CHAPTER VIII.
SYMPTOMS OF POISONING.
The "apparition" did not return. It did not reappear in the theatre, butit reappeared to the memory of Gwynplaine. Gwynplaine was, to a certaindegree, troubled. It seemed to him that for the first time in his lifehe had seen a woman.
He made that first stumble, a strange dream. We should beware of thenature of the reveries that fasten on us. Reverie has in it the mysteryand subtlety of an odour. It is to thought what perfume is to thetuberose. It is at times the exudation of a venomous idea, and itpenetrates like a vapour. You may poison yourself with reveries, as withflowers. An intoxicating suicide, exquisite and malignant. The suicideof the soul is evil thought. In it is the poison. Reverie attracts,cajoles, lures, entwines, and then makes you its accomplice. It makesyou bear your half in the trickeries which it plays on conscience. Itcharms; then it corrupts you. We may say of reverie as of play, onebegins by being a dupe, and ends by being a cheat.
Gwynplaine dreamed.
He had never before seen Woman. He had seen the shadow in the women ofthe populace, and he had seen the soul in Dea.
He had just seen the reality.
A warm and living skin, under which one felt the circulation ofpassionate blood; an outline with the precision of marble and theundulation of the wave; a high and impassive mien, mingling refusal withattraction, and summing itself up in its own glory; hair of the colourof the reflection from a furnace; a gallantry of adornment producing inherself and in others a tremor of voluptuousness, the half-revealednudity betraying a disdainful desire to be coveted at a distance by thecrowd; an ineradicable coquetry; the charm of impenetrability,temptation seasoned by the glimpse of perdition, a promise to the sensesand a menace to the mind; a double anxiety, the one desire, the otherfear. He had just seen these things. He had just seen Woman.
He had seen more and less than a woman; he had seen a female.
And at the same time an Olympian. The female of a god.
The mystery of sex had just been revealed to him.
And where? On inaccessible heights--at an infinite distance.
O mocking destiny! The soul, that celestial essence, he possessed; heheld it in his hand. It was Dea. Sex, that terrestrial embodiment, heperceived in the heights of heaven. It was that woman.
A duchess!
"More than a goddess," Ursus had said.
What a precipice! Even dreams dissolved before such a perpendicularheight to escalade.
Was he going to commit the folly of dreaming about the unknown beauty?
He debated with himself.
He recalled all that Ursus had said of high stations which are almostroyal. The philosopher's disquisitions, which had hitherto seemed souseless, now became landmarks for his thoughts. A very thin layer offorgetfulness often lies over our memory, through which at times wecatch a glimpse of all beneath it. His fancy ran on that august world,the peerage, to which the lady belonged, and which was so inexorablyplaced above the inferior world, the common people, of which he was one.
And was he even one of the people? Was not he, the mountebank, below thelowest of the low? For the first time since he had arrived at the age ofreflection, he felt his heart vaguely contracted by a sense of hisbaseness, and of that which we nowadays call abasement. The paintingsand the catalogues of Ursus, his lyrical inventories, his dithyrambicsof castles, parks, fountains, and colonnades, his catalogues of richesand of power, revived in the memory of Gwynplaine in the relief ofreality mingled with mist. He was possessed with the image of thiszenith. That a man should be a lord!--it seemed chimerical. It was so,however. Incredible thing! There were lords! But were they of flesh andblood, like ourselves? It seemed doubtful. He felt that he lay at thebottom of all darkness, encompassed by a wall, while he could justperceive in the far distance above his head, through the mouth of thepit, a dazzling confusion of azure, of figures, and of rays, which wasOlympus. In the midst of this glory the duchess shone out resplendent.
He felt for this woman a strange, inexpressible longing, combined with aconviction of the impossibility of attainment. This poignantcontradiction returned to his mind again and again, notwithstandingevery effort. He saw near to him, even within his reach, in close andtangible reality, the soul; and in the unattainable--in the depths ofthe ideal--the flesh. None of these thoughts attained to certain shape.They were as a vapour within him, changing every instant its form, andfloating away. But the darkness which the vapour caused was intense.
He did not form even in his dreams any hope of reaching the heightswhere the duchess dwelt. Luckily for him.
The vibration of such ladders of fancy, if ever we put our foot uponthem, may render our brains dizzy for ever. Intending to scale Olympus,we reach Bedlam; any distinct feeling of actual desire would haveterrified him. He entertained none of that nature.
Besides, was he likely ever to see the lady again? Most probably not. Tofall in love with a passing light on the horizon, madness cannot reachto that pitch. To make loving eyes at a star even, is notincomprehensible. It is seen again, it reappears, it is fixed in thesky. But can any one be enamoured of a flash of lightning?
Dreams flowed and ebbed within him. The majestic and gallant idol at theback of the box had cast a light over his diffused ideas, then fadedaway. He thought, yet thought not of it; turned to otherthings--returned to it. It rocked about in his brain--nothing more. Itbroke his sleep for several nights. Sleeplessness is as full of dreamsas sleep.
It is almost impossible to express in their exact limits the abstractevolutions of the brain. The inconvenience of words is that they aremore marked in form than ideas. All ideas have indistinct boundarylines, words have not. A certain diffused phase of the soul ever escapeswords. Expression has its frontiers, thought has none.
The depths of our secret souls are so vast that Gwynplaine's dreamsscarcely touched Dea. Dea reigned sacred in the centre of his soul;nothing could approach her.
Still (for such contradictions make up the soul of man) there was aconflict within him. Was he conscious of it? Scarcely.
In his heart of hearts he felt a collision of desires. We all have ourweak points. Its nature would have been clear to Ursus; but toGwynplaine it was not.
Two instincts--one the ideal, the other sexual--were struggling withinhim. Such contests occur between the angels of light and darkness on theedge of the abyss.
At length the angel of darkness was overthrown. One day Gwynplainesuddenly thought no more of the unknown woman.
The struggle between two principles--the duel between his earthly andhis heavenly nature--had taken place within his soul, and at such adepth that he had understood it but dimly. One thing was certain, thathe had never for one moment ceased to adore Dea.
He had been attacked by a violent disorder, his blood had been fevered;but it was over. Dea alone remained.
Gwynplaine would have been much astonished had any one told him that Deahad ever been, even for a moment, in danger; and in a week or two thephantom which had threatened the hearts of both their souls faded away.
Within Gwynplaine nothing remained but the heart, which was the hearth,and the love, which was its fire.
Besides, we have just said that "the duchess" did not return.
Ursus thought it all very natural. "The lady with the gold piece" is aphenomenon. She enters, pays, and vanishes. It would be too much joywere she to return.
As to Dea, she made no allusion to the woman who had come and passedaway. She listened, perhaps, and was sufficiently enlightened by thesighs of Ursus, and now and then by some significant exclamation, suchas,--
"_One does not get ounces of gold every day!_"
She spoke no more of the "woman." This showed deep instinct. The soultakes obscure precautions, in the secrets of which it is not alwaysadmitted itself. To keep silence about any one seems to keep them afaroff. One fears that questions may call them back. We put silence betweenus, as if we were shutting a door.
So the incident fell into oblivi
on.
Was it ever anything? Had it ever occurred? Could it be said that ashadow had floated between Gwynplaine and Dea? Dea did not know of it,nor Gwynplaine either. No; nothing had occurred. The duchess herself wasblurred in the distant perspective like an illusion. It had been but amomentary dream passing over Gwynplaine, out of which he had awakened.
When it fades away, a reverie, like a mist, leaves no trace behind; andwhen the cloud has passed on, love shines out as brightly in the heartas the sun in the sky.