“I don’t think it should be left entirely to me to say. Doesn’t your own reason suggest a proper course in the matter?”
“My reason is utterly unable to determine anything in which you are concerned. Mrs. Lafirme,” he said checking his horse and laying a restraining hand on her bridle, “let me speak to you one moment. I know you are a woman to whom one may speak the truth. Of course, you remember that you prevailed upon me to go back to my wife. To you it seemed the right thing—to me it seemed certainly hard—but no more nor less than taking up the old unhappy routine of life, where I had left it when I quitted her. I reasoned much like a stupid child who thinks the colors in his kaleidoscope may fall twice into the same design. In place of the old, I found an entirely new situation—horrid, sickening, requiring such a strain upon my energies to live through it, that I believe it’s an absurdity to waste so much moral force for so poor an aim—there would be more dignity in putting an end to my life. It doesn’t make it any the more bearable to feel that the cause of this unlooked for change lies within myself—my altered feelings. But it seems to me that I have the right to ask you not to take yourself out of my life; your moral support; your bodily atmosphere. I hope not to give way to the weakness of speaking of these things again: but before you leave me, tell me, do you understand a little better why I need you?”
“Yes, I understand now; and I thank you for talking so openly to me. Don’t go away from Place-du-Bois: it would make me very wretched.”
She said no more and he was glad of it, for her last words held almost the force of action for him; as though she had let him feel for an instant her heart beat against his own with an echoing pain.
Their ways now diverged. She went in the direction of the house and he to the store where he found Grégoire, whom he sent for his wife.[Back to Table of Contents]
VI
One Night.
“Grégoire was right: do you know those nasty creatures have gone and left every speck of the supper dishes unwashed? I’ve got half a mind to give them both warning to-morrow morning.”
Fanny had come in from the kitchen to the sitting-room, and the above homily was addressed to her husband who stood lighting his cigar. He had lately taken to smoking.
“You’d better do nothing of the kind; you wouldn’t find it easy to replace them. Put up a little with their vagaries: this sort of thing only happens once a year.”
“How do you know it won’t be something else just as ridiculous to-morrow? And that idiot of a Minervy; what do you suppose she told me when I insisted on her staying to wash up things? She says, last whatever you call it, her husband wanted to act hard-headed and staid out after dark, and when he was crossing the bayou, the spirits jerked him off his horse and dragged him up and down in the water, till he was nearly drowned. I don’t see what you’re laughing at; I guess you’d like to make out that they’re in the right.”