"How, then?" I whispered.
He got up from his chair and laid one hand on my arm in a fatherly fashion.
"I do not consider he will require the constant supervision demanded by most students. It will be a question of providing guidelines and stimulation. This case is a challenge, madame, a test of my professional ingenuity. You may rest assured that I shall establish a means of study entirely appropriate to the rather singular circumstances in which we find ourselves."
I felt tears of gratitude welling up into my eyes and turned away hastily before they could fall.
"You are very kind," I murmured.
"My dear lady," he sighed, "I am not kind… I am fascinated."
It was as well that I had been left in comfortable circumstances at Charles's death, for otherwise the cost of Erik's unique education would have pauperized us. I was obliged to lease my father's house in Rouen in order to provide him with the tools of his study, but I did not begrudge him the only happiness I was capable of giving. Father Mansart lined every room in the house with bookshelves and month after month the obscure and weighty tomes—some of them rare editions—continued to arrive from Paris, accompanied by instructions and lecture notes from the professor. He came himself, at regular intervals, to spend the entire day closeted with his eager pupil.
"One day," he told me, with barely concealed excitement, "this boy will astonish the world."
When he spoke of the Grand Prix de Rome and of his determination that Erik should be the youngest ever entered for that coveted prize, I made no comment. Nor did I correct the child when he spoke of the five years he expected to spend studying architecture at the Villa Medici, as a pensionnaire of the French Academy. Neither I nor the professor was prepared to admit to ourselves that castles in the air were the only things Erik would ever be given the opportunity to build. Like two ostriches we buried our heads in the sand and refused to look on the ugliness of reality.
I dared not think of the life which lay ahead of Erik beyond the protection of my door, in a world whose sole purpose would be to mock his grotesque appearance. I dared not begin to anticipate the future.
But I could not deny him his dreams.
Even then I was aware that dreams were all he could ever have.
A few months after he had begun to study architecture with Professor Guizot, Erik asked me for a mirror.
I was taken so completely by surprise that I
did not know what to say to him. My first instinct was to refuse, but since my instincts where he was concerned were usually wrong, I decided to yield to his bizarre request. Fetching a small hand mirror from the drawer in my room where I was careful to keep it hidden, I gave it to him with uneasy reluctance. He never spoke about "the face," but since I was still regularly awakened by a single scream of terror from his room, I assumed the memory still troubled him.
He took the mirror from me with exaggerated care, as though it were a poisonous snake that might bite, and turned it hastily facedown upon the table. He was panting a little, as though he had been running hard, and I sensed such fear in him that I was sorely tempted to snatch the mirror away. But I resisted the urge and waited.
"If I took off the back," he began hesitantly, "Would I still be able to see…
things
?"
"No," I said steadily, "the reverse surface of a mirror reflects no image. You will see nothing at all."
His sigh of relief was painfully and unmistakably audible.
"It has a safe side, then," he muttered to himself. "That's good." He glanced up at me uncertainly. "May I look inside, Mama?"
"If you wish."
I watched him remove the backing from the mirror with dexterous fingers and prize up a loose corner of the tin foil.
"It's only glass underneath!" he cried, in astonishment. "It's only glass and a piece of tin! How could the face get inside?"
I felt cold with misery as he looked up at me. All that brilliance, all that learning, and still the simple truth of this eluded him.
"The face was not inside, Erik, it was outside. A mirror merely reflects an image of any object that is placed in front of it."
"Then how are the images changed into monsters?" he demanded seriously. "Is it magic? Will you show me how it works?"
I felt sobs massing in my throat, and as I took up the mirror and looked into it, I was aware of him straining to see over my shoulder.
"Oh! It's not working!" he exclaimed with disgusted disappointment. "There's nothing there, it must be broken."
I altered the angle of the mirror so that my image swam abruptly into his view and he gave a cry of delight.
"Look!" he shouted in great excitement. "There's two of you! The magic has changed."
"Erik… there is no magic. Whenever anyone looks into a mirror they see a reflection of themselves… nothing else but themselves. A mirror has no power to show a monster unless that monster stands before it."
"But I saw one!" he insisted angrily. "I
saw
one!"
I laid the mirror face downward on the table in front of him.
"Yes," I said gently, "I know what you saw."
I left him alone then and went into the adjoining room to wait for the first scream of understanding; but it did not come. When I looked in, I saw that he was playing with the mirror, holding it carefully at an angle which did not show him his face. Presently I heard him go upstairs and when I went to retrieve the mirror from the table, I found it gone.
He came down to supper, seeming perfectly calm, and asked if he might have the mirror to keep. Surprised and relieved, I agreed to his request without question, hoping that the trauma of acceptance was now behind us.
But next day, I found the mirror broken into half a dozen pieces, each one laid carefully facedown on the chest of drawers in his room. When 1 asked indignantly why he had done this, he explained patiently that it made better magic that way. And he proceeded to prop the pieces of glass above a drawing at angles which produced a strange, distorted maze of reflections.
"You see, Mama, you were wrong about mirrors," he said triumphantly. "You can make all sorts of magic with them. I wonder what they would show if I bent them? Do you think they would go soft enough to bend if I put them in the fire?"
"I've no idea!" I said with horror. "And don't you even think of trying such a silly trick! All you will succeed in doing is burning yourself. Erik… Erik, are you listening to me?"
"Yes, Mama," he said innocently. But he did not look at me as he said it, and I was immediately suspicious of such easy acquiescence. He did not normally give in so easily.
I would have taken the pieces of glass away from him on the spot, but I hesitated to provoke one of his terrible rages, which would only end in a savage beating. Perhaps I should be glad that he had overcome his irrational terror of such a simple everyday object. And if he burned himself… well, he would not do it again.
I decided to leave well enough alone.
"Madeleine."
Marie came into the kitchen, and as she closed the door behind her with a furtive gesture, I became aware that her earnest face was creased with anxiety.
"I think you should know," she continued uneasily, "that Erik has asked me to buy him some glass and tin… and a glass cutter. He gave me this and begged me not to tell you."
She held out her palm to display a hundred francs and I frowned.
"So that's where the money went… I had my suspicions. What did you say to him?"
She sighed. "Well, of course I knew the money couldn't possibly be his. I told him it was wrong to steal… and— and he just looked at me as though he didn't understand a word I was saying."
I nodded grimly. "He understands only what he wishes to understand. All he cares for at the moment is satisfying this morbid obsession with illusion and magic. And he knows how much it angers me—I told him last week he could not have that glass."
"What on earth does he want it for?"
"He wants to make mirrors—can you believe it? Magic mirrors that will show him only what he wants to see. For hundreds of years the Venetians kept the secret of their craft from the rest of the world and now this child—this
crazy
child—thinks he can start making mirrors in an attic bedroom. Thank God I never told him about the mercury or he would have demanded that, too, I suppose! What in God's name makes him behave like this?"
Marie laid the money on the table and looked at me thoughtfully.
"I think you must let him have this glass which is so very important to him," she said after a moment.
"Oh, really!" I retorted coldly. "Perhaps you think he should have the mercury, too, so that he can poison us all when the fancy takes him."
She shrugged uneasily. "Madeleine, if you don't give that glass to him he will simply find a way of taking it for himself. Do you want him to start breaking your windows?"
I stared at her in horror. "You think he is capable of such wickedness?"
She shook her head slowly.
"I don't think he would consider it wickedness, Madeleine—simply the next logical step toward his objective."
"The end justifies the means…" I said softly, looking inward. "That is the teaching of the devil."
She was silent, looking at the floor, and I knew that in her heart she was forced to agree.
At the end of the week, when I presented him with the glass and tin foil, I had to turn away from his cry of delight. He disappeared to his room for the rest of the day and that evening I found him rigid with fury at his failure.
"There must be a better way," he muttered, "I shall ask Professor Guizot when he comes tomorrow."
"Mirrors?" echoed the professor vaguely as Erik pounced on him at the front door next day. "Well, of course, we've always used tin and mercury for the backing up till now."
"Mercury!" I saw Erik stiffen with annoyance. "I didn't know about the mercury!"
"It hardly signifies," continued the professor jovially. "No one will be using that laborious old method much longer. I believe a new process called silvering has recently been discovered in Germany."
"Germany," Erik repeated solemnly. "How far away is that… ?"
The dining-room door closed behind them and I heard no more.
From that point I made it my business to keep Erik supplied with any material he asked for, no matter how bizarre the request might seem. Glass, metal, nuts and bolts and springs… they were toys that I no longer denied him, for the simple reason that I dared not.
I was beginning to understand the danger of attempting to block the natural outlet of an active volcano.
I was also beginning to understand Father Mansart's urgent concern for Erik's soul
Ever since he was old enough to walk, I had taken the precaution of locking Erik in his room at night, partly for his protection, but chiefly for my own peace of mind. He was eight when I made the unwelcome discovery that barred windows and a locked door were no longer sufficient to contain his captive imagination.
Father Mansart came to me one morning in considerable anxiety, telling me that there was great unrest in the village and that I must take more care to keep Erik inside at night.
"I don't understand you." I frowned. "You know quite well that he is never permitted to go beyond the garden."
The priest shook his head. "Madeleine, he has been seen by more than one person in the church grounds. And last night several witnesses insist they heard the organ playing at midnight."
"But that's not possible, Father," I protested. "I myself locked him in his room at eight o'clock."
"Did you leave the key in the door?"
"Yes. But that is exactly where I found it this morning. Even if he had contrived to push the key from the lock and slide it underneath the door, he could hardly have locked himself in there again once more."
"I fear that with Erik all things are possible," said the priest gravely. "I think I had better talk to him."
To my intense dismay Erik made no attempt to deny his escape; he admitted it quite freely and only bowed his head when Father Mansart rebuked him for the sin of deceit.
"I wasn't doing any harm," he protested, looking at me anxiously, as though he expected me to beat him in front of the priest.
"Then what exactly were you doing?" I shouted.
"There are foxes in the forest," he said quietly. "I like to watch their cubs playing in the moonlight. Last spring they—"
He stopped, aghast at my expression. I could not believe that he had been roaming as far as the Foret de Roumare for a year or more without my knowledge. I saw very clearly then what had happened, how his gradually mounting confidence had persuaded him to venture deeper and deeper into the village, where the beautiful Romanesque church pulled like a lodestar.
"How do you get out of your room?" I demanded.
"Oh, that's easy," he admitted. "I just unscrew the bars on the window and jump into the tree outside."
I closed my eyes in horror. His room was at least twenty feet above the ground and the tree he referred to was far enough away from the window to make that jump positively suicidal to anything but a cat. I didn't bother to ask how he managed to get back in… no doubt it was by a method equally lunatic.
"You stupid boy! You could have been killed!"
He looked at the floor. "Everything is so beautiful at night and no one sees me," he murmured.
"Well, last night you were not only seen, you were heard!" I snapped. "By now the entire village must know you were playing the organ in the church."
"Oh!" he said miserably. "I thought if anyone heard they would think it was a ghost."
"Erik," said Father Mansart, intervening hastily as he saw me clench my fists, "what you have been doing is very foolish and puts both you and your mother at risk. It must not occur again. If you continue to alarm the village in this fashion there may be unpleasant… reprisals."
Erik made an instinctive movement toward me and then froze.
"You understand what I mean by reprisals, don't you, my child?"