She took after both her parents: from her father she came by the outline of her features and the charming smile, which in his case promised more than he realized, and in hers, as she was still pure, more than she wished; while from her mother she inherited a surface tranquillity, a poise of manner, and a mind that was serious despite its extreme freedom. Doubly alluring she was, with the charm of the one and the reserve of the other. It was impossible to guess which of the two temperaments was dominant in her. Her true nature still remained unknown,—to herself as well as to others. None suspected her hidden universe. She was an Eve in the garden, half slumbering. She had not yet become conscious of the desires that were within her; nothing had awakened them, for nothing had disturbed them. It seemed that she had but to stretch out her arm to gather them. She never tried, lulled by their happy humming. Perhaps she did not wish to try. . . . Who knows how far one tries to dupe oneself? One would rather not see the disturbing things within one. . . . And she preferred to ignore that interior sea. The Annette whom people knew, the Annette who knew herself, was a very calm, reasonable, well-regulated little person, mistress of herself, who had her own will and her own independent judgment, but who, so far, had never had occasion to oppose these to the established rules of the world or of her household.
Without in any way neglecting the duties of social life, nor being indifferent to its pleasures, which she enjoyed with a healthy appetite, she had felt the need of a more serious activity. She busied herself with fairly thorough studies, with following university courses, with passing examinations and taking a double degree. Possessed of a lively intelligence that demanded occupation, she loved exact studies, particularly the sciences, in which she was highly gifted. Perhaps it was that her healthy nature, with an instinct for equilibrium, felt the necessity of opposing the strict discipline of a clear method and sharply defined ideas to the disquieting attraction of that inner life which she feared to face, and which, despite her precautions, came beating on her door at each halt of the inactive mind. This clear, accurate, regular activity satisfied her for the moment. She did not care to speculate on what would follow. Marriage held no attraction for her; she avoided thought of it. Her father smiled at her resolutions; but he was disinclined to oppose them, for he found them to his own advantage.
[II]
The disappearance of Raoul Rivière shook to its foundations the well-ordered edifice of which, without Annette's realizing it, he was the principal pillar. She was not unfamiliar with the face of death. Five years before she had made its acquaintance, when her mother had left her. But the features of this face are not always the same. After spending several months in a private hospital, Madame Rivière had departed silently, as she had lived, guarding the secret of her last terrors as she had the trials of her life; leaving behind her, in the candid egotism of the young girl, along with a gentle sorrow that resembled the first rains of spring, an impression of relief that was unconfessed, and the shadow of a remorse that was soon to be lost in the joy of living.
Quite different was the end of Raoul Rivière. Stricken in the midst of a happiness that he felt sure of enjoying for a long time still, he brought to his departure no philosophy. He greeted his sufferings and the approach of death with cries of revolt. Until the supreme breath of a gasping agony, like that of a galloping horse that climbs a slope, he battled fearfully. Those frightful images were stamped in Annette's burning brain as though in wax. She remained haunted by them at night. In the darkness of her room, in bed, upon the verge of sleep or suddenly awakening, she revived the agony and the face of the dying man with such violence that she was the dying man himself: her eyes were his eyes, her breath was his breath; she no longer distinguished between them; in the eye-sockets she recognized the appeal of a drowning glance. She came close to destruction; but robust youth enjoys such elasticity! The more the cord is stretched, the further flies the arrow of life. The blinding light of those maddening images was extinguished by its own excess, and night fell upon the memory. The features, the voice, the radiance of the vanished man, all had vanished: Annette, determined to exhaust the shadow that was within her, could find no further trace of it. Nothing but herself. She alone. . . . Alone. The Eve of the garden was awakening without the companion at her side,—the man whom she had always felt near her, without seeking to define him; the man who, unknown to her and as yet indistinctly, was assuming the shape of love. And suddenly the garden lost its security. Disquieting breaths from without had entered it; both the breath of death and the breath of life. Annette opened her eyes, as did the world's first men at night, with the apprehension of a thousand unknown dangers ambushed about her, with the instinct of imminent battle. Of a sudden the dormant energies gathered themselves together, and held themselves tensely ready. And her solitude was peopled by passionate forces.
Her equilibrium was destroyed. Her studies, her work, now meant nothing to her; the place that she had accorded them in her life now seemed a mockery. But the other part of her life, which sorrow had just touched, revealed itself to be of immeasurable extent. The shock of the injury had awakened all its fibres: around the wound, opened by the disappearance of the beloved companion, gathered all the forces of love, hidden and unknown; sucked in by the void that had been hollowed out, they came hastening from the distant depths of her being. Surprised by this invasion, Annette strove to evade its significance; she persisted in relating everything to the precise object of her grief: everything,—the sharp, burning stimulus of Nature, whose spring breezes bathed her in moisture; the vague and violent longing for happiness . . . lost or desired?—the arms outstretched towards the absent one; and the bounding heart which yearned for the past . . . or was it the future? But she succeeded only in dissolving her grief into a confused mystery of sorrow, passion, and obscure pleasure. By this she was at once devoured and revolted. . . .
On this evening in late April, she was swept away by revolt. Her rational mind waxed furious at the confused reveries which it had too long left uncontrolled, and of which it saw the danger. It wished to repel them, but this was not easy; they no longer listened; the mind had lost its habit of command. . . . Annette, tearing herself away from contemplation of the fire upon the hearth, from the insidious advance of the night that had completely fallen, stood up, chilly now, and, enveloping herself in a dressing-gown of her father's, she flooded the room with light.
It was Raoul Rivière's old study. Through the open bay-windows, through the sparse young foliage of the trees, one could see the Seine in the darkness, and on its sombre, seemingly immobile mass, the reflections of houses whose windows were being lighted upon the opposite bank, and of the daylight that was dying above the hills of Saint-Cloud. Raoul Rivière, who was a man of taste—although disinclined to use it to satisfy the insipid routine or laughable caprices of his wealthy clients—had chosen for himself, at the gates of Paris, on the Quai de Boulogne, an old Louis XVI mansion that he had had no hand in building. He had contented himself with making it comfortable. His study had also served him admirably for affairs of gallantry, and there was reason to believe that the room had not suffered from lack of use in this capacity. Here Rivière had received more than one amiable visit, suspected by no one; for the chamber had its private entrance from the garden. But for two years the entrance had been useless, and the sole feminine visitor had been Annette. Annette, coming and going, tidying things, pouring water into a vase of flowers, constantly moving about; then suddenly motionless over a book, curled up in her favorite corner of the divan, whence she might silently watch the passage of the sinuous river and, without interrupting her absent-minded reading, carry on an absent-minded conversation with her father. But he, sitting yonder, listless and weary, his sly profile catching her slightest movement from the corner of one eye; he, an old spoiled child who could never admit that, wherever he might be, he was not the center of all thoughts, harassed her with witticisms, wheedling questions, insistent, disturbing, in order to attract Annette's attention to himself and make sure that she was really listening to everything. . . . To the very end, touched and delighted that he could not do without her, she gave up everything else for the sake of devoting herself to him alone. Then he was satisfied; and, sure of his public, he showered upon it the resources of his brilliant mind. He shot off his rockets, he laid bare his memories. Of course, he was careful to select only the most flattering; and he arranged them ad usum Delphini, to the taste of the dauphine, cleverly guessing at her secret curiosities and her sudden fits of bristling repugnance. He told her precisely what she desired to hear; and Annette, all ears, was proud of his confidences. She was quite ready to believe that she possessed more of her father than her mother had ever known. Of his intimate life's story she remained, so she thought, the sole trustee.
But, since her father's death, another trust had been left in her hands: all his papers. Annette had no desire to learn what they contained. Her piety told her that they did not belong to her; but another sentiment whispered the contrary. In any event, it was necessary to decide upon their fate: Annette, sole heiress, might die in her turn, and those family papers should not be allowed to fall into strange hands. It was urgent, then, to examine them, and to determine whether they were to be destroyed or preserved. For some days now Annette had been decided on this course. But when she found herself again, at evening, in the room that was permeated by the beloved presence, she lacked courage to do more than drink in this presence for hours, without stirring. She feared, in opening these letters of the past, too direct a contact with reality.
Yet it must be done. This evening she was resolved upon it. In the diffused softness of this over tender night, in which she disturbedly felt the dwindling of her grief, she wished to affirm her possession of the dead man. She went toward the piece of rosewood furniture, more suitable for a coquette than for a worker, a high Louis XV chiffonier, in which Rivière had heaped his letters and intimate papers, disposing them in the seven or eight drawers that made the piece a kind of anticipatory and charming model of the American skyscraper. Annette, kneeling, pulled out the lower drawer; then to examine it the better, she lifted it out completely, and, returning to her place by the fire, she sank to her knees and bent over it. Not a sound in the house. She was living there alone, save for an old aunt who kept house and who scarcely counted: Aunt Victorine, an eclipsed sister of Annette's father, who had always lived to serve Rivière, and who now continued as housekeeper in the service of her niece,—not unlike an old cat, having finally become a part of the furniture of the house, to which she was as much attached, no doubt, as to the human beings. Having retired to her room early in the evening, her distant presence on the floor above, the peaceable coming and going of her old felt-shod feet, disturbed Annette's reveries no more than would a familiar animal.