However interminable the evenings seemed, she sometimes came back to the house before dusk had fallen,—either because, at the sight of her, a mother had seized her child by the hand and dragged it roughly back into the farmyard,—or because some herdsman, whose name she knew, had not answered her greeting. Oh, how good it would be to lose herself, to drown herself in the deepest depths of some populous city! At Argelouse, there was not a shepherd that did not know her story (even Aunt Clara’s death was laid to her charge). There was not a threshold that she would have dared to cross: she went out by a back door, and avoided houses; the distant rumble of a cart was enough to make her hurry down a side road. She walked quickly, with the beating heart of a driven bird; and she lay down in the heather to wait until a bicycle had passed.
On Sunday, at Mass at Saint Clair, she did not feel this terror, and was conscious of a respite. Public opinion in the town seemed more favourable. She did not know that her father and the La Traves had depicted her as an innocent victim wounded to death. “We are afraid that the poor girl will never get over it: she refuses to see any one and the doctor says that she must not be opposed. Bernard is constantly with her, but her mind is affected....”
On the last night of October a violent wind from the Atlantic raved among the pines for many hours, and Thérèse lay between sleeping and waking listening to its ocean roar. But at daylight she was awakened by quite another sound of lamentation. She pushed open the shutters and the room was still dark: a dense steady rain streamed down on to the roofs of the out-buildings and the leaves of the oak trees, which had hardly yet begun to fall. Bernard did not go out that day. Thérèse sat smoking; she threw away her cigarette, went out onto the landing, and heard her husband wandering from one room to another on the ground floor: a smell of pipe-smoke reached her room, overpowered that of Thérèse’s light tobacco, and she recognised the smell of her old life. The first day of bad weather.... How many would she have to live through, sitting at the corner of that fire-place by the dying embers? In the corners of the room the paper was peeling off the damp walls, on which could still be seen the marks of the old pictures which Bernard had taken away to adorn the drawing-room at Saint Clair,—and the desolate rusty nails. On the mantelpiece, in frames with a triple border of tortoiseshell, stood photographs as pallid as if the dead they represented had died a second death. Bernard’s father, her grandmother, Bernard himself as a boy, with bobbed hair. There was still the whole day before her which she must spend in that melancholy room; and weeks, and months to follow.
As it began to grow dark, Thérèse could bear it no longer; she opened the door quietly, went downstairs and into the kitchen. There she saw Bernard sitting on a low chair before the fire. He got up suddenly; Balion stopped cleaning a gun; Balionte dropped her knitting. All three of them looked at her with such an expression that she asked:
“Are you afraid of me?”
“Didn’t you know you were forbidden to enter the kitchen?” She did not reply and turned towards the door. Bernard called her back.
“However, as you have come, I should like to tell you that my presence here is no longer necessary. We have been able to work up a good deal of sympathy at Saint Clair; people think you, or pretend to think you, rather neurasthenic. It is understood that you prefer to live alone and that I often come to see you. After this you need not come to Mass.”
She stammered out that she did not mind coming; to which he replied that her likes and dislikes were not in question. The desired result had been obtained:
“And since the Mass means nothing to you....”