Sometimes, however, in a rebellious mood he managed to check himself, to stop the ill-regulated clockwork of his prayers, and then he would try to examine himself, to get above himself, and to see in a comprehensive glance the puzzling perspective of his nature.
And facing these chambers of the soul, dim with mist, he was struck by a strange association of the Revelations of Saint Theresa and a tale by Edgar Poe.
Those chambers of the inner man were empty and cold, and like the halls of the House of Usher, surrounded by a moat whence the fog rose, forcing its way in at last and cracking the worn shell of wall. Alone and uneasy, he prowled about the ruined cells, with closed doors that refused ever to open again; thus his walks about his own mind were very limited, and the panorama he could see was strangely narrowed, shrunk close and near to him, almost nothing. And he knew full well that the ruins surrounding the central cell, the Master's Room, were bolted and fastened with rivets that could not be unscrewed, and triple bars—inaccessible. So he restricted himself to wandering in the halls and passages.
At Notre Dame de l'Atre he had ventured further; he had gone into the enclosure round about the abode of Christ; he had seen in the distance the frontiers of Mysticism, and, too weak to go on his road, he had fallen; and now this was to be lamented, for, as Saint Theresa truly remarks, "in the spiritual life, if we do not go forward, we go back." He had, in fact, retraced his steps, and lay half paralyzed, no longer even in the vestibule of his mansion, but in the outer court.
Till this time the phenomena described by the matchless Abbess had been exactly repeated. In Durtal, the Chambers of the Soul were deserted as after a long mourning; but in the rooms that had remained open, phantoms of sins confessed, of buried evil-doing, wandered like the sister of the tormented Usher.
Durtal, like Edgar Poe's unhappy sufferer, listened with horror to the rustle of steps on the stairs, the piteous weeping behind the doors.
And yet these ghosts of departed crimes were no more than indefinite shapes; they never consolidated nor took a definite form. The most persistent miscreant of them all, which had tormented him so long, the sin of the flesh, at last was silenced, and left him in peace. La Trappe had rooted up the stock of those debaucheries. The memory of them, indeed, haunted him still, on his most distressing, most ignoble side; but he could see them pass, his heart in his mouth, wondering that he could so long have been the dupe of such foul delusions, no longer understanding the power of those mirages, the illusions of those carnal oases as he met them in the desert of a life shut up in seclusion, in solitude, and in books.
His imagination could still put him on the rack; still, without merit, without a struggle, by the help of divine grace, he had escaped a fall ever since his return from the monastery.
On the other hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly vile; and he was nevertheless as closely bound to evil as ever, only the nature and character of the bonds were different, and no longer the same.
Besides that dryness of the heart which made him feel as soon as he entered a church or knelt down in his room, that a cold grip froze his prayers and chilled his soul, he detected the covert attacks, the mute assaults of ridiculous pride.
In vain did he keep watch; he was constantly taken by surprise without having time even to look round him.
It began under the most temperate guise, the most benign reflections.
Supposing, for instance, that he had done his neighbour a service at some inconvenience to himself, or that he had refrained from retaliating on anybody against whom he believed he had a grievance, or for whom he had no liking, a certain self-satisfaction stole, sneaked into his mind, a certain vain-glory, ending in the senseless conclusion that he was superior to many another man; and then, on this feeling of petty vanity, pride was engrafted—the pride of a virtue he had not even struggled to acquire, the arrogance of chastity, so insidious that most of those who indulge it do not even suspect themselves.
And he was never aware of the end of these assaults till too late, when they had become definite, and he had forgotten himself and succumbed; and he was in despair at finding that he constantly fell into the same snare, telling himself that the little good he could do must be wiped out of the balance of his life by the outrageous extravagance of this vice.
He was frenzied, he reasoned with the old mad arguments, and cried out at his wits' end—
"La Trappe crushed me! It cured me of sensuality, but only to load me with disorders of which I knew nothing before I submitted to that treatment! It is humble itself, but it puffed up my vanity and increased my pride tenfold—then it set me free, but so weak, so wearied, that I have never since been able to conquer that inanition, never have been fit to enjoy the Mystical Nourishment which I nevertheless must have if I am not to die to God!"
And for the hundredth time he asked himself—
"Am I happier than I was before I was converted?"
And to be truthful to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which was undermining the walls.
Having reached this stage of his round of meditations, he was compelled to throw himself on the Abbé Gévresin, who required him, in spite of his coldness, to take the Communion. Since his return from Notre Dame de l'Atre his friendship with the Abbé had become much closer, altogether intimate.
He knew now the inner man of this priest, who, in the midst of modern surroundings, led a purely mediæval life. Formerly, when he rang at his bell, he had paid no heed to the housekeeper, an old woman, who curtsied to him without a word when she opened the door.
Now he was quite friendly with this singular and loving creature.
Their first conversation had arisen one day when he called to see the Abbé, who was ill. Seated by the bedside, with spectacles on the alert at the tip of her nose, she was kissing, one by one, the pious prints that illustrated a book wrapped in black cloth. She begged him to be seated, and then, closing the volume, and replacing her spectacles, she had joined in the conversation; and he had left the room quite amazed by this woman, who addressed the Abbé as "Father," and spoke quite simply of her intercourse with Jesus and the Saints as if it were a natural thing. She seemed to live in perfect friendship with them, and spoke of them as of companions with whom she chatted without any embarrassment.
Then the countenance of this woman, whom the priest introduced to him as Madame Céleste Bavoil, was, strange to say, the least of it. She was thin and upright, but short. In profile, with her strong Roman nose and set lips, she had the fleshless mask of a dead Cæsar; but, seen in front, the sternness of the features was softened into a familiar peasant's face, and melted into the kindliness of an old nun, quite out of keeping with the solemn strength of her features.
It seemed as though with that clean-cut, imperious nose, small white teeth, and black eyes sparkling with light, busy and inquisitive as those of a mouse, under fine long lashes, the woman ought, notwithstanding her age, to have been handsome; it seemed at least as though the combination of these details would have given the face a stamp of distinction. Not so; the conclusion was false to the premises; the whole betrayed the combined effect of the details.
"This contradiction," thought he, "evidently is the result of other peculiarities which nullify the harmony of the more important features; in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood dotted here and there with