M. Chantal ceased speaking. He was seated on the billiard-table,
dangling his feet, his left hand playing with a ball, while his right
fiddled with a cloth which was used for wiping the chalk-marks off
the scoring-slate, and which from its use we called the chalk-cloth.
Rather red, his voice indistinct, he was speaking to himself now, lost
in his recollections, going gently through the bygone things and the
old events that were waking in his mind, as one strolls through the old
gardens of the home where one was brought up, and where each tree, each
path, each plant, the prickly hollies, the sweet-smelling laurels, the
yews, whose fat red berries crush between one’s fingers, evoke at every
step some little fact of our past life, one of those insignificant and
delicious facts that make up the very foundation, the very warp of
existence.
As for me, I stood there facing him, my back leaning against the wall,
and my hands supported on my unused billiard-cue.
After a minute he resumed.
“Ah, me! How pretty she was at eighteen ... and gracious ... and
perfect.... Ah! what a pretty ... pretty ... pretty and kind ...
and good ... and charming girl! ... She had eyes ... blue eyes ...
transparent ... clear ... the like of which I have never seen ...
never!”
He lapsed into silence again. I asked, “Why has she never married?”
He replied, not to me, but to the word “married” that had been let fall:
“Why? Why? She never wished to ... never wished. Though she had thirty
thousand francs dowry, and was asked several times ... she never wished
to! She seemed sad in those days. That was when I married my cousin,
little Charlotte, my wife, to whom I had been engaged for six years.”
I looked at M. Chantal, and it seemed to me that I saw into his soul,
that I suddenly saw into one of those humble and cruel dramas of
honourable hearts, upright hearts, of hearts without reproach, into one
of those mute, unexplored hearts, which no one has understood, not even
those who are their uncomplaining and resigned victims.
And, suddenly impelled by a daring curiosity, I blurted out:
“Should not you have married her, Monsieur Chantal?”
He trembled, looked at me, and said:
“I? Marry whom?”
“Mademoiselle Perle.”
“Why so?”
“Because you loved her better than your cousin.”
He looked at me with strange, round, startled eyes, then he stammered:
“I loved her ... I? ... how? Who told you that?...”
“Why, any one can see it ... and that’s why you were so long in
marrying your cousin, who waited six years for you.”
He dropped the ball that he was holding in his left hand, seized the
chalk-cloth with both hands, and, hiding his face with it, began to sob
into it. He wept in a distressing, ridiculous way, as a sponge weeps
when it is squeezed, from his eyes and nose and mouth all at once. And
he coughed and hawked, blew his nose into the chalk-cloth, wiped his
eyes, sneezed, began running again from every aperture in his face,
with a throaty noise that suggested gargling.
As for me, frightened and ashamed, I wanted to make my escape and was
at my wits’ end to know what to say, or to do, or try.
And suddenly Madame Chantal’s voice sounded on the stairs, “Will you
soon be done with your smoke?”