The Story of a Child Part 4

CHAPTER XIII.

"And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. . . . And they that were ready went in with him to the marriage; and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.

"But he answered and said, Verily, I say unto you, I know you not.

"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh."

After reading these verses in a loud voice, my father closed the Bible; in the room where we were a.s.sembled there was a sound of chairs being moved and we all went down upon our knees to pray. Following the usage in old Huguenot families, it was our custom to have prayers just before retiring to our rooms for the night.

"And the door was shut. . . ." Although I still knelt I no longer heard the prayer, for the foolish virgins appeared to me. They were enveloped in white veils that billowed about them as they stood before the door holding in their hands the little lamps whose flickering flames were so soon to be extinguished, leaving them in the gloom without before that closed door, closed against them irrevocably and forever. . . . And a time could come then when it would be too late; when the Saviour weary of our trespa.s.sing would no longer listen to our supplications! I had never thought that that was possible. And a fear more terrifying and awful than any I had ever known before completely overwhelmed me at the thought of eternal d.a.m.nation. . . .

For a long time, for many weeks and months, the parable of the foolish virgins haunted me. And every evening, when darkness came, I would repeat to myself the words that sounded so beautiful and yet so dismaying: "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." If he should come to-night, was ever my thought, I would be awakened by a noise as of the sound of rushing waters, by the blare of the trumpet of the angel of the Lord announcing the terrifying approach of the end of the world. And I could never go to sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I commended myself to the mercy of my Saviour.

I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not reported it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I carry my squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells over his beads, these words: "After all, perhaps I do not remember just exactly how it was." When I think of the thousand remorses and fears which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which from my sixth to my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel a sort of retrospective depression.

At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future, when a man, without hesitation I would answer: "I expect to be a minister,"--and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought, inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.

In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that hereafter which to p.r.o.nounce the name of filled me with terror: eternity. And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great splendor of light among the mult.i.tude of angels and chosen ones around the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and continuously in the infinite void of heaven.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature, and it bit her and that made her die."

It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme end of her garden in the lovely month of June under a branching apricot tree. We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old planks. Our dwelling was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams pierced the roof, which was of a coa.r.s.e straw-colored material, and the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and ap.r.o.ns. (During at least two summers it had been our favorite amus.e.m.e.nt to build, in isolated nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, "a very large fruit from the colonies," had suddenly plunged me into a reverie. And I had a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing words, "the colonies" conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful splendor and their enervating melancholy.

I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an ill.u.s.trated book called the "Young Naturalists," by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New Year's evening. (Green-house palms had not at that time been brought to our little town.)

The ill.u.s.trator had placed two of these unfamiliar trees at the edge of a sea-sh.o.r.e along which negroes were pa.s.sing. Recently I was curious enough to hunt in the little yellow, faded book for that picture, and truly I wonder how that ill.u.s.tration had the power to create the very least of my dreams unless it were that my immature mind was already leavened by the memory of memories.

"The colonies!" Ah! how can I give an adequate idea of all that awoke in my mind at the sound of these words? A fruit from there, a bird or a sh.e.l.l, had instantly the greatest charm for me.

There were a number of things from the tropics in little Antoinette's home: a parrot, birds of many colors in a cage, and collections of sh.e.l.ls and insects. In one of her mamma's bureau drawers I had seen quaint necklaces of fragrant berries; in the garret, where we sometimes rummaged, we found skins of animals and peculiar bags and cases upon which could still be made out the names of towns in the Antilles; and a faint tropical odor scented the entire house.

Antoinette's garden, as I have said, was separated from ours by a very low wall overgrown with roses and jasmine. And the very old pomegranate tree growing there spread its branches into our yard, and at the blooming season its coral-red petals were scattered upon our gra.s.s.

Often we spoke from one house to the other:

"Can I come over and play with you?" I would ask. "Will your mamma allow me?"

"No, because I have been naughty and I am being punished." (That happened very often.)--Such an answer always grieved me a great deal; but I must confess that it was more on account of my disappointment over the parrot and the tropical things than because of her punishment.

Little Antoinette had been born in the colonies, but, curiously enough, she never seemed to value that fact, and they had very little charm for her, indeed she scarcely remembered them. I would have given everything I possessed in the world to have seen, if only for the briefest time, one of those distant countries, inaccessible to me, as I well knew.

With a regret that was almost anguish I thought, alas! that in my life as minister, live as long as I might, I would never, never see those enchanting lands.

CHAPTER XV.

I will now describe a game that gave Antoinette and me the greatest pleasure during those two delicious summers.

We pretended to be two caterpillars, and we would creep along the ground upon our stomachs and our knees and hunt for leaves to eat. After having done that for some time we played that we were very very sleepy, and we would lie down in a corner under the trees and cover our heads with our white ap.r.o.ns--we had become coc.o.o.ns. We remained in this condition for some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the role of insects in a state of metamorphosis, that any one listening would have heard pa.s.s between us, in a tone of the utmost seriousness, conversations of this nature:

"Do you think that you will soon be able to fly?"

"Oh yes! I'll be flying very soon; I feel them growing in my shoulders now . . . they'll soon unfold." ("They" naturally referred to wings.)

Finally we would wake up, stretch ourselves, and without saying anything we conveyed by our manner our astonishment at the great transformation in our condition. . . .

Then suddenly we began to run lightly and very nimbly in our tiny shoes; in our hands we held the corners of our pinafores which we waved as if they were wings; we ran and ran, and chased each other, and flew about making sharp and fantastic curves as we went. We hastened from flower to flower and smelled all of them, and we continually imitated the restlessness of giddy moths; we imagined too that we were imitating their buzzing when we exclaimed: "Hou ou ou!" a noise we made by filling the cheeks with air and puffing it out quickly through the half-closed mouth.

CHAPTER XVI.

The b.u.t.terflies, the poor b.u.t.terflies that have gone out of fashion in these days, played, I am ashamed to say, a large part in my life during my childhood, as did also the flies, beetles and lady-bugs and all the insects that are found upon flowers and in the gra.s.s. Although it gave me a great deal of pain to kill them, I was making a collection of them, and I was almost always seen with a b.u.t.terfly net in my hand. Those flying about in our yard, that had strayed our way from the country, were not very beautiful it must be confessed, but I had the garden and woods of Limoise which all the summer long was a hunting-ground ever full of surprises and wonders.

But the caricatures by Topffer upon this subject made me thoughtful; and when Lucette one day caught me with several b.u.t.terflies in my hat, and in her incomparably mocking voice called me, "Mr. Cryptogram," I was much humiliated.

CHAPTER XVII.

The poor old grandmother who sang so constantly was dying.

We were all standing about her bed at nightfall one spring evening. She had been ailing scarcely more than forty-eight hours; but the doctor said that on account of her great age she could not rally, and he p.r.o.nounced her end to be very near.