The Thibaults (55 page)

“What about Nicole?” she asked abruptly.

“Nicole?”

“Have you let her know?”

“No.”

How was it she did not think of this herself, when leaving Paris? She drew Jerome aside.

“You
must
, Jerome. She’s Nicole’s mother.”

The look of entreaty on his face gave her the measure of his weakness, and her resolution faltered too. To think of Nicole coming to this hateful house, entering such a room, confronting Jerome by this bedside! But she insisted, though her tone was less assured.

“You
must!
”

The curious earth-brown hue which darkened Jerome’s dusky skin still more whenever he was thwarted came to his cheeks; his narrow lips set in a harsh grimace, baring his teeth.

“Jerome, Nicole must be sent for,” she repeated gently.

His slender eyebrows drew together, drooped, and for a while he still held out. At last, raising his hard eyes to hers, he yielded.

“What is her address?”

When he had left to send the telegram she returned to the bed; somehow she could not tear herself away from it. She stood beside it with drooping arms, her fingers locked. What had possessed her to imagine Noémie out of danger? And why did Jerome not seem more distressed? What were his plans? Would he come back to live with her? Certainly no such suggestion would cross her lips; yet she would not deny him shelter, if he asked it.

A grateful mood of peace, almost of happiness, crept over her; the feeling shamed her and she sought to banish it. To pray. To pray for this departing soul that was returning to the Universal Soul. Poor soul, she thought, that takes so little with her on her way! Yet, in the ineluctable ascent of all towards a higher plane, through the vast sequence of our earthly incarnations, does not each upward effort, however feeble, tell in favour of the one who makes it? Does not each trial mean a step forward on the pathway of perfection? That Noémie had suffered, Thérèse could not doubt. Despite the specious glamour of her life, surely there had rankled in the poor woman’s heart a deep unrest, the dull ache of a conscience that, for all its unconcern, trembled in secret at its degradation. And now that suffering would be accounted to the poor soul’s credit in another, better life; and her love, too, despite its guilt and the evil it had done. This, in her present mood, Thérèse could readily forgive. Still, she reflected, such forgiveness did her little honour. For, there was no denying it, she could not persuade herself that Noémie’s death would be a great misfortune. For anyone. Her feelings were evolving with remorseless speed; she, like Jerome, was growing used to the notion that Noémie was to pass out of their lives. Less than an hour had gone since first she
knew
—and, already, almost her only feeling was one of resignation.

When, two days later, Nicole stepped down from the Paris express, her mother had been dead for thirty-six hours; the funeral was to take place on the following morning.

Everyone concerned seemed eager to have done with it—the proprietress of the pension, Jerome, and, most of all, the young doctor, recipient of the five hundred florins, who had signed the death certificate without even coming upstairs to view the body, after a brief parley in one of the ground-floor rooms.

Harrowing though the task would have been, Thérèse expressed a desire to help in laying out the body; she wished to be able to tell Nicole that she had carried out this pious duty in her stead. But, at the last moment and on trivial grounds, they had refused her access to the room; the midwife had insisted on attending to the laying out—”After all, she’s used to it,” Jerome had observed—in the presence of the nurse alone.

Nicole’s arrival brought a welcome change. Hour by hour Mme. de Fontanin had been finding her encounters in the corridor, with pension-keeper, doctor, and the nurse, more and more unbearable; indeed, from the moment she had come, the atmosphere she was breathing in this house seemed to suffocate her. Nicole’s open face, her youth and health, brought a breath of fresh, cleansing air into the place. The violence of her grief, however—Jerome was so unnerved by it that he took refuge in another room—struck Mme. de Fontanin as disproportioned to the girl’s true feelings towards a mother she had cast out of her life. The childish extravagance of her outburst bore out the older woman’s view of her niece’s mentality; a warm-hearted girl, she thought, but lacking real depth of character.

Nicole wanted to bring her mother’s body back to France; as she declined to have anything to do with Jerome, whom she still held responsible for her mother’s lapse, her aunt volunteered to sound him on the matter. Jerome met the proposal with an emphatic veto. He expatiated on the exorbitant railway charges in such cases, the endless formalities involved, and, finally, the inquest on which, needless though it was, the local police would certainly insist; they delighted, Jerome averred, in putting foreigners to inconvenience. So Nicole’s plan had to be dropped.

Exhausted though she was by her emotions and the journey, Nicole insisted on keeping vigil beside the coffin. The three of them passed the night, in silence and alone, in Noémie’s room. The coffin, spread with flowers, rested on two chairs. So heady was the perfume of jessamine and roses that they had to keep the window wide open. The night was hot, and bright as day with dazzling moonlight. Now and again they heard low sounds of water lapping round the piles which supported the house. Near at hand the passing hours chimed from a clock-tower. A moonbeam, gliding across the floor, crept every minute nearer to an over-blown white rose fallen beside the coffin’s foot, making it seem translucent, almost blue. Nicole’s indignant eyes took in the squalor of the room; here her mother had lived, perhaps; assuredly had suffered. She was counting up, perhaps, the printed flowers on yonder curtain when first she heard death’s summons and, in a tragic pageant, the follies of her wasted life had passed before her dying eyes. Had she given her daughter then a last, belated thought?

The funeral took place very early next day. Neither midwife nor pension-keeper put in an appearance. Thérèse walked between Jerome and Nicole, and the only other mourner was an old clergyman whom Mme. de Fontanin had sent for to attend the funeral and read the burial service.

To spare Nicole another visit to the odious house beside the canal, Mme. de Fontanin decided to take the girl directly to the station on leaving the graveyard. Jerome would follow up with the luggage. Moreover, Nicole refused to take over any object whatsoever associated with her mother’s life abroad; the decision to leave Noémie’s trunks behind made the final settlement with the proprietress a much simpler matter.

When all the bills had been paid and Jerome was on his way to the station, he found he had a good deal of time on his hands before the train was due to leave; yielding to a sudden impulse, he directed the cabman to take another road, and revisited the graveyard for the last time.

He lost his way several times before finding the grave again. When he sighted in the distance a mound of newly turned earth, he took off his hat and walked towards it with measured steps. Here lay all that remained of their six years of life in common, of quarrels, jealousy, and reconcilements; six years of memories and secrets shared—all to end in the final, most tragic secret whose upshot lay before his eyes.

“After all, things might have turned out worse; I do not seem to feel it much,” he consoled himself, though his careworn forehead and blinding tears appeared to belie the thought. Was he to blame if rejoicing over his wife’s return outweighed his grief? Surely there had been one love only in his life—Thérèse! But would she ever understand that? Would she ever forgo her cold austerity and realize that, appearances notwithstanding, she alone fulfilled the life of this too wayward lover, who yet had loved with all his soul one woman only? Would it ever come to her that, beside the wholehearted devotion he bestowed on her, no other love of his was more than a passing fancy? Surely this very moment bore him out—Noémie’s death had left him neither lost nor lonely. So long as Thérèse lived, though she were even more aloof from him, though she might fancy every bond between them severed, he was not alone. For an instant he tried to picture Thérèse lying there under the flower-strewn turf; but found the thought unbearable. He hardly blamed himself at all for any of the sufferings he had brought on his wife, so firm was his conviction at this solemn moment that he had deprived her of nothing which really mattered, but had devoted to her all that was best and most enduring in his heart—so sure was he that he had never for a moment been unfaithful to her. What are her plans for me? he asked himself, but with no anxiety. Surely she would want him to come back to her and to the children. His head was bowed, his cheeks were wet with tears—but in his heart hope glowed insidiously.

If it weren’t for Nicole, all would be for the best! he thought. He recalled the girl’s hostile silence and her steely eyes. He saw her again bending above the grave, and heard again the dry, racking sob she had not been able to keep back.

Yes, the thought of Nicole was a torment to him. Was it not on? his account that, angered beyond bearing, she had fled her mother’s: house? A passage from the Gospels echoed in his memory: “Woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” How shall I make amends?.’ he wondered. He could not endure the thought that anyone disapproved of him… . Suddenly he had an inspiration. Why not adopt her as his daughter?

Yes, that settled everything! In his mind’s eye he pictured it—the little flat that he would share with Nicole; she would, of course, arrange it to her liking, keep house for him, help him to entertain. How everybody would admire his gesture of contrition! Thérèse, too, would approve.

He put on his hat again and, turning his back on the grave, walked briskly to the cab.

The train had been in for some time when he reached the station. The two women had already taken their seats. Mme. de Fontanin was perturbed by her husband’s delay in coming. Had some complication arisen at the pension? Almost anything seemed possible. Would Jerome be prevented from leaving? Was her dream of bringing him back to Maisons, of smoothing the way for his return to her and, it well might be, for his repentance—was her fond dream so soon to vanish like a mirage? Her apprehension grew to panic when she saw him approaching with rapid strides and an anxious air.

“Where is Nicole?”

“Why, over there, in the corridor,” Mme. de Fontanin replied with some surprise.

The window was half down and Nicole stood beside it, idly gazing at the gleaming network of rails. She felt sad, but weary most of all; sad, yet happy too, for today’s sorrow could not even for an instant quell her secret joy. Her mother was dead—but was not the man she loved awaiting her? And once again she tried to ban the thought, as something impious, from her mind, that her mother’s death could not but prove, for her lover anyhow, a relief—a lifting of the one and only shadow that hitherto had dimmed their future.

She did not hear Jerome’s step behind her.

“Nicole, I implore you—for your mother’s sake—forgive me!”

She started and turned round. He stood before her, hat in hand, his eyes aglow with humble entreaty. And now his face, ravaged by sorrow and remorse, no longer disgusted her; she was touched by pity. She could almost fancy that this opportunity for kindliness was of her seeking; yes, she would forgive him.

Without answering, impulsively, she held out her little black-gloved hand, and he pressed it with unfeigned emotion.

“Thank you,” he murmured. Then he moved away.

Some minutes passed. Nicole did not move. Things were better so, she thought, if only for her aunt’s sake; and then, of course, there would be Felix to tell about this touching little incident. People were bustling along the corridor, jostling her with their luggage. At last the train began to pull out. The sudden stresses helped to dispel her lethargy, and she returned to the compartment. Late-comers occupied the seats which only a moment earlier were empty. At the far end, ensconced in the corner-seat facing Mme. de Fontanin, one arm lolling in a leather window-strap and eyes fixed on the landscape, her uncle Jerome, she observed, was munching a ham sandwich.

JACQUES spent the evening trying to reconstruct, word for word, his talk with Jenny. He made no attempt to analyse what exactly it was that drew his thoughts so urgently towards that conversation, yet it obsessed his mind. He woke up several times in the course of the night and harked back each time to the same theme with unabated eagerness. So, naturally enough, he was bitterly disappointed when he went to the tennis-club next morning only to find that Jenny had not turned up.

He was asked to join in a set and thought it better to comply, but he played badly, for his eyes strayed all the time towards the entrance-gate. The morning passed and soon it was too late to hope that Jenny would come. He made his escape the moment he could decently do so. His hope had failed him, but he was not hopeless yet.

Then he saw Daniel coming towards him.

“Where’s Jenny?” he asked at once. Daniel’s presence at this hour was unexpected, but he made no comment on it.

“She’s not playing this morning. Are you leaving now? Then I’ll come along with you. I’ve been at Maisons since yesterday evening.” As soon as they had left the club grounds he explained: “Mother’s been called away, you see; she asked me to sleep at home so that Jenny wouldn’t be alone at night—our house is such miles from anywhere. It’s another of my father’s little games and Mother, poor thing, can never say no to him.” A shadow flitted across his face, but soon was vanquished by a resolute smile, for Daniel had a short way with disagreeable thoughts. “And how are you getting on?” His eyes conveyed affectionate concern. “I’ve been thinking quite a lot about your
Startled Secret
; I like it as much as ever, you know. And the more I think about it the better I like it. Psychologically it’s in a class by itself—a trifle brutal, perhaps, and a bit obscure in places. But you’ve hit on a fine idea and your two heroes are very life-like and, what’s more, original.”