We had arranged to spend a certain day in Rouen, but when the day came
I did not feel well: I was tired and inclined to be feverish. The
first sign of a coming illness, to which bad dreams and bad conscience
(Money) were each contributing. I asked to be left at home. The
Countess and the two girls went away by the early train; de Fouquier
also was to be absent for a whole day, visiting some distant farms. I
was alone.
I was restless, and could not settle down to read or even to think. A
ride might cheer me up, I decided, so I went down to the stables and
ordered the horse I always rode. Then I went upstairs and put on my
riding-habit. By the time I was downstairs again, I felt tired and
disinclined. I sent the horse away, and threw myself down in a chair in
the great dining-room, without changing back into my ordinary clothes.
I still had the whip in my hand.
I cannot have been more than half awake, for though I had a dim
notion of Gabrielle retreating through the curtains and depositing a
gentleman in the room, I remember nothing in the way of announcement or
explanation. Some one was there: who or how or why I did not know. I
took in that he was tall, dressed like a gentleman, and silver-haired;
but at his face, for some vaguely-felt reason of half-awakeness or
self-consciousness or fear, I could not look.
"Good day, Sir," I said, shunning his eyes, "pray won't you sit down."
Naturally I spoke in French.
"Thank you, perhaps I will," he replied in languid and exquisite
English, utterly ignoring the fact that I had spoken in French. "I am
happy to meet a fellow-countrywoman in this Papist land."
The ancient familiar jargon flung at me so unexpectedly, and in a voice
that matched it so ill, roused me to immediate hostility. And was my
French so bad that he must needs assume I was English? Or did he know?
But it was my own annoyance at his Christian phrasing that annoyed me
most. Though, to be sure, the voice was not a Christian's. Who could he
be?
I looked more boldly, though still avoiding his eyes. It was impossible
to guess his age. The fresh skin and beardless chin were a boy's,
the carriage suggested a man in the prime of life, the headful
of silvery-white denoted venerable age. The features were small,
patrician, womanish; the mouth especially being too small for a man's,
while full of pride and authority and race. A lordly and effeminate
_grand seigneur_.
The eyes, I knew, were the key to the mysterious face, and at these I
dared not look.
All these impressions must have been gathered in a second of time, for
he seemed to be still in the same sentence.
"--Yes, I am happy to meet you, for I feel you are the Lord's." The
languid voice fashioned such a mockery of our Brethren speech that for
a moment I could have railed at him for Antichrist. Then I felt quickly
that I was foolish, and let him go on. "Assure me that you are His,
Mademoiselle, pray assure me."
"I may be," I said sharply, "but plain 'Miss' is good enough for me,
s'il vous plait, _monsieur_."
"May-be, may-be!" he sneered, for I had roused his spite. "'May-be' is
the cry of souls in torment, the watchword of the damned. Beware, young
woman, of your woman's filthy pride. It is the snare of men, the source
of all wickedness. Woman, subtle of heart and impudent of face, who
hath cast down many wounded, whose house is the way to Hell--"
It was a madman. He had forgotten me, he had forgotten himself. He
was hypnotizing himself with his own words; his eyes were wild and
unseeing. I looked into them now. God, they were not his eyes, but _my
own_, just as I saw them when I stared in a mirror. I was bewitched,
and could only go on staring, staring. The mystical excitement seized
me, the sense of physical existence departed, more surely than ever
before the imminent immanent moment was upon me, I had discovered the
World, I was kissing the eyes, my soul moved forward to reach him--. I
found myself stumbling up from my chair in his direction, and with my
ordinary eyes saw him still standing there, still intoning away, still
almost unconscious of everything--but not completely, for he knew his
power over me.
Suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he stopped. I broke in quickly, in
sanest worldliest fashion.
"I should be glad to know, Sir," I said coldly, "why in an ordinary
sensible house, which is neither yours nor mine, you are favouring me
with these extraordinary speeches. You have not the advantage of my
acquaintance, nor I of yours. Is it Madame the Countess de Florian you
called to see?"
"Ah true, true!"--there was no change of voice or manner, but a change
(I felt) of person inside him--"Yes: I am an old friend of the family;
I came over from Rouen, through which I was passing, and learn from the
servant that by a piece of ill-fortune the family are in Rouen today.
Here is my card."
I took it, without looking at it.
"I am an English friend who lives here," I said, "a kind of companion
to the girls."
"Indeed, indeed! As I was saying"--and impatient of the length of this
irrelevant interruption of his ravings, he half-closed his eyes again
and resumed the tirade of piety and denunciation and woman-hating and
hell-fire. He was mad. He was not mad. All the world was mad. _It was
not happening._
I was working myself up to face again the experience of his eyes, when
my glance lighted accidentally on the visiting card in my hand.
The news entered my soul before my brain. It was not news; I had known
it all the time. I stared at the printed letters one by one, not able
to understand them, understanding them all too well. They stood up from
the card, assumed hideous shapes. It was a nightmare. It was not true.
I clutched at the side of the bed--no, it was the dining-room table
against which I was leaning. There were the chair, the sideboards, the
armour; there was _he_.
In my visions of this meeting I had always taken him unawares and now
it was I who had been surprised. The second part of my dreams at any
rate should not fail. I gripped the whip more tightly.
In crowding tumult every word of my Grandmother's old narration filled
my heart and brain. I was ten years old again. She called me upstairs
to her bedroom, pulled out the brown tin box from under the bed, drew
forth the packet. Each phrase of each pitiful letter was marshalled by
my inhuman memory before my eyes. Bitch, Bitch, he called her Bitch. As
I looked at the white halo-crowned vile beautiful face before me, as
he raved away, I did not listen: one by one I went over the ill-deeds
and the cruel words I had to his account, feverishly I visualized my
mother's suffering and sorrow till I was at the white heat for avenging
them. The hardest part was to keep calm, sane: to keep my will in
control of my emotions, which were bursting through all the ancient
bonds of self-restraint, urging me tempestuously to await no perfectly
planned moment, but to wound him _now_.
Somehow I kept my voice steady. I interrupted; and, following my plan,
veered him back into his maniacal misogyny.
"You have a poor opinion of our sex indeed. What, Sir, if you have a
daughter of your own?"
"I busy myself not with my children of the flesh, but only with my
children of the spirit."
He was impossibly real, impossibly like Grandmother's story. He meant
what he said; there was no hypocrisy. I was proud of the handsome face,
had a lunatic longing for the eyes.
I could kiss him, kill him.
"I had a child once, they tell me--at least her mother said it was
mine--"
_Now!_ cried Melodrama, _Now!_ cried the Plan, and the Mary I had
always visualized for this moment achieved herself as--suddenly,
savagely--I cut him across the face with my whip.
He was an old man now, and fell to the ground helplessly. I lashed at
him in a blind fury of revenge and righteousness, shouting horrible
words of which I hardly knew the meaning. He tried to rise, but I
struck him down again. "Bitch, Bitch, you called her Bitch. You swine,
God is paying you back."
I knelt down suddenly beside him: "Father, will you kiss me?"
I have a distant notion of de Fouquier somewhere near me, of fading
away into a world vaguer and colder than dreams....
There is a door that leads to happiness. Revenge cannot force the lock.