Читать книгу The Complete Early Novels - Emile Zola - Страница 43

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SINCE the night when he made her cry, Daniel only lived for Jeanne. She, on her part, felt that he was very different from those who were usually about her; but to tell the truth, he repelled her more than he attracted her. This serious, sad-looking young man, who was strangely ugly, almost terrified her. But she knew that he was there in the house, and that he followed her every movement with the greatest interest.

When she went out in the carriage, although she had vowed she would never do so, she raised her eyes and saw him at the window. This look, however, spoiled all her drive. She wondered what grudge he could have against her. She began to cross-examine herself, fearing she had committed some error.

Daniel, on his side, understood that the battle had begun, and he played his dumb part of preceptor more or less well, longing all the time to throw himself down on his knees before the young girl and beg her forgiveness for the severity he seemed to be practising. He guessed he was displeasing her, and he feared making her thoroughly angry with him. And, indeed, when he saw her looking so beautiful, he felt seized with the most tender affection, and it seemed a crime to disturb her in her happiness.

But his duty spoke with inexorable voice. He had sworn to watch over Jeanne’s happiness, and this feverish worldliness which had taken possession of the young girl could only be a little voluptuousness, which would leave her afterwards repentant and cast down. He wished to withdraw her from these empty pleasures, and to try to do this he was constantly obliged to wound her in her gaieties and in her pride.

So he became a sort of nightmare to Jeanne and Madame Tellier. He dressed himself completely in black. He was always on the spot, putting himself like a barrier between these women and the unworthy life they were leading. He managed his time so that he could follow them wherever they went, to protest, by his presence, against the frivolity of their amusements.

Nothing was more extraordinary than to see this curious young man taking a walk among the fashionable world of Paris. He had been nicknamed “The Black Knight,” and truly he could have had many love affairs if he had chosen.

One day Jeanne was to do the quête in a church. Daniel, who had already saved some money, placed himself where the quêteuse must pass.

The young girl was advancing with a pleasant smile, thinking much more of the elegance of her toilette than of the misery of the poor. She was there, as if in a drawing room, with a half-mocking, half-smiling look on her face; at last she came in front of Daniel.

“For the poor, if you please,” she said, without looking at him.

The large amount of his offering made her raise her head, and when she recognised the young man she began to blush, without knowing why. She continued her quête, but there were tears in her eyes.

On another occasion she was present at a theatre at the representation of a rather risky piece, and she was laughing at, without, however, understanding, the actor’s dangerous jokes. As she turned round she noticed Daniel, who seemed to be looking at her reproachfully. This look went to her heart; she feared at once she was doing wrong since the Black Knight was angry. She laughed no more, and during the entr’acte, she went and hid herself at the back of the box.

But what struck her most was Daniel’s intervention in an unpleasant experience she and her aunt had one day. Madame Tellier had formerly, when alone, met with an insult, and this deplorable adventure was repeated on this particular occasion. Two young men, doubtless very much elevated after a superabundant lunch, met them, and thought they had to do with women of doubtful reputation, for the ladies were most showily dressed, and seemed to them to promise an easy conquest. One young man even pretended that he knew them.

“Hullo! Pomponette!” he exclaimed, addressing Jeanne. And as the young girl stared at him, terrified and speechless: “Are you going to do the proud?” he went on. But he suddenly felt himself seized by the arm. Daniel held him in a close grasp.

“Monsieur,” said he, “you have made a mistake.... Be quick and make your excuses to these ladies.” He pointed to them, and dragged him to the carriage door. The young man stammered, and the only excuse he made was to say:

“Pardon, but if respectable women are dressed like women that are the reverse, how do you expect people to distinguish between them?”

Daniel allowed him to depart, and he entered the carriage of Madame Tellier at her request. The coachman was told to return to the rue d’Amsterdam. He drove off, giggling and cracking his whip.

The carriage was crossing the place de la Concorde when Daniel perceived a queen of the demimonde passing by, laughing immoderately. He pointed her out to Jeanne and quietly said:

“Mademoiselle, there is Pomponette!”

The young girl looked at the creature for whom she had just been mistaken, and she blushed when she saw that they were dressed in exactly the same style. There was the same extremity of fashion and the same reckless luxury. Directly she reached home she went up to her room to weep without being disturbed, and thus get over the wicked temper she felt against Daniel.

But Madame Tellier henceforth hated her husband’s secretary cordially. For his action in the last adventure that had happened to them she could not help but thank him, but she was singularly irritated by the forwardness of this young man, who formed, she said, a dark blot on her establishment.

On several occasions she had tried to have him dismissed, but the deputy clung to Daniel, for he had made himself indispensable to him. He could give full fling to his folly since he paid a brain to be intelligent for him, and he felt so thoroughly at home in his folly that he took great care not to deprive himself of that commodity. He received his wife’s complaints with condescending superiority; he sent her off to her furbelows, telling her that as he was tolerant to her toilettes, she, for her part, ought to tolerate his secretary. So long as he had been the mere tradesman he had shown himself tractable enough, but since he had become a deputy he had taken the attitude of a master, and intended to rule all around him.

Daniel was perfectly ignorant of the disturbance he caused or had caused in the household. He went blindly on, straight to his goal, as a man strong in the righteousness of his intentions. As a matter of fact, he went awkwardly to work at his task. Madame de Rionne could not have found any one with a more whole-hearted devotion and more profound affection; but she probably expected him to display more tact in the accomplishment of his painful task.

The young man was passionately fulfilling his mission of love. His ignorance, his brusque kindheartedness should even have raised him in any one’s estimation.

If he found himself as a stranger in the world in which circumstances compelled him to live, still he was the representative there of plighted faith, of self-sacrifice. The dead woman, with the clear foresight of the dying, had judged Daniel rightly, however. Whilst Monsieur de Rionne was consummating his own downfall, without even remembering that he had a daughter, whilst Madame Tellier selfishly wrought harm to Jeanne, Daniel, having no other tie but that of gratitude, watched over the young girl, and bitterly regretted that he could invoke no human answer to his love. He had ended by understanding that he gave her daily offence. Jeanne must have asked herself by what right he thus followed her about everywhere, looking at her all the while with his serious eyes. All he was to her, he told himself, was a simple employé — a poor devil, with difficulty gaining his daily bread. Out of sheer pity she did not want him to be dismissed. Poor Daniel, his heart almost failed him at times; he felt that Jeanne’s disdainful manner was crushing him, and an immeasurable bitterness took possession of him.

If, however, he had studied more carefully the haughty but timid looks that the young girl cast upon him, he would have experienced a joy that would have somewhat consoled. He excited in her an emotion she could not define; the affection that lay dormant in the depths of her nature was imperceptibly stirred; she mistook for anger what was only the nervous awakening of her true self. Daniel developed in her a remorse she had not yet acknowledged even to herself. When he was near her she felt a sort of shame, and this was what made her angry with him.

Daniel every day fully persuaded himself that he had made a great mistake in not abducting her when she was quite a little thing. This was a perpetual source of despair to him. In the place of this harebrained, mocking girl, he pictured to himself the gentle, good young girl whom he would have brought up. His child’s heart had been spoiled, and now he could not educate her over again; he must look on with anguish at the frivolities, the mischievousness of this poor lost soul, of whom he had promised to make a good, loving, true woman.

One day Jeanne went to Monsieur Tellier’s study to look for a book and took a malicious pleasure in walking round and round Daniel, thinking to embarrass him. She had noticed that the Black Knight was only stem before the world, and that he became extremely timid when he found himself alone with her. And she was right. He felt like a coward before the young girl. He had never dreamt of trying to explain to himself the sudden blushes, the trembling which seized him in her presence when alone together. He dreaded seeing her, hearing her speak, face to face, because then he became for the time being nothing but a little boy, and then she triumphed over him.

Jeanne on this day, despairing of making him lift his head up, was about to withdraw, when her skirt caught on the sharp corner of a piece of furniture and was torn with a rasping noise. At the crackling of the stuff he looked up and saw Jeanne smiling quietly at him, whilst disengaging her dress.

He felt the necessity of speaking, and he said something idiotic.

“There is a dress done for,” he muttered.

Jeanne cast at him a surprised look which clearly signified “What business is it of yours?” Then, with a mischievous smile, she asked: “Do you happen to be a tailor by any chance, that you can thus estimate the amount of damage done?”

“I am poor,” replied Daniel, more firmly than before. “I do not like to see expensive things destroyed. Pray forgive me.”

The young girl was touched with the emotion he had put in these few words. She blamed herself for saying what she did.

“You hate luxury, do you not, Monsieur Daniel?” added she.

“I do not hate it,” answered the young man; “I fear it.”

“Do you, then, frequent places where the fashionable world congregates, in order to test your courage? I fancy I have seen you in very good company sometimes.”

Daniel did not answer at first “I fear luxury,” he repeated, adding, however, afterwards, “because it is dangerous for the soul as well as the mind.”

Jeanne was hurt at the look with which he accompanied these words.

“You are not very polite,” she concluded, drily.

And she went out of the room, irritated, leaving the poor creature in despair at his want of tact and his rudeness.

He realised that she had escaped him, and he condemned himself for not knowing how to give her good advice gently but profitably. The moment he succeeded in touching her feelings, in getting rid of the mocking smile on her lips, that moment he spoiled all by telling her truths so bluntly that she was offended and angered.

The fact was that he could not fight advantageously against the all-powerful influences which surrounded Jeanne. She belonged to the world; she lived in a constant state of excitement which prevented her hearing the suppressed sorrow at her heart. The emotions that Daniel’s words at times gave birth to were quickly stifled by the continual dissipation in the midst of which she found herself.

The scene of the tom dress was renewed in other forms on several occasions. Daniel often had the opportunity of moralising to her, and each time he felt he was losing ground with her instead of gaining it. He found her colder and more disdainful than before when he met her afterwards. She must have argued that this poor wretch meddled with what did not concern him, and he could not say to her as he longed to: “You are my beloved child; I only live for you. You are the precious legacy of her to whom I owe all. Your kind words fill me with delight; your malicious laughter wounds and crushes me. In pity be kind that I may be kind in return, I implore you! I am working solely for your good and for your happiness.”

For a time he had had a serious fear, from which he was now happily delivered. He trembled lest Monsieur de Rionne should remember his daughter and seek her out. But since he lived at the Tellier’s he had never yet seen anything of her father, the man whose cowardice and vice horrified him.

Monsieur de Rionne absolutely forgot his daughter’s very existence. He had come to see her once after she left the convent, solely in order to beg his sister on no account to ever bring her to see him. “You understand,” he had said, with a faint smile, “I only receive men, and Jeanne would be quite out of place at my house.”

And he went off feeling sure that he would never be disturbed, happy at the precautions he had just taken. He never went there again, fearing he should have to submit to some caprice of his daughter.

But now Daniel often came across some one in the house whose presence there gave him great anxiety. Lorin was for ever there. He was a good talker, and made himself most agreeable; and, in fact, he was always pleasant. And Jeanne seemed to like to see and hear him. He knew how to amuse her. When she showed herself mischievous he allowed himself with good grace to serve as a butt for her wit So he became almost indispensable to her.

Daniel, perplexed with terror, wondered what this man’s aim was. The scrap of conversation which he had had with him filled him with anxiety. Since that day he had never lost sight of him; he even sought to question him, but he learnt nothing which could confirm his suspicions. Nevertheless he had misgivings, and longed ardently to withdraw Jeanne from the influences which were poisoning her mind. He felt convinced that he would always be powerless as long as she lived among the giddy pleasures of the world. He wished he could carry her away far from the crowd to a calm solitude.

His dream came true — this dream-hope in a way was realised. One morning Monsieur Tellier informed him that in a week he should start with his wife and Jeanne to go and spend the spring and summer in the country. He reckoned upon taking his secretary with him, and there passing their time together at his great work, which was, so far, only making slow progress.

Daniel went up to his room, delirious with joy. He had passed a terrible winter, living a life which was killing him, and now at last he would be able to breathe freely again under the open sky near his well-beloved Jeanne. There, in the sweet peace of spring, he would try to accomplish the wish of the dead.

The following week he was in Normandy on an estate belonging to Monsieur Tellier on the banks of the Seine.