Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

XII

One day toward the middle of the winter of that year, Claire said to me; “What has happened to Philibert? He acts as if he were in love with his wife.” It was true. We had all noticed it. I mean Claire and my mother and myself, but gradually we came to notice something else as well, namely that Philibert’s increased attentions did not seem to be making Jane happy. She was strangely preoccupied and for her, strangely languid. Her old buoyancy was gone, and with it the impression she had so often conveyed of an over-powering awkward energy. Maman need never fear now that Jane would fall on her and crush her. Claire need not worry about being pushed into corners. When Jane did join our family parties, and she came much less frequently than in the early days, she was almost always so absent-minded as to seem scarcely to realize where she was. She would come in with Philibert and the child Geneviève, kiss my mother gently on the forehead and then sink into a chair and forget us. We might now have said anything preposterous that came into our heads. She would not have noticed us. She did not listen to our talk, and when we addressed her directly would give a little start and say—“Je vous demande pardon, je n’ai pas compris.” Sometimes I caught Philibert watching her as if he too were mystified and troubled. He would drag her into the conversation. “Mais, mon amie, écoutes donc, quand on vous parle,” he would exclaim in affectionate remonstrance, and she would flush a little and make a very obvious effort to pay attention. My mother felt there was something wrong. It may have seemed to her that she was herself responsible. She may have felt a certain contrition about Jane, or she may merely have found it intolerable that any one should derive from her drawing room circle so little apparent interest. In any case she made on her part an effort and talked to Jane much more, and in a different more intimate way than she had ever done before. And, of course, when actually talking directly to Maman Jane was perfectly attentive and perfectly courteously sweet-tempered. But when my mother turned her head toward some one else, Jane, as if released from the end of some invisible string that had held her erect in her chair, would slip back and lean her cheek on her hand, and the light in her eyes would be veiled by that invisible glaze that means an inward gazing. Such are the eyes of the blind. One could at such moment have waved one’s fingers an inch from Jane’s face, and she would not have blinked, at least that was my impression.

And she was incredibly thin. Many people thought this becoming to her, but to me it was painful. I had no wish to find Jane beautiful if I felt that she was going to die, and there were days when I did feel she was, as one says, going into a decline. She had been so harmoniously big that one would never have supposed she carried much superfluous flesh, until one saw it wasting away and found her still alive, and not a hideous skeleton. Her marvellous hands and feet were now, I suppose, even more marvellous, but to me their beautiful exposed structure of lovely bones was a source of pain. Her wrists and ankles were so slim that one felt if she made a wrong movement they would snap, and her rich lustrous clothes seemed to find round her waist and bust nothing to cling to. Only her broad shoulders and narrow hips seemed to support them. One could not tell where her waist was. Sometimes under the silken fabric of her skirt one saw the shape of a sharp knee bone. Her face seemed to have grown much smaller. The cheeks hollowed in under prominent cheek-bones, and her small green eyes were sunk into her head—that was more than ever like some carved antique coin and had taken on a quite terrifying beauty; I mean that the charm of her ugliness had received its special ordained stamp, the mark that the god or imp who made it had meant it to have. She reddened her lips a little now; otherwise her face was untouched by powder or rouge. The skin was of the palest ivory colour, a close smooth dull surface, without a blemish, soft and pure and dead. There was about the texture of her skin something curious. It made one dream of a contact so cold that if a butterfly brushed against it the little living thing would fall lifeless to the ground.

And a new charm disengaged itself from her person. She seemed possessed of a hitherto-unused and undiscovered magnetism, and she dwelt with it silently, wrapped in a kind of gentle gloom that she tried now and then to throw off as one throws off a wet clinging garment. I do not want to give the impression that she was moody, for that would be untrue. She was, on the contrary, of an uncanny equanimity, and when she smiled her smile crept slowly and softly over her face and as softly faded away. There was no jerk of nerves about it. Nervous was the last word one could apply to her. She was superlatively quiet, unnaturally calm, and yet at times she looked at me like a haunted woman, a woman haunted not by a ghost but by an idea, perhaps by some profoundly disturbing knowledge.

We were increasingly troubled. We wondered if at last she had found out things about Philibert, particularly about Philibert and Bianca, and somehow the fact that we knew he was devoting himself more to Jane and less to Bianca did not console us. What indeed was it but just the most disturbing thing of all that Philibert’s new devotion to Jane produced in her no flush of responsive joy? My mother was very worried indeed, and we were affected by her anxiety. Even Claire began to watch Jane with a questioning puzzled attention. Often I found Claire’s dark eyes travelling from Jane to Philibert, from Philibert to my mother, from my mother back to Jane. And simultaneously my mother’s eyes moved from one to the other, and so did Philibert’s and so did mine. We were all looking from one to the other, watching, referring, puzzling, comparing. Jane alone looked at no one.

I should have felt this to be humorous had it not humiliated and annoyed. It seemed to me that we were slightly ridiculous at times, and at other times lacking in delicacy. The last impression irked me exceedingly. For my mother and sister to be guilty of indelicacy was strangely unpleasant, I knew they were not impelled in their new interest by affection. They did not even now care for Jane. She had become to them an enigma; that of course was something more than she had been; there was a shade of admiration now in their wondering, but no genuine feeling for her and no sympathy. Their sympathy was for Philibert, and perhaps, a little for themselves. In any case they were afraid for Philibert. They saw his great social edifice swaying. They were holding their breath. And Jane gave them no sign. Had she calculated her effect with consummate art her manner could not have been more perfectly tuned to the high fine note of suspense. And they dared not to ask her anything.

But as the weeks passed, they gave way to asking each other. In her absence they constantly talked of her. It was curious how much of their attention she took up by staying so much away. Claire and my mother could now often be heard to say—“Have you seen Jane? What is the child doing with herself? I find her looking very unwell. Has she complained to you of feeling ill?” and now and again with a sigh of reproach either my mother or Claire would say to the other—“What a pity you never won her confidence. She tells us nothing, but absolutely nothing. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.”

And Philibert seemed as much at a loss as they. He could enlighten them very little. Gradually as their nervousness made them less discreet they took to questioning him. “But what is the matter with her?” they would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders. He didn’t know. Did he think she was ill? No, she wasn’t ill, she had never been so active. Was she then unhappy? Ah, who could say? She was now and then very gay, much gayer at moments than he had ever known her. She went out constantly. She had ideas of her own about receiving. She was arranging a series of musical evenings for the audition of unpublished works of young French composers. She was multiplying her activities. Sometimes he did not see her alone for days together. And here my mother gently and timidly interrupted him. “Mais mon enfant, when she is alone with you, is she amiable, is she kind? Enfin, is she gracious?” And Philibert again, but this time with a more exaggerated movement, shrugged his shoulders—“Comme cela. I have no right to complain.”

And then quickly I saw them all look at each other and saw the same thought flit from one mind to the other and dodge away out of sight, and the spectacle of those intelligent evasive glances exasperated me.