by Grant Allen
‘And he didn’t marry you?’ Ruth asked, faltering.
‘He meant to, Madame: I assure you, he meant to,’ Zélie answered hastily. ‘He was a kind soul, Hector; he began it all at first for the good motive. But, meanwhile, you understand, in waiting for the priest — —’ Zélie lifted her flounce close up to her face and stitched away at it nervously.
‘And that was all?’ Ruth put in, with her scared white face — I could hear and see it all through the door from my study.
‘That was all, Madame,’ Zélie answered, very low. ‘I m’a dit, “Veux-tu?” Je lui ai dit, “Je veux bien.” Et tout d’un coup, nous voilà père et mère presque sans le savoir.’
There was a pause for a moment, during which you could hear Zélie’s needle go stitch, stitch, stitch, through the stiff starched muslin. Then Ruth spoke again: ‘And, after that, he left you?’
Zélie’s stoicism began to give way a little. There were tears in her eyes, but still she stitched on, to hide her confusion. ‘He never meant any harm, my poor boy!’ she answered, bending over. ‘He really loved me, and he always hoped, in the end, to marry me. So, when he knew Frasine was beginning to be, he said to me, one fine day, “Zélie, I will go up to Vence, and arrange your affair with my father and the curé.” And he went up to Vence, and asked his father’s consent to our marriage; for, chez nous, you know, one is not permitted to marry without the consent of one’s family. But Hector’s father was very angry at the news, and refused his consent, because he was proprietor, and I was but a servant. And about that time it was Hector’s year to serve, and they put him into a regiment that was stationed a long way off — oh! a very long way off — quite far from my country, in the direction of Orleans. And without his father’s consent, of course, he could never marry me, for that’s our law here in France, to us others. So he served his time, and at the end of it all — well, he married another woman, and settled in Paris.’
‘He married another woman,’ Ruth repeated slowly, ‘and left you with Frasine.’
‘Parfaitement, Madame,’ Zélie answered with a gulp. Then, all at once, her stoicism broke down completely; she laid aside her sewing, and burst into tears with perfect frankness.
Ruth bent over her tenderly and stroked her brown hand. ‘Dear Zélie!’ she said; ‘he treated you cruelly.’
‘No, no, Madame!’ Zélie answered through her tears, still loyal to her lover. ‘You do not understand. He could not help it. He was a brave boy, Hector. He meant to do well, it was all for the good motive; but his family opposed; and with us, when your family oppose, mon Dieu! it is finished. But still, he was good; he did what he could for me. He acknowledged his child, and entered it at the Mairie as his own and mine, which alters, of course, its état civil — Frasine has right, at his death, to a share of his property. My poor, good Hector! it was all he could do for me.’
Ruth burst away at once, and came in to me, crying. This was all so new to her, and we were both of us so genuinely attached to Zélie. ‘Oh, Hugh!’ she began, ‘Zélie’s been telling me such a dreadful, dreadful story. Do you know she has — —’
‘My child,’ I said, ‘you may save yourself the trouble of repeating it all to me; I’ve heard through the door every blessed word you two have been saying.’
Ruth stood by my side, all tearful. ‘But isn’t it sad, Hugh?’ she said; ‘and she seemed so resigned to it.’
‘Very sad, dear,’ I answered. ‘But, do you know, little Ruthie, I’m afraid such stories are by no means uncommon — abroad, I mean, dear.’
‘Hugh,’ Ruth cried, seizing my arm, ‘we must see this little girl of hers.’ She rushed out into the kitchen again. ‘Zélie,’ she said, ‘where is Frasine?’
Zélie had taken up her sewing once more by this time, and answered with a little sob, ‘In our mountains, Madame, near Vence; in effect, she lives with my parents.’
‘And do you see her often? Ruth asked.
‘Once in fifteen days she comes to Mass in the town,’ Zélie answered with a sigh; ‘and then, when Madame’s convenience permits, I usually see her. And when I have made my winter season, I go up for eight days with her, to stop with my people, before I leave for Aix-les-Bains; and when I return again in autumn, before Madame arrives, I have eight days more. Ce sont là mes vacances.’
‘And where will she make her first Communion?’ Ruth asked.
‘Why, naturally, in the town,’ Zélie answered, ‘with the other young people. The Bishop of Fréjus comes over, from here a fortnight.’
‘Bring her down here,’ Ruth said in her imperious little way. ‘Let her stop with us till the time. Monsieur and I desire to see her.’
So Frasine came down, and very proud indeed Zélie was of her daughter. Barring the irregularity of her first appearance in this wicked world, Zélie had cause to be proud of her. She was tall and well grown and as modest as a rosière. She had dove-like eyes and peach bloom on her cheeks; and when Ruth and Zélie had arranged her, all blushing, in her pretty white dress and her long tulle veil, she looked a perfect model for Jules Breton’s young Christians. Zélie kissed her as she stood there with a mother’s fervour; and Ruth kissed her, I declare, just as fervently as Zélie. They couldn’t have made more fuss about that slip of a girl if Frasine’s father had kept his promise and the child had been born in lawful wedlock.
After a day or two Ruth began to talk about something that was troubling her. It was a very serious thing, she said, this first Communion. It was an epoch in a girl’s life, a family occasion. Every member of the family ought to be apprised of it beforehand. Hector might be married to another horrid woman in Paris, but, after all, Frasine was his daughter, acknowledged as such in due form at the Mairie. I’m bound to say that, though Ruth is a stickler for the strictest morality on our side of the Channel, she didn’t take much account of that woman in Paris. I ventured to suggest that to invite the good Hector to the first Communion might be to endanger the peace of a deserving family. Madame Hector de jure might be unaware of the existence of her predecessor de facto, and might regard little Frasine, as an unauthorised interloper, with no friendly feeling. But Ruth was inexorable. You know her imperious, delicious little way when she once gets a fixed idea into that dear glossy head of hers. She insisted on maintaining the untenable position that a man is somehow really and truly related to his own children, no matter who may be their mother. As an English barrister, I humbly endeavoured to point out to her the fact that recognition of this pernicious principle would involve the downfall of law and order. Still, Ruth was impervious to my sound argument on the subject, and refused to listen to the voice of Blackstone. So the end of it all was that she persuaded Zélie to write to Hector, informing him of this important forthcoming epoch in their daughter’s history.
Of course, I had a week of it. To search for Hector in Paris, after nine years’ silence, would be to search for a needle in a bottle of hay, as I pointed out at once to those two fatuous women. My own opinion was that Hector was to be found (as we say facetiously) in the twenty-first arrondissement — the point of which is that there are but twenty. But I rushed up to Vence all the same, to prosecute inquiries as to what had become of the former owner of that belle propriété which loomed so large in Zélie’s imagination. With infinite difficulty, and after many trials, I had reason to believe, at last, that the nommé Hector Canivet, ancient proprietor, was to be found at a certain number in a certain street in the Montmartre Quartier. Hither, therefore, we despatched our letter of invitation, dexterously concocted in our very best French by Ruth, Zélie, and myself in council assembled. It informed Monsieur Hector Canivet, without note or comment, that Mdlle. Euphrasyne Canivet, now aged twelve years, would make her first Communion in our parish church on Wednesday the 22nd, and that Mdlle. Zélie Duhamel invited his presence on this auspicious occasion. As an English barrister, I insisted upon the point that consideration for the feelings of Madame Canivet in Paris should make us leave it open for M. Hector Canivet to
treat Mdlle. Euphrasyne, if he were so minded, as a distant cousin. So much of masculine guile have I still left in me. Ruth was disposed to protest; but Zélie, more French, acquiesced in my view of the case, and over-persuaded her.
Three days later I was sitting in my study, intent on the twenty-fourth chapter of my ‘History of the Rise of the Republic of San Marino,’ when suddenly the door opened, and Ruth burst in upon me with the most radiant expression of perfect happiness I ever saw even on that dimpled face of hers. She held a letter in her hand, which she thrust forward to me eagerly.
‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘Has that brute of a husband of Amelia’s been kind enough to drink himself to death at last?’
‘No; read it, read it!’ Ruth exclaimed, brimming over. ‘Zélie and Frasine are dissolved in tears in the kitchen over the news. I knew I was doing right! I was sure we ought to tell him!’
I took the letter up in a maze. It was involved and long-winded, full of the usual inflated rhetoric of the Provençal peasant. But there was no doubt at all about the human feeling of it. Monsieur Hector Canivet wrote with the profoundest emotion. He had always loved and remembered his dear Zélie. She was still his dream to him. He had married and settled because his parents wished it; but now, his parents were dead, and he had sold his property, and was doing very well at his métier in Paris. The late Madame Canivet — on whose soul might the blessed saints have mercy! — had died two years ago. Ever since that event he had had it in his mind to return to his country, and look up Zélie and his dear daughter; but pride, and uncertainty as to her feelings, had prevented him. It was so long ago, and he knew not her feelings. He took this intimation, however, as a proof that Zélie had not yet entirely forgotten him; and if the devotion of a lifetime, and a comfortable fortune (for a bourgeois) in Paris, would atone to Zélie for his neglect in the past, he proposed not only to be present at Frasine’s first Communion, but also to superadd to it another Sacrament of the Church which he was only too conscious should have preceded her baptism. In short, if Zélie was still of the same mind as of old, he desired to return, in order to marry her.
‘That’s well,’ I said. ‘He will legitimatise his daughter.’
‘You don’t mean to say,’ Ruth cried, ‘he can make it just the same as if he’d married Zélie all right to begin with?’
‘Why, certainly!’ I answered; ‘in France, the law is sometimes quite human.’
Ruth rushed into my arms. And the brave Hector was as good as his word.
But we shall never get another cook like Zélie!
THE CHILD OF THE PHALANSTERY
‘Poor little thing,’ said my strong-minded friend compassionately. ‘Just look at her! Clubfooted. What a misery to herself and others! In a well-organised state of society, you know, such poor wee cripples as that would be quietly put out of their misery while they were still babies.’
‘Let me think,’ said I, ‘how that would work out in actual practice. I’m not so sure, after all, that we should be altogether the better or the happier for it.’
I
They sat together in a corner of the beautiful phalanstery garden, Olive and Clarence, on the marble seat that overhung the mossy dell where the streamlet danced and bickered among its pebbly stickles; they sat there, hand in hand, in lovers’ guise, and felt their two bosoms beating and thrilling in some strange, sweet fashion, just like two foolish unregenerate young people of the old antisocial prephalansteric days. Perhaps it was the leaven of their unenlightened ancestors still leavening by heredity the whole lump; perhaps it was the inspiration of the calm soft August evening and the delicate afterglow of the setting sun; perhaps it was the deep heart of man and woman vibrating still as of yore in human sympathy, and stirred to its innermost recesses by the unutterable breath of human emotion. But at any rate there they sat, the beautiful strong man in his shapely chiton, and the dainty fair girl in her long white robe with the dark green embroidered border, looking far into the fathomless depths of one another’s eyes, in silence sweeter and more eloquent than many words. It was Olive’s tenth day holiday from her share in the maidens’ household duty of the community; and Clarence, by arrangement with his friend Germain, had made exchange from his own decade (which fell on Plato) to this quiet Milton evening, that he might wander through the park and gardens with his chosen love, and speak his full mind to her now without reserve.
‘If only the phalanstery will give its consent, Clarence,’ Olive said at last with a little sigh, releasing her hand from his, and gathering up the folds of her stole from the marble flooring of the seat;— ‘if only the phalanstery will give its consent! but I have my doubts about it. Is it quite right? Have we chosen quite wisely? Will the hierarch and the elder brothers think I am strong enough and fit enough for the duties of the task? It is no light matter, we know, to enter into bonds with one another for the responsibilities of fatherhood and motherhood. I sometimes feel — forgive me, Clarence — but I sometimes feel as if I were allowing my own heart and my own wishes to guide me too exclusively in this solemn question: thinking too much about you and me, about ourselves (which is only an enlarged form of selfishness, after all), and too little about the future good of the community and — and—’ blushing a little, for women will be women even in a phalanstery— ‘and of the precious lives we may be the means of adding to it. You remember, Clarence, what the hierarch said, that we ought to think least and last of our own feelings, first and foremost of the progressive evolution of universal humanity.’
‘I remember, darling,’ Clarence answered, leaning over towards her tenderly; ‘I remember well, and in my own way, so far as a man can (for we men haven’t the moral earnestness of you women, I’m afraid, Olive), I try to act up to it. But, dearest, I think your fears are greater than they need be: you must recollect that humanity requires for its higher development tenderness, and truth, and love, and all the softer qualities, as well as strength and manliness; and if you are a trifle less strong than most of our sisters here, you seem to me at least (and I really believe to the hierarch and to the elder brothers too) to make up for it, and more than make up for it, in your sweet and lovable inner nature. The men of the future mustn’t all be cast in one unvarying stereotyped mould; we must have a little of all good types combined, in order to make a perfect phalanstery.’
Olive sighed again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said pensively. ‘I don’t feel sure. I hope I am doing right. In my aspirations every evening I have desired light on this matter, and have earnestly hoped that I was not being misled by my own feelings; for, oh, Clarence, I do love you so dearly, so truly, so absorbingly, that I half fear my love may be taking me unwittingly astray. I try to curb it; I try to think of it all as the hierarch tells us we ought to; but in my own heart I sometimes almost fear that I may be lapsing into the idolatrous love of the old days, when people married and were given in marriage, and thought only of the gratification of their own personal emotions and affections, and nothing of the ultimate good of humanity. Oh, Clarence, don’t hate me and despise me for it; don’t turn upon me and scold me; but I love you, I love you, I love you; oh, I’m afraid I love you almost idolatrously!’
Clarence lifted her small white hand slowly to his lips, with that natural air of chivalrous respect which came so easily to the young men of the phalanstery, and kissed it twice over fervidly with quiet reverence. ‘Let us go into the music-room, Olive dearest,’ he said as he rose; ‘you are too sad to-night. You shall play me that sweet piece of Marian’s that you love so much; and that will quiet you, darling, from thinking too earnestly about this serious matter.’
II
Next day, when Clarence had finished his daily spell of work in the fruit-garden (he was third under-gardener to the community), he went up to his own study, and wrote out a little notice in due form to be posted at dinner-time on the refectory door: ‘Clarence and Olive ask leave of the phalanstery to enter with one another into free contract of holy matrimony.’ His pen trembled a little
in his hand as he framed that familiar set form of words (strange that he had read it so often with so little emotion, and wrote it now with so much: we men are so selfish!); but he fixed it boldly with four small brass nails on the regulation notice-board, and waited, not without a certain quiet confidence, for the final result of the communal council.
‘Aha!’ said the hierarch to himself with a kindly smile, as he passed into the refectory at dinner-time that day, ‘has it come to that, then? Well, well, I thought as much; I felt sure it would. A good girl, Olive: a true, earnest, lovable girl: and she has chosen wisely, too; for Clarence is the very man to balance her own character as man’s and wife’s should do. Whether Clarence has done well in selecting her is another matter. For my own part, I had rather hoped she would have joined the celibate sisters, and have taken nurse-duty for the sick and the children. It’s her natural function in life, the work she’s best fitted for; and I should have liked to see her take to it. But, after all, the business of the phalanstery is not to decide vicariously for its individual members — not to thwart their natural harmless inclinations and wishes; on the contrary, we ought to allow every man and girl the fullest liberty to follow their own personal taste and judgment in every possible matter. Our power of interference as a community, I’ve always felt and said, should only extend to the prevention of obviously wrong and immoral acts, such as marriage with a person in ill-health, or of inferior mental power, or with a distinctly bad or insubordinate temper. Things of that sort, of course, are as clearly wicked as idling in work-hours, or marriage with a first cousin. Olive’s health, however, isn’t really bad, nothing more than a very slight feebleness of constitution, as constitutions go with us; and Eustace, who has attended her medically from her babyhood (what a dear crowing little thing she used to be in the nursery, to be sure!), tells me she’s perfectly fitted for the duties of her proposed situation. Ah well, ah well; I’ve no doubt they’ll be perfectly happy; and the wishes of the whole phalanstery will go with them in any case, that’s certain.’
