Complete Works of Emile Zola (132 page)

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 drawing-room 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 quick-set 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 house-keeping, 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.