Monsieur Delmare's plans fell in perfectly with Raymon's wishes. He
foresaw that this love affair which, so far as he was concerned, was
drawing near its close, would soon bring him nothing but annoyance and
importunity, so that he was very glad to see events arranging themselves
in such a way as to save him from the wearisome but inevitable results
of a played-out intrigue. It only remained for him to take advantage of
Madame Delmare's last moments of excitement, and then to leave to his
complaisant destiny the task of ridding him of her tears and reproaches.
So he returned to Lagny the next day, intending to exalt the unhappy
woman's enthusiasm to its apogee.
"Do you know, Indiana," he said, when they met, "the part that your
husband has requested me to play with respect to you? A strange
commission, upon my word! I am to entreat you to go with him to Ile
Bourbon; to urge you to leave me; to tear out my heart and my life. Do
you think that he made a good choice of an advocate?"
Madame Delmare's sombre gravity imposed a sort of respect on Raymon's
cunning.
"Why do you come and tell me all this?" she said. "Are you afraid that I
shall allow myself to be moved? Are you afraid that I shall obey? Never
fear, Raymon, my mind is made up; I have passed two nights looking at it
on every side; I know to what I expose myself; I know what I must defy,
what I must sacrifice, what I must disdain to notice; I am ready to pass
through this stormy period of my destiny. Will not you be my support and
my guide?"
Raymon was tempted to take fright at this cool determination and to take
these insane threats seriously; but in a moment he recurred to his
former opinion that Indiana did not really love him, and that she was
applying now to her situation the exaggerated sentiments she had learned
from books. He strove to be eloquent with passion, he devoted his
energies to dramatic improvisation, in order to maintain himself on his
romantic mistress's level, and he succeeded in prolonging her error.
But, to a calm and impartial auditor, this love scene would have seemed
a contest between stage illusion and reality. The grandiloquence of
Raymon's sentiments, the poesy of his ideas would have seemed a cold and
cruel parody of the real sentiments which Indiana expressed so simply:
in the one case mind, in the other heart.
Raymon, who however had some little fear that she might carry out her
promises if he did not shrewdly undermine the plan of resistance she had
formed, persuaded her to counterfeit submission or indifference until
such time as she could come forth in open rebellion. It was essential,
he said, that they should have left Lagny before she declared herself,
in order to avoid a scandal in presence of the servants, and Ralph's
dangerous intervention in the affair.
But Ralph did not leave his unfortunate friends. In vain did he offer
his whole fortune, his Bellerive estate, his English consols, and
whatever his plantations in the colonies would bring; the colonel was
inflexible. His affection for Ralph had diminished; he was no longer
willing to owe anything to him. Ralph might perhaps have been able to
move him had he possessed Raymon's wit and address; but when he had
plainly set forth his ideas and declared his sentiments, the poor
baronet believed that he had said everything, and he never attempted to
secure the retraction of a refusal. So he let Bellerive and followed
Monsieur and Madame Delmare to Paris, pending their departure for Ile
Bourbon.
Lagny was offered for sale with the factory and the appurtenances. The
winter was a melancholy and depressing one to Madame Delmare. To be
sure, Raymon was in Paris, he saw her every day, he was attentive and
affectionate; but he remained barely an hour with her. He arrived just
after dinner, and when the colonel went out on business, he also took
his leave to attend some social function or other. Society, you know,
was Raymon's element, his life; he must have the noise, the bustle, the
crowd, to breathe freely, to display all his intellectual power, all his
ease of manner, all his superiority. In the privacy of the boudoir he
could make himself attractive, in society he became brilliant; and then
he was no longer the man of a small coterie, the friend of this one or
that one; he was the man of intellect who belongs to all alike, and to
whom society is a sort of fatherland.
And then, as we have said, Raymon had some principle. When the colonel
manifested such confidence in him and esteem for him, when he saw that
he regarded him as the very type of honor and sincerity and desired him
to act as mediator between his wife and himself, he determined to
justify that confidence, to deserve that esteem, to reconcile that
husband and wife, to repel any attachment on the part of the latter
which might endanger the repose of the other. He became once more a
moral, virtuous, philosophical person. You will see for how long.
Indiana, who did not understand this conversion, suffered horribly to be
so neglected; and yet she still had the satisfaction of feeling that her
hopes were not entirely destroyed. She was easily deceived; she asked
nothing better than to be deceived, her real life was so bitter and
desolate! Her husband had become almost impossible to live with. In
public he affected the heroic courage and indifference of a brave man;
but when he returned to the privacy of his own home he was simply an
irritable, severe, absurd child. Indiana was the victim of his disgust
with life, and, we must confess, she was largely to blame. If she had
raised her voice, if she had complained, affectionately but forcibly,
Delmare, who was only rough, would have blushed at the idea of being
considered unkind. Nothing was easier than to touch his heart and govern
him absolutely, if one chose to descend to his level and enter into the
circle of ideas that were within the scope of his mind. But Indiana was
stiff and haughty in her submissiveness; she always obeyed in silence;
but it was the silence and submissiveness of the slave who has made of
hatred a virtue and of unhappiness a merit. Her resignation was the
dignity of a king who accepts fetters and a dungeon rather than
voluntarily abdicate his throne and lay aside a vain title. A woman of a
commoner mould would have mastered that commonplace man; she would have
said what he said and reserved the right to think differently; she would
have pretended to respect his prejudices and secretly have trampled them
under foot; she would have caressed him and deceived him. Indiana saw
many women who acted thus; but she felt so far above them that she would
have blushed to imitate them. Being virtuous and chaste, she thought
that she was not called upon to flatter her master by her words so long
as she respected him in his actions. She did not care for his affection
because she could not respond to it. She would have considered it far
more blameworthy to make a show of love for the husband whom she did not
love, than to give her heart to the lover who inspired love in her. To
deceive was the crime in her eyes, and twenty times a day she felt that
she must declare her love for Raymon; naught detained her but the fear
of ruining him. Her impassive obedience irritated the colonel much more
than a cleverly managed rebellion would have done. Although his
self-esteem would have suffered if he had ceased to be master in his own
house, it suffered much more from the consciousness that he was master
in a hateful and absurd fashion. He would have liked to convince and he
simply commanded; to reign, and he governed. Sometimes he gave an order
that was awkwardly expressed, or, without reflection, issued orders that
were injurious to his own interests. Madame Delmare saw that they were
carried out without scrutiny, without question, with the indifference of
the horse that draws the plough in one direction or another. Delmare,
when he saw the result of the failure to understand his ideas, of the
misconstruction of his wishes, would fly into a rage; but when she had
proved to him with a few tranquil, icy words that she had simply caused
his orders to be obeyed, he was reduced to the necessity of turning his
wrath against himself. It was a cruel pang, a bitter affront to that man
of petty self-esteem and of violent passions.
Several times he would have killed his wife, if he had been at Smyrna or
at Cairo. And yet he loved with all his heart that weak woman who lived
in subjection to him and kept the secret of his ill-treatment with
religious prudence. He loved her or pitied her--I do not know which. He
would have liked to win her love, for he was proud of her education and
of her superiority. He would have risen in his own eyes if she would
have stooped so far as to parley with his ideas and his principles. When
he went to her apartments in the morning with the purpose of picking a
quarrel with her, he sometimes found her asleep and dared not wake her.
He would gaze at her in silence; he would take fright at the delicacy of
her constitution, the pallor of her cheeks, at the air of calm
melancholy, of resignation to misfortune expressed by that motionless
and silent face. He would find in her features innumerable subjects of
self-reproach, remorse, anger and dread. He would blush at the thought
of the influence which so frail a creature had exerted over his
destiny--he, a man of iron, accustomed to command others, to see whole
battalions, spirited horses and frightened men march at a word from his
lips.
And a wife who was still but a child had made him unhappy! She forced
him to look within himself--to scrutinize his own decisions, to modify
many of them, to retract some of them--and all this without saying: "You
are wrong; I beg that you will do thus or thus." She had never implored,
she had never deigned to show herself his equal and to avow herself his
companion. That woman, whom he could have crushed in his hand if he had
chosen, lay there, an insignificant creature, dreaming of another before
his eyes, perhaps, and defying him even in her sleep. He was tempted to
strangle her--to drag her out of bed by the hair, to trample on her and
force her to shriek for mercy and to implore his forgiveness; but she
was so pretty, so dainty and so fair, that he would suddenly take pity
on her, as a child is moved to pity as he gazes at the bird he intended
to kill. And he would weep like a woman, man of bronze as he was, and
would steal away so that she might not enjoy the triumph of seeing him
weep. In truth I know not which was the unhappier, he or she. She was
cruel from virtue, as he was kind from weakness; she had too much
patience, of which he had not enough; she had the failings of her good
qualities and he the good qualities of his failings.
Around these two ill-assorted beings swarmed a multitude of friends who
strove to bring them nearer together, some in order to have something to
occupy their minds, others to give themselves importance, others as the
result of ill-advised affection. Some took the wife's part, others the
husband's. They quarrelled among themselves on the subject of Monsieur
and Madame Delmare, who, on the other hand, did not quarrel at all; for,
with Indiana's systematic submission, the colonel could never succeed in
picking a quarrel, whatever he might do. And then there were those who
knew nothing, but wanted to make themselves necessary. They counselled
submission to Madame Delmare and did not see that she was only too
submissive; others advised the husband to be inflexible and not to allow
his authority to pass into his wife's hands. These last, stupid mortals
who have so little feeling that they are always afraid that some one is
treading on them and who mistake cause and effect for each other, belong
to a species which you will find everywhere, which is constantly getting
entangled in other people's legs and makes a deal of noise in order to
attract attention.
Monsieur and Madame Delmare had made a particularly large number of
acquaintances at Melun and at Fontainebleau. They met these people again
at Paris, and they were the keenest in the game of evil-speaking that
was being played about them. The wit of small towns is, as you doubtless
know, the most ill-natured in the world. Good people are always
misunderstood there, superior minds are sworn foes of the public. If a
battle is to be fought for a fool or a boor you will see them running
from all directions. If you have a dispute with any one, they come to
look on as at the theatre; they make bets; they crowd upon your heels,
so eager are they to see and hear. The one who falls they will cover
with mud and maledictions; the weakest is always in the wrong. If you
make war on prejudices, petty foibles, vices, you insult them
personally, you attack them in what they hold most dear, you are a
treacherous and dangerous man. You will be summoned before the courts to
make reparation by people whose names you do not know, but whom you will
be convicted of having referred to in your slurring allusions. What
advice shall I give you? If you meet one of these people, avoid stepping
in his shadow, even at sunset, when a man's shadow is thirty feet long;
all that ground belongs to the inhabitant of the small town, and you
have no right to set foot upon it. If you breathe the air that he
breathes, you injure him, you destroy his health; if you drink at his
fountain, you cause it to run dry; if you lend a hand to business in his
province, you increase the price of the articles he purchases; if you
offer him snuff, you poison it; if you think his daughter pretty, you
intend to seduce her; if you extol his wife's domestic virtues, it is
insulting irony, and in your heart you despise her for her ignorance; if
you are so ill-advised as to pay him a compliment in his own house, he
will not understand it, and he will go about everywhere saying that you
have insulted him. Take your penates and carry them into the woods or to
the desolate moors. There only will the man of the small town leave you
in peace.
Even behind the manifold girdle of the walls of Paris the small town
pursued that ill-starred couple. Well-to-do families from Melun and
Fontainebleau took up their abode in the capital for the winter and
brought thither the blessing of their provincial manners. Cliques were
formed around Delmare and his wife, and all that was humanly possible
was attempted in order to make their position with respect to each other
more uncomfortable. Their unhappiness was increased thereby and their
mutual obstinacy did not diminish.
Ralph had the good sense not to meddle in their dissensions. Madame
Delmare had suspected him of embittering her husband against her, or at
least of seeking to put an end to Raymon's intimacy with her; but she
soon realized the injustice of her suspicions. The colonel's perfect
tranquillity with respect to Monsieur de Ramière was irrefutable
evidence of her cousin's silence. Thereupon she felt that she must thank
him; but he sedulously avoided any conversation on that subject;
whenever she was alone with him, he eluded her hints and pretended not
to understand them. It was such a delicate subject that Madame Delmare
had not the courage to force Ralph to discuss it; she simply endeavored,
by her loving attentions, by her delicate and affectionate deference to
him, to make him understand her gratitude; but Ralph seemed to pay no
heed, and Indiana's pride was wounded by this display of supercilious
generosity. She was afraid that she should seem to play the rôle of the
guilty wife imploring the indulgence of a stern witness; she became cold
and constrained once more with poor Ralph. It seemed to her that his
conduct in this matter was the natural consequence of his selfishness;
that he loved her still, although he no longer esteemed her; that he
simply desired her society for his own diversion, that he disliked to
abandon habits which she had formed for him in her home and to deprive
himself of the attentions that she was never weary of bestowing upon
him. She fancied that he was by no means anxious to invent grievances
against her husband or herself.
"That is just like his contempt for women," she thought; "in his eyes
they are simply domestic animals, useful to keep a house in order,
prepare meals and serve tea. He doesn't do them the honor of entering
into a discussion with them; their faults have no effect on him provided
that they do not interfere with his comfort or with his mode of life.
Ralph has no need of my heart; so long as my hands retain the knack of
preparing his pudding and of touching the strings of the harp for him,
what does he care for my love for another man, my secret suffering, my
deathly impatience under the yoke which is crushing me? I am his
servant, he asks nothing more of me than that."