Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was
seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with
Leon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm
full of darkness opened within her soul.
“Besides, he no longer loves me,” she
thought. “What is to become of me?
What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what
solace?”
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in
a low voice, with flowing tears.
“Why don’t you tell master?” the
servant asked her when she came in during these crises.
“It is the nerves,” said Emma. “Do
not speak to him of it; it would worry him.”
“Ah! yes,” Felicite went on, “you
are just like La Guerine, Pere Guerin’s daughter,
the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe
before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad,
to see her standing upright on the threshold of her
house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread
out before the door. Her illness, it appears,
was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the
doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either.
When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone
to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going
his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face,
crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage,
it went off, they say.”
“But with me,” replied Emma, “it
was after marriage that it began.”
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting
by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle,
trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses
are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds
newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to
be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through
the bars of the arbour and away beyond, the river
seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in
wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between
the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with
a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle
gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance
cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing
could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through
the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young
woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth
and school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks
that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar,
and the tabernacle with its small columns. She
would have liked to be once more lost in the long
line of white veils, marked off here and there by
the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she
looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid
the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she
was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted,
like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and
it was unconsciously that she went towards the church,
included to no matter what devotions, so that her
soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
