The will to live (Les Roquevillard)

by Henry Bordeaux

I’m waiting for you. I shall be here to help you. I am confident that if you come back all can yet be set right. For you are not guilty. It’s impossible that you should be. From your letter I can see quite well it was not you. If there is danger for you in coming back, come just the same. It is right that you should take your turn at suffering, and you will not be cowardly enough, I know, to shun it.

That’s all. I should like so much to feel that I have convinced you. However, if SHE prove stronger than we are, if in spite of our sacrifices and suffering you can’t come back now, I shall wait for you still. I should wait for you all my life. My life is only for you and father now. You know that I shall never abandon you. Did I not promise mamma? You were her last thought. And if my letter brings despair to you, remember that it has commended courage to you. Remember these words of father’s, too: “So long as one is not dead there’s nothing lost.”

Good-bye, Maurice, I send my love to you.

Your sister,

MARGARET.

The sorrow and shame which had seized hold of Maurice when his mistress had made her semi-revelations to him about her dot were as nothing in comparison with the flood of pain that Margaret’s letter now let loose upon him. How could he resist the appeal it made to him: had he not listened to the call of death, merely for an infamous suspicion? At his feet the lake still invited him, offered forgetfulness to him, silence and peace, yet now he did not even see it. The call of his race resounded in his breast, and behold, instead of being feeble, he was gathering all his strength and setting his face against the disaster that had overwhelmed him. The idea of death comes naturally to lovers the moment they conceive a doubt as to the eternity of their love. Now, it was not a question any longer of his happiness. That was an individual matter of which he believed himself to hold control. Losing that, he should think himself justified in not living on any longer, if he judged that best. All his family was concerned with him in this trial. No longer did he belong to himself alone. Whether he wished it or no, he must yield to a dependency, and the isolation that he had created round himself was nothing but chimerical and vain. And as he lost his lover’s eternal illusion of love’s solitude, of love’s unrelatedness to all the rest of the world, he drew comfort as from a reservoir of energy out of that depth of family ties and bonds that imposed themselves on him with such authority and power.

His cruellest suffering came from not being able to mourn for his mother freely and alone. He envied those mothers’ sons who could gather round a grave and surrender to their grief, with nothing to throw their thoughts back upon themselves. Had he not had some part in her unlooked-for end? He recalled the fact that the doctor had not given the sick woman up when he had left, that he had hoped for benefit from a regimen of quiet and rest. But how could her frail life have resisted such a storm?

And this storm that he had let loose behind him had indeed ravaged and destroyed his home. It was the dispersion—the Marcellaz gone, Hubert exiled, to seek a little honour for his tarnished name; the threat of ruin with the selling of the old estate. Only Margaret and his father, an old man already, were left at home. But why was Margaret not married? Could her fiancé have been so cowardly as to blame her for her brother’s fault? She said nothing of it at all in her letter. She forgot herself in her chronicle of their trials. “My life now is for you and father,” she said simply, without any other allusion to her sacrifice. No one of them had been spared, except the culprit, culling life’s sweetness under these cloudless skies.

For if he had not deserved all the ignominious accusations which Mr. Frasne hurled at him, he was guilty none the less toward his family for having believed he had the right to give them up. He accused his mistress for her imprudence in thus dishonouring him, for whose love he had been degraded. But was it really her love that had degraded him? He attributed all his sensibilities to love, as the harmonies in those legendary lyres that hung in trees were due the wind—love which he had so coveted in his at once studious and ecstatic youth, and which had passed across his heart as the warm winds across the lyres’ strings that waited for them. And he blamed it for enthusiasms and weaknesses that had their source in him alone. In his distracted retrospect across his life he summoned up the memory of Edith’s eyes, her mouth, her every movement. Yes, his heart had been hung up to catch this song of her grace, the caresses of her voice, the flame of her eyes. He would leave the woman, but he would not disown his love.

And, besides, what had he to reproach Edith with? What did she suspect, though it was through her fault, of this lamentable drama in which a whole race rolled in the dust? Nothing, surely. She had taken this money as she had stolen hearts, without meaning any ill, and believing she was within her rights. If he warned her of his danger, she would be astonished, and without hesitation, no doubt, she would return to Chambéry to proclaim her lover’s innocence to his judges. He did not want to profit by such generosity. He thought it better that she should always remain in ignorance, that she should run no risk for herself. He would leave this evening—no, not this evening, to-morrow morning, without saying anything to her, after having made good the amount of her wrongfully taken dowry, so that she should not want for anything.