M. Mairieux scanned his daughter critically, and I could see that he was worried by her altered appearance. He glanced from her to me, and I read in his face that he held me responsible for the change. Without a word he convicted me. Without a word of explanation he understood the drama that was in progress. Raymonde herself would have died rather than complain to him.
Mme. Mairieux, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about my wife’s appearance.
“Of course she has grown a little thinner, but it is fashionable nowadays to be slender,” was her characteristic remark.
For the first few days after our arrival, the rain kept up incessantly. Unable to leave the house, I went from room to room, turning over my regrets and boredom. In spite of my persistent contrariness Raymonde seemed born again. Only to see the trees against the grey horizon, leaning against the window, gave her pleasure.
Once more she could enjoy her beautiful allées. They were covered with weeds and almost blended with the mossy carpet of the woods, through which they continued their humble paths of light in every direction. Dilette was as yet unable to distinguish one tree from another, but her mother had taught her to shake her hand to people who offered her a greeting, and one day when we were out walking in the woods, imagining that the stirring branches were nodding to her, she waved her little hand in answer to the politeness of the trees.
We again began our long promenades. Soon we left the child with her governess, that we might bury ourselves deeper in the woods. About us were all the old peaceful surroundings. The Green Fountain, cleared of the dead leaves which obstructed it in the winter time, reflected in its surface all the tranquil beauty of its remote corner of the wood. If we had but leaned over its cool, transparent water, our faces would have touched as on that other day when our horses stopped to drink. But nothing seemed the same to her or to me.
I confused this calm with ennui. I did not know how to find happiness in the repetition of these ordinary experiences. I needed constant change of environment and new stimulation. To me life was tiresome if every day did not bring with it an interesting social function or some novel impression. The restless spirit of Paris is contagious. To be constantly active was an absolute necessity for me, and I found the dull family life to which I was condemned vapid and uninteresting.
To Raymonde, on the other hand, even despite the disillusioning conditions, this return to the country with me was, as it were, a halt on her road to Calvary. It brought soothing peace and comfort to her to know that she was not obliged to see people in whom she took no interest, to go to places merely to be seen. She was no doubt continuing to hope for a renewal of the beautiful memories of our engagement and of the blessed peace of the early days of our marriage, even though she knew that they could never be revived. Inspired by the choir of nature which she loved, the living beauty of her native soil in which our first tender thoughts and the awakening of our love had taken root, she awaited her fate, like the daughter of Jephthah, surrounded in her mountain retreat by the maidens of Israel, those faithful followers who for two months tried to stay the hand of death, “after which her father did with her according to his vow which he had vowed.” Raymonde, too, was waiting in that saddened state of mind that is hardly painful and has its secret charm.
* * *
I soon began to take long automobile rides. Our walks in the forest had become silent and dull. Perhaps I was unknowingly kinder in not accompanying her to the places where our love had blossomed.