Complete Works of Emile Zola (151 page)

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You are in pain,” she stammered, “and I have said things which are making your heart bleed — I know not why I told you all that. I was mad — Still I have not lost all my goodness of heart. You remember our happy evenings, when I had forgotten everything and thought myself worthy of you. Oh! how I loved you, William — And I love you still. I dare not swear to you that I love you always, because I feel that you will not believe me. It is the truth, however — In this room the memories seized me by the throat again, and I should have choked if I had not spoken.”

He said nothing, but sat still, prostrate in a despair without bounds. “Very well,” continued Madeleine, “I see all is over between us. Nothing remains now for me but to vanish out of sight — Death must be pleasant.”

William raised his head.

“Death,” he murmured, “death already — No, no, everything cannot be over yet.”

He was looking at his wife, deeply touched at the thought of seeing her dead. He could hope no longer, and he felt himself struck by a mortal wound which could never be healed, yet all his nervous want of courage grew alarmed in presence of an immediate and abrupt ending. He might wish to live longer, but it was not because he dreamed of trying to seek for happiness again; it was because, unknown to himself, he found a bitter pleasure in suffering for this love which had been the joy of his life. In the grave, he would not even feel the wounds that Madeleine had caused him.

“Well! be open,” said his wife, falling back into her harsh tone. “Don’t be afraid of being cruel. Have I spared you? — Henceforth there will be some one between us — Would you dare to kiss me, William?”

There was a moment of silence.

“You see, you can’t give me an answer,” she continued — “Flight is impossible. I have no wish to lay myself open to the chance of meeting women in rags on the road, who speak to me as if I were a partner in their shame, and I have no wish to stop at inns where I shall run the risk ‘of bringing to life again the days that are dead — It is better to have done with everything at once.”

She was walking up and down, now suddenly stopping, now as suddenly starting again, looking vaguely round her for some means of putting an end to her life. William carefully watched her, not knowing what to say. Had she killed herself at that moment, he would have offered no resistance. But she suddenly stopped: the thought of her child had just presented itself to her mind, but she would not confess to her husband the cause of her hesitation. She said, simply:

“Listen, promise not to seek to prevent me from dying, the day our life becomes intolerable — Will you promise me this?”

He nodded his head in assent. Then he rose and put on his hat.

“You don’t want to stay in this room till to-morrow, do you?” asked Madeleine.

“No,” he replied, with a slight shudder, “we are going away.”

When they had collected their belongings, they cast a farewell look on the room: the fire was dying out: the half displayed bed-sheets were quite pink: the pictures of the loves of Pyramus and Thisbe hung now on the walls like black patches: and the glass clock was becoming quite blue in the shade. And the young couple told themselves that they had entered this room with hope at their hearts, and that they were leaving it in despair. As soon as they were in the passage they trod softly, almost unconsciously, so as to deaden the sound of their footsteps. James might hear them going away.

Madeleine even turned her head and looked towards the end of the landing with an instinctive movement.

When they were in the yard, they had to wake the servant, who got up in a very bad humour. It was two o’clock in the morning, and this sudden departure seemed to him extremely singular. Then he imagined that there must have been a little scene of jealousy between Madame Madeleine’s two gentlemen, and this made him forget his bad temper. When William and Madeleine were in the gig he shouted out in a bantering tone:

“A pleasant journey. Good-bye, till we see you again, Madame Madeleine.” — .

The young wife began to weep in silence. William let the reins hang loose and the horse took the road to Véteuil of its own accord. The thought that they had started to go to Paris no longer troubled them, for they preferred now to go and staunch their bleeding wounds in the calm and silence of La Noiraude. And they travelled back, mechanically, over the road they had come, like wild beasts smitten to death and dragging themselves to their holes to die in peace. This return journey was almost heart-rending. The country lay spread out with a more forbidding aspect under the slanting rays of the moon, which traced out colossal shadows along the road now white with the frost. From time to time William gave au encouraging exclamation to his horse, quite unconscious that he did so, and Madeleine had begun again to stare vacantly at the yellow reflection of the lamps flitting over the ditches. Towards morning the cold became so keen that her hands were quite numb under the grey woollen rug.

CHAPTER XI.

At La Noiraude the young couple resumed their uneventful existence, and shut themselves up again in the silent shade of the vast dining-room. But their solitude had lost its previous smiling peace; it was gloomy and full of despair. Only a few days ago, they had spent their time in the chimney-corner, hardly speaking a word to each other, and content with the mere exchange of happy glances: to-day, their long silent tête-à-têtes depressed them with crushing weariness and vague fear. Nothing seemed changed in their life; it was the same calm, the same clock-work regularity, and the same solitary trance. Only, their hearts were closed, their looks no longer met with exquisite tenderness, and this was enough to make everything around them seem cold and forbidding. The big room had now a funereal aspect, and they lived there in a continual shudder, saddened by the cheerless wintry sunshine, and fancying themselves buried in some tomb. They would get up sometimes and go to the window, but, after casting a disconsolate glance at the bare trees in the park, they would come back with sudden shivers, to spread out their cold hands to the fire.

They never spoke of the drama which had crushed them. The few words that they exchanged never went beyond the commonplace and trivial expressions of ordinary intercourse. They sank prostrate in their ennui, with hardly the energy to think openly of their sufferings. The crisis which had overtaken them at the Big Stag seemed to throw them into a state of stupor and unworthy inaction: they had come out of it with aching brains and weary limbs, and they gave way to a feeling of heaviness in the gloomy tranquillity that surrounded them. If a painful thought came suddenly to disturb their sleepy existence, they would tell themselves that they had still a month before them. James had given them a thirty days’ peace, and they might slumber till his return. And they would fall back into their trance, striving to become callous, and musing from morn till night on trivial matters, on the fire that refused to burn, on the weather, or on what they were going to have for dinner.

They plunged more deeply every day into this animal life. Still, they enjoyed good health. Madeleine grew stout; her cheeks became fuller, and assumed the flabby paleness of a nun’s. She was becoming inordinately fond of good things, and felt a keen pleasure in all physical enjoyments. William gave way like his wife to the stupor of his grief, and spent hours in picking up with the tongs the little bits of burning wood that fell on to the ashes, and putting them behind the logs.

The month of sleepy inaction which the young couple had before them seemed as if it would never finish. They would willingly have consented to end their life in this blank inactivity in which they found themselves, and, for the first few days especially, they felt filled with a peaceful feeling of calm. But this stupor could not last: it was soon disturbed by sudden and painful transports of sorrow. The least event which drew them from their state of dejection caused them unbearable anguish. Geneviève was not long in making them undergo martyrdom: it was she who first drove them back to their suffering. She stood like a phantom before Madeleine, and crushed her with her presence.

Strong in her life of virtue and toil, the old fanatic showed herself without pity for the sinner. The thought of carnal joys exasperated this woman, this woman who had lived a life of strict virginity. Thus she could not forgive the young wife her career of love, and the quivering of pleasure that would still set her flesh vibrating. She could always see her passing from the arms of James to the arms of William, and this double surrender of herself seemed to her to be a diabolical prostitution, and to indicate a desire for coarse debauch. She had never loved Madeleine, and she now began to detest her with a disdain mingled with dread. This strong young woman, with a fair skin and red hair, frightened her as if she were a ghoul thirsting for the blood of young men; if she hated her to the very depths of her being, she trembled in her presence, and stood on the defensive through dread of seeing her spring at her throat. She would not have hated the devil more thoroughly, nor taken greater precautions against him.

She continued to live in close intimacy with the young couple, always taking her meals with them and passing the evenings in their company. Her rigid and threatening attitude was an eternal protestation: she treated them as guilty criminals, looked on them with the eyes of an implacable judge and clearly showed them every hour the disgust and anger that their union caused her. She tried especially to make Madeleine feel how much she despised her. When the young wife had touched any object, she avoided making use of it, wishing by this to show that she looked upon it as polluted. Every night she began to drawl the verses of her big Bible. William had requested her once to go and read it in her bedroom, hut she had given him to understand that her sacred reading purified the dining-room and drove away the demon. And she had become so doggedly persistent as to stay there till bed-time, filling the shade with her droning voice. Day by day, she read in a higher tone and selected passages more reeking with blood: the narratives of guilty women brought to chastisement, the fire of Sodom, or the pack of dogs worrying Jezebel’s entrails were continually on her lips, and then she would cast a look gleaming with fierce joy on Madeleine. Sometimes too she would add a few observations on the text, and threaten with horrible torments a criminal, not mentioned by name, but sufficiently designated by her eyes. In these extemporary comments, which were muttered in a deep voice, she set forth in all their terror the punishments of hell, the caldrons of boiling oil, the long tusks of the demons turning over on the red hot ashes the frizzled bodies of the damned, and the rain of fire falling throughout all eternity, every drop marking as with a searing iron the shoulders of the howling denizens of the abyss. Then she demanded of God speedy justice, and besought him not to let a single guilty soul escape, but to rid the earth at once of its pollution.

Madeleine had no wish to listen, but the mumbled hissing words entered her ears in spite of herself. At last she became superstitious, though hitherto she had not been able to bring her mind to believe in any form of faith. At certain periods of the disorder of her brain, she fancied that this hell, this chamber of torture, of which the fanatic always drew such a frightful picture, really did exist. From that time she lived in a perspiration of anguish which stood in beads on her brow, when the thought of death presented itself to her. She looked upon herself as guilty and doomed to eternal punishment. This old woman, who spent her days in causing her to feel the horror of her crime and the cruelty of the punishment which heaven was reserving for her, so far deranged her reason that she became as timid as a child: she hardly knew where she was, and thought of the | devil as she had thought of Old Mother Broomstick when she was a little girl. And she would say to herself: “I am a wretch, and Geneviève is right in treating me as a sinner: I bring a stain on this house by my presence and I deserve the most cruel torments.” Then, in the evenings she listened to the old protestant’s reading with terror and excitement, fancying she could catch the sound of the clanking of chains and the hissing of the flames in the murmur which pervaded the room. And she would think that if she happened to die during the night, she would wake up next morning in the heart of a blazing furnace.

But she did not always submit without resistance, to the influence of these horrible sensations which Geneviève’s attitude produced on her, and at times she would feel quite irritated at the continual presence of this pitiless woman. When she saw her reject the bread that she had just cut, or met the fierce look that followed her everywhere, she would at last fall into a blinding passion, for she still preserved an occasional burst of pride which made her revolt against the unceasing attacks of the old protestant. Then she would declare that she intended to be mistress in her own house and become almost furious.

“Out you go,” she would yell at the old woman. “Leave this house immediately. I’ll have no lunatic here.”

And, as William hung his head, not venturing to breathe a word, she turned towards him and added violently:

“What a coward you are! You stand by and let people be disrespectful to your wife — Rid me of this mad creature, if you have any love left for me.”

Geneviève gave a strange smile and rose, erect and rigid, fixing on Madeleine her round eyes flashing with suppressed fire:

“He is no coward,” she said in her cracked voice, “he is well aware that I am not insulting anybody — Why do you make such a violent objection, when it is God who speaks?”

She pointed, with a fiendish expression on her face, to her Bible. Then she too, became furious, and continued, raising her voice: — .

“That is always the way — Impurity wishes to raise its head and bite honest women. It Would be a fine thing, indeed, for you to drive me from this house where I have toiled for thirty years, you who have only come to bring sorrow and sin — Just look at me, and then look at yourself. I shall soon he a hundred years old: I have grown grey in devotion and prayer, and I have not a single fault to reproach myself with when I look back at my long life. And you want me to bend before you, and to be fool enough to give up my place to you! Where do you come from, and who are you? You are still quite young, and yet the hand of death is on you already; you come from the abode of evil, and you are fast approaching your punishment — I can pass my judgment on you to your face, and I ought not to obey you.”