But days and weeks passed without anything happening. He still found her there, planted rigidly at her post beside the line, with her flag. Far away, as soon as she was able to catch sight of the locomotive, he felt the sensation of her burning eyes. She saw him, notwithstanding the smoke, and embraced all his frame in her glance, following him in the lightning flash amidst the thunder of the wheels.
And the train was scrutinised at the same time, pierced through and through, inspected from the first carriage to the last; she always discovered the other one, the rival, whom she now knew to be there every Friday. And Séverine might well advance her head but a trifle, impelled by the imperious necessity to look. She was seen. Their eyes crossed like rapiers. The train was already far away, devouring space; and one person remained on the ground, powerless to follow it, raging at the happiness it bore along. Flore seemed to be growing. Jacques found her taller at each journey, and felt uneasy at her taking no action, wondering what plan would ripen in the head of this great, gloomy girl, whose motionless apparition he could not avoid.
There was also one of the servants of the company, that headguard, Henri Dauvergne, who inconvenienced Séverine and Jacques. He happened to be in charge of this Friday train, and he displayed importunate amiability towards the young woman. The attentions of Henri became so apparent, that Roubaud observed them with sneering countenance on the mornings when he was on duty at the departure from Havre. The headguard was in the habit of reserving an entire compartment for his wife, and took pains to see she was comfortable there, feeling the foot-warmer to make sure the water was hot, and so forth. On one occasion the husband, while continuing a chat with Jacques, attracted his notice to the proceedings of the young man with a wink, as if to inquire whether he permitted that kind of thing.
In the family quarrels, Roubaud flatly accused his wife of making love to the pair. And Séverine imagined, for an instant, that Jacques also had this belief, which was the cause of his sadness. In a burst of tears, she protested her innocence, telling him to kill her if she were unfaithful. But he merely laughed, and, turning very pale, embraced her, saying he was convinced of her fidelity, and that he sincerely hoped he would never kill anybody.
The first evenings of March were frightful, and they were obliged to interrupt their meetings. The trips to Paris, the few hours of freedom sought so far away, were no longer enough for Séverine. She experienced an increasing desire to have Jacques with her, always with her, to live together, without ever leaving one another. And her execration for her husband increased. The mere presence of this man threw her into an unhealthy and intolerable state of excitement. She so docile, with all the complacence of a tender-hearted woman, became irritated as soon as it was a question of Roubaud, flying into a passion at the least opposition he made to her will.
On such occasions the shade of her raven hair seemed to darken the limpid blue of her eyes. She became fierce, accusing him of having so thoroughly spoilt her existence that henceforth it would be impossible to live together. Had not he done it all? If they were no longer as man and wife, if she had a sweetheart, was it not his own fault? His sluggish tranquillity, the look of indifference with which he met her anger, his round shoulders, his enlarged stomach, all that dreadful fat, resembling happiness, completed her exasperation, she who suffered. Her one thought, now, was to break with him, to get away, to go and begin life again elsewhere. Oh! could she but commence again, wipe out the past, return to the life she led previous to all these abominations, find herself as she was at fifteen, and love, and be loved, and live as she dreamed of living then!
For a week, she courted the idea of taking flight: she would leave with Jacques, they would conceal themselves in Belgium, where they would set up housekeeping as a hard-working young couple. But she had not spoken to him on the subject. Obstacles had at once come in the way: their irregular position, the constant anxiety in which they would find themselves, and particularly the annoyance of leaving her fortune to her husband—the money, La Croix-de-Maufras.
By a donation to the survivor of the pair—which is possible in France, and cannot be revoked without the consent of both parties—they had willed everything away; and she found herself in his power, in that legal tutelage of a wife which tied her hands. Rather than leave, and abandon even a sou, she would have preferred to die there. One day when he came up, livid, to say that crossing the line in front of a locomotive he had felt the buffer graze his elbow, she reflected that if he had been killed, she would have been free. She observed him with her great staring eyes; why on earth did he not die, since she had ceased to love him, and he was now in the way of everyone?
From that moment the dream of Séverine changed: Roubaud had been killed in an accident, and she left with Jacques for America. But they were married. They had sold La Croix-de-Maufras, and realised all the fortune. Behind them they left nothing they were afraid of. If they emigrated, it was to be born again in the arms of one another. Over there, naught would exist of the events she wished to forget, and she could imagine she was beginning a new life. As she had made a mistake, she would engage in the experience of happiness again at the commencement. He would find employment; she could undertake something else. They would make their fortune. Perhaps children might come, and there would be a new existence of labour and felicity.
As soon as she was alone in bed in the morning, and while engaged on her embroidery in the daytime, she resumed the construction of this castle in the air, modifying, enlarging, ceaselessly adding delightful details to it, and ended by imagining herself overwhelmed with joy and riches. She, who formerly went out so rarely, had now a passion for going to see the mail-steamers put to sea: she ran down to the jetty, leant over the balustrade, followed the smoke of the vessel until it became lost in the haze of the offing; and she fancied herself on deck with Jacques, already far from France, steaming for the paradise of her dreams.