The Daughter Of Lilith
by
(Translator: Mrs. John Lane)
TO JEAN PSICHARI
I had left Paris late in the evening, and I spent a long, silent and snowy night in the corner of the railway carriage. I waited six mortal hours at X——, and the next afternoon I found nothing better than a farm-waggon to take me to Artigues. The plain whose furrows rose and fell by turns on either side of the road, and which I had seen long ago lying radiant in the sunshine, was now covered with a heavy veil of snow over which straggled the twisted black stems of the vines. My driver gently urged on his old horse, and we proceeded through an infinite silence broken only at intervals by the plaintive cry of a bird, sad even unto death. I murmured this prayer in my heart: “My God, God of Mercy, save me from despair and after so many transgressions, let me not commit the one sin Thou dost not forgive.” Then I saw the sun, red and rayless, blood-hued, descending on the horizon, as it were, the sacred Host, and remembering the divine Sacrifice of Calvary, I felt hope enter into my soul. For some time longer the wheels crunched the snow. At last the driver pointed with the end of his whip to the spire of Artigues as it rose like a shadow against the dull red haze.
“I say,” said the man, “are you going to stop at the presbytery? You know the cure?”
“I have known him ever since I was a child. He was my master when I was a student.”
“Is he learned in books?”
“My friend, M. Safrac, is as learned as he is good.”
“So they say. But they also say other things.”
“What do they say, my friend?”
“They say what they please, and I let them talk.”
“What more do they say?”
“Well, there are those who say he is a sorcerer, and that he can tell fortunes.”
“What nonsense!”
“For my part I keep a still tongue! But if M. Safrac is not a sorcerer and fortune-teller, why does he spend his time reading books?”
The waggon stopped in front of the presbytery.
I left the idiot, and followed the cure’s servant, who conducted me to her master in a room where the table was already laid. I found M. Safrac greatly changed in the three years since I had last seen him. His tall figure was bent He was excessively emaciated. Two piercing eyes glowed in his thin face. His nose, which seemed to have grown longer, descended over his shrunken lips. I fell into his arms.
“My father, my father,” I cried, sobbing, “I have come to you because I have sinned. My father, my dear old master, whose profound and mysterious knowledge overawed my mind, and who yet reassured it with a revelation of maternal tenderness, save your child from the brink of a precipice. O my only friend, save me; enlighten me, you my only beacon!”
He embraced me, and smiled on me with that exquisite kindness of which he had given so many proofs during my childhood, and then he stepped back, as if to see me better.
“Well, adieu!” he said, greeting me according to the custom of his country, for M. Safrac was born on the banks of the Garonne, in the home of those famous wines which seemed the symbol of his own generous and fragrant soul.
After having taught philosophy with great distinction in Bordeaux, Poitiers and Paris, he asked as his only reward the gift of a poor cure in the country where he had been born and where he wished to die. He had now been priest at Artigues for six years, and in this obscure village he practised the most humble piety and the most enlightened sciences.
“Well, adieu! my child,” he repeated. “You wrote me a letter to announce your coming which has moved me deeply. It is true, then, that you have not forgotten your old master?”