About nine o’clock the following morning there
was a knock at the door. She cried: “Come
in!” ready to throw herself into certain outstretched
arms. But an unknown person appeared; and while
he excused himself for disturbing her, and explained
his business, which was to collect a debt of Paul’s,
she felt the tears beginning to overflow, and wiped
them away with her finger before they fell on her
cheeks.
He had learned of her arrival through the janitor
of the Rue Sauvage, and as he could not find the young
man, he had come to see his mother. He handed
her a paper, which she took without knowing what she
was doing and read the figures—ninety francs—which
she paid without a word.
She did not go out that day.
The next day other creditors came. She gave them
all that she had left except twenty francs and then
wrote to Rosalie to explain matters to her.
She passed her days wandering about, waiting for Rosalie’s
answer, not knowing what to do, how to kill the melancholy,
interminable hours, having no one to whom she could
say an affectionate word, no one who knew her sorrow.
She now longed to return home to her little house at
the side of the lonely high road. A few days before
she thought she could not live there, she was so overcome
with grief, and now she felt that she could never
live anywhere else but there where her serious character
had been formed.
One evening the letter at last came, enclosing two
hundred francs. Rosalie wrote:
“Madame Jeanne: Come back at once, for
I shall not send you any more. As for M. Paul,
it is I who will go and get him when we know where
he is.
“With respect, your servant,
“Rosalie.”
Jeanne set out for Batteville one very cold, snowy
morning.
* * * *
*
LIGHT AT EVENTIDE
Jeanne never went out now, never stirred about.
She rose at the same hour every day, looked out at
the weather and then went downstairs and sat before
the parlor fire.
She would remain for days motionless, gazing into
the fire, thinking of nothing in particular.
It would grow dark before she stirred, except to put
a fresh log on the fire. Rosalie would then bring
in the lamp and exclaim: “Come, Madame
Jeanne, you must stir about or you will have no appetite
again this evening.”
She lived over the past, haunted by memories of her
early life and her wedding journey down yonder in
Corsica. Forgotten landscapes in that isle now
rose before her in the blaze of the fire, and she recalled
all the little details, all the little incidents, the
faces she had seen down there. The head of the
guide, Jean Ravoli, haunted her, and she sometimes
seemed to hear his voice.
Then she remembered the sweet years of Paul’s
childhood, when they planted salad together and when
she knelt in the thick grass beside Aunt Lison, each
trying what they could do to please the child, and
her lips murmured: “Poulet, my little Poulet,”
as though she were talking to him. Stopping at
this word, she would try to trace it, letter by letter,
in space, sometimes for hours at a time, until she
became confused and mixed up the letters and formed
other words, and she became so nervous that she was
almost crazy.
