Louise looked her doom in the face with steady eyes. No more hope, no
more doubt was possible. This was November. The third month had passed.
What she had dreaded more than death had come to pass. From the first
hour the fear of it had haunted her. Now she knew. She knew that the
outrage to which she had been subjected would endure; she knew that her
shame would live.
In the middle of the night after tossing sleeplessly for hours, the full
realization of this struck her heart like a blow. She sat up with
clenched teeth in the darkness, her hands pressed to her temples.
After a while she slid from her bed and stood motionless in the middle
of the room. Around her the world was asleep. She was alone with her
despair and her horror.
How should she elude her fate? How should she flee from herself and the
horror within her?
She turned on the light and went with quick steps to the mirror. There
she stood with bare feet in her long white nightdress, staring at
herself. Yes. She nodded and nodded like a demented creature at the
reflection she saw before her. She recognized the aspect of it; the
dragged features, the restless eyes, the face that seemed already too
small for her body, the hunted anxious look. That was maternity. To
violence nature had conceded what had been withheld from love. What she
and Claude had longed for, had prayed for--another child--behold, now it
was vouchsafed to her.
With teeth clenched she gazed at her white-draped reflection, she gazed
at the hated fragile frame in which the eternal mystery of life was
being accomplished. With the groan of a tortured animal she hid her face
in her hands. What should she do? Oh God! what should she do?
* * * * *
Then began for Louise the heartbreaking pursuit of liberation, the
nightmare, the obsession of deliverance.
All was vain. Nature pursued its inexorable course.
Then she determined that she must die. There was no help for it--she
must die. She dreaded death; she was tied to life by a two-fold
instinct--her own and that of the unborn being within her. How tenacious
was its hold on life! It would not die and free her. It clung with all
its tendrils to its own abhorred existence. Every night as she lay awake
she pictured what it would be if it were born--this creature conceived
in savagery and debauch, this child that she loathed and dreaded. She
could imagine it living--a demon, a monster, a thing to shriek at, to
make one's blood run cold. Waking and in her dreams she saw it; she saw
it crawling like a reptile, she saw it stained with the colour of blood,
she saw it babbling and mouthing at her, frenzied and insane.... That is
what she would give life to, that is what she would have to nurse and to
nourish; carrying that in her arms she would go to meet her husband when
he came limping back from the war on his crutches.
She pictured that meeting with Claude in a hundred different ways, all
horrible, all dreadful beyond words. Claude staring at her, not
believing, not understanding.... Claude going mad.... Claude lifting his
crutch and crushing the child's skull with it, as Amour's skull had been
crushed--ah! the dead horrible Amour that she had seen when she
staggered out of the room at dawn that day!... That was the first thing
she had seen--that gruesome animal with its brains beaten out and its
gleaming teeth uncovered. She could see it now, she could always see it
when she closed her eyes! What if this sight had impressed itself so
deeply upon her.... Hush! this was insanity; she knew that she was going
mad.
So she must die.
How should she die? And when she was dead, what would happen to
Mireille? And to Chérie?
_Chérie!_ At the thought of Chérie a new rush of ideas overwhelmed
Louise's wandering brain. Chérie! What was the matter with Chérie?
Had not she also that tense look, those pinched features, all those
unmistakable signs that Louise well knew how to interpret? Was it
possible that the same doom had overtaken her?
Then Louise forced herself to remember what she would have given her
life to forget. With eyes closed, with shuddering soul, she compelled
herself to live over again the darkest hours of her life.
... Before daybreak on the 5th of August. The house was silent. The
invaders had gone. Louise, a livid spectre in the pale grey dawn, had
staggered from her room--passing the dead Amour on Chérie's
threshold--and had stumbled down the stairs. There at the foot of the
wrought-iron banister lay Mireille, her mouth open, her breath coming in
gasps, like a little dying bird.
Louise had raised her, had unwound the long scarf that bound her, had
sprinkled water on her face and poured brandy down her throat ... until
Mireille had opened her eyes. Then Louise had seen that they were not
Mireille's eyes. There was frenzy and vacancy in the pale orbs that
wandered round the room, wandered and wandered--until they stopped and
were fixed, suddenly wild, hallucinated and intent. On what were they
fixed with such an expression of unearthly terror? The mother turned to
see.
Mireille's wild gaze was fixed upon a door, the red-curtained door of a
bedroom. It was a spare room, seldom used; sometimes a guest or one of
Claude's patients had slept there.
It was on this door--now flung wide open and with the red drapery torn
down--that Mireille's wild, meaningless gaze was fixed. Louise looked.
Then she looked again, without moving. She could see that the electric
lights were burning in the room; a chair was overturned in the doorway,
and there, there on the bed, lay a figure--Chérie! Chérie still in her
white muslin dress all torn and bloodstained, Chérie with her two hands
stretched upwards and tied to the bedpost above her head. A wide pink
ribbon had been torn from her hair and used to tie her hands to the
brass bedstead. Her face was scratched and bleeding. She was quite
unconscious. Louise thought she was dead.
Ah! how had she found the strength to lift her, to call her, to drag her
back to life, weeping over her and Mireille, gazing with maddened
despair from one unconscious figure to the other?... She had dressed
them, she had dragged and carried them down the stairs at the back of
the house. Should she call for help? Should she go crying their shame
and despair down the village street? No! no! Let no one see them. Let no
one know what had befallen them....
And--listen! Was that not the clatter of Uhlans galloping down the road?
Moaning, staggering, stumbling, she dragged and carried her two helpless
burdens into the woods....
There, the next evening a party of Belgian Guides had found them.