She did not answer, but seemed racked by some deep and dreadful grief.
Her husband tried to take her hands from her face, but she resisted him, repeating:
"No, no, no."
He appealed to his son.
"But what is the matter with her? I never saw her like this."
"It is nothing," said Pierre, "she is a little hysterical."
And he felt as if it were a comfort to him to see her suffering thus, as if this anguish mitigated his resentment and diminished his mother"s load of opprobrium. He looked at her as a judge satisfied with his day"s work.
Suddenly she rose, rushed to the door with such a swift impulse that it was impossible to forestall or to stop her, and ran off to lock herself into her room.
Roland and the doctor were left face to face.
"Can you make head or tail of it?" said the father.
"Oh, yes," said the other. "It is a little nervous disturbance, not alarming or surprising; such attacks may very likely recur from time to time."
They did in fact recur, almost every day; and Pierre seemed to bring them on with a word, as if he had the clue to her strange and new disorder. He would discern in her face a lucid interval of peace and with the willingness of a torturer would, with a word, revive the anguish that had been lulled for a moment.
But he, too, was suffering, as cruelly as she. It was dreadful pain to him that he could no longer love her nor respect her, that he must put her on the rack. When he had laid bare the bleeding wound which he had opened in her woman"s, her mother"s heart, when he felt how wretched and desperate she was, he would go out alone, wander about the town, so torn by remorse, so broken by pity, so grieved to have thus hammered her with his scorn as her son, that he longed to fling himself into the sea and put an end to it all by drowning himself.
Ah! How gladly, now, would he have forgiven her. But he could not, for he was incapable of forgetting. If only he could have desisted from making her suffer; but this again he could not, suffering as he did himself. He went home to his meals, full of relenting resolutions; then, as soon as he saw her, as soon as he met her eye--formerly so clear and frank, now so evasive, frightened, and bewildered--he struck at her in spite of himself, unable to suppress the treacherous words which would rise to his lips.
The disgraceful secret, known to them alone, goaded him up against her. It was as a poison flowing in his veins and giving him an impulse to bite like a mad dog.
And there was no one in the way now to hinder his reading her; Jean lived almost entirely in his new apartments, and only came home to dinner and to sleep every night at his father"s.
He frequently observed his brother"s bitterness and violence, and attributed them to jealousy. He promised himself that some day he would teach him his place and give him a lesson, for life at home was becoming very painful as a result of these constant scenes. But as he now lived apart he suffered less from this brutal conduct, and his love of peace prompted him to patience. His good fortune, too, had turned his head, and he scarcely paused to think of anything which had no direct interest for himself. He would come in full of fresh little anxieties, full of the cut of a morning-coat, of the shape of a felt hat, of the proper size for his visiting-cards. And he talked incessantly of all the details of his house--the shelves fixed in his bedroom cupboard to keep linen on, the pegs to be put up in the entrance hall, the electric bells contrived to prevent illicit visitors to his lodgings.
It had been settled that on the day when he should take up his abode there they should make an excursion to Saint Jouin, and return after dining there, to drink tea in his rooms. Roland wanted to go by water, but the distance and the uncertainty of reaching it in a sailing-boat if there should be a head-wind, made them reject his plan, and a break was hired for the day.
They started by ten to get there to breakfast. The dusty high road lay across the plain of Normandy, which, by its gentle undulations, dotted with farms embowered in trees, wears the aspect of an endless park. In the vehicle, as it jogged on at the slow trot of a pair of heavy horses, sat the four Rolands, Mme. Rosemilly, and Captain Beausire, all silent, deafened by the rumble of the wheels, and with their eyes shut to keep out the clouds of dust.
It was harvest-time. Alternating with the dark hue of clover and the raw green of beetroot, the yellow corn lighted up the landscape with gleams of pale gold; the fields looked as if they had drunk in the sunshine which poured down on them. Here and there the reapers were at work, and in the plots where the scythe had been put in the men might be seen see-sawing as they swept the level soil with the broad, wing-shaped blade.
After a two-hours" drive the break turned off to the left, past a windmill at work--a melancholy, gray wreck, half rotten and doomed, the last survivor of its ancient race; then it went into a pretty inn yard, and drew up at the door of a smart little house, a hostelry famous in those parts.
The mistress, well known as "La belle Alphonsine," came smiling to the threshold, and held out her hand to the two ladies who hesitated to take the high step.
Some strangers were already at breakfast under a tent by a gra.s.s plot shaded by apple trees--Parisians, who had come from Etretat; and from the house came sounds of voices, laughter, and the clatter of plates and pans.
They were eating in a room, as the outer dining halls were all full.
Roland suddenly caught sight of some shrimping nets hanging against the wall.
"Ah! ha!" cried he, "you catch prawns here?"
"Yes," replied Beausire. "Indeed it is the place on all the coast where most are taken."
"First rate! Suppose we try to catch some after breakfast."
As it happened it would be low tide at three o"clock, so it was settled that they should all spend the afternoon among the rocks, hunting prawns.
They made a light breakfast, as a precaution against the tendency of blood to the head when they should have their feet in the water. They also wished to reserve an appet.i.te for dinner, which had been ordered on a grand scale and to be ready at six o"clock, when they came in.
Roland could not sit still for impatience. He wanted to buy the nets specially constructed for fishing prawns, not unlike those used for catching b.u.t.terflies in the country. Their name on the French coast is _lanets_; they are netted bags on a circular wooden frame, at the end of a long pole. Alphonsine, still smiling, was happy to lend them.
Then she helped the two ladies to make an impromptu change of toilet, so as not to spoil their dresses. She offered them skirts, coa.r.s.e worsted stockings and hemp shoes. The men took off their socks and went to the shoemaker"s to buy wooden shoes instead.
Then they set out, the nets over their shoulders and creels on their backs. Mme. Rosemilly was quite sweet in this costume, with an unexpected charm of countrified audacity. The skirt which Alphonsine had lent her, coquettishly tucked up and firmly st.i.tched so as to allow of her running and jumping fearlessly on the rocks, displayed her ankle and lower calf--the firm calf of a strong and agile little woman. Her dress was loose to give freedom to her movements, and to cover her head she had found an enormous garden hat of coa.r.s.e yellow straw with an extravagantly broad brim; and to this, a bunch of tamarisk pinned in to c.o.c.k it on one side, gave a very dashing and military effect.
Jean, since he had come into his fortune, had asked himself every day whether or no he should marry her. Each time he saw her he made up his mind to ask her to be his wife, and then, as soon as he was alone again, he considered that by waiting he would have time to reflect.
She was now less rich than he, for she had but twelve thousand francs a year; but it was in real estate, in farms and lands near the docks in Havre; and this by-and-by might be worth a great deal. Their fortunes were thus approximately equal, and certainly the young widow attracted him greatly.
As he watched her walking in front of him that day he said to himself:
"I must really decide; I cannot do better, I am sure."
They went down a little ravine, sloping from the village to the cliff, and the cliff, at the end of this comb, rose about eighty meters above the sea. Framed between the green slopes to the right and left, a great triangle of silvery blue water could be seen in the distance, and a sail, scarcely visible, looked like an insect out there. The sky, pale with light, was so merged into one with the water that it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began; and the two women, walking in front of the men, stood out against this bright background, their shapes clearly defined in their closely-fitting dresses.
Jean, with a sparkle in his eye, watched the smart ankle, the neat leg, the supple waist, and the coquettish broad hat of Mme. Rosemilly as they fled away before him. And this flight fired his ardor, urging him on to the sudden determination which comes to hesitating and timid natures. The warm air, fragrant with seacoast odors--gorse, clover and thyme, mingling with the salt smell of the rocks at low tide--excited him still more, mounting to his brain; and every moment he felt a little more determined, at every step, at every glance he cast at the alert figure; he made up his mind to delay no longer, to tell her that he loved her and hoped to marry her. The prawn-fishing would favor him by affording him an opportunity; and it would be a pretty scene too, a pretty spot for love-making--their feet in a pool of limpid water while they watched the long feelers of the shrimps lurking under the wrack.
When they had reached the end of the comb and the edge of cliff, they saw a little footpath slanting down the face of it; and below them, about half-way between the sea and the foot of the precipice, an amazing chaos of enormous boulders tumbled over and piled one above the other on a sort of gra.s.sy and undulating plain which extended as far as they could see to the southward, formed by an ancient landslip.
On this long shelf of brushwood and gra.s.s, disrupted, as it seemed, by the shocks of a volcano, the fallen rocks seemed the wreck of a great ruined city which had once looked out on the ocean, sheltered by the long white wall of the overhanging cliff.
"That is fine!" exclaimed Mme. Rosemilly, standing still. Jean had come up with her, and with a beating heart offered his hand to help her down the narrow steps cut in the rock.
They went on in front, while Beausire, squaring himself on his little legs, gave his arm to Mme. Roland, who felt giddy at the gulf before her.
The two young people who led the way, went fast till on a sudden they saw, by the side of a wooden bench which afforded a resting place about half-way down the slope, a thread of clear water, springing from a crevice in the cliff. It fell into a hollow as large as a washing basin which it had worn in the stone; then, falling in a cascade, hardly two feet high, it trickled across the footpath, which it had carpeted with cresses, and was lost among the briars and gra.s.s on the raised shelf where the boulders were piled.
"Oh, I am so thirsty!" cried Mme. Rosemilly.
But how could she drink? She tried to catch the water in her hand, but it slipped away between her fingers. Jean had an idea; he placed a stone on the path and on this she knelt down to put her lips to the spring itself, which was thus on the same level.
When she raised her head, covered with myriads of tiny drops, sprinkled all over her face, her hair, her eyelashes, and her dress, Jean bent over her and murmured: "How pretty you look!"
She answered in the tone in which she might have scolded a child:
"Will you be quiet!"
These were the first words of flirtation they had ever exchanged.
"Come," said Jean, much agitated. "Let us go on before they come up with us."
For in fact they could see quite near them now, Captain Beausire"s back as he came down, stern foremost, so as to give both hands to Mme.
Roland; and further up, further off, Roland still letting himself slip, lowering himself on his hams and clinging on with both his hand and elbows at the speed of a tortoise, Pierre keeping in front of him to watch his movements.