Conscience Part 57

Instead of returning to her mother, trembling and holding on to the wall she entered the parlor and let herself fall into a chair, prostrated, crushed.

"Your brother--or me?"

This was, then, the truth, the frightful truth that she had never wished to see.

She stayed there until the noises in the street warned her that it was getting late, and she might be surprised. Then she returned to her mother.

"I am going out," she said; "I will return at half-past eight or nine o'clock."

"But your husband will not see you before going to the hospital."

"You will tell him that I have gone out."

She returned at half-past nine. Madame Cormier had finished dressing.

"At last you have come," she said.

But at sight of her daughter's face she saw that something had happened.

"My G.o.d! What is the matter?" she asked, trembling.

"Something serious--very serious, but unfortunately it is irreparable.

We must leave here, never to return."

"Your husband--"

"You must never speak to me of him. This the only thing I ask of you."

"Alas! I understand. It is what I foresaw, what I said would happen. You cannot bear the contempt that he shows us on account of your brother."

"We must hereafter be strangers to each other, and this is why we leave this house."

"My G.o.d! At my age, to drag my bones--"

"I have engaged a lodging at the Ternes; a wagon will come to take the furniture that belongs to us, what we brought here, only that. We will tell the concierge that we are going to the country. As for Josephine, you need not fear indiscreet questions, for I have given her a day off."

"But the money?"

"I have two hundred francs from the sale of my last picture; that is enough for the present. Before they are gone I shall have painted and sold another; do not worry, we shall have all we need."

All this was said in a hard but resolute tone.

A ring of the bell interrupted them. It was the express wagon.

"See that they do not take what does not belong to us," Phillis said.

"While they fill their wagon I will write in the parlor."

At the end of an hour the wagon was ready. Madame Cormier entered the parlor to tell her daughter.

"I have finished," Phillis said.

Having placed her letter in an envelope, she laid it in full view on Saniel's desk.

"Now let us go," she said.

And as her mother sighed, while walking with difficulty

"Lean on me, dear mamma, you know I am strong."

CHAPTER XLIV. AFTER LONG YEARS

Saniel did not return until quite late in the afternoon. When he opened the door with his key he was surprised at not seeing his wife run to him and kiss him.

"She is painting," he said to himself, "she did not hear me."

He pa.s.sed into the parlor, convinced that he would find her at her easel; but he did not see her, and the easel was not in its usual place, there nor anywhere else.

He knocked at the door of Madame Cormier's room; there was no reply; he knocked louder a second time, and after waiting a moment he entered. The room was empty; there was no bed, no furniture, no one.

Stupefied, he looked around him, then returning to the vestibule he called: "Phillis! Phillis!"

There was no reply. He ran to the kitchen, no one was there; he went into his office, no one there. But as he looked about him, he saw Phillis's letter on his desk, and his heart leaped; he grasped it eagerly, and opened it with a trembling hand. It was as follows:

"I have gone, never to return. My despair and disgust of life are such, that without my mother and the poor being who is so far away, I should kill myself; but in spite of the horror of my position I was obliged to reflect, and I do not wish to aggravate by folly the wickedness that is going on about me. My mother is no longer young; she is ill and has suffered cruelly. Not only do I owe it to her to brighten her old age by my presence, by the material and moral support that I can give her, but she must have faith that I am there to replace her, and to open my arms to her son, to my brother. The least that I can do for them is to wait courageously for him; and, however weary, terrible, or frightful my life may be hereafter, I shall bear it so that the unfortunate, the pariah, whom a pitiless fate has pursued, will find on his return a hearth, a home, a friend. This will be my only object, my reason for living; and in order to save myself from sluggishness and weariness, my thoughts will always be on the time when he will return, he whom I will call my child, and whom my love must save and cure. I know that long years separate me from that day, and that until it comes my broken heart will never have a moment of repose; but I shall employ this time in working for him, for the brother, for the child, for the cherished being who will come to me aged and desperate; and I wish that he may yet believe in something good, that he will not imagine everything in this world is unjust and infamous, for he will return to me weighed down by twenty years of shame, of degrading and undeserved shame. How will he bear these twenty years? What efforts must I not make to prove to him that he should not abandon himself to despair, and that life often offers the remedy, compa.s.sion to the most profound, to the most unjust human sorrows?

How can I make him believe that? How lead his poor heart, closed to confidence, to feeling, to the tears that alone can relieve it? G.o.d who has so sorely tried me, without doubt will come to my aid, and will inspire me with words of consolation, will show me the path to follow, and give me the strength to persevere. Have I not already to thank Him for being alone in the world, outside of a mother and brother who will not betray me? I have no children, and I am spared the terror of seeing a soul growing in evil, an intelligence escaping from me to follow the path of infamy or dishonor. I leave, then, as I came. I was a poor girl, I go away a poor woman. I have taken the clothing and personal effects that I brought into our common home, nothing that was bought with your money; and I forbid you to interfere with my wish in this question of material things, as well as in my resolution to fly from you. Nothing can ever reunite us; nothing shall reunite us, no consideration, no necessity. I reject the past, this guilty past, the responsibility of which weighs so heavily on my conscience, and I should like to lose the memory of the detested time. It would be impossible for me to accept the struggle, or supplications, if you think it expedient to make any. I have cut our bonds, and hereafter we shall be as far apart as if one of us were dead, or even farther. Have no scruples, then, in leaving me alone to face a new life, a beginning that may appear difficult to one not situated as I am. The trials of former times were good for me, since they accustomed me to the difficulties of work. The desolation of to-day will sustain me, in the sense that having suffered all I can suffer, I no longer fear some discouraging catastrophe that will check me in my resolutions. In order not to compromise you, and more fully to become myself again, I shall take my family name--a dishonored name--but I shall bear it without shame. I shall live obscurely, absorbed in work and in trying to forget your existence; do the same yourself. If you think of the past, you will find, perhaps, that I am hard; yet this departure is not an egotistic desertion. I am no good to you, and the repose that you want would shun you hereafter in my presence.

On the contrary, strive for forgetfulness, as I shall. If you contrive to wipe out of your life the part that is a.s.sociated with me, perhaps you will be able to banish the remainder, and to recover some of the calm of other days. I can no longer remember that I have loved you, for my position is such that I have not the refuge of memory; at my age I must remain without a past as without a future; the consolation of the unfortunate is lost to me with everything else. I cannot rise out of my sorrow to try to find one hour when life was sweet to me; those hours, on the contrary, make me tremble, and I reproach myself for them as if they were a crime.

Thus, whichever way I turn, I find only sadness and sharp regrets; everything is blighted, dishonored for me."

Standing in the middle of his office he read this hastily written letter breathlessly. Arrived at the end he looked about him vaguely. His chair was near his desk; he let himself fall into it and remained there prostrated, holding the letter in his shaking hand.

"Alone!"

It was an October afternoon, dark and muddy; in the Rue des Saints-Peres, in front of the houses that hide the Charity Hospital, coupes were standing, and their long line extended to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where the coachmen, having left their seats, talked together like persons who were accustomed to meet each other. At half-past four o'clock, in the deepening twilight, men with grave looks and dark clothes--members of the Academy of Medicine--the Tuesday sitting over, issued from the porch, and entered their carriages. Some of them walked alone, briskly, in a great hurry; others demonstrated a skilful tardiness, stopping to talk politely to a journalist, and to give him notes of the day's meeting, or continuing, with a 'confrere'

who was not an Academician, the conversation begun in the room of the 'pas-perdus'; it was the Bourse of consultations that was just closed.

Not all the members of the Academy have, in truth, a long list of patients to visit; but each one has a vote to give, and they are those whom the candidates surround, trying to win them.

One of the Academicians who appeared the last at the top of the steps was a man of great height but bent figure, with hollow cheeks and pale face lighted by pale blue eyes with a strange expression, both hard and desolate at the same time. He advanced alone, and his heavy gait and dragging step gave him the appearance of a man sixty years of age, while in other ways he retained a certain youthfulness. It was Saniel, twenty years older.

Without exchanging a bow or a hand-shake with any one, he descended to the pavement and walked to the boulevard, where he opened the door of a coups whose interior showed a complete ambulant library--a writing table with paper, ink, and lamp, pockets full of books and pamphlets.

Just as he was about to enter, a voice stopped him.

He turned; it was one of his old pupils, who had recently become a physician in the suburb of Gentilly.

"What is it?" asked Saniel.

"I want to ask you to come and a.s.sist me in a curious case of spasms, where your intervention may be decisive."