In spite of her determination to tell him all, Jeanne hardly knew how to explain herself.
"He--he refuses--to make me a mother."
The priest understood at once; it was not the first time he had heard of such things, but he asked for all the details, and enjoyed them as a hungry man would a feast. When he had heard all, he reflected for a few moments, then said in the calm, matter-of-fact tone he might have used if he had been speaking of the best way to insure a good harvest.
"My dear child, the only thing you can do is to make your husband believe you are pregnant; then he will cease his precautions, and you will become so in reality."
Jeanne blushed to the roots of her hair, but, determined to be ready for every emergency, she argued:
"But--but suppose he should not believe me?"
The cure knew too well the ins and outs of human nature not to have an answer for that.
"Tell everybody you are _enceinte_. When he sees that everyone else believes it, he will soon believe it himself. You will be doing no wrong," he added, to quiet his conscience for advising this deception; "the Church does not permit any connection between man and woman, except for the purpose of procreation."
Jeanne followed the priest"s artful device, and, a fortnight later, told Julien she thought she was _enceinte_. He started up.
"It isn"t possible! You can"t be!"
She gave him her reasons for thinking so.
"Bah!" he answered. "You wait a little while."
Every morning he asked, "Well?" but she always replied: "No, not yet; I am very much mistaken if I am not _enceinte_."
He also began to think so, and his surprise was only equaled by his annoyance.
"Well, I can"t understand it," was all he could say. "I"ll be hanged if I know how it can have happened."
At the end of a month she began to tell people the news, but she said nothing about it to the Comtesse Gilberte, for she felt an old feeling of delicacy in mentioning it to her. At the very first suspicion of his wife"s pregnancy, Julien had ceased to touch her, then, angrily thinking, "Well, at any rate, this brat wasn"t wanted," he made up his mind to make the best of it, and recommenced his visits to his wife"s room. Everything happened as the priest had predicted, and Jeanne found she would a second time become a mother. Then, in a transport of joy, she took a vow of eternal chast.i.ty as a token of her rapturous grat.i.tude to the distant divinity she adored, and thenceforth closed her door to her husband.
She again felt almost happy. She could hardly believe that it was barely two months since her mother had died, and that only such a short time before she had thought herself inconsolable. Now her wounded heart was nearly healed, and her grief had disappeared, while in its place was merely a vague melancholy, like the shadow of a great sorrow resting over her life. It seemed impossible that any other catastrophe could happen now; her children would grow up and surround her old age with their affection, and her husband could go his way while she went hers.
Towards the end of September the Abbe Picot came to the chateau, in a new ca.s.sock which had only one week"s stains upon it, to introduce his successor, the Abbe Tolbiac. The latter was small, thin, and very young, with hollow, black-encircled eyes which betokened the depth and violence of his feelings, and a decisive way of speaking as if there could be no appeal from his opinion. The Abbe Picot had been appointed _doyen_ of G.o.derville. Jeanne felt very sad at the thought of his departure; he was connected, in her thoughts, with all the chief events of her life, for he had married her, christened Paul, and buried the baroness. She liked him because he was always good-tempered and unaffected, and she could not imagine Etouvent without the Abbe Picot"s fat figure trotting past the farms. He himself did not seem very rejoiced at his advancement.
"I have been here eighteen years, Madame la Comtesse," he said, "and it grieves me to go to another place. Oh! this living is not worth much, I know, and as for the people--well, the men have no more religion than they ought to have, the women are not so moral as they might be, and the girls never dream of being married until it is too late for them to wear a wreath of orange blossoms; still, I love the place."
The new cure had been fidgeting impatiently during this speech, and his face had turned very red.
"I shall soon have all that changed," he said, abruptly, as soon as the other priest had finished speaking; and he looked like an angry child in his worn but spotless ca.s.sock, so thin and small was he.
The Abbe Picot looked at him sideways, as he always did when anything amused him.
"Listen, l"abbe," he said. "You will have to chain up your parishioners if you want to prevent that sort of thing; and I don"t believe even that would be any good."
"We shall see," answered the little priest in a cutting tone.
The old cure smiled and slowly took a pinch of snuff.
"Age and experience will alter your views, l"abbe; if they don"t you will only estrange the few good Churchmen you have. When I see a girl come to ma.s.s with a waist bigger than it ought to be, I say to myself--"Well, she is going to give me another soul to look after;"--and I try to marry her. You can"t prevent them going wrong, but you can find out the father of the child and prevent him forsaking the mother. Marry them, l"abbe, marry them, and don"t trouble yourself about anything else."
"We will not argue on this point, for we should never agree," answered the new cure, a little roughly; and the Abbe Picot again began to express his regret at leaving the village, and the sea which he could see from the vicarage windows, and the little funnel-shaped valleys, where he went to read his breviary and where he could see the boats in the distance. Then the two priests rose to go, and the Abbe Picot kissed Jeanne, who nearly cried when she said good-bye.
A week afterwards, the Abbe Tolbiac called again. He spoke of the reforms he was bringing about as if he were a prince taking possession of his kingdom. He begged the vicomtesse to communicate on all the days appointed by the Church, and to attend ma.s.s regularly on Sundays.
"You and I are at the head of the parish," he said, "and we ought to rule it, and always set it a good example; but, if we wish to have any influence, we must be united. If the Church and the chateau support each other, the cottage will fear and obey us."
Jeanne"s religion was simply a matter of sentiment; she had merely the dreamy faith that a woman never quite loses, and if she performed any religious duties at all it was only because she had been so used to them at the convent, for the baron"s carping philosophy had long ago overthrown all her convictions. The Abbe Picot had always been contented with the little she did do, and never chid her for not confessing or attending ma.s.s oftener; but when the Abbe Tolbiac did not see her at church on the Sunday, he hastened to the chateau to question and reprimand her. She did not wish to quarrel with the cure, so she promised to be more attentive to the services, inwardly resolving to go regularly only for a few weeks, out of good nature.
Little by little, however, she fell into the habit of frequenting the church, and, in a short time, she was entirely under the influence of the delicate-looking, strong-willed priest. His zeal and enthusiasm appealed to her love of everything pertaining to mysticism, and he seemed to make the chord of religious poetry, which she possessed in common with every woman, vibrate within her. His austerity, his contempt for every luxury and sensuality, his disdain for the things that usually occupy the thoughts of men, his love of G.o.d, his youthful, intolerant inexperience, his scathing words, his inflexible will made Jeanne compare him, in her mind, to the early martyrs; and she, who had already suffered so much, whose eyes had been so rudely opened to the deceptions of life, let herself be completely ruled by the rigid fanaticism of this boy who was the minister of Heaven. He led her to the feet of Christ the Consoler, teaching her how the holy joys of religion could alleviate all her sorrows, and, as she knelt in the confessional she humbled herself and felt little and weak before this priest, who looked about fifteen years old.
Soon he was detested by the whole country-side. With no pity for his own weaknesses, he showed a violent intolerance for those of others. The thing above all others that roused his anger and indignation was--love.
He denounced it from the pulpit in crude, ecclesiastical terms, thundering out terrible judgments against concupiscence over the heads of his rustic audience; and, as the pictures he portrayed in his fury persistently haunted his mind, he trembled with rage and stamped his foot in anger. The grown-up girls and the young fellows cast side-long glances at each other across the aisle; and the old peasants, who liked to joke about such matters, expressed their disapproval of the little cure"s intolerance as they walked back to their farms after service with their wives and sons.
The whole country was in an uproar. The priest"s severity and the harsh penances he inflicted at confession were rumored about, and, as he obstinately refused to grant absolution to the girls whose chast.i.ty was not immaculate, smiles accompanied the whispers. When, at the holy festivals, several of the youths and girls stayed in their seats instead of going to communicate with the others, most of the congregation laughed outright as they looked at them. He began to watch for lovers like a keeper on the look-out for poachers, and on moonlight nights he hunted up the couples along the ditches, behind the barns and among the long gra.s.s on the hill-sides. One night he came upon two who did not cease their love-making even before him; they were strolling along a ditch filled with stones, with their arms round one another, kissing each other as they walked.
"Will you stop that, you vagabonds?" cried the abbe.
"You mind yer own bus"ness, M"sieu l"cure," replied the lad, turning round. "This ain"t nothin" to do with you."
The abbe picked up some stones and threw them at the couple as he might have done at stray dogs, and they both ran off, laughing. The next Sunday the priest mentioned them by name before the whole congregation.
All the young fellows soon ceased to attend ma.s.s.
The cure dined at the chateau every Thursday, but he very often went there on other days to talk to his _penitente_. Jeanne became as ardent and as enthusiastic as he as she discussed the mysteries of a future existence, and grew familiar with all the old and complicated arguments employed in religious controversy. They would both walk along the baroness"s avenue talking of Christ and the Apostles, of the Virgin Mary and of the Fathers of the Church as if they had really known them.
Sometimes they stopped their walk to ask each other profound questions, and then Jeanne would wander off into sentimental arguments, and the cure would reason like a lawyer possessed with the mania of proving the possibility of squaring the circle.
Julien treated the new cure with great respect. "That"s the sort of a priest I like," he was continually saying. "Half-measures don"t do for him," and he zealously set a good example by frequently confessing and communicating. Hardly a day pa.s.sed now without the vicomte going to the Fourvilles, either to shoot with the comte, who could not do without him, or to ride with the comtesse regardless of rain and bad weather.
"They are riding-mad," remarked the comte; "but the exercise does my wife good."
The baron returned to Les Peuples about the middle of November. He seemed a different man, he had aged so much and was so low-spirited; he was fonder than ever of his daughter, as if the last few months of melancholy solitude had caused in him an imperative need of affection and tenderness. Jeanne told him nothing about her new ideas, her intimacy with the Abbe Tolbiac, or her religious enthusiasm, but the first time he saw the priest, he felt an invincible dislike for him, and when his daughter asked him in the evening: "Well, what do you think of him?"
"He is like an inquisitor!" he answered. "He seems to me a very dangerous man."
When the peasants told him about the young priest"s harshness and bigotry and the sort of war of persecution he waged against natural laws and instincts, his dislike changed to a violent hatred. He, the baron, belonged to the school of philosophers who worship nature; to him it seemed something touching, when he saw two animals unite, and he was always ready to fall on his knees before the sort of pantheistic G.o.d he worshiped; but he hated the catholic conception of a G.o.d, Who has petty schemes, and gives way to tyrannical anger and indulges in mean revenge; a G.o.d, in fact, Who seemed less to him than that boundless omnipotent nature, which is at once life, light, earth, thought, plant, rock, man, air, animal, planet, G.o.d and insect, that nature which produces all things in such bountiful profusion, fitting each atom to the place it is to occupy in s.p.a.ce, be that position close to or far from the suns which heat the worlds. Nature contained the germ of everything, and she brought forth life and thought, as trees bear flowers and fruit.
To the baron, therefore, reproduction was a great law of Nature, and to be respected as the sacred and divine act which accomplished the constant, though unexpressed will of this Universal Being; and he at once began a campaign against this priest who opposed the laws of creation. It grieved Jeanne to the heart, and she prayed to the Lord, and implored her father not to run counter to the cure, but the baron always answered:
"It is everyone"s right and duty to fight against such men, for they are not like human creatures. They are not human," he repeated, shaking his long white hair. "They understand nothing of life, and their conduct is entirely influenced by their harmful dreams, which are contrary to Nature." And he p.r.o.nounced "contrary to Nature" as if he were uttering a curse.
The priest had at once recognized in him an enemy, and, as he wished to remain master of the chateau and its young mistress, he temporized, feeling sure of victory in the end. By chance he had discovered the _liaison_ between Julien and Gilberte, and his one idea was to break it off by no matter what means. He came to see Jeanne one day towards the end of the wet, mild winter, and, after a long talk on the mystery of life, he asked her to unite with him in fighting against and destroying the wickedness which was in her own family, and so save two souls which were in danger. She asked him what he meant.
"The hour has not come for me to reveal all to you," he replied; "but I will see you again soon," and with that he abruptly left her.
He came again in a few days, and spoke in vague terms of a disgraceful connection between people whose conduct ought to be irreproachable. It was the duty, he said, of those who were aware of what was going on, to use every means to put an end to it. He used all sorts of lofty arguments, and then, taking Jeanne"s hand, adjured her to open her eyes, to understand and to help him.
This time Jeanne saw what he meant, but terrified at the thought of all the trouble that might be brought to her home, which was now so peaceful, she pretended not to know to what he was alluding. Then he hesitated no longer, but spoke in terms there could be no misunderstanding.
"I am going to perform a very painful duty, Madame la comtesse, but I cannot leave it undone. The position I hold forbids me to leave you in ignorance of the sin you can prevent. Learn that your husband cherishes a criminal affection for Madame de Fourville."