Persecution had taught Pierrette the wariness of slaves; so she answered bravely: —
“I don’t know what you mean, — ”
“Who means? — your dog?” said Sylvie, sharply.
“I should have said ‘cousin,’” replied the girl, humbly.
“And didn’t you get up and go in your bare feet to the window? — which will give you an illness; and serve you right, too. And perhaps you didn’t talk to your lover, either?”
“No, cousin.”
“I know you have many faults, but I did not think you told lies. You had better think this over, mademoiselle; you will have to explain this affair to your cousin and to me, or your cousin will be obliged to take severe measures.”
The old maid, exasperated by jealousy and curiosity, meant to frighten the girl. Pierrette, like all those who suffer more than they have strength to bear, kept silence. Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete, — for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity. Sylvie watched Pierrette narrowly. The girl colored; but the color, instead of rising evenly, came out in patches on her cheekbones, in burning and significant spots. A mother, seeing that symptom of illness, would have changed her tone at once; she would have taken the child on her lap and questioned her; in fact, she would long ago have tenderly understood the signs of Pierrette’s pure and perfect innocence; she would have seen her weakness and known that the disturbance of the digestive organs and the other functions of the body was about to affect the lungs. Those eloquent patches would have warned her of an imminent danger. But an old maid, one in whom the family instincts have never been awakened, to whom the needs of childhood and the precautions required for adolescence were unknown, had neither the indulgence nor the compassionate intelligence of a mother; such sufferings as those of Pierrette, instead of softening her heart only made it more callous.
“She blushes, she is guilty!” thought Sylvie.
Pierrette’s silence was thus interpreted to her injury.
“Pierrette,” continued Sylvie, “before your cousin comes down we must have some talk together. Come,” she said, in a rather softer tone, “shut the street door; if any one comes they will rung and we shall hear them.”
In spite of the damp mist which was rising from the river, Sylvie took Pierrette along the winding gravel path which led across the lawn to the edge of the rock terrace, — a picturesque little quay, covered with iris and aquatic plants. She now changed her tactics, thinking she might catch Pierrette tripping by softness; the hyena became a cat.
“Pierrette,” she said, “you are no longer a child; you are nearly fifteen, and it is not at all surprising that you should have a lover.”
“But, cousin,” said Pierrette, raising her eyes with angelic sweetness to the cold, sour face of her cousin, “What is a lover?”
It would have been impossible for Sylvie to define a lover with truth and decency to the girl’s mind. Instead of seeing in that question the proof of adorable innocence, she considered it a piece of insincerity.
“A lover, Pierrette, is a man who loves us and wishes to marry us.”
“Ah,” said Pierrette, “when that happens in Brittany we call the young man a suitor.”
“Well, remember that in owning your feelings for a man you do no wrong, my dear. The wrong is in hiding them. Have you pleased some of the men who visit here?”
“I don’t think so, cousin.”
“Do you love any of them?”
“No.”
“Certain?”
“Quite certain.”
“Look at me, Pierrette.”
Pierrette looked at Sylvie.
“A man called to you this morning in the square.”
Pierrette lowered her eyes.
“You went to your window, you opened it, and you spoke to him.”
“No cousin, I went to look out and I saw a peasant.”
“Pierrette, you have much improved since you made your first communion; you have become pious and obedient, you love God and your relations; I am satisfied with you. I don’t say this to puff you up with pride.”
The horrible creature had mistaken despondency, submission, the silence of wretchedness, for virtues!
The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found censure and injustice. Pierrette raised her grateful eyes to her cousin, feeling that she could almost forgive her for the sufferings she had caused.
“But if it is all hypocrisy, if I find you a serpent that I have warmed in my bosom, you will be a wicked girl, an infamous creature!”
“I think I have nothing to reproach myself with,” said Pierrette, with a painful revulsion of her heart at the sudden change from unexpected praise to the tones of the hyena.
“You know that to lie is a mortal sin?”
“Yes, cousin.”
“Well, you are now under the eye of God,” said the old maid, with a solemn gesture towards the sky; “swear to me that you did not know that peasant.”
“I will not swear,” said Pierrette.
“Ha! he was no peasant, you little viper.”
Pierrette rushed away like a frightened fawn terrified at her tone. Sylvie called her in a dreadful voice.
“The bell is ringing,” she answered.
“Artful wretch!” thought Sylvie. “She is depraved in mind; and now I am certain the little adder has wound herself round the colonel. She has heard us say he was a baron. To be a baroness! little fool! Ah! I’ll get rid of her, I’ll apprentice her out, and soon too!”
Sylvie was so lost in thought that she did not notice her brother coming down the path and bemoaning the injury the frost had done to his dahlias.
“Sylvie! what are you thinking about? I thought you were looking at the fish; sometimes they jump out of the water.”
“No,” said Sylvie.
“How did you sleep?” and he began to tell her about his own dreams. “Don’t you think my skin is getting tabid?” — a word in the Rogron vocabulary.
Ever since Rogron had been in love, — but let us not profane the word, — ever since he had desired to marry Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, he was very uneasy about himself and his health. At this moment Pierrette came down the garden steps and called to them from a distance that breakfast was ready. At sight of her cousin, Sylvie’s skin turned green and yellow, her bile was in commotion. She looked at the floor of the corridor and declared that Pierrette ought to rub it.
“I will rub it now if you wish,” said the little angel, not aware of the injury such work may do to a young girl.
The dining-room was irreproachably in order. Sylvie sat down and pretended all through breakfast to want this, that, and the other thing which she would never have thought of in a quieter moment, and which she now asked for only to make Pierrette rise again and again just as the child was beginning to eat her food. But such mere teasing was not enough; she wanted a subject on which to find fault, and was angry with herself for not finding one. She scarcely answered her brother’s silly remarks, yet she looked at him only; her eyes avoided Pierrette. Pierrette was deeply conscious of all this. She brought the milk mixed with cream for each cousin in a large silver goblet, after heating it carefully in the bain-marie. The brother and sister poured in the coffee made by Sylvie herself on the table. When Sylvie had carefully prepared hers, she saw an atom of coffee-grounds floating on the surface. On this the storm broke forth.
“What is the matter?” asked Rogron.
“The matter is that mademoiselle has put dust in my milk. Do you suppose I am going to drink coffee with ashes in it? Well, I am not surprised; no one can do two things at once. She wasn’t thinking of the milk! a blackbird might have flown through the kitchen t
o-day and she wouldn’t have seen it! how should she see the dust flying! and then it was my coffee, ha! that didn’t signify!”
As she spoke she was laying on the side of her plate the coffee-grounds that had run through the filter.
“But, cousin, that is coffee,” said Pierrette.
“Oh! then it is I who tell lies, is it?” cried Sylvie, looking at Pierrette and blasting her with a fearful flash of anger from her eyes.
Organizations which have not been exhausted by powerful emotions often have a vast amount of the vital fluid at their service. This phenomenon of the extreme clearness of the eye in moments of anger was the more marked in Mademoiselle Rogron because she had often exercised the power of her eyes in her shop by opening them to their full extent for the purpose of inspiring her dependents with salutary fear.
“You had better dare to give me the lie!” continued Sylvie; “you deserve to be sent from the table to go and eat by yourself in the kitchen.”
“What’s the matter with you two?” cried Rogron, “you are as cross as bears this morning.”
“Mademoiselle knows what I have against her,” said Sylvie. “I leave her to make up her mind before speaking to you; for I mean to show her more kindness than she deserves.”
Pierrette was looking out of the window to avoid her cousin’s eyes, which frightened her.
“Look at her! she pays no more attention to what I am saying than if I were that sugar-basin! And yet mademoiselle has a sharp ear; she can hear and answer from the top of the house when some one talks to her from below. She is perversity itself, — perversity, I say; and you needn’t expect any good of her; do you hear me, Jerome?”
“What has she done wrong?” asked Rogron.
“At her age, too! to begin so young!” screamed the angry old maid.
Pierrette rose to clear the table and give herself something to do, for she could hardly bear the scene any longer. Though such language was not new to her, she had never been able to get used to it. Her cousin’s rage seemed to accuse her of some crime. She imagined what her fury would be if she came to know about Brigaut. Perhaps her cousin would have him sent away, and she should lose him! All the many thoughts, the deep and rapid thoughts of a slave came to her, and she resolved to keep absolute silence about a circumstance in which her conscience told her there was nothing wrong. But the cruel, bitter words she had been made to hear and the wounding suspicion so shocked her that as she reached the kitchen she was taken with a convulsion of the stomach and turned deadly sick. She dared not complain; she was not sure that any one would help her. When she returned to the dining-room she was white as a sheet, and, saying she was not well, she started to go to bed, dragging herself up step by step by the baluster and thinking that she was going to die. “Poor Brigaut!” she thought.
“The girl is ill,” said Rogron.
“She ill! That’s only shamming,” replied Sylvie, in a loud voice that Pierrette might hear. “She was well enough this morning, I can tell you.”
This last blow struck Pierrette to the earth; she went to bed weeping and praying to God to take her out of this world.
VII. DOMESTIC TYRANNY
For a month past Rogron had ceased to carry the “Constitutionnel” to Gouraud; the colonel came obsequiously to fetch his paper, gossip a little, and take Rogron off to walk if the weather was fine. Sure of seeing the colonel and being able to question him, Sylvie dressed herself as coquettishly as she knew how. The old maid thought she was attractive in a green gown, a yellow shawl with a red border, and a white bonnet with straggling gray feathers. About the hour when the colonel usually came Sylvie stationed herself in the salon with her brother, whom she had compelled to stay in the house in his dressing-gown and slippers.
“It is a fine day, colonel,” said Rogron, when Gouraud with his heavy step entered the room. “But I’m not dressed; my sister wanted to go out, and I was going to keep the house. Wait for me; I’ll be ready soon.”
So saying, Rogron left Sylvie alone with the colonel.
“Where were you going? you are dressed divinely,” said Gouraud, who noticed a certain solemnity on the pock-marked face of the old maid.
“I wanted very much to go out, but my little cousin is ill, and I cannot leave her.”
“What is the matter with her?”
“I don’t know; she had to go to bed.”
Gouraud’s caution, not to say his distrust, was constantly excited by the results of his alliance with Vinet. It certainly appeared that the lawyer had got the lion’s share in their enterprise. Vinet controlled the paper, he reigned as sole master over it, he took the revenues; whereas the colonel, the responsible editor, earned little. Vinet and Cournant had done the Rogrons great services; whereas Gouraud, a colonel on half-pay, could do nothing. Who was to be deputy? Vinet. Who was the chief authority in the party? Vinet. Whom did the liberals all consult? Vinet. Moreover, the colonel knew fully as well as Vinet himself the extent and depth of the passion suddenly aroused in Rogron by the beautiful Bathilde de Chargeboeuf. This passion had now become intense, like all the last passions of men. Bathilde’s voice made him tremble. Absorbed in his desires Rogron hid them; he dared not hope for such a marriage. To sound him, the colonel mentioned that he was thinking himself of asking for Bathilde’s hand. Rogron turned pale at the thought of such a formidable rival, and had since then shown coldness and even hatred to Gouraud.
Thus Vinet reigned supreme in the Rogron household while he, the colonel, had no hold there except by the extremely hypothetical tie of his mendacious affection for Sylvie, which it was not yet clear that Sylvie reciprocated. When the lawyer told him of the priest’s manoeuvre, and advised him to break with Sylvie and marry Pierrette, he certainly flattered Gouraud’s foible; but after analyzing the inner purpose of that advice and examining the ground all about him, the colonel thought he perceived in his ally the intention of separating him from Sylvie, and profiting by her fears to throw the whole Rogron property into the hands of Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf.
Therefore, when the colonel was left alone with Sylvie his perspicacity possessed itself immediately of certain signs which betrayed her uneasiness. He saw at once that she was under arms and had made this plan for seeing him alone. As he already suspected Vinet of playing him some trick, he attributed the conference to the instigation of the lawyer, and was instantly on his guard, as he would have been in an enemy’s country, — with an eye all about him, an ear to the faintest sound, his mind on the qui vive, and his hand on a weapon. The colonel had the defect of never believing a single word said to him by a woman; so that when the old maid brought Pierrette on the scene, and told him she had gone to bed before midday, he concluded that Sylvie had locked her up by way of punishment and out of jealousy.
“She is getting to be quite pretty, that little thing,” he said with an easy air.
“She will be pretty,” replied Mademoiselle Rogron.
“You ought to send her to Paris and put her in a shop,” continued the colonel. “She would make her fortune. The milliners all want pretty girls.”
“Is that really your advice?” asked Sylvie, in a troubled voice.
“Good!” thought the colonel, “I was right. Vinet advised me to marry Pierrette just to spoil my chance with the old harridan. But,” he said aloud, “what else can you do with her? There’s that beautiful girl Bathilde de Chargeboeuf, noble and well-connected, reduced to single-blessedness, — nobody will have her. Pierrette has nothing, and she’ll never marry. As for beauty, what is it? To me, for example, youth and beauty are nothing; for haven’t I been a captain of cavalry in the imperial guard, and carried my spurs into all the capitals of Europe, and known all the handsomest women of these capitals? Don’t talk to me; I tell you youth and beauty are devilishly common and silly. At forty-eight,” he went on, adding a few years to his age, to match Sylvie’s, “after surviving the retreat from Moscow and going through that terrible campaign of France, a man is broken down; I’m nothing but
an old fellow now. A woman like you would pet me and care for me, and her money, joined to my poor pension, would give me ease in my old days; of course I should prefer such a woman to a little minx who would worry the life out of me, and be thirty years old, with passions, when I should be sixty, with rheumatism. At my age, a man considers and calculates. To tell you the truth between ourselves, I should not wish to have children.”
Sylvie’s face was an open book to the colonel during this tirade, and her next question proved to him Vinet’s perfidy.
“Then you don’t love Pierrette?” she said.
“Heavens! are you out of your mind, my dear Sylvie?” he cried. “Can those who have no teeth crack nuts? Thank God I’ve got some common-sense and know what I’m about.”
Sylvie thus reassured resolved not to show her own hand, and thought herself very shrewd in putting her own ideas into her brother’s mouth.
“Jerome,” she said, “thought of the match.”
“How could your brother take up such an incongruous idea? Why, it is only a few days ago that, in order to find out his secrets, I told him I loved Bathilde. He turned as white as your collar.”
“My brother! does he love Bathilde?” asked Sylvie.
“Madly, — and yet Bathilde is only after his money.” (“One for you, Vinet!” thought the colonel.) “I can’t understand why he should have told you that about Pierrette. No, Sylvie,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it in a certain way, “since you have opened this matter” (he drew nearer to her), “well” (he kissed her hand; as a cavalry captain he had already proved his courage), “let me tell you that I desire no wife but you. Though such a marriage may look like one of convenience, I feel, on my side, a sincere affection for you.”
“But if I wish you to marry Pierrette? if I leave her my fortune — eh, colonel?”
“But I don’t want to be miserable in my home, and in less than ten years see a popinjay like Julliard hovering round my wife and addressing verses to her in the newspapers. I’m too much of a man to stand that. No, I will never make a marriage that is disproportionate in age.”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 350