The Stain
The maid, who had been Giselle's nurse so short a time ago, opened the library door and announced, unwillingly, one could see, "Madame la Marquise de St. Agnan, Madame la Comtesse."
Giselle, in her heavy mourning, stood up from the chair by the window. She did not go forward to meet Paule.
"It is sweet of you to see me," said Paule, crossing the room to her, slender and tall and lovely.
The baby-boy and girl who had been playing with some wooden toy soldiers on the floor in a corner, both scrambled up and trotted over to their mother.
Paule had never seen them before. She wanted to take them both in her arms and hold them tight. She thought she could never have let the boy go.
But Giselle said to the maid, "Honorine, please take the children to Miss."
They went out with the old woman, who closed the door.
"It was very sweet of you to let me come," repeated Paule, because she had to say something. It was harder than she had thought possible.
"I have seen no one at all," said Giselle. "But your letter—I don't know—I wondered——"
They stood looking at one another. Of course, they did not touch one another's hands.
Suddenly the room seemed to swim about Paule, there was a surging in her ears. She said, "May I sit down?"
"But I beg you! I am sorry, I can't seem to think of things. Here in the window?"
Paule dragged the chair out of the light of the sunshiny June morning into the shadow of the curtain. She was wearing a heavy white lace veil, but she did not want to face the sunshine.
Giselle threw herself into the chair where she had been sitting before. Her crape and the traces of many tears upon her face only made her look the more pathetically young.
"You wondered," said Paule, "if my letter were true, really; if it were possible that I could honestly write like that of him?"
Giselle nodded her head, not speaking.
Paule saw that it would not have been possible for her to speak. She saw, what she had been sure she would see, that the younger woman was suffering intensely. She realized, more than ever what the thing meant to her Bernard's wife; how for her everything of her memory of him, the memory she was to keep with her all her life, depended on what she was to learn in this hour. All the memory she was to keep of her dead husband depended on it. That she might remember him with tenderness and solace and peace; or that it must be always with uncertainty and restlessness, and bitter thoughts. To be able to mourn him fully, fearlessly; or to go on always tormenting herself with doubt. It was of desperate importance to her. Paule saw that. She knew that the younger woman kept silent because she could not speak, not because of any realization she had of the advantage silence gave her.
Giselle, silent, waited.
The older woman, braving the silence, took the thing up.
"You are going to believe what I tell you. I don't know why you should believe me, but you will. They all talk of it, but I am the only one who really knows. And I have got to tell you. The things they say are true, but with such a difference. I must make you understand the difference. Since the moment Dolly told me that you knew, I have known that I must make you understand. I cannot let you misunderstand him when he is dead."
She was holding her parasol across her knees, her hands in their soft tan gloves clutching the two ends of it very tight.
"It is rather terribly hard for me to tell you," she said, "harder even than for you to listen. Remember that, if I seem to go over it cruelly." She stopped, and Giselle nodded again.
"I must go over it," Paule went on, speaking very fast now, "so that we can have it all clear between us. Don't you see? He came home here for six days' leave. He told you he had six days' leave. When he went, at the end of those six days, you thought it was back to the front he was gone. Then, three days after he left you, he was killed in a bayonet charge. And his colonel, and some of his friends, said, writing to you and to other people of him, that it was especially sad to think he had been killed the very day he came back from his leave. So you knew that his leave had been of eight days, that he had had two days' extra leave of which he had not told you, spent, you did not know where, or with whom. And then it happened Dolly spoke to you of seeing him with me in Evreux the very day before he was killed. And so you knew. She had spoken of it to lots of people—the way people always say, you know, 'and I saw him only the day before.' And so every one knew. And you knew. But I have got to make you understand."
She let go her parasol and, leaning forward into the sunshine, threw her veil back from her face with her two hands. "I will let you see how I have suffered," she said, "it is written for you in my face." She was glad to have the younger woman see how much of her beauty was gone. "And that I loved him. You know—I must let you know—that I loved him. I loved him when you were a little schoolroom girl. And he did love me then." She drew herself up with a sudden flaming of pride. "I will give myself the comfort of saying that he loved me before he knew you, Giselle." The flame died down instantly, and she leaned forward, almost beseechingly. The parasol had fallen to the floor. "But he never loved me afterwards. From the moment he saw you—I was with him at somebody's dance the first time he saw you—I knew that for me everything was finished. Everything was swept away by his love of you. You know that, don't you?"
"I believed it then," said Giselle, speaking at last, "then, and all the time, in spite of all the things that people said, until this."
"There was one thing I never let go," Paule went on; "it was the pitying, protecting tenderness a man who is good like Bernard always continues to feel for the woman he once loved and who goes on loving him. I kept that alive, I kept him being sorry for me. There's reason enough in my life for any one to be sorry for me. And I kept him feeling that he must protect me, protect me from the blackness of sorrow that, I let him know always, there was in my heart."
Giselle had turned from her, as if she could not look at her, and sat staring out of the window to the tops of the trees in the avenue. Her cheeks were burning, as if the shame of the miserable confession were her own.
"Do you not see, oh, do you not see?" begged the other woman.
There was a dreadful silence.
Paule took it up again. "And the last thing was the accumulation of the shame and misery of years. I wish I could make you see, a little, what it meant to me, that you might not quite despise me. I suppose there is no excuse. But it had been so dreadful, down there in the country, with my husband, as he is, you know, ill, needing me, hating me, wanting me every moment. And all these terrible months of war, nearly two years, never seeing Bernard, scarcely hearing of him. I made him come. I made him come by telling him that I was in desperate trouble, that if he did not come I could not face it. I told him he must tell no one, not even you: that my trouble was a thing I must keep secret. Against his will, just by abuse of his kindness I made him give me those two days. I want you to quite, quite understand that it was only that I loved him, that he loved you. And that those two days were my theft of time he wanted to give all to you."
"Oh, don't, don't!" cried Giselle, breaking into it. "You need not tell me any more." She covered her face with her hands, as if it were she who was ashamed.
"Some day you will wonder why I have told you," Paule said, "why any woman should so humiliate herself down to the dust. It is because you have the right to a beautiful memory of him. You must keep that beautiful memory of him for yourself and for his children. It belongs to you, and to his home, and to his children. Never doubt him, Giselle, and let your sorrow be a beautiful sorrow, because he loved you as you loved him, perfectly. And in death he is yours. That is all."
She stopped and picked up her parasol. It was a green parasol. She looked from its bright colour to Giselle's black dress. She shivered a little and stood up.
Giselle took her hands away from her eyes and stood up, too.
Paule would have turned and gone out of the room, but Giselle caught her hands and held her, and lifted up her young face from which the tortured look was gone. She was crying, but tenderly.
For an instant it seemed as if Paule would have drawn away from her. But then she bent from her lovely height and kissed the younger woman. Then she went away.
Giselle did not go to the door with her. Old Honorine let her out of the apartment.
She went down the stairs and out into the avenue, where the leaves of the trees made large shadows.
As she walked very wearily, she did not know where, she was telling herself that it was over, that she had done what she could. She had made poor little Giselle believe her. She had given him to Giselle.
The avenue ahead of her seemed very, very long. She wondered if she would ever get to the end of it. Her thoughts seemed confused. She wondered what there was so cruel about Giselle's black dress and her own green parasol with the parrot handle. She would manage somehow to make the world believe that story she had told Giselle. She had given him to Giselle to mourn for. Perhaps that would wipe out some of it.