The Thibaults (61 page)

He rose from his chair and moved to his mother’s side, feeling it his duty to let her know.

“Tell me, Mother, have you noticed anything special in Jacques’s attitude towards you … and towards Jenny?”

“Towards Jenny?” Mme. de Fontanin echoed Daniel’s words and, as they sank into her consciousness, they seemed to crystallize around a dim, unformulated fear. Less than a fear, perhaps—one of the transient impressions whose purport her keenly sensitive mind had noted, but without putting it into words. A spasm of anguish gripped her heart; and at once her faith took wing towards the Spirit. “Forsake us not!” she prayed.

The others came up to them.

“Hadn’t you better cover yourself up a bit more, sweetheart?” Jerome exclaimed. “You must be careful; it’s turned much cooler than usual this evening.”

He went to the hall and fetched a scarf, which he wrapped round his wife’s shoulders. It happened that the long wicker chair in which, on the doctor’s orders, Jenny rested after meals had been left under the plane-trees. No sooner did Jerome catch sight of her, dragging it across the sand, than he hurried to her aid and helped her to settle down in it.

But he had found it a none too easy task to tame her wild bird’s nature. The bond uniting Jenny with her mother had been so close throughout her early years that, even as a mere child, she had always judged her father without lenience. Jerome, however, delighted with his new-found daughter just ripening into womanhood, had been all attention, cajoled her with his subtlest methods of approach, and with so good a grace, such tact, that Jenny had been touched. Today, indeed, father and daughter had talked without reserve, like bosom friends, and Jerome was still tingling with the emotion he had felt.

“The air is fragrant with your roses this evening, sweetheart,” he said, as he dropped languidly into a rocking-chair and set it swaying. “The Gloire de Dijon round the dovecot’s a blaze of flowers.”

Daniel stood up.

“Time to be off,” he said and, going up to his mother, kissed her forehead.

She took the young man’s face between her hands and for a moment scanned it closely, murmuring:

“My own big boy!”

“D’you know, I think I’ll go with you as far as the station,” Jerome suggested. The morning’s escapade had whetted his appetite for brief evasions from the garden where, for a fortnight now, he had been leading a cloistered life. “Won’t you come too, Jenny?”

“I’ll stay with Mamma.”

“Got a cigarette?” asked Jerome, taking Daniel’s arm. Since his return he had eschewed tobacco rather than go out and buy it.

Mme. de Fontanin watched the two men’s receding figures; Jerome’s voice came wafted back to her.

“Do you think I can get Turkish tobacco at the station?” Then they disappeared behind the fir-trees.

Jerome pressed to his side the arm of this good-looking youth, his son. Any young creature had an intense appeal for him; intense, yet barbed with keen regret. Each day he spent at Maisons quickened his distress; time and again the sight of Jenny evoked—how cruelly!— his own lost youth. And, at the tennis-club, with what self-pity had he watched them—young men and girls, bright-eyed, their hair in disorder, their collars open and their clothes “all anyhow,” yet for all that flaunting the glorious panoply of youth! Lithe bodies, steeped in sunlight, whose very sweat was wholesome, redolent of health. In ten brief minutes he had realized in all its bitterness the handicap of his declining years. He was shamed and sickened by the thought that henceforth, day in day out, he must wage war against himself, against decrepitude and dirt, the noisesomeness of age; against the premonitions of that ultimate decay which had already set its mark upon his body. The contrast between his heavy gait, shortness of breath, and struggles to keep brisk, and his son’s limber strides appalled him; releasing Daniel’s arm, he gave vent to an envious cry.

“What wouldn’t I give to be your age, my boy!”

Mme. de Fontanin had made no protest when Jenny volunteered to keep her company.

“You’re looking fagged out, darling,” she said when they were alone. “Perhaps you’d rather go up to bed at once?”

“Oh, no!” Jenny replied. “The nights are quite long enough as it is.”

“Aren’t you sleeping well just now?”

“Not too well.”

“But why not, darling?”

The tone of Mme. de Fontanin’s voice conveyed more than a casual question. Jenny looked at her mother in surprise, and it dawned on her that something lay behind the words, an explanation was being asked of her. Instinctively she decided to elude it; though not secretive, she shrank from any effort to draw her out.

Mme. de Fontanin had not the art of subterfuge and the look she now cast on her daughter in the dying light was plain to read. If only the affection in her eyes might break the barrier of reticence that Jenny had set up between them! m

“As for once in a way we’re alone,” she began—there was a hint of emphasis in her tone, as though she begged the girl’s forgiveness for the inroads Jerome’s return had made upon their intimacy— “there’s something I’d like to speak to you about, darling. I’m thinking of the Thibault boy, whom I met yesterday… .” She paused; after this frontal attack on her subject, she was puzzled how to proceed. But her anxious air as she bent towards the girl spoke for the unspoken words, pointed a tacit question.

Jenny said nothing and Mme. de Fontanin slowly drew herself up, fixing her eyes upon the darkening garden.

Five minutes passed. The breeze freshened and Mme. de Fontanin imagined she saw Jenny shiver.

“You’re catching cold. Let’s go in.”

Her voice had regained its normal intonation. A new idea had come to her: what was the use of insisting? Glad she had spoken out and sure she had been understood, she faced the future confidently.

Mother and daughter rose and crossed the hall without a word, then climbed the stairs in almost total darkness. Mme. de Fontanin, who was in front, waited on the landing at Jenny’s door to kiss her goodnight as usual. Though she could not see the girl’s face, she felt her body, as she kissed her, stiffening with revolt, and for a moment held the young cheek pressed to hers, in a movement of compassion which made Jenny recoil instinctively. Mme. de Fontanin gently released her, then moved away towards her own bedroom. But then she noticed that, instead of opening the door and entering her room, Jenny was following; just as she was about to turn she heard the girl’s excited voice behind her, exclaiming passionately, in one breath:

“You’ve only got to treat him a bit more stiffly, Mamma, if you think he comes here too often.”

“Treat whom?” Mme. de Fontanin stared at her daughter. “Jacques? If he comes too often? But he hasn’t shown up for a fortnight or more!”

(Jacques’s non-appearance was deliberate; learning from Daniel of M. de Fontanin’s return and the disturbing factor it had proved in their home-life, he had thought it more tactful to keep away altogether for the present. Jenny, too, went far less often to the club and, when she did so, avoided Jacques as much as possible, waiting till he was playing in a set to slip away before he had a chance of saying more than a casual word to her. The result was that the two young people had seen very little of each other during the past fortnight.) Jenny deliberately entered her mother’s bedroom; shutting the door, she stood there, unspeaking, in an attitude of resolute courage. Mme. de Fontanin’s heart thrilled with pity; her one thought was to make it easy for Jenny to speak out.

“I assure you, darling, I really can’t see what you mean.”

“Why did Daniel ever bring those Thibaults to our place?” Jenny broke out passionately. “Nothing would have happened if Daniel hadn’t, for some fantastic reason, taken such a liking for those people.”

“But what
has
happened, darling?” Mme. de Fontanin’s heart beat quicker.

Jenny flared up.

“Nothing! Nothing has happened! That’s not what I meant. But, if Daniel and you, too, Mamma, hadn’t always been pressing those Thibaults to come here, I, I wouldn’t …” Her voice gave way.

Mme. de Fontanin summoned up all her courage.

“Please, Jenny dear, tell me about it. Do you think you’ve noticed that … that … well, that he feels in a special way towards …?” She did not need to end her question, for Jenny had lowered her head in a gesture of mute assent. Once again the moonlit garden, the little door, her profile on the wall, and Jacques’s outrageous gesture rose before Jenny’s eyes; but she was firmly resolved to breathe no word about the dreadful incident whose memory still haunted her nights and days. It was as though, by keeping the secret locked in her breast, she reserved to herself the choice of treating it as a source of horror, or simply of emotion.

Mme. de Fontanin knew that the crucial moment had come; she must not let Jenny build up once again a wall of’ silence between them. Resting a trembling hand on the table behind her to steady herself, the poor woman bent towards Jenny, whose face she could just barely discern in the faint glimmer coming from the open window.

“Darling,” she said, “there’s no need to take it to heart unless you, too … unless you are …”

An emphatic gesture of denial, repeated several times, was her answer. Now that the agony of doubt was past, Mme. de Fontanin heaved a sigh of relief.

“I’ve always loathed the Thibaults!” Jenny suddenly exclaimed in a tone her mother had never heard from her before. “The elder one’s no better than a conceited lout, and the other …”

“That’s not true,” Mme. de Fontanin cut in, and in the darkness her cheeks glowed fiery red.

“And the other one has always been Daniel’s evil genius,” Jenny added, harking back to an early grievance which even she had long ago discarded as unjust. “No, Mamma, please don’t stick up for them. You
can’t
like them—they’re so utterly different from you. They are—I don’t know what! Even when they seem to think like us, we shouldn’t let ourselves be taken in; they always think differently, and from different motives. As a family, they’re …” She groped for an epithet. Then, “They’re loathsome!” she exclaimed. “Loathsome!” Her mind was in a turmoil which now she made no effort to control. “No, Mamma,” she continued in the same breath, “I don’t want to hide anything from you. Nothing! Well, when I was quite little, I think I had a nasty sort of feeling towards Jacques, a sort of jealousy. It upset me to see Daniel making such a fuss over him. ‘He’s not good enough for my brother,” I used to think. ‘He’s vain and selfish. A sulky, jeering, ill-bred schoolboy! Only to look at him—that mouth of this, the shape of his jaws!’ I tried to keep him out of my thoughts. But I couldn’t; he’d always let fly some cutting remark that made me furious, that rankled! Then he was always coming to our place-it looked as if he made a point of hanging round me. But that’s all ancient history. I can’t think why I’m always coming back to it. Since those days I’ve observed him more closely. This year, especially—this last month. I’ve come to see him in another way. I try to be fair. I’m not blind to his good points, such as they are. There’s something I must tell you, Mamma; sometimes I’ve imagined, yes, it’s struck me sometimes that I, too—without realizing it—I felt somehow … drawn towards him. No, that’s impossible! It isn’t true a bit! I loathe everything about him … almost everything.”

“About Jacques,” Mme. de Fontanin admitted, “I can’t be sure. You’ve had more opportunities than I of judging what he is. But, as far as Antoine’s concerned, I can assure you-“

“No,” the girl broke in impulsively.. “I never said that Jacques was … I mean, I’ve never denied that he’s got very fine qualities too.” Little by little her voice had changed and she now spoke calmly. “To begin with, you can tell that he’s extremely clever by everything he says. I admit that. I’ll go even further; his nature isn’t warped, he can be not merely sincere, but generous, noble-minded. So you see, Mamma, I’m not at all biased against him. What’s more, I firmly believe”—she spoke with such deep conviction that Mme. de Fontanin was taken aback and gazed at her intently—”I believe that a great future awaits him, perhaps a very great one indeed. So now you can’t say that I’m unjust to him. Why, I’m almost convinced that the driving force behind him is nothing less than what is known as ‘genius’; yes, just that, genius!” The word, as she repeated it, rang like a challenge, though her mother had shown no sign of contradicting her.

Then suddenly she cried out in a paroxysm of despair:

“But all that doesn’t change anything! He has a Thibault’s character—he
is
a Thibault! And I hate them all!”

Mme. de Fontanin was stupefied, bereft of speech.

“But … Jenny …!” at last she murmured.

Jenny perceived behind her mother’s exclamation the selfsame meaning as that which she had read so clearly on Daniel’s face. With childish impetuosity she darted forward and put her hand over her mother’s mouth.

“No! No! It isn’t that. I tell you it isn’t that!”

Then as her mother clasped her to her breast, safe in the shelter of her mother’s arms, Jenny felt suddenly the stranglehold of sorrow loosening at her throat; now at last she could sob her heart out, repeating over and over again, in the small voice of her childhood when something had upset her:

“Mummy dear … oh, Mummy!”

And Mme. de Fontanin soothed her like a child upon her breast, murmuring vague consolations.

“Darling … don’t be frightened… . Don’t cry… . There’s nothing to worry about. No one’s going to force you to … Everything’s quite all right, so long as you don’t …” For a memory had flashed through her mind of the occasion when she had met M. Thibault, the morning after the two boys had run away from home; she seemed to see him again, big and burly, with the two priests on either side of him. And now she pictured him refusing to countenance Jacques’s love and desecrating Jenny’s with cruel scorn. “Oh, I’m so glad there’s nothing in it. And you mustn’t blame yourself the least little bit. I’ll talk to him myself; I’ll see the boy and make him understand. Don’t cry, darling. You’ll forget all about it. There, there, it’s all over… . Don’t cry any more.”

But Jenny sobbed more and more violently; each of her mother’s words dealt a new stab at her heart. For a long while they stayed thus in the darkness, closely enfolded; the girl nursing her sorrow in her mother’s arms, the mother murmuring cruel consolations, with staring, panic-stricken eyes. For, with her wonted prescience, she foresaw the path of destiny that Jenny must follow ineluctably; no fears of hers, not love, not even prayer could avert its menace from her child. For, as the whole creation moves on its slow upward progress to the spiritual plane—the thought appalled her!—each of us must make his way alone, from trial to trial—often enough from error to error—along the path which has been appointed him from all eternity.