Year after year!
And Bertrand would never come back!
CHAPTER XV
OLD MADAME
When old Madame heard from Bertrand that he had asked Nicolette Deydier to be his wife, and that Jaume had rejected his suit with contempt, she was hotly indignant.
“The insolence of that rabble passes belief!” she said, and refused even to discuss the subject with Bertrand.
“You do not suppose, I imagine,” she went on haughtily, “that I should go curtsying to that lout and humbly beg for his wench’s hand in marriage for my grandson.”
But her pride, though it had received many a blow these last few days, was not altogether laid in the dust. It was not even humbled. To the Comtesse Marcelle she said with the utmost confidence:
“You were always a coward and a fool, my dear: and imbued with the Christian spirit of holding out your left cheek when your right one had been smitten. But you surely know me well enough to understand that I am not going to do the same in our present difficulty. Fate has dealt us an unpleasant blow, I admit, through the hand of that vixen, my sister Sybille. You notice that I have refrained from having Masses said for the repose of her soul, and if the bon Dieu thinks as I do on the subject, Sybille is having a very uncomfortable time in Purgatory just now. Be that as it may, her spirit shall not have the satisfaction of seeing how hard her body could hit, and in a very few days—two weeks at most—you will see how little I have bent to adverse fate, and how quickly I have turned the tide of our misfortune into one of prosperity.”
She would say no more just then, only hinted vaguely at Court influence, which she was neither too old nor too poor to wield. The difficulty was to extract a promise from Bertrand not to do anything rash, until certain letters which she expected from Paris should arrive. Bertrand, indeed, was in such a state of misery that he felt very like a wounded animal that only desires to hide itself away in some hole and corner, there to bleed to death in peace. When Jaume Deydier had delivered his inflexible ultimatum to him, and he had realised that the exquisite Paradise which Nicolette’s love and self-sacrifice had revealed was indeed closed against him for ever, something in him had seemed to snap: it was his pride, his joy in life, his self-confidence. He had felt so poor, beside her, so poor in spirit, in love, in selflessness, that humiliation had descended on him like a pall, which had in it something of the embrace, the inevitable embrace of death.
He had gone home like a sleepwalker, and had felt like a sleepwalker ever since: neither his sister’s sympathy, nor old Madame’s taunts and arrogance affected him in the least. The cords of life were so attenuated that he felt they would snap at any moment. This was his only consolation: a broken spirit, which might lead to the breaking of the cords of life. Without Nicolette what was life worth now?