Then I rushed to her husband, and seizing him by the elbows said,
“Monsieur Chantal, my good friend Chantal, listen; your wife is calling
you; pull yourself together, pull yourself together at once; we must go
downstairs; pull yourself together.”
He stammered, “Yes ... yes ... I’m coming ... poor girl ... I’m coming
... tell her I’ll be in a moment.”
And he began conscientiously to wipe his face with the cloth that had
been wiping all the marks off the slate for two or three years. When
he finished, he showed half white, half red, his brow, his nose, his
cheeks, his chin all smeared with chalk, and his eyes swollen and still
full of tears.
I took him by the hands and dragged him into his room, murmuring, “I
beg your pardon, I do indeed, Monsieur Chantal, for having given you
pain, ... but ... I did not know ... you ... you understand.”
He pressed my hand, “Yes ... yes ... there are some awkward moments....”
Then he plunged his face into the basin. When he lifted his head he
still did not look presentable, but I thought of a little ruse. As he
looked rather uncomfortably at himself in the glass, I said to him, “It
will do if you tell them that you have some dust in your eye, and you
can let them see it watering as much as you like.”
So he went downstairs rubbing his eyes with his handkerchief. They made
a fuss about him; every one wanted to look for the speck of dust, which
was not to be found, and they related similar cases in which the doctor
had eventually to be called in.
As for me, I had rejoined Mademoiselle Perle, and I was watching her,
tormented by a burning curiosity, a curiosity which was becoming
torture. She must really have been very pretty once, with her gentle
eyes, so large, so calm, so open that they looked as if she never
closed them as other people do. Her dress was rather ridiculous, a
regular old maid’s toilet, and, without making her look a fright, did
not set her off.
I seemed to see into her soul, as I had seen into M. Chantal’s a
little before, as if I surveyed from end to end her humble, simple,
devoted life; but a necessity forced my lips, an imperious necessity
of questioning her, of learning if she too had loved him; if she had
suffered like him from that long-drawn sorrow, secret and acute, which
none knows, none sees, none suspects, but which finds vent at night,
in the solitude of the darkened room. I looked at her, I saw her heart
beating under her muslin bodice, and I asked myself whether that sweet,
frank face had groaned night by night in the moist thickness of her
pillow, and sobbed, her body racked by convulsions, in the fever of her
burning bed.
And I said to her, cautiously, as children do when they break a trinket
to see inside it, “If you had seen M. Chantal crying just now, you
would have been sorry for him.”
She trembled, “What? He was crying?”
“Yes, he was crying!”
“And why was he?”
She seemed very much perturbed. I replied:
“Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes. He was telling me how much he used to love you, and what it cost
him to marry his present wife instead of you....”
Her pale face seemed to me to lengthen a little; her eyes, always open,
her calm eyes closed suddenly, so quickly that they seemed to have
closed for ever. She slipped from her chair to the floor, and collapsed
there gently, gradually, as a fallen veil might have done.