THE BABY CLOTHES.
At the light knock heard on her chamber door Mme. Roumestan trembled as
if she had been caught in a crime, and pushing in again the gracefully
moulded drawer of her Louis XV bureau over which she had been leaning
almost on her knees, she cried:
“Who’s there? What do you want, Polly?”
“A letter for Madame; there is great haste,” answered the Englishwoman.
Rosalie took the letter and closed the door sharply. The writing was
unknown and coarse, traced upon wretched paper, and there was the
“urgent and personal” which accompanies begging letters. A Parisian
chambermaid would never have disturbed her for such a little thing as
that. She pitched it on the bureau, postponing the reading of it till
later, and returned quickly to her drawer which contained the marvels
of the baby’s old layette. For the last eight years, ever since the
tragedy, she had not opened it, fearing to find her tears there again;
nor even since her new happiness had she done so owing to a very
maternal superstition, fearing lest she should come to grief once more
by means of a premature caress given by way of its little layette to
the child that was yet to come.
This courageous lady had all the nervous feelings of the woman, all her
tremblings, all the shivery drawing-together of the mimosa. The world,
which judges without understanding anything, found her cold, just as
the dull and stupid suppose that flowers are not endowed with life. But
now, her happiness having endured for six months, she must make up her
mind to bring all these little articles out from their mourning and
enclosure, shake out their pleats, go over and perhaps change them; for
even in the case of baby clothes fashion changes and the ribbons are
adjusted differently at different times. It was for this most intimate
work that Rosalie had carefully locked herself in; throughout that big
bustling Ministry, rustling with papers and humming with reports and
the feverish flitting hither and thither from offices to departments,
there was assuredly nothing quite so serious, nothing quite so moving
as that woman on her knees before an open drawer, her heart beating and
her hands trembling.
She took up the laces somewhat yellow with time which preserved along
with the perfume all this white mass of innocent clothes--baby caps and
undershirts arranged according to age and size, the gown for baptism,
the robe full of little pleats and the doll stockings. She recalled her
life down there at Orsay, gently languid and at work for hours together
in the shadow of the big catalpa whose white petals dropped into her
work-basket among her spools and delicate embroidery scissors, her
entire thought concentrated upon some one point of tailoring which gave
her the measure of her dreams and the passage of time. What illusions
she had then had, what belief and trust! What a delicious murmuring
throughout the foliage above her head and what a rising up of tender
and novel sensations in herself! In a single day life had suddenly
taken all that from her. And so despair flowed back again to her heart
as little by little she pulled forth the layette--the treason of her
husband, the loss of her child.
The appearance of the first little dress all ready to be pulled on,
that which is laid on the cradle at the moment of birth, the sleeves
pushed one within the other, the arms spread apart, the little caps
blown up to a round shape, made her burst into tears. It seemed to her
that her child had lived and that she had known it and held it to her
heart. A son, O, certainly it was a boy, a strong and beautiful one,
and from his very birth he had the mysterious and deep eyes of his
grandfather! To-day he would have been eight years old and have had
long curls falling round his shoulders; at that age they still belong
to the mother, who takes them walking, dresses them, makes them work.
Ah, cruel, cruel life!
But after a while, as she pulled out and twitched into shape these
little objects tied together with microscopic bows, with their
embroidered flowers and snowy laces, she began to be calm. Well, no;
after all, life is not so evil, and while it lasts one must keep up
one’s courage. At that terrible turn of her life she had lost all of
hers, imagining that the end had come, so far as she was concerned, for
believing, loving, being wife and mother; thinking in fact that there
only remained for her the pleasure of looking back upon the shining
past and watching it disappear in the distance like some shore which
one regrets to leave. Then after gloomy years the spring had shot out
its fruits slowly beneath the cold snow of her heart; lo and behold,
it flowered again in this little creature who was about to live and
whom she felt was already vigorous from the terrible little kicks which
it gave her during the night. And then her Numa, so changed, so good,
quite cured of his brutality and violence! To be sure he still showed
weaknesses which she did not like, those roundabout Italian ways which
he could not help having, but, even as he said--“O, that?--that is
politics!” Besides that, she was no longer the victim of the illusions
of her early years; she knew that in order to live happily one must be
contented with coming near to what one desires in everything and that
complete happiness can only be quarried from the half-happinesses which
existence affords us.
A new knock at the door. It is M. Méjean who would like to speak to
Madame.
“Very good, I’m coming.”
She found him in the little drawing-room which he was measuring from
end to end with excited steps.
“I have a confession to make to you,” said he, using a somewhat brusque
tone of familiarity which their old friendship authorized and which
both of them would have liked to have turned into a relationship of
brother and sister. “Some days ago I put an end to this wretched
affair--and did not withhold the statement from you for the sake of
keeping this longer in my possession--”
He held out to her the portrait of Hortense obtained from Audiberte.
“Well, at last! O, how happy she is going to be, poor dear!”
She softened at the sight of her sister’s pretty face, her sister
sparkling with health and youth in that Provençal disguise, and read at
the bottom of the picture in her fine and very firm writing: “I believe
in you and I love you--Hortense Le Quesnoy.” Then, remembering that the
wretched lover had also read it and that he must have been intrusted
with a very sorrowful commission in procuring it, she grasped his hand
affectionately:
“Thank you.”
“No, do not thank me, Madame.--Yes, it was hard--but for the last eight
days I have lived with that ‘I believe in you and I love you,’ and at
times I could imagine that it was meant for me.” And then very low and
timidly: “How is she getting on?”
“Oh, not well at all--Mamma is taking her South. Now she is willing to
do whatever anybody wishes--it is just as if a spring had broken in
her.”
“Altered?”
Rosalie made a gesture: “Ah!”
“Till we meet again, Madame,” said Méjean very quickly, moving away
with hurried steps; he turned back again at the door and squaring his
solid shoulders beneath the half-raised curtain:
“It is the luckiest thing in the world that I have no imagination. I
should be altogether too unhappy!”
Rosalie returned to her room deeply dejected. There was no use in
fighting against it by recalling her sister’s youth and the encouraging
words of Jarras, who persisted in looking upon it merely as a crisis
which it was necessary to cross; black thoughts invaded her which
would not tally with the festive white in the baby’s layette. She
hastened to tie up, lay in order and turn the key upon these little
scattered articles, and as she got up she perceived the letter lying
on the bureau, took and read it mechanically, expecting to find the
commonplace begging statement which she received every day from so many
different hands, and which would have come at a lucky moment during one
of those spells of superstition, when charity seems a bringer of good
luck. That was why she did not understand it at first and was obliged
to read again these lines, which had been written out as a copy by the
ignorant pen of a schoolboy, the boy employed by Guilloche:
“If you are fond of codfish _à la brandade_, delicious is that which
is eaten to-night at the house of Mme. Bachellery in the Rue de
Londres. Your husband pays for the supper. Ring three times and enter
straight ahead.”
From these foolish phrases, from this slimy and perfidious abyss,
the truth arose and appeared to her, helped by coincidences and
recollections--that name “Bachellery” pronounced so often during the
past year, enigmatical articles in the papers concerning her engagement
at the opera, that address which she had heard Numa himself give, and
the long stay at Arvillard. In a second, doubt crystallized itself in
her to certainty. And besides, did not the past throw a light for her
upon this present and all its actual horror? Lies and grimace--he was
not and could not be anything but that. Why should this eternal maker
of dupes spare her? It was her fault; she had been the fool to allow
herself to be caught by his lying voice and vulgar caresses. And in the
same second certain details came to her mind which made her red and
pale by turns.
This time it was no longer despair showing itself with heavy, pure
tears as in the early deceptions, but anger against herself for having
been so feeble and cowardly as to have been able to pardon him, and
against him who had duped her in contempt of the promises and oaths
in connection with the former crime. She would like to have convicted
him of his villainy there, on the moment, but he was at Versailles in
the Chamber of Deputies. It occurred to her to call Méjean, but then
she felt a repugnance to force that honest fellow to lie. And being
thus reduced to crushing down a swarm of contrary feelings, prevent
herself from crying out and surrendering to the terrible nerve-crisis
which she felt rising in her, she strode to and fro on the carpet, her
hands with a familiar action resting against the loosened waist of her
dressing-gown. All of a sudden she stopped and shuddered, seized by a
crazy fear.
Her child!
He was suffering too and he was calling to his mother with all the
power of a life which is struggling to exist. Oh, my God, if he also,
if he was going to die like the other one at the same age, and under
exactly similar conditions! Destiny, which people call blind, has
sometimes savage combinations, and she began to reason with herself in
half-broken words and tender exclamations. “Dear little fellow!--poor
little fellow!--” and attempted to look upon everything coldly as it
exists, in order to conduct herself in a dignified way and above all
not to destroy that solitary good thing which remained to her. She even
took in hand some work, that embroidery of Penelope which the Parisian
woman keeps about her, being always in action; for it was necessary to
wait for Numa’s return and have an explanation with him, or rather to
discover in his attitude a conviction of his crime, before it came to
the irremediable scandal of a separation.
O, those brilliant wools and that regular and colorless canvas--what
confidences may they not receive, what regrets, joys and desires
form the complicated and knotted reverse of the canvas full of broken
threads in these feminine products, with their flowers peacefully
interwoven!
Coming back from the Chamber of Deputies, Numa Roumestan found his wife
embroidering beneath the narrow gleam of a single lighted lamp, and
this quiet picture, her lovely profile softened by her chestnut-colored
hair, in that luxurious shade of cushioned furniture where the lacquer
screens and old bronzes, the ivories and potteries, caught the warm and
shooting rays from a wood fire, overcame him by contrast with the noise
of the Assembly, where the brilliantly lighted ceilings are swathed in
a dust full of movement that floats above the hall of debate like the
smoke from powder above a field where military are manœuvring.
“How do you do, Mamma; it’s pleasant here with you.”
The day’s meeting had been a hot one; always that wretched
appropriation bill, and the Left fastened for five hours on the coat
tails of that poor General d’Espaillon, who didn’t know enough to put
two ideas together when he wasn’t saying g--d--, etc., etc. Well,
anyhow, the Cabinet would get through this time; but after the vacation
at New Year’s, when the Assembly would reach the question of the Fine
Arts--then was the time to look out!
“They are counting very much on the Cadaillac business to upset me!...
Rougeot is the one who will talk.... He’s no chicken, that Rougeot; he
has a backbone!”
Then with his famous jerk of the shoulder: “Rougeot against
Roumestan--the North against the South--all the better! It will amuse
me. It will be a hand-to-hand fight.”
Excited by his political matters, he talked on in a monologue without
noticing how silent Rosalie was. Then he approached her and, sitting
very near her on a footstool, made her stop her work by trying to kiss
her hand.
“You seem to be in a terrible hurry with what you are embroidering. Is
it for my New Year’s present? I have bought yours. Just guess what it
is!”
She pulled her hand gently away and looked him steadily in the face in
an embarrassing manner without answering him. His features were drawn
and weary from his days of work in the Assembly, showing that loosened
look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth
a character at once weak and violent--all the passions and nothing to
resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape. It is
better not to look at them unless the sun is shining.
“Are you dining at home?” asked Rosalie.
“No, I’m sorry to say--I’m expected at Durand’s--a tiresome
dinner--_té!_ I’m already late,” added he as he rose. “Luckily it is
not necessary to dress there.”
That fixed look in his wife’s face followed him. “Dine with me, I beg
of you--” and her harmonious voice hardened into insistence and sounded
threatening and implacable.
But Roumestan was no observer. “And besides, business is business, is
it not so? O, this life of a public man cannot be arranged as one would
wish!”
“Well then, goodbye,” said she gravely, completing that farewell within
her own mind with a “since it is our destiny.”
She listened to the coupé roll off beneath the vaulted passage and
then, having carefully folded up her work, she rang.
“A carriage, right away--a hackney-coach--and you, Polly, give me my
mantle and bonnet--I’m going out.”
Quickly ready to start, she embraced in one look the chamber she
was quitting, where she neither regretted anything nor left behind
her any part of herself, for it was merely the room of a furnished
apartment-house despite all the pomp of its cold yellow brocades.
“See that the big cardboard box is put in the carriage.”
Of what belonged to both, the baby’s layette was all that she carried
off.
Standing at the door of the coach the mystified Englishwoman asked if
Madame was not going to dine at home. No, she will dine at her father’s
where probably she will also pass the night.
On the way a doubt overcame her, or rather a scruple. Suppose nothing
of all this were true? Suppose that Bachellery girl did not live in
the Rue de Londres. She gave the coachman the address, but without much
hope; still, she must have certainty on this point.
The carriage stopped before a little house two stories high, crowned
by a terrace for a summer garden; it was the old home in Paris of a
Cairo man who had just died a bankrupt. There was about it the look
of a little house with shutters closed and curtains drawn; a strong
odor of the kitchen rose from the brightly lit and noisy basement.
Rosalie understood what it was just from noting how the front door
obeyed three strokes of the bell and of itself seemed to turn upon its
hinges. A Persian tapestry caught up by heavy cords in the centre of
the antechamber allowed a glimpse of the stair with its soft carpet and
its lamps in which the gas was burning at the highest point. She heard
laughter, took two steps forward and saw what never more in her life
she could forget.
At the turn of the stairs on the first floor Numa was leaning over the
banisters red and excited, in his shirt sleeves, with his arm round the
waist of that girl, who was also very much excited, her hair loosened
and falling down her back upon the frills of a rose-colored silk
morning-gown. And there he was, calling out in his violent way:
“Bompard, bring up the _brandade!_”
That was where he could be seen as he really was, the Minister of
Public Instruction and Religion, the great proclaimer of religious
morality, the defender of sound doctrines! It was there he showed
himself without mask or hypocritical grimace--all his South turned
outside for inspection!--at ease and in his shirt-sleeves as if at the
Fair of Beaucaire.
“Bompard, bring up the _brandade!_” repeated the giddy girl,
intentionally exaggerating Numa’s Provençal accent. Without a question
that was Bompard, the improvised cookshop boy who came up from the
kitchen, a napkin over his shoulder and his arms surrounding a great
big dish. It was he who caused the sounding wing of the door to turn on
its hinges.