HOW LITTLE CHEBE'S STORY ENDED
Meanwhil September arrived. The hunting season brought together a large,
noisy, vulgar party at the chateau. There were long dinners at which the
wealthy bourgeois lingered slothfully and wearily, prone to fall asleep
like peasants. They went in carriages to meet the returning hunters in
the cool air of the autumn evening. The mist arose from the fields, from
which the crops had been gathered; and while the frightened game flew
along the stubble with plaintive cries, the darkness seemed to emerge
from the forests whose dark masses increased in size, spreading out over
the fields.
The carriage lamps were lighted, the hoods raised, and they drove quickly
homeward with the fresh air blowing in their faces. The dining-hall,
brilliantly illuminated, was filled with gayety and laughter.
Claire Fromont, embarrassed by the vulgarity of those about her, hardly
spoke at all. Sidonie was at her brightest. The drive had given
animation to her pale complexion and Parisian eyes. She knew how to
laugh, understood a little too much, perhaps, and seemed to the male
guests the only woman in the party. Her success completed Georges's
intoxication; but as his advances became more pronounced, she showed more
and more reserve. Thereupon he determined that she should be his wife.
He swore it to himself, with the exaggerated emphasis of weak characters,
who seem always to combat beforehand the difficulties to which they know
that they must yield some day.
It was the happiest moment of little Chebe's life. Even aside from any
ambitious project, her coquettish, false nature found a strange
fascination in this intrigue, carried on mysteriously amid banquets and
merry-makings.
No one about them suspected anything. Claire was at that healthy and
delightful period of youth when the mind, only partly open, clings to the
things it knows with blind confidence, in complete ignorance of treachery
and falsehood. M. Fromont thought of nothing but his business. His wife
polished her jewels with frenzied energy. Only old Gardinois and his
little, gimlet-like eyes were to be feared; but Sidonie entertained him,
and even if he had discovered anything, he was not the man to interfere
with her future.
Her hour of triumph was near, when a sudden, unforeseen disaster blasted
her hopes.
One Sunday morning M. Fromont was brought back fatally wounded from a
hunting expedition. A bullet intended for a deer had pierced his temple.
The chateau was turned upside-down.
All the hunters, among them the unknown bungler that had fired the fatal
shot, started in haste for Paris. Claire, frantic with grief, entered
the room where her father lay on his deathbed, there to remain; and
Risler, being advised of the catastrophe, came to take Sidonie home.
On the night before her departure she had a final meeting with Georges at
The Phantom,--a farewell meeting, painful and stealthy, and made solemn
by the proximity of death. They vowed, however, to love each other
always; they agreed upon a method of writing to each other. Then they
parted.
It was a sad journey home.
Sidonie returned abruptly to her every-day life, escorted by the
despairing grief of Risler, to whom his dear master's death was an
irreparable loss. On her arrival, she was compelled to describe her
visit to the smallest detail; discuss the inmates of the chateau, the
guests, the entertainments, the dinners, and the final catastrophe.
What torture for her, when, absorbed as she was by a single, unchanging
thought, she had so much need of silence and solitude! But there was
something even more terrible than that.
On the first day after her return Frantz resumed his former place; and
the glances with which he followed her, the words he addressed to her
alone, seemed to her exasperating beyond endurance.
Despite all his shyness and distrust of himself, the poor fellow believed
that he had some rights as an accepted and impatient lover, and little
Chebe was obliged to emerge from her dreams to reply to that creditor,
and to postpone once more the maturity of his claim.
A day came, however, when indecision ceased to be possible. She had
promised to marry Frantz when he had obtained a good situation; and now
an engineer's berth in the South, at the smelting-furnaces of Grand
Combe, was offered to him. That was sufficient for the support of a
modest establishment.
There was no way of avoiding the question. She must either keep her
promise or invent an excuse for breaking it. But what excuse could she
invent?
In that pressing emergency, she thought of Desiree. Although the lame
little girl had never confided in her, she knew of her great love for
Frantz. Long ago she had detected it, with her coquette's eyes, bright
and changing mirrors, which reflected all the thoughts of others without
betraying any of her own. It may be that the thought that another woman
loved her betrothed had made Frantz's love more endurable to her at
first; and, just as we place statues on tombstones to make them appear
less sad, Desiree's pretty, little, pale face at the threshold of that
uninviting future had made it seem less forbidding to her.
Now it provided--her with a simple and honorable pretext for freeing
herself from her promise.
"No! I tell you, mamma," she said to Madame Chebe one day, "I never will
consent to make a friend like her unhappy. I should suffer too much from
remorse,--poor Desiree! Haven't you noticed how badly she looks since I
came home; what a beseeching way she has of looking at me? No, I won't
cause her that sorrow; I won't take away her Frantz."
Even while she admired her daughter's generous spirit, Madame Chebe
looked upon that as a rather exaggerated sacrifice, and remonstrated with
her.
"Take care, my child; we aren't rich. A husband like Frantz doesn't turn
up every day."
"Very well! then I won't marry at all," declared Sidonie flatly, and,
deeming her pretext an excellent one, she clung persistently to it.
Nothing could shake her determination, neither the tears shed by Frantz,
who was exasperated by her refusal to fulfil her promise, enveloped as it
was in vague reasons which she would not even explain to him, nor the
entreaties of Risler, in whose ear Madame Chebe had mysteriously mumbled
her daughter's reasons, and who in spite of everything could not but
admire such a sacrifice.
"Don't revile her, I tell you! She's an angel!" he said to his brother,
striving to soothe him.
"Ah! yes, she is an angel," assented Madame Chebe with a sigh, so that
the poor betrayed lover had not even the right to complain. Driven to
despair, he determined to leave Paris, and as Grand Combe seemed too near
in his frenzied longing for flight, he asked and obtained an appointment
as overseer on the Suez Canal at Ismailia. He went away without knowing,
or caring to know aught of, Desiree's love; and yet, when he went to bid
her farewell, the dear little cripple looked up into his face with her
shy, pretty eyes, in which were plainly written the words:
"I love you, if she does not."
But Frantz Risler did not know how to read what was written in those
eyes.
Fortunately, hearts that are accustomed to suffer have an infinite store
of patience. When her friend had gone, the lame girl, with her charming
morsel of illusion, inherited from her father and refined by her feminine
nature, returned bravely to her work, saying to herself:
"I will wait for him."
And thereafter she spread the wings of her birds to their fullest extent,
as if they were all going, one after another, to Ismailia in Egypt. And
that was a long distance!
Before sailing from Marseilles, young Risler wrote Sidonie a farewell
letter, at once laughable and touching, wherein, mingling the most
technical details with the most heartrending adieux, the unhappy engineer
declared that he was about to set sail, with a broken heart, on the
transport Sahib, "a sailing-ship and steamship combined, with engines of
fifteen-hundred-horse power," as if he hoped that so considerable a
capacity would make an impression on his ungrateful betrothed, and cause
her ceaseless remorse. But Sidonie had very different matters on her
mind.
She was beginning to be disturbed by Georges's silence. Since she left
Savigny she had heard from him only once. All her letters were left
unanswered. To be sure, she knew through Risler that Georges was very
busy, and that his uncle's death had thrown the management of the factory
upon him, imposing upon him a responsibility that was beyond his
strength. But to abandon her without a word!
From the window on the landing, where she had resumed her silent
observations--for she had so arranged matters as not to return to
Mademoiselle Le Mire--little Chebe tried to distinguish her lover,
watched him as he went to and fro across the yards and among the
buildings; and in the afternoon, when it was time for the train to start
for Savigny, she saw him enter his carriage to go to his aunt and cousin,
who were passing the early months of their period of mourning at the
grandfather's chateau in the country.
All this excited and alarmed her; and the proximity of the factory
rendered Georges's avoidance of her even more apparent. To think that by
raising her voice a little she could make him turn toward the place where
she stood! To think that they were separated only by a wall! And yet,
at that moment they were very far apart.
Do you remember, little Chebe, that unhappy winter evening when the
excellent Risler rushed into your parents' room with an extraordinary
expression of countenance, exclaiming, "Great news!"?
Great news, indeed! Georges Fromont had just informed him that, in
accordance with his uncle's last wishes, he was to marry his cousin
Claire, and that, as he was certainly unequal to the task of carrying on
the business alone, he had resolved to take him, Risler, for a partner,
under the firm name of FROMONT JEUNE AND RISLER AINE.
How did you succeed, little Chebe, in maintaining your self-possession
when you learned that the factory had eluded your grasp and that another
woman had taken your place? What a terrible evening!--Madame Chebe sat
by the table mending; M. Chebe before the fire drying his clothes, which
were wet through by his having walked a long distance in the rain. Oh!
that miserable room, overflowing with gloom and ennui! The lamp gave a
dim light. The supper, hastily prepared, had left in the room the odor
of the poor man's kitchen. And Risler, intoxicated with joy, talking
with increasing animation, laid great plans!
All these things tore your heart, and made the treachery still more
horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched
hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were doomed to pass your
life.
Sidonie was seriously ill for a long while. As she lay in bed, whenever
the window-panes rattled behind the curtains, the unhappy creature
fancied that Georges's wedding-coaches were driving through the street;
and she had paroxysms of nervous excitement, without words and
inexplicable, as if a fever of wrath were consuming her.
At last, time and youthful strength, her mother's care, and, more than
all, the attentions of Desiree, who now knew of the sacrifice her friend
had made for her, triumphed over the disease. But for a long while
Sidonie was very weak, oppressed by a deadly melancholy, by a constant
longing to weep, which played havoc with her nervous system.
Sometimes she talked of travelling, of leaving Paris. At other times she
insisted that she must enter a convent. Her friends were sorely
perplexed, and strove to discover the cause of that singular state of
mind, which was even more alarming than her illness; when she suddenly
confessed to her mother the secret of her melancholy.
She loved the elder Risler! She never had dared to whisper it; but it
was he whom she had always loved and not Frantz.
This news was a surprise to everybody, to Risler most of all; but little
Chebe was so pretty, her eyes were so soft when she glanced at him, that
the honest fellow instantly became as fond of her as a fool! Indeed, it
may be that love had lain in his heart for a long time without his
realizing it.
And that is how it happened that, on the evening of her wedding-day,
young Madame Risler, in her white wedding-dress, gazed with a smile of
triumph at the window on the landing which had been the narrow setting of
ten years of her life. That haughty smile, in which there was a touch of
profound pity and of scorn as well, such scorn as a parvenu feels for his
poor beginnings, was evidently addressed to the poor sickly child whom
she fancied she saw up at that window, in the depths of the past and the
darkness. It seemed to say to Claire, pointing at the factory:
"What do you say to this little Chebe? She is here at last, you see!"