Chapter 17

It was all the same to him whether he went to the right or left. He neither wanted anything nor had he the energy to do anything. He was surprised to see the movement around him--people who were hurrying along, walking quickly, on their way to something. He had had neither aim nor object in life for the last few hours. It seemed to him as though the world had come to an end, as though he were a dead man in the midst of the life and activity of Paris. He tried to think of anything in all that might happen to a man capable of moving him, of touching him in any way, and he could not conceive of anything which could reach to the depths of his despair.

Sometimes, as though he were answering inquiries about his daughter, he would say aloud, "Oh, yes, she is very ill!" and it was as though the words he had uttered had been said by some one else at his side. Often a work-girl without any hat, a pretty young girl with a round waist, gay and healthy with the rude health of her class, would pass by him. He would cross the street that he might not see her again. He was furious just for a minute with all these people who passed him, with all these useless lives. They were not beloved as his daughter was, and there was no need for them to go on living. He went into one of the public gardens and sat down. A child put some of its little sand-pies on to the tails of his coat; other children getting bolder approached him with all the daring of sparrows. Presently, feeling slightly embarrassed, they left their little spades, stopped playing and stood round, looking shyly and sympathetically, like so many men and women in miniature, at this tall gentleman who was so sad. M. Mauperin rose and left the garden.

His tongue was furred and his throat dry. He went into a café, and opposite him was a little girl wearing a white jacket and a straw hat. Her frock was short, showing her little firm, bare legs with their white socks. She was moving about all the time, climbing and jumping on to her father and standing straight up on his knees. She had a little cross round her neck. Every few minutes her father begged her to keep still.

M. Mauperin closed his eyes; he could see his own little daughter just as she had been at six years old. Presently he opened a review, _The Illustration_, and bent over it, trying to make himself look at the pictures, and when he reached the last page he set himself to find out one of the enigmas.

When M. Mauperin lifted his head again he wiped his face with his handkerchief. He had made out the enigma: _"Against death there is no appeal."_

XLV

The terrible existence of those who have given up hope, and who can only wait, now commenced for M. Mauperin; that life of anguish, fear and trembling, of despair and of constant shocks, when every one is listening and on the watch for death; that life when one is afraid of any noise in the house, and just as afraid of silence, afraid of every movement in the next room, afraid of the sound of voices drawing near, afraid to hear a door close, and afraid of seeing the face of the person who opens the door when one enters the house, and of whom one asks without speaking if the beloved one still lives.

As people frequently do when nursing their sick friends, he began to reproach himself bitterly. He made his sorrow still harder to bear by making himself believe that it was partly his own fault, that everything had not been done which ought to have been, that she might have been saved if only there had been a consultation earlier, if at a certain time, a certain month or day, he had only thought of something or other.

At night his restlessness in bed seemed to make his grief more wild and feverish. In the solitude, the darkness, and the silence, one thought, one vision, was with him all the time--his daughter, always his daughter. His anxiety worked on his imagination, his dread increased, and his wakefulness had all the intensity of the terrible sensation of nightmare. In the morning he was afraid to wake up, and just as a man, when half-awake, will instinctively turn over from the light, so he would do his utmost to fall asleep again, to drive away his first thoughts, not to remember anything and so escape for a moment longer from the full consciousness of the present.

Then the day came again with all its torments, and the father was obliged to control his feelings, to conquer himself, to be gay and cheerful, to reply to the smiles of the suffering girl, to answer her pitiful attempts to be gay, and to keep up her feeble illusions, her clinging to the future, with some of those heart-rending words of comfort with which dying people will delude themselves, asking as they so often do for hope from those who are with them.

She would say to him, sometimes, in that feeble, soft whisper peculiar to invalids and which dies away to a whisper, "How nice it would be to have no pain! I can tell you, I shall enjoy life as soon as I get quite well."

"Yes, indeed," he would answer, choking down his tears.

XLVI

Sick people are apt to believe that there are places where they would be better, countries which would cure them. There are certain spots and memories which come back to their mind and seem to fascinate them as an exile is fascinated by his native land, and which lull them as a child is lulled to rest in its cradle. Just as a child's fears are calmed in the arms of its nurse, so their hopes fly to a country, a garden, or a village where they were born and where surely they could not die.

Renée began to think of Morimond. She kept saying to herself that if she were once there she should get well. She felt sure, quite sure of it. This Briche house had brought her bad luck. She had been so happy at Morimond! And with this longing for change, the wish to move about which invalids get, this fancy of hers grew, and became more and more persistent. She spoke of it to her father and worried him about it. It would not make any difference to any one, she pleaded, the refinery would go along by itself, and M. Bernard, his manager, was trustworthy and would see to everything, and then they could come back in the autumn.

"When shall we start, father dear?" she kept saying, getting more and more impatient every day.

M. Mauperin gave in at last. His daughter promised him so faithfully that she would get well at Morimond that he began to believe it himself. He imagined that this sick fancy was an inspiration.

"Yes, the country will perhaps do her good," said the doctor, accustomed to these whims of dying people, who fancy that by going farther away they will succeed in throwing death off their track.

M. Mauperin promptly arranged his business matters, and the family started for Morimond.

The pleasure of setting off, the excitement of the journey, the nervous force that all this gives even to people who have no strength at all, the breeze coming in by the open window of the railway carriage kept the invalid up as far as Chaumont. She reached there without being overfatigued. M. Mauperin let her rest a day, and the following morning hired the best carriage he could get in the town and they all set out once more for Morimond. The road was bad and the journey was disagreeable and long. It began to get warm at nine o'clock, and by eleven the sun scorched the leather of the carriage. The horses breathed hard, perspired, and went along with difficulty. Mme. Mauperin was leaning back against the front cushion and dozing. M. Mauperin, seated next his daughter, held a pillow at her back, against which she fell after every little jolt. Every now and then she asked the time, and when she was told she would murmur, "No later than that!"

Towards three o'clock they were getting quite near their destination; the sky was cloudy, there was less dust, and it was cooler altogether. A water-wagtail began to fly in front of the carriage about thirty paces at a time, rising from the little heaps of stones. There were elm-trees all along the road and some of the fields were fenced round. Renée seemed to revive as one does in one's natal air. She sat up and, leaning against the door with her chin on her hand as children do when in a carriage, she looked out at everything. It was as though she were breathing in all she saw. As the carriage rolled along, she said:

"Ah, the big poplar-tree at the Hermitage is broken. The little boys used to fish for leeches in this pool--oh, there are M. Richet's rooks!"

In the little wood near the village her father had to get out and pluck a flower for her, which he could not see and which she pointed out to him growing on the edge of the ditch.

The carriage passed by the little inn, the first houses, the grocer's, the blacksmith's, the large walnut-tree, the church, the watchmaker's, who was also a dealer in curiosities, and the Pigeau farm. The villagers were out in the fields. Some children who were tormenting a wet cat stopped to see the carriage drive past. An old man, seated on a bench in front of his cottage door, with a woollen shawl wrapped round him and shivering in spite of the sun, lifted his cap. Then the horses stopped, the carriage door was opened, and a man who was waiting in front of the lodge lifted Mlle. Mauperin up in his arms.

"Oh, our poor young lady; she's no heavier than a feather!" he said.

"How do you do, Chrétiennot--how do you do, comrade?" said M. Mauperin, shaking hands with the old gardener, who had served under him in his regiment.

XLVII

The next day and the days which followed, Renée had the most delicious waking moments, when the light which was just breaking, the morning of the earth and sky, mingled--in the dawn of her thoughts--with the morning of her life. Her first memories came back to her with the first songs outdoors. The young birds woke up in their nests, awakening her childhood.

Supported and indeed almost carried by her father, she insisted on seeing everything again--the garden, the fruit-trees on the walls, the meadow in front of the house, the shady canals, the pool with its wide sheet of still water. She remembered all the trees and the garden paths again, and they seemed to her like the things one gradually recalls of a dream. Her feet found the way along paths which she used to know and which were now grown over with trees. The ruins seemed as many years older to her as she was older since she had last seen them. She remembered certain places on the grass where she had seen the shadow of her frock when as a child she had been running there. She found the spot where she had buried a little dog. It was a white one, named _Nicolas Bijou_. She had loved it dearly, and she could remember her father carrying it about in the kitchen garden after it had been washed.

There were hundreds of souvenirs, too, for her in the house. Certain corners in the rooms had the same effect on her as toys that have been stored away in a garret, and that one comes across years after. She loved to hear the sound of the mournful old weather-cock on the house-top, which had always soothed her fears and lulled her to sleep as a child.

She appeared to rouse up and to revive. The change, her natal air, and these souvenirs seemed to do her good. This improvement lasted some weeks.

One morning, her father, who was with her in the garden, was watching her. She was amusing herself with cutting away the old roses in a clump of white rose-bushes. The sunshine made its way through the straw of her large hat, and the brilliancy of the light and the softness of the shade rested on her thin little face. She moved about gaily and briskly from one rose-tree to another, and the thorns caught hold of her dress as though they wanted to play with her. At every clip of her scissors, from a branch covered with small, open roses, with pink hearts all full of life, there fell a dead earth-coloured rose which looked to M. Mauperin like the corpse of a flower.

All at once, leaving everything, Renée flung herself into her father's arms.

"Oh, papa, how I do love you!" she said, bursting into tears.

XLVIII

From that day the improvement began to disappear again. She gradually lost the healthy colour which life's last kiss had brought to her cheeks. She no longer had that delightful restlessness of the convalescent, that longing to move about which only a short time ago had made her take her father's arm constantly for a stroll. No more gay words sprang from her mind to her lips, as they had done at first when she had forgotten for a time all suffering; there was no more of the happy prattle which had been the result of returning hope. She was too languid to talk or even to answer questions.

"No, there's nothing the matter with me--I am all right;" but the words fell from her lips with an accent of pain, sadness, and resignation.

She suffered from tightness of breath now, and constantly felt a weight on her chest, which her respiration had difficulty in lifting. A sort of constraint and vague discomfort, caused by this, made itself felt throughout her whole system, attacking her nerves, taking from her all vital energy and all inclination to move about, keeping her crushed and submissive, without any strength to fight against it or to do anything.

Her father persuaded her to try the effect of a cupping-glass.

XLIX

She took off her shawl in that slow way peculiar to invalids, so slow that it seems painful. Her trembling fingers felt about for the buttons that she had to unfasten, her mother helped her to take off the flannel and cotton-wool in which she was wrapped, leaving her poor thin neck and arms bare.

She looked at her father, at the lighted candle, the twisted paper and the wine-glasses, with that dread that one feels on seeing the hot irons or fire being prepared for torturing one's flesh.

"Am I right like this?" she asked, trying to smile.

"No, you want to be in this position," answered M. Mauperin, showing her how to sit.

She turned round on her arm-chair, put her two hands on the back of it and her cheek down on her hand, pulled her legs up, crossed her feet, and, half-kneeling and half-crouching, only showed the profile of her frightened face and her bare shoulders. She looked ready for the coffin with her bony angles. Her hair, which was very loose, glided with the shadow down the hollow of her back. Her shoulder-blades projected, the joints of her spine could be counted, and the point of a poor thin little elbow appeared through the sleeves of her under-linen, which had fallen to the bend of her arm.

"Well, father?"

He was standing there, riveted to the spot, and he did not even know of what he was thinking. At the sound of his daughter's voice he picked up a glass, which he remembered belonged to a set he had bought for a dinner-party in honour of Renée's baptism. He lighted a piece of paper, threw it into the glass, and closed his eyes as he turned the glass over. Renée gave a little hiss of pain, a shudder ran through all the bones down her back, and then she said:

"Oh, well; I thought it would hurt me much more than that."

M. Mauperin took his hand from the glass and it fell to the ground; the cupping had not succeeded.

"Give me another," he said to his wife.

Mme. Mauperin handed it to him in a leisurely way.

"Give it me," he said, almost snatching it from her. His forehead was wet with perspiration, but he no longer trembled. This time the vacuum was made: the skin puckered up all round the glass and rose inside as though it were being drawn by the scrap of blackened paper.

"Oh, father! don't bear on so," said Renée, who had been holding her lips tightly together; "take your hand off."

"Why, I'm not touching it--look," said M. Mauperin, showing her his hands.

Renée's delicate white skin rose higher and higher in the glass, turning red, patchy, and violet. When once the cupping was done the glass had to be taken away again, the skin drawn to the edge on one side of the glass, and then the glass swayed backward and forward from the other side. M. Mauperin was obliged to begin again, two or three times over, and to press firmly on the skin, near as it was to the bones.

L

Disease does its work silently and makes secret ravages in the constitution. Then come those terrible outward changes which gradually destroy the beauty, efface the personality, and, with the first touches of death, transform those we love into living corpses.

Every day M. Mauperin sought for something in his daughter which he could not find--something which was no longer there. Her eyes, her smile, her gestures, her footstep, her very dress which used proudly to tell of her twenty years, the girlish vivacity which seemed to hover round her and light on others as it passed--everything about her was changing and life itself gradually leaving her. She no longer seemed to animate all that she touched. Her clothes fell loosely round her in folds as they do on old people. Her step dragged along, and the sound of her little heels was no longer heard. When she put her arms round her father's neck, she joined her hands awkwardly, her caresses had lost their pretty gracefulness. All her gestures were stiff, she moved about like a person who feels cold or who is afraid of taking up too much space. Her arms, which were generally hanging down, now looked like the wet wings of a bird. She scarcely even resembled her old self. And when she was walking in front of her father, with her bent back, her shrunken figure, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, and her dress almost falling off her, it seemed to M. Mauperin that this could not be his daughter, and as he looked at her he thought of the Renée of former days.

There was a shadow round her mouth that seemed to go inside when she smiled. The beauty spot on her hand, just by her little finger, had grown larger, and was as black as though mortification had set in.

LI

"Mother, it's Henri's birthday to-day."

"Yes, I know," said Mme. Mauperin without moving.

"Suppose we were to go to church?"

Mme. Mauperin rose and went out of the room, returning very soon with her bonnet and cape on. Half an hour later M. Mauperin was helping his daughter out of the carriage at the Maricourt church-door. Renée went to the little side-chapel, where the marble altar stood on which was the little miraculous black wooden Virgin to which she had prayed with great awe as a child. She sat down on a bench which was always there and murmured a prayer. Her mother stood near her, looking at the church and not praying at all. Renée then got up and, without taking her father's arm, walked with a step that scarcely faltered right through the church to a little side door leading into the cemetery.

"I wanted to see whether _that_ was still there," she said to her father, pointing to an old bouquet of artificial flowers among the crosses and wreaths which were hung on the tomb.

"Come, my child," said M. Mauperin; "don't stand too long. Let us go home again now."

"Oh, there's plenty of time."

There was a stone seat under the porch with a ray of sunshine falling on it.

"It's warm here," she said, laying her hand on the stone. "Put my shawl there so that I can sit down a little. I shall have the sun on my back--there."

"It isn't wise," said M. Mauperin.

"Oh, just to make me happy." When she was seated and leaning against him, she murmured in a voice as soft as a sigh, "How gay it is here."

The lime-trees, buzzing with bees, were stirring gently in the faint wind. A few fowl in the thick grass were running about, pecking and looking for food. At the foot of a wall, by the side of a plough and cart, the wheels of which were white with dry mud, on the stumps of some old trees with the bark peeled off, some little chickens were frolicking about, and some ducks were asleep, looking like balls of feathers. There seemed to be a murmur of hushed voices from the church, and the light played on the blue of the stained-glass windows. Flights of pigeons kept starting up and taking refuge in the niches of sculpture and in the holes between the old grey stones. The river could be seen and its splashing sound heard; a wild white colt bounded along to the water's edge.

"Ah!" said Renée after a few moments, "we ought to have been made of something else. Why did God make us of flesh and blood? It's frightful!"

Her eyes had fallen on some soil turned up in a corner of the cemetery, half hidden by two barrel-hoops crossed over each other and up which wild convolvulus was growing.

LII

Renée's complaint did not make her cross and capricious, nor did it cause her any of that nervous irritability so common to invalids, and which makes those who are nursing them share their suffering morally. She gave herself entirely up to her fate. Her life was ebbing away without any apparent effort on her part to hold it back or to stop it in its course. She was still affectionate and gentle. Her wishes had none of the unreasonableness of dying fancies. The darkness which was gathering round her brought peace with it. She did not fight against death, but let it come like a beautiful night closing over her white soul.

There were times, however, when Nature asserted itself within her, when her mind faltered from sheer bodily weakness, and when she listened to the stealthy progress of the disease which was gradually detaching her from her hold on life. At such times she would maintain a profound silence and would be terribly calm, remaining for a long time mute and motionless almost like a dead person. She would pass half the day in this way without even hearing the clock strike, gazing before her just beyond her feet with a steady, fixed gaze and seeing nothing at all. Her father could not even catch the expression of her eyes at such times. Her long lashes would quiver two or three times, and she would hide her eyes by letting the lids droop over them, and it seemed to him then as though she were asleep with her eyes half open. He would talk to her, search his brains for something that might interest her, and endeavour to make jokes, so that she should hear him and feel that he was there; but in the middle of his sentence his daughter's attention, her thoughts, and her intelligent look would leave him. He no longer felt the same warmth in her affection, and when he was with her he himself felt chilled now. It seemed as if disease were robbing him day by day of a little more of his daughter's heart.

LIII

Sometimes, too, Renée would let a few words slip, showing that she was mourning her fate as sick people do, words which sink to the heart and give one a chill like death itself.

One day her father was reading the newspaper to her; she took it from him to look at the marriage announcements.

"Twenty-nine! How old she was, wasn't she?" she said, as though speaking to herself. She had been glancing down the death column. M. Mauperin did not answer; he paced up and down the room for a few minutes and then went away.

When Renée was alone she got up to close the door, which her father had not pulled to, and which kept banging. She fancied she heard a groan in the corridor and looked, but there was no one there; she listened a minute; but as everything was silent again she was just going to close the door, when she thought she heard the same sound again. She went out into the corridor as far as her father's room. It was from there that it came. The key was not in the lock, and Renée stooped down and, through the keyhole, saw her father, who had flung himself on his bed, weeping bitterly and shaken with sobs. His head was buried in the pillow, and he was endeavouring to stifle down his tears and his despair.

LIV

Renée was determined that her father should weep no more on her account.