He put on his hat and unbuttoned his coat, under which his chest was bare. A red sash wound round his thin waist held his trousers up over his hips.
He took an envelope from his pocket—an envelope marked with every possible kind of stain, the sort of envelope that tramps keep tucked away in the lining of their clothes, and in which they put all kinds of identification papers, which may be genuine, faked, stolen, or legally correct, and which are the highly valued defences of their individual liberty in case of any meeting with the police. From the envelope he drew a photograph about the size of a letter (such as were formerly used). It was yellowish and crumpled with much handling, faded by the heat of the body against which it had been kept.
Holding it up to the Abbé, he asked:
“And this, do you know it?”
The Abbé took two steps forward to see better, then stopped; he turned pale, profoundly distressed, for this was a photograph of him taken for her in the bygone days of his love.
Still he did not understand and made no reply.
The vagabond repeated:
“Do you recognise this?”
The priest stammered:
“Well, yes.”
“Who is it?”
“Me.”
“It is really you?”
“Certainly.”
“Right; now look at your photograph, then look at me.”
The miserable priest had already seen that the two—the man in the photograph and the man standing at his side laughing, were as alike as two brothers, but still he did not understand and stammered:
“What do you want me to do?”
With a note of spite in his voice the beggar said:
“What do I want? Well, first of all I want you to recognise me.”
“But who are you?”
“What am I? Ask the first comer on the road, ask the servant; if you like, let us go and ask the mayor of the village and show him the photograph; he will laugh about it, I can tell you that. Ah! you refuse to recognise me as your son, Papa curé?”
The old man, lifting his arms with a biblical and despairing gesture, moaned:
“It can’t be true.”
The young man drew nearer and, facing him, said:
“Ah! It can’t be true. Ah! you priest, you must stop telling lies, do you hear?”
The expression on his face was threatening, his fists were doubled up, he spoke with so much violence that the Abbé, moving further away, asked himself which of the two was making a mistake.
However, he insisted again:
“I have never had a child.”
The other retorted:
“And you never had a mistress either?”
The old man with great determination uttered one word: making a dignified assent:
“Yes.”
“And this mistress was not with child when you turned her out?”
The old feeling of resentment, stifled twenty-five years ago—not really stifled but confined deep down in the lover’s heart—suddenly burst asunder the whole fabric of his religious belief, of his resigned devotion to his God, as well as his complete renunciation of worldly things: all that he had built up round it with so much care; and beside himself with rage, he shouted:
“I turned her out because she had deceived me and was with child by another, otherwise I would have killed her, sir, and you too.”
The young man hesitated, surprised at the sincerity of the curé’s outburst; he said in a gentler tone:
“And who told you the child was another’s?”
“She did, she herself, while defying me.”
Without questioning this statement, the vagabond said with the casual manner of a street-boy pronouncing judgment:
“Just so! Then Mamma made a mistake when she defied you, that is all there is to be said.”
Quickly regaining self-control after his sudden outburst, the Abbé began to question the boy:
“And who told you that you were my son?”
“She did when she was dying, your Reverence. … Besides, what about this!”
And he held the little photograph up to the priest.
The old man took it, and with anguish in his heart he spent some time comparing the unknown passerby with his old photograph—there could be no further doubt that the youth was indeed his son.
He was seized with a feeling of distress, an intensely painful, indefinable feeling like remorse for some old crime. He understood a little of what had happened, and guessed the rest, and again he saw the brutal scene of their parting. To save the life threatened by the man she had wronged, the woman—the deceitful, faithless female—had thrust this lie at him. … And the lie had succeeded. A son of his had been born, grown up, and turned into this sordid road tramp stinking of vice as a he-goat stinks of the beast.
He said in a low voice:
“Will you go for a short stroll with me so that we may clear the matter up?”
The other sneered:
“Will I? That is what I came for.”
They went off together, side by side, through the orchard. The sun had gone down and the keen freshness of the Southern twilight spread its invisible cooling cloak over the countryside. The Abbé shivered; raising his eyes to Heaven in the usual orthodox way, he saw all around him, trembling against the sky, the small grey leaves of the holy tree which had sheltered under its frail shadow the greatest of all suffering—the one and only moment of Christ’s weakness. A short prayer of desperation burst from him, spoken with that inner voice that never passes the lips, with which believers call upon the Saviour: “O God, help me.”
Then, turning towards his son:
“So then, your mother is dead?”
As he said the words: “Your mother is dead,” a new wave of grief swept through him, making his heart sink, a curious torment of the flesh unable to forget a cruel echo of the torture he had suffered; as she was dead, the most painful feeling of all seemed to be the faint stirring within him of that delirious, short-lived happiness which had left nothing behind it but the scar of remembrance.
The young man replied:
“Yes, your Reverence, my mother is dead.”
“Long ago?”
“Three years ago.”
Another doubt troubled the priest.
“Why did you not come sooner and look for
