“I have not reached the age of thirty-four, and brought up six children, and never once been late with so much as a ribbon, to cry for any man now. He’ll be a wonderful man that will ever make me cry. Henriette, don’t tug at your garter.”
And as she stood there, with great brown eyes burning beneath a weight of lustrous black hair, she seemed of marble without and within.
Nevertheless, before six months had passed, Madame Lataille fell impetuously in love with a young English clerk of twenty-one, called Henry Snow; what is more, she married him. Nobody in Lille was able to offer a credible explanation of her behavior. People were willing to admit that his conduct was comprehensible, notwithstanding the fourteen years of her seniority; and it says much for the way Juliette had impressed her personality upon a dull provincial world that Henry Snow’s action should have been so immediately understood. Before the problem of her conduct, however, the world remained in perplexity. Financial considerations could not have supplied a motive; from all accounts the Englishman was unlikely to help; indeed, gossip said that even in his obscure position he had already had opportunities of showing that, such as it was, the position was better than he deserved and unlikely to be bettered in the future. Nor could his good looks have attracted her, for he was insignificant; and since Englishmen in the experience of Lille were, whatever their faults, never insignificant, the insignificance of Henry Snow acquired an active quality which contradicted its characterization and made him seem not merely unattractive, but positively displeasing. Nor could she have required some one to help in managing her six children; altogether the affair was a mystery, which gathered volume when the world began to realize the depth of the feeling that Henry Snow had roused in Juliette. All the world loves a lover, but only when it is allowed to obtrude itself upon the love. Juliette, absorbed by her emotion and the eternal jealousy of the woman who marries a man much younger than herself, refused to admit any spectators to marvel at the development of the mystery. She carried on her work as usual; but instead of maintaining her position as a figure she became an object of curiosity, and presently, because that curiosity was never gratified, an object of suspicion. The lover-loving world began to shake its head and calumny whispered everywhere its commentary; she could never have been a femme propre; this marriage must have been forced upon the young Englishman as the price of a five-year-old intrigue. When some defender of Juliette pointed out that the clerk had only been in Lille three years, that his name had never been connected with hers, and that in any case he was only twenty-one now, calumny retorted with a long line of Henry Snows; presently the story of Juliette’s life with André Duchesnil was dragged to light, and by an infinite multiplication of whispers her career from earliest youth was established as licentious, mercenary, and cruel.
For a while Juliette was so much wrapped up in her own joy that she did not observe the steady withdrawal of popular esteem. Having made it clear to everybody that she wished to be left alone with her husband, she supposed she had been successful and congratulated herself accordingly, until one day a persistent friend, proof against Juliette’s icy discouragement, drove into her that the quartier was pitying Henry Snow, that things were being said against her, and that the only way to put a stop to unkind gossip was to move about among the neighbors in more friendly fashion.
Gradually it dawned upon Juliette that her friend was the emissary of a universally accepted calumny, the voice of the quartier, the first to brave her, and only now rash enough to do so because she had public opinion at her back. This did not prevent Juliette from showing her counselor the door to the street, nor from slamming it so abruptly that a meter of stuff was torn from her skirt; yet when she went back to her room and picked up her needlework there came upon her with a shock the realization of what effect all this might have on Henry. If the world were pitying him now, it would presently be laughing; if he were laughed at, he would grow to hate her. Hitherto she had been so happy in her love that she had never stopped to consider anything or anybody. She remembered now Henry’s amazement when, in the first tumultuous wave of passion dammed for so many years, she had refused to let herself be swept away; she recalled his faint hesitation when first she spoke of marriage and gave him to understand that without marriage she would not be his. Even then he must have foreseen the possibility of ridicule, and he had only married her because she had been able to seem so desirable. And she was still desirable; he was still enthralled; he was still vain of her love; yet how was the flattery of one woman to mitigate for a man the contempt of the crowd? Mercifully, he was an Englishman in a French town, therefore it would take longer for the popular feeling to touch him; but soon or late it would strike home to his vanity. Something must be devised to transfix him with the dignity of marriage. They must have a child; no father could do anything but resent and despise laughter that would be directed against his fatherhood. Juliette’s wish was granted very shortly afterward; and when she told her husband of their expectation she held him close and looked deep into his eyes for the triumph she sought. Perhaps the fire in her own was reflected in his, for she released him from her embrace with a sigh of content.
Through the months of waiting Juliette longed for a boy. It seemed to her somehow essential for the retention of Henry’s love that she should give him a boy; she could scarcely bear another girl, she who had brought into the world six girls. Much of Juliette’s pride during those months was softened by her longing; she began once more to frequent the company of her neighbors in her zest for the least scrap of information that would help the fulfilment of it. There was no fantastic concoction she would not drink, nor any omen she would not propitiate. Half the saints in the calendar were introduced to her by ladies that knew them and vouched for the interest they would take in her pregnancy. Juliette never confided to anybody her reason for wanting a boy; and nobody suspected it, since half a dozen girls were enough to explain any woman’s desire for a change. One adviser discovered in a tattered volume of obstetrical theory that when the woman was older than the man the odds were on a male child. Juliette’s researches to gather confirmation of this remark led her into discussions about unequal marriages; and as the time of her confinement drew near she became gentler and almost anxious to discuss her love for Henry Snow, so much gentler and less reserved that those who had formerly whispered loudest and most falsely to one another now whispered sympathetically to her.
On the day before Juliette’s confinement her husband came in from work very irritable.
“Here, when’s this baby going to be born? I’m getting a bit annoyed. The men at the office are betting on its being a boy. It makes me look a fool, you know, that sort of thing.”
She clutched his arm. “Which do you want, Henri? Tell me, mon amour, mon homme.”
“I don’t care which it is, as long as you’re quick about it and this betting stops.”