The Marquise of O and Other Stories (9 page)

The Marquise stood as if thunderstruck. Recovering herself, she was on the point of going straight to her father; but the strangely serious manner of this man by whom she felt so insulted numbed her in every limb. She threw herself down on the divan in the greatest agitation. Mistrustful of herself, she cast her mind back over every moment of the past year, and when she thought of those through which she had just passed it seemed to her that she must be going crazy. At last her mother appeared, and in answer to her shocked inquiry as to why she was so distressed, the Marquise informed her of what the doctor had just said. Her mother declared him to be a shameless and contemptible wretch, and emboldened her in her resolution to report this insult to her father. The Marquise assured her that the doctor had been completely in earnest and seemed quite determined to repeat his insane assertion to her father's face. Did she then, asked her mother in some alarm, believe there was any possibility of her being in such a condition? ‘I would sooner believe that graves can be made fertile,' answered the Marquise, ‘and that new births can quicken in the womb of the dead!' ‘Why then, you dear strange girl,' said her mother, hugging her warmly, ‘what can be worrying you? If your conscience clears you, what can a doctor's verdict matter, or indeed the verdict of a whole panel of doctors? This particular one may be mistaken, or he may be malicious, but why need that concern you at all? Nevertheless it is proper that we should tell your father about it.' ‘Oh, God!' said the Marquise, starting convulsively, ‘how can I set my mind at rest? Do not my own feelings speak against me, those inner sensations I know only too well? If I knew that another woman was feeling as I do, would I not myself come to the conclusion that that was indeed how things stood with her?' ‘But this is terrible!' exclaimed her mother. ‘Malicious! mistaken!' continued the Marquise. ‘What reasons can that man, whom until today we have always respected, what reasons can he have for insulting me so frivolously and basely? Why should he do
so, when I have never said anything to offend him? When I received him here with complete trust, fully expecting to be bound to him in gratitude? When he came to me sincerely and honestly intending, as was evident from his very first words, to help me rather than to cause me far worse pain than I was already suffering? And if on the other hand,' she went on, while her mother gazed at her steadily, ‘I were forced to choose between the two possibilities and preferred to suppose that he had made a mistake, is it in the least possible that a doctor, even one of quite mediocre skill, should be mistaken in such a case?' Her mother replied, a little ironically: ‘And yet, of course, it must necessarily have been one or the other.' ‘Yes, dearest mother!' answered the Marquise, kissing her hand but with an air of offended dignity and blushing scarlet, ‘it must indeed, although the circumstances are so extraordinary that I may be permitted to doubt it. And since it seems that I must give you an assurance, I swear now that my conscience is as clear as that of my own children's; no less clear, my beloved and respected mother, than your own. Nevertheless, I ask you to have a midwife called in to see me, in order that I may convince myself of what is the case and then, whatever it may be, set my mind at rest.' ‘A midwife!' exclaimed the Commandant's wife indignantly, ‘a clear conscience, and a midwife!' And speech failed her. ‘A midwife, my dearest mother,' repeated the Marquise, falling on her knees before her, ‘and let her come at once, if I am not to go out of my mind.' ‘Oh, by all means,' replied her mother. ‘But the confinement, if you please, will not take place in my house.' And with these words she rose and would have left the room. Her daughter, following her with outspread arms, fell right down on her face and clasped her knees. ‘If the irreproachable life I have led,' she cried, with anguish lending her eloquence, ‘a life modelled on yours, gives me any claim at all to your respect, if there is in your heart any maternal feeling for me at all, even if only for so long as my guilt is
not yet proved and clear as day, then do not abandon me at this terrible moment!' ‘But what is upsetting you?' asked her mother. ‘Is it nothing more than the doctor's verdict? Nothing more than your inner sensations?' ‘Nothing more, dear mother,' replied the Marquise, laying her hand on her breast. ‘Nothing, Giulietta?' continued her mother. ‘Think carefully. If you have committed a fault, though that would grieve me indescribably, it would be forgivable and in the end I should have to forgive it; but if, in order to avoid censure from your mother, you were to invent a fable about the overturning of the whole order of nature, and dared to reiterate blasphemous vows in order to persuade me of its truth, knowing that my heart is all too eager to believe you, then that would be shameful; I could never feel the same about you again.' ‘May the doors of salvation one day be as open to me as my soul is now open to you!' cried the Marquise. ‘I have concealed nothing from you, mother.' This declaration, uttered with passionate solemnity, moved her mother deeply. ‘Oh God!' she cried, ‘my dear, dear child! How touchingly you speak!' And she lifted her up and kissed her and pressed her to her heart. ‘Then what in the name of all the world are you afraid of? Come, you are quite ill,' she added, trying to lead her towards a bed. But the Marquise, weeping copiously, assured her that she was quite well and that there was nothing wrong with her, apart from her extraordinary and incomprehensible condition. ‘Condition!' exclaimed her mother again, ‘what condition? If your recollection of the past is so clear, what mad apprehension has possessed you? Can one not be deceived by such internal sensations, when they are still only obscurely stirring?' ‘No! no!' said the Marquise, ‘they are not deceiving me! And if you will have the midwife called, then you will hear that this terrible, annihilating thing is true.' ‘Come, my darling,' said the Commandant's wife, who was beginning to fear for her daughter's reason. ‘Come with me; you must go to bed. What was it you thought the
doctor said to you? Why, your cheeks are burning hot! You're trembling in every limb! Now, what was it the doctor told you?' And no longer believing that the scene of which she had been told had really happened at all, she took her daughter by the arm and tried to draw her away. Then the Marquise, smiling through her tears, said: ‘My dear, excellent mother! I am in full possession of my senses. The doctor told me that I am expecting a child. Send for the midwife; and as soon as she tells me that it is not true I shall regain my composure.' ‘Very well, very well!' replied her mother, concealing her apprehension. ‘She shall come at once; if that is what you want, she shall come and laugh her head off at you and tell you what a silly girl you are to imagine such things.' And so saying she rang the bell and immediately sent one of her servants to call the midwife.

When the latter arrived the Marquise was still lying with her mother's arms around her and her breast heaving in agitation. The Commandant's wife told the woman of the strange notion by which her daughter was afflicted: that her ladyship swore her behaviour had been entirely virtuous but that nevertheless, deluded by some mysterious sensation or other, she considered it necessary to submit her condition to the scrutiny of a woman with professional knowledge. The midwife, as she carried out her investigation, spoke of warm-blooded youth and the wiles of the world; having finished her task she remarked that she had come across such cases before; young widows who found themselves in her ladyship's situation always believed themselves to have been living on desert islands; but that there was no cause for alarm, and her ladyship could rest assured that the gay corsair who had come ashore in the dark would come to light in due course. On hearing these words, the Marquise fainted. Her mother was still sufficiently moved by natural affection to bring her back to her senses with the midwife's assistance, but as soon as she revived, maternal indignation proved stronger. ‘Giulietta!'
she cried in anguish, ‘will you confess to me, will you tell me who the father is?' And she still seemed disposed towards a reconciliation. But when the Marquise replied that she would go mad, her mother rose from the couch and said: ‘Go from my sight, you are contemptible! I curse the day I bore you!' and left the room.

The Marquise, now nearly swooning again, drew the midwife down in front of her and laid her head against her breast, trembling violently. With a faltering voice she asked her what the ways of nature were, and whether such a thing as an unwitting conception was possible. The woman smiled, loosened her kerchief and said that that would, she was sure, not be the case with her ladyship. ‘No, no,' answered the Marquise, ‘I conceived knowingly, I am merely curious in a general way whether such a phenomenon exists in the realm of nature.' The midwife replied that with the exception of the Blessed Virgin it had never yet happened to any woman on earth. The Marquise trembled more violently than ever. She felt as if she might go into labour at any minute, and clung to the midwife in convulsive fear, begging her not to leave her. The woman calmed her apprehension, assuring her that the confinement was still a long way off; she also informed her of the ways and means by which it was possible in such cases to avoid the gossip of the world, and said she was sure everything would turn out nicely. But these consoling remarks merely pierced the unhappy lady to the very heart; composing herself with an effort she declared that she felt better, and requested her attendant to leave her.

The midwife was scarcely out of the room when a footman brought the Marquise a written message from her mother, who expressed herself as follows: 'In view of the circumstances which have come to light, Colonel G— desires you to leave his house. He sends you herewith the papers concerning your estate and hopes that God will spare him the unhappiness of ever seeing you again.' But the
letter was wet with tears, and in one corner, half effaced, stood the word ‘dictated'. Tears of grief started from the Marquise's eyes. Weeping bitterly at the thought of the error into which her excellent parents had fallen and the injustice into which it had misled them, she went to her mother's apartments, but was told that her mother was with the Commandant. Hardly able to walk, she made her way to her father's rooms. Finding the door locked she sank down outside it, and in a heartrending voice called upon all the saints to witness her innocence. She had been lying there for perhaps a few minutes when her brother emerged, his face flushed with anger, and said that as she already knew, the Commandant did not wish to see her. The Marquise, sobbing distractedly, exclaimed: ‘Dearest brother!', and pushing her way into the room she cried: ‘My beloved father!' She held out her arms towards the Commandant, but no sooner did he see her than he turned his back on her and hurried into his bedroom. As she tried to follow him he shouted ‘Begone!' and tried to slam the door; but when she cried out imploringly and prevented him from doing so he suddenly desisted and letting the Marquise into the room, strode across to the far side of it with his back still turned to her. She had just thrown herself at his feet and tremblingly clasped his knees when a pistol which he had seized went off just as he was snatching it down from the wall, and a shot crashed into the ceiling. ‘Oh, God preserve me!' exclaimed the Marquise, rising from her knees as pale as death, and fled from her father's apartment. Reaching her own, she gave orders that her carriage should be made ready at once, sat down in utter exhaustion, hastily dressed her children, and told the servants to pack her belongings. She was just holding her youngest child between her knees, wrapping one more garment round it, and everything was ready for their departure in the carriage, when her brother entered and demanded, on the Commandant's orders, that she should leave the children behind and hand them over to
him. ‘These children!' she exclaimed, rising to her feet. ‘Tell your inhuman father that he can come here and shoot me dead, but he shall not take my children from me!' And armed with all the pride of innocence she snatched up her children, carried them with her to the coach, her brother not daring to stop her, and drove off.

This splendid effort of will gave her back her self-confidence, and as if with her own hands she raised herself right out of the depths into which fate had cast her. The turmoil and anguish of her heart ceased when she found herself on the open road with her beloved prize, the children; she covered them with kisses, reflecting with great satisfaction what a victory she had won over her brother by the sheer force of her clear conscience. Her reason was strong enough to withstand her strange situation without giving way, and she submitted herself wholly to the great, sacred and inexplicable order of the world. She saw that it would be impossible to convince her family of her innocence, realized that she must accept this fact for the sake of her own survival, and only a few days after her arrival at V— her grief had been replaced by a heroic resolve to arm herself with pride and let the world do its worst. She decided to withdraw altogether into her own life, to devote herself zealously and exclusively to the education of her two children, and to care with full maternal love for the third which God had now given her. Since her beautiful country house had fallen rather into disrepair owing to her long absence, she made arrangements for its restoration, to be completed in a few weeks' time, as soon as her confinement was over; she sat in the summer-house knitting little caps and socks for little feet, and thinking about what use she might most conveniently make of various rooms, which of them for instance she would fill with books and in which of them her easel might be most suitably placed. And thus, even before the date of Count F—'s expected return from Naples, she was quite reconciled to a life of perpetual cloistered
seclusion. Her porter was ordered to admit no visitors to the house. The only thing she found intolerable was the thought that the little creature she had conceived in the utmost innocence and purity and whose origin, precisely because it was more mysterious, also seemed to her more divine than that of other men, was destined to bear a stigma of disgrace in good society. An unusual expedient for discovering the father had occurred to her: an expedient which, when she first thought of it, so startled her that she let fall her knitting. For whole nights on end, restless and sleepless, she turned it over and over in her mind, trying to get used to an idea the very nature of which offended her innermost feelings. She still felt the greatest repugnance at the thought of entering into any relationship with the person who had tricked her in such a fashion; for she most rightly concluded that he must after all irredeemably belong to the very scum of mankind, and that whatever position of society one might imagine him to occupy, his origin could only be from its lowest, vilest dregs. But with her sense of her own independence growing ever stronger, and reflecting as she did that a precious stone retains its value whatever its setting may be, she took heart one morning, as she felt the stirring of the new life inside her, and gave instructions for the insertion in the M— news-sheets of the extraordinary announcement quoted to the reader at the beginning of this story.