“Colette loved you,” Rachell told him.
The old man opened one eye. “Humph,” he said, “it wouldn’t have lasted,” and he closed the eye again.
There was silence for ten minutes, then grandpapa opened both eyes and fixed them on his daughter-in-law with intense dislike.
“What are you stopping here for?” he asked her, “I don’t want you.”
Rachell got up. “Would you like André?” she asked.
Grandpapa gave one of his old snorts. “No. The boy’s a fool. Like his mother.” He paused. “Is that fellow Mabier here?”
Rachell was astonished. What was this strange link between grandpapa and Ranulph? “Yes,” she said.
“Then send him along,” said grandpapa, and turning his head away from her he closed his eyes again, dismissing her. Rachell paused for a moment, gathering her courage to say what duty compelled her to say.
“Father,” she said, “would you not like to see a priest?”
The furious blood mounted in a tide to grandpapa’s forehead and he almost raised himself in bed in his indignation.
“No!” he snarled. “I’ve been a hypocrite in life, but I’m damned if I’ll be one in death. Get out.”
With incomparable dignity Rachell left the room, closed the door softly behind her and sailed down to the library.
“My father-in-law wishes to see you,” she said to Ranulph. André looked up, astonished, but Ranulph left the room with no appearance of surprise. When he had gone Rachell remembered that she had not told him where to find grandpapa’s room and she half rose. Then she heard his step overhead. . . . Evidently he had found it.
Ranulph stood at the bottom of the bed and looked at his father.
“Well, Jean?” said grandpapa.
Ranulph smiled his rather unpleasant smile, and drummed with his fingers on the bed rail.
“How did you know me?” he asked.
“I’m no fool,” snapped grandpapa, “that story you told on Christmas Day—that gave you away—just your old way of telling lies—sit down.”
Ranulph sat down, an odd flicker of affection in his yellow eyes. He was astonished to find, beneath what he thought was his hatred of his father, this substratum of affection. . . . The old man was so game.
With the entrance of his son a sudden recrudescence of strength seemed to have come to grandpapa. His voice was clearer. He did not look so ill. His eyes, fixed on Ranulph, were intense, as though he meant to get to the bottom of this enigma of his son before he died.
“A nice sort of a mess you’ve made of things,” he told him, “a nice sort of a fool you’ve been—worse than André.”
Ranulph smiled. “And yet you want to see me and not André,” he said.
“Humph,” said grandpapa, “always fonder of you than of André.” He paused and then returned to the charge. “What made you turn such a damn fool?”
“Why go into it now?” asked Ranulph.
“Go on,” said the old man.
Ranulph crossed one leg over the other. “You drove me to it. You wanted me to be bound by your will, but one cannot live out the will of another. I wanted to be a sailor. You wouldn’t let me. You shut me in like a caged animal. Caged things always go mad sooner or later—go mad or die.”
“Humph,” said grandpapa and was silent. When he spoke again he was evidently following a train of thought suggested by Ranulph. “Your mother died.”
“You killed her,” said Ranulph.
“You liar.” Grandpapa, roused to fury, spat out the words.
“A caged thing, worn out with beating against bars, has no strength to fight disease,” said Ranulph bitterly, and could have killed himself for hatred of his own cruelty. What use in reproaching a dying man? His love for his mother, the strongest emotion in his life, and his grief at her death, were still so strong that they had betrayed him.
“It was after your mother died that you took to going to that bitch in La Rue Clubin,” said grandpapa. Ranulph was startled. He had not known his father knew of this.
“Yes,” he said. Grandpapa was silent again.
“One cannot,” he said at last, “live out life again.”
“No,” said Ranulph, “pity.”
Their eyes met and they looked at each other. Remorse, forgiveness mutually asked and given, a deep rooted affection surviving and reappearing after a lifetime of loss, were all expressed in their glance.
“You can stay here,” said grandpapa.
“I’ll stay,” said Ranulph.
After that grandpapa slept and Ranulph sat perfectly still for what seemed to him hours. Madame Gaboreau fetched him once to have some food, but he went quickly back again. The sun, mounting higher, flooded the room with light. Through the windows he could see the sea and the ships passing. Once, overcome by the airlessness of the room, he must have dozed, for he thought it was his mother who lay dying in that hateful great bed and he was overwhelmed once again by that old agony of grief and horror. He awoke to find the sweat streaming down his face and his father’s eyes fixed on him.
Grandpapa’s voice was thick and weak again, but his mind seemed clear as ever, and was fixed on his grandchildren.
“Peronelle,” he muttered, “should Marry Well.”
“Certainly,” said Ranulph, “fairy blood in her. She’ll do Credit to the Family.”
“Humph,” said grandpapa, “taking little thing. Colette, too. Fat little baggage—thin now.”
“It’s surprising how she’s blown out again these last two days,” said Ranulph.
Grandpapa smiled. “If Colin wants to go to sea let him go his own way,” he said.
“I’ll see to it,” Ranulph promised.
The sun passed its zenith and began to slip down the sky. The light in the room was less bright.
“You’ll find I’ve left precious little,” muttered grandpapa, “and that little to André. . . . Been improvident. . . . Horses. . . . André is a confounded fool. . . . Verge of bankruptcy.”
There was intense anxiety in his voice. Ranulph’s answer sprang quickly to allay it.
“I’ll see to them all. I’ve money.”
“Eh?” Grandpapa was startled into a last access of strength. He raised his head from his pillow and looked at his son. “You’ve money?”
“Yes. I’m what’s called a warm man. I made a pretty penny goldmining.” In spite of himself Ranulph could not help smiling at the astonishment and profound respect dawning in his father’s eyes. It was almost comic.
“What? What? Good God!” said grandpapa, “and I called you a fool! . . . A warm man!”
Satisfaction beamed out all over his face, and was still there when he slipped off into a doze. Half an hour later a change in the quality of his stillness struck Ranulph. He got up and looked at him. The doze had become coma. Ranulph ran downstairs to fetch André and Rachell. There was another long wait while Rachell knelt beside the bed and prayed, and the two men stood at the window watching the first shadows of twilight dimming the sea.
At the turn of the tide grandpapa died.
Chapter 8
I
SPRING came early that year, and its breaking through seemed to Rachell more triumphant than ever. Or perhaps she only thought so because her own heart, dancing for joy at Colette’s recovery, was more than usually in tune with the miracle of returning life.
She stood one morning outside the back door hanging up some washing. Sophie, who had always done such tasks for her, was now Madame Jacquemin Gossilin, and her mantle had fallen upon Toinette—a perfect marvel of incompetence. Rachell had to undertake half Toinette’s work for her and even then the other half could hardly be described as done. Toinette’s day’s work was just a sketchy affair of blurred outlines, more a suggestion of what a day’s work should be than an accomplished fact. Rachell, as she th
ought of Toinette, sighed. After Colette’s illness she had, overwhelmed with gratitude, taken Toinette to her bosom and assured that waif that Bon Repos was her home for ever. Toinette had responded to kindness with the dedication of her whole self, stunted body, weak mind, undeveloped soul and all, to the service of the du Frocq family. A little bedroom was contrived for her in an attic boxroom and she settled into it, contented as a swallow under the eaves. It had all been very beautiful and very touching, and had carried them on a wave of rapture through the first trying weeks of Toinette’s sojourn. But now the rapture had subsided, and Toinette’s rather grubby methods of washing up and bed making had begun to pall a little upon everyone but Colette, whose soul was so linked to Toinette’s that the weaknesses and failures of the body were of no importance. Rachell had even gone so far as to say to André, in the privacy of their four-poster, that her repentance for her bad deeds was never anything so deep as her repentance for her good deeds—and above all, for this good deed of the adoption of Toinette. “There are moments, André,” she said, “when I could wish I was not a Christian.”
“It does hamper one’s style,” agreed André.
“Were I a heathen I could turn the child out,” sighed Rachell. But under the circumstances she and André were agreed that that was impossible. There was nothing for it but to accept Toinette as one would a stray mangy dog, feed her and love her, and expect nothing from her more practical than devotion. And Toinette herself, unaware of her own incompetence, was blissfully happy. Day and night she was safe from cruelty and day and night she lived under the same roof as Colette, and basked in her sunshine. Then, too, she had the bliss of feeling herself indispensable, for was she not the one and only domestic the establishment boasted? And the pride of regarding the whole family as chickens under her wing.
Rachell, to gather strength for her next encounter with Toinette, turned and looked at the scene before her. The back door faced inland across the farmyard, and before her stretched trees and fields and hills and dales. It was one of those early spring days when colour is riotously lovely. The farther trees were not yet green but burned beneath the sun with a warm ruby glow, deepening to amethyst when the cloud shadows swept over them. In the foreground the hawthorn trees shook out a transparent veil of little, crumpled bright green leaves, and beneath them a flurry of primroses starred grass that was still tawny from winter frosts. The sky, pale as harebells on the horizon, deepened overhead to hyacinth, and, threaded like a ribbon behind the rosy trees, was a streak of distance so deeply and unbelievably blue that it seemed a myriad bluebells, blooming before their time, had poured like a great wave over the distant hills. The birds sang madly. Thrushes, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches, linnets, goldfinches and the little shrill-voiced wrens; they all shouted together with such abandon that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. In their ecstasy they seemed to have lost all fear. On a branch of lilac near Rachell sat a blackbird pouring out a cascade of song that filled and thrilled his throat nearly to bursting. She could have put out her hand and touched him, but he seemed not to know she was by. He was abandoned to his song as a saint to his contemplation. For a little Rachell looked and listened, sharing deeply in the ecstasy, drawing in strength, then she squared her shoulders and turned back to Toinette.
In the scullery, blinded by the light outside, she nearly fell over her, engaged in pouring buckets of water over the floor.
“I’m scrubbin’ the floor, m’dame,” Toinette told her jubilantly.
Rachell, lifting her skirts above the flood, remarked that she saw it was so.
“It’s like a river in spate,” she said, “must you use quite so much water, Toinette? Are you able to swim?”
“You must always use water for washin,’ dear m’dame,” Toinette told her gently and patiently.
Rachell felt rebuked. Whenever she was betrayed into impatience or sarcasm with Toinette the child’s patience with her failings made her ashamed. She carried the potatoes into the kitchen—it was impossible to stand ankle deep in water in the scullery—and began to peel them.
“Where is Mademoiselle Colette?” she called through the swish of the water.
“Down the garden with ’er playmates, m’dame,” called back Toinette. Rachell’s heart stood still. These playmates were a new development. With the others at school, and her mother struggling to keep the house going without Sophie’s help, Colette in her convalescence had been lonely and had produced from her imagination three invisible playmates to amuse her. That, at least, was how the situation was described by Colette’s family; she herself did not consider her playmates invisible, and was firmly convinced that they came not from her imagination but from behind the trees at the bottom of the orchard. They lived there, she told her mother, and came to her when she called them. Asked what they looked like she shook her head and smiled a very secret smile.
II
They had first appeared on the very first morning that she had been allowed to go and play in the garden alone. It had been a fine day in late February, warm and soft, and full of little whispers. Only the snowdrops and aconites were in bloom, and the trees were still bare, but the damp earth was speared all over the place with sharp, green points and the bare twigs were thickened and flushed with life. Colette, in her two flannel petticoats, her overcoat, her goloshes and her tam-o’-shanter, ran across the courtyard and into the garden. She stood and looked round her. She had not been here by herself for weeks and she felt she had to get to know the garden all over again. She went slowly down the moss-grown path where the Canterbury bells grew in summer. There were snowdrops everywhere, little white bells veined in green drooping on slender, pale stalks that seemed too weak to hold them up. Colette wondered if they would ring, but they didn’t. They seemed too busy spearing up through the black dampness of the garden to have any energy left for music. Colette felt that the garden was not paying much attention to her, it was too busy fighting its way back to life after the death of the winter. This was not very nice of the garden, she felt, for she was doing exactly the same herself, and it should have had a fellow feeling for her. She turned her back on it and ran on into the little orchard. Here, growing in the tawny grass under the thickening twigs, were the aconites. There were hundreds of them, spilled all over the orchard like fairy gold, each pale gold disk framed in a green toby frill. Sophie had often told her how the fairies hid their treasure in the cromlechs, but how mortals could never find it because when they entered the cromlechs it turned to shells. Colette herself, when once Peronelle had taken her inside a cromlech, had found a pile of tiny little shells lying in a corner and had picked them up, thrilled to feel herself handling fairy coinage. To-day she wondered if the aconites were not fairy sovereigns too. There was certainly something unearthly about them. She tried to talk to them but they were not in the least conversational. They had none of the cheeky friendliness of golden crocuses. The paleness of their faces made them look a little reserved, and the frills round their necks, like the boa of a lady of fashion, kept one in one’s place.
It may have been her own lack of bodily vigour that made Colette feel depressed, or it may have been that the garden was really too engrossed in its preparation for the spring resurrection to be friendly, but whatever the reason she felt lonely.
She turned her back on the orchard and went on to the rampart of earth crowned with twisted oak trees that separated the orchard from the cliff beyond. These trees had always fascinated her. The winter storms had twisted their trunks and branches into the most extraordinary fantastic shapes, so that they looked like queer rheumatic old men holding up bony arms and outspread knotted fingers against the sky. On the landward side their branches were black, but on the seaward side they were covered with grey lichen. They had almost the appearance of white-haired negroes. They were quite certainly alive, not only with the universal life that was shared by all the other growing things but with an individual life of their own.
Colette loved them and, in spite of their ugliness, was not in the least afraid of them. She knew they felt friendly towards her, and not only towards her but towards the whole little world of Bon Repos that lay stretched at their feet. For did they not protect it? Year after year they stood on top of their bank holding out their arms to shelter the house and garden from the wild tearing wind from the sea. The full violence of the storms beat upon them, twisting them and spoiling their beauty, but never vanquishing them. All the years that they had stood there not a single tree had been uprooted and not a single branch broken off. In the blackness of midnight storms, on the rare occasions when the tumult awakened her, Colette would think of them standing out there in the darkness, bending, creaking, straining, lashing back at the wind with their tortured arms but never yielding for one moment. . . . They were invincible.
To-day there was not a breath of wind and they were resting in a rare peace. They stood up black as ebony against the tranquil silver sky spread behind them. Their knotted old hands were resting on each other’s shoulders, and their hoary heads lolled a little. There was not a single swelling bud to be seen upon them. They never achieved much in the way of foliage, the few leaves that did put in an appearance arrived upon the scene very late and fell off very early, blackened and nipped by the salt in the wind. Colette was quite glad to find they were not, as yet, giving the spring a thought; they would, perhaps, have a little attention left to spare for her. But they hadn’t much. They greeted her kindly and even, in spite of the windlessness of the day, tapped her gently on the shoulder as she ran along beneath them, but they were really too tired after the rigours of the winter to do more than pass the time of day. They knew they had a good deal more in the way of spring storms to face and they were resting and gathering strength. Colette quite understood, but at the same time she really did feel extremely bored. If no one would play with her, what on earth was she to do with herself? Her old habit of placid wonder seemed to have left her. Her illness had left her feeling weak and yet restless. She wanted to be amused. . . . It was then that the miracle happened.