The Thibaults (76 page)

At last Antoine managed to bring down the pain.

“It’s a quarter past,” he said. “When have you to be off?”

“Not … not till … till five o’clock,” his victim stammered. “I’ve my car … wait—waiting.”

Antoine bade him take heart with a good-natured smile, but there was a touch of irony behind it; he could not help picturing the dapper chauffeur with his tricolour cockade awaiting, statue-like upon his seat, His Excellency’s delegate. And then—at this very moment, perhaps, they were unfurling under the marquee of the Flower Show the roll of carpet along which, only an hour hence, friend Rumelles, who now lay there wriggling and writhing like a new-born babe, would advance in solitary state with measured steps, resplendent in his frock-coat, his cat-like moustache uptilted in a smile, to greet the little queen. But, on the instant, the vision faded; now under the doctor’s eyes there lay merely a patient—less than that, a “case”; less still, a chemical process, the action of a caustic on a mucous membrane, an action which he had deliberately provoked, for which he was responsible, and whose latent but inevitable operation he was now observing with his mind’s eye.

Léon’s three discreet taps on the door deflected his attention to the outside world. “Gise has come,” he said to himself as he slapped his instruments into the tray of the sterilizer. Eager though he was to see the last of Rumelles, it was against his principles to palter with the duties of his calling, and he waited patiently till the painful effects of the nitrate had eased off.

“Make yourself at home and rest a bit,” he said as he went out. “I shan’t be needing this room. I’ll come and tell you when it’s ten to the hour.”

“WILL you be so good as to wait there, Miss?” Léon had said to to Gise.

By “there” he meant Jacques’s old room, which now was darkening with the nightfall, sombre and silent as a crypt. Her heart-beats quickened as she crossed the threshold and the effort she had to make to master her distress took, as usual, the form of a prayer, a brief appeal to Him who never leaves His children unconsoled. Instinctively she went towards the bed-sofa where, at so many different periods of her life, she had sat and talked the happy hours away with “Jacquot.” Gise could hear—was it in the street or in the waiting-room?—a child’s tempestuous sobs. She always found it difficult to control her feelings. Nowadays, for nothing at all, her eyes would brim with tears. A good thing she was alone just now. Yes, she would have to see a doctor. Not Antoine, however. She was out of sorts, losing weight—her insomnia, most likely. Anyhow it wasn’t normal for a girl of nineteen… . For a minute or two she let her mind dwell on the curious sequence of those nineteen years, her never-ending childhood passed in the company of two old people; then—in her sixteenth year—heavy with cruel mystery, the blow had fallen!

Léon came in and turned on the light; Gise did not dare to tell him she would rather have been left in semi-darkness. Now, under the lamplight, she knew each object in the room for a familiar friend. Obviously enough, out of devotion to his brother’s memory, Antoine had made a point of not disturbing anything; and yet, by slow degrees, once he had started using the room for meals, each object had been shifted from its place or changed its function till everything looked different—the table, for instance, planted with its leaves outspread plumb in the middle of the room, and the tea-service lording it on the disused desk between the bread-basket and a bowl of fruit. Even the bookcase… . Yes, those green curtains behind the glazed doors used not to be like that. One of them was gaping a little and, when Gise stooped to look at it, she caught the glint of glass and silver. Léon had piled up all the books on the top shelf. If poor Jacques could have seen his bookcase transformed into a sideboard …!

Jacques! Gise refused to think of him in terms of death; not merely would it not have startled her in the least, suddenly to see him standing there on the threshold, but she was always expecting him to reappear at any moment. And for the past three years her fanatic expectancy had kept her in a daydream, ecstatic—yet depressing.

Here, in these familiar surroundings, phantoms of the past flocked round her. She could not move and hardly dared to breathe, lest the faint movement of the air should desecrate the silence. There was a photograph of Antoine on the mantelpiece and, as her eyes fell on it, she remembered the day when Antoine had given that copy to Jacques; he had presented Mademoiselle with another like it, which she still had upstairs. It brought back to her an Antoine of earlier days, the Antoine who had been her stand-by in the three dark years that followed. How often since Jacques had left them had she come downstairs to talk to him about the fugitive, how often all but shared with him her secret! But now—everything had changed. Why? What had come between them? She could not fix on anything definite; the only thing she could recall was that brief scene last June, just before she left for London. The imminence of her departure, of whose secret motive he had no inkling, had seemed to throw him off his balance. What exactly had he said to her? She had gathered that his love for her was no longer a mere elder-brotherly regard, but he felt towards her in “quite another way.” Surely she was mistaken, she must have dreamt it! Yet, no; even the letters he had written to her—how puzzling they had seemed, too tenderly effusive and, for all that, so reticent!—no longer conveyed the tranquil affection of former years. And so, ever since her return to France, she had instinctively kept out of his way, and during the past fortnight avoided being alone with him at any moment. And now today—what did he want of her?

She started at a sound; rapid yet measured footsteps: Antoine’s steps. He entered the room and stood before her, smiling. He looked rather tired, but his brow was calm, his eyes were gay and sparkling. Gise, who had been feeling herself adrift, pulled herself together at once; Antoine’s presence always had that effect on others, it seemed to emanate a vibrant energy.

“Hallo, Blackie!” he hailed her with a smile. (“Blackie” was a nickname which M. Thibault, in a burst of good humour, had bestowed on her. It dated from those far-off days when circumstances had compelled Mile, de Waize to adopt her little orphan niece and, taking the child under her wing, had introduced into the staid Thibault household what at the time had seemed to them an untamed little savage.)

“I suppose you have a crowd of patients this afternoon,” Gise remarked, to make conversation. .

“All in the day’s work,” he cheerfully replied. “Will you come to the consulting-room? Or shall we stay here?” Without waiting for her answer he sat down beside her. “How are you getting on? We hardly ever seem to see each other nowadays. That’s a pretty shawl… . Give me your hand.” He took the little, unresisting hand without more ado, laid it flat upon his fist, and held it up to his eyes. “Not so plump as it used to be, your little hand.” Gise smiled good-humouredly and Antoine saw two little dimples form in her brown cheeks. She made no effort to withdraw her arm, but Antoine felt that she was on her guard, ready to shrink from him. He all but murmured: “You’re not so nice as you used to be before you went away,” but thought better of it, and lapsed into a moody silence.

“Your father insisted on going back to bed, on account of his leg,” she said evasively.

Antoine made no comment. What an age it was since he was last alone with Gise! He riveted his gaze on the small, dark hand, and his eyes followed the blue tracery of veins along the slender, well-knit wrist; then, examining the fingers one by one, he tried to laugh it off. “Do you know what they remind me of? Dainty little half-coronas!” But all the while, across a shimmering haze that seemed to rise before them, his eyes were lingering in an insidious caress on all the sinuous curves of her lithe, bent body, from the soft roundness of her shoulder to the angle of her knee under the silk shawl. It made his senses tingle, that languid grace of hers, so naive … and so near. Sudden and catastrophic, like a rush of blood to tbe head or a pent-up torrent chafing at the flood-gates, came a flood of desire. He almost yielded to an impulse to slip an arm around her, draw the young, lithe body closely to his side. But then … he only bowed his head and lightly pressed his cheek against the little hand. “How soft your skin is, Blackie!” he murmured. He lifted his eyes slowly towards her face and when she saw the look in them, a look of famished, almost insensate craving, instinctively Gise turned aside, withdrew her hand.

“What did you want to tell me?” she asked in a level tone.

Antoine pulled himself together.

“I’ve some terrible news to give you, my dear.”

Terrible news? A dreadful fear leapt into her mind. Supposing …? Was this the bitter end of all her hopes? Her terror-stricken eyes swept round the room, lingering for an agonizing moment on each familiar landmark of her love.

“Father is dangerously ill, you know,” Antoine went on.

At first it seemed she had not heard him; her thoughts had been so far away.

Then, “Dangerously ill?” she repeated and, as she spoke, grew suddenly aware that she had known it all’ the time. Her brows lifted and her eyes showed an anxiety that was partly feigned.

“Do you mean that he will …?”

Antoine nodded. When he spoke again his tone implied that he had long foreseen that it would come to this.

“The operation last winter, the excision of the right kidney, served only one purpose, really: it prevented us from nursing any more illusions as to the nature of the tumour. The other kidney became infected almost immediately after. But since then the disease has taken a new turn, it’s become generalized, and that’s just as well, in a way. It helps us to keep the truth from the patient; he has no suspicions, no idea that it’s a hopeless case.”

There was a brief silence before Gise spoke again.

“How long do you think …?”

He observed her with satisfaction. She would make a good wife for a doctor. She knew how to face the inevitable; she had not shed a single tear. Those months she passed abroad had formed her character. And he regretted his habit of always regarding her as more of a child than she really was.

“Two or three months at the most,” he replied in the same tone. Then added, rather hastily: “Very much less, perhaps.”

Though inclined to be slow in the uptake, Gise guessed that Antoine’s last remark had some special application to her, and was relieved when he went on to explain himself at once.

“Look here, Gise, now that you know the truth, can you really leave me all by myself? Must you go away again?”

She did not reply, but gazed sedately at the wall in front with bright and steady eyes. Her round little face seemed quite composed but for a tiny wrinkle that came and went incessantly between her brows, the only outward sign of her inward struggle. Her first response had been a thrill of affection; his appeal had touched her. It had come as a surprise that anyone should appeal to her for support—Antoine most of all, whom the whole family looked up to as a tower of strength.

No! She had seen through his ruse, guessed why he wanted to detain her at Paris; and all her being rebelled against it. Only by going to England could she carry out her great project, the one thing in the world for which she lived. If only she could have told Antoine all about it! No, that would be a betrayal of her heart’s secret; more, a betrayal of it to the last person on earth to welcome such a confidence! Later on, perhaps … in a letter. But not now.

Her eyes remained obdurately focused on the middle distance. A bad sign, Antoine thought, but nevertheless persisted.

“Why won’t you answer?”

A tremor shook her body, but her look was as determined as ever.

“But surely, Antoine, it’s just the other way round. There’s all the more reason for me to hurry up and get my English certificate. I shall have to start earning my living much sooner than I expected.”

Antoine cut her short with a gesture of annoyance. On her tight mouth and in her eyes he was surprised to see what seemed the shadow of a despondency past all redress, and, at the same time, a rapture, a passion of wild, unreasoning hope. Obviously, there was no place for him in such feelings as those. In a spasm of vexation he tossed back his head. Vexation or despair? Rather despair; a lump rose in his throat, tears to his eyes. For once he did not try to check them or conceal them; they might help him yet to break down her incomprehensible resistance.

Gise was deeply touched; she had never seen Antoine cry, had never even dreamt he could do so. She avoided looking at him. Her affection for him was tender and profound, and she never thought of him without a quickening of the heart, a thrill of enthusiasm. For three years he had been her only comforter, a tried and stalwart comrade whose nearness was the one bright spot in her life. And now—why should he seem to want of her more than her trust, her loyal admiration? Why must she now conceal her sisterly regard?

A bell tinkled in the hall. Instinctively Antoine pricked up his ears. A sound of closing doors; then, once again, silence.

They sat there side by side, unmoving, unspeaking, while their thoughts raced on and on along divergent paths… .

At last the telephone rang. There was a footstep in the hall, and Léon appeared at the door.

“It’s a call from upstairs, Miss. Dr. Thérivier has come to see M. Thibault.”

Gise got up at once. Antoine called Léon back and asked in a weary voice:

“How many people in the waiting-room?”

“Four, sir.”

Then he, too, rose; life took charge again. “And there’s Rumelles expecting me at ten minutes to the hour!” he said to himself.

“I must go upstairs at once,” she said, without coming near him. “Goodbye, Antoine.”

He gave a slight shrug and his lips parted in a forced smile.

“All right, then, off you go … Blackie!” In the sound of his own voice he seemed to hear an echo of his father’s “All right then, off you go, my boy!” earlier in the day—and the reminder galled him. He added in a different tone: “Please tell Thérivier that I can’t get away just now. If he has anything to say he can drop in here on his way out. Got it?”