“I’ve failed,” he said simply. “It’s my own fault. I can see that. But God didn’t send you to me for nothing. One day, I believe, I shall still be able to save you.”
He brushed some of the dust out of the folds of his skirt and got to his feet again.
“I shall go now,” he said. “But later you will come to me.”
Anna got hurriedly to her feet.
“Not that way. Not past the house,” she said. “This path leads straight down to the other gate. It’s nearer. I’ll take you there.”
“But why should gentleman go so soon in any case?” M. Moritz’s voice inquired from just behind her. “You see so few of your friends. And there is nothing to prevent a priest’s taking a glass of wine when he is out visiting.”
When they turned, M. Moritz was smiling. His hands were in the pockets of his jacket and he was see-sawing backwards and forwards on his little feet. There was an almost terrifying affability in his manner. He stretched out his hand towards Anna.
“We live so quietly at the villa, don’t we, my dear?” he remarked. “Just like an old married couple.”
He studied Father Ignatius’s face as he said it, and his smile broadened a trifle.
“Just like an old married couple,” he repeated.
Father Ignatius had not yet spoken. He was standing there tightlipped and unbending. With his right hand he was playing with the tassel of his girdle, clasping it and unclasping it with monotonous regularity. He was endeavouring to stare M. Moritz out of countenance.
But M. Moritz would have none of it.
“But, my dear Father,” he said, laying his hand upon his arm, “you must sit down. You must really join us. I’m afraid you’ve been treated very badly. At first my wife tells you that she won’t see you and then when you persuade her to change her mind she keeps you standing.”
There was a chair immediately behind Father Ignatius, and as he was speaking M. Moritz was carefully edging him towards it. When at last the hard wooden edge of the seat was against the back of Father Ignatius’s knees he gave just the least little extra push. Father Ignatius’s balance was abruptly overthrown and he found himself sitting.
M. Moritz released his grip and rubbed his hands delightedly.
“That’s far more sociable,” he said. “I felt sure you’d stop if we asked you.”
He looked up and then nodded his head in approval.
“Ah, here he comes,” he said. “I was afraid that he was going to keep us waiting.”
Coming down the path towards them was Henri. On the tray that he was carrying three glasses were set out.
Father Ignatius had still not spoken; and, for a moment M. Moritz addressed himself to Anna.
“And is this the good Father you went to visit so late one evening while I was away?” he asked. “Remember I haven’t even been introduced to him.”
Before Anna could answer, he had faced round again, and was addressing Father Ignatius once more.
“Such a beautiful little church,” he said. “So secluded. Like this villa. Tucked away where you would not expect a stranger to find it—almost as if it were hiding from someone.”
The bottle of champagne that Henri had brought had been uncorked and he was filling the glasses. M. Moritz watched him pass the first glass to Anna, but she merely shook her head. Then he took the second glass himself and offered it to Father Ignatius. At first the priest tried to refuse. But if he had not taken the glass, it would have spilled. In self-defence he took it just at the moment when M. Moritz was about to let it go. And having taken he held it at arm’s length resentfully.
M. Moritz made it clear, however, that he had not noticed any reluctance upon the part of his guest; and he continued as charmingly as ever.
“It’s an interesting wine, this,” he said. “I would like to see my cellar full of it.”
He broke off and turned suddenly to Anna.
“But, my dear,” he said. “You’re very silent. I believe I’m embarrassing you. Perhaps you’d rather see the good Father alone?”
Before Anna could reply, M. Moritz had addressed himself to Father Ignatius again. He had dropped his voice a little.
“My wife is a very devout Catholic at heart,” he said. Positively a religieuse. I often think that religion is her true vocation. That is what makes her present situation so painful to her.”
While he was speaking, Father Ignatius had risen. He was frowning. His untasted glass stood on the table beside him.
M. Moritz went up to him and took him by the arm.
“If you really have to go so soon,” he said. “I’ll ask if I might walk a little of the way with you. I want your advice. I want to consult you as a man of the world. Tell me, Father, with yourexperience in dealing with people, what would you recommend my poor wife to do?”
He began moving away as he was speaking, still holding Father Ignatius by the arm; and Anna could catch only one sentence of the conversation.
“You see,” M. Moritz was saying, “with my dear first wife still living it is difficult to go through any of the ordinary forms of marriage. Besides, it is so embarrassing for the present Madame Moritz. Though we’ve never discussed it, I understand that she has a husband already.”
Then they turned into the path that ran at right angles to the cypress walk, and Anna could hear no more.
Chapter XXXIII
I
The Nurse was installed by now: she had arrived from Nice three days before in her own magnificence of veil, white starch and a false fringe. Her luggage was in two parts, a brass-bound box containing her uniforms and a small leather case, scarcely larger than a hat box, holding the secrets of her profession.
Anna disliked the woman, but obeyed her. She was strict and efficient. She kept Anna indoors a great deal to protect her from the treacherous effects of the brise; told her to avoid even the slightest exertion and unnecessary exercise; over-fed her; and was careful to gratify her slightest whim, examining and cross-examining her to make sure that there was no rare or unusual food for which she was secretly hankering.
She was nearly sixty, this nurse, and she left nothing to chance. A devotee of hygiene in its most modern forms, she even insisted on having the wet nurse brought to her so that she could satisfy herself as to her condition. Within ten minutes she had entirely rearranged the poor woman’s diet.
The doctor, too, was calling almost daily. He was the most expensive on the Riviera. He specialised in the ailments of women and had cultivated a manner of infinite charm and solicitude. A large man with a dense forked beard, he was like a tender bear in the bedroom. He carried a separate pair of pure white kid gloves which he put on before touching his patients.
The months had passed quickly. It seemed now to Anna that it was only a matter of weeks since she had known that she was with child. But she had grown so completely to accept it that she could not remember what her life had been like before the child had been the centre of it. Its coming had magically transformed and altered everything.
Because of the child her mind was now focused upon the present and the future; the past grew fainter every day. Rhinehausen was now a dream and her father and Berthe and the Baron—Charles even —misty figures in it. M. Duvivier was someone who did not belong in this life at all; and it was only Captain Picard who still appeared suddenly and without warning before her eyes. In death he alone still had the embodiment of life.
As for Father Ignatius, he no longer troubled her. After his brief show of authority he had done nothing: his first visit to the villa had been his last. M. Moritz had even commented upon his absence, had asked Anna when she was expecting the confessor to call again. And he had been innocently astonished when she had told him that she did not know.
M. Moritz himself had grown more loving and concerned than ever. His business still took him often to Geneva, but he telegraphed constantly and returned often by inconvenient trains, always bearing presents. The new nurseries had been completed under his pers
onal supervision and thoughts of the child filled nearly every moment of his waking day. He still did not question that it would be a boy, and his latest enthusiasm was for Hégésippe.
He was indulgent too, and raised no objection when Anna placed on the table of her boudoir a small Virgin and child that she had bought. It was only the workmanship of which he disapproved. He picked it up and examined it as he would examine any other objet d’art that might have been set before him; and when he had finished handling it he flicked the base contemptuously with his finger nail and pushed the little figure away from him.
“I shall get you a good Virgin,” he said. “Something that you’ll be glad to look at.”
And on his return from his next trip to Geneva he brought with him a costly fragile little doll in ivory with a child miraculously carved into its arms. It was mounted on an onyx base and there was a case of domed glass to protect it from the world. M. Moritz removed the glass tenderly and respectfully and held the figure at arm’s length.
“There’s something that any one might be proud to worship,” he said. “You could search half the museums of Europe and not find a better one.”
Then, content that he had done what he had promised, he picked up the plaster Madonna and, holding it between two fingers as if it were something distasteful, crossed the room and dropped it into the waste basket.
When he had gone, Anna went over to recover it, but the plaster had broken and the bambino was in pieces.
II
It was now no more than a matter of hours, the doctor said. The first pains had come and gone away again, but the nurse was emphatic in declaring that they would return at any moment. She spoke as though in some mysterious way the pains were hers and not Anna’s. Anna herself was in a state in which she no longer cared anything for pains. She was tired and was content to lie there in the sickroom, propped up by too many pillows, breathing in the heavy air that the nurse kept sprayed with orris-water and eau-de-Cologne. The book that she had been reading lay face downwards beside her and from time to time she dozed.
In a chair beside the bed M. Moritz was sitting. He had changed into a velvet smoking jacket and a pair of scarlet slippers; and he was strangely and rather luxuriously at his ease. Without moving he was able to stretch out his hand and stroke Anna’s hair.
Now, with her eyes closed, she looked younger than ever. Younger, but not more beautiful. During the past months her face had grown heavier and the line of her cheeks that he had always admired so much had almost gone. But in his present mood it only helped to make him love her more. There was something in such a sacrifice that appealed to him very deeply.
“To think,” he began saying to himself, “that she should have lost her looks to bear my child. It’s the least that I can do to see that she’s properly looked after so that she can recover them again.”
He cast his eyes round the room and approved of everything that he saw—the bottles of lotion, the powder bowls, the atomisers.
“No one could have done more for her,” he reflected, and bending forward he kissed her forehead.
It may have been the kiss that woke her. When he looked again he noticed that her eyes were wide open and gazing up at the empty ceiling. He asked if there were anything that she wanted; if he should call in the nurse from the adjoining bedroom. But Anna continued almost as if he had not spoken.
“You remember the day when Father Ignatius called?” she asked at last.
M. Moritz leant forward anxiously.
“You want him?” he inquired.
Anna shook her head.
“There was something you said to him that has just come back to me,” she continued. “Something that I think you meant me to hear.”
M. Moritz turned his head away and coughed. “What was it?” he asked.
“I forget.”
“You told him that you thought I had been married already.”
M. Moritz smiled and gave a little shrug of his shoulders.
“But it was so obvious,” he said. “I could tell you most things about that marriage He was someone you weren’t in love with. You probably hated him—or at least you grew to hate him. If you hadn’t hated him you would never have been so cold with me when I first brought you here to the villa. I often think that I saved you only just in time.”
He rose and stood by the bed fondling her hand in his. But, when he looked down, he saw that across her forehead little beads of perspiration had broken out. Her breathing had become laboured.
He ran to the door of the adjoining room and called urgently for the nurse.
A girl! The fact stunned him. It seemed the first of his major plans ever to have gone wrong beyond recovery.
“A daughter! What do I want with a daughter?” he kept asking himself.
And in his despair he walked aimlessly from room to room, trying to find consolation. But, a daughter—there was no consolation possible.
Anna was not yet comfortable—it was too early for that. M. Moritz, however, had been allowed into the bedroom and had seen her very pale amid the pillows. The nurse said that she was not to be disturbed or excited in any way and M. Moritz obeyed her: in his misery he was as silent as a thief. He was sorry for her, acutely sorry; he realised that she must recognise how great a disappointment to him she had been. And because he was sorry he fastened round her neck the chain of pearls that he had been saving up to celebrate their son. And, having placed them there, he kissed the damp forehead and withdrew.
For the next half hour he had stood beside the complicated wicker cot staring down at the tiny area of skull that showed above the blankets. There were tears of disappointment in his eyes as he looked at it.
When the nurse gave Anna the child to feed she was conscious of a strange confusion of emotions. There was happiness and response in the presence of the warm body beside her own, and a rich sensuous pleasure in the pull of the strong lips at her breast. But there was also another and still deeper feeling.
“It is my child, not his,” she kept saying. “It belongs to me.”
And she pulled the tiny puckered face away from her, trying to see in it a likeness, an image, something that would reassure her. But the child, deprived of its food, only began to cry.
This time, a new emotion, of pity, came over her.
“It is in my power to make this new life happy or miserable,” she told herself. “She is all mine.”
And she began impetuously dedicating her whole future to her child.
Her possessiveness, her jealousy, increased so that she resented the nurse’s hands every time they touched the child. She wanted to be allowed to bath it herself, to attend to it, to lay it down, to wash it. Even its grossest acts seemed charming. But the nurse was adamant. She insisted that Anna was not strong enough, that it was unladylike, unheard of. The most that she would allow Anna was to hold the child in her arms for a few minutes after its napkins had just been changed, and then surrender it again.
The nurse announced, too, that as soon as the baby had drawn off the first milk to avoid fever, she would give it altogether to the wet nurse. She spoke as though a mother’s wanting to feed her own baby were something that was unknown in her circles of maternity. She even mentioned in confidence that M. Moritz had made it clear to the doctor that he wanted everything that was possible done to ensure that Anna should not permanently lose her figure.
So, at the end of the third day, the wet nurse was summoned and Anna’s baby was taken away from her. A room next to the new nursery had been set aside for the woman, and it was to this room that the child was taken for its meals—the nurse would not hear of actually having the woman in the bedroom. Anna lay there in her room, her breasts bound up in bandages, and cried—cried, not because the bandaging hurt her, but because she was not allowed to look after her own child. The nurse, however, persisted that she knew best in such matters. She reeled off the names of Marquises and Comtesses whom she had nursed, and showed her devotion to her patient, by prescribi
ng a special lotion to prevent the hair from falling, changing the flowers in her room more frequently than ever, shaking up the pillows, indulging in light conversation and spraying the air until it smelt like the dressing-room of an actress. She did everything in fact except allow Anna to get up, or have her child.
On the tenth day Anna was permitted to put her foot to the ground and, three weeks after the child had been born, she was led by the nurse as far as the seat in the garden. As she sat there, the bassinette was wheeled up beside her and a parasol erected over it. The nurse warned her against moving it because of the dangerous effects of too much sunlight on a young baby’s face; and she cautioned her, too, about raising the veils of the bassinette for fear of flies.
But as soon as the woman had gone Anna went over to the wicker carriage, pushed down the hood and took the child out on her lap. It remained there, happy and contented, its deep eyes staring up at her. Then, tired of the world, it closed its eyes and slept. Anna hugged it to her.
“They shan’t take you from me,” she said. “They shan’t.”
And bending very low she kissed the small hands, the flaxen down that covered its head, the soft rounded cheeks.
When the nurse found her, she was horrified. She hinted darkly at disaster, and protested that she would not have left the child for a single moment if she had imagined that such a thing could happen. That night, when the child was allowed to feed too greedily and brought a little of its food back again, the nurse gave Anna a look that prepared her for the worst.
The fear that the child might die, that something that she might unwittingly do, might kill it, was indeed constantly with her. Its roots went deep. It was the fact that the child had not yet been baptised that frightened her. Unbaptised babies, she knew, went to limbo and could never go to Heaven, and she told herself how wicked she had been not to have called in a priest the moment the child had been born.
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