CHAPTER XVII
"There!" said Madame Garnier, scanning the chair-filled assembly-room from the back, "up there in the second row there are three seats. We can take two and hold one and perhaps after Danielle has played, she can come and sit by us."
They were in plenty of time, long before the contest began, so that she gave herself the pleasure of walking slowly down the aisle, stopping wherever she saw a familiar face to exchange greetings and to say proudly, "Yes, Jean-Pierre is returned from America. Looking very well, isn't he? Yes, that's the style in America, neither beard nor mustache. But I think after a while he'll let his mustache grow again. I tell him he looks like a priest."
But she did not think that he looked in the least like a priest. She thought him the most beautiful young man in the world, and she was so ecstatically happy to have him back again after the rending anguish of the two years' separation, that she forgave him all the anxiety he had caused them by that foolish infatuation of his. That was in the past now, she hoped. Perhaps he had outgrown his foolish idea, as they had hoped he might when they had sent him away. He had certainly said nothing about it in any of his letters. But even if he hadn't forgotten, if he but knew it, she was more than ready to yield the point to him, to yield anything that would end his alienation from her, that would bring him back to live in Bayonne. She had grown old during those two endless years. They had broken her resolution. He was too precious. She could deny him nothing. If he still wanted it, why, let him have his little American girl, as soon as she was old enough to marry. She might be made over into a passable wife for Jean-Pierre. There was no doubt she was pretty and fine, with nice hands and feet; and she seemed gentle and quiet. Once get her away from those impossible parents, into a decent home...!
Her heart was rippling full with joy to feel Jean-Pierre there beside her. At times it overflowed, and she all but opened her lips to tell him she would sacrifice anything for him, that she would put no obstacle in his way. But for the moment a prudent thought restrained her. She would wait and see whether perhaps Jean-Pierre had not forgotten that curious infatuation with a mere child. There was no use putting the idea back in his head, if his exile and two years' time had blotted it out.
They sat in a decorous silence, waiting for the beginning of the program. Madame Garnier moved nearer to Jean-Pierre, for the pleasure of feeling his arm, a man's arm now, inside a very well-cut masculine coat-sleeve. She remembered what it had been, the rosy translucent flesh of her first baby, then the little thin, white arm of his long ailing boyhood—how she had fought with ill-health to keep him—all those years, never an instant's relaxation of her care, her prayers, her piercing anxiety! Oh, well, it was all over now. There he sat, a splendid young man, still a little delicate, but sound and well. Her reward had come. How goldenly the years stretched out before her! Perhaps it was just as well to have him marry young, to have his wife come to him intact in the first bloom of her early girlhood. He himself was so unworldly, he would never be able to manage an older woman. A fleeting picture came to her of a rosy baby's face—Jean-Pierre's first child. The thought flooded over her, rich with pride and joy.
She continued to gaze at a certain spot in the curtain, her face framed in her heavy velvet hat, composed in decorous vacancy.
Beside her Jean-Pierre also fixed his eyes on a certain spot in the curtain, and composed his face to quiet. But he was afraid of the silence. He wished his mother had gone on chatting, or that they had sat down near acquaintances with whom he would have been forced to talk. Then he would not have been so conscious of the dryness of his mouth, of the roaring of his pulse in his ears. He stared hard at the curtain, trying to interest his eyes in the design of the tapestry. But they could see nothing but what they had seen for two years, liquid dark eyes looking straight into his heart, his poor heart that he could not hide from them; dark eyes that seemed to be looking wistfully for something they did not find, something that he knew he could give, something that he longed to give with such an abandon of desire that he felt now, as so many times before, the sweat start out on his forehead.