IIITHE CALVARY OF LEMENC
ON leaving his father’s house Maurice Roquevillard crossed to the other side of the town and made his way straight up to the Calvary of Lemenc, the place where Mrs. Frasne had appointed that they should meet.
The choice of this place in itself was a defiance of public opinion. It was a hill that dominated all Chambéry and was visible from all sides. In the old days it had been only a bare rock, of such considerable strategic importance that in the times of the old dukes there had been a beacon there, answering the signals of Lepine and Guet, those forward-thrusting summits that stand like redoubtable sentinels on the frontiers of France. You reach it nowadays by a path which rises upward from the Reclus district, above the railways, and follows on one side the high walls of a convent, and on the other a series of miserable one-story dwellings. At the end of this defile you come out into the country, and find yourself opposite a little hill, crowned no longer now with works of war, but with a chapel that stands out against the dear and distant background of the Revard hills and Nivolet. From there on the path is quite open. A thin border of acacias gives it scant protection. Cut into the very rock, it crowds out the meagre grass. Some unfinished stations of the cross, with empty niches, occur at intervals on the way up. It is an abandoned promenade, where even if you are visible from a distance you do not ever meet a soul.
The little chapel of the cross, Byzantine in style, consists of a dome and peristyle resting on four columns, their bases raised a few steps above the ground. An archbishop of Chambéry was buried there in 1889. His tomb is cut in the rock, and the interior of the monument is quite empty.
From the first station at the foot of the path Maurice could distinguish a figure seated on the steps between the columns. It was she, waiting for him. In vain, beside her, the pale gold branches of the acacias lightly showed their delicate sprays; in vain the purple mountains rose before him in their autumn light: he saw only her, framed at the foot of the cross. Her elbows on her knees, she rested her face upon her two hands, the fingers open and showing rosy and transparent in the sunlight. Motionlessly with her eyes of fire she watched him coming. He hastened to her all out of breath. When he was near her she rose with a single, unsuspected movement, like a careless fawn that surprises you with its unexpected play of muscles.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said, “and my life was over.”
“I was detained, Edith.”
He was so obviously upset that she could not reproach him. She took him by the hand and led him round to the other side of the chapel, where she showed him the lush grass, and a protecting shadow.
“Let’s sit down, shall we? It’s not cold. We shall be all right.”
They ensconced themselves side by side there, leaning against the wall of the shrine, which shut them out from Chambéry and the world. They could see nothing in front of them but the peaks of Nivolet in the full sunlight. She twined herself caressingly round him.
“I love you so much,” she murmured plaintively.
Was not their love delicious and dolorous both at once? They called each other by endearing terms, and yet they were not lovers. She held herself away a little to get a better look at him.
“You have been unhappy. Was it on my account?”
He reviewed his scene with his father briefly, telling of his discovery of their infatuation, and of the still greater difficulties it implied for their future.
“What’s to become of us?” he asked.
“Yes, what is to become of us?” she repeated. “Our secret is no longer ours, and I, well, I don’t know how to hide it any longer.”
“Our secret is no longer ours,” he repeated bitterly, “and you, you have never yet been mine.”
She leaned her head on the young man’s breast and yielded purposefully to him, lulling him like a child, the wheedling tones of her voice striking on his heart strings like fingers on the keys of a piano.
“How dare you say I am not yours? When have I refused myself to you, you bad boy? Will you go away from here with me? I am all yours. But you are so young, and I shall be thirty very soon. Thirty years, and my love, which is my whole life, began only a few months ago. I looked at you, and there was sunlight on you, and I crept out of the shadows to be with you. One day I’ll tell you about my childhood, my youth and marriage, and I shall tell it so as to see your tears.”
“Edith!”
“Ah, yes! People who find marriage the gate to light and gladness, and not the door to a prison, have a fine time of it scorning our frailty. When fate overtakes them, too, do they get any more than we deserve? But they don’t ever ask themselves that question. Happiness is due them as a matter of course. They don’t even do anything to protect it, and if they happen to lose it, they call it just their bad luck, anybody’s fault but their own.”
“Edith! I love you, and you’re not happy.”
She half raised herself, and took his face in her hands, with an adoring gesture.
“Give me one year of your life for the whole of mine, Will you? Come! Let us go away, let us forget—I don’t want to lie any more—I don’t want to belong to any one else. I can’t any more, now that I’m yours.”
She stood up with one bound. Behind the chapel, not far from them, the rock fell perpendicularly to the Aix road. She went up close to the edge, defying the empty air.
“Edith!” he cried, jumping up hastily.
She came back to him, more calm, and smiling.
“I love dizzy places, but I’ve more sense than that,” she said, coming back to her place beside him.
But it was only to begin again the worry about the future.
“Our secret is everybody’s secret now. My husband will know it soon. He suspects it already. He loves me in his way, but it’s a way that revolts me. I’m sure that he is spying on us. He’ll revenge himself somehow. He’ll manage it very deliberately, like everything he undertakes.”
“Listen, Edith. You must divorce him.”
“Divorce him, yes. I’ve thought of that. But suppose he should oppose me. And he will, too. And then a divorce always takes a year or two, perhaps more. It would oblige me to go and live with my people, away from you. To be always waiting, still two long years of seclusion: I should come out of it all quite old. I should be separated from you. From you, do you understand? I have thought it all over, you see. It’s impossible.”
They were silent a moment, and in the stillness that surrounded them as they leant against each other the deep calls of their two natures sounded. A rustling along the wall near them made them start.
“Some one is coming,” he whispered.
“Let us stay,” she replied imperiously.
They stayed. Their destiny was taking its course; already it lay in their own hands. But their witness was only a she-goat nibbling the sparse grass. A little girl, who followed after her with a switch, considered them a moment blankly and went on her way again. And they were sorry that their imprudence had not been followed by some irreparable consequence.
Time passed, but decided nothing for them. Should they take up their heavy chains again and go back down the hill; or should they break them, refusing to take any new precautions? She crept close along his side, trying to read the answer in his eyes.
“Your eyes, your dear eyes. Why do they turn away from me?” she pleaded.
“I don’t know,” he sighed, half closing them, growing dizzy as he had been just now when she leant beyond the precipice.
She kissed him on the eyelids, uttering sweet words that cloaked a bold resolve.
“These autumn days, these golden days, make me feel as if my heart were breaking. Each evening as it falls is cruel to me, because it has robbed me of a happiness. I am going away to-night, do you know it?”
At this unexpected finish he started, and disengaged himself from her arms.
“Don’t say that, Edith.”
“These last days, when I’ve told you that, you’ve thought it all an idle threat. You’ve deceived yourself, Maurice. I shall go away this evening.”
At other times when she had tempted him thus he had put aside her plan as impractical, even going so far once as to offer to leave first and send for her afterward when he should have obtained something to do in Paris. Disturbed, frightened, beggared of devices before this new assault, more keen than any of the others, and more pressing, he found himself trying still to hold her back.
“Hush! I’m staying here, and I love you.”
For the third time, masterful and overwrought, she repeated:
“I shall leave to-night. The train for Italy passes through at midnight. At midnight I shall be free.”
He knotted his hands in despair.
“Hush!”
“Free to cry out my love. Free, if you’re not there, to taste this new joy of crying without constraint. Free to adore you, if you come.”
“For pity’s sake don’t tempt me any more.”
“I’m suffocated in this town of yours. Its old houses smell musty. I am suffocated with tenderness, do you see? Here we shall always be kept apart. I want to enjoy my sorrow if you don’t come: if you do come I want to live and breathe. Will you come? Will you come to-night?”
In the end she overpowered his senses with her kisses, and he promised.
A moment she tasted her triumph in silence, then murmured:
“I have forgotten all my past.”
She led him away from their retreat, in front of the Calvary, round toward the sun. What use was there in any more concealment? They could see now in a great glory, under a clear sky, the radiant diverse forms of the land. There before them, stretching away to the farthest horizon, filling in all the empty space between the black masses of the Granier and the Roche du Guet, were the delicate outlines of the Dauphine Alps—the Sept-Laux, Berlange, and the Grand Charnier—powdered with the first snows and rosy now with the dying light of day. Less distant, and further to the right, the wooded slopes of Corbelet and Lepine, between which the valley of the Echelles was hollowed out, bore like a gold-red fleece the woods and forests that the autumn had set ablaze. Before these chains of mountains was a garland of delicate hills—Charmettes, Montagnole, Saint-Cassin, Vimines, whose soft curves and graceful undulations made one’s eyes love to dwell on them. Floods of light slipped down through their folds, making shafts of dust between their shadows. The sharp spires of the bell towers, the green and gold poplars, served as salient points in the scene. In the plain, Chambéry slumbered. And quite nearby, at the foot of the hill, a vine of dull red and gold threw in its striking note of joyousness.
“Show me Italy,” she bade him.
He made a negligent gesture toward the right, but instead of following the movement of his arm, she turned toward him, and was aghast to find his face so full of anguish. She understood. For herself she could view like a passing tourist these lofty beauties of nature’s mood. Her companion did not feel it thus. Was it not his own land’s supreme attempt to hold him back? Down there he could see La Vigie, and memories of his childhood, of a childhood all clean and pure, rose up from the earth like birds and came to him. Nearer, as he could tell from the vicinity of the castle, was “The House,” that place which each of us calls, just like that, “the house,” as if there were but one in the world.
She followed this last conflict that showed in Maurice’s eyes with a sort of envy, she who had nothing to give up herself. With a sigh she touched him on the shoulder.
“Listen,” she said, “let me go away alone.”
But he was uncomfortable at being detected in the most hidden and instinctive impulses of his soul.
“No, no! You don’t love me, then, any more?”
“As if I didn’t!”
She smiled at him, with an infinitely tender smile that he did not see. The fires in her eyes grew veiled. A woman of to-day, keen for sincerity and the individual life, grown suddenly impatient after nine years of silent waiting, she had decided, cost what it might, to take advantage of her husband’s temporary absence and escape out of the prison house of her marriage. Her romantic departure had been carefully prepared in all its practical details, and in its chosen hour. Maurice’s irritation with his father favoured her plan and left him almost at her mercy. And yet now, how could she best testify to her great love for Maurice? By associating him with her in her inevitable and dangerous destiny, or, better still, by leaving him here in his native place? Before her love for him she could not bear her life. He had, without knowing it, fanned the spirit of revolt in her. How could she separate herself from him? The offer she had just made him broke her very heart, and yet she insisted on it. Never before had she been so conscious of the detachment from herself which passion now and then lets loose on us, as a humid plain is burned dry by the devouring sun.
“One thing at a time, slowly,” she replied, “you would forget me. Don’t protest. Listen to me. You are so young. All your life is before you. Let me go alone.”
But he revolted against this injurious condescension. What was to keep him back? Had not his reason—the reasoning of twenty-four—shown the right of every one to seek his own happiness?
“I don’t want life without you,” he protested.
“I will stay,” she said again, “if you prefer it. I shall learn to tell better lies, you’ll see. When one is in love all wrongs are right for the sake of love.”
It was a proposal made too late. This time she knew, and watched for a refusal. It came, and she threw herself against her lover’s breast.
“I love you so I could die for you,” he murmured.
“Is that all?” she said. “I love you more than that.”
“It’s not possible.”
“Oh, yes. I love you so I could commit crime for you.” And without transition she added negligently:
“This evening I shall take away my dot with me.”
He recalled his father’s doubts on this point.
“Your dot?”
“Yes. It’s provided for in my marriage settlement. Did I not show it to you?”
“You haven’t the right to take it. The court only allowed it to you.”
“Shall I surrender what’s my own to my husband? And what should we live on if I did?”
“Edith, I shall have some money to-night. Then I can find some work to do in Paris. The father of one of my friends is manager of a large company there, and he’s promised to save a place for me in their lawyer’s offices. These last days I have recalled his promise to do so, at all events.”
She did not discourage this bland optimism.
“Yes, you will have to work. We’ll go to Paris later. But to-night it’s Italy.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it the regular pilgrimage for honeymoons?”
She bent her head modestly, supple and pliant, and appeared all at once a young girl just betrothed—woman of thirty though she was, with her face that could change so easily from disenchantment to childish grace, as eager to taste of life as children are of those green fruits the very sight of which sets the teeth on edge.
The shadows were already coming up over the plain. Before them the map of the landscape grew clearer as its golden tones grew purple. She suffered from these too beautiful October evenings as from desire.
“To-morrow,” she said, “to-morrow.”
He took a step forward, and turning his back deliberately on the scene, he looked at her alone, as she stood leaning there against a column beneath the peristyle of the chapel. Was she not henceforth to be all his country to him?
They took a sort of revenge against the town by going openly down the hill of Lemenc together, as far as the Reclus bridge, taking the risk of meeting people whom they knew.
“It’s almost five,” she said as she was leaving him. “Only seven hours more.”
Hope revivified the flame in her eyes. Yet Maurice could only see in these seven hours, distastefully, the cruel time that he must pass in deception of his family. She guessed this, and sympathised with her lover’s lot, meaning to destroy in advance the influence that she feared.
“Poor child, shall you know how to fib for a whole evening?”
He started at finding himself discovered, and repeated to her, not without bitterness, her own lately uttered words.
“There’s nothing wrong any more when you love.”
“It’s horrible,” she replied, “you see. You can understand my shame and weariness. As for me, I lie because I love you. Courage, until to-night.”
Before going home he went hastily round to see various people, from whom he hoped to borrow the necessary money. From his great-uncle Stephen Roquevillard, an original old fellow who passed for a miser, from his Aunt Teresa, pious and charitable, he secured some loans, about a thousand francs, besides five hundred from his sister Mrs. Marcellaz, as well as from his future brother-in-law Raymond Bercy. He had to concoct some story about debts contracted during his student days in Paris. It was a ruse that caused him some humiliation—a sacrifice which he offered to his love, but without deriving much comfort from it. He did not stop to think, moreover, that all the strangers to whom he had applied had refused him, while his family, whether with tenderness or crustiness, had hastened to help him in his imaginary plight.
At six o’clock he returned to Frasne’s offices, just as the clerks were closing up.
“I’ve a letter or two to write,” he said. “I’ll lock up.”
He did write, as a matter of fact, to the most influential of his acquaintances, asking that some lucrative place in Paris might be gotten for him as promptly as possible. Having taken prizes in all his courses, he counted on the recommendations of his old law professors to help him. He was not easily dashed by the difficulties of existence, and had no doubt of his ability to surmount them easily. Where should the answers to his letters be sent?
He hesitated, then wrote down:Milan, post restante.
By these preparations, which kept his mind occupied, he succeeded in obscuring his regret at parting. It came over him again, however, sharp and poignant, when he crossed the threshold of his father’s house for the last time. He slipped in furtively and was at once noticed, but shut himself up in his room. Margaret came to look for him there at dinner time, and found him with his head in his hands beneath the lamp, so absorbed that he did not hear her knock.
“Maurice,” she asked, “what’s troubling you?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m your little sister, and you’re not willing to tell me your worries. Who knows if I might not be of some use to you?”
To account for his air of worry, which he could not deny, he fell back again on his pretended need of money, the story that he had just been telling in various forms. The girl stopped him at once.
“Wait a moment,” she said.
She disappeared, and came back a little later triumphantly, placing in front of him a fine blue bill for one thousand francs.
“Is that enough? Father gave me three of them for my trousseau, and luckily this one’s left.”
“You are mad, Margaret. I don’t want it.”
“Yes, yes, take it. I shall be so glad. A few bits of linen more or less will scarcely make me feel poor.”
She laughed, and he, his nerves all strung, felt the tears gather at the edge of his eyes. By a great effort he succeeded in controlling himself, and rested content with drawing the girl to his heart—a heart which, after all, did not belong entirely to Mrs. Frasne.
“Love me always,” he murmured, “whatever happens.”
She raised her eyes to his inquiringly, but was too generous to demand a secret in exchange for what she had done. Only, as she went with him to the dining-room, she let these words slip out quietly, like a prayer:
“Be nice to father, and I shall love you still more.”
Dinner passed without incident, thanks to the presence of Raymond Bercy, which made the meeting of father and son less trying. In the evening Maurice withdrew at an early hour, making the excuse of a headache. He went to his mother’s room, where she lay in bed still suffering. In his soul’s anguish he embraced the invalid in the darkness. She knew him by his kiss, and feebly called him by his name, patting his face with her hands. He stifled a sob and went out. Love condemned him to such cruelties.
He packed his valise lightly, so that he might carry it himself to the station, and put all the money he had in a pocket-book. With the loans he had raised that night, and Margaret’s, it made altogether a little more than five thousand francs, a total which seemed to him in his inexperience an important sum of money. Next he packed up the few pieces of jewelry that belonged to him and might be turned to account, and then, his toilette for the execution made, sat down and waited like a criminal condemned to death for the hour that should deliver him to his beloved. His reason, his infallible reason, sustained him in his resolve, represented to him the beauty of living his life freely and in his own way, rather than taking his place as the last of his class in the uninterrupted line of the Roquevillards.
... Reassured by Maurice’s attitude, and by a half confidence on the part of Margaret, Mr. Roquevillard went to bed and asleep without any immediate concern, deciding first, however, that he would send his son away from Chambéry. He would write to an old friend that he had done various good turns for at one time and another, who had knocked about the world a good deal and squandered his inheritance, but who was now settled in Tunis as a lawyer, and had prospered there. He had lately expressed in his letters a desire to retire from practice, or at least to take in an assistant. At twenty-four such a voyage, such a life, with all its novelty, might mean forgetfulness, salvation, for Maurice.
In the night he thought he heard a door open and shut, but silence descending on the house again, he fancied he must have been mistaken, and tried to get to sleep once more. After a rather long struggle, he lighted a match, and looked at his watch, which showed half an hour past midnight. He rose and left his room. At the end of the hall a ray of light appeared beneath Maurice’s door. He went up to it, listened, and hearing no sound, he knocked. There was no response, and after some hesitation he went in.
“He must have forgotten to put out his lamp,” he tried to persuade himself, anxiety already beginning to torment him.
With one glance he saw that the bed was untouched, that a drawer had been emptied. He went back to his own room, dressed in haste and ran like a young man, despite his sixty years, to the railway station. The time for the express to Italy must have passed, but there was still a last train in the direction of Geneva. An employee, who recognised him, gave him his information. Maurice had gone away withher. They had taken their tickets for Turin.
Alone there in the night he gave a groan, like some oak straining at the first blow of the axe. But, like the oak, too, he was full of resistance, and stiffened himself against fate.
It was not possible that a whole race, a family, not possible even that one life, could be compromised by a single youthful fault. He would find his son again, sooner or later, and bring him home. Or else fate would take charge of him as of the prodigal son; and as in the parable, too, he would be weak enough to kill the fatted calf on his return, instead of loading him with reproaches. The paternal hearth: there one comes back to dress one’s wounds, certain of not being turned away. A husband may desert his wife, a woman her husband, ungrateful children may desert their father and mother: a father and mother can never abandon their child, even if the whole world should give him up.
The town lay as if dead in the moonlight. Mr. Roquevillard’s steps resounded in the deserted streets. From Boigne Street, as he went up, he could see the castle tower clear before him, lengthened by the perspective of the night. A neighbouring tree traced the shadow of its leaves on the façade. In a few hours the hushed city would come to life again, to laugh insultingly at this family drama.
When he opened his door a white shadow came to him. It was Margaret.
“Father, what is it?”
In default of his wife he must share the weight of this trial with Margaret. He thought enough of her not to attempt concealment.
“They have gone,” he muttered briefly.
“Oh,” she breathed, understanding, and remembering the sad phrase her brother had used to her that evening.
Again father and daughter clasped each other to their hearts in a common anguish. Then tenderly he led her to her room and left her.
“Let your mother sleep, little girl,” he said. “She always finds out our troubles soon enough.”