But where is the beginning of our acts? The thread of our fate, when we try to lay it bare, is like one of those plants that cannot be torn up with all its roots. Should Thérèse go back to her childhood? But childhood itself is an end and a fulfilment.
Thérèse’s childhood;—snow at the source of a stream now utterly defiled. At school she appeared to live aloof from those petty tragedies that tormented her companions. The mistresses often held up Thérèse Larroque as an example to the rest. “Thérèse,” one of them said, “is an unusually high moral type: she knows it: and her pride in that fact is quite enough to keep her straight without any fear of punishment.”
“But was I happy?” Thérèse asked herself. “And was I sincere? All my life before my marriage has, as I look back on it, this air of innocence, in contrast, no doubt, to the ineffaceable contamination of my marriage. My life at school, before I became a wife and a mother, seems a paradise, though I did not realise it then. How could I know that in those years before my life began I was living my real life? Pure I was: an angel if you like: but a very passionate angel! Whatever my mistresses may have said, I knew what suffering was and I made others feel it. I enjoyed the pain I gave and the pain that my friends inflicted: my suffering was a pure emotion, untainted by remorse: and indeed, there was pain and joy in most simple pleasures.”
But Thérèse was satisfied if she could feel herself worthy of Anne when she met her once more in the summer heats, under the oak trees of Argelouse. She must be able to say to this little offspring of the Convent: “I can be as pure as you are without all those wreaths and ribbons.” Besides, Anne de la Trave’s purity was mainly ignorance. The ladies of the Sacré-Cœur drew many veils between their little charges and the world. Thérèse despised them for confusing virtue and ignorance. “You don’t know anything about life, darling,” she used often to say, in those far-off summers at Argelouse. Those lovely summers; Thérèse, as she sat in the little train, that had at last begun to move, realised that she must go back to them if she was to get a clear view of what had happened. It is incredible, but true, that in those pure dawns of our lives the most dreadful storms are already threatening in the distance. Those azure mornings are an evil omen for the weather of the afternoon and evening. They portend wrecked flower-beds, broken branches, and muddy ruin everywhere. Thérèse did not reflect, or come to a decision at any period of her life; there were no sharp turnings; she went down an imperceptible slope, gradually at first, and then faster. The lost woman of this evening was identical with the radiant creature of those summers at Argelouse, where she was now returning in secret and under cover of the night.
How wearisome it all was! Where was the use in trying to uncover the hidden springs of acts accomplished? She could see nothing through the carriage window except the reflection of her pale expressionless face.
There came a sudden break in the monotonous rhythm of the little train: the engine gave a prolonged whistle and cautiously drew in to a station. An arm held up a swaying lantern: there followed shouted utterances in the local dialect, and squeals from sundry pigs that were being taken off the train: Uzeste already. One more station and then Saint Clair: thence she must drive the rest of the way to Argelouse. Thérèse had very little time left to prepare her defence.
CHAPTER III
Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,—one of those places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them “Quartiers.” A few farms, with no church or cemetery, scattered round a field of rye, over five miles from the market-town of Saint Clair, with which it is connected by a single road in very bad repair. This road, such as it is, fades away beyond Argelouse into sandy tracks: and thence, until the sea, there is nothing but fifty miles of marshes, lagoons, young pines, and sandy heath; and by the end of winter the very sheep look as grey as that bleak landscape.
The best families in Saint Clair come from these lost lands. Towards the middle of the last century, when the sale of resin and timber began to swell their scanty profits from flocks and herds, the grandparents of those living to-day moved to Saint Clair, and their ancestral homes at Argelouse were used as farm buildings. The carved beams of the gables, and here and there a marble mantelpiece, bore witness to their ancient dignity. Every year they came nearer to collapse, and one of the roofs had sagged lower and lower until its eaves nearly touched the ground. Two of these ancient habitations, however, still housed their proprietors. The Larroque and the Desqueyroux families left their homes at Argelouse just as they had received them from their predecessors. Jerôme Larroque, Mayor and County Councillor of B., whose principal residence was just outside that small provincial town, would never allow any alterations at the estate at Argelouse, which had come to him through his wife (who had died in child-bed while Thérèse was still a baby), and where he thought it quite natural that his young daughter should like to spend her holidays. She used to go there at the beginning of July, under the tutelage of an elder sister of her father’s, one Aunt Clara, a deaf old maid, who also liked the lonely place because, as she used to say, she did not have to be constantly watching people’s lips to make out what they were saying, and because she knew that there was nothing to listen to except the wind in the pines. Monsieur Larroque was pleased, because Argelouse relieved him of his daughter’s company and brought her into contact with Bernard Desqueyroux whom she was one day to marry, in accordance with the wishes of both families, though the understanding was not as yet official.