At such times Jeanne braced her shivering limbs and throbbing nerves to steady rigidity and bore her burden as though she had the strength of eternity in her heart. Scraps of phrases from André’s letters came before her eyes, as voices speak to tranced saints. As she worked she saw, written before her, “Whoever is responsible for the war, the children are not.” Or again, “We are all evil creatures, God knows, and our motives must be mixed in this war because they are mixed in everything else. But with whatever of virtue there is in me, I am fighting for what I think best fit to survive in the world I wish my children to inhabit.” Or again, for her own comfort, “Dearest darling Jeanne, the very powers of hell cannot take away from me the ten years of supreme happiness you have given me.”
The days went by, one, two, three, four, five, with no letters, with no words at all beyond the steady advance of the Germans. The nights went by, the long, long nights, not black and empty, but filled with dreadful lightning visions of what might be happening, even at that instant, as she lay in her bed. Jeanne felt no fatigue, no hunger, no consciousness of her body at all, at such times. It happened once, after one of these long, numb days, that she cut her hand deeply, and did not know she had done it till she saw the smears of blood on her skirt. Her first thought was that it was the only skirt she possessed and that she must not spoil it with her blood, because there was no money to buy another.
It was that very evening, after she had tied up the wound on her hand and was beginning to undress the younger children, interrupting herself frequently to help Jacques with his Latin, that she heard the front door of the house open and shut.
She went as cold as ice. Her heart stopped beating, her hair stirred itself on her head. It had come. Some one had brought a telegram with the bad news.
She put the children on one side, quietly, opened the kitchen door, and stepped out into the cold twilight of the hall.
André stood before her, a shadowy figure in the obscurity, pale, unshaven, muddy, smiling, a strange, dim, tired, infinitely tender smile. His arms were outstretched toward her.
For a moment—a long, silent, intense moment of full life—she knew nothing but that he was there, that she held him in her arms, that his lips were on hers. Nothing else existed. There was no war, no danger, no fear, no wonder how he could have come. There was nothing in all her being but the consciousness that they were together again. She was drowned deep in this consciousness; the blessed flood of it closed over her head.
Presently the door of the kitchen opened, and the littler ones trooped out to find her. They could live but so few moments, those littler ones, without sucking at her vitality.
She fell at once into the happy confusion of the usual leave of absence, crying out to the children, “See, see, papa has come! See, Uncle André is here!”
It seemed to her the children were singularly apathetic, not instantly molten joy as she had been. The younger ones were even a little shy of him, who was, after all, an unknown man to them; and more than a little jealous of him, who came to share with them their maman, their auntie, the source and light and warmth of their exacting little, new lives. It seemed to Jeanne that they looked even more queerly at him this time than usual, and that there was in the sidelong glances of the older ones an element of strangeness. Their father was becoming a mere legend to them, she thought with a painful contraction of her heart.