Part 2

To gain an interview with madame Herbelin strained patience. But after the applicant had sat for a long while, with her feet on the sawdust of the salle d'attente, where an officer, and a marquise drooped resignedly, madame la Directrice told her: "It is a sad pity that you left the town." Marie could not remember that the busy woman said anything more valuable.

There was, however, another occasion. This time the lady said: "Mademoiselle, I knew you when you were a little girl, and I knew your parents, and I have regretted, more than you may suppose, that it was not in my power to offer you an appointment at the Lycée, in your emergency. But I have recently heard something about you that is very grave--something that I trust is not true."

"Madame," said Marie, trembling, "I can guess what you have heard, and it is _not_ true. Only this is true--I have placed a child with a concierge in the rue Lecomte and go to see it there. It is the orphan of a woman who was my friend in Paris, a widow--we lived together."

Madame Herbelin did not speak.

"Madame Branthonne was killed in a railway accident, going to England," Marie went on; "she was a teacher in the Bernstein School. Her baby had been left in Amiens, with a woman called Gaillard. A few weeks ago the woman wrote to me that she was going away, and was unable to keep the child any longer. I couldn't abandon it to the _Assistance publique_."

"Where is she now, this madame Gaillard?" inquired the Directrice coldly.

"I do not know," said Marie. And then, recognising the lameness of the reply, she burst forth into a torrent of details to corroborate the story.

Her voice, more than the details, carried conviction to the listener. After a long pause she said:

"Mademoiselle, I believe you have done a generous thing." The thief winced. "But it was an imprudent thing, a thing that you could not afford to do. I do not speak of your intention to maintain the child--may le bon Dieu aid you in the endeavour! But you did wrong to bring it to Chauville. You should not expose yourself to calumny. I counsel you most earnestly to place the child somewhere else without delay."

"Madame, it is my duty to have him under my own eyes," she urged. "Apart from me, he might be starved, beaten, corrupted--my friend's boy might be reared as an apache. How could I know? I should risk it all. It would be inhuman of me."

"I think you over-estimate the dangers," sighed madame Herbelin. "In fine, if you put the boy away from you, it is possible he may suffer. But if you keep him near you, it is certain _you_ will suffer. I cannot say more."

"_I_ must suffer," answered Marie.

A permanent home for him, not far from the rue Lecomte, was found at a bonneterie, whose humble little window contained Communion caps, and the announcement "Piqures à la Machine."

To have had him in her lodging would have cost her less. But this child that dishonoured her must be covert from the jeunes filles that she hoped would come there; and if she had to give lessons out, she could not leave him there alone.

She did have to give lessons out. It was a descent for her here to go to the pupils' houses, but she was compelled to do it. And something bitterer--she was compelled to accept a lowered fee, and affect to be unconscious why a reduction was proposed. To obtain the services of a "belle musicienne" for a trifle, there were a few mothers who engaged her, and replied to questioning relatives that she was a "slandered woman." But to her they did not say that she was slandered, and their hard eyes were an insult.

She gave a lesson twice a week for twenty francs a month now, mademoiselle Marie Lamande, who had advertised recitals in Paris, and she went short of food, to meet the charges at the bonneterie. The boy seemed to be amply nourished, and the remembrance sustained her on the days when she was dinnerless.

God! for a chance to get away, to be free of this place, where it was an ordeal to tread the streets. When she could afford to buy a postage stamp she applied for salaried work in some distant school. Once it looked as if the child were not to live; and as she sat, obeying orders, through one endless night, she knew, before she fainted from exhaustion, that if he died, her own escape from Chauville would be made by the same road.

But he recovered--thanks partially to her--and her duty still had to be done.

He recovered, and, as time passed, began to talk like other children on the doorsteps. She recalled the refinement of his mother, and the little child in a black blouse, shrilling kitchen French, avenged himself unknowingly. "As often as we ever meet, when the boy I robbed is a poor, big, common man," she thought, "every note of his voice will be a chastisement!"

Before she accomplished her release, she bore in Chauville-le-Vieux a three-years' martyrdom.

Madame Herbelin had consented to testify to her abilities, and she went far away, to a school at Ivry-St.-Hilaire. She had pleaded that, in the letter of recommendation, she might be referred to as "madame" Lamande, but this entreaty the Directrice would not grant.

"Mademoiselle," she said, "I cannot do it for you; and if you are wise, there is no need. Remember what I told you when you returned, and be guided by me this time. Do not repeat there the blunder that you made here. Leave the child where he is; you have tested the person and you know she is honest. Occasionally, once a year, you can afford to come and see him. If you take him with you, you will not gain much by your removal. Of course, at Ivry-St.-Hilaire your parentage is unknown and there is nothing to hinder you from inventing a relationship; but it isn't worth the trouble--believe me, you would be suspected just the same. Make the most of this opportunity; go unencumbered--do not live your whole life in shadow for the sake of an ideal."

But her conscience would not allow her to see him only once a year, nor to leave him to play on the doorstep, and attend the École Communale. In view of a constant salary, she already foresaw herself alleviating his plight. She was resigned to live her life in shadow, that she might yield a little sunshine to him.

So, when she had sacrificed herself again, madame la Directrice thought: "She is strangely devoted to the child. I wonder if I was wrong to befriend her--perhaps she is a bad woman, after all!"

She did not venture to take the boy with her, however. She was more than three months at Ivry before her furtive arrangements for him were concluded. Then she placed him with priests twenty miles distant from her, in the Etablissement des Frères Eudoxie at Maison-Verte. Small as the annual charges were, they were vast in relation to her salary. Till she succeeded, by slow degrees, in obtaining a few private pupils, her self-denial was severe.

But the little chap was in better hands now. And the woman had procured a respite from disdain. A tinge of colour crept back into her cheeks, and she faced the world less fearfully. By and by, when she could afford the fare, she went to the institution sometimes, on a Sunday, and walked with him in the cour, and noted that gradually his speech improved. As she could afford the fare but seldom, the intervals were long.

Paul looked forward to her rare visits. Some of the boys had visitors more frequently than he, pale women who came to walk beside them in the cour; and the boastful shout of "Ma mère!" was often humiliating to Paul. He had been taught to call her "mademoiselle," but one Sunday, the child, in a triumphant cry, found his own name for her: "_Mademoiselle ma mère est venue!_"

After that, he called her always "Mademoiselle ma mère"; and, divining something of the little wistful heart, mademoiselle did not reprove him.

At Ivry-St.-Hilaire a thing strange and bewildering happened. For the first time in her life a man sought her society; for the first time in her life she was happier for talking to a man. Two moments were prodigious to her--a moment after she had heard herself laughing merrily; a moment when she realised why she had just plucked out a grey hair.

When they were alone together one day the man said to her:

"Now that I have made a practice in the town at last, I am rooted here--and Ivry isn't amusing. If a woman were to marry me she would have to live here always. I tell you this because I love you."

It was as if God had wrought another miracle. "I can't understand it," she whispered truly.

Then the man laughed and took her in his arms, and it seemed to her that she had never known what it was to be tired.

When he let her go and she came back to the world, her sin was staring at her. And now the voice that decoyed her before was clamouring: "If you degrade yourself in his sight you'll lose him."

Her lover appeared to her no less a hero because, under his imposing presence, he was a cur, and the thing that she feared would revolt him was her dishonesty.

Not on that day, nor on the next, but after many resolutions to do right had melted into terrors, she forced him to listen; and it seemed to her that she was dying while she spoke.

"I stole," she moaned, her face covered.

"Pauvrette!" he exclaimed tenderly.

When she dared to look, he was smiling. The relief and gratitude in her soul were so infinite that she wanted to kneel at his feet.

But when she sobbed out the story of her later struggles and told him how she was devoting her life to the child, his brow grew dark.

"That, of course, would have to be changed," he said.

"Changed?" she stammered.

"Obviously, best beloved. One must consider public opinion. These journeys to Maison-Verte are mad; they must cease. You have not been fair to yourself; and now, more than ever, you need to reflect that----"

"But," she broke in, frightened, "you don't understand. It is not a mere question of my going to Maison-Verte; he will not be there always--he will grow up, and his future will be my care. My responsibility goes on. Oh, I know--you need not tell me--that you have thoroughly the right to refuse, but--but I have no right to alter. Since I have seen that I could never hope to give back what I took, I have seen that he was my charge for life."

"Mon Dieu!" he said, "you exaggerate quixotically. To give back what you took? Remember what you have already done!"

"Counted in francs," she pleaded, "I have done very little. It has been difficult to do, that's all."

Presently, when he perceived that, on this one point, the little weak woman was inflexible, the man made a beautiful speech, declaring that she was worth more than the opinion of Ivry-St.-Hilaire, and of all France. He said that nothing mattered to him but their "divine love." He looked more heroic still, and his eyes were moist with the nobility of the sentiments that he was delivering.

But as he sat in the principal café of the town by and by, among the stacks of swords in the corners, and the elite of the military and civil circles, clearing their throats vociferously on to the floor, he knew that a few days hence he meant to deliver a second lie about the "supplications of his family and his duty as a son." Had her debt been paid, he would have held her absolved from yielding so much as another thought to the boy, and he could have afforded to pay the debt, but it did not even enter his mind to commit such a madness. Yet, in his fashion, he loved her. The "chivalry" of offering marriage to a woman without a _dot_ had proved it.

It would have been kinder to her not to leave her in a fool's paradise; she was to suffer more intensely because of that.

"Some of the facts, sufficient to explain the position, I have confided to my mother," he told her. "She is very old, and the honour of the family is very dear to her. I entreat you, in her name. The boy shall remain in this institution, or be placed in some other. They will teach him a trade. When the time comes for him to earn his living he will be no worse off than the other _gosses_ there. Be guided by me. I assure you, you are morbidly sensitive. There is no reason why you should ever meet him again. My adored one, our happiness is in your hands. Give the child up!"

"I cannot," she repeated hopelessly.

And then, all of a sudden, the imposing presence vanished and she saw the puny man--more clearly than he had ever seen himself.

"It begins to be plain why you 'cannot,'" he hissed. "Zut, tell your yarn about your 'theft' to somebody greener. For _me_ it's too thin!... But why should we part, ducky? The matter could be arranged."

When he had demonstrated his intelligence in this way, without advantage, the man went down the garden path, out of her life--and for an hour she sat sightless, and ageing years. The birds in the garden were making a cruel noise. She felt that she had grown too old during the afternoon to bear the shrillness of the birds. When was it that she had had the arrogance to pull out a grey hair?

* * * * *

Her love-story was over; but the drear routine continued--the thrift, the drudgery, the clandestine journeys to the boy. If, when she saw him next, he felt that she was colder to him, she did not mean to be so. Never had she striven quite so wearily to be tender.

It was insensibly that she ceased to recall him as a burden. Had Time's touches been more swift she would have marvelled at the mystery of the thing. But the weight of life was lifted very slowly, and the burden bid fair to be consoling before she realised that the load was less.

As the months wore by, and term succeeded term, the boy evoked an interest in the loneliness. Duty no longer took her to him--it was affection; to amuse him now was not a task--their playtime had become her single pleasure. From this child, the woman who had had no childhood, captured gleams of youth--the virgin who was for ever celibate, caught glimpses of maternity. "In the _vacances_, Paul, I'll come and stay at Maison-Verte," she used to say, "and we'll have picnics in the park!" When the _trimestre_ was over and she studied his report, her smile was proud. Once when she went, he rushed to meet her with a prize. "Mademoiselle ma mère, look, look!" he halloed. And the virgin's arms were flung about him and she hugged him like a mother.

As a mother she marked his progress, year by year; as a mother, mourning his barren prospects and craving to advance them, she beat her breast that she had made him penniless. It was as a mother that, by parsimonies, protracted and implacable, she garnered the means at last to better his condition. By this time her hair was all grey, and the schoolboy's voice was breaking.

On the day that she was strong enough, she meant to confess to him and see his love turn to contempt. But the day when she was strong enough wouldn't come. When he was sixteen she had said: "I shall tell him in a year from now!" When he was seventeen she had wept: "God couldn't mind his loving me for a year more!"

"Mademoiselle," he would say--for he was a young man and had dropped the other name--"I don't know why you have been so good to me." And she would answer: "Your mother and I were friends, dearest." Only that.

"You work too hard," he would declare, "ever so much too hard; you're always tired. You know, you weren't ambitious enough--that was your great mistake. You shouldn't have gone in for teaching; you ought to have played at concerts--you might have been no end of a swell. Play something to me now, will you? What used my mother to say about your playing?"

"She said once that it made her cry for her baby, Paul. What do _you_ think of when I play?"

But he was shy of admitting what he thought of, because he thought of noble deeds, and his ideal woman, and of the ecstasy it would be to see his name on the cover of a book--and he was doomed to be a clerk.

Yet when the clerk chafed in his bonds, and the conceit of authorship was too mighty to be bridled, it was to her that he first revealed a manuscript. It was she, trembling, who was his first critic. "Your good women are all perfect," she told him, "and your bad women have never a good impulse. We aren't like that." But she was never too weary to talk about the tales; and when they began to wander among august journals that refused them, she used to pray, before the crucifix in her bedroom, that the hearts of editors might be moved.

Now she meant to confess to him before he entered on his military service.

The parting was so bitter that she failed at the last moment. He went far from her. The years of his service were a much greater hardship to her than to him. During the first week she stinted her own diet to send a _bon de poste_ to ameliorate his food; but he wouldn't keep the money. In the avenues of Ivry, never did she see the pitifully garbed conscripts being drilled without picturing the conscript who was dear to her, garbed like that--and closing her eyes with the pain.

And when he was free to return, the meeting was so sweet that she was a coward once more.

He was a clerk for a long time, but his dissatisfaction would have been longer still without her. She it was who took to the _Echo d'Ivry-St.-Hilaire_ the article that paved his way to journalism. There was a day of sovereignty when he was offered an ill-paid post on that undistinguished paper. How victoriously he twirled his moustache! How proudly, through her spectacles, she watched him do it!

Oh, of course he wouldn't be content to stick for ever on the Ivry _Echo_, not he! He was going to write great novels just the same. Incipiently the women of his stories lived now, but he was still very young. She said to him at this stage: "You put your girls in a drawing-room, but they come from a tavern." And, abashed and wondering, he saw that poor mademoiselle knew more of girlhood than a literary man had learnt. He was an artist, or he would not have seen.

Because he was an artist he probed his questions deep. Because she loved him she did not flinch. To him she voiced truths that she had shrunk from owning to herself. Thoughts that had frightened her, and thoughts that she had deemed too sacred to be uttered, she brought forth for his guidance. Her innocence and her knowledge she yielded to him, her vanities and her regrets. She bared the holiest secrets of her sterile life and stripped her soul, that he might make his books of it.

But always there remained the one secret that she could not tell.

After he had begun to get on--when he was a journalist in Paris--she had a terrible grief. She had travelled to Paris to see him, and he declined to admit her. He declined to admit her because he knew what she had come to say, and, under Heaven, there was nothing to him so precious as an idol that he had made out of a spiritual profile and some vices. The Ivry editor had told her it was rumoured that the woman talked of marrying Paul, and mademoiselle had written imploring letters to him without avail. "He must be the best judge of his own mind," he had answered, "and of the true nature of the woman he loved."

Then, distraught, she had made the journey, and been turned from the door with a servant's transparent he. The tumult of the modern traffic confused her--the failing little figure was jostled by the crowd. She went, deafened, through remembered gates, to a bench, and sat there, feeling stunned. The bench was in the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it seemed to her that in another life she had walked beside his mother.

She had to save him. When her mind cleared, she thought only of that. Since it was impossible to plead to Paul, she must plead to the woman. She would find out where she lived; she would say In imagining herself in the presence of such a woman, she was as timorous as a child. She would say--what? The wildness of the notion overwhelmed her. Suddenly she felt that she could say nothing, that she would be tongue-tied, a sight for ridicule.

But she must save Paul!

She was two days in Paris before she obtained the address; and she was no less amazing to the wanton than was the wanton to the spinster. From different worlds they marvelled at each other across a hearthrug. She said:

"He is not my son, but he is as dear to me as if he were; indeed, the sons of many women are far less to them, I think, than he to me. I worked for him when he was a baby. Since he has been a man, he has meant the only interest in my life; it has been a wretched failure of a life--the one hope left in it is to see him succeed. Madame, his career is in your hands. I entreat you to be merciful--I beg it of you on my knees. I don't pretend to judge your feelings for him, but if you care for him really and deeply, do what you know is right for the man you love--make a memory for yourself that you'll be proud of. You're beautiful now, and young, and you don't take some things very earnestly, but one day, when you're older and memories are all you've got, a noble remembrance will be sweet. You'll say to yourself: '_I_ saved a man from ruining his future, _I_ saved a woman from breaking her heart.'"

After her curiosity in the alien was exhausted, the beauty rang the bell, and said:

"What kind of a fool are you to have imagined I should give up a man I liked, because a stranger asked me to? It's about the silliest idea I ever heard of."

And then she herself did something sillier. She told Paul what had happened, mimicking the suppliant's sorrow, and jeering at her prayer. The man read into the scene the pathos that the jeerer missed, and he saw that the woman he had idealised lacked the grace of pity.

Later, when success came to him, there was no domestic tragedy darkening the home behind it, and he had owed to mademoiselle a timely rent in the veil of his illusion.

She was teaching at Ivry still when his success came. For weeks she had known by his letters, and the papers, that his new book had made a reputation for him, but one morning she heard that it was "making him rich." The hard times were over for them both, he wrote. There was to be no more labour for her, no more loneliness; they were to live together in a little appartement in Passy. She was to rest, "with flowers in the window, and her hands in her lap--he was coming to carry her away."

The letter quivered as she read it, and she put it down, in fright. The secret that had smouldered while she toiled for him, while she worked to keep herself, flared menace now that he proposed to keep her. She dared not accept her comfort of his ignorance. She saw herself as a cheat who had hidden her sin, a hypocrite who had taken gratitude to which she had no claim. Now he must be told. The confession that had terrorised her all her life could be escaped no longer; the day of her Calvary was here.

At every step in the street she shuddered, though it was not till evening that he was due. She clasped him, crying with pride and fear, when he strode in. He rattled gaily of things triumphant, things too difficult to-day for her to understand. She thanked God that it was twilight and he couldn't clearly see her face. She crept away from him and bowed her head. The young man looked forward. The old woman looked back.

In the twilight her confession came at last--in the twilight, his reverent knowledge of his boundless debt.

"But I have loved you," she sobbed. "At the beginning you were my punishment, but then I loved you!"

"You have borne want for me, and contempt. I have taken your youth from you, and your happiness and your strength." He went to her, and knelt, and kissed the trembling hands. "How _I_ love _you_," he cried, "mademoiselle ma mère!"

II

ARIBAUD'S TWO WIVES