'Go on, get out,' commanded the comtesse angrily. 'The child will look after us.' Staring up at me from her bunch of bolster and pillow, the face still grey and flabby, deep shadows beneath her eyes, she put out her hand and pulled me down beside her. As I kissed the sagging cheek I thought how odd it was that this filial embrace, which should have been repellent, was somehow comforting, while the brush with the handsome Renee had been distasteful, crude.
'Mon Dieu,' she whispered, 'how the little one made me laugh!' Then, pushing me away, she said aloud, 'Sit down and drink your tea. What have you been doing all day besides getting your parcels mixed up?'
Once again I was at ease with her; I could talk, I could laugh, she conjured a gaiety out of me I did not know was there. We made a trio perfectly at ease with one another, the comtesse, the child and I, the comtesse slopping her tea into a saucer and sipping it in gulps, the last drop lapped by the begging dogs, while the child, enthroned as pourer-out, picked fastidiously at toast, her eyes upon us.
I told of my visit to the verrerie, speaking with greater confidence now that my furtive call to Paris had produced, or might produce, a temporary solution, and the comtesse, without prompting, enlarged upon past glories as old people will, to my secret interest and the child's delight. She told us of the days when the glass was blown by hand, which she remembered well, and how long ago, before her time, the furnace was fed by wood from the nearby forest - that all glass foundries were established in forest country for this reason - and how in olden days, a century ago, there had been a hundred and sixty horses working, and women and children. The names of the workmen and their families were all written down somewhere in a book, in the library, perhaps, she did not remember.
'Oh well,' she said, 'that's all over. No more of that. The old days can never come back.'
I was reminded of Julie, who had shown the same acceptance of change, the same dismissal of things that were finished, but when I told her about my visit to the cottage, and the poor burnt Andre lying in bed, she shrugged her shoulders, grown suddenly callous.
'Oh, those people,' she said. 'They'll squeeze the last franc out of us if they can. I wonder how much Julie has got out of me in her time. As for her son, he's always been a good-for-nothing. I don't blame the wife for running off with a mechanic in Le Mans.'
'That cottage is in a shocking state of repair,' I said.
'Don't do anything about it,' she answered. 'Once you begin, they'll ask for something else. We're beggared enough without bothering about them. And likely to remain so, unless Francoise produces a son, or ...' She stopped, and although I did not understand her words, a certain tone in her voice, and the sidelong glance she gave me, were somehow acutely disconcerting. After a moment she went on, 'These days people must fend for themselves. And what are they grumbling at? They have no rent to pay.'
'Julie didn't grumble,' I said. 'She asked for nothing.'
'I should hope not. She's got a nice sum, no doubt, tucked away under a floorboard. I wish I had as much.'
Her attitude troubled me. I felt disenchanted. Julie, who had seemed so honest and so loyal, was now shown as grasping, and the comtesse, a moment ago laughing and generous, was suddenly heartless, lacking perception. The wave of sympathy which I felt for both, instinctive, sincere, was somehow dulled, and puzzling this, while Marie-Noel poured me out another cup of tea, I realized that it was not the comtesse who lacked perception, but myself. I was a sentimentalist. I wanted people to be kinder, more generous, than they were.
'You know,' said Marie-Noel, suddenly breaking into the conversation, 'it was very curious when Maman and I opened that present in front of my aunt Blanche. Maman said "Don't be so obstinate, Blanche, it can't kill you, and if Jean has brought you something it must mean he has some feeling, surely, and wants to tell you so in this way." And my aunt Blanche looked down, and after ages she said, "You open it, then. I don't mind - it's nothing to me." But I am sure she was curious too, because she put her lips in a way she has sometimes. So we opened the parcel, and when Maman saw the great big bursting bottle of scent she said, "Good heavens, why ever this?", and my aunt Blanche had to look then, and do you know she went dead white, and she got straight up and went out of the room. I said to Maman, "It's not medicine, like uncle Paul's present. Why should she mind?" and Maman said, in a funny sort of way, "I'm afraid it must have been a joke after all, and rather cruel." Then of course we found the note to the other person, Bela, and Maman said, "No, it isn't a joke, it's a mistake. This is for someone else." But I still don't see why either of them should have thought it cruel.'
Her words seemed to make a hole in silence. Waves of nothing hung about the air. In a curious way the child and I were together. My ignorance, and her innocence, made us one. The mother stared at me, and there was something in her eyes I could not read. It was neither condemnation nor reproach, yet there was speculation: a kind of wondering search that touched a chord, suggesting, though I know it could not be, that some inner sense of hers had pricked my identity, uncovered my secret, knew me for a fraud. Yet when she spoke her words were for the child.
'You know, little one,' she said, 'the ways of women are very mysterious, especially one who is religious like your aunt. Remember that, and don't turn into a fanatic like her.'
She looked suddenly tired and old. Hilarity was spent. The gesture with which she brushed away the terriers was pettish, weary.
'Come on,' I said to Marie-Noel, 'let's put the tea-table out of the way.'
We moved it back against the wall, beside the dressing-table, on which I caught a glimpse of a large tinted photograph of Jean de Gue in uniform prominent amongst the silver brushes. Some intuition made me glance at the bed. The mother was gazing at it too, the same odd look of speculation on her face. When our eyes met we dropped them simultaneously. At that moment Charlotte came into the room, followed by the cure. The child went to him and curtsied.
'Good evening, Monsieur le cure,' she said. 'Papa has given me a life of the Little Flower. Shall I fetch it for you to see?'
The old man patted her head. 'Later, my child, later,' he said. 'When I come down you shall show it to me.' He advanced to the foot of the bed and stood with hands clasped over his rounded belly, looking down at the grey, exhausted face of the comtesse.
'Well,' he said, 'so we are not so bright today? Too much excitement yesterday, perhaps, followed by a wakeful night and bad dreams. St Augustine has something to say about that. He suffered too.'
He drew a book from the folds of his cassock, and I saw the comtesse, with a supreme effort, force her wandering attention to his words. She motioned to the chair I had just left, and the cure, spreading his skirts, sat down. At the far end of the room Charlotte also composed herself to listen, hands folded, head bowed.
'May I stay?' whispered Marie-Noel, her eyes shining with excitement as though she was asking permission to watch some spectacle. When I nodded, uncertain what was expected of me, she fetched the stool from the dressing-table and planted it close to the cure. Then, like a child actress living her role, she changed her expression of bustling preparation to one of rapture, eyes closed, hands clasped, lips moving silently in response to the old man's prayers. I glanced at the comtesse. Courtesy and training kept her propped against her pillows, but weariness caused the massive head to droop, ever so slightly, to the chest, and the flickering eyelids were symptoms, not so much of reverence as of intolerable fatigue.
I left the room and went downstairs and out into the park, wandering in those paths beyond the stone Artemis, now grey and solemn in the falling light. The chateau, which had seemed a jewel in sunlight, was more forbidding at the approach of dusk. The roof and turrets that had blended against blue took on a sharpened tone against the changing sky. I thought how like a bastion it must have been when water filled the moat, before the eighteenth-century facade of the central portion linked the early Renaissance towers. Were they any more lonely, the silken ladies peering through those slits, tha
n the Renee and the Francoise of today, with the clammy water damping the mouldering walls, and the forest, thick and shaggy, shrouding the very door? Did the wild boar, fiery-eyed, come rooting where the cattle wandered now, and the thin horn of the huntsman sound in early morning when the mist still clung about the trees? What drinking, roystering nobles of Anjou must have clattered forth over the drawbridge to hunt and fight and kill; what love-making by night, what long uneasy births, what sudden deaths? And now, in another time, how much of this was repeated, oddly, in a different way, with stifled emotions and hungers more obscure. Cruelty was of a deeper kind today, wounding the spirit, hurting the secret self, but then it was more openly brutal: only the tough survived, and the lonely Francoise or the frustrated Renee of that age went like blown candles into disease and death, lamented or forgotten by their lords, who, prototype of Jean de Gue, feasted and fought, shrugging a velvet shoulder.
Someone was going round the chateau, closing the shutters and folding the long windows one by one, and the shutting out of night was like withdrawal into privacy. What happened within was dead, was finished, was no more; the chateau was a tomb, and only the cattle lived, grazing beside me, snuffling the wet grass, and the jackdaws, fluttering to roost, and a dog barking in the village beyond the church.
This second evening of my masquerade took shape and substance like a second night at school. I was familiar now with my surroundings. The blank astonishment had gone. My audacity, an intoxicating drug the night before, seemed natural, and when I opened a door, or went into a room, or came face to face with one of the family I no longer felt a shock of surprise. I recognized sounds, smells, voices; knew which chair was whose; heard bells without inwardly flinching; washed my hands and was not amazed at the action; changed my coat and shoes for dinner with the same herd-instinct as a new boy aping his fellows at school, who does as the others do, letting his old home self and habits slip away until next holiday, and for the moment of his term assumes a hard bright shell, a glittering mask to win the approval of boys and masters, and is himself deceived and fascinated by the new personality walking in his stead. Eating, drinking, picking up a paper were suddenly actions interesting in themselves because they were not mine but those of Jean de Gue. The strangeness of a dream is always natural to the dreamer, and I began to move with ease amongst my phantoms, who talked to me, smiled at me, or ignored me. The ritual was already established; the wheel that had always turned continued turning, and I was merely borne by it, unprotesting, part of the framework.
Dinner was a silent affair. We were only four. Marie-Noel, I discovered, had soup and biscuits at seven and did not join us, while Blanche, according to Gaston, wished to fast. She was in her room, he said, and would not be coming down again this evening.
Conversation languished. Francoise, the prop at lunch, looked tired, and with flagging interest touched upon little topics to stir the silence: illness in the village, the cure's evening visit, a letter from a cousin in Orleans, troubles in Algiers, a train-crash north of Lyon. The dullness of it soothed me. Her voice, when the complaint was out of it, was clear and pleasant. Renee, wearing a high-necked blouse that became her well, with hair again brushed up to show her ears, had put a spot of rouge on either cheek-bone, whether to dazzle me with her charm, or wound me with her wit, or make me jealous with sudden bright chat to Paul I did not know. The scheme, if scheme there was, failed. I was unmoved, and Paul did not notice what she was about. He concentrated upon his food, which he ate noisily, grunting replies between mouthfuls, seldom raising his eyes from his plate; and directly dinner was over he moved to a chair under the best light in the salon, and, lighting a cigar, was hidden to view by the wide-open sheets of Figaro and L'Ouest-France.
Marie-Noel came down in a dressing-gown, and she, Francoise, and I - Renee was on the sofa with a book whose pages she never turned - played draughts and dominoes, a peaceful family trio who must have done the same before, night after night, time without number, until nine o'clock struck and Francoise, yawning with fatigue, said, 'Well now, bed time, cherie.' The child, without demur, got up, tidied away the draughts and put them in a drawer, kissed her uncle and her aunt and her mother, and taking my hand said, 'Come on, Papa.'
This, I supposed, was the nightly routine, and we marched upstairs to the nursery-bedroom in the turret. The doll, no longer stabbed by a penholder, had been rescued from martyrdom and was now a penitent, forced to a kneeling position beside an inverted tin that served as a confessional, while a large lopsided Donald Duck, with one leg missing, had been cast in the role of priest, the sailor's hat draped in black cloth to suggest a biretta.
'Sit down,' the child commanded, and then, taking off her dressing-gown, hesitated a moment before, as I thought, going to her makeshift prie-dieu to say her prayers.
'Would you like to watch me mortify the flesh?' she said.
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'I sinned, you know, in saying I would kill myself last night,' she said. 'I told my aunt Blanche, who said it was very wrong. It's too soon to make my confession, so I've decided to give myself a penance to fit the crime.' She slipped off her nightgown, and stood thin and bony before me. 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,' she said. She went to the untidy bookcase, and rummaging a moment, fetched out a small leather dog-whip with a knotted end. She shut her eyes and then, before I realized what she was about, lashed herself swiftly across her back and shoulders. There was no feint about it. She jumped involuntarily, drawing in her breath with pain.
'Stop it,' I said, and, getting up, tore the whip out of her hand.
'You do it,' she said, 'you whip me instead.'
She watched me, bright-eyed, and I picked up the nightgown she had thrown on the floor.
'Put it on,' I said curtly, 'and hurry up. And then say your prayers and get into bed.'
She obeyed, and the prompt response, the eager willingness to do what I told her, was somehow worse than if she had shown defiance. She was excited, tense, beneath the dutiful facade, and although I knew nothing about children, knew nothing of their games, the excitement seemed to be wrong, unnatural.
The prayers at the packing-case prie-dieu were interminable. She did not say them aloud, so I could not tell if this was pretence or not, but presently she crossed herself, and rose, and with a subdued expression climbed into her narrow bed.
'Good night,' I said, and bent to kiss her, but whether the cool, tight face upturned to me was intended as further punishment for herself or for me it was impossible to tell. I went out and shut the door, and glancing down at the worn, knotted whip, turned left, after passing through the baize door at the bottom of the turret stairs, and went on sudden impulse to the room in the tower at the far end of the first corridor. I tried the handle. It was locked. I knocked on the door.
'Who is there?' said Blanche.
I did not answer. When I knocked again I heard footsteps and the sound of a key being turned in the lock, and then the door opened and Blanche stood there in a dressing-gown, her hair released from the screwed knot and hanging straight about her face, giving her, in an instant, that same childish look of Marie-Noel upstairs. The expression in her eyes, incredulous, alarmed, defeated my purpose. The feud between her and her brother was not my affair. She could, at least, be warned about the child. I thrust the whip into her hands.
'Keep this,' I said, 'or throw it away. Marie-Noel was trying to use it on herself. I suggest you tell her that scourging drives the devil in, not out.'
The expression in her eyes turned to hatred so intense that I stared fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the sudden savagery in that pale, impassive face. And then, before I could say anything more, she had flung herself against the door and locked it, leaving me in the corridor outside, having done no good, perhaps having antagonized her even further. I walked slowly back along the corridor, shocked, dismayed, haunted by the thought of those eyes, so venomous and unforgiving, that surely must once have been wide and full of trust.
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As I came to the head of the stair, wondering which way to turn and what was the procedure now, I met the three of them coming up the stairs to bed, one behind the other: Francoise heavy, leaden-eyed and pale; Renee, the spot of colour on her cheek still vivid, the high-necked blouse emphasizing the high-dressed hair; and Paul, his hand on the light-switch, yawning, another newspaper, a local one, underneath his arm. They looked up at me, the three faces caught in the feeble jet of light, and because I was not one of them as they believed, but was outside, a stranger, peering down into their world, it was as though all three of them were naked, without masks. I caught the anguish of Francoise, uplifted on a breath and instantly cast down again in disillusion, with only endurance to sustain her after the one magic moment; Renee triumphant because she believed her body to be beautiful, flaunting desire so that it might be given her again, forever returning, forever unfulfilled; while Paul, bewildered, tired, and envious, wondered what miracle might be achieved, or what oblivion.
We bade each other good night, pairing off like couples at a set of lancers. As I followed Francoise along the corridor I wondered, dispassionately, how I should have felt had it been otherwise, had Renee been the wife of Jean de Gue. Were attraction and revulsion so near in kind that forced proximity could bridge the gulf between them and make them one? I was spared further speculation because I found that an alteration had taken place in the dressing-room. There was now a bed in the room, a camp-bed, with bolster, sheets and blankets. Oddly, my first instinct was not relief but guilt. What had happened? What was the matter? Then, going to the chest-of-drawers, I saw standing on it the huge bottle of scent, with the glaring motif 'Femme'. It was untouched.
I thought a moment, and then passed through the bathroom to the bedroom. Francoise was sitting by her dressing-table, pinning her hair.
'Do you want me to sleep in the dressing-room?' I asked.
'Wouldn't you prefer it?' she said.