He was quite right, he had indeed said so very often. But what was he worrying about now? What he called the honour of the name, was safe: the whole story would have been forgotten by the time of the Senatorial elections, Thérèse thought to herself, as she did her best not to catch up the two men; but in the heat of the discussion, they stopped, gesticulating at each other, half-way down the street.
“My advice to you, Larroque, is to face the thing out: take the offensive in next Sunday’s Semeur: I’ll see about it if you like. Get them to put in a notice headed ‘An Infamous Rumour’ or something like that.”
“I don’t agree with you, my dear fellow: as a matter of fact there is no case to answer, the prosecution obviously had not a leg to stand on; they did not even consult hand-writing experts. I am sure the best thing will be to say nothing, and hush it all up. I will do what is necessary and I won’t spare expense: we can’t afford to have any scandal, for the sake of the family.”
They had walked on again by this time, and Thérèse did not hear Duros’ answer. She inhaled the damp night air once more as though she were afraid of choking; and suddenly there came before her mind the unknown face of her maternal grandmother Julie Bellade: it was indeed unknown, for neither the Larroque nor the Desqueyroux families possessed a single likeness of her, and nothing was known about her except that she had one day disappeared. Thérèse realised that she too might have been wiped out of existence, and later on not even her little daughter Marie would have been allowed to find in an album the likeness of one who had brought her into the world. At that moment Marie was already asleep in a room at Argelouse, where Thérèse would arrive late that evening: she would listen in the darkness to the murmur of that childish slumber; she would lean over the bed and her lips would drink in the sweetness of that sleeping life like a draught of clear water.
The carriage stood waiting by the ditch at the edge of the road; the hood was raised and the two lamps lit up the skinny hind quarters of the horses. Beyond it towered two dark walls of forest. The tops of the lower tiers of pines on either side met overhead, and the road vanished into the darkness under that dim archway. Above it gleamed the sky, fretted by a network of myriad branches.
The coachman watched Thérèse with greedy curiosity. When she asked him if they would get to Nizan station in time to catch the last train, he said they would if they started at once.
“I shall not need to trouble you again, Gardère.”
“Has Madame no more business here, then?”
She shook her head, while the man still devoured her with his eyes. Would she be looked at like that for the rest of her life?
“Well, are you glad?” asked her father. He seemed at last to have noticed her presence. Thérèse glanced at that sallow bilious countenance, those cheeks bristling with a coarse growth of whitish-yellow hair, so painfully distinct in the light of the carriage lamps.