CHAPTER XVIII
IN those last autumn days, under the rain of dead leaves, they enjoyed delicious hours. Leonor lived attentively, taking care that no single word of his might shock the young girl. Rose, her eyes always sad, answered with cordial politeness. Their words were measured, insignificant, but they were uttered in a voice full of a secret emotion.
They directed the alterations together, giving no orders without consulting one another; and they were soon agreed about everything, for their only desire was to stand together looking at the workmen. They confined themselves to cutting a few useful paths, transplanting a few bushes and arranging the lawns and flower beds.
The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous. Discovering a few sprigs of violet under a wall, picking them, offering them to her: that was the act which won for Leonor his first smile from the girl, a smile that was still vague, a smile in which the soul, so long solicited, showed itself for an instant, as though at a window visited at last by the sun.
One day, while they were holding a lilac that was being transplanted, their hands met. Rose withdrew hers without affectation, but a little later she approached it once more and perhaps that tree, as it was wrenched from the earth, felt a thrill of love passing through its sleeping trunk.
Léonor thought of nothing but the charm of his present life; he analysed himself no more; he made no plots or projects; he breathed pure air, he was opening out.
Though less wretched, Rose still suffered. One evening, when she was undressing to go to bed, she called to mind all the liberties she had permitted. No detail was spared her and it was in vain that her body revolted; along her nerves she felt the now shameful shudder of her former voluptuousness. She threw herself into her bed and soon, in the warmth, the imaginary contacts grew more numerous and precise. Then, losing her head, she yielded and went to sleep in a trance of pleasure.
Accordingly, in the mornings, she was apt to be a little peevish. Leonor seemed, at these moments, to lose all he gained in the afternoons; but he was not disturbed by it. He knew that characters change according to the time of day, as they change according to the season. Happy in being able to hope for everything, he waited without impatience. Exorcising Rose demanded a whole morning of Leonor's company. The sound of his voice, rather than his words, calmed her possessed spirit. She would end by doubting the very existence of the spell from which she had been released and, by the time lunch was over, she was a child smiling at love.
Some evenings the crisis was very intense. Hardly had she entered her room when she seemed to receive a kind of imperious injunction to look at herself in the glass. Standing there, she would press her shoulders feverishly. Then she felt herself lifted up and carried to her bed, at the mercy of the demon of love. At other times the obsession was less malignant and she was able to attempt some resistance. The fall was slow, gradual and sometimes incomplete. She noticed that she had more peace and more strength on the evenings when she had, by her attitude, encouraged Leonor to make some tenderer utterance, and that fact caused her great joy. For she loved her exorcist; like a sick woman full of confidence, she loved her doctor.
Now she appeared more humble and at the same time almost provocative. She allowed her eyes to rest more often and for a longer time on the young man's face. She even came to studying his face when he was looking, and, though she dropped her eyes quickly at the first alarm, Leonor noticed it.
"She loves me, she loves me. Ah! this time she will listen to me, and perhaps she will speak."
But, by dint of loving innocently, Leonor had become shy; and several days passed in the motions of the eyes and heart. Rose derived great consolation from them. One evening, when the obsession had almost left her in peace and she was about to go to sleep victorious, she suddenly saw herself once more in
. the drawing room. Leonor was offering her a marvellous flower of a kind she did not recognize. She took it and when she smelt it felt an inexpressible sweetness slowly penetrate her whole being; she was asleep.
She awoke full of joy, a thing that had not happened since the day of her great grief. She was smiling at Leonor before she had even seen him. They met on the stairs. Leonor heard a door slam, the sound of hurrying feet. He drew back to make passage room. It was Rose. Playfully, as she had already allowed him to do, he made as though to bar her way.
"You shan't pass," he said.
"Very well, I won't pass."
And she fell into the open arms that closed at once round her body—a happy prisoner.
"Do you love me, then? At last?"
"Yes, I love you."
Rose never once remembered that it was thus she had fallen into M. Hervart's arms in the staircase of the tower. She forgot in its entirety the first advanture of her poor abused heart and her troubled senses. When M. Hervart's name was pronounced in her presence, it recalled to her those studious walks at Robinvast, with that old friend of her father's who told her the anecdotes of entomology.
M. Des Boys, as he had resolved, revealed to his daughter what he called the misfortunes of M. Hervart. And so, when she heard that he was to marry Mme Suif, she allowed herself an honest smile of commiseration. That happened in the third year of their marriage; they were spending the season at Grandcamp, where, without knowing her, she often rubbed shoulders with a young woman who had played a decisive part in her history.
Leonor was wandering one morning on this same beach where Gratienne had attracted him; but he was not thinking of Gratienne, who as it happened was looking at him, from a distance, with interest. He was thinking of Hortense, of whose death he had seen the announcement in a local paper; of Hortense, who had written him, on the eve of his marriage, a letter so moving in its proud resignation that it had almost made him weep; of Hortense whom he had loved and who perhaps had died because of his happiness.
When he came back, Rose received him as a lover is received. She had found in marriage the attentions which her nature demanded. She was happy.
The End