a heathen, was always saying to me: “Jeanbernat, my boy, I fully expect to meet you again in the hot place, so that you will be able to serve me there as you have up here.”’

      Once more he waved his hand to the horizon and added: ‘You hear, nothing; there’s nothing. It’s all foolery.’

      Dr. Pascal began to laugh.

      ‘A pleasant piece of foolery, at any rate,’ he said. ‘Jeanbernat, you are a deceiver. I suspect you are in love, in spite of your affectation of being blase. You were speaking very tenderly of the trees and stones just now.’

      ‘Oh, no, I assure you,’ murmured the old man, ‘I have done with that. At one time, it’s true, when I first knew you and used to go herborising with you, I was stupid enough to love all sorts of things I came across in that huge liar, the country. Fortunately, the old volumes have killed all that. I only wish my garden was smaller; I don’t go out into the road twice a year. You see that bench? That’s where I spend all my time, just watching my lettuces grow.’

      ‘And what about your rounds in the park?’ broke in the doctor.

      ‘In the park!’ repeated Jeanbernat, with a look of profound surprise. ‘Why, it’s more than twelve years since I set foot in it! What do you suppose I could do inside that cemetery? It’s too big. It’s stupid, what with those endless trees and moss everywhere and broken statues, and holes in which one might break one’s neck at every step. The last time I went in there, it was so dark under the trees, there was such a stink of wild flowers, and such queer breezes blew along the paths, that I felt almost afraid. So I have shut myself up to prevent the park coming in here. A patch of sunlight, three feet of lettuce before me, and a big hedge shutting out all the view, why, that’s more than enough for happiness. Nothing, that’s what I’d like, nothing at all, something so tiny that nothing from outside could come to disturb me. Seven feet of earth, if you like, just to be able to croak on my back.’

      He struck the table with his fist, and suddenly raised his voice to call out to Abbe Mouret: ‘Come, just another glass, your reverence. The old gentleman isn’t at the bottom of the bottle, you

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