Complete Works of Emile Zola (777 page)

‘Have you heard the row to which Mademoiselle Pauline has just been treating us?’ she asked Véronique, who had begun furiously polishing her brass-ware.

The servant, with her head bent over the polish, made no answer.

‘She is getting quite unbearable! I can do nothing with her. Would you believe that she is actually talking about leaving us at once? She is packing her things at this moment. I wish you would go upstairs and try to reason with her.’

Then, as she still got no answer, she added:

‘Are you deaf?’

‘If I don’t answer, it’s because I don’t choose,’ Véronique cried snappishly, bursting with angry excitement, and rubbing a candlestick violently enough to hurt her fingers. ‘She is quite right in going away. If I had been in her place, I would have taken myself off long ago.’

Madame Chanteau listened with gaping lips, quite stupe­fied by this mutinous outburst of loquacity.

‘I’m not talkative,’ Véronique continued, ‘but you mustn’t press me too far or I shall let out all I think. I should have liked to fling Mademoiselle Pauline into the sea on the day you first brought her here as a little girl, but I can’t bear to see anyone ill-treated, and you have all of you treated her so abominably that one of these days I shall give anyone who hurts her a swinging box on the ears. You can give me warning, if you like; I don’t care a button; but I will let her into some nice secrets. Yes, she shall know all about how you have treated her, with all your fine pretences to honour and honesty.’

‘Hold your tongue! You are quite mad!’ cried Madame Chanteau, much disquieted by this fresh explosion.

‘No, I will not hold my tongue! It is all too shameful! Shameful, I say! Do you hear me? I have been choking with it all for years and years! Wasn’t it bad enough of you to rob her of her money? Couldn’t you have been content with that, without tearing her poor little heart to shreds? Oh yes! I know all about it; I have seen through all your underhand plottings. Monsieur Lazare is perhaps not quite so calculating as you are; but in other respects he’s not much better than you, for he wouldn’t much mind giving her her death-blow out of mere selfishness, just to save him­self from feeling bored! Ah, me! there are some people who come into this world only to be preyed upon and devoured by others.’

She flourished the candlestick about, and then caught hold of a pan, which rumbled like a drum under the violent rubbing she gave it. Madame Chanteau had been sorely tempted to turn her out of the house at once, but she suc­ceeded in restraining herself and said to her icily:

‘So you won’t go up and speak to the girl? It would be for her own good, to prevent her from committing a piece of folly.’

Véronique became silent again, but at last she growled out:

‘I’ll go up to her. Reason is reason, after all, and an inconsiderate act never does any good.’

She stayed for a minute or two to wash her hands, and then took off her dirty apron. When she opened the door in the passage to make her way to the stairs a loud wail rushed in. It was the ceaseless heart-rending wail of Chan­teau. Madame Chanteau, who was following Véronique, thereupon seemed struck with an idea, and exclaimed in an undertone, emphasising her words:

‘Tell her that she can’t think of leaving her uncle in the dreadful state in which he is. Do you hear?’

‘Well, he certainly is bellowing hard; there’s no doubt of that,’ Véronique replied.

She went up the stairs, while her mistress, who had stretched out her hand towards her husband’s room, pur­posely refrained from closing the door. The sick man’s groans ascended the staircase, increasing in volume at every fresh storey. When Véronique reached Pauline’s room she found her just on the point of leaving, having fastened up in a bundle what little linen she would absolutely require, and intending to send old Malivoire to fetch the rest in the morning. She had calmed down again, and, though very pale and low-spirited, was simply obeying the dictates of her reason without any feeling of anger.

‘Either she or I,’ was the only answer she returned to all that Véronique said, and she sedulously avoided mentioning Louise’s name.

When Véronique conveyed this reply to Madame Chanteau, she found the latter in Louise’s room, where the girl, having dressed herself — for on her side she was determined to go away — stood trembling, alarmed at the slightest creaking of the door. Madame Chanteau was obliged to yield, and sent to Verchemont for the baker’s trap, saying that she would take Louise to her Aunt Léonie at Arromanches. They would invent some story to tell this lady; they would make the violence of Chanteau’s attack a pretext, alleging that his screams had become quite unendurable.

After the departure of the two ladies, whom Lazare safely seated in the baker’s trap, Véronique shouted in the passage at the top of her voice:

‘You can come downstairs now, Mademoiselle Pauline; there is nobody here.’

The house seemed empty; the heavy gloomy silence was broken only by Chanteau’s perpetual groans, which became louder and louder. As Pauline came down the last step Lazare, returning to the house from the yard, met her face to face. His whole body shook with a nervous trembling; he paused for a moment, as though anxious to confess his fault and implore forgiveness, but a rush of tears choked his voice, and he hurried up to his own room, without having been able to say a word.

Chanteau was still lying with his head across the bolster and his arm rigidly outstretched. He no longer dared make the slightest movement; doubtless he had not even been aware of Pauline’s absence, as he lay there with his eyes closed and his mouth open to yell and groan. None of the sounds of the house reached him; and all he thought of was to complain as long and as loudly as his breath would let him. His cries grew more and more desperate, till they at last seriously disturbed Minouche, who had had a family of four kittens thrown away that morning, and who, already quite forgetful of them, had been purring lazily on an arm­chair.

When Pauline took her place again, her uncle howled so loudly that the cat got up, unable to endure the din. She fixed her eyes steadily on the sick man, with the indignation of a well-behaved person whose serenity is disturbed. If she could not be allowed to purr in peace, it would be impossible for her to stop there. And she took herself off, with her tail in the air.

CHAPTER VI

When Madame Chanteau returned home again in the evening, a few minutes before dinner, no further mention was made of Louise. She merely called to Véronique to come and take her boots off. Her left foot was paining her.

‘Little wonder of that!’ the servant murmured. ‘It’s quite swollen.’

The seams of the leather had indeed left crimson marks on the soft white skin. Lazare, who had just come down­stairs, looked at his mother’s foot and said:

‘You have been walking too much.’

But she had really only walked through Arromanches. Besides the pain in her foot, she that day experienced a difficulty in breathing, such as had been increasingly affecting her at intervals for some months past. Presently she began to blame her boots for the pain she was enduring.

‘Those tiresome bootmakers don’t ever seem to make the instep high enough! As soon as ever I get my boots on I’m in a state of torture.’

However, as she felt no further pain after she had put on her slippers, nothing more was thought of the matter. Next morning the swelling had extended to her ankle, but by the following night it disappeared altogether.

A week passed. From the very first dinner at which Pauline had again found herself in the presence of Madame Chanteau and Lazare they had all forced themselves to resume their ordinary demeanour towards each other. No allusion was made to what had occurred; everything seemed to be just the same as usual. The family life went on in the old mechanical way, with the same customary expressions of affection, the same good-mornings and good-nights, and the same lifeless kisses given at fixed hours. A feeling of great relief came, however, that they were at last able to wheel Chanteau to his place at table. This time his knees had remained stiff with ankylosis, and he could not stand upright. But none the less he enjoyed his freedom from actual pain, and was so entirely wrapped up in egotistical satisfaction at his own well-being that he never gave a thought to the joys or cares of the other members of the family. When Madame Chanteau ventured to mention Louise’s sudden departure, he begged her not to speak to him of such melan­choly matters. Pauline, now freed from her attendance in her uncle’s room, tried to find some other means of occupying herself, but she could not conceal the grief oppressing her. She found the evenings especially painful, and her distress was plainly visible despite all her affectation of calmness. Ostensibly everything was just the same as usual, and the old every-day routine was gone through; but every now and then a nervous gesture or even a momentary pause would make them all conscious of the hidden breach, the rift of which they never spoke, but which was, all the same, always widening.

At first Lazare had felt contempt for himself. The moral superiority of Pauline, who was so upright and just, had filled him with shame and vexation. Why had he lacked the courage to go to her, confess his fault, and ask her pardon? He might have told her the whole truth, how he had suddenly been excited and carried away by the presence of Louise, whose glamour had intoxicated him; and his cousin was too generous and large-hearted not to understand and make allowances. But insurmountable em­barrassment had kept him back; he felt afraid of cutting a still more contemptible figure in the girl’s eyes by entering upon an explanation in which he would very likely stammer and hesitate like a child. Beneath his hesitation, too, there lurked the fear of telling another falsehood, for his thoughts were still full of Louise, her image was per­petually haunting him. In spite of himself, his long walks always seemed to lead him into the neighbourhood of Arromanches. One evening he went right on to Aunt Léonie’s little house and prowled round it, hurriedly taking flight as he heard a shutter move, all confusion at the baseness he had contemplated. It was the sense of his own unworthiness that doubled his feeling of shame in Pauline’s presence; and he freely condemned himself, though he could not quench his passion. The struggle was perpetually going on within his mind, and never before had his natural irreso­lution proved such a source of pain to him. He only had sufficient honesty and strength of purpose left him to avoid Pauline and thus escape the last dishonour of perjuring him­self. It was possible that he still loved his cousin, but the alluring image of her friend was ever before him, blotting out the past and barring the future.

Pauline, on her side, waited for his defence and apology. In her first outburst of indignation she had sworn that she would never forgive him. Then she had begun to suffer secretly at finding that her forgiveness had not been asked. Why did he keep silence, and seem so feverish and restless, spending all his time out of doors, as though he were afraid to find himself alone with her? She was quite ready to listen to him and to forget everything, if only he would show a little repentance. As the hoped-for explanation failed to come, she racked her mind to find reasons for her cousin’s silence. Her own pride kept her from making the first advance; and, as the days painfully and slowly passed, she succeeded in conquering herself so far as to resume all her old cheerful activity. But beneath that brave show of calmness there lurked everlasting unhappiness, and in her own room at night she burst into fits of tears, and had to stifle the sound of her sobs by burying her head in her pillow. Nobody spoke about the wedding, though it was evident that they all thought of it. The autumn was coming on; what was to be done? Nobody seemed to care to say anything on the matter; they all avoided coming to a decision till they should feel able to discuss it again.

It was about this time that Madame Chanteau completely lost her head. She had always been excitable and restless, but the dim causes which had undermined all her good prin­ciples had now reached a period of great destructiveness. Never before had she found herself so completely off her balance, so nervously feverish as now. The necessity for restraint exasperated her torment. She suffered from her rageful longing for money, which grew stronger day by day and ended by carrying off her reason and her heart. She was continually attacking Pauline, whom she now began to blame for Louise’s departure, accusing her of it as of an act of robbery that had despoiled her son. She felt an ever-open wound which would not close; the smallest trifles assumed monstrous proportions; she remembered the slightest incidents of the horrid scene; she could still hear Pauline crying, ‘Be off! Be off!’ And she began to imagine that she herself was being driven away, that all the joy and the fortune of the family was being flung into the streets. At night-time, as she rolled about in bed in a restless semi-somnolent state, she even regretted that death had not freed them from that accursed Pauline. Intricate schemes and calculations sprang up in wild confusion in her brain, but she was never able to hit upon any practicable means of getting rid of the girl.

At the same time a kind of reaction seemed to increase her affection for her own son, and she worshipped him now almost more than she had done when she had held him in her arms as an infant and had possessed his undivided love. From morning till night she followed him with her anxious eyes; and when they were alone together she would throw her arms around him and kiss him, and beg him not to distress himself. She swore to him that everything should be put right, that she would strangle those who opposed her rather than have him unhappy. After a fortnight of this continual struggling, her face had become as pale as wax, though she grew no thinner. The swelling in her feet had twice appeared again, and had then subsided.

One morning she rang for Véronique, to whom she showed her legs, which had swollen to the thighs during the night.

‘Just look at the state I’m in! Isn’t it provoking? I wanted to go out so much to-day, and now I shall be obliged to stay in bed! Don’t say anything about it for fear of alarming Lazare.’