The Thibaults
Page 48
Antoine, craning his neck over Rachel’s shoulder, had just time to catch a glimpse of tangled, naked limbs before Rachel deftly clapped her hands over his eyes. The warmth of her palms upon his eyelids brought back to him, with less of feverish insistence but in all else the same, her gesture at the climax of her ecstasy, to veil from her lover’s eyes the passion on her face. He made a playful effort to free himself. Suddenly she sprang down from the bed, pressing to her dressing-gown a sheaf of photographs tied up together. Laughing, she ran to the desk, slipped the package into a drawer, and turned the key.
“For one thing,” she explained, “they aren’t mine. I’ve no rights over them at all.”
“Whose are they?”
“They belong to Hirsch.”
She returned and sat at Antoine’s side.
“Now will you promise to be sensible? I’ll carry on, then. Sure you’re not bored? Look here; that’s another travel picture of sorts. A donkey-ride in the Saint-Cloud woods. As you can see, those kimono sleeves were just coming in. That was a fetching little dress I had on, wasn’t it now?”
X
ALWAYS, Mme. de Fontanin mused, I am lying to myself; were I to face the facts, I’d give up hope.
Standing at a window of the drawing-room, she observed across the silk-net curtain the trio in the garden—Jerome, Daniel, and Jenny—pacing to and fro.
“How easily even the most honest of us can make themselves at home in a world of lies!” she murmured. But, just as she so often failed to hold in check a rising smile, so now she could not stem the tide of happiness that, wave on wave, came surging through her heart.
Leaving the window she went out to the terrace. It was the hour when eyes grow tired of trying to discern the forms of things; on an iridescent sky some pale and early stars were glimmering. Mme. de Fontanin sat down, letting her eyes linger for a moment on the familiar scene. Then she sighed. Only too well she knew Jerome would not continue living at her side as for the past fortnight he had done; that this renewal of their home-life would prove short-lived as ever. For did she not discern, with mingled joy and apprehension, in his whole attitude towards her, yes, even in his sedulous affection, the selfsame Jerome whom she had always known? Did it not prove that he had never changed and soon would leave her once again? Already the crestfallen, ageing Jerome whom she had brought back home with her from Holland, the husband who had clung to her for succour like a drowning man, was changed out of recognition. Even now, though in her presence he might affect the manner of a contrite child, and despite the seemly sighs of resignation that escaped him when he remembered his bereavement—even now he had unpacked a summer suit, and (though he was unaware of it) was looking vastly younger. “Why not call for Jenny at the club this morning? That will give you a nice walk,” she had suggested. True, he had feigned indifference; yet he had risen without demur, and presently she had seen him walking briskly away, in white flannel trousers and a light coat, holding himself erect. Yes, she had even caught him picking a sprig of jessamine for his buttonhole!
Just then Daniel, who had noticed that his mother was alone, came up to her. Since Jerome’s return Mme. de Fontanin had felt rather ill at ease in her relations with her son. Daniel had noticed this and, as a result, was coming oftener to Maisons and doing his utmost to show himself more attentive than ever to his mother. He wished to make it clear to her that he quite grasped the situation, and blamed her not at all.
Stretching himself full length in a low deck-chair, his favourite seat, he lit a cigarette and smiled towards his mother… . How like his father’s are his hands and gestures! she thought.
“Will you be leaving us again tonight, dear boy?”
“Yes, Mother, I must. I’ve an appointment early tomorrow morning.”
He fell to talking of his work—a thing he rarely did; he was preparing for the autumn season a special number of Progressive Art, devoted to the newest schools of European painting, and found the choice of the abundant illustrations that would accompany the text a thrilling task. But the theme was soon talked out.
The silence was murmurous with the vague sounds of evening, and the shrill chorus of the crickets in the forest fosse below the terrace dominated all the rest. Now and again a vagrant breeze wafted towards them from the firs a tang of toasted spices, rustled the fibrous plane-leaves and shreds of bark across the sand. Swiftly, on flaccid wings, a bat swooped down and lightly brushed Mme. de Fontanin’s hair; she could not repress a cry of alarm.
“Will you be here on Sunday?” she asked.
“Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow and stay two days.”
“You should ask your friend to lunch. I met him, by the by, in the village, yesterday.” And, partly because she really thought it, partly because she credited Jacques with all the qualities she thought to see in Antoine, and—last, but not least—wishing to please her son, she added: “What a sincere, noble-minded fellow he is! We had quite a long walk together.”
Daniel’s face fell, for he remembered Jenny’s outburst the evening after her walk with Jacques across the forest.
What an ill-developed, ill-starred, ill-balanced mind Jenny has! he mused regretfully; old beyond her years with thought and solitude and reading! Yet she knows nothing, nothing at all of life. But what can I do? She doesn’t trust me now, as she used to. If only she had a solid constitution! But she’s all nerves, like a little girl. And full of romantic ideas! She refuses to explain herself, prefers to fancy she’s “misunderstood.” A sort of uncommunicative pride it is, that’s poisoning her life; or is it only a hang-over from the awkward age?
He rose from his chair and moved to his mother’s side, feeling it his duty to let her know.
“Tell me, Mother, have you noticed anything special in Jacques’s attitude towards you … and towards Jenny?”
“Towards Jenny?” Mme. de Fontanin echoed Daniel’s words and, as they sank into her consciousness, they seemed to crystallize around a dim, unformulated fear. Less than a fear, perhaps—one of the transient impressions whose purport her keenly sensitive mind had noted, but without putting it into words. A spasm of anguish gripped her heart; and at once her faith took wing towards the Spirit. “Forsake us not!” she prayed.
The others came up to them.
“Hadn’t you better cover yourself up a bit more, sweetheart?” Jerome exclaimed. “You must be careful; it’s turned much cooler than usual this evening.”
He went to the hall and fetched a scarf, which he wrapped round his wife’s shoulders. It happened that the long wicker chair in which, on the doctor’s orders, Jenny rested after meals had been left under the plane-trees. No sooner did Jerome catch sight of her, dragging it across the sand, than he hurried to her aid and helped her to settle down in it.
But he had found it a none too easy task to tame her wild bird’s nature. The bond uniting Jenny with her mother had been so close throughout her early years that, even as a mere child, she had always judged her father without lenience. Jerome, however, delighted with his new-found daughter just ripening into womanhood, had been all attention, cajoled her with his subtlest methods of approach, and with so good a grace, such tact, that Jenny had been touched. Today, indeed, father and daughter had talked without reserve, like bosom friends, and Jerome was still tingling with the emotion he had felt.
“The air is fragrant with your roses this evening, sweetheart,” he said, as he dropped languidly into a rocking-chair and set it swaying. “The Gloire de Dijon round the dovecot’s a blaze of flowers.”
Daniel stood up.
“Time to be off,” he said and, going up to his mother, kissed her forehead.
She took the young man’s face between her hands and for a moment scanned it closely, murmuring:
“My own big boy!”
“D’you know, I think I’ll go with you as far as the station,” Jerome suggested. The morning’s escapade had whetted his appetite for brief evasions from the garden where, for a fortnight now, he had been leading a
cloistered life. “Won’t you come too, Jenny?”
“I’ll stay with Mamma.”
“Got a cigarette?” asked Jerome, taking Daniel’s arm. Since his return he had eschewed tobacco rather than go out and buy it.
Mme. de Fontanin watched the two men’s receding figures; Jerome’s voice came wafted back to her.
“Do you think I can get Turkish tobacco at the station?” Then they disappeared behind the fir-trees.
Jerome pressed to his side the arm of this good-looking youth, his son. Any young creature had an intense appeal for him; intense, yet barbed with keen regret. Each day he spent at Maisons quickened his distress; time and again the sight of Jenny evoked—how cruelly!— his own lost youth. And, at the tennis-club, with what self-pity had he watched them—young men and girls, bright-eyed, their hair in disorder, their collars open and their clothes “all anyhow,” yet for all that flaunting the glorious panoply of youth! Lithe bodies, steeped in sunlight, whose very sweat was wholesome, redolent of health. In ten brief minutes he had realized in all its bitterness the handicap of his declining years. He was shamed and sickened by the thought that henceforth, day in day out, he must wage war against himself, against decrepitude and dirt, the noisesomeness of age; against the premonitions of that ultimate decay which had already set its mark upon his body. The contrast between his heavy gait, shortness of breath, and struggles to keep brisk, and his son’s limber strides appalled him; releasing Daniel’s arm, he gave vent to an envious cry.
“What wouldn’t I give to be your age, my boy!”
Mme. de Fontanin had made no protest when Jenny volunteered to keep her company.
“You’re looking fagged out, darling,” she said when they were alone. “Perhaps you’d rather go up to bed at once?”
“Oh, no!” Jenny replied. “The nights are quite long enough as it is.”
“Aren’t you sleeping well just now?”
“Not too well.”
“But why not, darling?”
The tone of Mme. de Fontanin’s voice conveyed more than a casual question. Jenny looked at her mother in surprise, and it dawned on her that something lay behind the words, an explanation was being asked of her. Instinctively she decided to elude it; though not secretive, she shrank from any effort to draw her out.
Mme. de Fontanin had not the art of subterfuge and the look she now cast on her daughter in the dying light was plain to read. If only the affection in her eyes might break the barrier of reticence that Jenny had set up between them! m