The Story of André Cornélis

by Paul Bourget

[X]

The train from Paris approached, and stopped. The railway officials called out the name of the station, as they opened the doors of the carriage one after another, very slowly it seemed to me. I went from carriage to carriage seeking my mother. Had she at the last moment decided not to come! What a trial to me if it were so! What a night I should have to pass in all the torment of suspicions which, I knew too well, her mere presence would dispel. A voice called me. It was hers. Then I saw her, dressed in black, and never in my life did I clasp her in my arms as I did then, utterly forgetting that we were in a public place, and why she had come, in the joy of feeling my horrible imaginations vanish, melt away at the mere touch of the being whom I loved so profoundly, the only one who was dear to me, notwithstanding our differences, in the very depths of my heart, now that I had lost my aunt Louise. After that first movement, which resembled the grasp in which a drowning man seizes the swimmer who dives for him, I looked at my mother without speaking, holding both her hands. She had thrown back her veil, and in the flickering light of the station I saw that she was very pale and had been weeping. I had only to meet her eyes, which were still wet with tears, to know that I had been mad. I felt this, with the first words she uttered, telling me so tenderly of her grief, and that she had resolved to come at once, although my stepfather was ill. M. Termonde had suffered of late from frequent attacks of illness. But neither her grief nor her anxiety about her husband had prevented my poor mother from providing herself, for this little excursion of a few hours, with all her customary appliances of comfort and elegance. Her maid stood behind her, accompanied by a porter, and both were laden with three or four bags of different sizes, carefully buttoned up in their waterproof covers; a dressing-case, writing-case, an elegant wallet to hold the traveller's purse, handkerchief, book, and second veil; a hot-water bottle for the feet, two cushions for her head, and a little clock.

"You see," said she, while I was pointing out the carriage to the maid, so that she might get rid of her impedimenta, "I shall not have my right mourning until to-morrow "—and now I perceived that her gown was dark brown and only braided with black—"they could not have the things ready in time, but will send them as early as possible." Then, as I placed her in the carriage, she added: "There is still a trunk and a bonnet-box." She half smiled in saying this, to make me smile too, for the mass of luggage and the number of small parcels with which she encumbered herself had been of old a subject of mild quarrel between us. In any other state of mind I should have been pained to find the unfailing evidence of her frivolity side by side with the mark of affection she had given me by coming. Was not this one of the small causes of my great misery? True, but her frivolity was delightful to me at that moment. This then was the woman whom I had been picturing to myself as coming to the house of death, with the sinister purpose of searching my dead aunt's papers and stealing or destroying any accusing pages which she might find among them! This was the woman whom I had misrepresented to myself, that morning, as a criminal steeped in the guilt of a cowardly murder! Yes! I had been mad! I had been like a runaway horse galloping after its own shadow. But what a relief to make sure that it was madness, what a blessed relief! It almost made me forget the dear dead woman. I was very sad at heart in reality, and yet I was happy, while we were rattling through the town in the old coupé, past the long lines of lighted windows. I held my mother's hand; I longed to beg her pardon, to kiss the hem of her dress, to tell her again and again that I loved and revered her. She perceived my emotion very plainly; but she attributed it to the affliction that had just befallen me, and she condoled with me. She said, "My André," several times. How rare it was for me to have her thus, all my own, and just in that mood of feeling for which my sick heart pined!

I had had the room on the ground floor, next to the salon, prepared for my mother. I remembered that she had occupied it, when she came to Compiègne with my father, a few days after her marriage, and I felt sure that the impression which would be produced upon her by the sight of the house in the first instance, and then by the sight of this room, would help me to get rid of my dreadful suspicions. I was determined to note minutely the slightest signs of agitation which she might betray at the contact of a resuscitated past, rendered more striking by the aspect of things that do not change so quickly as the heart of a woman. And now, I blushed for that idea, worthy of a detective; for I felt it a shameful thing to judge one's mother: one ought to make an Act of Faith in her which would resist any evidence. I felt this, alas! all the more, because the innocent woman was quite off her guard, as was perfectly natural. She entered the room with a thoughtful look, seated herself before the fire, and held her slender feet towards the flames, which touched her pale cheeks with red; and, with her jet black hair, her elegant figure, which still retained its youthful grace, she shed upon the dim twilight of the old-fashioned room that refined and aristocratic charm of which my father spoke in his letters. She looked slowly all around her, recognising most of the things which my aunt's pious care had preserved in their former place, and said, sorrowfully: "What recollections!" But there was no bitterness in the emotion depicted on her face. Ah! no; a woman who is brought, after twenty years, into the room which she had occupied, as a bride, with the husband whose murder she has contrived after having betrayed him, has not such eyes, such a brow, such a mouth as hers.

Every detail of all that passed that evening served to prove to me how basely my puerile and disgraceful fancies had calumniated her who ought to have been sacred in my sight. Julie had prepared a sort of supper, and wished to attend at table herself. I observed the former mistress and the old servant brought thus face to face, and, although I knew that they had not got on well together in past days, I saw that they were well pleased to meet again. Poor Julie especially, who was a simple creature, incapable of deceit or dissimulation, was so glad that she took me aside a few minutes before the meal, to tell me what a consolation it was to her in her grief to see my mother so kind and affectionate to me, and to wait on us both at the same table, as in the bygone time. Had there been in my mother's past life any of those guilty secrets which faithful servants are more quick than any others to divine, the honest and true-hearted woman who had tended both my father and myself would neither have been ignorant of it nor capable of condoning it. I should have detected the trace of it in her wrinkled face with the drawn-in lips, for its every wrinkle spoke eloquently to me. Nor would my mother have been pleased and easy in the presence of this witness of a sin of the past; her manner would have betrayed a secret disturbance, were it only by the haughtiness with which, as it were, one repels the silent censure of an inferior by anticipation.

Julie's face made one among the many things which recalled her first marriage to my mother's mind; and, either because the almost sudden death of my aunt had deeply moved her, or because this sentimental recurrence to the past was an indulgence of her taste for the romantic, far from avoiding such recollections, she yielded to them fully, while I silently blessed her for thus destroying the last vestiges of my mute calumny. How fervent was my mental thanksgiving, when, later in the night, she asked to see my dear dead aunt, so that she might take a last farewell of her! We entered the room where the dying woman had striven with the last earthly solicitude from which I had drawn such black conclusions. Death had strengthened the resemblance that existed in her lifetime between my aunt and my father. The motionless face forcibly recalled that other face still living in my sad memory, and in whose presence my mother had clasped me in so warm an embrace; and the resemblance was made more striking by the chin-cloth which kept the mouth closed. Once more we stood side by side before a funereal spectacle; but I was no longer a child, and my mother was no longer a young woman.

How many years lay between those two deaths—and what years! The comparison struck my mother too; she did not speak for a while—then she whispered: "How like him she is!" She bent over the bed, pressed a kiss on the ice-cold brow, and kneeling at the foot of the bed, she prayed. This trying ordeal, of which I had hardly ventured to dream, she herself had sought in so natural, so simple a way. . . . Since then I have had many other tokens of the absolute blamelessness of my mother, I have heard words uttered by him who had contrived and arranged the whole crime, which fully exonerated the noble woman; but there was no need of them. The sight of her kneeling beside the dead sister of my dear father had sufficed to exorcise the phantom.

After her prayer, she expressed a wish to remain in the room; but I objected, fearing that the trial would be too severe for her strength, and induced her to go downstairs with me. She was too much affected to sleep, and she begged of me to stay with her for a while. I complied with joy, so afraid was I that when out of her sight I might be revisited by the hallucinations that had been so completely banished by her demeanour. I felt myself once more so entirely her child for this night, that I was in delight with her least actions, her slightest gestures, just as I used to be in my real childhood. I admired the skill with which she instantly transformed the chimney corner of the salon into a quiet little retreat, just the place for a comfortable long talk. She made me arrange the screen so as to shut in the sofa, and place a little table within its shelter; on this she set out her travelling cloak, her smelling-bottle, and my cigarettes. She put on a white dressing-gown, wrapped round her head and shoulders a black-lace mantilla, and when she was settled snugly on the sofa she tucked round her a soft covering of pink wool decked with ribbons. She leaned her cheek on one of the two little red silk cushions that she used in the railway carriage, and inhaled some wood violets which Julie had placed in a little vase. The scent of the flowers mingled with the perfume of her garments and her hair, and I liked to see her thus, to revive my earliest impressions of her by the aid of her refined luxuriousness. Above all I liked her to talk as she now talked, showing her mind to me, and letting so many recollections escape from it. She had begun by questioning me about my aunt's illness, and then she went on to speak of my father. This was very rare with her; it was also rare for her and me to be so familiar and so united. It was a strange sensation to hear her tell the story of her marriage in that salon, filled with the relics of the dead, and with the ever present remembrance of the letters which I had read that day in my mind.

She told me—but this I already knew—how her marriage was brought about. She met my father at a ball given by a great lawyer, who was intimate with her family; their name was De Slane. She described her own dress at this ball, and then sketched my father for me, in his black coat, with an ill-tied white cravat and ill-fitting gloves. "A young girl is always so foolish," she said. "He had himself introduced to us, and he proposed for me twice over. I refused him each time, just because I had those ill-fitting gloves in my mind. The third time he asked to see me in private. Mamma wished very much for the marriage, notwithstanding certain differences in station and education. Your father was such a good man, so clever and hard-working, and then he adored my mother with frank simplicity, just as if she were an idol. Well, she consented to the interview. I received your father with the firm intention of saying 'No' to him, and he spoke to me so nicely, with so much eloquence and such perfect tact, I saw so plainly how much he loved me, that I said 'Yes.' . . . ."

What a commentary upon the whole of my father's correspondence was this entry into marriage, what a symbol of the years that were to follow! Yes, even until their last breakfast together before the murder, they had lived thus; she allowing herself to be loved, with the indulgent pride of a woman who knows herself to be the superior in refinement and distinction, and he—the hard-working man of business, only a little above the people—loving that refined and charming woman with an idolatrous sense of her superiority, and a single-hearted unconsciousness of his own. A fatal poison of the heart is silence; I had already learned this too well, and I felt it on that of my father, whose sombre and reserved nature I had inherited. And my mother continued—how heart-rending it was to hear her—dwelling on my father's qualities, on his uprightness, his perseverance, and also certain points in his character which had always puzzled her. "Since he died so sadly," she resumed, "I have often asked myself whether I made him as happy as he might have been. I was very young then, and we had no tastes in common. I have always liked society—that was born with me—and he did not care about it, he did not feel at ease in it. I was very pious, and he was of the school of Voltaire. He believed other men to be as good as himself, and thought we could do without religion. . . . We have seen since his time what that brings us to. He was not jealous, he never once made a remark to me upon the few men friends I had, but there was a restless tendency in him. When he was obliged to leave Paris for a short time, if I chanced to send my daily letter to the post too late, there would surely come a telegram urgently requesting news of my health. If, in the evening, I came home a little later than usual, I would find him in great anxiety, full of the notion that an accident had happened. And then, he was subject to causeless fits of depression, prolonged spells of silence. I did not venture to question him. You take after him in this, my poor André."