Читать книгу: «Mademoiselle Blanche», страница 6

To Jules the mass that preceded the marriage ceremony seemed interminable; he kept glancing at Blanche's flushed face and downcast eyes, and plucking at his gloves. Then, when he found himself standing before the priest, holding Blanche's hand, and listening to the solemn words of the service, he came near bursting into tears. He thought afterward how ridiculous he would have been if he hadn't been able to control himself. He was relieved when the service was ended, and as he walked to the vestry with his wife on his arm, he could have laughed aloud for joy.

When the register had been signed and they had shaken hands with the priest, they drove at once to the café in the avenue de l'Opéra, where Jules had ordered a sumptuous breakfast. There they remained till four o'clock. Monsieur Berthier was the gayest of them all, and he was seconded by Jeanne, who pretended to flirt desperately with Jules and made pert speeches to Pelletier. Then they all returned to the rue St. Honoré, where Blanche changed her wedding finery for a travelling dress.

During the farewell between Blanche and her family, Jules suffered; he never could bear the sight of women in tears. He was greatly relieved when he put his almost hysterical wife and Madeleine into the carriage, and slammed the door behind him.

XI

They went straight to Vienna, arriving fatigued from their long journey. After three days, spent at a little French hotel, Jules found near the Ringstrasse a furnished apartment that suited him, and they took possession at the end of the week.

Blanche soon felt at home, but Madeleine, though she had become deeply attached to her new mistress, and now had more companionship than she had known since the death of Jules' mother, secretly grieved for her beloved Paris, and looked and acted as if utterly bewildered.

The day of his arrival in Vienna, Jules proceeded to the Circus and had a long talk with Herr Prevost, the manager, with regard to his wife's engagement. He explained the difference in the plunge Blanche would be obliged to take there from her usual one, and persuaded Prevost to make this a feature in his advertisements; he also secured permission for Blanche to practise in the ring every morning till her engagement began.

So he went back to the hotel elated, and explained to Blanche that, after all, in the theatrical life good management was half the battle. Now that she had shaken off that worthless Pelletier and he himself had taken charge of her affairs, she would undoubtedly be recognized in a very few years as the greatest acrobat in the world.

She must sit at once, in costume, for some new photographs, and he would send them to the leading managers of Europe and America. If they could only arrange to go to America under good auspices, their fortune would be made. Instead of receiving, as they were doing in Vienna, five hundred francs a week, they would be paid as much as twice that amount in New York, if not more. Indeed, Jules had so much to say about America, he seemed to have it on the brain.

Blanche experienced no difficulty in making her plunge in the new amphitheatre, and after her first trial there, declared that she had no fear for the public performances. Jules, however, insisted on her practising every morning; she must keep her muscles limber, he said; besides, if she didn't practise, she might lose confidence.

He found himself treating her as her mother had done, directing her movements like those of a child, and she obeyed him as if she considered his attitude toward her eminently natural and right. Even Madeleine adopted a motherly tone with her, chose the dresses she should wear each day, and instructed her in a thousand feminine details.

Blanche, Jules was surprised and secretly annoyed to discover, could speak German, and in the mornings she sometimes gave him lessons. He also picked up a good deal of German slang in the cafés that he frequented during the day, where he drank coffee and read whatever French and English papers he could find.

After his wife's performances began, he found himself falling into a routine of life. In spite of his distaste for his duties at the wool-house, he had expected to miss them at first; but he quickly became accustomed to his leisure. He really considered himself a busy person, for in addition to his nightly appearance in the arena, momentary but intensely dramatic, he spent considerable time in fraternizing with the Viennese journalists, to secure newspaper puffs for his wife, in conferring with Prevost, and in corresponding with managers for future engagements. After his first month in Vienna, he felt as if he had been connected with the circus for years.

Blanche heard constantly from home, from either her mother or one of the two girls, – more often from Louise than from Jeanne, who hated to write letters. Six weeks after her departure from Paris, her mother became Madame Berthier, without, as she had said, "any fuss," and was now installed with the children in the big house where Félix had passed so many lonely years as a bachelor. Jules and Blanche wrote a joint letter of congratulation, and after that Blanche seemed even happier than she had been; it was so good, she said, to think that the girls were provided for.

In the afternoons Jules took walks or drives with his wife, and on Sundays he accompanied her to early mass in the little church that they had discovered near their apartment. Blanche would have liked to go to high mass, but to this Jules strenuously objected; it was too long, and he couldn't understand the sermon, and altogether it made him sleepy. Sometimes on Sundays they would go to one of the cafés for déjeuner or dinner, and over this they used to be very happy, for it recalled the first months of their love.

After a time, however, these walks grew less frequent. Jules stayed at home more, and Madeleine became solicitous for Blanche's health. Jules had long talks with Prevost; Blanche had been engaged at the Circus for three months, and Prevost wished to reengage her for the spring season; but Jules explained that he had already received several offers for the spring, and had refused them all; his wife needed a long rest, and from Vienna they would go to Boulogne for a few months, to be with her people.

The reference to the engagements was not exactly true; Jules had one offer only for the summer; that was from Trouville. For the autumn he had a fairly generous offer from South America, and a better one from the Hippodrome in London, to begin on the first of December. He had practically decided to accept the offer from London; but before giving a definite answer, he resolved to consult Blanche about it.

"It will just fit in with our plans," he said. "On the first of May we'll take a good long rest. We'll go to your mother's old house. It hasn't been let yet, you know, and no one will want it before then. So you and Madeleine and I will live there together, and we'll pass the days out of doors, and take long walks by the sea, and forget all about the circus. Then, when you are well and strong again, we'll go to London, and astonish the English, who think there's nothing good in France. What do you say, dear? Don't you think that's a good plan?"

"Yes," she said slowly. "It will be very nice, Jules, if – "

"If? If what?"

"If I'm alive," she answered softly, turning her head away.

He took her in his arms and pressed his cheek against hers. "What a foolish little girl it is to talk like that! Of course you'll be alive, and you'll be even better and stronger and happier than you are now. And then think of all the good times you'll have this summer with Jeanne and Louise and your mother and Monsieur Berthier. We'll have fêtes for the girls at our house, and every day we'll go to see your mother. You don't think she'll be too proud to receive us, do you, now that she's rich and important? I suppose she's the queen of Boulogne, with her carriages and her horses and her servants. She'll soon be getting a husband for Jeanne, some fine young fellow with a lot of money. And won't Jeanne put him through his paces? She's a high-stepper, that Jeanne, and I should pity the man who got her and didn't understand her. Think of trying to keep Jeanne down!"

In her moments of depression he always spoke to her like that, and for the time it cheered her; but when the spring came, she drooped visibly, and Jules became alarmed; sometimes she would have attacks of convulsive weeping, and these would be followed by hours of profound sadness, during which she spoke scarcely a word. There were other days when she would be full of courage and hope, gayer than she had ever been; then they would drive into the country and she would take deep draughts of the fresh spring air, and her eyes would brighten and her cheeks flush.

In spite of his anxiety, these days were very happy for Jules; the thought that he might lose her made her dearer to him. Sometimes he would take her hand and tell her that without her he couldn't live; she had made him realize how wretched his existence had been before marriage; he could not go back to that again. Then she would rest her head on his shoulder and whisper that she would try to be brave. Her sufferings seemed to be wholly in her mind; the doctor Jules consulted said that, bodily, she was perfectly strong, and could easily fill her engagement at the circus; her work in the ring had given her a remarkable development of the muscles and the chest; if she stopped the work now, and ceased to practise, she would suffer from the inaction.

Jules, however, felt relieved when the fifteenth of April came, and they were able to leave Vienna for Paris. There they remained only a day, for they were eager to reach Boulogne and the little home that Madame Berthier had arranged for them, in the house where Blanche had been born, and had passed the few weeks in each year when she was not travelling.

When they arrived, early in the afternoon, Madame Berthier and the girls, together with Berthier, were at the station to meet them, and they received a rapturous greeting, the girls clinging to their sister with frantic embraces.

"We had déjeuner prepared for you at your house," said Madame, when the first greetings were over. "I knew you'd want to go there the first thing. Then to-night you are to come and dine with us. I feel as if I hadn't seen you for years."

"But we've never met Madame Berthier before," Jules replied, making a feeble attempt to be gay, for he saw that Blanche's meeting with her mother threatened to upset her.

Madame blushed like a young girl, and turning, led the way to the carriages.

"One of these is for you and Jules," she said. "I don't mean just for now, but for all the time you are here. Félix chose the horse for you, dear, and she's so gentle you can drive her alone if you want to."

"I'm going to put the three girls and their mother in the big carriage," Berthier said to Jules, "and you and Madeleine and I will follow them." The arrival of his stepdaughter seemed to have given him as much pleasure as any of the others, and his good-natured face was radiant. "Jump in, girls," he cried, holding out his hand to Blanche. "We'll have to turn those lilies of yours into roses this summer, my dear. Here, Jeanne, stop flirting with Jules, or we won't let you come with us. You wouldn't have known our little Louise, Blanche, if you hadn't expected to find her here, would you? She's grown an inch in four months. It's the most wonderful thing I've ever known in my life. And would you believe it? – she's become a perfect chatterbox – she's worse than Jeanne. Sometimes I have to run out of the room to read my paper in peace and have a quiet smoke."

The whole family seemed to have agreed to assume toward Blanche the bantering tone that Jules had adopted. When they reached the house they continued their gayety, though Blanche, tired from her journey, sank weakly on the couch in the salon.

She looked around, however, and saw that the room had been redecorated, probably by Monsieur Berthier, and when she felt rested she went all over the house and observed many new pieces of furniture, and many touches here and there that made the place more attractive and homelike. "Ah, it is so good to be at home," she said to her mother when they were alone; and then Madame Berthier took her in her arms and kissed her on the forehead and told her she must have courage for Jules' sake.

After the excitement of Paris and Vienna, Jules found it hard to accustom himself to the dull life at Boulogne. He bought a small yacht, and found amusement in sailing with his new acquaintances, and sometimes, when the weather was fine, he took Blanche and the girls with him. He also occupied himself with the little garden around his cottage; but this soon bored him, and he gave it over to Monsieur Berthier's gardener, who came every few days to look after it. In the afternoons he drove with Blanche far into the country, and sometimes they stopped at a little café by the roadside and had an early dinner, and then hurried home before the damp night should close around them.

On these occasions they had many earnest talks, and Jules was surprised by the seriousness and depth of his wife's mind; at any rate, she impressed him as being wonderfully profound. The longer he knew her, the more she awed and puzzled him; there were moments when she seemed to dwell in another world, a world that made her almost a stranger to him.

Since her return to Boulogne she had grown much more cheerful than she had been during those last weeks in Vienna; but a thousand little things she said showed him that beneath the surface of her thought there still lurked a strange melancholy, an unchangeable conviction that life was slipping away from her. He spoke of this once to her mother, and she explained mysteriously that he must expect that; it was very natural with one of Blanche's temperament. She had known many cases like it before.

As the summer passed, Jules said little to his wife about the circus; indeed, her work was scarcely mentioned between them, though every morning she practised her exercises. Jules, however, had decided that they should go to London late in November and, the first week of the following month, appear at the Hippodrome, which had been established with great success the year before, at a short distance from the Houses of Parliament. The contract had not been signed, for Jules had written to Marshall, the manager, that he could not bind himself to an engagement until early in the autumn; but he explained that his word was as good as any contract.

When September came, Blanche seemed much better for her months of rest; her eyes were brighter, and her cheeks were shot with color. Sometimes Jules wished that she were not quite so religious; she went to early mass every morning now, and rather than let her go alone, he went with her, for Madeleine had assumed the duties of the household. Their evenings, which during the summer had been spent chiefly on the porch of Monsieur Berthier's house, were now passed in their salon, bright with flowers, sometimes with a wood-fire crackling on the old-fashioned hearth. Blanche's fingers were always busy with soft, fleecy garments, which Jules used sometimes to take in his hands and rub affectionately against his face. Then he often noticed a light in her eyes that he had never seen before; it reminded him of pictures of the Madonna. Sometimes he was so touched when he looked at her that he would take her in his arms and hold her close for a long while. Their evenings together became very dear to him; yet they said little to each other: he was content to sit and watch her, with the curtains drawn to shut out the rest of the world.

Occasionally Father Dumény would come in for an hour's chat. He was a large-framed, heavy man, with deep gray eyes shaded by enormous eyebrows that moved up and down as he spoke. He spoke as he walked, slowly and lumberingly, and he had a quaint humor that used to delight Blanche and puzzle Jules. When he appeared, she always brightened, and she liked to hear his doleful accounts of his rheumatism. He seemed to find humor in everything, even in his arduous duties and his ailments.

"Ah, my children," he would say, "why should any one go to the theatre for pleasure? This life is nothing but a comedy, if you only look at it in the right way."

From Blanche he derived a great deal of amusement; that she should perform in a circus always seemed a joke to him, and he was continually making fun over it. He had never been at a circus; so, though he had baptized Blanche and had met her during her visits in Boulogne, he had never seen her perform. Once when Jules showed him a photograph of Blanche as she appeared while posing on the rope, he rolled his eyes and pretended to be much shocked, and they all laughed together.

"I suppose you two people will be leaving this nest of yours before winter comes," he said one night. "You've made your plans already, haven't you?"

Jules looked down at Blanche, but she avoided his eyes.

"We haven't decided definitely," Jules replied, "but we think of going to London."

Blanche sighed, and Father Dumény glanced at her quickly and then smiled up at Jules.

"She has a notion that she isn't going to live," Jules added, nodding at his wife. "Ridiculous, isn't it?"

Father Dumény put his hands to his sides, and for a moment his great body shook with laughter.

"Why, I expect to baptize at least half a dozen of your children! In a few years we shall see them trotting around here in Boulogne and coming to my Sunday-school to be prepared for their first communion. We need all the good Catholics we can have, in these days, to fight against the infidelity that's ruining the country. Ah, my dear child," he said, patting Blanche's hand, "when you're a grandmother with a troop of children around you, you'll look back and smile at these foolish little fears."

After that night he came oftener, and kept Blanche laughing with his gayety.

"When you go to London," he said one evening, "I shall give you letters to some dear English friends of mine, – Mr. and Mrs. Tate. I met the Tates when I was in Paris visiting Father Brémont more than ten years ago. Mr. Tate represented the banking-house of Welling Brothers, of London, there, and now he's in London as a member of the firm, I believe. You'll like Mrs. Tate, my dear. She's a good soul, and she speaks French almost as well as English. I shall expect to hear that you've become great friends."

"But we aren't sure of going to England yet," Blanche replied with a weary smile.

"Perhaps we shall go to America," Jules laughed. "I want Blanche to see the country."

Toward the end of September Blanche drooped again, and her mother was with her nearly every moment of the day, remaining sometimes till late at night. The girls had gone back to the convent, but they were allowed to come home twice a week, and most of their freedom they devoted to their sister, whom they treated with a protecting tenderness that used to afford Jules secret amusement. Madame Berthier maintained a cheerful composure in her daughter's presence, but when alone with Jules she became so serious that for the first time he grew nervous. Then as his anxiety deepened he began to resent it, as he did any long-continued annoyance. Why should they be kept in idleness and suspense so long? How stupid to be buried in a wretched provincial town when they might be earning thousands of francs in Vienna, or Bucharest, or Paris!

Then one night he was suddenly aroused from his sleep, and he felt a sensation of mingled horror and awe. He dressed himself quickly, his whole being wrung by the groans he heard from the next room, and tore out of the house to Doctor Brutinière's, five minutes away. After delivering his message, he ran breathlessly to summon Madame Berthier. It took her scarcely five minutes to dress, and then they were in the street together. Madame Berthier went at once to Blanche's room, and Jules paced up and down in the half-lighted salon.

That was the ghastliest night of Jules Le Baron's life. He was overwhelmed by the knowledge that Blanche was in agony, that she was battling for life, that at any moment he might hear she was dead. Why should the burden of suffering fall on her? Oh, how cruel Nature was, how pitiless to women! The poor child, the poor little one, to be tortured so! Several times he listened for a sound, and the silence terrified him. Suddenly he heard a shriek, loud and piercing, that only the most exquisite pain could have wrung, and he clenched his hands in impotent horror and misery.

The stillness that followed made him fear that she was dead, and he could hardly keep from rushing up the stairs and learning the truth. After a few moments, as he stood at the door, he heard another cry, small, timorous, peevish, that changed to a wail and then died away. He turned into the room, clapsed his face in his hands, and cried, "Thank God, thank God! And mercy for her, my God, mercy for my poor little Blanche!"

After what seemed to him a long time, during which he was tortured with suspense, a door opened and shut, and he heard a rustling on the stairs. He stepped out into the hall and saw Madame Berthier descending. She stopped, smiled, and put her hand to her lips; he could see traces of tears in her eyes.

"Come up," she whispered. "It's all over. It's a girl, and Blanche has her in her arms."

Jules bounded up the stairs. "Only a minute, you know," she said softly, "and you must be very quiet."

When she opened the door he almost pushed her aside in his eagerness to enter. The Doctor and Madeleine were standing beside the bed, where Blanche, white but bright-eyed and smiling, was lying with the babe nestling close to her. Jules flung himself by her side, and kissed her passionately, murmuring incoherent words of love and thankfulness.