The Works of Guy de Maupassant Volume V Part 12

"And we should have a nice reputation, shouldn't we, with our name and connections?" burst out Julien. "People would say that we encouraged vice, and sheltered prost.i.tutes, and respectable people would never come near us. Why, what can you be thinking of? You must be mad!"

"I will never have Rosalie turned out," she repeated, quietly. "If you will not keep her here, my mother will take her back again. But we are sure to find out the name of the father."

At that, he went out of the room, too angry to talk to her any longer, and as he banged the door after him he cried:

"Women are fools with their absurd notions!"

In the afternoon Jeanne went up to see the invalid. She was lying in bed, wide awake, and the Widow Dentu was rocking the child in her arms.

As soon as she saw her mistress Rosalie began to sob violently, and when Jeanne wanted to kiss her, she turned away and hid her face under the bed-clothes. The nurse interfered and drew down the sheet, and then Rosalie made no further resistance, though the tears still ran down her cheeks.

The room was very cold, for there was only a small fire in the grate, and the child was crying. Jeanne did not dare make any reference to the little one, for fear of causing another burst of tears, but she held Rosalie's hand and kept repeating mechanically:

"It won't matter; it won't matter."

The poor girl glanced shyly at the nurse from time to time; the child's cries seemed to pierce her heart, and sobs still escaped from her occasionally, though she forced herself to swallow her tears. Jeanne kissed her again, and whispered in her ear: "We'll take good care of it, you may be sure of that," and then ran quickly out of the room, for Rosalie's tears were beginning to flow again.

After that, Jeanne went up every day to see the invalid, and every day Rosalie burst into tears when her mistress came into the room. The child was put out to nurse, and Julien would hardly speak to his wife, for he could not forgive her for refusing to dismiss the maid. One day he returned to the subject, but Jeanne drew out a letter from her mother in which the baroness said that if they would not keep Rosalie at Les Peuples she was to be sent on to Rouen directly.

"Your mother's as great a fool as you are," cried Julien; but he did not say anything more about sending Rosalie away, and a fortnight later the maid was able to get up and perform her duties again.

One morning Jeanne made her sit down, and holding both her hands in hers;

"Now, then, Rosalie, tell me all about it," she said, looking her straight in the face.

Rosalie began to tremble.

"All about what, madame?" she said, timidly.

"Who is the father of your child?" asked Jeanne.

A look of despair came over the maid's face, and she struggled to disengage her hands from her mistress's grasp, but Jeanne kissed her, in spite of her struggles, and tried to console her.

"It is true you have been weak," she said, "but you are not the first to whom such a misfortune has happened, and, if only the father of the child marries you, no one will think anything more about it; we would employ him, and he could live here with you."

Rosalie moaned as if she were being tortured, and tried to get her hands free that she might run away.

"I can quite understand how ashamed you feel," went on Jeanne, "but you see that I am not angry, and that I speak kindly to you. I wish to know this man's name for your own good, for I fear, from your grief, that he means to abandon you, and I want to prevent that. Julien will see him, and we will make him marry you, and we shall employ you both; we will see that he makes you happy."

This time Rosalie made so vigorous an effort that she succeeded in wrenching her hands away from her mistress, and she rushed from the room as if she were mad.

"I have tried to make Rosalie tell me her seducer's name," said Jeanne to her husband at dinner that evening, "but I did not succeed in doing so. Try and see if she will tell you, that we may force the wretch to marry her."

"There, don't let me hear any more about all that," he said, angrily.

"You wanted to keep this girl, and you have done so, but don't bother me about her."

He seemed still more irritable since Rosalie's confinement than he had been before. He had got into the habit of shouting at his wife, whenever he spoke to her, as if he were always angry, while she, on the contrary, spoke softly, and did everything to avoid a quarrel; but she often cried when she was alone in her room at night. In spite of his bad temper, Julien had resumed the marital duties he had so neglected since his wedding tour, and it was seldom now that he let three nights pa.s.s without accompanying his wife to her room.

Rosalie soon got quite well again, and with better health came better spirits, but she always seemed frightened and haunted by some strange dread. Jeanne tried twice more to make her name her seducer, but each time she ran away, without saying anything. Julien suddenly became better tempered, and his young wife began to cherish vague hopes, and to regain a little of her former gayety; but she often felt very unwell, though she never said anything about it.

For five weeks the crisp, shining snow had lain on the frozen ground; in the daytime there was not a cloud to be seen, and at night the sky was strewn with stars. Standing alone in their square courtyards, behind the great frosted trees, the farms seemed dead beneath their snowy shrouds.

Neither men nor cattle could go out, and the only sign of life about the homesteads and cottages was the smoke that went straight up from the chimneys into the frosty air.

The gra.s.s, the hedges and the wall of elms seemed killed by the cold.

From time to time the trees cracked, as if the fibers of their branches were separating beneath the bark, and sometimes a big branch would break off and fall to the ground, its sap frozen and dried up by the intense cold.

Jeanne thought the severe weather was the cause of her ill-health, and she longed for the warm spring breezes. Sometimes the very idea of food disgusted her, and she could eat nothing; at other times she vomited after every meal, unable to digest the little she did eat. She had violent palpitations of the heart, and she lived in a constant and intolerable state of nervous excitement.

One evening, when the thermometer was sinking still lower, Julien shivered as he left the dinner table (for the dining-room was never sufficiently heated, so careful was he over the wood), and rubbing his hands together:

"It's too cold to sleep alone to-night, isn't it, darling?" he whispered to his wife, with one of his old good-tempered laughs.

Jeanne threw her arms round his neck, but she felt so ill, so nervous, and she had such aching pains that evening, that, with her lips close to his, she begged him to let her sleep alone.

"I feel so ill to-night," she said, "but I am sure to be better to-morrow."

"Just as you please, my dear," he answered. "If you are ill, you must take care of yourself." And he began to talk of something else.

Jeanne went to bed early. Julien, for a wonder, ordered a fire to be lighted in his own room; and when the servant came to tell him that "the fire had burnt up," he kissed his wife on the forehead and said good-night.

The very walls seemed to feel the cold, and made little cracking noises as if they were shivering. Jeanne lay shaking with cold; twice she got up to put more logs on the fire, and to pile her petticoats and dresses on the bed, but nothing seemed to make her any warmer. There were nervous twitchings in her legs, which made her toss and turn restlessly from side to side. Her feet were numbed, her teeth chattered, her hands trembled, her heart beat so slowly that sometimes it seemed to stop altogether; and she gasped for breath as if she could not draw the air into her lungs.

As the cold crept higher and higher up her limbs, she was seized with a terrible fear. She had never felt like this before; life seemed to be gradually slipping away from her, and she thought each breath she drew would be her last.

"I am going to die! I am going to die!" she thought; and, in her terror, she jumped out of bed, and rang for Rosalie.

No one came; she rang again, and again waited for an answer, shuddering and half-frozen; but she waited in vain. Perhaps the maid was sleeping too heavily for the bell to arouse her, and, almost beside herself with fear, Jeanne rushed out onto the landing without putting anything around her, and with bare feet. She went noiselessly up the dark stairs, felt for Rosalie's door, opened it, and called "Rosalie!" then went into the room, stumbled against the bed, pa.s.sed her hands over it, and found it empty and quite cold, as if no one had slept in it that night.

"Surely she cannot have gone out in such weather as this," she thought.

Her heart began to beat so violently that it almost suffocated her, and she went downstairs to rouse Julien, her legs giving way under her as she walked. She burst open her husband's door, and hurried across the room, spurred on by the idea that she was going to die and the fear that she would become unconscious before she could see him again.

Suddenly she stopped with a shriek, for by the light of the dying fire she saw Rosalie's head on the pillow beside her husband's. At her cry they both started up, but she had already recovered from the first shock of her discovery, and fled to her room, while Julien called after her, "Jeanne! Jeanne!" She felt she could not see him or listen to his excuses and his lies, and again rushing out of her room she ran downstairs. The staircase was in total darkness, but filled with the desire of flight, of getting away without seeing or hearing any more, she never stayed to think that she might fall and break her limbs on the stone stairs.

On the last step she sat down, unable to think, unable to reason, her head in a whirl. Julien had jumped out of bed, and was hastily dressing himself. She heard him moving about, and she started up to escape from him. He came downstairs, crying: "Jeanne, do listen to me!"

No, she would not listen; he should not degrade her by his touch. She dashed into the dining-room as if a murderer were pursuing her, looked round for a hiding-place or some dark corner where she might conceal herself, and then crouched down under the table. The door opened, and Julien came in with a light in his hand, still calling, "Jeanne!

Jeanne!" She started off again like a hunted hare, tore into the kitchen, round which she ran twice like some wild animal at bay, then, as he was getting nearer and nearer to her, she suddenly flung open the garden door, and rushed out into the night.

Her bare legs sank into the snow up to her knees, and this icy contact gave her new strength. Although she had nothing on but her chemise she did not feel the bitter cold; her mental anguish was too great for the consciousness of any mere bodily pain to reach her brain, and she ran on and on, looking as white as the snow-covered earth. She did not stop once to take breath, but rushed on across wood and plain without knowing or thinking of what she was doing. Suddenly she found herself at the edge of the cliff. She instinctively stopped short, and then crouched down in the snow and lay there with her mind as powerless to think as her body to move.

All at once she began to tremble, as does a sail when caught by the wind. Her arms, her hands, her feet, shook and twitched convulsively, and consciousness returned to her. Things that had happened a long time before came back to her memory; the sail in Lastique's boat with _him_, their conversation, the dawn of their love; the christening of the boat; then her thoughts went still farther back till they reached the night of her arrival from the convent--the night she had spent in happy dreams.

And now, now! Her life was ruined; she had had all her pleasure; there were no joys, no happiness, in store for her; and she could see the terrible future with all its tortures, its deceptions, and despair.

Surely it would be better to die now, at once.

She heard a voice in the distance crying:

"This way! this way! Here are her footmarks!" It was Julien looking for her.