Complete Works of Emile Zola (143 page)

“Just fancy, this young miss had not got up,” said Madeleine, “and it took me a whole quarter of an hour to get her to come with me. They had promised, she said, to roast her some apples this morning. I have had to put two in my pocket and give her my solemn word that I would roast them here on the hearth.”

“But I’m going to roast them myself,” replied Lucy; “I know quite well how to do it.”

As soon as her father had put her down on the carpet, in the room upstairs, she toddled round her mother until she had succeeded in thrusting her hand to the bottom of the pocket in her skirt. When she had got the two apples, she stuck them on to the point of a knife, and bent down as seriously as could be before the fire. She cleared a little place in the cinders, put the fruit on to the rib, and then set down to watch them, never taking her eyes off them. Her big piece of cake she had carefully placed on her knees.

William and Madeleine smiled as they looked at her. The thoughtful look of a busy housewife which she assumed highly amused them. They had such need to seek for rest in the innocent ways of this child after the agitations to which they had been subject! They would willingly have played with her, so that they might forget the past and pretend to be still little and innocent themselves. Lucy’s childish serenity, and the fresh fragrance of her breath, softened their hearts and shed around them a balmy tranquillity. And they were full of hope, telling themselves that the future would be peaceful and pure; the future was contained in this dear creature, this good angel of peace and purity.

They had sat down at the little table and were eating with good appetites. They even ventured to speak of the morrow, making plans, and already seeing their daughter grown up, married and happy. The memory of James had been driven away by the child.

“Your apples are burning,” said Madeleine laughing.

“Oh, no! they are not,” replied Lucy, “I am going to toast my cake.”

She had raised her head, and was looking, at her mother with a serious expression which made her features prematurely old. When she was not smiling, her lips became firm, almost harsh, and there was a slight contraction of the eyebrows. William looked at her, and gradually grew pale as he examined her with increasing curiosity.

“What is the matter with you?” asked Madeleine in an uneasy tone.

“Nothing,” he replied.

And he still continued to gaze on Lucy, unable to take his eyes from her, and leaning back in his chair, as if to avoid a sight which frightened him. There was an expression of restrained, terrible suffering in his ‘face. He even vaguely waved his hand, as if he were trying to put the child aside. Madeleine, alarmed at his paleness, and unable to understand the cause of this agitation, pushed the little table back and came and sat on the arm of his chair.

“Tell me,” she said, “what is the matter with you?
We were so peaceful — You were smiling just now — Why, William, I thought our happiness had returned, and that we were beginning a new life. Tell me the bad thoughts that are coming back to your mind. I will send them away, I will make you better. I do want to be happy.”

He shook his head and trembled.

“Look at Lucy,” he said in a whisper, as if he were afraid somebody might hear him.

The child, still seated on the carpet, in front of the fireplace, was toasting her cake quite seriously with a fork. With contracted lips and frowning eyebrows, she seemed quite absorbed in the importance of her work.

“Well, what is there!” asked Madeleine.

“Don’t you see?” replied William in a voice more and more changed.

“I don’t see anything.”

Then the young fellow hid his face in his hands and wept. At last he appeared to make an effort and stammered:

“
She is like James.”

Madeleine shuddered. Her eyes, dilated with frenzy, were fixed on her daughter with an anxiety which caused her whole body to tremble. William was right; Lucy bore a faint resemblance to James, and this resemblance became quite striking when the child pursed her mouth and brow. This half-frown like that of a practical man, was the usual expression on the doctor’s face. The young mother refused for the moment to acknowledge this terrible truth.

“You are mistaken,” she murmured. “Lucy is like me. We should have noticed what, you say before now, if it really was so.”

She avoided the mention of James’s name. But William felt her shuddering by his side, and he answered:

“No, no, I am not mistaken. You know it is so — The child is growing, by and by she will be his exact image. I have never seen this serious look on her face before — I am going mad.”

He really was losing his head, wiping the cold sweat which flowed down his temples, and holding his brow with his hands as if to prevent it from splitting. His wife did not dare to speak; she leaned on his shoulder, unable to hold herself up, and continuing to look at Lucy who paid no attention to what was going on around her. Her apples were hissing, and her smoking cake was putting on a lovely brown colour.

“Were you thinking of him?” asked William in a hollow voice.

“I thinking of him?” stammered Madeleine.

She saw what he meant. He thought that she had evoked the memory of James, at the moment when she was conceiving Lucy between his arms. The nightmares of the young husband were springing up again in his distracted brain; he was thinking again of that strange moral adultery of which his wife must have rendered herself guilty, in allowing her imagination to accept her husband’s kisses for her lover’s. Hence, the resemblance of her daughter to this lover. Now, he had a proof; he could no longer doubt the odious part that he had played. His child was not his; she was the fruit of Madeleine’s shameful connexion with a phantom. When the young wife had guessed these accusations in his wild look, she went on:

“Why, it is monstrous, what you are thinking of. Be reasonable, and don’t make me more infamous than I am. I have never thought of this man, when I was with you.”

“Lucy is like him,” repeated William pitilessly.

Madeleine wrung her hands.

“I don’t know how it is,” she said. “Fate is against me. Oh! I have never, never done what you think. It is vile.”

William shrugged his shoulders. His obstinacy was the unfeeling obstinacy of suffering. The thought that Lucy’s resemblance to her mother’s first lover was a pretty frequent case, depending on certain physiological laws as yet unknown, could not occur to him, in such a moment of anguish. No such explanation came to relieve his tortured mind. Madeleine’s whole nature was indignant. She would have wished to persuade him of her innocence, but she saw with despair that it was impossible to give a proof He was accusing her thoughts, and she had only protestations and adjurations to defend herself with. For some minutes, they both preserved a silence full of sobs and suppressed cries.

“
Oh! my apples are done!” suddenly said little Lucy.

Up to this time she had sat in a meditative attitude of ecstasy, silenced by the sight of her apples and her cake. She then rose, clapping her hands, and took a plate from the table, and went back in order to place her apples tidily on it. But they were so hot that she was obliged to wait. She sat down again on the carpet watching them smoke with a longing that made her from time to time touch them with the tips of her fingers. When they seemed all right for eating, she was seized with a scruple. She reflected that perhaps it would be the proper thing to offer some to her parents. There was a short struggle between her greediness and her generosity; then she approached her father and held out the plate.

“
Will you have some, papa!
”
she asked in a hesitating voice that craved a refusal.

Since she had been attending to her cooking, with the busy look of a woman overwhelmed with work, she had not raised her eyes. When she saw her father weeping and looking at her in a despondent way, she became quite serious. She put her plate on the ground, and continued:

“You are crying, you have not been good!”

She went across to Guillaume, laid her little hands on his knees and raised herself on tip-toe, with the obvious idea of using an arm of the chair to climb up to his face. The sight of her parents so sad alarmed her not a little, and she did not know whether to laugh or to burst into tears too. For a moment she stood there, worried, looking up at her father with an expression of tender sympathy. Then she held out her hands to him.

“Take me,” she cried, in the special little wheedling voice she knew how to assume.

But he merely stared at her, leaning back, paler than ever, shivering all over. How like Jacques she was, especially when grave like this! Her little hands seemed to burn his knees. He wanted her out of the way, not to torment himself any more, studying her every feature. But Lucie had a clear idea what she wanted. This was to put her arms round her Daddy’s neck and comfort him. At the same time, she was beginning to feel rather frightened, and would have had nothing against taking refuge in his arms. And when she had asked him to pick her up a number of times and saw he had no intention of doing so, she tried to clamber up, and had already succeeded in raising herself up on her elbows, when Guillaume completely lost his head and suddenly thrust her from him, with some violence. The child staggered, then fell back, landing with a bump on her bottom. The carpet softened the fall. She did not even cry at once. She was so astonished that she merely stared at her father, with terrified surprise. Again she knit her little lips and frowned, exactly like Jacques.

Seeing the child fall, Madeleine rushed to her. The little one’s head had nearly hit the edge of the fireside table.

“Oh, Guillaume!” she cried. “You are cruel! I did not know you were so evil.... Take it out on me, if you like, but not on this poor child.”

She clutched Lucie to her bosom, and now the child cried, sobbing desperately, as if Guillaume had struck her hard. In fact, Lucie had come to no harm, but it was enough to be pitied, for her to think it her duty to scream her head off, while her mother strode up and down, with her in her arms, trying to soothe her, telling her it was nothing, telling her it was all well again, kissing her little cheeks noisily.

Guillaume was at once stabbed by remorse for his brutality. Indeed, the instant he saw Lucie staggering away, he himself had begun to sob with mingled shame and grief. Had he then now come to the murder of little children? His gentle nature was outraged by the mere thought, and he felt the pangs which made him so touchy and so rough more fiercely than ever. At the thought that little Lucie’s head might have crashed against the corner of the table, he felt his blood chill, as if he had indeed been a murderer. At the same time, little Lucie’s sobs exasperated him and Madeleine’s kisses seemed monstrous. It even came into his mind that as she kissed the child she must feel she was kissing Jacques. This last fantastic notion was the last straw. He flung himself broken on to the bed and hid his head in a pillow, to see and hear no more, and from now on lay there, utterly defeated, without stirring.

But sleep did not come to him. Despite himself, he could hear Madeleine prowling about. Though his eyes were closed, his night was shot with lightning flashes constantly revealing those pursed-up lips of his child, those tight-knit lips, that frowning brow. Never again would he be able to bring himself to kiss the infant face, which at instants could assume all the gravity of a grown man. Never, without frightful suffering, would he be able to see his wife fondle that fair head. He had no daughter now, there was no longer any living bond between him and Madeleine, and his last hope of salvation had been transformed to supreme pain. From now on it would be silly even to try again to achieve happiness. Like a death- knell these thoughts clanged in his head, unhinged by suffering, till at last despair wore him out completely, and he slept.

When he wakened, it was still pitch dark. He got up, all aches and pains, wondering what could have made him so utterly exhausted, and then, all at once, it came back to him, and again he suffered, but now with a suffering which was indeed grim. The crisis was over, all he felt now was dull, hopeless exhaustion. There was no candle lit, only the yellowish glimmer of the hearth to light the room with its ponderous shadows. He caught sight of Madeleine. She lay stretched out in one of the armchairs, beside the fire. Eyes wide open, she was staring fixedly at him. Lucie was no longer there. Madeleine must have taken her back to the farm. Guillaume did not ask. He seemed to have forgotten she existed.

“What is the time?” he asked his wife.

“Eight,” she replied, calmly. There was a brief silence.

“Have you slept?” he asked, again.

“Yes, a little.”

It was true, Madeleine had gone off for a few minutes. But what an endless, crushing afternoon it had been. She had gone through terrible moments between these four walls where formerly she had slept so peacefully. She was resigned now. How to combat her fate she had no idea. “I shall kill myself tomorrow, if it has to be,” she told herself, and the certainty of being able thus to escape shame and suffering, if she wished, almost completely restored her peace of mind. She spoke in a hushed voice now, like a woman, dying and resigned who, seeing that things can never be worse than they have hitherto been, surrenders herself to her fate as a relief.

Guillaume walked up and down for some moments, then drew the curtains from the windows. It was brighter outside. Across the fields he could see the dark mass of
Noiraude.
Only the ground-floor windows were lighted. Jacques must have left. He went up to his wife, still seated by the fire. He seemed to weigh things up for a moment, hesitant, then at last he spoke.

“We’ll go to Paris for a month.”

She showed no astonishment, hardly looked up.

“We’ll leave in an hour’s time,” he went on.

“Very well,” was all she said.

What did it matter to her whether she went to Paris or stayed at
Noiraude
? Would her running sore not bring her the same pain wherever she went? She realized that Guillaume wanted to avoid seeing Lucie for a time, and she approved of this search of oblivion. Indeed, a moment later this thought of going away somewhere awakened in her a faint hope of healing her sores. Her first acceptance of the idea was entirely passive, but a few moments later she seized on the idea as a last chance of achieving salvation.