THE MYSTERIOUS MANOR

At dawn he began to walk again. But his swollen knee hurt him; he had to stop and sit down every moment, the pain was so sharp. The place where he was in happened to be the most desolate in Sologne. During all the morning he saw, in the distance, only a farm girl bringing in her flock. In vain he called to her and tried to run; she disappeared without hearing him.

Nevertheless he went on walking in her direction with a distressing slowness.... Not a roof, not a soul. Not even the cry of a curlew in the reeds of the marshes. And above this complete solitude shone a December sun, clear and icy.

It might have been three o’clock in the afternoon when he noticed at last, above a fir wood, the spire of a grey turret.

‘Some old forsaken manor,’ thought he; ‘some deserted dovecot!’

And without hurrying he went on his way. At the corner of the wood, in between two white posts, appeared a drive which Meaulnes entered. He walked up a few yards and stopped startled, disturbed by inexplicable feelings. He walked with the same fatigue, the icy wind cut his lips and took his breath away, and yet a strange contentment urged him on, a perfect and almost intoxicating peace, the assurance that his goal had been reached and that he had now nothing but happiness to expect. In the same way he once used to feel faint with excitement on the eve of great summer festivals, when fir trees, whose branches overshadowed his bedroom window, were set up at nightfall along the village streets.

‘So much joy,’ he said to himself, ‘just because I am coming to this old dovecot full of owls and draughts!...’

And angry with himself he stopped, wondering if it would be better to turn back and go on to the next village. He had been thinking thus for a while, with head lowered, when he suddenly noticed that the drive had been swept clean in big regular circles as was usual at his home at festival time. He was really in a lane which looked like the High Street of La Ferté on the morning of Assumption Day!... Had he noticed at the bend of the drive a crowd of holiday-makers raising up the dust as in the month of June, he could not have been more surprised.

‘Would there be a fête in this lonely spot?’ he said to himself.

Advancing as far as the first bend, he heard the sound of approaching voices. He stepped behind some bushy young firs, crouched and listened, holding his breath. They were childish voices. A group of children passed close to him. One of them, probably a little girl, was speaking in a way so wise and so decided that Meaulnes, although he hardly caught the sense of her words, could not help smiling.

‘One thing alone worries me,’ she was saying, ‘that is the question of the horses. No one will ever prevent Daniel riding on the big bay pony.’

‘No one will ever prevent me!’ replied the mocking voice of a young boy: ‘are we not allowed to do just as we please?... Even hurting ourselves, if we like....’

And the voices grew distant as another group of children approached.

‘If the ice thaws,’ said a little girl, ‘to-morrow morning we shall go boating.’

‘But shall we be allowed?’ said another.

‘You know very well that we are arranging things in our own way.’

‘But suppose Frantz was to come back this very evening with his fiancée?’

‘Well! he would do as we wish!...’

* * * * *

‘No doubt a wedding,’ thought Augustin. ‘But the children lay down the law here!... Strange land!’

He wanted to come out of his hiding-place and ask them where he could find something to eat and drink. He stood up and saw the last group going away. There were three little girls with pinafore dresses reaching to their knees. They wore pretty hats with strings. Down the neck of each hung a white feather. One of them, half turning round and slightly leaning towards her friend, was listening to long explanations the other was giving with one finger raised.

‘I should frighten them,’ thought Meaulnes, looking at his ragged peasant overall and the queer belt of the schoolboys at Sainte-Agathe.

Fearing that the children would meet him on their way back along the drive, he passed on through the firs in the direction of the ‘dovecot,’ without considering at all what he could ask for there. He was soon stopped at the edge of the wood by a low mossy wall. On the other side, in between the wall and the outhouses of the estate, was a long narrow courtyard as full of carriages as the yard of an inn on the day of a fair. These carriages were of all kinds and shapes: some elegant and small four-seaters with their shafts up in the air; wagonettes; bourbon coaches quite out of date with their moulded cornices, and even some old berlins with windows raised.

Meaulnes, hidden behind the firs for fear of being seen, was examining the disorder of the place when he noticed, on the other side of the yard, just above the driver’s seat of a tall wagonette, a window in one of the outhouses, half open. Two iron bars, such as are often seen on stable shutters behind old manors, were meant to close this aperture, but time had loosened them.

‘I will go in through there,’ thought the schoolboy. ‘I shall sleep in the hay and leave at daybreak without having frightened these lovely little girls.’

He climbed over the wall, painfully because of his wounded knee, and jumping from one carriage to another, from the coachman’s box of a wagonette to the roof of a berlin, he hauled himself up to the window, which noiselessly opened under his push, like a door.

He found himself, not in a hayloft, but in a big room with low ceiling, which must have been a bedroom. In the winter twilight one could make out that the table, the mantelpiece, and even the armchairs were covered with tall vases, objects of value, ancient weapons. At the other end of the room hung curtains to conceal an alcove.

Meaulnes had closed the window, both because of the cold and for fear of being seen from outside. He went to raise the curtains at the back of the room and disclosed a big low bed covered with old gilded books, lutes with broken strings, and chandeliers all thrown in a heap. He pushed all these things to the back of the alcove, then stretched himself on this couch to rest and to ponder over the strange adventure which had befallen him.

A deep silence reigned over his domain. Only at intervals the moaning of the high December wind could be heard.

And Meaulnes, stretched out, began to wonder if in spite of these strange meetings, in spite of the voices of the children in the drive, in spite of the carriages huddled together, the place was not simply, as he had thought at first, an old disused building in the winter wilderness.

Soon the wind seemed to bring him the sound of distant music. It was like a memory full of charm and of regret. He recalled the days when his mother, still young, used to come in the afternoon, and sit at the drawing-room piano and he, silently, from behind the door leading to the garden, listened to her until night....

‘Surely it seems as if some one is playing the piano somewhere?’ he thought.

But leaving his question without an answer, worn out with fatigue, he was soon asleep....