Chapter Five.
“Lo, as some innocent and eager maiden
Leans o’er the wistful limit of the world,
Dreams of the glow and glory of the distance,
Wonderful wooing and the grace of tears,
Dreams with what eyes and what a sweet insistance
Lovers are waiting in the hidden years.”
P.W.H. Myers.
Thérèse was really grateful to the Roulleaus for their concession, grateful and a little touched by what seemed honest delicacy of feeling. Madame Roulleau, who could dig like a mole when she wanted to find out a character, had been digging and burrowing while her husband was at Ardron, and knew pretty well by this time what strings to pull. People who have this sort of shrewdness can see a good deal without going far down; she did not reach the depths, but she was quite satisfied. It was not worth her while to study all the complexities of the girl’s nature, if she had tried doing so she would have had a baffling task, for there were plenty of contradictions about it. Probably Thérèse’s education had something to do with all the contrarieties and incongruities which met you at every turn—she was tender and hard, resolute and timid, generous and distrustful; it was impossible to know which of the opposing qualities would come uppermost: a great hopefulness, perhaps, impressed you the most. It was not insensibility to, but an inborn dread of the sadnesses of life which made her cling to the bright side. In spite of what they may say, there are people who find a certain sort of enjoyment in trouble, they like to be made to weep over fictitious distresses, there is a chord in them which responds at once to any call for sympathy. Thérèse was not one of these people to whom we turn in our sorrows, sure at least of being understood, if we are not helped. As yet she was impatient of sorrow, eager for happiness. She hated tragedies, sad books, minor music. As I have said, it was not that such things did not touch her—perhaps if she had been indifferent she would not have minded them so much—but her nature rose up in rebellion against them: they were part of Adam’s curse. She had not learned that, after all, through the Infinite Love that uses sorrow and suffering for instruments, they have caught a Divine beauty, a sweet solemn loveliness which by degrees reveals itself and wins our hearts. Thérèse believed only in one kind of happiness—our wills gratified, our dreams realised, all the little idols we have set up smiling down upon us from their pedestals: as we go on in life we find out sometimes that it was well our idols were shattered for us, or we might have been crushed under their weight; but Thérèse had no fear of this. She thought of herself as if some day all her longings must be satisfied, her troubles ended and laid aside, every thing completed, rounded off, and perfect. After that, I think there came a golden haze. There is something half-pathetic, half-comforting, in this unlimited faith in coming happiness. We see where it fails, but every now and then it acts upon our wearier spirits like a breath of immortality.
Thérèse had already met with enough to daunt her in her little life, although it had not had that effect; she looked upon all the roughnesses of the road, so far, as things extraneous, and not altogether belonging to her existence. Whatever part of her they affected it was not her belief in the rose-coloured days that were coming. That stood unshaken. Nor while it lasted could she be said to have lost her courage; yet it had grown to have a strange admixture of timidity since she went—a bold brave child—to live at Rouen. Her heart used to swell, and her cheeks flush, when M. Moreau was harsh to her aunt, to Fabien; but her woman’s nature, though it resented his treatment, quailed before it. Once or twice she had resisted him, but all the time she was terribly frightened. Poor Thérèse! she was only a girl, and he had every thing on his side except right, as she used to say to herself indignantly, half angry at her own weakness.
Madame Moreau was a large feeble woman, who scarcely ventured to think without her husband’s permission. She was so passive under his provocations that you were inclined to wonder whether she had been so from the first, or whether, after he had frightened the spirit out of her, nature had avenged herself by giving her this impervious armour. Thérèse’s little fiery outbreaks on her behalf were always wasted. They were much more appreciated by Fabien; he incited her to them, and she was too generous to notice that she was left to bear the consequences alone. He was her hero, over whom she rang her little changes of admiration: when he told her that he loved her, instead of formally beforehand requesting her hand from her uncle, she promised, with her grey eyes shining straight into his, and all her heart in her words, never to give him up. Fabien promised the same. “Every thing,” says an old writer, “has a double handle, or at least we have two hands by which to apprehend it.” I suppose it was so with this promise.
Then came the crash, and her hero went away, more of a hero than ever. In her thoughts Thérèse set a crown on his head, and turned him into one of the old champions. Fabien, who was thoroughly nineteenth-century, would have been utterly puzzled what to do with himself if her ideas had come true. And then, with her boundless store of hopefulness, of expectation, she did not find the waiting so weary as it looked. Every now and then, to be sure, there would surge up in her heart a wild longing, a yearning such as had broken out when M. Deshoulières spoke, the days would seem interminable, the distance from Fabien infinite. Such pangs came more acutely after M. Moreau had one day called her into his room.
“So you are still thinking of that ungrateful?” said the old man mockingly. “In that case you shall receive his latest news.”
And then he showed her Fabien’s lines of renunciation.
All the girl’s fear of her uncle vanished: she lifted her head proudly. “When Fabien writes those words to me, I will believe them,” she said, and went away, leaving old Moreau speechless at her presumption. It was her greatest victory among their encounters, but it was one of those victories which cost more than defeats. Not all her buoyancy could rise against the weight which the words left in her heart. How could he write them? How could he? She used to put the question passionately, and then answer it with a hundred fond excuses. All must be right some day,—that was the creed to which she clung; could she only keep free from the convent walls, all must be right. When her aunt died, and she lost the one slender link to her uncle’s affection, her dread of them increased; afterwards, through all the terrible time at the Cygne, she could not altogether repress the sense of liberty which came with the lifting from her the weight of that indomitable will. Whatever happened, she thought she must breathe more freely. She was not at all prepared to find M. Moreau’s intentions echoed back by her new guardian. Madame Roulleau had taken care to impress her with an idea of his inflexible nature, and she began, in her ignorance, to dread that he might have the power to compel her to submit. Any fate seemed preferable, and Madame Roulleau was well aware that in taking her into her house, she might impose what terms she pleased.
At first there was not much laid upon her. She had a miserable little room, it is true, bare and dreary, but what then? “If mademoiselle expects another Château Ardron, she must not come to Rue St. Servan,” said Madame, with her disagreeable smile. Thérèse hastened to explain that no such discontented comparison had entered her head. She was in fact too young to care much for the want of comfort round her; she pulled the things about and spread out her little possessions, and wasted no repinings for the blue silk curtains, and the gilding, and the ormolu at Château Ardron. Out of her window, beyond the roofs, she could see one of the Cathedral spires, with its delicate stone fretwork; a great expanse of sky over the flat country round; the very roofs were too crooked, too full, of quaint character, to be commonplace. She could make histories out of them, weave romances about the people who lived beneath them—romances into which her own story and Fabien’s stole in some irrepressible way. It seemed like a little time of rest after all the harshness and unkind words of the last years. Surely some intuitive instinct would tell Fabien that she was alone in the world, and that no one need come between them now.
But in a little while she found she had no time for dreaming. Things seemed to fell upon her as a matter of course. Mme. Roulleau would come in with a great heap of clothes in her arms, her own, Adolphe’s, Octavie’s, for mademoiselle to exercise her powers of reparation upon. It was often very difficult to make out of them what madame expected; only Aladdin’s magician with his new lamps for old could have satisfied her, and poor Thérèse darned and turned and patched, and patched and turned and darned, in despair: more than once before she had learned her lesson of economy, she cut up her own things in a vain attempt to perform the impossible. If she could only have pleased by her efforts she would not have disliked the work; she was active-minded, glad to be of use, there would have been a certain enjoyment in her own ingenuity. And if Mme. Roulleau was capable of being touched she must have been conscious of the sweetness with which Thérèse took her rebuffs, the patience with which she tried to follow out her directions. They were the only weapons the girl brought forward at this time. But to certain natures there is nothing so dear as the power of petty tyranny, and neither the money paid by M. Deshoulières, nor the work she extracted from her, were so delightful to Madame Roulleau as the infliction of daily snubs upon Thérèse. Skilfully drawing out her desire to remain free and lead a secular life, skilfully playing upon her fears of a convent, imperceptibly strengthening her dread of M. Deshoulières’ decisions, far more swift than he to fathom the secret of the girl’s heart and to turn it to their purpose, she did her best to make Thérèse’s life a burden.
And yet for a time, as I have said, Thérèse bore it all not only with patience but with cheerfulness. She hoped bravely, and this was the elixir which prevented her feeling madame’s sting. It was not pleasant to be found fault with, but she said to herself that it all came from her own stupidity, her want of knowledge about useful things. After all, they were useful, and it was very good for her to be forced into them. She preached vigorous little lectures over her own reluctance and want of gratitude. Monsieur and madame were not charming, certainly, but they had been very generous and only demanded a return. In those days her step was buoyant, her colour bright, her grey eyes sparkling. Madame Roulleau used to look at her and say crossly to her husband,—
“She has had some news of that vaurien.”
The little notary used to get into a fever of alarm. “Zénobie,” he would say, with his shrill voice quavering, “if he comes back we are ruined.”
“He must not come back,” said madame, quietly.
“Must not!” repeated the little man, querulously. “That is very fine, but who is to keep him away? It appears to me that there was never such a world as this for gossip. Instead of minding their own affairs, people talk, talk, like so many parrots, and who is to make sure that their mischievous tongues will not one day carry the news to the wrong person?”
His wife darted a contemptuous glance at him. “It is a lottery, as I told you before,” she said coldly. “One or other must lose.”
“And you talk of it so calmly! Do you know what a frightful risk I run? If M. Saint-Martin comes home, and the little hindrances I have put in his way are discovered—or if that girl finds out the double payment, I am ruined! I shudder when I think of it.”
He was shuddering. It was a hot June day, and he shivered as if he had the ague. Madame looked at him with still the same expression in her face.
“You are a coward, Ignace,” at last she said, letting her words drop slowly, “and that makes you a fool. Do you suppose that I have not weighed the risk? Do you suppose that I am not watching?”
Under her eyes he shivered more visibly. “I know,” he said in a submissive voice; “I only thought—”
“Do not think,” she interrupted contemptuously; “leave thinking to me.”
“He might write to her,” M. Roulleau muttered under his breath.
“What are you saying?”
“Do not be angry, Zénobie; I only remarked that he might write to her.”
“Here?”
“No; to Château Ardron. In that case, mon amie,” continued the little man, apologetically, “permit me to observe that the letter would be forwarded to Monsieur Deshoulières.”
Madame sighed. “I do not think I shall ever be able to educate you,” she said; “I must soon give it up. And you can actually assert that such a danger has only just struck you, and that all this time you have taken no precaution against it. Hein! look here!”
Her tone rose peremptory and shrill. M. Roulleau looked obediently at the copy of the letter she flourished before his eyes, and then admiringly at her.
“You are a marvel!” he said in his feeble, abject voice.
“I made her write it,” she said, still shrilly. “Bah, she is only too easy to manage, there is no satisfaction, one had but to work on her fears. Her letters will be sent here, and I think, monsieur, you will acknowledge that I can arrange who shall be the receiver?”
“I acknowledge every thing,” he said, with a deprecating gesture.
“Perhaps you may be relieved to know,” she continued, returning to her cold measured tones, “that I took further steps at the same time. It would be inconvenient if other letters reached M. Deshoulières. I requested, therefore, in his name, that all documents which might arrive should be forwarded to you. By this means we control one channel of communication.”
“But, Zénobie, my angel—”
“Well? more scruples?”
“You said in his name?”
“Exactly.”
“But—suppose he should find it out?”
“In that case, and supposing also that you had not the wit to persuade him that such were his orders, our little enterprise is at an end. I have told you that there must be risk. Bah!” she continued, suddenly becoming fierce again, “you do not fear to be a villain, Ignace, provided you may have the profit without the danger. You can creep, but you cannot spring.”
She did not look unlike a wild-cat herself, with her round black eyes sparkling, her hands making energetic passes in the air. M. Roulleau was in an agony lest any one should hear her imprudent words.
“Hush-h-h,” he said tremulously, “I am not so clever as you, Zénobie, I do not affirm it. Only tell me what you would have me do.”
“Do!” she cried in her high-pitched voice. And then, with one of those sudden strange checks by which she controlled her passion, she changed back to her contemptuous manner. “You can never be any thing but what you are, but you may be useful in your own way. Do? Go and creep, Ignace.”