CHAPTER XVII.THE BABY CLOTHES.
At the light knock heard on her chamber door Mme. Roumestan trembled as if she had been caught in a crime, and pushing in again the gracefully moulded drawer of her Louis XV bureau over which she had been leaning almost on her knees, she cried:
“Who’s there? What do you want, Polly?”
“A letter for Madame; there is great haste,” answered the Englishwoman.
Rosalie took the letter and closed the door sharply. The writing was unknown and coarse, traced upon wretched paper, and there was the “urgent and personal” which accompanies begging letters. A Parisian chambermaid would never have disturbed her for such a little thing as that. She pitched it on the bureau, postponing the reading of it till later, and returned quickly to her drawer which contained the marvels of the baby’s old layette. For the last eight years, ever since the tragedy, she had not opened it, fearing to find her tears there again; nor even since her new happiness had she done so owing to a very maternal superstition, fearing lest she should come to grief once more by means of apremature caress given by way of its little layette to the child that was yet to come.
This courageous lady had all the nervous feelings of the woman, all her tremblings, all the shivery drawing-together of the mimosa. The world, which judges without understanding anything, found her cold, just as the dull and stupid suppose that flowers are not endowed with life. But now, her happiness having endured for six months, she must make up her mind to bring all these little articles out from their mourning and enclosure, shake out their pleats, go over and perhaps change them; for even in the case of baby clothes fashion changes and the ribbons are adjusted differently at different times. It was for this most intimate work that Rosalie had carefully locked herself in; throughout that big bustling Ministry, rustling with papers and humming with reports and the feverish flitting hither and thither from offices to departments, there was assuredly nothing quite so serious, nothing quite so moving as that woman on her knees before an open drawer, her heart beating and her hands trembling.
She took up the laces somewhat yellow with time which preserved along with the perfume all this white mass of innocent clothes—baby caps and undershirts arranged according to age and size, the gown for baptism, the robe full of little pleats and the doll stockings. She recalled her life down there at Orsay, gently languid and at work for hours together in the shadow of the big catalpawhose white petals dropped into her work-basket among her spools and delicate embroidery scissors, her entire thought concentrated upon some one point of tailoring which gave her the measure of her dreams and the passage of time. What illusions she had then had, what belief and trust! What a delicious murmuring throughout the foliage above her head and what a rising up of tender and novel sensations in herself! In a single day life had suddenly taken all that from her. And so despair flowed back again to her heart as little by little she pulled forth the layette—the treason of her husband, the loss of her child.
The appearance of the first little dress all ready to be pulled on, that which is laid on the cradle at the moment of birth, the sleeves pushed one within the other, the arms spread apart, the little caps blown up to a round shape, made her burst into tears. It seemed to her that her child had lived and that she had known it and held it to her heart. A son, O, certainly it was a boy, a strong and beautiful one, and from his very birth he had the mysterious and deep eyes of his grandfather! To-day he would have been eight years old and have had long curls falling round his shoulders; at that age they still belong to the mother, who takes them walking, dresses them, makes them work. Ah, cruel, cruel life!
But after a while, as she pulled out and twitched into shape these little objects tied together with microscopic bows, with their embroidered flowersand snowy laces, she began to be calm. Well, no; after all, life is not so evil, and while it lasts one must keep up one’s courage. At that terrible turn of her life she had lost all of hers, imagining that the end had come, so far as she was concerned, for believing, loving, being wife and mother; thinking in fact that there only remained for her the pleasure of looking back upon the shining past and watching it disappear in the distance like some shore which one regrets to leave. Then after gloomy years the spring had shot out its fruits slowly beneath the cold snow of her heart; lo and behold, it flowered again in this little creature who was about to live and whom she felt was already vigorous from the terrible little kicks which it gave her during the night. And then her Numa, so changed, so good, quite cured of his brutality and violence! To be sure he still showed weaknesses which she did not like, those roundabout Italian ways which he could not help having, but, even as he said—“O, that?—that is politics!” Besides that, she was no longer the victim of the illusions of her early years; she knew that in order to live happily one must be contented with coming near to what one desires in everything and that complete happiness can only be quarried from the half-happinesses which existence affords us.
A new knock at the door. It is M. Méjean who would like to speak to Madame.
“Very good, I’m coming.”
She found him in the little drawing-room whichhe was measuring from end to end with excited steps.
“I have a confession to make to you,” said he, using a somewhat brusque tone of familiarity which their old friendship authorized and which both of them would have liked to have turned into a relationship of brother and sister. “Some days ago I put an end to this wretched affair—and did not withhold the statement from you for the sake of keeping this longer in my possession—”
He held out to her the portrait of Hortense obtained from Audiberte.
“Well, at last! O, how happy she is going to be, poor dear!”
She softened at the sight of her sister’s pretty face, her sister sparkling with health and youth in that Provençal disguise, and read at the bottom of the picture in her fine and very firm writing: “I believe in you and I love you—Hortense Le Quesnoy.” Then, remembering that the wretched lover had also read it and that he must have been intrusted with a very sorrowful commission in procuring it, she grasped his hand affectionately:
“Thank you.”
“No, do not thank me, Madame.—Yes, it was hard—but for the last eight days I have lived with that ‘I believe in you and I love you,’ and at times I could imagine that it was meant for me.” And then very low and timidly: “How is she getting on?”
“Oh, not well at all—Mamma is taking her South. Now she is willing to do whatever anybodywishes—it is just as if a spring had broken in her.”
“Altered?”
Rosalie made a gesture: “Ah!”
“Till we meet again, Madame,” said Méjean very quickly, moving away with hurried steps; he turned back again at the door and squaring his solid shoulders beneath the half-raised curtain:
“It is the luckiest thing in the world that I have no imagination. I should be altogether too unhappy!”
Rosalie returned to her room deeply dejected. There was no use in fighting against it by recalling her sister’s youth and the encouraging words of Jarras, who persisted in looking upon it merely as a crisis which it was necessary to cross; black thoughts invaded her which would not tally with the festive white in the baby’s layette. She hastened to tie up, lay in order and turn the key upon these little scattered articles, and as she got up she perceived the letter lying on the bureau, took and read it mechanically, expecting to find the commonplace begging statement which she received every day from so many different hands, and which would have come at a lucky moment during one of those spells of superstition, when charity seems a bringer of good luck. That was why she did not understand it at first and was obliged to read again these lines, which had been written out as a copy by the ignorant pen of a schoolboy, the boy employed by Guilloche:
“If you are fond of codfishà la brandade,delicious is that which is eaten to-night at the house of Mme. Bachellery in the Rue de Londres. Your husband pays for the supper. Ring three times and enter straight ahead.”
From these foolish phrases, from this slimy and perfidious abyss, the truth arose and appeared to her, helped by coincidences and recollections—that name “Bachellery” pronounced so often during the past year, enigmatical articles in the papers concerning her engagement at the opera, that address which she had heard Numa himself give, and the long stay at Arvillard. In a second, doubt crystallized itself in her to certainty. And besides, did not the past throw a light for her upon this present and all its actual horror? Lies and grimace—he was not and could not be anything but that. Why should this eternal maker of dupes spare her? It was her fault; she had been the fool to allow herself to be caught by his lying voice and vulgar caresses. And in the same second certain details came to her mind which made her red and pale by turns.
This time it was no longer despair showing itself with heavy, pure tears as in the early deceptions, but anger against herself for having been so feeble and cowardly as to have been able to pardon him, and against him who had duped her in contempt of the promises and oaths in connection with the former crime. She would like to have convicted him of his villainy there, on the moment, but he was at Versailles in the Chamber of Deputies. It occurred to her to call Méjean,but then she felt a repugnance to force that honest fellow to lie. And being thus reduced to crushing down a swarm of contrary feelings, prevent herself from crying out and surrendering to the terrible nerve-crisis which she felt rising in her, she strode to and fro on the carpet, her hands with a familiar action resting against the loosened waist of her dressing-gown. All of a sudden she stopped and shuddered, seized by a crazy fear.
Her child!
He was suffering too and he was calling to his mother with all the power of a life which is struggling to exist. Oh, my God, if he also, if he was going to die like the other one at the same age, and under exactly similar conditions! Destiny, which people call blind, has sometimes savage combinations, and she began to reason with herself in half-broken words and tender exclamations. “Dear little fellow!—poor little fellow!—” and attempted to look upon everything coldly as it exists, in order to conduct herself in a dignified way and above all not to destroy that solitary good thing which remained to her. She even took in hand some work, that embroidery of Penelope which the Parisian woman keeps about her, being always in action; for it was necessary to wait for Numa’s return and have an explanation with him, or rather to discover in his attitude a conviction of his crime, before it came to the irremediable scandal of a separation.
O, those brilliant wools and that regular and colorless canvas—what confidences may they notreceive, what regrets, joys and desires form the complicated and knotted reverse of the canvas full of broken threads in these feminine products, with their flowers peacefully interwoven!
Coming back from the Chamber of Deputies, Numa Roumestan found his wife embroidering beneath the narrow gleam of a single lighted lamp, and this quiet picture, her lovely profile softened by her chestnut-colored hair, in that luxurious shade of cushioned furniture where the lacquer screens and old bronzes, the ivories and potteries, caught the warm and shooting rays from a wood fire, overcame him by contrast with the noise of the Assembly, where the brilliantly lighted ceilings are swathed in a dust full of movement that floats above the hall of debate like the smoke from powder above a field where military are manœuvring.
“How do you do, Mamma; it’s pleasant here with you.”
The day’s meeting had been a hot one; always that wretched appropriation bill, and the Left fastened for five hours on the coat tails of that poor General d’Espaillon, who didn’t know enough to put two ideas together when he wasn’t saying g—d—, etc., etc. Well, anyhow, the Cabinet would get through this time; but after the vacation at New Year’s, when the Assembly would reach the question of the Fine Arts—then was the time to look out!
“They are counting very much on the Cadaillac business to upset me!... Rougeot is the onewho will talk.... He’s no chicken, that Rougeot; he has a backbone!”
Then with his famous jerk of the shoulder: “Rougeot against Roumestan—the North against the South—all the better! It will amuse me. It will be a hand-to-hand fight.”
Excited by his political matters, he talked on in a monologue without noticing how silent Rosalie was. Then he approached her and, sitting very near her on a footstool, made her stop her work by trying to kiss her hand.
“You seem to be in a terrible hurry with what you are embroidering. Is it for my New Year’s present? I have bought yours. Just guess what it is!”
She pulled her hand gently away and looked him steadily in the face in an embarrassing manner without answering him. His features were drawn and weary from his days of work in the Assembly, showing that loosened look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth a character at once weak and violent—all the passions and nothing to resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape. It is better not to look at them unless the sun is shining.
“Are you dining at home?” asked Rosalie.
“No, I’m sorry to say—I’m expected at Durand’s—a tiresome dinner—té!I’m already late,” added he as he rose. “Luckily it is not necessary to dress there.”
That fixed look in his wife’s face followedhim. “Dine with me, I beg of you—” and her harmonious voice hardened into insistence and sounded threatening and implacable.
But Roumestan was no observer. “And besides, business is business, is it not so? O, this life of a public man cannot be arranged as one would wish!”
“Well then, goodbye,” said she gravely, completing that farewell within her own mind with a “since it is our destiny.”
She listened to the coupé roll off beneath the vaulted passage and then, having carefully folded up her work, she rang.
“A carriage, right away—a hackney-coach—and you, Polly, give me my mantle and bonnet—I’m going out.”
Quickly ready to start, she embraced in one look the chamber she was quitting, where she neither regretted anything nor left behind her any part of herself, for it was merely the room of a furnished apartment-house despite all the pomp of its cold yellow brocades.
“See that the big cardboard box is put in the carriage.”
Of what belonged to both, the baby’s layette was all that she carried off.
Standing at the door of the coach the mystified Englishwoman asked if Madame was not going to dine at home. No, she will dine at her father’s where probably she will also pass the night.
On the way a doubt overcame her, or rather a scruple. Suppose nothing of all this weretrue? Suppose that Bachellery girl did not live in the Rue de Londres. She gave the coachman the address, but without much hope; still, she must have certainty on this point.
The carriage stopped before a little house two stories high, crowned by a terrace for a summer garden; it was the old home in Paris of a Cairo man who had just died a bankrupt. There was about it the look of a little house with shutters closed and curtains drawn; a strong odor of the kitchen rose from the brightly lit and noisy basement. Rosalie understood what it was just from noting how the front door obeyed three strokes of the bell and of itself seemed to turn upon its hinges. A Persian tapestry caught up by heavy cords in the centre of the antechamber allowed a glimpse of the stair with its soft carpet and its lamps in which the gas was burning at the highest point. She heard laughter, took two steps forward and saw what never more in her life she could forget.
At the turn of the stairs on the first floor Numa was leaning over the banisters red and excited, in his shirt sleeves, with his arm round the waist of that girl, who was also very much excited, her hair loosened and falling down her back upon the frills of a rose-colored silk morning-gown. And there he was, calling out in his violent way:
“Bompard, bring up thebrandade!”
That was where he could be seen as he really was, the Minister of Public Instruction and Religion, the great proclaimer of religious morality, the defender of sound doctrines! It was there heshowed himself without mask or hypocritical grimace—all his South turned outside for inspection!—at ease and in his shirt-sleeves as if at the Fair of Beaucaire.
“Bompard, bring up thebrandade!” repeated the giddy girl, intentionally exaggerating Numa’s Provençal accent. Without a question that was Bompard, the improvised cookshop boy who came up from the kitchen, a napkin over his shoulder and his arms surrounding a great big dish. It was he who caused the sounding wing of the door to turn on its hinges.