They came to the turn of the road. He got down, and the carriage plunged on into the mist and disappeared. For a long time he could hear the rumbling of the wheels and the horses' hoofs. Great masses of white mist rolled over the fields. Through the close tracery of the branches the dripping trees dropped water. Not a breath of wind. The mist was stifling life. Christophe stopped, choking…. There was nothing now. Everything had gone….
He took in a long breath, filling his lungs with the mist, and walked on. Nothing passes for him who does not pass.
III
Absence adds to the power of those we love. The heart retains only what is dear to us in them. The echo of each word coming through space from the distant friend, rings out in the silence, faithfully answering.
The correspondence of Christophe and Grazia took on the serious and restrained tone of a couple who are no longer in the dangerous period of trial of love, but, having passed it, feel sure of the road and march on hand in hand. Each was strong to sustain and direct the other, weak and yielding to the other's support and direction.
Christophe returned to Paris. He had vowed never to go there again. But what are such vows worth? He knew that he would find there the shade of Grazia. And circumstances, conspiring with his secret desires against his will, showed him a new duty to fulfil in Paris. Colette, well informed as to society gossip, told Christophe that his young friend Jeannin was making a fool of himself. Jacqueline, who had always been weak in her dealings with her son, could not hold him in check. She herself was passing through a strange crisis, and was too much occupied with herself to pay much heed to him.
Since the unhappy adventure which had destroyed Olivier's marriage and life, Jacqueline had lived a very worthy life. She withdrew from Parisian society, which, after imposing on her a hypocritical sort of quarantine, had made fresh advances to her, which she had rejected. She was not at all ashamed of what she had done as far as these people were concerned: she thought she had no reason to account to them for it, for they were more worthless than she: what she had done openly, half the women she knew did by stealth, under cover of their homes. She suffered only from the thought of the wrong she had done her nearest and dearest, the only man she had loved. She could not forgive herself for having, in so poor a world, lost an affection like his.
Her regrets, and her sorrow, grew less acute with time. There were left only a sort of mute suffering, a humiliated contempt for herself and others, and the love of her child. This affection, into which she poured all her need of love, disarmed her before him; she could not resist Georges's caprices. To excuse her weakness she persuaded herself that she was paying for the wrong she had done Olivier. She had alternate periods of exalted tenderness and weary indifference: sometimes she would worry Georges with her exacting, anxious love, and sometimes she would seem to tire of him, and she let him do as he liked. She admitted to herself that she was bringing him up badly, and she would torment herself with the admission; but she made no change. When, as she rarely did, she tried to model her principles of conduct on Olivier's way of thinking, the result was deplorable. At heart she wished to have no authority over her son save that of her affection. And she was not wrong: for between these two, however similar they might be, there were no bonds save those of the heart. Georges Jeannin was sensible of his mother's physical charm: he loved her voice, her gestures, her movements, her grace, her love. But in mind he was conscious of strangerhood to her. She only saw it as he began to grow into a man, when he turned from her. Then she was amazed and indignant, and attributed the estrangement to other feminine influences: and, as she tried awkwardly to combat them, she only estranged him more. In reality, they had always lived, side by side, each preoccupied with totally different interests, deceiving themselves as to the gulf that lay between them, with the aid of their common surface sympathies and antipathies, which disappeared when the man began to spring forth from the boy (that ambiguous creature, still impregnated with the perfume of womanhood). And bitterly Jacqueline would say to her son:
"I don't know whom you take after. You are not like your father or me."
So she made him feel all that lay between them; and he took a secret pride that was yet feverish and uneasy.