Complete Works of Emile Zola (134 page)

“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The young fellow, almost hurt, would have perhaps withdrawn his offer, had he not thought himself bound now to plead the cause of their love.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 to-morrow.’’

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 night-mares 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 day-break. 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.

CHAPTER VI.

THE four years that followed were calm and happy. The newly-married couple spent them at La Noiraude. They had made plans, the first year, for travelling: they had wished to air their love in Italy or on the banks of the Rhine, as is the fashion. But they always held back at the moment of starting, finding it useless to go and seek so far away for a happiness which they had at home. They did not even pay a single visit to Paris. The memories which they had left in their little house in the Rue de Boulogne, filled them with uneasiness. Shut up in their beloved solitude, they thought themselves protected against the miseries of this world and defied sorrow.

William’s existence was one of unmixed bliss. Marriage was realising the dream of his youth. He lived an unchequered life, free from all agitation, a round of peace and affection. Since Madeleine had come to live at La Noiraude, he was full of hope, and thought of the future without a fear. It would be what the present was, a long sleep of affection, a succession of days like these and equally happy. His restless mind must have this assurance of uninterrupted tranquillity: his dearest wish was to arrive at the hour of death like this, after a stagnant existence, an existence free from events, an existence of one unbroken sentiment. He was at rest, and he felt an aversion to quit this state of repose.

Madeleine’s heart too was at rest. She was enjoying a delicious repose from the troubles of her past in the calm of her present life. There was nothing now to hurt her. She could respect herself, and forget the shame of the past. Now she shared her husband’s fortune without scruple, and reigned in the house as legitimate wife. The solitude of La Noiraude, of this huge building, all black and ruinous, pleased her. She would not allow William to have the old house done up in modern fashion. She simply permitted him to repair an apartment on the first floor, and the dining and drawing-rooms down stairs. The other rooms remained closed. In four years they never once climbed the staircase to the attics. Madeleine liked to feel all this empty space round her; it seemed to isolate her all the more, and protect her against harm from without. She took a pleasure in forgetting everything in the spacious room on the ground floor: a silence which calmed her seemed to fall from the lofty ceiling, and the dark corners of the room made her dream of immensities of peaceful shade. At night, when the lamp was lit, she was deeply soothed at the thought of being alone, and so small in the midst of this infinity. Not a sound came from the country: the secluded sanctity of a cloister, that seclusion one finds in a sleepy province, seemed to have settled on La Noiraude. Then Madeleine’s thoughts would recur at times to one of the noisy evenings she had passed in the Rue Soufflot with James; she would hear the deafening rumble of the carriages on the pavement in Paris, she would see the harsh glare of the gas-lamps, and she would live again, for a second, in the little hotel-apartment full of the fumes of tobacco, chinking of glasses, bursts of laughter and kisses. It was only a flash, like a whiff of warm and nauseous air coming right into her face, but she would look round, terrified, stifling already. And then she would breathe freely again as she found herself in the sombre and deserted big room: she would awake from her bad dream, trustful and comforted, to bury herself once more with greater pleasure, in the silence and shade around her.

How sweet this placid life was for her straightforward and cold nature, after the agitations of the flesh to which fate had exposed her! She would thank the cold ceiling, the dumb walls and all this building which enveloped her in a winding-sheet: she would stretch out her hands to William, as if to return thanks to him: he had brought her true joy by restoring to her her lost dignity, he was her beloved deliverer.

They thus passed their winters in almost complete solitude. They never left the drawing-room on the ground-floor, a big fire of logs of wood blazed in the huge fireplace, and they stayed there the whole day long, spending each hour alike. They led a clock-work life, clinging to their habits with the obstinacy of people who are perfectly happy and fear the least agitation. They hardly did anything, they never grew weary, or at least the feeling of gloomy weariness in which they indulged seemed to them bliss itself. Yet, there were no passionate caresses, no pleasures to make them forget the slow march of time. Two lovers will shut themselves up sometimes, and live for a season in each other’s arms, satisfying their desires and turning days into nights of love. William and Madeleine simply smiled on each other, their solitude was chaste; if they shut themselves up, it was not because they had kisses to conceal, it was because they loved the still silence of the winter, the tranquillity of the cold. It was enough for them to live alone, side by side, and to bestow on each other the calm of their presence.

Then, directly the fine days came, they opened their windows and went down to the park. Instead of isolating themselves in the huge room, they would hide in some thicket. There was no change. In this way they lived in the fine weather, wild and retired, shunning the noise.

 William preferred winter, and the warm moist atmosphere of the hearth, but Madeleine was always passionately fond of the sunshine, the blazing sunshine which scorched her neck and made her pulse beat steady and strong. She would often take her husband into the country, they would go and revisit the spring, or follow the open space by the brook reminding each other of their walks in the days gone by, or they would visit the farms again, rambling about, striking into the fields, far away from the villages. But the pilgrimage they loved best was to go and spend the afternoon in the little house where Madeleine had lived. A few months after their marriage, they had bought this house, for they could not bear the idea of its not belonging to them, and they felt an unconquerable desire to go in, whenever they passed by it. When it was theirs, their minds were at rest, and they said to themselves that no one could enter and drive away the memories of their affection. And when the air was mild, they used to go there nearly every day, for a few hours. It was like their country-house, although it was only ten minutes’ walk from La Noiraude. Their life there was even more solitary than at La Noiraude, for they had given orders that they were never to be disturbed. They sometimes even slept there, and on these nights they forgot the whole world. Often would William say: