Chapter Eight.
“Behind this eminence the sun
Would drop serenely, long ere day was done;
And one who climbed that height, might see again
A second setting o’er the fertile plain
Beyond the town, and glittering in his beam,
Wind far away that poplar-skirted stream.”
Archbishop Trench.
Looking back afterwards, it seemed to Thérèse as if that soft July day had been her last day of liberty; Octavie and Adolphe became terrible taskmasters. The weather changed, it grew hot, sultry, oppressive; she used to sit in the stuffy little room at Rue St. Servan and gasp for a breath of fresh air. “Adolphe, must you be all day about your theme?” she would ask, a little too impatiently perhaps; and then Octavie would hold her disagreeable little head in the air and reply, “Mamma does not like you to correct Adolphe, mademoiselle.”
She was not patient at all in these days. She hated the lessons and the eternal mendings, and all the petty humiliations madame visited upon her, enduring them only as alternatives for worse things. There must come a day of escape, she thought; but her hope was beginning to grow restless and feverish. Every morning she got up thinking something must be heard of Fabien that day, and every day the weight in her heart became heavier. She could not understand it. She was still so childish in some things that she thought the good things must come, the hard go away; I think she pictured Fabien as a kind of beautiful fairy prince, at whose appearance Madame Roulleau and Monsieur Deshoulières, and the terrible children, and the great heaps of worn-out clothes, would die away out of her life. She painted her own future in these colours until it seemed absolutely to belong to her. But, although when misgivings of its certainty obtruded themselves, she rebelled against them, I am inclined to think that misgivings came more frequently as the weeks went on.
After all, the mending was not so bad as the teaching. The clothes were a burden, but they could not contradict her or make disagreeable remarks like Octavie, or have Adolphe’s fits of obstinate sulkiness. She was not patient, as I have said, but she might have pleaded a certain amount of excuse when she had but the choice of being called cross by the children or remiss by their mother. Octavie—who was dressed in the extreme of fashion, and had a sallow face, high strongly-marked eyebrows, black eyes, and hair drawn up into a number of little curls at the back of her head—kept a sharp look-out for poor Thérèse’s short-comings. “Mamma does not think Adolphe has improved in his writing;” “Mamma expects that you will see that our rooms are always in order, mademoiselle.” When Thérèse could not smile at these speeches they hurt her terribly.
Old Nannon came to Rue St. Servan, and was duly acknowledged as the girl’s attendant whenever she went out. She and Madame Roulleau had a preliminary skirmish, from which madame retired a little discomfited; for, with all her simplicity, Nannon had no lack of shrewdness. In spite of the spirit of contradiction which prompted it, Thérèse had not made a bad choice. There was a fresh vigorous heart beating in the old woman’s bosom, an unconquerable fidelity, keen humour, clear wit; she liked any thing young and pretty, and felt a great compassion for this girl, who was not only young and pretty, but so friendless. Before a month was over she would have gone through fire and water to serve her. She served her better by the homely words she let drop. Every life has its pathos and its poetry, whether we acknowledge it or not; Nannon, with her hard fare and her weather-beaten face, was like the rest. Her lover had been a soldier, had fallen out of the ranks in a long march, and died of typhus in a hut by the roadside. It was months before she heard of it—months during which she waited, and hungered, and hoped.
“And yet you lived?” asked Thérèse, looking at the brown face in wonder.
“Si fait, si fait,” said Nannon, laughing and showing her white teeth. “If people died of such things, mademoiselle, the world would never go on as it does. And there was my sister to take care of besides; it would have been very selfish to talk about dying.”
This sister and her children seemed all the world to Nannon. It appeared to Thérèse as if the whole burden of their existence fell upon those broad old willing shoulders. Once she had asked what Mère Belot did, and Nannon quite ruffled up at the question.
“If Mademoiselle were a mother she would know that is enough,” she said, reproachfully.
Thérèse could not understand her. Afterwards she found out by some chance that Mère Belot was one of those incapable women who are always taken care of, and toiled for, and shielded. There are poor queen bees as well as rich ones, and her sister brought her as much honey as she could scrape together, and pinched, and struggled, and fought for the children, while Mère Belot sat in the street outside the house and spun a little cotton yarn between her intervals of gossip, and accepted her good things placidly. They came to her quite as a matter of course; and, though it be but a poor little hive, it makes a great difference whether you are the queen or the working bee.
Nannon had taken all the children into her faithful heart, but, perhaps, she loved Jean-Marie the best. He had been a trouble ever since he was born. He had been twice as long as the others in cutting his teeth, had frightened them all out of their wits with croup and small-pox and fevers, had broken his leg, and set the house on fire, and was for ever being dragged out of scrapes by Nannon. So many things happened to him that I believe she looked upon him as a hero at last. He was always making fresh starts on the road to fortune, and trailing back again before a week was over. This last start at Gohon’s farm had carried him quite a long way. He had been there more than a month: Nannon’s pride was excessive; she used to walk out through the waving cornfields, and watch the farm for an hour for the happiness of seeing Jean-Marie bring out the horses or fetch the cows. It was an innocent little triumph very dear to her; and, perhaps, it was no wonder that she felt it hard when M. Deshoulières brought to light that misdemeanour with the Cottereaus and Michault, which threatened to put an end to all her triumphs. She did not know that it was M. Deshoulières also who had gone out to the farm the next day, and asked that the boy might have a longer trial; she accused the doctor of having almost deprived Jean-Marie of his situation; and Thérèse had all her baseless prejudices against him confirmed by the old woman. It was very unfortunate, because she might have escaped from the Roulleau tyranny if Nannon had counselled her to appeal to M. Deshoulières; but since his decision against her boy, there was no harshness of which Nannon did not believe him guilty.
So these two used to sit and talk on the hot, dry evenings, when Thérèse could get away from her labour in the stifling little house. Nannon and she would wander through the quaint old town, down the steep streets, and so to the quiet river, whose murmur fell on her ears like the sound of a comforting voice before she reached it.
She liked those evenings best when the sky was tender primrose colour, and the dusky trees stood up against it in soft, shady, mysterious masses, with strangely bright bars of colour gleaming through them. There were disused fortifications, an old gateway, and a bridge; above these houses jumbled oddly together clambering up the side of the hill. She liked to watch the water slip calmly by, the leaves floating on its surface, the long grasses under the bank breaking it into little brown eddies. There were quiet shadows, shadows always comprehensible, never terrible; shadows which stole gently down to the roots of the willows, by which the river rolled along, catching their reflection on its surface, and then suddenly lit up with a sheet of tremulous golden light. A little rough causeway ran by the waterside, here and there a stunted sapling thrust itself out as though to kiss the stream that moved on regardless; here and there were little wooden standing-places—lavatoires—for the washerwomen, who all day long thumped and gesticulated and chattered shrilly, but in the evening left the river to its own unceasing songs.
It was a very quiet, out-of-the-way little corner. The cornfields stretched far away—great flat plains; a bird might cry in the distance, the church bells clang, a peasant in his blouse go by and wish them good evening; except these signs of life there was very little to disturb them. Nannon thought it triste; but it seemed to bring refreshment to Thérèse, who never before had liked silence and solitude. She was ill at this time, I think; feverish, restless, and sick with hope deferred. She had been waiting for two years, at her age a lifetime. Separation had not before been so cruel as it was now that the great bar between her and Fabien was gone, and only his presence was needed. Perhaps her hopefulness would have sunk altogether under the strain if it had not been for the river and Nannon.
Sitting on a stone by its bank one evening, as I have described their doing, they were startled by seeing a figure coming along the narrow causeway towards them. The sun had set behind the upper town; they were too much under the hill to see the houses or the Cathedral spires, but the rich autumnal sunset lingered in the sky, crimson patches and dark purples on a background of tawny gold; there was a soft, breezy rustle in the air. The figure came out of dusky shadows along the causeway, and it startled Thérèse, because she saw at once it was not one of the blue-shirted labourers, who, at rare intervals, came back into the town by that path. When it drew nearer she recognised M. Deshoulières. He had been detained at a village, which lay not far from Charville, where a little child had been ill. That afternoon it had died, and M. Deshoulières, who loved little children, was coming home touched and softened. He had chosen this path, perhaps, because, although he did not think about it in his heart, the river and the long grasses, and the tremulous golden light, had their attractions also for him. He was looking at the water, and when he suddenly came upon these two figures sitting quietly there in the midst of the solitude, he could not refrain from an exclamation of surprise.
“Mademoiselle Veuillot!” he said.
Thérèse did not know what to answer. Neither of them had expected to meet the other here. She was half angry, half-frightened, lest this innocent little enjoyment of hers should also be pronounced unfitting. Both she and Nannon had risen, Nannon standing with her arms crossed defiantly.
“We came here because it is so cool and so pleasant,” said Thérèse, looking beseechingly at her enemy. Surely the river might be spared to her! “Is it late?” she said, suddenly conscious of the depth of the shadows.
“A little,” he answered dryly. In his heart he was wondering with a little amusement at her fancy for solitude, and at the companionship in which he found her. It seemed to him as if the silence and the shadows were more fitting for a grave man like himself than for such a child as Thérèse. In the waning light, in her black dress, she looked thin and pale. “This is not a place for you to sit in so late. There is mist from the river,” he said. “You should keep on the higher ground.”
“We do not often stay so late, do we, Nannon?” said Thérèse, appealingly; “and it is so hot in the town.”
Nannon, who represented the opposition to M. Deshoulières, was nothing loath to enter upon the field. “There is no harm in the river,” she said, with decision. “Monsieur would know that if he had lived in the town as long as I have. If mademoiselle prefers the band and a little distraction, she can always find it above there; but if she likes better to come and sit in this seclusion, there is nothing to prevent it. White mist does no one any hurt. It is the stirring up which brings the fever,” added Nannon, with a spiteful allusion to some sanitary measures of M. Deshoulières.
“You are coming back now?” he said, addressing himself to Thérèse, without taking any notice of Nannon’s speech.
Long afterwards she wondered at the clearness with which she remembered every detail of that walk, the little rough, untidy path, the rose-bushes growing out of the grey wall, the dog that stood and barked, then the houses and the steep hot streets. At the time she scarcely noticed them, but afterwards they came back. M. Deshoulières was grave and preoccupied; but once, when Nannon had lingered behind to speak to some friend, he turned round and said, with a sudden smile and a twinkle in his blue eyes,—
“So that is the companion you have chosen, mademoiselle?”
Thérèse murmured something, feeling horribly guilty: she wondered whether he would guess that her sympathy with Nannon began in the market.
“She is not a bad old woman,” went on the unconscious Max. “She lets herself be eaten up by that sister of hers, and she does not always tell the truth; but she will be honest and faithful.”
“I am sure she is faithful,” said Thérèse, forcing herself to say something, and thinking of Fabien.
M. Deshoulières looked up quickly. “Is faithfulness a favourite virtue of yours, mademoiselle?”
“It seems to me that it is the anchor of life,” answered the girl in a low voice.
He looked at her again with a little wonder. There was something almost passionate in the tone with which she spoke those few words. His next question came out abruptly.
“Does your present residence suit you? Are you sure that you would not prefer a change?” Thérèse thought of the convent, and turned sick. “I do not wish for any change,” she said, hurriedly.
“You are content to remain where you are?”
It was a strange sort of contentment, Thérèse thought, with a quick flash of self-pity; but the other place of refuge that was open to her would be unbearable. She said yes to his question, and then despised herself for the falseness of her answer. “Every place must be a little sad to me, just now, monsieur,” she went on, “for I belong to no one. But I am glad to stay at Mme. Roulleau’s.”
He did not answer. She thought, perhaps, he had not listened to her pathetic little explanation; she did not know that it had gone straight for his heart. The pity that he had felt once or twice before became more intense, more personal. Perhaps the time and circumstances helped the feeling: the evening was soft, quiet, almost solemn; all his sympathies had been called out that day by the little child’s deathbed. “Let me go to sleep,” the little tired voice had said; there was no more pain afterwards, except in the hearts of the watchers. The words came back to him continually, with a vision of the tiny, wasted, flushed face; any appeal would have touched him in his present mood, and Thérèse seemed only an older child, with no one, as she said, to care for her. He walked on, thinking silently, and she made a great effort to put a question into words.
“Have you heard nothing yet of Monsieur Saint-Martin?”
“Nothing, nothing. One would have supposed that by this time a letter—a message, at least—might have reached Ardron. It would seem that the estrangement was serious. Why do people take so much trouble to forge their own unhappiness, Mademoiselle Veuillot?”
There are many ways of doing that work, innocent, unconscious ways, sometimes. At this very moment, M. Deshoulières, with his big, manly, pitiful heart, was laying it open and making it ready for the sharp red-hot thrusts that came afterwards. We do the same, all of us, often. We grind the weapons that are to wound us. But, thank God, the weapons are not always evil, and such leave no poison in the wound.
“Mademoiselle, did you hear the clock strike?” said Nannon, bustling up. “We must make haste, the days grow so short, and the virgins up there do not carry their lamps lit.”
“Up there” was the cathedral porch, where the parable is graven, and the ten stand in their changeless attitudes of despair or bliss. M. Deshoulières, Thérèse, and Nannon passed under them. It was not so dark as Nannon represented, but a sweet duskiness was veiling all the bright tints; people sat outside their houses laughing and chattering with their children; a few lights began to appear; in the distance was heard the indistinct roll of a drum. Rue St. Servan looked gloomy when they turned into it: the light always left it early. When M. Deshoulières wished Thérèse good evening, he said, with a smile which she did not see,—“Do not stay so long by the river another evening, mademoiselle.”