Complete Works of Emile Zola (774 page)

At this Véronique could not restrain herself, but broke out: ‘I’m sure Madame could never think of turning her out of doors?’

‘What do you mean? What are you speaking about?’ her mistress demanded angrily. ‘There’s no question of anyone being turned out of doors. I never turned anybody out of doors. What I said was that nothing can be more foolish, when one has had a fortune of one’s own, to go frittering it all away and becoming dependent upon other people. Go off to your kitchen.’

The servant went off, grinding out muttered protests from between her teeth. Then there came an interval of silence, while Louise poured out the tea. The only sound in the room was the slight rustling of the newspaper, which Chanteau read from end to end, not missing even the advertisements. Now and then he spoke a word or two to the young girl.

‘You might give me another piece of sugar, please. Have you had a letter from your father yet?’

‘No, indeed,’ she answered with a smile. ‘But if I am in the way I can leave at any time, you know. You have quite sufficient trouble with Pauline’s illness. I would rather have gone away before, but you insisted upon my staying.’

‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ he interrupted. ‘It is only too kind of you to give us the pleasure of your society till poor Pauline can get downstairs again.’

‘I can go to Arromanches till my father comes, if I am in the way,’ she continued, as though she had not heard him, merely by way of teasing. ‘My aunt Léonie has taken a châlet there, and there are plenty of people there, and a good beach where one can bathe at any rate. But she is very wearisome is my aunt Léonie.’

Chanteau laughed at the girl’s playful, fondling ways. Though he dare not confess it to his wife, he was entirely on the side of Pauline, who nursed him so kindly and carefully. He buried himself in his newspaper again; while Madame Chanteau, who had been immersed in deep reflections, suddenly started up, as though awaking from a dream.

‘There’s one thing which I can’t forgive her. She has completely taken possession of my son. He scarcely stops at the table for a quarter of an hour, and I can hardly get a single word with him.’

‘That will soon be over,’ said Louise. ‘She must have someone with her.’

Madame Chanteau shook her head and tightened her lips but the words which she seemed trying to keep back broke out, apparently in spite of herself.

‘It’s all very well to say that, but it’s a little peculiar for a young man to be always shut up with a sick girl. There! I’ve said what I mean and haven’t kept it back, and if it doesn’t please others I can’t help it.’

Then, noticing Louise’s embarrassed look, she added:

‘It isn’t healthy to breathe the atmosphere of a sick­room. She may easily infect him with her sore throat. Those girls who seem so vigorous have sometimes all sorts of impurities in their blood. Well, I don’t know why I shouldn’t say it, but I don’t think she is quite sound and healthy.’

Louise then feebly defended her friend. She had always found her so nice and kind; that was the only argument which she contrived to bring forward in reply to the accusation of a stony heart and ill-health. An instinctive desire for tranquil peace and quietness induced her to try to mitigate Madame Chanteau’s rough ill-feeling, although every day she listened to her trying to excel her bitterness of the day before. While making some kind of protest against the harshness of Madame Chanteau’s language, Louise indeed flushed with secret pleasure at finding herself preferred to Pauline, promoted to the position of favourite. She was like Minouche in this respect, content to be caressing so long as her own enjoyment was not interfered with.

Every evening the conversation, after flowing along the same channels, ended invariably in the same way, Madame Chanteau slowly saying:

‘No, Louisette, the girl that my son ought to marry—’

And from that starting-point she would launch out into a disquisition upon the qualities of an ideal daughter-in-law, while her eyes all the time remained fixed upon Louise, trying to make her understand more than she was willing to actually say. It was the girl’s own self that was gradually being described. A young person who had been well brought up and educated, who had acquired a knowledge of society, and who was fit to play the part of a hostess, who was grace­ful rather than beautiful, and, what was especially desirable, who was truly feminine and lady-like; for a boy-like girl, a hoyden who made frankness a pretence for being rough and rude, was, said she, her detestation. Then there was the question of money — which was really the only one that influenced her — and this she made a pretence of dismissing with a word, saying that, though she made no account of a dowry, her son had great schemes and aims for the future, and could not, of course, afford to contract a marriage that would be likely to lead to ruin.

‘I may tell you, my dear, that if Pauline had come here penniless, with nothing but the chemise she wore, the mar­riage would probably have taken place years ago. But you can’t be surprised at my hesitation and distrust, when I see money slipping through her hands like water. The sixty thousand francs she still has left won’t trouble her much longer, I fancy. No! Lazare deserves a better fate than that, and I will never consent to his marrying a mad creature who would stint the house in food so that she might ruin herself with idiotic follies.’

‘Ah, no! money’s nothing,’ said Louise, lowering her eyes; ‘still one needs some.’

Although Louise’s dowry was not directly referred to, her two hundred thousand francs seemed to be lying there upon the table, glistening beneath the glow of the hanging lamp. It was because Madame Chanteau felt and saw them there that she became thus excited, and swept aside Pauline’s paltry sixty thousand in her dream of winning for her son that other girl whose big fortune was still intact. She had noticed how Lazare had been drawn towards Louise before all this tiresome business, which now kept him in seclusion upstairs. If the girl was equally attracted towards him, why shouldn’t they make a match of it? Her husband would give his consent, and that the more readily when he saw it was a case of mutual affection. Thus she did all she could to fan Louise’s love into life, spending the rest of the evening in making such remarks as she thought likely to excite the girl’s passion.

‘My Lazare is so good! No one knows half how good he is. You yourself, Louisette, have no notion how affectionate is his nature. Nobody will pity the girl who gets him for a husband. She will be quite certain of being passionately loved. And he is such a handsome vigorous fellow, too! His skin is as white as a chicken’s. My grandfather, the Chevalier de la Vignière, had such a white skin that he used to wear his clothes cut quite low like a woman’s when he went to masked balls.’

Louise blushed and smiled, and was much amused with Madame Chanteau’s details. The mother’s advocacy of her son, and the confidences which she poured out to Louise with the object of inclining her to a union with Lazare, might have kept her there all night if Chanteau had not begun to feel very drowsy over his newspaper.

‘Isn’t it about time for us all to go to bed?’ he asked with a yawn.

Then, as though he had been quite unconscious for some time of what had been going on, and was taking up the thread of Madame Chanteau’s earlier conversation, he added:

‘You are quite mistaken. She is a good girl, and I shall be very glad when she is able to come downstairs again and eat her soup beside me.’

‘We shall all be glad,’ cried his wife, with considerable bitterness. ‘We may speak and say what we think, without ceasing to be fond of those of whom we talk.’

‘The poor little dear!’ exclaimed Louise, in her turn; ‘I should be very glad to bear half the pain for her, if such a thing were possible. She is so amiable!’

Véronique, who was just bringing them their candles, once more put in her word.

‘You are quite right to be her friend, Mademoiselle Louise, for no one, unless she had a paving-stone for a heart, could ever wish her unkindly.’

‘That will do,’ said Madame Chanteau. ‘We didn’t ask for your opinion. It would be very much better if you cleaned the candlesticks. This one here is quite filthy.’

They all rose from their seats. Chanteau lost no time in escaping from his wife’s snappishness, and shut himself up in his room on the ground floor. But when the two women reached the landing upstairs, where their rooms adjoined each other, they did not at once go to bed. Madame Chanteau almost always took Louise into her own room for a little time and there resumed her remarks about Lazare, showing the girl one and another portrait of him, and even exhibiting little memorials and souvenirs, such as a tooth which had been extracted when he was quite young, or a lock of the pale hair of his infancy, or even some of his old clothes; for instance, the bow he had worn at his first communion, or his first pair of trousers.

‘See!’ she said, one night, ‘these are some locks of his hair. I have a number, cut at all stages of his life.’

Thus, when Louise got to bed she could not sleep for thinking of the young man whom his mother was trying to force on her.

Up above, Pauline’s convalescence was progressing gradu­ally. Although the patient was now out of danger, she still remained very feeble, worn out and exhausted by feverish attacks which astonished the doctor. As Lazare said, doctors were always being astonished. He himself was growing more irritable every hour. The sudden lassitude which had fallen upon him when the crisis was over seemed to be turning into a kind of uneasy restlessness. Now that he was no longer wrestling against death, he began to feel dis­tressed by the close atmosphere of the apartment and the spoonfuls of physic which had to be administered at regular hours, and all the other little duties of a sick-room, which he had so enthusiastically taken upon himself at first. Pauline was able to do without him now, and he sank back into the boredom of an aimless empty existence — a boredom which kept him fidgeting from chair to chair, with his hands hanging listlessly by his side, or wandering about the room, staring hopelessly at the walls, or deep in gloomy abstraction in front of the window, looking out, but seeing nothing.

‘Lazare,’ Pauline said to him one day, ‘you must go out. Véronique will be quite able to do everything.’

But he hotly refused. ‘Couldn’t she bear his presence any longer,’ he asked, ‘that she wanted to send him away? It would be very nice of him, wouldn’t it, if he were to desert her like that before she was quite strong again?’

But he grew calm as she gently explained to him:

‘You wouldn’t be deserting me by just going out to get a little fresh air. Go out in the afternoon. We should be in a pretty way if you were to fall ill too.’

Then, however, she unfortunately added:

‘I have seen you yawning all the morning.’

‘You’ve seen me yawning!’ he cried. ‘Say at once that I have no heart! This is a nice way to thank me!’

The next morning Pauline was more diplomatic. She pretended that she was very anxious that the construction of the stockades should be proceeded with; the high winter tides were coming on, and the experimental works would be swept away if the system of defence was not completed. But Lazare no longer glowed with his early enthusiasm; he was dissatisfied with the resistance of the timbers as he had arranged them, and fresh study would be necessary. Then, too, the estimate would be exceeded, and the authorities had not yet voted a single sou. For two days Pauline tried to fan his inventive
amour-propre
into fresh life. She asked him if he was going to let himself be beaten by the sea, with all the neighbourhood looking on and smiling; as for the money, it would certainly be paid back, if she advanced it, as they had settled she should. By degrees Lazare then seemed to work himself up to his old pitch of enthusiasm. He made fresh designs and again called in the carpenter from Arromanches, and had long consultations with him in his own room, the door of which he left open so that he might be ready to go to Pauline at the first summons.

‘Now,’ said he one morning as he kissed the girl, ‘the sea won’t be able to break anything. I am quite sure we shall be successful. As soon as you are able to walk, you must go and see how the works are getting on.’

Louise had just come up into the room to inquire after Pauline’s health, and as she, too, kissed her, the patient whispered to her:

‘Take him away with you.’

Lazare at first refused to go. He was expecting the doctor, he said. But Louise laughed and told him that she was sure he was much too gallant to let her go alone to the Gonins, where she was going to choose Borne lobsters to send to Caen. Besides, he could give a look at the works on the way.

‘Yes, do go,’ said Pauline. ‘It will please me if you do. Take his arm, Louise. There, now, don’t let him get away again.’

She grew quite merry as the two others jokingly pushed each other about; but when they had left the room she became very thoughtful, and leaned over the edge of her bed to listen to their laughter and footsteps dying away down the stairs.

A quarter of an hour later Véronique came in with the doctor. By-and-by she installed herself at Pauline’s bedside, but without abandoning her saucepans, for she kept per­petually running to and fro between the kitchen and the bedroom, spending an hour or so there, as she was able, in the intervals of her work. She did not, however, take over all the duties of nurse at once. Lazare came back in the evening after going out with Louise, but he set off again the next morning; and each succeeding day, carried away as he was, absorbed more and more in outdoor life, his visits to Pauline grew shorter and shorter, till he soon stayed only long enough to inquire after her. Pauline, too, always told him to run off, if he merely spoke of sitting down; and when he and Louise returned together she made them tell her all about their walk, and grew quite bright amidst their anima­tion and the touch of the fresh breezes which still seemed to cling to their hair. They seemed such good friends, and nothing else, that all her old suspicions of them had vanished. And when she saw Véronique coming towards her, with her draught in her hand, she cried out to her gaily: