Читать книгу The Complete Works of Emile Zola - Emile Zola - Страница 158

MONSIEUR DE VIARGUE was dead. The truth had been concealed from William in order that the sad news might he broken gently.

Long after, the circumstances connected with this poor man’s death would make the servants of La Noiraude shudder. The day before, the count had shut himself up as usual in his laboratory. As she did not see him come down at night, Geneviève seemed surprised; but he sometimes worked late, and took some food up with him, so the old woman did not disturb him for dinner. That evening, however, she felt a presentiment of something wrong; the window of the laboratory, which usually shone over the country, like one of the red mouths of the infernal regions, remained in darkness the whole night.

Next day, Geneviève, feeling very uneasy, went and listened at the door. She could hear nothing, not a sound, not a breath. Alarmed at this silence, she shouted out, but there was no reply. She noticed then that the door was simply closed; this detail terrified her, for the count always double locked it when he went in. She entered. In the middle of the room, Monsieur de Viargue was lying dead on his back, his legs all stiff, his arms apart and convulsed; the grinning head, disfigured with livid spots, was thrown back, exposing the neck which was covered also with long yellow marks. In the fall, the skull had knocked against the floor; a little stream of blood was trickling on and forming a tiny pool right under the stove. The death-straggle hardly seemed to have lasted more than a few seconds.

At the sight of the dead body, Geneviève fell back with a shriek. She leaned against the wall and mumbled a short prayer. What terrified her most, were the marks on the face and the neck which looked like contusions; the devil had strangled her master at last, the imprint of his fingers clearly proved it. She had long been expecting this event; when she had seen the count shut himself up, she had murmured: “He is going again to invoke the Accursed One: Satan will be even with him; one of these nights, he will take him by the throat and so have his soul at once.” Her prediction was being realised, and she shuddered as she thought of the terrible struggle which must have brought about the death of the heretic. Her ardent imagination pictured the devil to her eyes, hairy and black, seizing his victim by the throat, tearing out his soul and then disappearing up the chimney.

The shriek she had uttered brought the servants. These domestics whom Monsieur de Viargue had carefully chosen from the most illiterate in the country, were convinced, like Geneviève, that their master had died in a conflict with the demon. They carried him down and laid him on a bed, with shudders of terror, as they trembled to see some unclean animal come forth from the black, open mouth of the corpse. It was firmly believed, for miles round, that the count was a sorcerer, and that the devil had carried him off. The doctor who came to inquire into the cause of death, explained it otherwise; he could see by the appearance of the livid spots which disfigured the skin, that it was a case of poisoning, and his curiosity as a medical man was singularly piqued by the strange nature of these yellow marks, the presence of which the action of no known poison could explain: he thought rightly that the old chemist must have poisoned himself by the aid of some new agent discovered by him during the course of his long researches. This doctor was a prudent man; he made a sketch of the marks from his love for science, and kept the secret of this violent death to himself. He attributed the decease to an attack of apoplexy, wishing by this to avoid the scandal there must have been, had any mention of Monsieur de Viargue’s suicide been made. There is always an interested respect for the memory of the rich and the influential.

William arrived an hour before the funeral. His grief was great. The count had always treated him with coldness, and when he lost him, he could not feel that the snapping of the bonds of an affection which had never been very close could tear his heart; but the poor fellow was then in such a feverish state of mind that he wept bitterly. After the restless and painful days which he had just spent with Madeleine, the least sorrow would melt him to tears. Perhaps two months before, he would not have even sobbed.

On the return from the funeral, Geneviève took him up to her room. There, with the cruel calmness of her fanaticism, she told him that she had been guilty of sacrilege, in allowing his father to be buried in consecrated ground. Unfeelingly, she related to him, after her fashion, the story of that death which she attributed to the devil. Perhaps she would not have given these details over the hardly closed grave of the count, had she not wished to draw a moral from them; she adjured the young man, and solemnly implored him to swear that he would never form a compact with hell. William swore to everything she asked. He listened to her with a stupefied look, crushed by his grief, unable to understand why she spoke of Satan, and feeling himself going mad at the tale, uttered in her shrill voice, of his father’s struggle with the devil. He listened quietly to what she said about the spots on the face and neck of the dead body, but he became quite pale, not daring yet to accept the thought which presented itself to his mind.

He was informed, just at this moment, that somebody wished to speak to him. In the hall, William found the doctor, who had investigated the cause of death. Then, this man, after beating about the bush for a long time, told him the horrible truth; be added, that if he had allowed himself to conceal it from the public, he had thought it his duty to declare everything to the deceased’s son. The young man, chilled by such a confidence, thanked him for his concealment of the facts. He was not weeping now, he was looking before him with a fixed and gloomy gaze; it seemed to him that an unfathomable abyss was opening at his feet.

He was going away staggering like one drunk, when the doctor held him back. This man had not come simply, as he said, to inform him of the real truth. Impelled by an irresistible wish to penetrate into the count’s laboratory, he had seen that a better opportunity would never occur: the son was to show him into that sanctuary, the door of which had always been closed to him by the father, during his lifetime.

“Excuse me,” he said to William, “if I mention these matters to you at a moment like this. But I am afraid that tomorrow it will be too late to investigate certain details. The marks which I noticed on Monsieur de Viargue, were of such a peculiar nature, that I am totally ignorant of the poison which could have produced them — I beg you to be kind enough to allow me to visit the room in which the corpse was found; that will enable me, no doubt, to give you more precise information.”

William asked for the key of the laboratory, and went up with the doctor. Had he been asked, he would have taken him anywhere, to the stables, to the cellars, without manifesting the least surprise, without knowing even what he was doing.

But, when he entered the laboratory, the look of this room astonished him so, that the shock roused him from his stupor. The big chamber was so strangely altered, that be hardly knew it again. When he had been in it before, about three years ago, the day that his father had forbidden him all work and all connection with science, it was in a perfect state of order and cleanliness: the tiles in the stove shone bright; the copper and glass-work of the apparatus reflected the clear light from the big window; the shelves that ran round the walls were covered with bottles, phials, and receivers of every description: on the middle of the table had stood piles of huge books, all open, and bundles of manuscripts. He still remembered the impression of reverential surprise produced on him by the sight of this study-workshop, littered methodically, so to speak, with quite a multitude of objects. There reposed the fruits of a long life of labour, the precious secrets of a philosopher who had questioned nature for more than half a century, never wishing to confide to anyone the results of his ardent curiosity.

As William penetrated into the laboratory, he expected to find again, in their place, the apparatus and the shelves, the books and the manuscripts. He entered into a veritable ruin. A storm seemed to have passed through the room, soiling and breaking everything; the stove, black with smoke, looked as if it had not been lit for months, and the heap of cold ashes which filled it had partly fallen out on to the floor: the copper of the apparatus was all bent, the glass broken: the phials and bottles on the shelves shivered into a thousand bits, lay piled in a comer, like those heaps of broken crockery one sees in slums; the shelves themselves were hanging down, as if they had been torn from their supports by some furious hand: as for the books and manuscripts, they were strewn, tom and half burnt, in another corner. And this wreck was not of yesterday; the laboratory seemed to have been devastated for a considerable time; huge spider-webs hung from the ceiling, and a thick layer of dust covered the rubbish that lay scattered everywhere.

At the sight of such destruction, William felt an oppression at his heart. He thought he could account for it. His father had formerly spoken to him of science with secret jealousy and bitter irony. He must have looked on it as a lewd and cruel mistress sapping his life-blood with her charms: and so, from tenderness for her, and disdain for the world, he would have no one take her after him. And the young man drew a sad picture of the day when the old philosopher, seized with rage, had wrecked his laboratory. He could see him kicking the apparatus against the walls, smashing the phials on the floor, wrenching down the shelves, and tearing and burning his manuscripts. An hour, a few minutes perhaps, had been enough to destroy the researches of a lifetime. Then, when not one of his discoveries, not one of his observations remained, when he had found himself standing alone in the midst of his laboratory in ruins, he must have sat down and wiped his face with a terrible smile.

What horrified William above everything, was the thought of the frightful days which the man had passed afterwards, buried in this room, this tomb where slept his life, his toils, his loves. For months, he had shut himself up here as before, touching nothing, walking up and down, lost in the nothingness that he thought he had found. He would crush beneath his feet the fragments of his beloved instruments, he would kick away disdainfully the scraps of his manuscripts, the broken pieces of the phials that still contained a few atoms of the substances that he had analysed or discovered: or he would finish the work of destruction, upsetting a vessel still full, or giving a last stamp to an apparatus. What thoughts of supreme disdain, what bitter jeers, what a longing for death must have risen to his powerful mind, during the long hours that he spent in idleness musing on the self-made ruins of his labour!

Nothing remained. As William went round the room, he noticed at last, however, an object which his father’s hand had spared; it was a sort of cupboard fastened in the wall, a little bookcase with glass doors containing small bottles full of liquids of different colours. The count, who had taken great interest in toxicology, had kept there certain violent poisons still unknown, and discovered by himself. The little bookshelf had come from a sitting-room on the ground-floor where William remembered to have seen it in his childhood; it was of foreign wood, ornamented at the corners with brass, and very chastely inlaid at the sides. This costly bit of furniture, of rich and wonderful workmanship, would not have disfigured a pretty woman’s boudoir. The count had dipped his finger in the ink and written the word “Poisons” on each pane, in big black letters.

William was deeply touched at his father’s cruel irony in preserving from all harm this cupboard and its contents. The whole life, the whole range of knowledge of the count was concentrated there, in a few phials of new poisons. He had destroyed his other discoveries, those which might have been useful, and out of his vast researches, out of the labours of his powerful mind, had bequeathed to humanity merely a few agents of suffering and death. This hit at learning, this sinister mockery, this disdain for mankind, this last avowal of sorrow, showed clearly what the death-agony of this man must have been, who after fifty years of study seemed to have found in his retorts nothing but the few drops of the drug with which he had poisoned himself.

William fell back to the door. Fright and disgust were driving him out. This filthy room, full of nameless rubbish, with its spider webs and its thick dust, exhaled a fetid odour which almost made him sick. The dirty heaps of broken bottles and old papers lying in the corners, seemed to him the filth of that science from which the count had estranged him, and which he seemed to have scornfully swept aside before dying, as one puts to the door a vile creature that one loves, with a contempt still full of longing desires. And as he opened the door of this poison cupboard, he fancied he could hear the pained laugh of the old chemist as he meditated for months on his suicide. Then, in the middle of the laboratory, he shuddered as he saw the narrow streak of blood which had come from his father’s skull and trickled right under the stove. He could see too that this blood was beginning to clot.

Meantime the doctor was rummaging about. The moment he had crossed the threshold, he had understood all, and he had become really angry.

“What a man! what a man,” he murmured. “He has destroyed everything, broken everything — Oh! if I had been there, I would have chained him up as a furious madman.” —

And turning towards William he went on:

“Your father was a very clever man. He must have made some wonderful discoveries. And see what he has left. It is madness, sheer madness — Can you understand it? A scholar who might have been a member of the Institute and yet preferred to keep to himself the result of his labours! Still, if I unearth one of his manuscripts, I will publish it, and it will be an honour both to him and myself.”

He went and groped about among the heap of papers, regardless of the dust; but he soon began to moan:

“Nothing, not a single whole page. I never saw such a madman.”

When he had visited the pile of papers, he passed on to the heap of broken bottles, and there continued to moan and cry out. He put his nose to the broken necks of the phials, sniffing, trying to discover the chemist’s secrets.

At last he came back to the middle of the room, furious at not having been able to learn anything. It was then that he noticed the cupboard containing the poisons. He rushed towards it with a shout of joy. But the key was not in the lock, and he had to be content with examining the phials through the panes.

“Sir,” he said seriously, addressing himself to William, “I beg you as a favour to allow me to analyse these substances.

I address this request to you in the name of science, in the name too of the memory of Monsieur de Viargue.”

The young man shook his head, and pointing to the rubbish which strewed the floor, he replied:

“You see, my father has wished to leave no trace of his labours. Those phials shall remain there.”

The doctor insisted, but he could not break his resolution. He began to walk round the laboratory again, more exasperated than ever. When he came to the streak of blood, he stopped and asked if this blood was Monsieur de Viargue’s.

When William replied in the affirmative, his face seemed to brighten. He bent down by the pool which had formed under the stove; then, with the tips of his nails, he tried, with delicate care, to detach a clot already almost dry. He hoped to be able, by submitting this blood to a minute analysis, to discover what poisonous agent the count had used.

When William understood for what object he was doing this, he advanced towards him with quivering lips, and, taking him by the arm, said to him in a peremptory tone:

“Come, sir, you can see very well that the place is stifling me — We must not disturb the peace of the dead. Let that blood alone. I insist on it.”

The doctor left the clot with very bad grace. Urged on by the young man, he went out under protest. William, who had waited for him a moment with feverish impatience, breathed at last when he was in the passage. He shut the door of the laboratory, quite disposed to keep the oath which he had taken to his father never to set foot in it.

When he got downstairs, he found in the drawingroom on the ground-floor a magistrate from Véteuil. This gentleman explained to him, in a courteous tone, however, that he had come to put the seals on the deceased’s papers, in case a legal will could not be shown him. He even had the delicacy to give the young man to understand that he was aware of the bond of relationship between him and the deceased, of his title of adoptive son, and to say that he did not doubt the existence of a will entirely in his favour. He ended his little speech with a gracious smile: this will would certainly be found in some drawer, but law was law, it might contain legacies of a private nature, and everybody must wait and see. William put a stop to his talk by showing him a will which left him sole legatee. The count had had to wait for his son’s majority in order to be able to. adopt him and transmit to him his name; and as the adoption entailed the necessity of making his will, he had been allowed to treat his natural son as a legitimate child. The magistrate was full of excuses; he repeated that law was law, and withdrew, giving, with many bows, the name of Monsieur de Viargue to him whom a few minutes before he had addressed thoughtlessly as Monsieur William, though he must have known of the right which he had to assume the title of his adoptive father.

During the next few days, William was overwhelmed with duties. Not an hour was his own to think of his new position. On all sides, he was pestered with condolences, applications, and offers of service. At last he shut himself up in his room, requesting Geneviève to reply to the host of people who were importuning him. He left the management of his affairs entirely to her. The count, in his will, had left the old woman an income which would have permitted her to end her days in peace. But she was almost angry, refusing the money, saying that she would die on her legs and that she did not intend to give up her work. Really, the young man was very pleased to find some one who would relieve him of the material cares of life. His indolent and feeble disposition detested activity: the smallest annoyances of existence were for him big obstacles of vexation and disgust.

When at last he could find solitude, he was seized with sadness. His feverishness no longer buoyed him up, and he felt himself crushed by gloomy dejection. He had been able to forget for a few days the suicide of his father; now he thought of it again: he saw once more, in his ever-present thoughts, the laboratory wrecked and stained with blood, and the implacable remembrance of this sinister room brought with it, one by one, the cruel memories of his life. This recent drama seemed to him to be fatally connected with the long series of miseries which had already tortured him. He remembered with anguish his chance birth, his excited anti terrified childhood, his boyhood of martyrdom, and his whole existence doomed to sorrow. And then his father must go and add to all this the horror of his violent death and the irony of his negations! The weight of all these sad circumstances pressing on the gentleness of this tender nature, was crushing its finer feelings and dismaying it in its need for affection and peace. William was stifling in this atmosphere heavy with sorrow which he had been breathing from the cradle; he was shrinking into himself, he was becoming more nervous, and more averse to action as events were bent on destroying his happiness. At last he looked upon himself as the victim of fate, and would have purchased the mournful tranquillity of forgetfulness at the price of any sacrifice. When he saw himself the possessor of a fortune, when he had to begin to play his part as a man, his hesitations and fears increased still more, for he knew nothing of the world, and he trembled before the future as he asked himself what new sorrows were awaiting him. During his hours of meditation, he felt a vague presentiment that his ways of life, the circumstances and surroundings in which he had grown up, were going to thrust him to the bottom of some gulf, the moment he ventured to take a step.

He thought himself very wretched, and this redoubled his love for Madeleine, and he began to think of her with a sort of religious devotion. She alone, he thought, knew his worth and loved him according to his deserts. Yet if he had examined himself more closely, he would have found within him a secret dread of that intimacy with a woman of whose past he was ignorant; he would have told himself that this again was one of the fatalities of his existence, one of the consequences of the circumstances which were influencing his life. Perhaps he would have even recoiled had he called to mind the history of his own mother. But he felt such a need of being loved, that he rushed blindly into the passion for the only being who had yet given him a few months of tenderness and peace. He wrote long letters to Madeleine every day, bewailing his loneliness and assuring her that their separation would soon cease. One moment, he resolved to go again and shut himself up with his mistress in the little house in Rue de Boulogne: then he bethought himself of the miserable days they had spent there, and he was afraid of never again finding their by-gone happiness. Next day, he wrote to the young woman begging her to come at once and join him at Véteuil.

Madeleine was delighted at this arrangement. She too dreaded the solitude of their little house, filled as it was with James’s memory. During the fortnight that she had been living there alone, she had been wretched. The very first night, she had hidden the portrait of the man whose memory never left her; for by keeping it constantly in sight in her bedroom, now that she was free, she would have thought each night that she was surrendering herself to a phantom. She even felt angry sometimes with William for leaving her like that in a house inhabited by her former lover. It was with unfeigned joy that she shut the door of the little house, for it seemed as if she was imprisoning James’s spectre within its walls.

William was waiting for her at Mantes. He led her a little way from the station to explain to her the plans of their new life. She was to appear as if she had come to make a short stay in the country, and he would pretend to let her the summer residence situated at the extremity of the park; there, he would come to see her whenever she wished. Madeleine shook her head; the idea of living yet with her lover was repugnant to her, and she tried to think of good reasons for refusing the hospitality which he was offering her. At last she told him that they would not be so free by both living almost in the same house, that this would give rise to gossip and that it would be better a thousand times to let her go into some little house near La Noiraude. The young man perceived the wisdom of these reflections, as he thought of the scandal produced in the country in former days by the intimacy of the count with the notary’s wife. It was decided then between them that he was to return by himself in the carriage that had brought him, and that she was to take the coach so as to arrive at Véteuil as a stranger. Directly she had taken a house, she would let William know.

Madeleine had the good fortune to find what she was looking for immediately. The proprietor of the hotel where she put up, had a sort of farm about a mile from La Noiraude; he had had a plain house built there, and he was very sorry for it now, for he hardly ever lived there and he regretted the money that it had cost him. When the young woman, on the night of her arrival, spoke of her wish to stay in the district, provided she could find in the neighbourhood of the town a house that suited her, he offered to let her his. The next morning, he got her to visit it. It was a one-storied summer residence with four rooms; the rains of the preceding winter had hardly discoloured the white walls, against which were fastened the grey window shutters; the red tiles of the roof appeared quite gay among the trees; a quickset hedge surrounded the few yards of private garden; and a little way off, at about a stone’s throw, was the farm, a collection of long black buildings, where she could hear the crowing of cocks and the bleating of sheep. Madeleine was delighted with her find, the more so that the house was let furnished, which allowed her to take possession of it at once. She rented it on the terms of five hundred francs for the six summer months, calculating that she would still have enough to pay for her daily expenses herself. That night, she was settled in her new home. She hummed a tune as she emptied her trunks, and she felt inclined to laugh and skip like a child. Since she had seen the little house with the red roof and grey shutters, white and smiling among the green leaves, she had kept saying to herself: “I feel that I shall he happy here in this secluded nook.”

About nine o’clock, she had a visit from William to whom she had written in the morning. She did the honours of her house with a sort of joyous playfulness, taking him into every corner, not even forgetting a cupboard. She even wanted him to visit the garden, although the night was very dark. “There,” she said with a look of pride, “there, I have strawberries; there, violets; here, I think I saw radishes.” William could distinguish nothing; but, in the shadow, he had his arm round Madeleine’s waist, he was kissing her bare arms, and laughing at her smiles. When they got to the end of the garden the young woman went on in a grave tone: “Just here, I saw a big gap in the hedge; this is the way you must come in everyday, sir, so as not to compromise me.” Then she insisted on the young man trying to see if he could get through the gap. It was long since the lovers had enjoyed such a pleasant time together.

Madeleine had not been mistaken; her life in this secluded spot was to be a happy one. It seemed as if a new love was filling her heart, a school girl’s open smiling love. James’s portrait was forgotten in the house in the Rue de Boulogne, where she had shut it up with all the painful memories of the years that were dead. At times, she would fancy that she had hardly left the boarding school, so joyous and free from anxiety did she feel. What charmed her most, was the thought of being at last in a home of her own; she would say: “My house, my room,” with childish glee; she did the housekeeping, calculated the cost of the dishes that she ate, and became quite concerned if the price of eggs and butter went up. William had never made her so happy as on the days when he accepted her invitations to dinner; on these days, she forbade him to bring even fruit from La Noiraude, she wanted to take all the expense on herself, and she felt a delight at being able to give now in her turn instead of receiving. Henceforth she could love William on equal terms, for her affection was free; the shame in the idea that she was a kept woman could no longer shock the pride of her nature, and her heart expanded, without any relapse, at the sudden thought of her situation. When William came, she would throw her arms round his neck, while her smile, her look, and her unconstraint would say, “It is a free surrender of myself, there is no selling now.”

Here was the explanation of the new affection of the lovers. William was surprised and delighted at thus finding in Madeleine a phase of her character which he had not known before. Hitherto she had been his mistress; now she had become his sweetheart. That is to say, that hitherto he had loved her at his own house, now he went to pay her his addresses at hers. This difference was the key-stone of their happiness. Unconsciously, he was less free in the little cottage at Véteuil than he had been in the house in the Rue de Boulogne; he no longer felt himself master of the house and he was more grateful for the kisses which Madeleine allowed him to take. There was less coarseness in their intimacy; he experienced a sort of delicious restraint which redoubled his pleasures by giving them a new and delicate charm. His mind, prone to respectful love, enjoyed with exquisite relish the delicate touches of their new situation. There was a sensation of pleasure in visiting a woman as the lover of her choice; and he found in this house an unknown perfume of elegance and grace, and a genial warmth which was wanting at La Noiraude. Then he had to go there stealthily, for fear of malicious tongues; he went across country, tramping through ploughed fields, getting his feet wet in the dew on the grass, as happy as a truant scholar; when he thought somebody was looking at him, he would pretend to be gathering herbs, stooping down for flowers and grasses; then he would walk on again, looking round anxiously and breathless, happy already in the thought of his coming joys; and when he got to the garden, when he had crept like a burglar through the hole in the hawthorn hedge, he would throw his posy of wild flowers into Madeleine’s skirt who was waiting for him to take him straight to the house, where she would present him at last her lips and cheeks, far from prying eyes. This little adventure, this walk, and the kiss of welcome became more charming to him every day. Had he been more free, he would perhaps have tired of it sooner.

And when they had shut the door, William would take a singular delight in telling himself that his happiness was unknown to everybody. He looked on each visit as a charming adventure, as an appointed meeting with a staid maiden. He was completely forgetting the months they had spent in the Rue de Boulogne. Besides, Madeleine was a different woman; she no longer had her fits of dreaming, she was bright and lively, and still she loved him; she loved him secretly, like a lady with a character to think of; she received him in her bedroom with sudden blushes, in that bedroom where he simply paid his visits now, and where the peculiar fragrance caused him at each visit a deep-felt emotion. He had nothing of his own in this room, not even slippers.

This pleasant life lasted the whole of the summer. The days glided by in happy peacefulness. The lovers were full of mutual gratitude and affection for the bliss they were conferring on each other, just as formerly they had nearly, quarrelled as they felt that they were making each other unhappy.

Madeleine had taken the little house about the middle of April. She knew nothing of the country except a few nooks in the neighbourhood of Paris. Life in the open fields, for a whole summer, was for her a life of delight and health. She saw the trees bloom and the fruits ripen, standing by with happy surprise at the working of the soil. When she came, the bright green leaves were still tender; the country, still moist with the rains of winter, was bursting into life beneath the vernal rays of the sun, with the charming grace of a child just waking from sleep; from the depths of these pale horizons there came a sort of breezy and virginal freshness to her heart. Then, the caresses of the zephyrs became warmer, the leaves grew darker, the soil became a woman, an amorous and fruitful woman whose womb trembled with a mighty pleasure in the pangs of maternity. Madeleine, strengthened and soothed by the warmth of spring, felt the heat of the summer fill her with energy and give a steady strong flow to the blood in her veins. She thus found, in the sunshine, peace and vigour; she resembled one of those shrubs which though battered by the winter winds spring up again, which become young in order to grow afresh and unfold in the vigour of their foliage.

She felt a need of the free air, a love for the open sky which made her delight in long walks. Nearly every day she went out, and walked for miles and miles without ever complaining of fatigue. Usually, she met William in a little wood through which ran the brook where her lover had in former days hunted for crawfish. When they met each other, they walked away gently on the soft grass, hidden by the trees on both sides, ascending a sort of valley concealed by foliage and refreshingly cool. At their feet flowed the brook, a silver streak gliding noiselessly over the sand; here and there were little waterfalls whose crystal tones seemed as though they proceeded from a shepherd’s flute. And, on both sides, rose the big tree-trunks, like the shafts of fantastical pillars, eaten away with a leprosy of moss and ivy; among these trunks, briars had sprung up, throwing out to one another their long prickly arms, and forming green walls which enclosed the valley and turned it into an interminable path of foliage. Above their heads, the vault was peopled with wrens, like big humming flies; in places, the branches became more open, which permitted them to catch a glimpse, through this green verdure, of the blue sky. William and Madeleine loved this secluded valley, this natural bower whose end they could never discover; they forgot themselves for hours as they followed its windings; the coolness of the water and the silence of the trees filled them with exquisite delight. With their arms round each other’s waists, they clasped each other more closely in the hollows where the shade became thicker. At times they would play like children, running after one another, getting entangled in the briars and slipping on the grass. Suddenly Madeleine would disappear; she had hidden behind a bush; then her lover, who clearly saw a bit of her bright skirt, would pretend to hunt for her with an uneasy look; then, with a sudden spring, he would catch her and hold her on the ground, shaking with laughter, in his arms.

Sometimes, Madeleine would declare that she felt cold, and that she wanted to walk in the sun; the shade always became oppressive to her vigorous nature. Then they would go into the sun, the hot July sun. They would stride over the wall of briars and find themselves at the edge of immense cornfields, undulating in bright waves right to the horizon, and lulled to rest in the heat of the mid-day sun. The atmosphere was sweltering. Madeleine walked comfortably in this burning furnace; she took a delight in letting the sun scorch her neck and bare arms; somewhat pale, her forehead beaded with little drops of perspiration, she revelled in the caresses of the orb of day. It gave her new strength, she said, when she was tired; she felt better under the crushing weight of the burning sky which pressed lightly on her strong shoulders. But William suffered a good deal from this heat; so when she saw him panting, she led him into the shady walk again, by the side of the clear cool brook.

Then they would resume their delightful walk, finding a fresh charm in this silence and coolness which they had left for a moment. Thus they came to a sort of amphitheatre where they usually stopped and rested. The valley grew broader, the brook formed a little lake with a surface as smooth as glass, the line of trees made a gentle curve, disclosing a broad belt of sky. It might have been thought a room made of verdure. At the edge of the pool grew tall waving reeds; then a carpet of grass was spread beneath the feet, reaching from the water to the foot of the trees, where it lost itself in the tall underwood which surrounded the opening with au impenetrable wall. But the charm of their wild and pleasant retreat was a spring which gushed from a rock; the enormous block, covered at the summit with overhanging briars, projected out at the top a little, forming at its foot a sort of cavern filled with a pale blue tint; the slender stream glided, with the easy motion of an adder, from the further end of this grotto with its walls covered with climbing plants and oozing with moisture. William and Madeleine would sit here, listening to the drops as they fell one by one in regular cadence from the roof; there was in this sound an endless lullaby, a vague sensation of sleep and eternity which harmonised with their happy love. Gradually, they ceased to talk, overcome by the monotony of the continual music of the drops of water, fancying that they could hear the beating of their hearts, dreaming and smiling, hand in hand.

Madeleine always brought some fruit. She would forget her musing, and eat her supplies with hearty appetite, giving her lover a bite of her peaches and pears. William was enraptured to see her by him; each day, her beauty seemed more dazzling; he watched, with admiring surprise, the development of health and strength which the fresh air was imparting to her. The country was really making her another woman. She even seemed to have grown. Full of health and vigour and endowed with strong limbs, she had become a powerful woman, with a broad chest and a clear laugh. Her skin, though slightly tanned, had not lost its transparency. Her gold-red hair, carelessly tied up, fell on her neck in a thick glowing coil. Her whole body gave evidence of superb vigour.

William never grew tired of gazing at this healthy being, whose calm lusty kisses soothed his own feverishness. He felt that a supreme serenity was reigning in her; she had recovered her strength of will, she lived without agitation, obeying the native simplicity of her being; these surroundings of solitude and bright sunshine suited her, under their influence she was unfolding in grace and strength, becoming what she always would have been had her need for esteem and tranquillity been satisfied. During the long hours that they spent at the Spring, the name they had given to their retreat, William would gaze on Madeleine as she lay stretched on the ground, her neck all red with the reflection of her hair; he would trace, beneath her light dress, the firm lines of her limbs, and at times he would raise himself up to take her in his arms in a clasping embrace, with a sudden pride of possession. Still there was nothing of the animal in his love; it was calm and chaste.

On the days that the lovers did not visit the spring, they would drive out a few miles in a carriage, then leave their conveyance at some inn and tramp the country wherever the roads took them. They only chose the narrowest lanes, those that would lead them to the unknown. When they had walked for hours, between two hedges of apple-trees, without meeting a living soul, they were as happy as marauders who had escaped the eye of the keeper. These broad Norman plains, rich and monotonous, seemed to them the image of their tranquil affection; they never grew tired of the same horizons of meadows and cornfields. They would often ramble in the fields or visit the farms. Madeleine loved domestic animals; a brood of chickens pecking round their mother as she clucked and spread out her wings, would amuse her for a whole afternoon; she would go into cattle-sheds to stroke the cows; the young skipping kids filled her with delight; all the little denizens of a poultry yard held her charmed and filled with a longing desire to have at her own home hens, ducks, pigeons, and geese; and had not William’s smile checked her, she would never have returned to Véteuil without carrying back some little animal or other in her skirts. She had another passion too, a passion for children; when she saw one rolling in a farm yard, on a midden, among the poultry, she would gaze at him in silence, somewhat pensively, with a softened smile; then, as if drawn to him, she would go up and take the little urchin in her arms, regardless of his face all smeared with dirt and jam. She would ask for milk, keeping hold of the child until she was served, making him skip and calling her lover to admire the dear creature’s large eyes. When she had drank her milk, she would withdraw regretfully, turning round and casting a last glance on the child.

Autumn came. Dark clouds crossed the leaden sky driven on by icy winds; the fields were going to repose. The lovers wished to pay one last visit to the spring. They found their retreat very desolate. A shower of yellow leaves lay strewn on the grass; the walls of verdure were falling down; the amphitheatre, exposed to all beholders, was now only formed by the slender trunks of the trees whose branches stood out in rueful nakedness against the grey sky. The little lake and the spring itself were muddy, troubled by the last storm. William could see that winter was approaching, and that their walks would have to cease. He mused sadly on this death of summer as he looked at Madeleine. The young woman, seated in front of him, full of thought, was breaking the bits of dead branches with which the turf was strewn.

Since the previous night William had been thinking of proposing to his mistress to marry her. This idea of immediate marriage had occurred to him in a farm, as he had seen Madeleine fondling one of those little darlings that she adored. He had thought that if she should ever become enceinte, he would have a bastard for his son. The memories of his childhood always frightened him at this word bastard.

Besides, everything was tending without gainsay to marriage. As he used to say in the old days to James, he was fated to love one woman only, the first he met; he was fated to love her with his whole being, and to cling to this love, out of hatred of change, out of terror for the unknown. He had been lulled to rest in Madeleine’s affection: now that he was warm, now that he was comfortable in this affection, he intended to stay there for ever. His inert mind and his gentle nature delighted in thinking. “I have a resting-place where I have taken refuge for life.” Marriage would simply legalise an union which he already looked upon as eternal.

The thought that he might have a son only made him desirous of hastening an end that he had foreseen. Then, winter was coming, he would be cold, all alone in his big deserted château; he would no longer spend his days in the warm breath of his loved one. During these long cold months, he would have to run in the rain as he went to knock at Madeleine’s door. What a happy warmth, on the contrary, if they lived in the same house! They would spend the days of bad weather in the chimney corner; they would pass their chilly honeymoon in a warm recess, which they would only leave in the following spring, to return to the sunlight. And there was too, in his resolution, the desire to love Madeleine openly, and to confer on her a mark of esteem which should touch her heart. He thought he could foresee that they would suffer no more from their intimacy, that they would no longer hurt each other’s feelings, when there was a binding bond between them.

Yet at the bottom of the project which William fondly indulged in, there lay a vague feeling of dread which kept him uneasy, and hesitating. During the months of forgetfulness that they had just passed, he had never been a prey to the terrors about the future which the suicide of his father had awakened in him; events no longer crushed him; his love, after so many rebuffs, seemed to him a sovereign repose, a balm for his sufferings and fears. The fact was, he was living in the present, in the hours that glided by, bringing each its pleasure. But since he had begun to think of the future, the unknown in this future filled him with secret uneasiness. Perhaps he was trembling unconsciously on the brink of an eternal engagement with a woman whose history he did not know. Anyhow, he was full of conflicting thoughts, for his hesitations did not assume a definite form, while his heart urged him on to his project.

He had come to the spring, fully determined to speak. But the trees were so bare, the sky so gloomy, that be did not venture to open his lips, shivering at the first breath of winter. Madeleine was cold too; a kerchief on her neck, her feet well under her skirts, she was continuing to break the bits of dead branches on the turf, unconscious of what she was doing, gazing with a melancholy air at the clouds charged with rain that were silently drifting across the sky. At last, when it was time to return, William told her his project; his voice trembled a little and he seemed to be asking for a favour. Madeleine looked at him with a surprised, almost terrified air. When he had finished she said:

“Why not stay as we are? I don’t complain, I am happy. We should not be any fonder of each other if we were married. Perhaps that would even spoil our happiness.”

And as he was opening his lips to insist, she added in a brief tone: “No, indeed. It makes me quite afraid.”

And she began to laugh, in order to tone down the hardness and strangeness of her words. Even she herself was surprised at having uttered them and with such stress. The truth was that William’s proposal caused her a singular feeling of revolt; it seemed to her that he was asking for something impossible, as if she were not her own mistress and already in the possession of another man. Her voice and gesture had been like that of a married woman requested by a lover to live with him as his wife.

The young fellow, almost hurt, would have perhaps withdrawn his offer, had he not thought himself bound now to plead the cause of their love. He grew warm as he spoke, forgetting gradually the oppression of heart that he had felt at the point blank refusal of his mistress, and he melted into gentle and endearing words as he drew a picture of the calm and happy life they would lead when they were married. For some minutes, he thus poured forth his heart in his words, bending over Madeleine in an attitude of prayer and adoration.

“I am an orphan,” he said, “I have no one in the world but you. Don’t refuse to link your life to mine, or I shall think that Heaven continues to persecute me with its anger, and I shall tell myself that you do not love me enough to wish to assure my happiness. Oh! if you knew how I need your affection! You alone have soothed me, you alone have opened to me a refuge in your arms. And to-day I know not how to thank you; I offer you everything that I have, which is nothing in comparison with the happy hours you have given me and will give me again. Come now, I feel that I shall always be your debtor, Madeleine. We love one another, and marriage cannot increase our affection; but it will permit us to adore each other openly. And what a life ours will be! a life of peace and pride, a confidence without bounds for the future, an affection constant in the present. Madeleine, I implore you.”

The young woman listened, as if seized with distressing thoughts, with a curbed impatience which gave to her lips the appearance of a peculiar smile. When her lover could find nothing more to say and stopped, with a choking sensation in his throat, from the emotion which was overpowering him, she sat silent for a moment. Then in an unfeeling tone, she exclaimed:

“You cannot however marry a woman of whose past you know nothing. I must tell you who I am, where I came from, and what I have done before knowing you.”

William was already on his feet and putting his hand on her mouth.

“Don’t say a word!” he answered with a sort of terror. “I love you, and I want to know nothing more. Como now, I know you quite well. You are perhaps better than I am; you certainly have more will and strength. You can’t have done wrong. The past is dead; I am speaking to you of the future.”

Madeleine was struggling in his clasping embrace of supreme tenderness and absolute faith. When she could speak she said:

“Now listen, you are a child, and I must argue for you. You are rich, you are young, and some day you will reproach me for having accepted your offer too hastily. As for myself, I have nothing, I am a poor girl! but I am anxious to keep my pride, and I should not like you to turn round and accuse me later on of having entered your house as a fortune-hunter. You see, I am frank. I can make you an adorable mistress; but if I were to become your wife, you would say to yourself next day that you ought to have married a girl with a better dowry and more worthy of you than myself.”

If Madeleine had wished to make William more in earnest, she could not have devised a better method. The suppositions that she was making almost made him weep. Now he had the anger of a child, and swore to overcome his mistress’s resistance at all cost.

“You don’t know me, Madeleine,” be exclaimed, “and you hurt my feelings. Why do you talk like that? Are you not aware what I have been thinking of and dreaming of, for the whole year that we have been living together? I should like to go to sleep on your breast and never awake. You know very well that that is the desire of my whole being; you do wrong to think that my thoughts are like other men’s. I am a child, you say; ah well! so much the better! you can’t be afraid of a child who trusts in you.”

He went on in a gentler tone, and fell again into his tender beseeching accents. He spoke so much that his heart was full. Madeleine was giving way. She was touched by this trembling voice which was offering her so humbly the pardon and the esteem of the world. Yet, deep in her heart, there still continued the vague feeling of revolt. When her lover wound up by saying, “You are free, why refuse me this happiness,” she gave a sudden start.

“Free,” she replied in a strange voice, “yes, I am free.”

“Well!” added William, “say nothing more of the past. If you have loved before, that love is dead, and I am marrying a widow.”

Madeleine was struck by this word widow, and became slightly pale. Her hard brow and grey eyes had an expression of painful anxiety.

“Let us go back,” she said, “night is coming on. I will give you an answer tomorrow.’’

They went back. The sky had become dark, and the wind was howling mournfully in the trees that overhung the path. When William left Madeleine, he pressed her silently to his heart. He could find no words to say to her, and he wished to take possession of her being by this last embrace.

Madeleine passed a sleepless night. When she was alone, she reflected on her lover’s proposal. The thought of marriage flattered her feelings, and yet caused her a sort of terrified surprise. A thought of this ceremony had never occurred to her. She had never ventured to indulge in such a dream. Then, as she thought of the calm and worthy life which William offered her, she was very much surprised at feeling so averse to it. At the recollection of the young man’s endearing words, she felt ashamed of having shown so much unfeelingness: she asked herself what secret thought had induced her to refuse such an union, which she ought to have accepted with humility and gratitude. Why those fears, those doubts? Was she not free as William had said? What necessity was making her disdain the unexpected happiness which was coming to her? She became bewildered in these questions, and could only feel herself troubled with a vague sense of disquietude. She could have given herself an answer, but it seemed foolish and ridiculous, and she avoided it. The truth was she was thinking of James. She had felt the memory of this man springing up again confusedly in her being, while her lover was speaking. But it could not be this memory which troubled her. James was dead, and she owed him nothing, not even a regret. By what right had he come to life again in her thoughts to remind her that she was his? The doubts which she felt now about her liberty irritated her deeply. Now that the phantom of her first lover stood before her, she struggled with him in the flesh, she wished to overcome him in order to show him that she was his no longer. And she had a consciousness, in spite of her disdainful smiles, that it was James alone who had been able to make her harsh towards William. This was monstrous, inexplicable. When these thoughts presented themselves clearly, in the nightmares of her sleeplessness, she made up her mind with all the impulsiveness of her nature, that she would silence the dead by marrying the living. Then she fell asleep at daybreak. She dreamed that the shipwrecked man was rising out of the livid waves of the sea, and coming to snatch her from her husband’s arms.

When William came in the morning, trembling and anxious, he found Madeleine still asleep. He took her gently in his arms. Madeleine awoke with a start and threw herself on his bosom, as if to take refuge there and tell him: “I am thine.” Then came the long kisses, and the passionate embraces. They both seemed to feel a need of abandoning themselves to each other’s caresses, to each other’s arms, so as to be convinced of the strength of their union.

That afternoon, William went to arrange about the formalities of the marriage. When, at night, he announced to Geneviève that he was going to marry a young lady in the neighbourhood, the protestant looked at him with her malicious eyes, and said:

“That will be better.”

He saw that she knew everything. People had no doubt noticed him with Madeleine, and gossip travelled fast in the country, Geneviève’s remark made him hasten the wedding-day. A few weeks were enough. The lovers were married at the beginning of winter, almost secretly. Five or six inquisitive Véteuil folks alone watched them enter their carriage as they left the mayoralty and the church. When they were back at La Noiraude, they thanked their witnesses and shut themselves up. They were at home, united for life.