The Dark Girl laughed aloud, revealing a gray mouthful of sharp, serrated teeth. "You ask me to prophesy? I am the Mother of Fantasies, the Mother of Faith, Hope, and the Church."
De Maillet stared, clutching his ebony cane to his chest. "You are Ignorance."
"I am," the Dark Girl said. "So ask of me no favors, you who have pursued and harried me throughout this world; you, who through your learned books and the example of your life, shall harry me still, even after your death. Ask questions of my daughters, if ask you must."
The Dark Girl gestured with her slate-gray hand, and three weird Sisters sprang up from the sand at de Maillet's feet.
"I am Faith," said the first of the Sisters. "I am she who enters the mind of man when his power to reason is exhausted, and he clings stubbornly to his own wishes and ambitions, and believes in them, for fear of madness otherwise. You have chased me from your own mind and, with your books, sometimes from the minds of others; but I will persist as long as there is ignorance and fear."
"Why do you cringe, then?" said de Maillet. "And why is your face so pale?"
"O savant, you have wounded me. In the new age that dawns, it will be possible to live without me, as you have lived. You and your brethren, with eyes that see everything and fear nothing, will make me a thing of catalogs and dissertations and claw me with harsh arguments and skeptical logics. That is why I tremble and cannot meet your eyes."
"What of my System, then, Spirit? Will it be revealed as truth?"
"You must believe that it will," said Faith, and seeped away into the sand.
The second Sister stepped before him. "I am Hope," she said accusingly, "and I, too, shall be wounded grievously. I shall no longer be the great, blind Hope of Salvation, but only trivial fragments of hope: for power, or riches, or earthly glory, or simply for an end to pain. This era to come will not be a time of great hopes, but of plans, predictions, theories, and hypotheses, when man will seize the reins of fate in his own hands, and have only himself to blame or credit. I shall not be totally destroyed; but you shall rob me of my glory."
"What of my System, then, Spirit? You whose eyes are fixed always on the future? Will my work persist?"
"You must hope that it will," she said, and vanished into the sand.
De Maillet faced the specter of the Church. "You should have been mine!" said the last of the Sisters, pointing at him with a bony arm lopped off clean at the wrist. Within her hooded veil, the crone's eyes were tightly shut. "If not one of my theologians, then mine to burn!"
"I never opposed you," said de Maillet. "Not openly."
"But your logics have chopped off my hands!" the Spirit wailed. "In the days to come, your successors will cry, 'Crush the infamous thing!' and make of me a mockery, a thing to be shunned by free-thinking men.
"Your heart was not mine, philosopher. It belonged to science and to worldly fame. Each time you despised and doubted the flames of hell, those flames guttered a little lower. As you have discovered His worldly machineries, you have withered the God of the Prophets to a watchmaker's God, a phantom mechanic. The demons that lurked in the wastes; the spirits of woods and dells; the legions of ghosts and angels, all, all will shrivel in the pitiless light!
"No more will I gather the souls of believers for rapture and punishment. When the great Change is through, there will be no souls. Men will stand revealed as cunning animals, born from the loins of apes. Their sharpened minds will cut all my fine fictions into pieces." Weeping, the Church turned her back on the philosopher.
De Maillet leaned on his cane. "You should not have concealed the truth," he said.
"The Truth!" cried Ignorance. "O mortal, the truth exists in the minds of men. It is you who have brought this great Change upon the world. The round and cozy firmament was too small for your ambitions. No, you would have stars in Newton's orbits, and whole universes reeling to your laws! Every law and datum wrenched from the great Mystery enfeebles God, to put man in His place! I see my fate is written on your brow. The day will come, in stark futurity, when the mind of man will encompass all, and his omniscience will utterly destroy me. So know my hatred!"
From the depths of the sea, a wall of turgid water roared upon the land and struck de Maillet down. His stick was knocked from his grasp and his nostrils were filled with the smell of muck. As he floundered in the dark water, blinded, he seized a smooth and rounded pebble from the beach. He lurched splashing to his feet.
His spectacles were gone. He looked around wildly for the apparition of the Dark Girl. "This!" he shouted, shaking the pebble in his clenched fist. "This will defeat you, Dark Spirit! This is the evidence; I put my Faith and Hope in that, and in myself...."
A dull roaring came from out to sea. Dimly, de Maillet saw the waves receding, and a vast wall surging toward the land, bright with lightnings. The storm burst upon him with appalling speed, crackling, rumbling, and roaring, with a sound like the walls of Heaven itself, crumbling under siege.
Gasping, stumbling, clutching his pebble to his pounding heart, Benoit de Maillet fled into the ultimate darkness. A pure and searing light beat down on the old man's eyelids. Groaning, de Maillet opened his eyes upon a brilliant summer dawn.
Suddenly the face of his servant Torquetil was thrust before his own. De Maillet seized the shoulder of the young man's livery coat. "Torquetil!"
"Huzza!" cried Torquetil, pulling loose and leaping into the air in joy. "He stirs, he lives! My master speaks to me!"
A hoarse, ragged cheer broke out. De Maillet, dizzily, sat up. A motley collection of house servants, fisherfolk, and townsmen had gathered around him, some of them clutching burned-out torches. "We have searched for you all night," said Torquetil. "I brought the carriage as soon as the weather turned bad, but you had gone!"
"Help me up," de Maillet said. The young Breton put his shoulder under de Maillet's arm and hoisted him to his feet. "Monsieur's clothes are drenched," Torquetil said.
Blinking myopically, de Maillet stared at the pebble he held in his hand.
"It was the young gentleman here who first thought of looking among the Lovers' Rocks," said
Torquetil, gesturing politely at the confident well-dressed figure of Jean Martine the Younger.
"It was nothing," the young merchant said, stepping closer. "After we, ah, parted, I felt some concern for Your Excellency. The weather turned foul quite suddenly, and I thought Your Excellency might have sought shelter here." He smiled patronizingly at de Maillet, obviously pleased at his own ingenuity in tracking down an eccentric dotard. "The rocks were very high; in the wind and darkness my servants lost their way. I do hope Your Excellency is not injured."
"I've lost my spectacles," de Maillet said. "Torquetil, do you have my spare ones?"
"Of course, monsieur." He produced them. De Maillet hurriedly pinched them on and studied the wave-smoothed pebble. "Remarkable," he said. "Remarkable! Have I played by the shore of this great ocean so long, to have no more than this? Still, I have this. I do. This, at least, is mine."
Torquetil glanced pleadingly at Jean Martine; the merchant stifled a smile. "We must get Your Excellency into some dry clothes," he said. "My carriage is on the road, not far from here. It is at your service."
"Come along, monsieur," said Torquetil with exaggerated gentleness. He lowered his voice. "It is not well that the common folk should see you like this."
There was a sudden bustle at the back of the small crowd, and three ragged children burst forth. "We found it, we found it!" they cried. One of them carried de Maillet's ebony cane.