by George Sand
When he was almost recovered, he looked around at the situation in France. Things were getting worse; on all sides, people were threatening to refuse to pay taxes. Raymon was amazed at his party’s foolish confidence and, thinking it judicious not to throw himself into the fray just yet, he shut himself up at Cercy with the sad memory of his mother and Madame Delmare.
By dint of reflecting on the idea that he had not taken very seriously at first, he became used to thinking that Indiana was not lost to him if he wanted to take the trouble to ask her to come back. He saw many drawbacks to this course of action, but still more advantages. It was not in his interest to wait till she was a widow in order to marry her, as Madame de Ramière had thought. Delmare might live for another twenty years and Raymon did not want to give up for ever the chance of a brilliant marriage. His optimistic, fertile imagination thought of something better than that. By taking a little trouble, he could exercise an unbounded influence over his Indiana. He felt his mind was skilful and crafty enough to make of that passionate, sublime woman a submissive, devoted mistress. He could remove her from the wrath of public opinion, conceal her behind the impenetrable wall of his private life, keep her like a treasure in the depths of his country retreat, and use her to spread the happiness of a pure, generous affection over his moments of solitary meditation. He would not have to make much effort to avoid her husband’s anger; the Colonel would not come three thousand miles to look for his wife when his business interests pinned him down irrevocably in another world. Indiana would not demand much in the way of pleasure and liberty after the harsh trials which had bent her neck to the yoke. She was ambitious only for love, and Raymon felt he would love her out of gratitude as soon as she was useful to him. He recalled too, her constancy and gentleness during the long days of his coldness and neglect. He promised himself to preserve his liberty skilfully so that she would not dare to complain. He flattered himself that he would take sufficient control over her thoughts to make her agree to everything, even to seeing him married, and he supported this hope with the numerous examples of intimate liaisons he had seen survive, in spite of the laws of society, because of the prudence and skill which had enabled them to avoid the judgements of public opinion.
‘Moreover,’ he added to himself, ‘she will have made an irrevocable, total sacrifice for me. For me, she will have travelled across the world and left every means of existence, all possibility of pardon, behind her. Society is severe only on petty commonplace faults. An unusual bold deed surprises it, a striking misfortune disarms it. It will pity her; perhaps it will admire the woman who will have done for me what no other would dare to attempt. It will blame her but it will not mock her, and I’ll not be blameworthy for taking her in and protecting her after such a signal proof of her love. Perhaps, on the contrary, I’ll be praised for my courage. At least I’ll have defenders and my reputation will be subjected to a glorious and inconclusive trial. Sometimes society likes to be defied. It does not bestow its admiration on those who crawl along the beaten track. At the present time, public opinion must be driven by a whip.
Under the influence of these thoughts, he wrote to Madame Delmare. His letter was what was to be expected from the hand of such a skilful, experienced man. It gave the impression of love, grief, and, above all, of truth. Alas! What a pliable reed truth is, to bend thus at every breath!
Yet Raymon was wise enough not to express explicitly the purpose of his letter. He pretended to look on Indiana’s return as an unhoped for happiness, and this time he spoke vaguely of his duties. He told her his mother’s last words. He depicted vividly the despair to which his loss reduced him, the miseries of his solitude, and the danger of his political situation. He painted a sombre, terrible picture of the revolution which was developing on the horizon in France, and while pretending to rejoice that he was alone to withstand its blows, he hinted to Indiana that the moment had come to put into practice the enthusiastic fidelity, the perilous devotion, of which she had boasted. Raymon blamed his fate and said that virtue had cost him very dear, that his yoke was very harsh, that he had held happiness in his hand, and that he had had the strength to condemn himself to eternal solitude.
‘Don’t tell me any more that you have loved me,’ he added. ‘That makes me so weak and disheartened that I curse my courage and hate my duty. Tell me that you are happy, that you are forgetting me, so that it will be within my power not to snatch you away from the bonds that separate us.’
In a word, he said he was unhappy: that was to tell Indiana he was waiting for her.
XXVI
DURING the three months which elapsed between the sending of this letter and its arrival at Bourbon Island, Madame Delmare’s situation had become almost intolerable after a domestic incident of the greatest importance for her. She had acquired the sad habit of writing down every evening an account of the day’s sorrows. The diary of her suffering was addressed to Raymon, and although she had no intention of sending it to him, she talked to him, at times passionately, at times bitterly, of the sorrows of her life and of the feelings she could not suppress. These papers fell into Delmare’s hands; that is to say, he broke open the box where they, as well as Raymon’s old letters, were kept, and he read them eagerly with furious jealousy. In his first access of anger, he lost the power of self-control and, with beating heart and clenched fists, he went outside to wait for her return from her walk. Perhaps if she had been a few minutes later, the unhappy man would have had time to regain his self-possession, but the evil stars of both of them decreed that she should appear before him almost immediately. Then, without being able to say a word, he grabbed her by the hair, threw her down, and kicked her on the forehead with the heel of his boot.
He had no sooner imprinted the blood-stained mark of his brutality on a weak creature than he was horrified by his own deed. He fled aghast at what he had done and shut himself up in his room, where he loaded his pistols to blow his brains out. But just as he was about to do so, he saw Indiana beneath the verandah; she had picked herself up and, calmly and coldly, was wiping away the blood which covered her face. Since he thought he had killed her, his first feeling was of joy at seeing her on her feet, but then his anger blazed up anew.
‘It’s only a scratch,’ he cried, ‘and you deserve a thousand deaths! No, I shan’t kill myself, for you would go and rejoice over my death in your lover’s arms. I don’t want to assure the happiness of both of you. I want to live to make you suffer, to see you waste away from dreary boredom, to dishonour the scoundrel who tricked me.’
He was struggling against his torturing, jealous fury when Ralph came in by another verandah door and found Indiana in the dishevelled state in which this horrible scene had left her. But she had not shown the least sign of fear, she had not uttered one scream, she had not raised a hand to ask for mercy. Tired of life, she seemed to have had the cruel desire to give Delmare time to commit murder by calling no one to help her. It is clear that when this incident took place, Ralph was twenty paces away and had not heard the slightest sound.
‘Indiana!’ he cried, drawing back in horrified surprise. ‘Who has hurt you like that?’
‘You may well ask!’ she replied with a bitter smile. ‘Who else but your friend has the right and the desire to do it?’
Ralph threw away the cane he was holding. He needed no weapons other than his large hands to strangle Delmare. In two strides he reached the door and broke it open with his fist . . . But he found Delmare stretched out on the ground, his face purple, his throat swollen, a prey to the suffocating convulsions of apoplexy.
He picked up the papers scattered over the floor. When he recognized Raymon’s writing and saw the remains of the box, he understood what had happened. Carefully collecting the incriminating documents, he hurried to give them to Madame Delmare, urging her to burn them immediately. Delmare had probably not taken time to read them all.
Then he urged her to retire to her room while he would call the servants to look after the Colone
l. But she did not want either to burn the papers or hide her injury.
‘No,’ she said haughtily. ‘I’m not willing to do that. In the past he didn’t deign to hide my flight from Madame de Carvajal. He rushed to make public what he called my dishonour. I want to show everyone this stigma of his own dishonour that he took care to stamp on my face himself. It’s a strange justice that requires one person to keep secret another’s crimes, when that other assumes the right to condemn one without pity.’
When Ralph saw the Colonel in a fit state to listen to him, he overwhelmed him with reproaches more energetically and fiercely than one would have thought him capable of doing. Then Delmare, who was certainly not a bad-natured man, wept like a child over the crime he had committed. But he wept over it without dignity, as one is prone to do when one reacts to the feeling of the moment without rational consideration of its causes and effects. Quick to rush to the opposite extreme, he wanted to call his wife and ask her pardon. But Ralph was opposed to the idea and tried to make him understand that such a childish reconciliation would compromise the authority of the one without wiping out the insult to the other. He knew very well that there are unpardonable insults and unforgettable woes.
From that moment, the husband became an odious person in his wife’s eyes. Everything he did to atone for the wrong he had done deprived him of the little consideration he had been able to retain till then. His fault had been enormous, to be sure. The man who does not feel strong enough to be cold and implacable in his vengeance must forgo all show of impatience and resentment. There is no possible role between that of the Christian who forgives and that of the man of the world who repudiates. But Delmare too had his share of selfishness. He felt old; his wife’s attentions were becoming more necessary to him every day.
He was developing a terrible fear of solitude, and if, in the crisis of his wounded pride, he returned to his soldier’s habits in ill-treating her, reflection soon brought him back to the old man’s weakness of being terrified of being left alone. Too weakened by age and hardships to aspire to become a father, he had remained an old bachelor in his household and he had taken a wife as he would have taken a housekeeper. So it was not out of affection for her that he forgave her for not loving him, it was out of self-interest. And if he was sad not to reign over her affections, it was because he was afraid he would be less well looked after in his old age.
For her part, when Madame Delmare, deeply wounded by the laws of society, stiffened all the sinews of her heart to hate and despise them, there was also, at the bottom of her thoughts, a quite personal feeling. But perhaps this consuming need for happiness, this hatred of injustice, this thirst for liberty, which disappear only with life, are all constituent parts of egotism, the word the English use for love of self, considered as a human right and not as a vice. It seems to me that the individual selected from amongst all others to suffer from institutions beneficial to his fellows must, if he has any spiritual energy, fight against such an arbitrary yoke. I also think that, the greater the nobility of his soul, the more it must be outraged by the blows of injustice. If he had dreamed that happiness should reward virtue, into what terrible doubts, into what desperate bewilderment, must he be cast by the disappointments experience brings!
So all Indiana’s reflections, all her activities, all her sorrows, were linked to nature’s terrible, great struggle against civilization. If the island’s deserted mountains had been able to hide her for long, she would certainly have taken refuge there on the day she was assaulted. But Bourbon was not extensive enough to conceal her from search parties, and she resolved to put the sea, and uncertainty about her hiding-place, between herself and her tyrant. After she had made that decision, she felt more at ease and seemed almost carefree and cheerful at home. Delmare was so surprised and delighted at this that, with a bully’s reasoning, he thought it a good thing to make women feel the law of the strongest occasionally.
After this incident, Indiana dreamt only of flight, solitude, and independence. In her wounded, grief-stricken mind, she turned over a thousand plans for settling romantically in the desert lands of India or Africa. In the evening, her eye followed the flight of the birds as they went to their rest on Rodrigues Island.* This abandoned island promised her all the delights of solitude, the first need of a broken heart. But the same reasons which prevented her from going into the interior of Bourbon made her give up the idea of the restricted refuge of the neighbouring islands. At her home she often saw wealthy traders from Madagascar who had business dealings with her husband, stolid, bronzed, coarse individuals, who were shrewd and tactful only in their trading interests. Nevertheless, their tales aroused Madame Delmare’s attention. She liked questioning them about the wonderful products of Madagascar, and what they told her about nature’s marvels in that island kindled more and more her desire to go and hide there. The extent of the area and the small amount of territory occupied by Europeans led her to hope that there she would never be discovered. So she settled on this plan and fed her unoccupied mind with dreams of a future that she aimed to create quite alone. She was already building her solitary hut in the shelter of a virgin forest on the bank of a nameless river; she was seeking refuge in the protection of those peoples who have not been debased by the yoke of our laws and prejudices. Ignorant as she was, she hoped to find there the virtues banished from our hemisphere, and to live in peace, away from all organized society. She imagined she could escape the dangers of isolation and resist the devastating diseases of the climate. She was a weak woman who could not endure one man’s anger, yet thought she could defy the rigours of the state of nature.
In the midst of these romantic preoccupations and extravagant plans, she forgot her present ills. She made for herself a world apart, which consoled her for the one in which she was forced to live. She became used to thinking less about Raymon, who was soon to have no place in her solitary, reflective existence. By building a future according to her own fancy, she let the past rest a little, and already, through feeling her heart freer and braver, she imagined she was reaping in advance the fruits of her hermit’s life. But Raymon’s letter arrived and the structure of daydreams vanished like a puff of wind. She felt, or thought she felt, she loved him more than in the past. For my part, I like to think she never loved with all the strength of her heart. It seems to me that an ill-placed affection differs from a mutual affection as much as error differs from truth. It seems to me, too, that if the exaltation and fervour of our feelings deceive us to such an extent as to make us believe that that is love in all its power, we learn later when we experience the joys of a real love, how much we deceived ourselves.
But Raymon’s situation, as he described it, rekindled in Indiana’s heart the generous impulse which was a need of her nature. Learning he was alone and unhappy, she felt in duty bound to forget the past and not to foresee the future. The day before, she wanted to leave her husband out of hatred and resentment. Now, she was sorry she did not esteem him so that she could make a real sacrifice to Raymon. Such was her enthusiasm that she was afraid of doing too little for him, in escaping from an ill-tempered master at the risk of her life and in undergoing the awful conditions of a four-month voyage. She would have given her life, and think she had not paid enough for one smile from Raymon. That’s how women are.
So it only remained for her to leave the island. It was very difficult to get round Delmare’s mistrust and Ralph’s perspicacity. But that was not the principal obstacle; she had to avoid the announcement which, according to law, all passengers are obliged to put in the newspapers about their departures.
Among the few vessels anchored in the dangerous roadstead at Bourbon, the ship Eugène was about to leave for Europe. For a long time, Indiana looked for an opportunity to speak to the captain without being seen by her husband, but every time she expressed a wish to go for a walk by the harbour, he affected to put her under Sir Ralph’s protection, and his eyes followed them with a maddening persistence. However, by noting wi
th scrupulous care all the signs favourable to her purpose, Indiana learned that the captain of the ship bound for France had a relative at the village of La Saline* in the interior of the island and that he often walked back to his ship to spend the night on board. From that moment she kept constant watch at the rock which she used as an observation post. To allay suspicions she would go by roundabout paths and return by the same route when, at nightfall, she had not seen the person she wanted on the path to the mountains.
She had only two more days of hope left, for the land wind was already blowing on the roadstead. The anchorage was threatening to be no longer secure and Captain Random was impatient to sail out to sea.
Finally, she prayed ardently to the God of the weak and the oppressed, and went and installed herself right on the road to La Saline, braving the danger of being seen and risking her last hope. She had been waiting for less than an hour, when Captain Random came down the path. He was a real sailor, always rough and cynical, whether he was in a cheerful or gloomy mood. His look made the melancholy Indiana freeze with terror. However, she plucked up all her courage and, resolute and dignified, went to meet him.
‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘I have come to put my life and honour in your hands. I want to leave the colony and go back to France. If, instead of granting me your protection, you betray the secret I am entrusting to you, there is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the sea.’