Read Ebook: Madame Margot: A grotesque legend of old Charleston by Bennett John

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Ebook has 142 lines and 11926 words, and 3 pages

Margot cowered as if to avoid a blow; her eyes dilated; yet she seemed incapable of seeing; her mouth fell open, she seemed to scream, yet made no sound but that of the whistling breath through her nostrils, as one who sustains the torture of the rack.

She thrust Gabrielle from her. "Go!" she gasped, and struck herself on head and breast, crying out, "Mother of God! I should have known! Fool, fool, fool!" Then, as if stunned, her head fell down upon her breast.

In the dark and breathless stillness of the night there was a stern, strange loveliness; and now something akin to terror, the terror of a child that dreams, and, waking in the darkness, cries out from dread of unknown things.

An ill wind, which had been blowing since sunset with a far-off, moaning sound, had arisen to a melancholy, screaming note, with an extraordinary rumbling in the chimney. Clouds of soot and ashes, blown from the fireplace, whirled in drifts around the floor. The sound of distant thunder, the velocity of the wind, the increasing turmoil and confusion, filled the night with keen disease. A bird sped round the house with a shrill cry; the wind bellowed hoarsely in the chimney; the house shook with the blast; over the housetops could be heard the coming of the rain; the light of the flickering candles served only to increase the gloom; the draft from the window swelled out the print curtain and floated it half-way across the room, straining and whipping at its pole; the black magnolias bent, and rose, and bent again, as if beneath the beating of gigantic wings: it was close upon midnight.

Before her crucifix Margot knelt, regardless of the storm, praying in anguish for the safety of her child. Ever before her imagining was Gabrielle, dishonored and betrayed, abandoned to scorn and poverty. Her hands twisted in desperate appeal.

"Blessed St. Dominique, lover of souls, preserve my daughter!" she plead. She listened motionless; all that she heard was the roar of the wind.

"Mary, Mother, great in grace, defend and preserve my child! Mary, Mother of Sorrows, have mercy upon my daughter!"

Again she listened; but for the howl of the gale the silence was profound.

"All ye Holy Virgins, intercede for us!" Her panting voice broke. "Lord of Compassion, hear me! Lord of Infinite Mercy, hear me! Have mercy upon my child! O Thou, Most Pitiful Lord of the Innocent, answer my prayer!"

Again she listened. There was no sound but the roar of the storm, the creak of the house, and the gnawing of the great rats in the timbers of the wall. She cringed and shivered, and in extreme entreaty cried, "Lord, Seigneur Dieu, preserve and spare my child! You see her young and fair, her soul as pure as the flowers that bloom in Paradise! You breathed into her life; by your law she was made; but for you she never had been; dare you then let her fall?"

But all was still. Heaven, to mortal anguish, seems intolerably serene, so far beyond comprehension is the inscrutable leisure of God. It was taking too long for her sorrow to reach the foot of the throne. She was seeking her daughter's safety, though it should be at the hazard of her soul; but all she had was the bitterness of unanswered supplication. To hearts dismayed there is nothing so appallingly still as God. The confident faithful may await the ultimate reply; but the desperate storm heaven, they have not time to wait.

She beat her breast; her hair was moist; her garments disarrayed; her voice grew sharp; by vicars, saints and intercessors, by all intermediaries, she plead with Almighty God to listen and to reply. There was no answer. "Mary, Mother of Sorrows!" she gasped. "Does God not understand?"

A tremendous gust blew through the house; the wind sucked in the chimney with a sound like awful laughter; the blinds recoiled with thunderous shock; but from Heaven there was no answer.

There was a queer shuffling sound as of footsteps in the entry. The candles sank to dull blue sparks devoid of radiance; yet, instead of darkness there was light. Outside was darkness, vast, pitmirk; inside, appalling light. All the place was stunned and blinded by an overwhelming light which cast no shadows anywhere, but, vehemently streaming, searched crack and cranny; not a crevice escaped. It lapped and flowed like waves, and penetrated everything; even the gross material of the walls, saturated by that flame, gave back a superfluous glow, a white excess of light, and every pointed thing within the room was peaked and capped with flame. Round and round the room a bewildered host of moths in little wavering flights and drops went fluttering, with a light rustle of powdery wings, and, among them, bats splashed through the light with a low, continuous whirr. Round and round, like froth-clots on flood-water swinging around a vortex, whirled slantbat and moth in a dizzy, irregular ring, in the midst of which, crouched in a high-backed chair, sat a shriveled, dead-alive, mummy-like figure, as thin and fleshless as a skeleton,--an apparition, sinister, white, and wasted as a corpse new-risen from the grave.

Its chin upon its folded hands, its hands about one knee, the knee upheld by the heel crooked at the chair-seat's edge, the other gaunt leg dangling across the upraised foot, the specter smiled on Margot a bleak, Saturnine smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all the life of it seemed gathered into the brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed with infernal light, in splendid scorn, without remorse, sardonical; a countenance such as God alone endures to look upon unmoved; a figure terrible.... Deity, deformed, might look like this, grotesquely majestical, hideous, baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an archangel, fallen, outcast, depraved: Satan, god of the discontent.

A twisted smile wreathing his evil lips, with his chin hooked over his hands,--a smile of cool confidence mingled with nonchalance, "Why not try me?" he said.

Staring into the abyss of blinding terror and light which encircled that thunder-scarred visage, with its thin, sleepless eyelids and twisted, ironic smile, Margot shrank against the wall, shivering as with cold; one hand shielding her blinded eyes, one groping along the wall, she listened, breathlessly.

In a voice whose deep and hollow sound seemed part of the midnight storm, Satan spoke.

"God has forgotten you; that is plain," he said. "Then why not pray unto me? I remember when God forgets.

"Nay, though your heart break with its burden, not a jot of His law shall be altered to ease your load.

"I have seen all the piety under the sun; and its wages are vanity. What profit have you of all your labor; what recompense of your toil? Heaven hath sent you sorrow; it hath not sent a cure, nor had compassion upon you.

"If this be loving-kindness, why not try damnation awhile; not forfeit riches, power, and place, for a fool's hope of treasures in heaven?

"Doubtless the priest hath said unto you, 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' Faw! I say unto you, 'What profit hath a man, though he save his own soul, if he lose his heart's desire?'

"When you are dead and done for, and lie sleeping in the dust; when worms destroy your body, when your days upon earth are become as shadows, and you have no more a portion forever in anything under the sun, what shall it profit you to have saved your soul at the cost of your heart's desire? Nay; ye have been cajoled! Your way is without hope.

"But come unto me, ye anxious, whose hearts are bowed with care, and I will give you your hearts' desire! No man calls on me in vain; I turn none empty away; the world is full of my mercies upon those who trust in me; and my benefits fall like the summer rain on all who covenant with me. Ask, and ye shall receive, whatsoever your hearts may wish; yea, though it lie at the ends of the earth it shall be given unto you; your house shall be full of good things, riches, and place, and power; ye shall heap up gold like dust from the streets; ye shall have your hearts' desire!

"Come unto me, ye weary, whose hearts are bent with trouble; lay down your burden, and follow me; I will give you your heart's desire!"

Margot's hand went up the wall a little way toward the crucifix, then slipped back with fumbling fingers.

"Lord ... Lord!" she whispered hoarsely, "give me my heart's desire!"

"And what is your heart's desire?"

"That my daughter, Gabrielle, should be white to all eternity! All that I have, and all that I am, will I give, ... yea, for this would I give my soul."

Satan smiled.

"Then lay down your burden, my daughter; you shall have your heart's desire!"

Margot, with a sobbing cry, laid down her life's unbearable burden at the feet of the Prince of the Powers of Darkness.

The candles sent up a thin flare of flame and smoke, and went out in utter darkness. Crouched on the floor against the wall Margot still knelt in a stupor. A rat came out of a hole in the wall and gnawed at her rosary. Dawn came in at the windows; the twilit gray grew pink. The walls were blotched and spotted; everything exhaled an odor of mildew; Margot still huddled upon the floor beneath the crucifix; over her head the crucified Christ hung mute in His agony.

The flight of hours, the decline of day, the season's turn, all things which preface change are presages of parting, and, like the proximity of the tomb, though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are subtly fraught with sadness and regret. All love's farewells are so oppressed. Though with absolute confidence in themselves and in each other, sure of the imperishable structure of their love, a nameless apprehension fills the hearts of all who part, and casts a melancholy shade on partings. "Until to-morrow!" Ah, to-morrow! "To-morrow I will come again!" she says. They go, with trembling hands, each, shaken by departure, saying, "Shall we meet again?"

"To-morrow!" Gabrielle had said, as she took her lips away. "To-morrow I will come again!" and was gone.

In the warm heart of the midsummer night he dreamed again among the hedges, a boy's dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart's delight. Her lips were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks were wild peach flowers; it was a boy's dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart's delight! Her waist was as a willow-withe, her voice a bird in the deep wood calling; her feet danced fantasies in his heart. He came all in the daze of a boy's dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart's desire. With every eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine fragrance of the night.

All day long, like a sullen army, a great cloud heaved and gloomed along the west, with wind-blown vapors streaming around its thunderous heights. All day long, in awe of it, men put off going here and there, gave over plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous imminence. The day was darkened by the dominion of the cloud. At evening it rolled off across the plain, obliterating leagues of lesser storms, with fire stabbing at its breast, and distant bellowings of tremendous sound. Heaving slowly against the twilight stars, rolling in sullen majesty upon the gale, pale moonlight falling on its peaks, and the gray rain trailing down below, in its heart innumerable lightnings, thunder grumbling in its front, it left the drenched field to the moon. Beyond the edge of the world it hung, gloomily brooding upon the splendor of the night.

In the magic of the moonlight Lilac lane lay ghostly as a dream, hushed, alluring, unfamiliar. The strange, white light of the immense full moon lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows were hung with the shadows and darkness of strange delight; the cicada chittered in the almond tree; the great moths flapped heavily among the wet moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible wind blew, languid-sweet, hardly moving the heavy leaves of the magnolias; a gray bird pitched a wild song somewhere deep within a hedge.

In Margot's garden everything was wrapped in night's singular fantasy. In the pallor of the moonlight the garden lay like an enchanted realm of goblin loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and chill as flowers carved of marble; among the drowsy poppies hung garlands of nocturnal vine whose folded blooms in chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid moonshine. The whole place trembled in a pale, strange beauty which the silence made lovelier still. Like an island in a silvery mist Margot's house stood blind asleep, its little windows curtained deep with shadows, dim, blue, and dark, and on the woodwork of the door, like petals of dismantled flowers, wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths thrown there by the whining wind, slowly blowing across leagues of lonely marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms, faintly lighted and phosphor-green, crawled up and down, up and down, to nowhere: it looked like the door of the way to oblivion, so lonely it seemed and so still. The garden was utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.

He looked; he listened; and his heart stood still; save for the glow-worm and the moth there was nothing alive there but him. Like the chill which creeps across the matted grass of evening in the last fair days of autumn, full of the faded fragrance and haunted dusk of fall, a wordless dread stole over him. The moonlight gleamed on the cottage-wall with a singular, mournful splendor; a heavy wind began to stir the trees; immensely mournful, faint and far-away, there came a boom of thunder from beyond the rim of the world; joy all at once was gone from the midsummer night; the haunting strangeness crept into his heart. The place was full of the heavy fragrance of dead flowers. Here and there a palsied rose, its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell without a sound.

Under the fig-trees he paused a moment, undecided,--to listen, shivering a little, and peering along the wall. There was no sound of human life. Though the wind had set the great leaves stirring, all was ghostly as a dream. One white star above the roof-peak sailed among the broken clouds; the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in the magnolia, mournfully gleaming through the black boughs; in the still air the moonlight stood; the shadows lay like solid things upon the cottage wall.

At the corner of the house he paused and listened again. In the strange, unanswering silence a sense of disaster gripped him. There was no sound anywhere; his heart almost ceased beating.

With premonition of catastrophe he ran along the wall:--nothing, but windows, battened or curtained, blank as a blindman's eyes; not a sign of humanity.

Where he had dreamed to stand speechless with happiness, he stood shaken by nameless fear.

Deep within the house he heard a relaxed beam "pung" with a sound like a viol string softly struck by a hand in passing: the deep, slow sound reverberated through the hollow house, and died away in vacant whispering.

Through the crevice of the shutter he saw the cold moonlight fall along the deserted floor. The house was absolutely empty.

There is a convent-school for orphaned girls kept by the nuns in New Orleans. The loveliest girl seen there in years was Gabrielle Lagoux, carried there between two nights, lest young love, like death, insist.

Dawn and departure. She had trembled like a leaf, half comprehending only; her mother kissed her twice, in feverish haste, with lips like dry leaves: that was their parting. Some one called "Gabrielle!" at the door. The coach was at the gate. She stopped at the wicket, looked down the lane, said a few words to the coachboy who guarded her gown from the wheels: "Tell him," she said, "that I love him. Tell him remember me." She paused again at the door of the coach, her foot on the step, a dazed look in her eyes, saying, "Tell him not to forget me. I love him!" The wheels rumbled over the cobbles. She never came back. When she entered the coach young love was done for forever: she never saw her golden lad again. Love beat his rose-red wings in vain; he could not overtake the coach; for the coach was fate; all was over; his dusty feet halted in the heat of the dusty road; "Good-by!... Good-by, forever!"

Days became weeks, weeks months, months grew into years; she never came again. She passed through the convent's sheltering door, was safe from mischance and folly; passed into a world remote of unfamiliar faces, and forgot.

God made memory cruel, that men might know remorse; but the Devil devised forgetfulness, anodyne of regret.

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