M. JEROME went to bed. The mirrors in which Jean had so often seen his wretched face were covered with dustsheets. His body had been dressed as though for high mass, and Cadette had even put a soft felt hat upon his head and a prayer book in his hands. The kitchen was all bustle and confusion for there would be forty people in the dining-room, and a group of farmers standing round the hearse groaned uncontrollably, like the mourners of ancient days. It was the first time that the priest had officiated at a funeral of such magnificence. Each guest was given a pair of gloves and a sou wrapped in paper. It rained during the service, but afterwards the sun broke through the clouds and shone until the funeral procession had left the cemetery. Jean Péloueyre awaited the resurrection of the dead, his body lying uncorrupted in the dry embalming sand. Noémi Péloueyre shrouded herself in crêpe for three years and her deep mourning enabled her to be almost literally invisible. She only went out to go to mass, and always before crossing the square made certain that no one was in sight. Even through the heat of summer she wore a high black collar edged with white, and in order to protect herself against the comments of the severe she refused to wear dresses made of a too silky material.
About this time a report of the young doctor's conversion went the rounds. He went to mass, and was seen in the church on week-days as well. When the priest was approached on the subject of this event which must have been such a satisfactory one to him, a smile played about his thin-lipped mouth, but he said nothing.
He seemed to have lost his influence and his power of persuasion, for he was unable to find out from M. Jêrome whether he had taken out of his will the clause which obliged Noémi not to re-marry. He failed, too, when he expressed his disapproval of the mourning and insisted that they should relax the strictness with which it was being carried out. M. Jêrome was proud of belonging to a family whose widows never went out of mourning, and the d'Artiailhs were most anxious for Noémi to continue wearing it. And this was why, in the early winter mornings, the young doctor was no more able to see the widow in her shadowy retreat than she to see her husband through the flagstone that sealed his grave, upon which she knelt every day. At times, however, he caught glimpses of her face, youthfully radiant in spite of her secluded life and of her fasts before Communion. The day after the Anniversary Mass, when it became known in the town that Noémi would stay in mourning, the doctor's Christian resolutions broke down. He neglected his patients as well as his religious duties, and Doctor Pieuchon was told that his young colleague had taken to drink, that he even kept a bottle at his bedside for nocturnal consumption. M. Jêrome's health was excellent, so his daughter-in-law had a good deal of leisure; she occupied herself with the estate, but the timber cutting required little supervision. Her religion was a cut-and-dried, mechanical affair, took up a very small part of her time and was not strengthened by reading. She was scarcely capable of meditation, so her faith rested almost entirely upon formula. In a country flowing with resin there is scarcely any poverty; and only a few moments are necessary once a week to collect the bleating flock of the Children of the Virgin about a harmonium. The only thing left for Noémi to do was to interest herself mildly, as did most of the women of Les Landes, in cooking. After the third year of her mourning she began to put on flesh, and Doctor Pieuchon had to prescribe an hour's walk every day.
One warm afternoon in the early spring she went as far as the farm called Tartehume and sank down exhausted on the bank that ran along the side of the road. Bees hummed in the broom; horseflies stung her ankles. Noémi's heart was beating rapidly and she could think of nothing but the dusty road that led back to the house; there were two miles of blazing sun, for the trees that bordered the road had recently been cut down. She felt that she would be forever hemmed in by these endless pines with their sticky red gashes, and in these dreary stretches of sand and burnt heather. In her slow uncultivated mind there was a confused echo of the conflict that had tortured Jean Péloueyre in the days of his bachelorhood. The aridity of her country and the solitude of her life parched her soul with mortal thirst and forced the wretched girl to raise her eyes and stretch out her hands towards the Living Water which is perpetual refreshment.
Noémi dried the perspiration from her hands with a black-bordered handkerchief. She looked at her dusty shoes and at a tuft of young ferns whose fronds were opening out like fingers. Then she raised her eyes slowly and the smell of rye bread came drifting across to her like the very breath of the farm. Suddenly she stood up, trembling. A gig that she easily recognized was standing in front of the farmhouse. How often through half-opened shutters she had gazed at its polished axle-caps, more thrilling to her than the stars in the heavens! Noémi shook the sand from the folds of her dress; the wheels of a farm cart creaked; a jay cried. A swarm of horseflies enveloped her as she stood watching the farmhouse door. Her mouth was open, her breath came quickly, and she waited and waited—a meek submissive animal. Then the door swung half-way back, and she tried to see into the dim hall where he was standing. A familiar voice was prescribing in peasant dialect enormous doses of tincture of iodine. He appeared; and every button on his hunting jacket gleamed in the sunlight, as the farmer accompanied him to the gate and held his horse, remarking that this was the season for forest fires; everything was dry; there was no green undergrowth and no rain to ease the situation. The young man picked up the reins.
Noémi drew back; her impulsive movement towards him was checked by a hidden force. She plunged into a thicket of tall heather bushes, scratching her hands on the brambles, and listened for a moment as the gig rattled away down the road. No doubt she was thinking, as she hid from him, of the town's disapproval of all lapses from respectable widowhood; and then there was the clause in M. Jêrome's will, which would always prevent her parents from giving their consent to what Madame d'Artiailh called a crazy match. Noémi would have instinctively swept aside such obstacles as these, had not her instinct been stifled by something still more powerful. Her trifling personality was condemned to greatness; her slavery had become authority. This commonplace girl could not help transcending herself; no road was open to her save that of renunciation, and in this moment she knew that her fidelity to the dead was a humble glory from which her destiny forbade her to escape.
So Noémi ran on through the scorched heather, till at last breathless, exhausted, and her shoes full of sand, she faltered and grasped a stunted oak whose withered leaves rustled in the hot wind—a stunted blackened tree that reminded her of Jean Péloueyre.
La Motte, Vémars, July;
Johannet, Saint-Symphorien, September 1921.