When she got back Séverine found Professor Henri at Pierre’s bedside.
“I took the opportunity of a Sunday free to be with Sérizy a bit,” said the surgeon. “I told him where he stood. In a couple of weeks’ time you must take him south. The sun is kind to the muscles.”
“Darling, aren’t you glad?” she asked when they were alone together again.
She tried to put cheerfulness into her words, but the scene she’d just been through robbed her voice of resonance. Strange—she didn’t feel the slightest sensation of relief. She trusted Hippolyte’s word implicity—in fact, Juliette left the following morning without waiting for her pay—but gaining the security she’d so despaired of achieving filled her with no joy. It only scooped a shapeless, nameless hollow inside her, into which everything sank. The runner who has put out too violent a final effort falls, in the same way, beside the winning-post he’s just passed.
Painfully she repeated, “You are glad, aren’t you?”
Pierre made no reply. It was growing dark, she had difficulty seeing the reactions of his feebly expressive face. She switched on the light, sat down beside those dead legs and, as always, questioned her husband’s eyes.
And then Séverine knew a crueler suffering than any that had ever wrung her heart. Embarrassment … worse, shame was what she saw in those trembling, boyish, faithful eyes. Shame for his ruined body, shame for having always to be looked after by her, the one person he himself had so dearly protected.
“Pierre,” she stammered out, “my darling, I’m absolutely happy with you.”
He tried to shake his head, scarcely succeeded in doing so and mumbled between twisted lips—“Poor … poor … south … the small car … sorry.”
“Please, Pierre, no more, no more.”
It was he who was asking her forgiveness, and all his life long, she knew now, he’d think himself a burden on her and long to die to free her from it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Séverine cried out suddenly. “I can’t bear.…”
She pressed her face against the chest that had once been so warm and strong. Was the whole struggle and its miraculous ending going to turn against Pierre then! She would seem purer and purer to him and he would simply suffer the more at causing her so much trouble, she … she who’d been.…
She knew no more. She wanted only to know where the real good, and true salvation lay. She longed for lightning, a shock, a thunderbolt.
In her feverish despair, pressing closer and closer against Pierre, she felt his clumsy hands trying to stroke her hair. Those invalid fingers were intolerably trusting, they decided the struggle. Séverine had been able to endure it all, but this was beyond her. She told him.
How is it possible to explain her motive? The impossibility of showing a false virtue to the man she loved so infinitely? A less noble need to confess? Or a hidden hope of being pardoned despite it all, and of living out her life without the weight of a horrible secret upon her? Who could assess the powers that moved and melted a human heart after such dreadful disturbances, and forced its secrets onto trembling lips?
Three years have now gone by. Séverine and Pierre live over a quiet little beach. But since the day Séverine spoke, she has not heard her husband’s voice.
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Belle De Jour Page 15
