Simare bent over towards Gilberte and whispered a few words in her ear.
Young Lartiste, who owed his fame as a great actor to his name and to his name alone, was reserved for the end.
“No one recites like young Lartiste,” people said at Domfront.
And, from the first words that he spoke, everybody watched Gilberte, to enjoy her amazement. Unfortunately, Simare was continuing his more or less decorous reflexions; and Gilberte, although not always catching his exact meaning, felt so uncomfortable that she did not listen to young Lartiste at all and forgot to applaud at the striking passages, an omission that was put down to her bad taste.
“Mme. de la Vaudraye is furious,” said Simare. “Her son’s gone. And I expect she jolly well lectured him about making himself agreeable to you. By Jove, when you’re a mother, you have to think of your son’s future. But Guillaume making himself agreeable is a sight that was never yet seen! Besides, he looks down upon us too much to remain in the drawing-room. Just fancy, a writer like him! ... Oh, I say, madame, look at the eyes Beaufrelant’s making at you! Beaufrelant is the Don Juan of Domfront. No one can resist him. They even say ... but I don’t know if I ought. ... Pooh, you have a fan ... if you want to blush.”
And he again leant over towards Gilberte.
She rose from her seat at the first words. Mme. de la Vaudraye came running up to her:
“I am sure that that scapegrace of a Simare is saying all sorts of things that he shouldn’t.”
She drew her aside:
“Be careful with him, my child,” she said. “I can see through his designs: he is trying to compromise you. He is head over ears in debt and hunting for a fortune. ... But haven’t you seen Guillaume? Wait for me here, I’ll bring him to you.”
Simare came up to Gilberte:
“I must apologize to you, madame; I shocked you just now.”
“No, no,” stammered Gilberte, driven to her wits’ end by this persistency, “only I thought I ought not to ...”
He interrupted her:
“It was I who ought not. I couldn’t help it: I was talking, talking a little at random, lest I should say what I have no right to say, what lies deep down within myself, one of those involuntary sentiments. ...”
“I am so sorry, Mme. Armand,” cried the hostess, returning. “My son was a little tired and has gone up to his room.”
The musical and literary evening was over. But the resources of the la Vaudraye salon did not end there. Its frequenters prided themselves on knowing how to talk. And the conversation went by rule, of course, as everything went by rule in this society which, by the almost daily repetition of the same acts, had established habits as strong as immutable laws.
The licensed talkers were M. Beaufrelant, who, they said, cultivated the flowers of rhetoric with the same zeal and the same success as the flowers of the soil; Mme. de la Vaudraye, who specialized in literary discussions; M. Lartiste, who, as a printer, was naturally marked out for the loftiest philosophical speculations; M. Simare the elder, a remarkable spinner of anecdotes; and, lastly, M. Charmeron and his sister-in-law, Mme. Bottentuit, who found, in their morbid need for contradicting and disputing with each other, an inexhaustible source of opinions, witticisms and banter. Outside these privileged and, so to speak, official protagonists, it was very seldom that any one ventured to open his mouth.
Gilberte, who was beginning to feel terribly bored, listened without a word, which was taken for a sign of admiring deference. The truth is that this oratorical joust surprised her greatly. All these people, speaking turn and turn about, seemed to be pursuing so many different conversations, each of them thinking only of shining in the department that had devolved upon himself. M. Lartiste, who had talked his best on capital punishment, the subject in which he excelled, was answered by Mme. de la Vaudraye with a vigorous parallel between the respective merits of Victor Hugo and Lamartine, which parallel was duly refuted in a lyrical outburst from M. Beaufrelant on the bulbs of the double dahlia.
And the utmost seriousness presided over all this incoherence, each disputant confounding, with deadly earnestness, the interlocutor in whom he saw such another indomitable as himself. And the dumb circle of hearers listened with nods and grunts of approval, as though these strange discussions had excited them to the highest pitch.
“Well ... and you?” said Mme. de la Vaudraye to M. Simare the elder, at the exact moment when the ardour of the tourney seemed about to wane. “Are you not in form to-day?”
M. Simare, the anecdotist, smiled. His strong point lay in saying nothing until he was questioned; and his dry silence, rich in promise, lent enormous value to the one anecdote to which he treated you each evening, after carefully preparing, polishing, repolishing and chipping it like a precious stone. Everybody burst out laughing before he even opened his mouth: it was understood from his manner that the story would be a little ... naughty.
He said:
“I do not know if I can speak. There are young ears present.”
A movement on the part of the mothers, a glance; and the five young ladies disappeared “without seeming to.”
He insisted:
“All the same, I feel bound to warn you that it is a very risqué story. I shall call a spade a spade: local colour demands it.”
“Go on, M. Simare!” said somebody. “We are all married people here!”
Gilberte was sitting in the front row of chairs, understanding nothing of the departure of the young girls nor of all this preamable and in absolute ignorance of what was looming ahead.
M. Simare walked up to her, bowed to her gallantly, like a bull-fighter dedicating his next feat of prowess to the most prominent person present and sat down four feet in front of her. And he began:
“The setting first, madame. Picture the skirt of a wood: dramatis personæ, Fanchon and her friend Colin, who is whispering sweet nothings in her ear, very much in her ear, and ... but wait! At no great distance, in the middle of the wood, his reverence the rector is strolling, reading his breviary; and his walk takes him in the direction of our young rustics. ... He comes. ... He comes nearer and nearer. ... Do you see the picture, madame?”
“Yes, yes,” said Gilberte, earnestly, like a child who is interested in a fairy-tale. “What next?”
“The sun darts his rays through the branches, from the patches of blue sky. ...”
He continued his description at length, talked of the rector and the birds and the flowers and the cool shade of the trees; and, strange to say, there was not another word about Fanchon and Colin.
“M. Simare is a little discursive this evening,” whispered somebody. “He is not coming to the point as quickly as usual.”
In fact, he was veering away from it, with his eyes fixed on Gilberte, who listened eagerly and who repeated, at intervals:
“And then? What next?”
Thereupon, he got more and more entangled in the poetic stroll of the rector, who kept on walking and never seemed to come as far as Fanchon and Colin. And it was Gilberte who, at last, exclaimed:
“But what became of Colin and Fanchon?”
Then the old boy made a decisive gesture:
“I can’t, I can’t tell you. ... No, I won’t tell you. ...”
Everybody rose. Everybody protested.
M. Simare took refuge in laughter:
“Well, no, I won’t tell you.”
“But why not?”
“Why not? I don’t know! It’s her eyes. ... There are words one can’t utter when one looks at her, there are things one can’t tell.”
He was no longer laughing. The others were silent. And he continued:
“Look at her eyes. They gaze at you so softly, so innocently. ... All the time that I was talking my nonsense, I wanted to invent something for her, something about saints and angels and a good little girl who loves her mother and only thinks of pleasing her and is happy from morning till night. ...”
V. THE SUITORS
GILBERTE WENT
TO more of Mme. de la Vaudraye’s evenings: not that she liked them much; but she did not wish to have it thought that she disliked them.
And her presence delighted all the frequenters of the salon, the most cross-grained ladies and the most indifferent men alike. It was a curious influence exercised by that mere child; and she owed it neither to her experience — for what did she know of life? — nor to her tact — for what aim had she in view? — but to an inexplicable charm which affected all who came near her and which, at the same time, protected her against them. Her innocence was a greater attraction than any subtlety or intellectual charm and defended her to better purpose than prudence would have done or cleverness.
Old Simare was mad about her. Mme. Bottentuit told her all the secrets of her home life. Mme. Charmeron confided to her that she was broken-hearted at having nothing but daughters, but that she had not given up hope yet. Mlle. du Bocage hid her head on Gilberte’s shoulder, wept and told her all her old-maidenly disappointments and regrets.
“You are the ornament of my salon, Gilberte,” said Mme. de la Vaudraye.
She was not jealous of her. Gilberte, with her exquisite compassion, had guessed that the former lady of the Logis must still suffer from the ruin of her fortunes, must still feel how stunted and narrow was her life; and she showed her more attention than she did to any other.
Out of kindness to the mother she even tried to win the son’s sympathies; but here she encountered a medley of such shyness and rudeness, so unlovable a nature and so marked a determination to repel her advances and treat her as he treated the other frequenters of the salon that Gilberte was quite discomfited.
“Do not be discouraged,” said the mother. “He is a little unsociable; but he is so full of good qualities.”
Nevertheless, Gilberte once heard her mutter between her teeth:
“What a bear that boy is!”
And she heard on all sides that mother and son did not agree.
The salon underwent a change. There were as many commonplaces uttered as ever; but those who spoke them did so with less smug importance than before. People were less sure of themselves. The talented amateurs in singing and piano-playing sought for shades of expression and feeling. Lastly, the order of the concert became “subject to alterations” and the performers no longer wore the air of automata obeying predestined laws. There were asides in the conversation; people talked among themselves, for the pleasure of talking and in accordance with their various sympathies.
One evening, Beaufrelant drew Gilberte into a corner and said:
“I am mad, madame, do you hear? I am mad. I care for nothing, I am indifferent to my flowers, it is you all the time. I am free: my name, my life are yours; give me some hope. ...”
The next day, le Hourteulx made his declaration:
“Life has become a burden to me. If you do not take pity on me, madame, I shall cease to exist. ... But I can hardly believe that you will reject me. ... Do you dislike me? ... I am a widower and well-off, you know. ...”
That was the only dark spot that troubled Gilberte’s serenity: the more or less discreet attentions which all those men paid her. Simare the younger went far more cleverly to work and tried to inspire confidence with a pretence of delicacy by which Gilberte allowed herself to be taken in. But Beaufrelant and Le Hourteulx showed no pity: they pursued her relentlessly, speaking to her, not unnaturally, as to a woman who knows what life is and who could not well take offence at a declaration or even at the terms in which it was made.
Poor Gilberte did not take offence, but she was very much surprised; and the sighs and transports of those two men of forty bored her terribly. She avoided them and she also had to avoid young Lartiste, who tried the effect of poetry and fired the most passionate verses of Musset and Verlaine at her; the brother too of the Demoiselles Bottentuit, a schoolboy who was only let out on Thursdays and Sundays and who, the third time he saw her, threatened to kill himself at her feet; and lastly a cousin of Mlle. du Bocage, who was engaged to the elder Charmeron girl and who offered to break off the marriage and abandon a very good match if it caused her the faintest annoyance.
She no longer enjoyed at the Logis the atmosphere of peace and isolation so dear to her. Adèle had to defend the door, with the vigilance of a watch-dog, against the daring suitors who tried to obtain admission to her mistress upon some pretext:
“Madame is at home to nobody; I have positive instructions.”
The old servant saw through the disguise of M. le Hourteulx, who appeared dressed up as a beggar, and of Beaufrelant, who, in cap and blouse, came round with a green-grocer’s barrow.
Gilberte could not go for a stroll in her garden without seeing the figure of one or other of those importunate gentlemen on the right, in the next garden which ran from the castle down to the river. At nightfall, she was conscious of shadowy forms prowling round the manor-house. She felt herself spied upon on every side, stalked like a beast of the chase.
It was Easter Sunday. After dinner, Adèle and her husband went to the fair, just outside the town. Gilberte was left alone.
It had been raining; and the fresh smell of wet leaves and moist earth came through the open window of the boudoir which she had made into her study. The book which she was reading in an absent-minded way dropped to her lap and she sat dreaming, with her gaze lost in the blackness of the trees. And, quite without reason — for the least sound would have struck her ear — she was overcome with an indescribable sense of dread, which increased from moment to moment. The silence seemed to her unnatural and awful. The darkness was heavy with menace; and she could not take her eyes from it, sat spellbound by the unknown peril which she felt was there.
A recollection doubled her fears. On the evening before at Mme. de la Vaudraye’s, a turn in the conversation had led her to say that her servants were going to this fair. So they knew that she was all alone at the Logis.
Her one thought was to close the window, fasten down the shutters and place an obstacle between herself and the snares that were being laid for her in the threatening darkness; and yet she dared not stir, as though the least movement would have exposed her to immediate dangers. ... But what dangers?
She made an effort and rose from her chair. At the same moment, a head appeared and a man strode across the balcony and sprang into the room. It was Simare.
The revulsion of feeling was such that she almost felt inclined to laugh. Wearily, she sat down and murmured:
“Oh, monsieur, you ought not to have done this! ... I should never have thought it of you. ...”
He flung himself on his knees:
“Do not judge me unheard. ... I am not master of myself. ... I have to go away for a month ... and I wanted to see you ... to tell you what I feel, what I suffer. ... Oh, you don’t know how your indifference has tortured me. ... My sadness, my admiration, my hopes, my emotion, when in your presence: you have understood none of these ... but then you never do understand. ... At this very moment, when I am here, at your knees, when I am imploring you, when I am proclaiming my sorrow and my obsession, I feel that my words do not reach you. And yet they must. You must, you shall know what I have to say to you. ... Listen to me. ...”
But Gilberte would not listen. Although her extreme innocence had preserved her at first contact with the world, nevertheless she was beginning to see a glimmer of the meaning of many things; and she was frightened of the words that were coming. No, she would not hear them from the lips of this man, she would not allow this man to be the first to speak them in her ear. She had a sudden intuition of their importance and their sweetness and their magic; and she felt that it was almost a contamination to hear them.
She entreated him:
“Be quiet. ... I shall be so grateful if you will. ...”
“No, no,” he cried, “I must speak. Ever since I have known you, the words I have to say have been on my lips, suffocating me. ... Gilberte, Gilberte, I ...”
She gave a desperate glance, the glance of a
victim which does not know how to defend itself and awaits the blow that is about to fall. He stammered:
“Oh, your eyes ... your eyes ...!”
He remained on his knees, humble and undecided, and repeated, in a low voice:
“Your eyes ... yes ... my father told me ... child’s eyes that put one off ...”
He rose and struck his fist upon the table:
“No, after all, I will not allow myself to be thwarted. I mean to speak and I shall speak. ... If your eyes prevent me, well, I sha’n’t see your eyes!”
He went to the lamp and, with a sudden movement, put it out.
Gilberte gave a scream. She tried to run away, stumbled over a chair and fell. She tried to call out; and her voice died away in her throat.
Then, powerless, she stirred no more.
He seized her hand and raised it to his lips.
She made a weak attempt to release herself, but strength failed her.
She said, simply:
“Please, monsieur ... I have never done you any harm. ... I have always been kind to you. ... Please. ...”
His hand slacked its grasp. They remained opposite each other. What was he going to say to her? At her wits’ end, with her heart wildly beating, she tried, through the darkness, through the great, impenetrable silence that enshrouded the two of them, to see Simare’s face, to read his tumultuous thoughts, his will. ... A few seconds passed. ...
Then he said:
“I beg your pardon. ... I am a scoundrel. ... I wanted to force you to take my name, to share my existence. ... It was cowardly and base of me. ... Still, there was more in me, believe me, than wicked designs. ... Oh, I hear your heart beating ... do not tremble! ... You will never be in danger from any one ... it is not only your eyes that protect you: there is the sound of your voice, there is your silence, there is the air you breathe, your mere presence. ... Forgive me. ...”
He went away. She dimly saw him cross the window-rail and presently heard the sound of his steps as he walked down the gravel-path in the garden.
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 385
