THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя

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СКАЧАТЬ got quietly out of bed, with infinite precautions, so as not to wake William. When she had put her feet on the carpet, she looked at him uneasily, dreading lest he should ask her where she was going. But he was asleep, his eyes still full of tears. Then, she went and looked for the night-lamp and passed into the sitting-room, trembling when the floor creaked beneath her bare feet.

      She walked straight to the album, opened it on a little table, and sat down before James’s portrait. It was James that she came to look for. Her shoulders covered with her loose hair, wrapping herself up shiveringly in her long nightdress, she gazed long at the portrait in the yellow flickering light of the lamp. A deep silence fell around her, and as she listened, starting with sudden and groundless fears, she could hear nothing but William’s feverish breathing in the next room.

      James no longer appeared to her to have his mocking look of the morning. His bare neck and arms, and his open shirt no longer irritated her memories. The man was dead; his portrait had assumed an indefinable softened expression of friendship and Madeleine felt soothed as she gazed on him. He was smiling at her with his old cordial smile, and even his careless attitude touched her deeply. The young fellow, astride on a chair, smoking his clay pipe, seemed to be forgiving her goodnaturedly. He was as she had known him, a good fellow in death; he looked as if she had opened the door of their room in the Rue Soufflot, and James in his lighthearted, offhand way was getting forgiveness for his peccadillos by his gay spirits.

      Her tears became less bitter, she forgot herself in the contemplation of him who was no more. Henceforth this portrait would be a relic, and she thought she had nothing to fear from it. Then, she remembered her struggles of the morning, her indecision, her anxiety to know what to do. Poor James, at the moment of her distress at seeing him rise up between herself and her lover, had seemed to have sent her the news of his death to tell her to live in peace. He would come no more to disturb her in her new love; he seemed to authorise her to bury deep in her heart the secret of their intimacy. Why make William suffer? and why not seek for happiness again? She ought to keep silent out of pity, out of affection. James’s portrait murmured: “Go, try to be happy, my child. I am no longer near you. I will never appear before you as your living shame. Your lover is a child. I have befriended him, and I implore you to befriend him in your turn. If you are good, just think of me sometimes.”

      Madeleine’s mind was made up. She would say nothing, she would not be more cruel than fate which had wished to conceal her first lover’s name from William. Besides, had he not said so himself? James’s memory would live in his mind, and it must live there elevated and serene. It would be doing wrong to speak. When she had sworn to preserve silence, it seemed to her that the portrait thanked her for her resolution.

      She kissed the likeness.

      Day was breaking when she went back to bed. William, worn out, was still slumbering. She fell asleep at last, comforted, nursed by distant hope. They would forget this day of anguish, they would come back to their beloved state of bliss and love.

      But their dream was over. The peacefulness of their first acquaintance was never more to lull them in their retreat in the Rue de Boulogne. During the days that followed, the rueful phantom of the shipwreck haunted the house, casting around them a gloomy sadness. They forgot their kisses, they would sit for a whole morning side by side, hardly saying a word, absorbed in their sad memories. James’s death had entered into their genial solitude like an icy blast; now they shuddered, and it seemed to there as if the little rooms, where they had lived the day before on each other’s knees, were large, dilapidated and exposed to every wind. The silence and the seclusion which they had sought, caused them a vague feeling of terror. They found themselves too lonely. One day, William could not restrain a cruel remark.

      “This house is really like a grave,” he exclaimed, “it is enough to stifle one.”

      He was sorry for it directly he had spoken, and, taking Madeleine’s hand, he added:

      “Forgive me. I shall forget him, and I will be yours again.” He was in earnest, but he was not aware that the same dream rarely comes twice. When they had got over their dejection, they had lost the blind confidence of their early acquaintance. Madeleine especially was quite changed. She had just evoked the past, and she could no longer surrender herself to William’s embraces like one who knew nothing. Life had inflicted a wound on her, it would do so again, and she must, she thought, be on her guard against the wounds that threatened her. Before, she hardly thought of the shame attached to her title of mistress; it seemed to her natural to be loved, she herself loved, smilingly, forgetting the world. Now, her pride had been hurt, she was feeling again the anguish she had felt in the Rue Soufflot, and she looked upon her lover as an enemy who was robbing her of her self-respect. There was a something which made her feel that she was not in her proper sphere in the Rue de Boulogne. The thought, “I am a kept woman,” presented itself to her in all its nakedness and made her burn like a hot iron; she rushed off, and shut herself up in a room, and there wept bitterly, almost heartbroken. William often made her presents, for he was fond of giving. At the beginning she had received these presents with the joy of a child at the gift of a plaything. The value of the object made little difference. She was happy that her lover was constantly thinking of her, and she accepted jewels as mere keepsakes. After the shock which awoke her from her dream, she was strangely troubled at seeing herself dressed in robes of silk and adorned with diamonds that she had not paid for herself. Her life from that time was a continual bitterness, for she was hurt at the sight of this luxury which did not belong to her. She was pained by the lacework and the softness of her bed, and by the rich furniture in the house. She looked upon everything about her as the price of her shame.

      “I am selling myself,” she would think sometimes, with a horrible oppression at her heart.

      William, on one of their gloomy days, brought her a bracelet. She grew pale at the sight of the jewel and did not utter a word.

      The young man, astonished not to see her fling her arms round his neck, as in the old days, said to her gently:

      “You don’t like this bracelet, perhaps?”

      She was silent for a moment; then in a trembling voice she said:

      “My dear, you spend a lot of money on me. You do wrong. I don’t want all these presents and I should love you quite as much if you gave me nothing.”

      She restrained a sob. William drew her quietly towards him, surprised and vexed, yet not daring to divine the cause of her paleness.

      “What is the matter with you?” he answered. “Madeleine, those are horrid thoughts — Are you not my wife?”

      She looked him in the face, and her steady, almost stern gaze, said plainly: “No, I am not your wife.” Had she dared, she would have proposed to him to pay for her food and dress out of her little income. Since her fall, her pride had become refractory; she felt that everything wounded her feelings and that irritated her all the more.

      A few days after, William brought her a dress and she said to him with a nervous smile:

      “Thank you; but, in future, let me buy these things. You don’t understand anything about them, and they cheat you.”

      From that time she made her purchases herself. When her lover wanted to refund her the money that she had spent, she contrived a little plot to refuse it. Thus she was always on her guard, always making little attacks to defend her pride which was so easily wounded by a trifle. The truth was that life was beginning to prove unbearable to her in the Rue de Boulogne. She loved William, but she had made, herself so wretched by her daily revolts, that she would fancy that she did not love him, though this could not prevent her from feeling greatly distressed when she thought that he might leave her as James had done. Then she СКАЧАТЬ