IV
M. Chantal ceased speaking. He was seated on the billiard-table, dangling his feet, his left hand playing with a ball, while his right fiddled with a cloth which was used for wiping the chalk-marks off the scoring-slate, and which from its use we called the chalk-cloth. Rather red, his voice indistinct, he was speaking to himself now, lost in his recollections, going gently through the bygone things and the old events that were waking in his mind, as one strolls through the old gardens of the home where one was brought up, and where each tree, each path, each plant, the prickly hollies, the sweet-smelling laurels, the yews, whose fat red berries crush between one’s fingers, evoke at every step some little fact of our past life, one of those insignificant and delicious facts that make up the very foundation, the very warp of existence.
As for me, I stood there facing him, my back leaning against the wall, and my hands supported on my unused billiard-cue.
After a minute he resumed.
“Ah, me! How pretty she was at eighteen ... and gracious ... and perfect.... Ah! what a pretty ... pretty ... pretty and kind ... and good ... and charming girl! ... She had eyes ... blue eyes ... transparent ... clear ... the like of which I have never seen ... never!”
He lapsed into silence again. I asked, “Why has she never married?”
He replied, not to me, but to the word “married” that had been let fall:
“Why? Why? She never wished to ... never wished. Though she had thirty thousand francs dowry, and was asked several times ... she never wished to! She seemed sad in those days. That was when I married my cousin, little Charlotte, my wife, to whom I had been engaged for six years.”
I looked at M. Chantal, and it seemed to me that I saw into his soul, that I suddenly saw into one of those humble and cruel dramas of honourable hearts, upright hearts, of hearts without reproach, into one of those mute, unexplored hearts, which no one has understood, not even those who are their uncomplaining and resigned victims.
And, suddenly impelled by a daring curiosity, I blurted out:
“Should not you have married her, Monsieur Chantal?”
He trembled, looked at me, and said:
“I? Marry whom?”
“Mademoiselle Perle.”
“Why so?”
“Because you loved her better than your cousin.”
He looked at me with strange, round, startled eyes, then he stammered:
“I loved her ... I? ... how? Who told you that?...”
“Why, any one can see it ... and that’s why you were so long in marrying your cousin, who waited six years for you.”
He dropped the ball that he was holding in his left hand, seized the chalk-cloth with both hands, and, hiding his face with it, began to sob into it. He wept in a distressing, ridiculous way, as a sponge weeps when it is squeezed, from his eyes and nose and mouth all at once. And he coughed and hawked, blew his nose into the chalk-cloth, wiped his eyes, sneezed, began running again from every aperture in his face, with a throaty noise that suggested gargling.
As for me, frightened and ashamed, I wanted to make my escape and was at my wits’ end to know what to say, or to do, or try.
And suddenly Madame Chantal’s voice sounded on the stairs, “Will you soon be done with your smoke?”
I opened the door and called, “Yes, Madame, we are coming down.”
Then I rushed to her husband, and seizing him by the elbows said, “Monsieur Chantal, my good friend Chantal, listen; your wife is calling you; pull yourself together, pull yourself together at once; we must go downstairs; pull yourself together.”
He stammered, “Yes ... yes ... I’m coming ... poor girl ... I’m coming ... tell her I’ll be in a moment.”
And he began conscientiously to wipe his face with the cloth that had been wiping all the marks off the slate for two or three years. When he finished, he showed half white, half red, his brow, his nose, his cheeks, his chin all smeared with chalk, and his eyes swollen and still full of tears.
I took him by the hands and dragged him into his room, murmuring, “I beg your pardon, I do indeed, Monsieur Chantal, for having given you pain, ... but ... I did not know ... you ... you understand.”
He pressed my hand, “Yes ... yes ... there are some awkward moments....”
Then he plunged his face into the basin. When he lifted his head he still did not look presentable, but I thought of a little ruse. As he looked rather uncomfortably at himself in the glass, I said to him, “It will do if you tell them that you have some dust in your eye, and you can let them see it watering as much as you like.”
So he went downstairs rubbing his eyes with his handkerchief. They made a fuss about him; every one wanted to look for the speck of dust, which was not to be found, and they related similar cases in which the doctor had eventually to be called in.
As for me, I had rejoined Mademoiselle Perle, and I was watching her, tormented by a burning curiosity, a curiosity which was becoming torture. She must really have been very pretty once, with her gentle eyes, so large, so calm, so open that they looked as if she never closed them as other people do. Her dress was rather ridiculous, a regular old maid’s toilet, and, without making her look a fright, did not set her off.
I seemed to see into her soul, as I had seen into M. Chantal’s a little before, as if I surveyed from end to end her humble, simple, devoted life; but a necessity forced my lips, an imperious necessity of questioning her, of learning if she too had loved him; if she had suffered like him from that long-drawn sorrow, secret and acute, which none knows, none sees, none suspects, but which finds vent at night, in the solitude of the darkened room. I looked at her, I saw her heart beating under her muslin bodice, and I asked myself whether that sweet, frank face had groaned night by night in the moist thickness of her pillow, and sobbed, her body racked by convulsions, in the fever of her burning bed.
And I said to her, cautiously, as children do when they break a trinket to see inside it, “If you had seen M. Chantal crying just now, you would have been sorry for him.”
She trembled, “What? He was crying?”
“Yes, he was crying!”
“And why was he?”
She seemed very much perturbed. I replied:
“Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes. He was telling me how much he used to love you, and what it cost him to marry his present wife instead of you....”
Her pale face seemed to me to lengthen a little; her eyes, always open, her calm eyes closed suddenly, so quickly that they seemed to have closed for ever. She slipped from her chair to the floor, and collapsed there gently, gradually, as a fallen veil might have done.
I cried, “Help, help! Mademoiselle Perle is unwell.”
Madame Chantal and her daughters rushed to her, and, as they went for water and a napkin and vinegar, I got my hat and escaped.
I hurried away, my heart torn, my mind full of remorse and regret. And yet now and again I was glad; I felt as if I had done something commendable and necessary.
I kept asking myself, “Was I wrong? Was I right?” They had that in their souls like a bullet in a healed-up wound. Will they not be happier now? It was too late to renew their torture, and not too late for them to remember with fondness.
And perhaps some evening next spring, moved by a moonbeam falling through the branches on the grass at their feet, they will take each other’s hands and clasp them in memory of all that suppressed cruel suffering; and perhaps, too, that brief clasp will send through their veins a little of that thrill which otherwise they would never have known, and will excite in those dead ones, resuscitated in an instant, the swift, divine sensation of that intoxication, that madness, which gives lovers more happiness in one thrill than other men can gather in a lifetime.
THE END.
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