CHAPTER IX
Léon had, from the first, the best intentions. He was to be the good comrade to Raoul, the sympathetic counselor to Madame, and for the situation in general a happy blend of an olive branch, a dove, and a rainbow in the heavens!
His shrewdness of judgment was only to be matched by the lightness of his heart. For a month many of his most salient gifts had been lying idle. Rose had not asked for management, and there had been in their easy-going lovemaking no very great place for tact.
Léon was on the look-out for difficulty, for gulfs of temperament and training, efforts and sacrifices and gently taught lessons, but after a time his look-out ceased. Rose looked out. She made the efforts, she learned his lessons, before the need arose to teach her. In fact, she saved him trouble, and there had been moments when Léon found this a trifle dull. It was different now; his skill was called upon at every turn. Madame Gérard was a very unhappy woman. She had had a spoilt childhood and a sentimental and enthusiastic youth guarded at every point from experience.
All her adventures had been in her unfettered dreams. She had dreamed that she should marry Raoul, and then she had married him. Life had brought her up very short. She had believed in an exquisite and ideal relationship and she had been given with terrible promptitude Monsieur Gérard’s impression of what constituted the marriage tie.
He had spoilt her dreams, he had shaken about her ears the fullness of her life; but he was still the man she loved. All other men were but as trees walking, even Léon was only a tree that walked. It was true that he walked more and more frequently in her direction. She took a certain notice of him, her heart lay in the dust but it began to mean something to her that Léon resented this. She felt through the bitterness of her shame a tiny spark of returning pride.
It was a very tiny spark, it hardly amounted to self-respect--but Léon guarded it and kept it alight, as a man shields a flickering match from the rough air. He flattered her grossly at first because she was too sad to understand subtlety. Afterwards, as her mind turned towards him, he refined his flatteries. He kept her a little hungry so that she should more and more look to him for this nourishment of the spirit.
But Madame Gérard, in spite of her grief, was a kind-hearted little woman. She remembered Rose.
“We must not neglect her,” she would say gently, “the little English wife. One does not cure one unhappiness by making another.” And Léon would explain that the English were a strange race. They loved solitude, speechlessness and wonderful long newspaper articles about politics. Also Rose was learning French from a nun and she didn’t care to make a third in their little amusements until she could talk more freely with them.
“She has a pride about it,” Léon explained. “These cold, silent women are very proud.”
“I should not have thought her cold,” said Madame Gérard, thoughtfully. “She has kind eyes. When one is very unhappy one notices kind eyes.”
Léon led the conversation back to Madame’s unhappiness and away from Rose’s eyes. He had not meant to be disloyal to Rose, he rather liked to think of her as cold and proud. After a time Madame no longer tried to send him back to Rose; she was a Frenchwoman, even if she was broken-hearted, and she was not slow to understand Léon. “This type,” she said to herself, “will always be with some woman or other--with me he is safe! I shall send him back to her as he came even perhaps a little wiser, a little more appreciative of her. I will do her no bad turn, the little English wife.”
Madame Gérard had the best intentions, too. She had even better ones than Léon, but neither of them perceived that they had them in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, for a time all went well. Monsieur Gérard studied for the coming opera season with a freer mind and in a better temper.
Rose took long lessons from the nun, and as she slowly and painstakingly began to master the intricate and exquisite language of her husband she felt as if she were approaching his spirit, and preparing for herself and for him a fresh world of understanding and companionship. Day by day Léon brought her, with fresh enthusiasm, endless stories of his progress with the affair Gérard. Some instinct in Rose told her that by the length of these stories, and by Léon’s absorbed, invigorated returns to her, their love was still safe.
She needed all the assurances that she could get, for she was very much alone. She was always just the same to Léon; she spread about him the warm, wide sea of her magnanimity; he was never to know she felt sad or strange, or that she had a silly habit of almost crying when she walked alone on the cliffs above the bright, transparent sea.
He wasn’t to dream that she minded his boating and driving and walking with Madame Gérard, or that she kept explaining to herself how natural it was for him to talk more and with more gaiety in French, and not to care so much as he used to for moonlight in the garden.
She succeeded so entirely in the effect of appearing not to mind that she thoroughly annoyed Léon.
He had been looking forward to a fresh drama with Rose, a little visible but not fettering jealousy, a scene or two, even a few tears, wise and tender explanation on his part, and passionate pleading upon her own.
But Rose’s passion was very quiet and it never occurred to it to plead.
She had no such intention, but she made Léon’s vanity smart, under her daily serenity. “Is she made of wood--or of iron,” he asked himself bitterly, “that she lets me live in the pocket of another woman even during the honeymoon? What have I to look forward to--centuries of ice?”
He knew very well that there was no ice in Rose, but his bad conscience enjoyed resentment very much. It was not only his vanity that was injured, he began to be conscious of a secret fear.
Rose was to be his guardian angel in this affair--he mustn’t, whatever happened, be allowed to lose his head.
He didn’t expect his wife to stop his doing what he wanted, but she ought to be so effective, so in the center of things as to prevent his wanting it, and Rose wouldn’t come into the center of things. She remained in the background, trusting him. He felt the burden of her confidence checking him at every turn.
There was danger, and she didn’t see danger. Was she going to walk straight through it, with her wonderful blue eyes forever unaware?
She ought to have realized that however noble a man is, and however unhappy a woman, a situation in which, from the best motives, they are constantly thrown together, needs watching. A most unfortunate thing had already happened. Madame had discovered, from an unguarded remark of Léon’s, that he had talked with her husband about her. Madame Gérard had a constructive mind--if two and two were anywhere about, it did not take her long to arrive at four. Instantly she understood: this new companionship, the devout attention of her husband’s friend was nothing at all but a plot between the two men to play with her broken heart!
She knew their aim; it was to make her compliant to the lowest needs of one who had not so much affection for her as a stray dog for the hand that strokes it. To say that Madame Gérard was angry at this discovery is to underestimate the uses of language. She was attacked by a bitter fury of outraged pride. Léon had brought back her pride, then, simply in order to outrage it! But this time she kept her head. Any woman can keep her head with a man with whom she is not in love.
Madame Gérard knew herself to be standing with her back to the wall, fighting for her life against two men, one of them at least she could injure.
She gave herself a moment of despair, her small hand clutched fiercely at a little stone beside the path near which they sat--her hidden eyes burned with unshed tears. For a long moment she held herself in silence, while she let Léon cover up his mistake as if she had not heard him; then, being a practical woman, she put despair away till afterwards: besides, despair could only hurt herself.
It was a pity that in destroying Léon’s marriage she should have to destroy Rose’s. Enraged as she was, she thought of this; still, she couldn’t stop to consider a woman who, if she had had the least sense, would have interfered in the whole affair long ago.
“You are not angry,” Léon urged, “that I should have touched on your sufferings with the good Raoul?”
Madame laughed softly and looked at Léon with provocative, caressing eyes.
“You who know women--must know how safe you are from me,” she replied. “Do I look angry?” She did not look angry, but she looked provocative, and this was the first time that she had looked provocative.
It was the difference between a battery turned on and a battery turned off. Madame Gérard, like all Frenchwomen, could use her sex or sink it as the occasion required. Up till now she had never used it, she had kept it steadily in abeyance out of respect to Rose. Now Rose had to go, respect had to go, everything had to go--but her fierce rage against the two men who were in league against her pride.
It was no wonder that Léon began to be afraid, even though it must be admitted that his fear was chiefly of a pleasurable nature, nor that Monsieur Gérard should suddenly feel that he had evoked rather more help than he needed; nor that Rose should find herself not only more alone but suddenly deprived of the support of the long histories Léon used to make to her, on his returns.
He could no longer tell her what took place between him and Madame; speech had become a medium for something better not explained.
Madame Gérard was the only one of the group who appeared wholly at her ease; all her energies were being freely used, and in the direction she had chosen for them. She was making her husband jealous, Léon infatuated and giving the stupid English wife plenty of time to learn French.
The good intentions of everybody began to look a little like the fashion of the year before last.