“She has done that once too often.”
Rose was standing very close to me and I caught distinctly the note of scorn in her indulgent compassion.
“Oh, that! . . . Madame is like a child.” It was impossible to get the bearing of that utterance from that girl who, as Doña Rita herself had told me, was the most taciturn of human beings; and yet of all human beings the one nearest to herself. I seized her head in my hands and turning up her face I looked straight down into her black eyes which should have been lustrous. Like a piece of glass breathed upon they reflected no light, revealed no depths, and under my ardent gaze remained tarnished, misty, unconscious.
“Will Monsieur kindly let me go. Monsieur shouldn’t play the child, either.” (I let her go.) “Madame could have the world at her feet. Indeed she has it there only she doesn’t care for it.”
How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips! For some reason or other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort.
“Yes?” I whispered breathlessly.
“Yes! But in that case what’s the use of living in fear and torment?” she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment. She opened the door for me and added:
“Those that don’t care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy.”
I turned in the very doorway: “There is something which prevents that?” I suggested.
“To be sure there is. Bonjour, Monsieur.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER I
“Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white as snow. She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end of a long handle. A very great lady but her voice was as kind as the voice of a saint. I have never seen anything like that. She made me feel so timid.”
The voice uttering these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped up from ceiling to floor. The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness. In this thin medium Therese’s form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black paper. It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in the full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully.
In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman’s existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept, how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to which I was condemned.
It was Therese’s habit to begin talking directly she entered the room with the tray of morning coffee. This was her method for waking me up. I generally regained the consciousness of the external world on some pious phrase asserting the spiritual comfort of early mass, or on angry lamentations about the unconscionable rapacity of the dealers in fish and vegetables; for after mass it was Therese’s practice to do the marketing for the house. As a matter of fact the necessity of having to pay, to actually give money to people, infuriated the pious Therese. But the matter of this morning’s speech was so extraordinary that it might have been the prolongation of a nightmare: a man in bonds having to listen to weird and unaccountable speeches against which, he doesn’t know why, his very soul revolts.
In sober truth my soul remained in revolt though I was convinced that I was no longer dreaming. I watched Therese coming away from the window with that helpless dread a man bound hand and foot may be excused to feel. For in such a situation even the absurd may appear ominous. She came up close to the bed and folding her hands meekly in front of her turned her eyes up to the ceiling.
“If I had been her daughter she couldn’t have spoken more softly to me,” she said sentimentally.
I made a great effort to speak.
“Mademoiselle Therese, you are raving.”
“She addressed me as Mademoiselle, too, so nicely. I was struck with veneration for her white hair but her face, believe me, my dear young Monsieur, has not so many wrinkles as mine.”
She compressed her lips with an angry glance at me as if I could help her wrinkles, then she sighed.
“God sends wrinkles, but what is our face?” she digressed in a tone of great humility. “We shall have glorious faces in Paradise. But meantime God has permitted me to preserve a smooth heart.”
“Are you going to keep on like this much longer?” I fairly shouted at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about the sweet old lady who came in a carriage. Not a fiacre. I can tell a fiacre. In a little carriage shut in with glass all in front. I suppose she is very rich. The carriage was very shiny outside and all beautiful grey stuff inside. I opened the door to her myself. She got out slowly like a queen. I was struck all of a heap. Such a shiny beautiful little carriage. There were blue silk tassels inside, beautiful silk tassels.”
Obviously Therese had been very much impressed by a brougham, though she didn’t know the name for it. Of all the town she knew nothing but the streets which led to a neighbouring church frequented only by the poorer classes and the humble quarter around, where she did her marketing. Besides, she was accustomed to glide along the walls with her eyes cast down; for her natural boldness would never show itself through that nun-like mien except when bargaining, if only on a matter of threepence. Such a turn-out had never been presented to her notice before. The traffic in the street of the Consuls was mostly pedestrian and far from fashionable. And anyhow Therese never looked out of the window. She lurked in the depths of the house like some kind of spider that shuns attention. She used to dart at one from some dark recesses which I never explored.
Yet it seemed to me that she exaggerated her raptures for some reason or other. With her it was very difficult to distinguish between craft and innocence.
“Do you mean to say,” I asked suspiciously, “that an old lady wants to hire an apartment here? I hope you told her there was no room, because, you know, this house is not exactly the thing for venerable old ladies.”
“Don’t make me angry, my dear young Monsieur. I have been to confession this morning. Aren’t you comfortable? Isn’t the house appointed richly enough for anybody?”
That girl with a peasant-nun’s face had never seen the inside of a house other than some half-ruined caserio in her native hills.
I pointed out to her that this was not a matter of splendour or comfort but of “convenances.” She pricked up her ears at that word which probably she had never heard before; but with woman’s uncanny intuition I believe she understood perfectly what I meant. Her air of saintly patience became so pronounced that with my own poor intuition I perceived that she was raging at me inwardly. Her weather-tanned complexion, already affected by her confined life, took on an extraordinary clayey aspect which reminded me of a strange head painted by El Greco which my friend Prax had hung on one of his walls and used to rail at; yet not without a certain respect.
Therese, with her hands still meekly folded about her waist, had mastered the feelings of anger so unbecoming to a person whose sins had been absolved only about three hours before, and asked me with an insinuating softness whether she wasn’t an honest girl enough to look after any old lady belonging to a world which after all was sinful. She reminded me that she had kept house ever since she was “so high” for her uncle the priest: a man well-known for his saintliness in a large district extending even beyond Pampeluna. The character of a house depended upon the person who ruled it. She didn’t know what impenitent wretches had been breathing within these walls in the time of that godless and wicked man who had planted every seed of perdition in “our Rita’s” ill-disposed heart. But he was dead and she, Therese, knew for certain that wickedness perished utterly, because of God’s anger (la colère du bon Dieu). She would have no hesitation in receiving a bishop, if need be, since “our, Rita,” with her poor, wretched, unbelieving heart, had nothing more to do with the house.