85
The Vision of Athos
WHEN THIS FAINTING OF Athos had ceased, the Comte,
almost ashamed of having given way before this super-natural event,
dressed himself and ordered his horse, determined to ride to Blois,
to open more certain correspondence with either Africa, d‘Artagnan,
or Aramis. In fact, this letter from Aramis informed the Comte de
la Fère of the bad success of the expedition of Belle-Isle. It gave
him sufficient details of the death of Porthos to move the tender
and devoted heart of Athos to its last fibres. Athos wished to go
and pay his friend Porthos a last visit. To render this honour to
his companion in arms, he meant to send to d’Artagnan, to prevail
upon him to recommence the painful voyage to Belle-Isle, to
accomplish in his company that sad pilgrimage to the tomb of the
giant he had so much loved, then to return to his dwelling to obey
that secret influence which was conducting him to eternity by a
mysterious road. But scarcely had his joyous servants dressed their
master, whom they saw with pleasure preparing himself for a journey
which might dissipate his melancholy; scarcely had the Comte’s
gentlest horse been saddled and brought to the door, than the
father of Raoul felt his head become confused, his legs give way,
and he clearly perceived the impossibility of going one step
farther. He ordered himself to be carried into the sun; they laid
him upon his bed of moss, where he passed a full hour before he
could recover his spirits. Nothing could be more natural than this
weakness after the inert repose of the latter days. Athos took a
basin of soup to give him strength, and bathed his dried lips in a
glassful of wine he loved the best—that old Anjou wine mentioned by
Porthos in his admirable will. Then, refreshed, free in mind, he
had his horse brought again; but it required the aid of his
servants to mount painfully into the saddle. He did not go a
hundred paces; a shivering seized him again at the turning of the
road.
“This is very strange!” said he to his
valet-de-chambre, who accompanied him.
“Let us stop, monsieur—I conjure you!” replied the
faithful servant; “how pale you are getting!”
“That will not prevent my pursuing my route, now I
have once started,” replied the Comte. And he gave his horse his
head again. But suddenly, the animal, instead of obeying the
thought of his master, stopped. A movement, of which Athos was
unconscious, had checked the bit.
“Something,” said Athos, “wills that I should go no
farther. Support me,” added he, stretching out his arms; “quick!
come closer! I feel all my muscles relax, and I shall fall from my
horse.”
The valet had seen the movement made by his master
at the moment he received the order. He went up to him quickly,
received the Comte in his arms, and as they were not yet
sufficiently distant from the house for the servants, who had
remained at the door to watch their master’s departure, not to
perceive the disorder in the usually regular proceeding of the
Comte, the valet called his comrades by gestures and voice, and all
hastened to his assistance. Athos had gone but a few steps on his
return, when he felt himself better again. His strength seemed to
revive, and with it the desire to go to Blois. He made his horse
turn round; but, at the animal’s first steps, he sank again into a
state of torpor and anguish.
“Well! decidedly,” said he, “it is WILLED that I
should stay at home.” His people flocked around him; they lifted
him from his horse, and carried him as quickly as possible into the
house. Everything was soon prepared in his chamber, and they put
him to bed.
“You will be sure to remember,” said he, disposing
himself to sleep, “that I expect letters from Africa this very
day.”
“Monsieur will no doubt hear with pleasure that
Blaisois’s son is gone on horseback, to gain an hour over the
courier of Blois,” replied his valet-de-chambre.
“Thank you,” said Athos, with his bland
smile.
The Comte fell asleep, but his disturbed slumber
resembled suffering more than repose. The servant who watched him
saw several times the expression of interior torture thrown out
upon his features. Perhaps Athos was dreaming. The day passed away.
Blaisois’s son returned: the courier had brought no news. The Comte
reckoned the minutes with despair; he shuddered when those minutes
had formed an hour. The idea that he was forgotten seized him once,
and brought on a fearful pang of the heart. Everybody in the house
had given up all hopes of the courier—his hour had long passed.
Four times the express sent to Blois had reiterated his journey,
and there was nothing to the address of the Comte. Athos knew that
the courier only arrived once a week. Here, then, was a delay of
eight mortal days to be endured. He commenced the night in this
painful persuasion. All that a sick man, irritated by suffering,
can add of melancholy suppositions to probabilities always sad,
Athos heaped up during the early hours of this dismal night. The
fever rose; it invaded the chest, where the fire soon caught,
according to the expression of the physician, who had been brought
back from Blois by Blaisois at his last journey. It soon gained the
head. The physician made two successive bleedings, which unlodged
it, but left the patient very weak, and without power of action in
anything but his brain. And yet this redoubtable fever had ceased.
It besieged with its last palpitations the stiffened extremities;
it ended by yielding as midnight struck.
The physician, seeing the incontestable
improvement, returned to Blois, after having ordered some
prescriptions, and declared that the Comte was saved. Then
commenced for Athos a strange, indefinable state. Free to think,
his mind turned towards Raoul, that beloved son. His imagination
painted the fields of Africa in the environs of Gigelli, where M.
de Beaufort must have landed his army. There were grey rocks,
rendered green in certain parts by the waters of the sea, when it
lashed the shore in storms and tempests. Beyond, the shore, strewn
over with these rocks like tombs, ascended, in form of an
amphitheatre, among mastic-trees and cacti, a sort of small town,
full of smoke, confused noises and terrified movements. All on a
sudden, from the bosom of this smoke arose a flame, which
succeeded, by creeping along the houses, in covering the whole
surface of the town, and which increased by degrees, uniting in its
red vortices tears, cries, arms extended towards heaven.
There was, for a moment, a frightful confusion of
houses falling to pieces, of swords broken, of stones calcined, of
trees burnt and disappearing. It was a strange thing that in this
chaos, in which Athos distinguished raised arms, in which he heard
cries, sobs and groans, he did not see one human figure. The cannon
thundered at a distance, musketry cracked, the sea moaned, flocks
made their escape, bounding over the verdant slope. But not a
soldier to apply the match to the batteries of cannon, not a sailor
to assist in manoeuvring the fleet, not a shepherd for the flocks.
After the ruin of the village, and the destruction of the forts
which dominated it—a ruin and a destruction operated magically,
without the cooperation of a single human being—the flame was
extinguished, the smoke began to descend, then diminished in
intensity, paled, and disappeared entirely. Night then came over
the scene; a night dark upon the earth, brilliant in the firmament.
The large, blazing stars which sparkled in the African sky shone
without lighting anything even around them.
A long silence ensued, which gave, for a moment,
repose to the troubled imagination of Athos; and, as he felt that
that which he saw was not terminated, he applied more attentively
the looks of his understanding upon the strange spectacle which his
imagination had presented. This spectacle was soon continued for
him. A mild and pale moon arose behind the declivities of the
coast, and streaking at first the undulating ripples of the sea,
which appeared to have calmed after the roarings it had sent forth
during the vision of Athos—the moon, say we, shed its diamonds and
opals upon the briers and bushes of the hills. The grey rocks, like
so many silent and attentive phantoms, appeared to raise their
verdant heads to examine likewise the field of battle by the light
of the moon, and Athos perceived that the field, entirely void
during the combat, was now strewed over with fallen bodies.
An inexpressible shudder of fear and horror seized
his soul when he recognised the white and blue uniform of the
soldiers of Picardy, with their long pikes and blue handles, and
their muskets marked with the fleur-de-lis on the butts. When he
saw all the gaping, cold wounds, looking up to the azure heavens as
if to demand back of them the souls to which they had opened a
passage,—when he saw the slaughtered horses, stiff, with their
tongues hanging out at one side of their mouths, sleeping in the
icy blood pooled around them, staining their furniture and their
manes,—when he saw the white horse of M. de Beaufort, with his head
beaten to pieces, in the first ranks of the dead, Athos passed a
cold hand over his brow, which he was astonished not to find
burning. He was convinced by this touch that he was present, as a
spectator, without fever, at the day after a battle fought upon the
shores of Gigelli by the army of the expedition, which he had seen
leave the coasts of France and disappear in the horizon, and of
which he had saluted with thought and gesture the last cannon-shot
fired by the Duc as a signal of farewell to his country.
Who can paint the mortal agony with which his soul
followed, like a vigilant eye, the trace of those dead bodies, and
examined them, one after another, to see if Raoul slept among them?
Who can express the intoxication of joy with which Athos bowed
before God, and thanked Him for not having seen him he sought with
so much fear among the dead? In fact, fallen dead in their ranks,
stiff, icy, all these dead, easy to be recognised, seemed to turn
with complacency towards the Comte de la Fère, to be the better
seen by him during his funeral inspection. But yet, he was
astonished, while viewing all these bodies, not to perceive the
survivors. To such a point did the illusion extend, that this
vision was for him a real voyage made by the father into Africa, to
obtain more exact information respecting his son.
Fatigued, therefore, with having traversed seas and
continents, he sought repose under one of the tents sheltered
behind a rock, on the top of which floated the white fleur-de-lised
pennon. He looked for a soldier to conduct him to the tent of M. de
Beaufort. Then, while his eye was wandering over the plain, turning
on all sides, he saw a white form appear behind the resinous
myrtles. This figure was clothed in the costume of an officer: it
held in its hand a broken sword: it advanced slowly towards Athos,
who, stopping short and fixing his eyes upon it, neither spoke nor
moved, but wished to open his arms, because, in this silent and
pale officer, he had just recognised Raoul. The Comte attempted to
utter a cry, but it remained stifled in his throat. Raoul, with a
gesture, directed him to be silent, placing his finger on his lips
and drawing back by degrees, without Athos being able to see his
legs move. The Comte, more pale than Raoul, more trembling,
followed his son, traversing painfully briers and bushes, stones
and ditches, Raoul not appearing to touch the earth, and no
obstacle impeding the lightness of his march. The Comte, whom the
unevenness of the path fatigued, soon stopped, exhausted. Raoul
still continued to beckon him to follow him. The tender father, to
whom love restored strength, made a last effort, and climbed the
mountain after the young man, who attracted him by his gesture and
his smile.
At length he gained the crest of the hill, and saw,
thrown out in black, upon the horizon whitened by the moon, the
elongated aerial form of Raoul. Athos stretched out his hand to get
closer to his beloved son upon the plateau, and the latter also
stretched out his; but suddenly, as if the young man had been drawn
away in spite of himself, still retreating, he left the earth, and
Athos saw the clear blue sky shine between the feet of his child
and the ground of the hill. Raoul rose insensibly into the void,
still smiling, still calling with a gesture:—he departed towards
heaven. Athos uttered a cry of terrified tenderness. He looked
below again. He saw a camp destroyed, and all those white bodies of
the royal army, like so many motionless atoms. And, then, when
raising his head, he saw still, still, his son beckoning him to
ascend with him.