The old woman recovered herself first, and stammered, without advancing a step: "Is"t thou, boy?"
The young fellow answered: "Yes, it is I, mother," and stepping up to her, kissed her on both cheeks with a son"s hearty smack. Then he rubbed noses with his father, who had taken off his cap, a very tall, black silk cap, made Rouen fashion, like those worn by cattle dealers.
Then George said: "This is my wife," and the two country people looked at Madeleine. They looked at her as one looks at a phenomenon, with an uneasy fear, united in the father with a species of approving satisfaction, in the mother with a kind of jealous enmity.
The man, who was of a joyous nature and inspired by a loveliness born of sweet cider and alcohol, grew bolder, and asked, with a twinkle in the corner of his eyes: "I may kiss her all the same?"
"Certainly," replied his son, and Madeleine, ill at ease, held out both cheeks to the sounding smacks of the rustic, who then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The old woman, in her turn, kissed her daughter-in-law with a hostile reserve. No, this was not the daughter-in-law of her dreams; the plump, fresh housewife, rosy-cheeked as an apple, and round as a brood mare. She looked like a hussy, the fine lady with her furbelows and her musk. For the old girl all perfumes were musk.
They set out again, walking behind the carriage which bore the trunk of the newly-wedded pair. The old fellow took his son by the arm, and keeping him a little in the rear of the others, asked with interest: "Well, how goes business, lad?"
"Pretty fair."
"So much the better. Has thy wife any money?"
"Forty thousand francs," answered George.
His father gave vent to an admiring whistle, and could only murmur, "Dang it!" so overcome was he by the mention of the sum. Then he added, in a tone of serious conviction: "Dang it all, she"s a fine woman!" For he found her to his taste, and he had pa.s.sed for a good judge in his day.
Madeleine and her mother-in-law were walking side by side without exchanging a word. The two men rejoined them. They reached the village, a little roadside village formed of half-a-score houses on each side of the highway, cottages and farm buildings, the former of brick and the latter of clay, these covered with thatch and those with slates. Father Duroy"s tavern, "The Bellevue," a bit of a house consisting of a ground floor and a garret, stood at the beginning of the village to the left. A pine branch above the door indicated, in ancient fashion, that thirsty folk could enter.
The things were laid for lunch, in the common room of the tavern, on two tables placed together and covered with two napkins. A neighbor, come in to help to serve the lunch, bowed low on seeing such a fine lady appear; and then, recognizing George, exclaimed: "Good Lord! is that the youngster?"
He replied gayly: "Yes, it is I, Mother Brulin," and kissed her as he had kissed his father and mother. Then turning to his wife, he said: "Come into our room and take your hat off."
He ushered her through a door to the right into a cold-looking room with tiled floor, white-washed walls, and a bed with white cotton curtains. A crucifix above a holy-water stoup, and two colored pictures, one representing Paul and Virginia under a blue palm tree, and the other Napoleon the First on a yellow horse, were the only ornaments of this clean and dispiriting apartment.
As soon as they were alone he kissed Madeleine, saying: "Thanks, Made. I am glad to see the old folks again. When one is in Paris one does not think about it; but when one meets again, it gives one pleasure all the same."
But his father, thumbing the part.i.tion with his fist, cried out: "Come along, come along, the soup is ready," and they had to sit down to table.
It was a long, countrified repast, with a succession of ill-a.s.sorted dishes, a sausage after a leg of mutton, and an omelette after a sausage. Father Duroy, excited by cider and some gla.s.ses of wine, turned on the tap of his choicest jokes--those he reserved for great occasions of festivity, s.m.u.tty adventures that had happened, as he maintained, to friends of his. George, who knew all these stories, laughed, nevertheless, intoxicated by his native air, seized on by the innate love of one"s birthplace and of spots familiar from childhood, by all the sensations and recollections once more renewed, by all the objects of yore seen again once more; by trifles, such as the mark of a knife on a door, a broken chair recalling some pretty event, the smell of the soil, the breath of the neighboring forest, the odors of the dwelling, the gutter, the dunghill.
Mother Duroy did not speak, but remained sad and grim, watching her daughter-in-law out of the corner of her eye, with hatred awakened in her heart--the hatred of an old toiler, an old rustic with fingers worn and limbs bent by hard work--for the city madame, who inspired her with the repulsion of an accursed creature, an impure being, created for idleness and sin. She kept getting up every moment to fetch the dishes or fill the gla.s.ses with cider, sharp and yellow from the decanter, or sweet, red, and frothing from the bottles, the corks of which popped like those of ginger beer.
Madeleine scarcely ate or spoke. She wore her wonted smile upon her lips, but it was a sad and resigned one. She was downcast. Why? She had wanted to come. She had not been unaware that she was going among country folk--poor country folk. What had she fancied them to be--she, who did not usually dream? Did she know herself? Do not women always hope for something that is not? Had she fancied them more poetical? No; but perhaps better informed, more n.o.ble, more affectionate, more ornamental. Yet she did not want them high-bred, like those in novels.
Whence came it, then, that they shocked her by a thousand trifling, imperceptible details, by a thousand indefinable coa.r.s.enesses, by their very nature as rustics, by their words, their gestures, and their mirth?
She recalled her own mother, of whom she never spoke to anyone--a governess, brought up at Saint Denis--seduced, and died from poverty and grief when she, Madeleine, was twelve years old. An unknown hand had had her brought up. Her father, no doubt. Who was he? She did not exactly know, although she had vague suspicions.
The lunch still dragged on. Customers were now coming in and shaking hands with the father, uttering exclamations of wonderment on seeing his son, and slyly winking as they scanned the young wife out of the corner of their eye, which was as much as to say: "Hang it all, she"s not a duffer, George Duroy"s wife." Others, less intimate, sat down at the wooden tables, calling for "A pot," "A jugful," "Two brandies," "A raspail," and began to play at dominoes, noisily rattling the little bits of black and white bone. Mother Duroy kept pa.s.sing to and fro, serving the customers, with her melancholy air, taking money, and wiping the tables with the corner of her blue ap.r.o.n.
The smoke of clay pipes and sou cigars filled the room. Madeleine began to cough, and said: "Suppose we go out; I cannot stand it."
They had not quite finished, and old Duroy was annoyed at this. Then she got up and went and sat on a chair outside the door, while her father-in-law and her husband were finishing their coffee and their nip of brandy.
George soon rejoined her. "Shall we stroll down as far as the Seine?"
said he.
She consented with pleasure, saying: "Oh, yes; let us go."
They descended the slope, hired a boat at Croisset, and pa.s.sed the rest of the afternoon drowsily moored under the willows alongside an island, soothed to slumber by the soft spring weather, and rocked by the wavelets of the river. Then they went back at nightfall.
The evening"s repast, eaten by the light of a tallow candle, was still more painful for Madeleine than that of the morning. Father Duroy, who was half drunk, no longer spoke. The mother maintained her dogged manner. The wretched light cast upon the gray walls the shadows of heads with enormous noses and exaggerated movements. A great hand was seen to raise a pitchfork to a mouth opening like a dragon"s maw whenever any one of them, turning a little, presented a profile to the yellow, flickering flame.
As soon as dinner was over, Madeleine drew her husband out of the house, in order not to stay in this gloomy room, always reeking with an acrid smell of old pipes and spilt liquor. As soon as they were outside, he said: "You are tired of it already."
She began to protest, but he stopped her, saying: "No, I saw it very plainly. If you like, we will leave to-morrow."
"Very well," she murmured.
They strolled gently onward. It was a mild night, the deep, all-embracing shadow of which seemed filled with faint murmurings, rustlings, and breathings. They had entered a narrow path, overshadowed by tall trees, and running between two belts of underwood of impenetrable blackness.
"Where are we?" asked she.
"In the forest," he replied.
"Is it a large one?"
"Very large; one of the largest in France."
An odor of earth, trees, and moss--that fresh yet old scent of the woods, made up of the sap of bursting buds and the dead and moldering foliage of the thickets, seemed to linger in the path. Raising her head, Madeleine could see the stars through the tree-tops; and although no breeze stirred the boughs, she could yet feel around her the vague quivering of this ocean of leaves. A strange thrill shot through her soul and fleeted across her skin--a strange pain gripped her at the heart. Why, she did not understand. But it seemed to her that she was lost, engulfed, surrounded by perils, abandoned by everyone; alone, alone in the world beneath this living vault quivering there above her.
She murmured: "I am rather frightened. I should like to go back."
"Well, let us do so."
"And--we will leave for Paris to-morrow?"
"Yes, to-morrow."
"To-morrow morning?"
"To-morrow morning, if you like."
They returned home. The old folks had gone to bed. She slept badly, continually aroused by all the country sounds so new to her--the cry of the screech owl, the grunting of a pig in a sty adjoining the house, and the noise of a c.o.c.k who kept on crowing from midnight. She was up and ready to start at daybreak.
When George announced to his parents that he was going back they were both astonished; then they understood the origin of his wish.
The father merely said: "Shall I see you again soon?"
"Yes, in the course of the summer."
"So much the better."
The old woman growled: "I hope you won"t regret what you have done."
He left them two hundred francs as a present to a.s.suage their discontent, and the carriage, which a boy had been sent in quest of, having made its appearance at about ten o"clock, the newly-married couple embraced the old country folk and started off once more.
As they were descending the hill Duroy began to laugh.